By Asad Haider

Maurice Blanchot wrote in a tribute to his friend Georges Bataille, a decade after his death, that friendship “does not allow us to speak of our friends, but only to speak to them.”1 Chris Chitty was my friend. As I read his posthumous book Sexual Hegemony, which comes to me in his absence, I cannot help but speak to him. And I have tried to remember when we spoke to each other, as he passed the time he was given on earth. A life leaves traces after its end, but most elude our grasp. With my own passage of time, I have come to think they become the warp and weft of memory and loss which weave the fabric of a life that continues.

As I tried to access these memories, I had to pose myself the question of whether to review the writing that had been exchanged between us. Initially I decided that I would deliberately leave these traces unseen, and unthought. Yet I eventually found myself combing through every trace that remained. I expected mainly to find vigorous intellectual exchanges. Certainly, I found those. But I also learned that, in the strange operations of the unconscious, the psychic toll of his last days and death had suppressed memories of the time we had spent together, which was much more than I remembered, and the genuine intimacy and conviviality between us. I was reminded, too, of his political interventions, which in writing consisted primarily of commentaries and proposals regarding university austerity and the labor conditions of instructors. I found no record of the discussions between us that arose in the moments of eruption, when early mornings were spent on picket lines and buildings were occupied, or the rest and refuge we took in his apartment after long nights on the streets, as we set off together on the arduous and aleatory path of the movement.

We met as graduate students in History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz, both interested in Marxism and both interested in the work of Michel Foucault. Unlike many others, we viewed the encounter between Marx and Foucault not as an antagonistic confrontation, but as a kind of swerve which made a world. I approached Foucault as one instance of the broader French intellectual and political scene of the 60s and 70s, and it was primarily through French Marxism that I staged the encounter, in which questions of method and politics were transversally posed. Chris had deeply absorbed himself in Foucault’s work itself, and moved through it into dialogue with Marxism on the division of labor, technology, political economy, the family, and the state.

Engaged in a polemic against the anti-Marxist sectarianism of depoliticised academic “Foucauldians,” while, at the same time, trying to demonstrate to Marxists that Foucault had made a singular contribution which could not be dismissed from the vantage point of a fictive Marxist orthodoxy, Chris already had his work cut out for him. But he also sought to follow the example of Foucault rather than simply commenting on him or “applying” his theories, and this meant conducting fine-grained research into changing power relations in the transition to capitalism, as Foucault explicitly saw himself doing since History of Madness.2

When dealing with a certain kind of Marxism, this presented methodological ambiguities, which Foucault himself had wryly noted. Those who, like Jean-Paul Sartre, accused Foucault of the “refusal of history” seemed never to have set foot in an archive.3 Closer to the Marx who sat on his carbuncles in the British Museum was Foucault, who from the very beginning wroteHistory of Madness immersed in the “slightly dusty archives of pain.”4 In the Marxian register captivated by the idea of history, yet unburdened by historical research, the microscopic detail typical of Foucault’s practices of archaeology and genealogy could become little more than evidence for causal historical claims guaranteed in advance by a general theory, necessary expressions of a predetermined historical totality.

The task Chris set for himself was to write about Foucault, and to write about Marxism, and, from this overlapping conceptual standpoint, enter into the archive to write a different kind of history of homosexuality. I had the fortune of many discussions with Chris on the broad contours of his project; in one memorable case, he told me about his research into the history of homosocial male spaces as we changed clothes in the men’s locker room of the UCSC gym.

The publication of the first volume of the History of Sexuality in 1976 inspired countless attempts to formulate a theory of the modern constitution of homosexuality. The difficulty of this task is perhaps best illustrated by none other than Foucault himself, who immediately entered into a year of apparent intellectual silence. He returned with a marked change in his approach, and would not publish another book until just before his death in 1984: the second and third volumes ofThe History of Sexuality, which abruptly turned the reader to a study of ethics, truth, and the self in antiquity, and announced a shift from the analysis of power to the analysis of “the subject.”5 It was the very category he had ruthlessly criticised for decades – another axis of dispute with Sartre – but which he now sought to rethink in an entirely novel way. As we will see, Chris had profound insights into these developments in Foucault’s thought.

There are many reasons why projects remain unfinished. I have the impression from my discussions with him that the scale and ambition of Chris’s project demanded a series of studies, beyond the scope of a single dissertation. But there is something constitutive about incompleteness, as the examples of both Marx and Foucault attest. As Blanchot put it in “The Absence of the Book”: “To write is to produce the absence of work.”6

In his first great book, Foucault used the phrase “absence of work” as the definition of “madness.” It is likely he was recalling a figure almost lost to history: Jacques Martin, who, along with Louis Althusser, formed Foucault’s closest circle of friends at the École normale supérieure in the late 40s. InHistory of Madness, the absence of work was also a theory of history itself: of that which is rejected by a civilisation as useless and unintelligible, and thus makes history meaningful by constituting its limits. For Foucault, the production of the categories of madness and homosexuality rended the dialectic of history; Martin’s experience was located at both of these limits. Unable to write, Martin called himself a “philosopher without work,” a label he realised by destroying his own papers. Facing the prospect of a lifetime of confinement, Martin’s struggle culminated in his tragic suicide.7

Thanks to the publication of Sexual Hegemony, Chris Chitty is not a philosopher without work. But it is the absence of work which I am unable to forget: not only everything he did not manage to write, every conversation we never ended up having, but also the question of history and its limits which pervades the traces he left.

In another moving tribute, Blanchot wrote that “friendship was perhaps promised to Foucault as a posthumous gift.” He said: “In bearing witness to a work demanding study (unprejudiced reading) rather than praise, I believe I am remaining faithful, however awkwardly, to the intellectual friendship that his death, so painful for me, today allows me to declare to him.”8 It is this Foucault who, in his investigation of truth-telling in his final years, will make note of “the obligation to be frank with one's friends.”9 My faithfulness to this friendship is to speak now to Chris Chitty, and to speak frankly, as a matter of ethics, in tribute to his own thinking of and as the subject of truth. And, so, I turn first to my own archives.

***

I found exchanges with Chitty in 2012 revolving around his translation of Foucault’s 1976 lecture “The Mesh of Power,” which he published in Viewpoint along with a detailed and original commentary that was immediately an outstanding success and has since been widely cited.10 On rereading, I find it magisterial. Chitty had mastered the whole scope of Foucault’s work, in its notoriously inscrutable convolutions and changes in terminology, identifying not only the shifts themselves but also what was at stake in them, operating not only at the level of the concept but also of politics. Thus, Chitty situated Foucault’s shifting thought in his participation in the struggles of the 60s and 70s, with a political and theoretical acumen that should embarrass those who blather about whether the fact that Foucault read Gary Becker made him a closet neoliberal.

In dialogue, Chitty and I worked out our thinking. Reviewing my own positions, I do not always agree with myself, though often I do. The crux of the discussion: Chitty insisted to me that it was necessary to pose a dialectical question regarding Foucault’s thought. This was because Foucault studied, first of all, vestigial forms of power, but then went on to show how new political rationalities, or technological organisations, were grafted onto these older edifices. But the followers of Foucault, he argued, had failed to measure up to these questions because they had rejected the possibility of thinking them dialectically. He attributed the needed dialectic to Marx, meaning that only Marx’s theory could explain how the residual forms of power of political economy and the state continued to exist after the end of 19th century capitalism, and, indeed, how existing political forms might survive a transition out of capitalism.

I did not agree with him then because I believed in the necessity of rejecting the dialectic of history, which so many enemies of the dialectic have ended up reproducing. I thought, and still think, that the historical dialectic cannot deal with this problem, because it is concerned with supersession, and not with survivals, vestiges, or residues.

Nevertheless, already thirty years ago, Judith Butler asked, in a perceptive analysis of Foucault in the context of the reading of Hegel, if anti-dialectical positions are “still haunted by the dialectic, even as they claim to be in utter opposition to it.” As Butler points out, Foucault criticises a Hegelian philosophy of history “inasmuch as the dialectical explanation of historical experience assumes that history manifests an implicit and progressive rationality.” Accordingly, he questions the historiographical assumption that “the origin of an historical state of affairs can be found and, if found, could shed any light on the meaning of that state of affairs.”11

Yet Foucault, Butler suggests, nevertheless remains a “tenuous dialectician,” insofar as his is “a dialectic without a subject and without teleology, a dialectic unanchored in which the constant inversion of opposites leads not to a reconciliation in unity, but to a proliferation of oppositions which come to undermine the hegemony of binary opposition itself.”12

How such distinctions might have generated a different dialogue in response to Chitty’s dialectical injunction, I will never know. What is striking to me now is that the carefully refined text Chitty finally placed on my desk expelled the question of the dialectic entirely. He expressed no regret about this. The prevailing theoretical discourse had sutured the question of the dialectic to the polarisation between Marx and Foucault; Chitty took up a position in the battlefield of philosophy which opposed the very framing of this question.

In an exchange which followed soon after the publication of his article on Foucault, Chitty pointed out that the dialectical mode of historical thought, which he associated with Sartre but said was rooted in 19th century discourse, posited a set of speaking subjects at the centre of the historical process, which was precisely the existential subject. Foucault, in contrast, while posing the same questions regarding the construction of thought and sequences of thought, took the perspective of a moment in which the speaking subject could no longer be established as the driving force of an individual psychic history, or for that matter as the driving force of history as such. It was technology that decentred the subject, because, at a certain historical stage, the technological organisation of society began to matter much more than what people thought or said about it.

Because 19th century discourse was unable to grasp the role of technology in the industrial age, Chitty said that Marx had failed to develop a theory of the material force of ideology, while Hegel had to attempt to hypostatise human consciousness in the form of the “world-historical individual.” Foucault, in contrast, theorised the scientific and technological neutralisation of the speaking subject. His challenge to Marxism, then, was that a “theory of praxis” could not capture the way technology had begun to program subjectivity and impose limits on collective agency. Studying the history of industrial society now required us to capture new phenomena, namely the category of the population, and so Foucault abandoned his previous idea, which Chitty attributed to The Order of Things, that history was a “process without a subject.” Now the population became the subject of history, thus presenting the possibility of periodisation, and with the method of genealogy Foucault surpassed the archaeological opposition between continuity and discontinuity.

In my view, this reading presents us with a historicist Foucault, indeed a Foucault who had, despite his stated intentions, returned to the historical dialectic. Yet, at the same time, Chitty argued forcefully against a historicist reading of Foucault, the reading that Sartre himself had presented in response toThe Order of Things, which turned his thought into a mere expression of an alienated and technocratic society. Chitty explained his rejection of this reading by arguing that the history of categories and thought forms refers to things which formally exist between us and reality, rather than being purely objective or purely subjective. It was, instead, a matter of a dense and historical combination of the two.

As I read this now, I see two possible dialectics. At first, we have a “dialectic unanchored,” a logical dialectic for which historical thought is the relation between thought and the history of thought. But then we have history as the historical combination of the objective and the subjective, the historical dialectic, in which case we have a subject of history.

***

Reviewing Chitty’s work I was struck to find that in a talk at the Historical Materialism conference in New York the year after our exchange, he now affirmed that, for Foucault, history remained a process without a subject.13 This term – which, to my knowledge, Foucault does not use – was introduced in passing by Étienne Balibar in the 1964-5 Reading Capital seminar (though of course the words may have been uttered earlier unrecorded), but was only developed three years later by Althusser in a talk called “Marx’s Relation to Hegel” at the seminar of Jean Hyppolite.14

In posing the question of Foucault’s adherence to the concept of history as a process without a subject, Chitty was pointing to a fundamental methodological problem. In The Order of Things, Foucault had indeed shown that the subject of Man is a discursive effect which is coming to be displaced by a new order of knowledge. It was also precisely in the critique of the anthropological conception of history, of history as the process of alienation of the subject of Man, that Althusser formulated the concept of the process without a subject. Provocatively, Althusser credited Hegel himself with this concept, since for Hegel the subject of the historical dialectic is not Man but the dialectic itself. The insertion of Man as the subject of history by Feuerbach and the young Marx was not a viable materialism; it could not measure up to the systematic power of Hegel’s idealism. The real difference between Marx’s materialist dialectic and Hegel’s idealist dialectic, Althusser argued, was not that the form of dialectics was applied to a different substance, which would after all be an entirely non-dialectical formulation.15 It was, rather, that, for the materialist dialectic, the historical process was no longer directed towards the telos of Absolute Knowledge, and therefore, as he would later elaborate, was also a process without a goal.16

But this was not due to a historicalground for history, identified by a subject of knowledge which, in a kind of circle, would also be generated by that same historical ground. (This circle can be taken as a geometrical definition of historicism.) It was, instead, theconcept of history, which was the product of a break in knowledge resulting from theoretical labors which had no relation of necessity to their historical time. That is the concept of history as a process without a subject was a constitutive condition and limit of knowledge of history, which Marxproduced through theoretical work rather than byexpressing his historical period in thought. To posit that historicity emerges at a historical moment, which amounts to saying that it becomes available to a subject of knowledge that had to already exist and be oriented towards this goal, would be to regress from the Marxist to the Hegelian dialectic.

The idealist dialectic is only possible on the basis of what Althusser had earlier characterised in his paper for the Reading Capital seminar as the “homogeneous continuity” and “contemporaneity” of time. Thehomogeneous continuity of time “is the reflection in existence of the continuity of the dialectical development of the Idea.” For this conception, historical analysis consists of the “division of this continuum according to a periodisation corresponding to the succession of one dialectical totality after another.” Thecontemporaneity of time is the structure of the “essential section”: “an intellectual operation in which avertical break is made at any moment in historical time, a break in the present such that all the elements of the whole revealed by this section are in an immediate relationship with one another, a relationship that immediately expresses their internal essence.”17

In contrast, for the materialist dialectic, making a cut in history would reveal different levels with different temporalities – political, legal, ideological, and economic levels whose times, breaks, rhythms, and punctuations would not correspond.18 From this vantage point, Foucault presents us with several difficulties in The Order of Things, despite his stated opposition to both the dialectic and to historicism. The “episteme” appears to be an essential section, in which all knowledge is necessarily its expression. Because of Foucault’s emphasis on discontinuity, it might appear, as it did to Sartre, that these are simply static and disconnected images. But, in fact, it is difficult to see how such “ages” can be periodised without reference to a homogeneous and continuous historical time. Furthermore, since the standpoint from which Foucault studies the episteme remains unspecified, and yet it is the modern episteme which gives rise to historicity itself, it is not clear how we can avoid returning to the historicist circle of the subject. We run the risk of either allowing for the possibility of a subject which is outside history altogether, or restoring the subject of history.

In the unfinished work of Sexual Hegemony, I see Chitty working through these very problems. He engages in the complex staging of conceptual conflicts internal to his own framework, and in this displays the exceptional combination of creativity and erudition which characterised his intelligence. A careful reading of the incompleteness of his text, its distance from resolution, a refusal to fill its empty spaces with ideological plenitude and to resolve its points of heresy into harmonious reconciliation, is what will allow us to pose the questions which otherwise remain obscure.

***

The question of history in Sexual Hegemony is closely articulated with differing conceptions of capitalism. Chitty’s “hypothesis concerning the relation between sexual repression and the origins of capitalism” has a powerful attraction today, but the concepts it implies are not simply given by the empirical data; they must be constructed. The visible presentation of this hypothesis is situated within “the longue durée of sexuality, social form, and economic development” – a reference to the historiography associated with the Annales school, represented in the book’s footnotes by Fernand Braudel.19 Foucault noted at the beginning of The Archaeology of Knowledge that this new writing of history displaced the subject with the vast sedimentary strata of geography and demography. But it did so within the frame of historical continuity, in contrast to the emphasis on discontinuity that was characteristic of Foucault’s own previous work and new developments in the history of the ideas.20

The tension between continuity and discontinuity pervades the trajectory of Foucault’s historical method, and it also appears in the conceptions of capitalism in Sexual Hegemony. The following passage points us to the visible and invisible questions at stake:

Historical periods of intensive politicization of homosexuality correspond to what Giovanni Arrighi and others have identified as periods of world-systemic crisis, periods in which a hegemonic power has entered a phase of financialization, deepening internal social divisions and destabilizing the wider geopolitical balance of power, which had been the basis of its cycle of capital accumulation and rise to hegemony.21

While the word “capitalism” does not appear in this passage, the word which gives us access to the invisible questions of the text is “correspond.” Correspondence is the master concept which regulates the visible historical analysis in Sexual Hegemony.

In TheArchaeology of Knowledge, where the unresolved questions ofThe Order of Things are taken up in a new discourse on method, we find indications what this word means for historical analysis.

The first indication comes when Foucault defends himself from the criticism that The Order of Things reduces every phenomenon to a necessary expression of its historical period. Foucault argues that his conception of a “discursive formation” does not follow such rules of historical necessity – in fact, it is subject to modifications made possible by its system of “strategic choices.”22 The discursive formation “does not play the role of a figure that arrests time and freezes it for decades or centuries,” as critics like Sartre had charged. It, rather, “determines a regularity proper to temporal processes,” presenting “the principle of articulation between a series of discursive events and other series of events, transformations, mutations, and processes.” Therefore “it is not an atemporal form, but a schema of correspondence between several temporal series.”23

The second indication comes when Foucault attempts to distinguish his work from the history of ideas, even though he had initially identified it as the site of new histories of discontinuity. Now, Foucault entirely associates the history of ideas with traditional forms of historical analysis, defined by “genesis, continuity, totalization.” It is the analysis of “distant correspondences, of permanences that persist beneath apparent changes, of slow formations that profit from innumerable blind complicities, of those total figures that gradually come together and suddenly condense into the fine point of the work.” Foucault’s “archaeological description” is a radical alternative to this history of ideas.24

To use his own terminology, Foucault has mobilised the word correspondence within two distinct strategies. First, he uses it to show that the discursive formation is neither static nor the necessary unfolding of a historical origin, because it is the analysis of correspondences between several temporal series. Second, he uses it to show that the history of ideas remains within the traditional form of history, because it is the analysis of correspondences between permanences that constitute the unity of the work. Correspondence is doubled here, representing at the same time the discontinuity and dispersion of multiple temporalities described by archaeology, and the continuity of the unitary temporality of the traditional conception of historical continuity.

Another term, however, which appears and reappears in entirely different contexts in TheArchaeology of Knowledge, establishes a marginal tension with correspondence. This word,décalage, which I will, for the momen,t translate as discrepancy, is not easy to detect, because it is never presented systematically and frequently appears in lengthy lists including words like series, cuts, limits, levels, specificities, forms, relations, temporalities, remanences, modifications, analogies, differences, hierarchies, complementarities, coincidences, thresholds, succession, disconnections, dispersions, ruptures, and scansions.25

In this barrage of terms, it is not self-evident why each one is necessary, whether they are compatible with each other, or how they help us understand what is distinctive about archaeology. In the English translation, matters are even less clear, because the term is rendered as both “shifts” and “gap,” and on one occasion is omitted.26 To these translations, along with “discrepancy,” we could add “lag” and “delay.”

In Reading Capital, where it is used constantly by both Althusser and Balibar, it has been translated as “dislocation.”27 This usage of the term is fundamental, because it grasps precisely the historical problem Chitty posed to me, of the grafting of new forms onto the vestigial edifice, a phenomenon which is actually inexplicable in the linear and unitary temporality of the historical dialectic. In the transition to capitalism, Balibar points out, the existing forms of the law and the state are not expressions of the emergent economic structure – this would be a teleological absurdity. Yet their power and organised force facilitate and accelerate the capitalist transition. As Balibar writes: “this dislocation can be translated by saying that the correspondence appears… in the form of anon-correspondence between the different levels.”28 That is, it is not a non-correspondence which is resolved into correspondence, but a constitutive dislocation which Althusser calls the “intertwining” of multiple temporalities in the historical process.29 Thus dislocations cannot be measured against a single continuous time, and the radical implication is that “there is no history in general, but only specific structures of historicity.”30

To return to the question of historical knowledge, it is in precisely the same sense that there is a dislocation between knowledge and history, not as an expression in thought of a historical moment but as a structure of historicity. This dislocation, which might now be more clearly stated as a discrepancy, rules out the possibility that knowledge simply corresponds to history, that it expresses history in the manner that we might be tempted to say that any ideological phenomenon is the expression of the historical stage of the economic structure.

Notwithstanding his moments of historicist restoration, Foucault’s project also begins with the critique of the notion that the process of cognition emerges from the identity between the subject of experience and the subject of history. With this starting point, the subject is always decentred, because we have no extra-historical vantage point from which to identify a historical period and determine that a particular kind of subject is its expression, and there is no subject of history whose self-consciousness constitutes historical knowledge. As he attempts to maintain this position over time, Foucault constantly passes through discrepancies; by considering them seriously, The Order of Things, too, as Balibar has since demonstrated, can be read otherwise.31

***

We have established the fundamental relation between capitalism and history and its consequences for historical knowledge. The conception of capitalism which introduces the theory of correspondence in Sexual Hegemony is the historical continuity of trade as it extends across the world-system over the course of seven centuries, comprising cycles of financial and material expansion in Florence, Venice, Milan, Genoa, Amsterdam, London, and New York.

However, another capitalism emerges later in the text, when Chitty writes:

Most perspectives fail to account for the agrarian origins of the capitalist system. In my approach, property relations are understood as they are defined by Robert Brenner… England’s early transition to capitalist property relations had to do with its class structure, one in which lords cooperated with the absolutist state to liquidate the old rights of peasants and managed to invest in the means of production on large estates.32

According to this conception, capitalism emerges primarily within two centuries in the English countryside, as the result of struggles within feudal society. As Chitty writes, this account “shifts focus away from a deterministic account” towards the “contingent features of the transition to capitalism.”33 Peasant revolts provoked landlords to consolidate and enclose their land and lease it to competing tenants, separating people from their means of subsistence and ultimately forcing them to sell their labor-power for a wage. Within this new capitalist class structure it became possible for property owners to extract a surplus from labour and accumulate capital.

This is a theory of discontinuity, insofar as capitalism is now a historical rupture whose specific social relations of trade, division of labour, and accumulation cannot be used to explain its own emergence. The geographical and temporal specificity of the transition to capitalism could, furthermore be taken as a kind of historical nominalism.

However, it is possible for the category of “property relations” to reintroduce both historical continuity and a general theory of history, if it is a historical invariant built on a transhistorical foundation. In the classical and now more or less discredited model of dialectical and historical materialism, this foundation was the development of the productive forces. That theory has today been replaced by one more palatable to our contemporary sensibilities: the choices made by individual economic actors who seek to reproduce themselves. Chitty, aware that this takes us back to the most unreconstructed conception of the subject, hesitates in adopting this framework. Foucault made the point quite clearly in The Archaeology of Knowledge:

Continuous history is the indispensable correlative of the founding function of the subject: the guarantee that everything that has eluded him may be restored to him; the certainty that time will disperse nothing without restoring it in a reconstituted unity… Making historical analysis the discourse of the continuous and making human consciousness the original subject of all historical development and all action are the two sides of the same system of thought.34

Now, an alternative to the restoration of the subject is already implied in The Archaeology of Knowledge: strategy. Foucault writes that “strategic choices do not emerge directly from a world-view or from a predominance of interests peculiar to this or that speaking subject.” They are, rather, “determined by points of divergence” within a particular system.35

In The History of Sexuality, this logic is elaborated in a manner that bears directly on the transition to capitalism. When we speak of struggles and their contingent effects, we are operating within the “strategic field of power relations.” While power is exercised with “a series of aims and objectives,” these do not result from “the choice or decision of an individual subject.” Instead, “the rationality of power is characterized by tactics,” which form systems whose logic is intelligible without being traceable to any originary subject.36

Is this an ontology of power which, in its own way, restores continuity? Foucault evades this charge, precisely with resort to nominalism: “One needs to be nominalist, no doubt: power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategic situation in a particular society.”37

The question of nominalism is an ongoing theme in Chitty’s critique of the historiography of homosexuality. He perceptively observes that Foucault “avoids ontological questions with a nominalism where convenient (as with homosexuality and madness) and stages ontologies with vague metaphorics (as with the concept of a ‘technology of power’) where convenient.”38This criticism, which sees a vacillation between nominalism and ontology, resonates with Butler’s important point regarding Foucault’s preoccupation with war inThe History of Sexuality, which appears to lead to “a renewed desire for life, the intensification and multiplica­tion of bodily pleasures, the promotion of sexual vitalism.” Butler asks whether Foucault’s “claim that vitalism is constitutive of all contemporary political struggles is an historically contingent claim or a claim of universal ontology”; the latter would be “in some senseprior to any of the historical observations that Foucault is making.”39

But, here, Foucault is proposing a nominalism of power, not an ontology. In his classic analysis of Foucault and Marx throughThe History of Sexuality, Balibar argues that it is precisely Foucault’s “practice of historical nominalism” which allows him to avoid lapsing into vitalist or biological ontologies, not only because it excludes idealised notions of “sex” or “power,” but also because forbids us from passing “directly from the material nature of bodies to the ideal nature of life.” Conversely, Marxists who embrace a philosophy of history of historical materialism are too frequently “unable to desist from moving from the material nature of social relations to the ideal nature of dialectics.” Balibar imagines Marx replying to Foucault, in a manner very different from the Marxists enamored of the idea of history. “It is I who am the most thoroughgoing nominalist,” says Balibar’s Marx, “the least metaphysical, of the two of us.” In response to Foucault’s materialism of bodies, of power relations which act upon bodies, Marx replies that these bodiesthemselves are constituted by class relations, ruling out any metaphysical conception of bodies. It is not so much a matter of choosing one position in this exchange, but recognising how nominalism becomes “a supplement to materialism necessary to stop a particular form of materiality – economic, political, or discursive – from turning back into metaphysics.”40

Such insights in the texts of Marx and Foucault are revealed with attention to discrepancies; and, if we turn in Chitty’s text from correspondence to discrepancy, other insights await.

***

In the very sections of Sexual Hegemony that propose correspondence, we find discrepancies. Chitty writes quite explicitly of his historical narrative that “economic development accounts for a significant part of this story; however, political contingency has also played a crucial role.”41 He adds that “by considering cultures of sex between men in light of the temporality of attempts to establish early modern republics,” which he describes as “a cycle of revolution, interregnum, and restoration,” he aims to “foreground the role of contingency in the history of cultures of sodomy.”42

Note that there is a single temporality, which is cyclical. Yet there is a discrepancy between this model of the highest order of historical necessity – cycles which occur in a single temporality – and the assertion of the role of contingency.

Chitty’s sharp insights into his historical archives compel him to repeatedly reformulate his questions and his solutions. There are two questions he initially describes as central: “why did sex between men become so problematic within social forms that placed such great importance upon a division of labor,” and “how did the political and social struggles that characterized such social forms generate and transform cultures of sex between men?” Answering these questions requires, Chitty writes, “an approach able to take into account both the structural conditions of possibility for cultures of sex between men and the contingent effects of political struggles upon such cultures.”43

He then turns back to the scene of Greek homosexuality, which he says is not a timeless phenomenon, but began somewhere around 650 BC, provoked by three historical events: the Dorian invasions, the military technology facilitated by iron, and the development of craft production and the expansion of trade networks. Chitty’s source on this history is primarily Foucault’s inaugural 1970-1 Collège de France lectures titled The Will to Know, which will become the subtitle of the first volume ofThe History of Sexuality. (Since all my further references will be to the first volume, I will henceforth omit this qualification.) The cited lecture is concerned specifically with the formation of classes and the relation between knowledge and the state apparatus.44 On the basis of Foucault’s economic analysis, Chitty argues that the so-called homosexualities of so-called ancient Greece “must themselves be considered the contingent outcome of a history of class struggle, war, and the first democratic and republican polities.”45

Here we also encounter the question of Chitty’s historical ground. Interspersed throughout his historical exposition are critical accounts of contemporary historiographies of homosexuality. Chitty argues for a “historical materialist understanding of cultural artifacts,” which “requires dialectical ways of thinking the relationship between and simultaneity of residual and emergent social and sexual forms.” These phenomena, Chitty writes, “cannot be incorporated by either a model emphasizing radical breaks and discontinuities or simplistic models of succession and accretion.”46

In other words, the simultaneity of residual and emergent social and sexual forms is to be distinguished from both “radical breaks and discontinuities”and “simplistic models of succession and accretion.” The problem of continuity and discontinuity remains unresolved, but the simultaneity of the residual and the emergent calls us to another pairing, the structuralist division between the synchronic and the diachronic. The forceful critique of structuralism Althusser presents inReading Capital, often obscured by the reckless application of the label “structuralist” that both he and Foucault were forced to militate against, is that the synchronic corresponds precisely to the essential section and its model of expressivity. The residual and the emergent then must be measured according to a diachronic reference time, meaning that they are only residual and emergent as the past and future of a unitary time which undergirds the expression of the totality in all of its parts. As Althusser puts it:

The synchronic therefore presupposes the ideological conception of a continuous-homogeneous time. It follows that the diachronic is merely the development of this present in the sequence of a temporal continuity in which the “events” to which “history” in the strict sense can be reduced (cf. Lévi-Strauss) are merely successive contingent presents in the time continuum.47

With the structuralist model, we are left unable to grasp the constitutive character of the dislocation. To avoid “relapsing into the ideology of a homogeneous-continuous/self-contemporaneous time,” we need a different concept, one which can “think the concept of these so-called backwardnesses, forwardnesses, survivals and unevennesses of development which coexist in the structure of the real historical present: the present of the conjuncture.”48

Now, this word is not absent from Chitty’s text. When he poses what appears to be the fundamental question of his visible text, for which his position of enunciation is stated as the place of “late capitalism” and recent social movements, the word appears without the concept. He writes:

Based on such assessments of the present conjuncture, it’s possible to pose the following historical question: To what extent are politicizations and neutralizations of homosexuality contingent or structural features of periods of crisis in the historical hegemonies of the capitalist world system?49

However, he does not precisely answer this question, but a different question. The difference is subtle, but with profound implications. The question he answers is: how are the politicisations and neutralisations of homosexuality structural features? In other words, the text askswhether these phenomena are structural or contingent, which would then invite an explanation ofwhy they are one or the other, and this is articulated to an invisible question, which is the relation between structure and conjuncture and necessity and contingency in the method of historical analysis. But then there is a lapse in the text, because we proceed immediately with the assumption that theyare structural features into a general account of them.

We have encountered certain discrepancies. Contingency is counterposed not to necessity but to structure. Conjuncture and structure are not counterposed. Conjuncture is assigned to the present, structure to the past, but they appear in a unity contrary to contingency. There are the present conjuncture and structural features, and the present conjuncture makes it possible to pose the historical question about structural features. At one point, Chitty describes the “structural causes” of “conjunctural politicization.”50 The conjunctural character of the present is annulled by correspondence to structural causes; which leads to mirror formulations, on the very same page, of “conjunctural and structural forces” and then “structural and conjunctural forces.” However, in the second case, he precedes this conflation by observing that “the ‘development of modern sexuality’ is nonlinear: sudden jolts forward, backward, or laterally into entirely different sexual norms seem to be the rule.”51

If nonlinearity is the “rule,” we might ask if in fact we are dealing with a rule of exceptions – the “exceptional situation” as the rule itself.52 Behind the word “conjuncture” is an absent concept: the possibility of thinking the present in terms of the coexistence and articulation of levels with multiple temporalities irreducible to a continuous reference time.53

***

What results from the displacement of the oppositions between structure and conjuncture, necessity and contingency, to the unity of conjuncture and necessity and the opposition of structure and contingency? Are we simply dealing with contradictions, which for a certain register of thought would indicate that the text is incoherent, and for another call for dialectical reconciliation?

Of course, I take neither view. Let us instead look to the text for its own conception of contradiction. In the passage I have already cited which argues for the historical materialist dialectic, Chitty immediately goes on to argue for the centrality of contradiction, offering a distinctive definition:

Contradiction, according to this conception, is a narrative strategy for representing events, institutions, and cultural formations over which multiple forces have struggled to achieve certain outcomes; recognizing this contingency, often apparent only in evental disruptions of the status quo or dramatic reversals of fortune, as when winners lose and losers win, opens up a perspective on how struggles and contestation drive a historical process that would otherwise appear unilinear or geologically static.54

This definition of contradiction reveals, once again, discrepancies and the absence of a concept, which for our reading will function as a conceptual hinge. While the word “politics” is absent in this passage, the previous passages I have cited counterpose the “contingent effects of political struggles” to “economic development” and “structural conditions.”

Political struggles are assigned to contingency. There are discrepancies here, however, because the word politicization is initially assigned to correspondence. This is of decisive importance, because, inSexual Hegemony, politicisation refers first and foremost to the repression and persecution of sodomy, which corresponds to the economic cycles in the historical longue durée.

But Chitty cannot remain entirely within the correspondence regulated by the economic cycle: he must pose the question of “the history of homosexuality and its relation to political forms,” because “the politicization of cultures of sex between men struck at the core of problems of government.”55 This means that, in the moment of social analysis, the dislocated level of the state must be understood according to its own temporality. However, this goes even further: Chitty also cannot remain at the level of the social analysis of politicisation, because his vantage point is also that of the struggles and contestation associated with moments of evental disruption, which opposes the historical logic of linear necessity.

In working through these questions, Chitty’s reading of Foucault is of considerable importance, and his work should not be interpreted as some kind of Marxist “correction” of Foucault’s “errors.” One does not simply add “class struggle” to The History of Sexuality like investors add stocks to their portfolios. It would already be impossible to read the works leading up toThe History of Sexuality and conclude that Foucault did not address the class struggle and the transition to capitalism, or that he ignored the labouring classes. Conversely, one cannot simply assert that class struggle should be reintroduced afterThe History of Sexuality when it is precisely at this time that, in his lectures, Foucault is in the process of presenting a new and distinct theory of class struggle.

Of course, the historical claims and conceptual logic of Foucault’s work should be critically assessed, and Sexual Hegemony presents criticisms ofTheHistory of Sexuality which are likely to draw considerable attention. But discussions of Chitty’s reading of Foucault should be situated within the context of his fidelity to the singular invention of Foucault’s thought. In my experience this was an unwavering and rigorous intellectual commitment. Our cynical and competitive intellectual cultures are too quick to dismiss such fidelities, which are not barriers to new inventions, but their condition.

Though Chitty’s ongoing analysis of Foucault was cut tragically short, some elements of it are publicly available, and his Viewpoint article quite definitively demonstrated thatThe History of Sexuality cannot be interpreted in isolation. In this article he directly addressed Foucault’s account of the relation between “race war” and “class war” from the“Society Must Be Defended” lectures contemporaneous withThe History of Sexuality. Despite the brevity of his engagement with this topic, Chitty’s overall interpretation of the lectures is crucial: through them he identifies “a remarkable transitional period from 1976 to 1979 in which Foucault experienced a profound intellectual crisis and began a project of self-criticism, before turning to the more ethical concerns that would characterize his late period.”56 I will end by considering the implications of this late period, by returning to the point where I began.

***

In a 1981 interview with the magazine Gai Pied, Foucault made the extraordinary remark that “the development toward which the problem of homosexuality tends is the one of friendship.” This interview was called “Friendship as a Way of Life,” and Foucault went on to say that we should mistrust the relating of homosexuality to the questions “who am I?” and “what is the secret of my desire?” We should instead ask how sexuality can be used to arrive at a “multiplicity of relationships” – we should ask, “what relations, through homosexuality, can be established, invented, multiplied, and modulated?” This leads us to an entirely different set of questions, which Foucault characterises as “questions of existence”: “How is it possible for men to be together? To live together, to share their time, their meals, their room, their leisure, their grief, their knowledge, their confidences?” It is these questions of existence, and not the sexual act itself, which make homosexuality “disturbing” to our “sanitized society,” which, Foucault says, can in fact tolerate public homosexuality. It can tolerate the scene of “immediate pleasure,” of “two young men meeting in the street, seducing each other with a look, grabbing each other’s asses and getting each other off in a quarter of an hour.” But what it cannot tolerate, Foucault goes on to say, is “everything that can be troubling in affection, tenderness, friendship, fidelity, camaraderie, and companionship.” It is these relations which provoke the society’s fear of “the formation of new alliances and the tying together of unforeseen lines of force.”57

The scenario Foucault describes is what Chitty sets out to explain at the end of Sexual Hegemony. Over the 70s and 80s, the once threatening public sexuality of proletarian men came to be “formalized in commercial establishments openly catering to gay clientele,” and “markets stepped in to meet and shape a consumer profile of gay identity.”58 Today, “as sexual object choice becomes increasingly less determinant of life possibilities in high-income countries, it will continue to weaken as a marker of identity, devolving into a set of consumer preferences and choices exercised in a market.” In the face of an “infinitely more permissive establishment,” Chitty writes, “the political ground of sexual contention and countercultural opposition has crumbled beneath our feet,” and it is that that frames Foucault’s carnal scene.59 Chitty’s seemingly counterintuitive formulation is that “the homosexual appropriation of companionate marriage is capable of supporting semipublic cultures of stranger intimacy,” which no longer form the essence of a counterculture, but simply become part of a set of “nonsubversive life options.”60

What are the causes of this scenario? Here, the analysis is suspended between the structural and the conjunctural. For Chitty, “the achievement of homosexual rights” resulted from both a “depoliticization of sex” and a “politicization of homosexuality.” These are characterised as part of a “structural transformation” which was obscured by “a contingent repoliticization of homosexuality during the first two decades of the AIDS crisis.”61 The relation between structure and conjuncture, and the role of contingency, shift constantly throughout this analysis. What matters to me is that these discrepancies separate politics from history – and so I will now focus on politics.

In this sceptical account of the achievement of homosexual rights Chitty refers to a depoliticisation ofsex, not specifically of homosexuality. This is one of only two times the notion of “depoliticization” appears. The second time comes after he observes that “the present crisis has enabled a partial overcoming of antihomosexual prejudice by affirming the threatened values of family and intimate coupling,” and suggests that this has rendered the question of whether to attack “normativity” or retreat into it obsolete. He writes that “without the strong antagonism of a bourgeois dominant against which a homosexual counterculture once asserted itself, this language and these categories may no longer be relevant to a depoliticized sexual field.” Sex, rather than being politicised, becomes a “matter of personal taste,” and a range of different sexual practices are “culturally recombinable to varying degrees even within a single individual’s highly compartmentalized social milieus and self-presentations.”62 Depoliticisation is the marketplace of sexual tastes, but it is also the result of a shift in the antagonistic balance of forces in the sexual field.

Alongside depoliticisation, we find dividing conceptions of politicisation. As I have noted, when Chitty speaks of the politicisation of homosexuality, this almost always refers to the history of state repression and persecution of sodomy.63 The politicisation of sex refers to the discursive construction of norms that facilitate the formation of states.64 But, here, the politicisation of homosexuality is also the effect of liberation movements – of “the gay and lesbian rights movement’s struggle for recognition and for gains in formal equality.”65

With specific reference to the AIDS crisis, the politicization of homosexuality appears twice. The first time, it follows a critique of histories of homosexuality which understand it in terms of repression provoked by moral panics and fear of social deviance. Chitty argues that this sociological paradigm fails to grasp the specificity of homosexuality, collapsing it into a general framework of law and transgression. But it became an established interpretation due to historical circumstances: “The moral reaction to homosexuality during the AIDS epidemic invested this theory with the explanatory power to describe past and present politicizations of homosexuality and to establish apparent historical continuity and intelligibility between historically episodic panics.” Here, the politicisation of homosexuality is a false continuity within the historiography of repression. But he adds: “This paradigm, however, is itself historical and ultimately results in elevating a liberal bourgeois theory of the state into the constitutive principle of human desire and all other cultural formations.”66

To say that this paradigm is itself historical is a historicist claim. But this historicism is what reveals to us that, as Foucault will put it in his own historicist turn in the “Society Must Be Defended” lectures, “a continuity has been established between historical narrative and the management of the State.”67 In Foucault’s thought, we also encounter political discrepancies as he approaches the problem of history. They appear first in the void upon which history emerges, then in the strategy and tactics to which history is sutured, and finally as the limit and possibility of the subject of truth for which other histories are possible.68

So it is significant that the second use of the word “politicization,” in another discussion of the AIDS crisis, has precisely the opposite meaning. Chitty describes how “new forms of solidarity between gay men and lesbians” were crucial to “the radical politicization of AIDS.” The “political mobilization around AIDS,” facilitated by a “feminist affinity with male homosexuality,” extended its solidarities across a broad range of class, racial, and sexual boundaries.69

This is the politicisation of movements. In a passage which is not directly connected to sex or homosexuality, but to the movements which extend from the Arab Spring to Occupy, the terms shift once again in their relations and meaning. Chitty writes that “the structural causes and grievances of that conjunctural politicization of a global condition of social and economic disenfranchisement persist,” but also that “the flare-up of new movements of this sort suggests possibilities beyond the morbid forms of slow death or the demands for a return to normal.”70

Now, Chitty identifies a phenomenon which suggests possibilities, but, in a terminological lag, characteristic of conceptual labours, he gives it the same name assigned to its antagonist. This discrepancy strikes us once again near the end of Sexual Hegemony, when Chitty inquires into the prospects for a “future politicization of sex” and the “future politicization of sexual health.”71

I will posit a gap: politicisation is the continuity of the history of states, while politics is the evental disruption which suggests possibilities. Between these two terms, we must make a decision. I have no uncertainty about Chitty’s decision; in Sexual Hegemony, its affirmation is painfully brief and allusive, but it is, nevertheless, unmistakeable when, echoing Foucault’s reflection on friendship, Chitty suggests the possibility of moving away from the “history of deviant sexual behaviors and identities, their purely negative relation to some law or norm,” towards “the transformative and emancipatory possibilities of love and intimacy outside the institutions of family, state, and the couple form.”72

But what he tells us in conclusion is that it is not homosexuality in itself that will provide the basis for a future politics of sex. Our political question today revolves around “the exhaustion of the libidinal body” – the precarity of bodies, of “sick, worn-out laboring bodies,” this intolerable regime of poverty, inequality, and disease.73 The future politics of sexual health, Chitty writes, must be part of a “movement responding to worsening conditions of life.”74 It will confront the obscene persistence of capitalism, which relies on “the physical deterioration of the body” imposed on the labouring and surplus populations who are denied healthcare, housing, and the conditions of a free collective life by the biopolitics of a “managed slow death.”75

***

There is a library where I helped Chris's parents unpack his books, which, upon his death, they graciously donated to readers of the future. We placed them on shelves I would return to, from time to time, in pursuit of some new insight, or perhaps some old one memory had lost.

Far away, now, from those shelves, I again enter Chris's library, and he receives me there; I speak to him and ask him the reasons for his words. At times my questions are sceptical, and I do not hesitate to voice disagreement. He is never at a loss to reply to me, whether it is with obstinacy or in a spirit of cooperation, both of which challenge me to think more clearly.

The critical inquiry into the history of ourselves requires a patient labour, as Chris knew well; but as we speak it is his impatience for liberty that I hear. It is a militant impatience, which says that his inquiry into the relation between capitalism and homosexuality cannot be confined to history, cannot only be the object of analysis: it must also be the site of prescription. There is no automatic progression from the analysis of capitalism as a social and historical order to the political statement: that capitalism is intolerable. There is no political essence of homosexuality which determines it to be antagonistic to capitalism, or, for that matter, complicit with it, as a matter of historical necessity.

There is politics, though, he is clear, insofar as homosexuality raises questions of existence. We have to answer these questions as subjects of truth: not subjects of experience or subjects of history, but subjects who affirm the true life, which this life is not.

The friendship we continue to share, Chris Chitty and me, is the one directed towards creating the alliances and lines of force that could destroy this intolerable regime. Such friendships, the friendships which the regime cannot tolerate, are eternal.

• 1. Maurice Blanchot, Friendship, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 291; L’amitié (Paris; Gallimard, 1971), 328.
• 2. See Remarks on Marx, trans. R. James Goldstein and James Cascaito (New York: Semiotext(e), 1991), 77-8; “Foucault étudie la raison d’État” in Dits et écrits 4, ed. Daniel Defert and François Ewald (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 59-60.
• 3. Ibid., 120, 125, 129; 74, 76, 77. See “Jean-Paul Sartre répond,” L'Arc 30 (1966): 89-97.
• 4. Michel Foucault, History of Madness trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa (New York: Routledge, 2006), xxxvi; Dits et écrits 1, ed. Daniel Defert and François Ewald (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 167.
• 5. Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990); L’usage des plaisirs (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), 12.
• 6. Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 424; L’entretien infini (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 622-3. Translation modified. Note that in the original Blanchot also omits the article: l’absence de livre, though I found this improbable in English.
• 7. Foucault, History of Madness; xxxi-xxxix; 161-3. In my forthcoming article “The Absence of Work: Foucault, History, and Politics” I trace the history of this term in detail and elaborate on its relevance for understanding the relation between Foucault and Marxism.
• 8. Maurice Blanchot, “Michel Foucault as I Imagine Him,” trans. Jeffrey Mehlman in Foucault/Blanchot (New York: Zone, 1987) 109; Michel Foucault tel que je l'imagine (Paris: Éditions Fata Morgana, 1986), 64. I share the point of departure indicated by Jacques Derrida that immediately precedes his reading of these passages of Blanchot: “The stake of this question is, of course, also political.” Whether we will arrive in the same place remains to be seen. Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (New York: Verso, 2005), 294; Politiques de l’amitié (Paris: Galilée, 1994), 326.
• 9. Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, trans. Graham Burchell and ed. Frédéric Gros, François Ewald, and Alessandro Fontana (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 365; L’herméneutique du sujet, ed. Frédéric Gros, François Ewald, and Alessandro Fontana (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 347.
• 10. Chris Chitty, “Towards a Socialist Art of Government: Michel Foucault’s ‘The Mesh of Power,’” Viewpoint 2 (2012).
• 11. Judith Butler, Subjects of Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 176-7.
• 12. Ibid., 225.
• 13. This talk was transcribed and published as Christopher Chitty, “Reassessing Foucault: Modern Sexuality and the Transition to Capitalism,” Viewpoint (April 2017).
• 14. Étienne Balibar, “The Basic Concepts of Historical Materialism” in Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster and David Fernbach (New York: Verso, 2015), 439; “Sur les concepts fondamentaux du matérialisme historique,” in Lire le Capital 2 (Paris: Maspero, 1969), 175. Louis Althusser, “Marx’s Relation to Hegel,” in Politics and History, trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1972)“Sur le rapport de Marx à Hegel” in Hegel et la pensée moderne, ed. Jacques d’Hondt (Paris: PUF, 1970).
• 15. “It is hardly worth pointing out that, in the first case, the application of a method, the exteriority of the dialectic to its possible objects poses a pre-dialectical question, a question without any strict meaning for Marx.” Louis Althusser, “Contradiction and Overdetermination” in For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Verso, 2005), 93; “Contradiction et surdétermination” in Pour Marx (Paris: La Découverte, 2005), 91.
• 16. See the “Reply to John Lewis,” first published in English in the Communist Party of Great Britain journal Marxism Today in October and November 1972, and then in French the following year as Réponse à John Lewis (Paris: Maspéro, 1973), then finally collected with other material in Essays in Self-Criticism (London: New Left Books, 1976).
• 17. Althusser, “The Object of Capital,” 241; Lire le Capital 1 (Paris: Maspero, 1969), 116.
• 18. Ibid., 251-2; 129-30.
• 19. Chitty, Sexual Hegemony., 35.
• 20. Foucault, Archaeology, 3-17; 3-20. Foucault confirms that the reference is to the longue durée of the Annales school in “The Archeology of Knowledge,” trans. John Johnston in Foucault Live, ed. Sylvère Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 1996), 58; “Michel Foucault explique son dernier livre” in Dits et écrits 1, 773.
• 21.
• 22. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 67; L'Archéologie du savoir (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1969), 72.
• 23. Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, 74; 80. Emphasis mine.
• 24. Ibid., 138; 145. Emphasis mine.
• 25. Foucault, Archaeology, 10, 175, 187, 188, 192; 11, 186, 199, 201, 205. I have modified some translations, and for the sake of simplicity I have broken some composite terms apart.
• 26. Ibid., 187; 199.
• 27. See also Louis Althusser, “Rousseau: The Social Contract (The Discrepancies)” in Politics and History; “Sur le « Contrat social »” in Solitude de Machiavel, ed. Yves Sintomer (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998).
• 28. Balibar, “Basic Concepts,” 478; 224.
• 29. Louis Althusser, “The Object of Capital,” 252; 130.
• 30. Ibid., 256-7; 136.
• 31. Étienne Balibar, “Foucault’s Point of Heresy: ‘Quasi-Transcendentals’ and the Transdisciplinary Function of the Episteme,” Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 32:5–6 (2015): 64-6.
• 32. Ibid., 127-9.
• 33. Ibid., 129.
• 34. Foucault, Archaeology, 12; 14.
• 35. Ibid., 72; 77-8.
• 36. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 94-6; Histoire de la sexualité 1: La volonté de savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 124-6.
• 37. Ibid., 93; 123. Translation modified.
• 38. Chitty, Sexual Hegemony, 154-5.
• 39. Butler, Subjects of Desire, 226-7.
• 40. Étienne Balibar, “Foucault and Marx: The Question of Nominalism” in Timothy J. Armstrong, Michel Foucault: Philosopher (Hertfordshire: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), 55-6; “Foucault et Marx. L’enjeu du nominalisme” in Michel Foucault philosophe (Paris: Seuil, 1989), 74-6.
• 41. Chitty, Sexual Hegemony, 24.
• 42. Ibid., 25.
• 43. Ibid., 30-1.
• 44. Michel Foucault, Lectures on the Will to Know, ed. Bernard Harcourt and trans. Graham Burchell (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 116-32; Leçons sur la volonté de savoir suivi de Le savoir de l'Œdipe, ed. François Ewald, Alessandro Fontana, and Daniel Defert (Paris: Seuil/Gallimard, 2011), 111-25. On the term “state apparatus” see the letter from Étienne Balibar to the editor regarding the immediately subsequent lectures in Penal Theories and Institutions, ed. Bernard Harcourt and trans. Graham Burchell (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019); Théories et institutions pénales, ed. Bernard Harcourt (Paris: Seuil/Gallimard, 2015).
• 45. Chitty, Sexual Hegemony, 59.
• 46. Ibid., 158.
• 47. Althusser, “The Object of Capital,” 242-3; 118-9.
• 48. Ibid., 254; 133.
• 49. Chitty, Sexual Hegemony, 178.
• 50. Ibid., 178.
• 51. Ibid., 135.
• 52. Althusser, “Contradiction and Overdetermination,” 104; 103.
• 53. Althusser, “The Object of Capital,” 254; 133.
• 54. Chitty, Sexual Hegemony, 158.
• 55. Ibid., 38.
• 56. Chitty, “Towards a Socialist Art of Government.”
• 57. Michel Foucault, “Friendship as a Way of Life,” trans. John Johnston, in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow, (New York: New Press, 1997), 135-7; Dits et écrits 4, 163-4. Translation modified. For other treatments of this interview, see Tom Roach, Friendship as a Way of Life (Albany: SUNY Press, 2012) and Judith Revel, “Between Politics and Ethics: The Question of Subjectivation” in Foucault and the Making of Subjects, ed. Laura Cremonesi, Orazio Irrera, Daniele Lorenzini and Martina Tazzioli (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016). A comparison of Foucault’s account with Derrida’s Politics of Friendship illustrates precisely the extent to which Foucault is proposing a new political project. This does not reduce the power and acuity of Derrida’s reading, but between the undecidability of democracy-to-come and the formation of new alliances and the tying together of unforeseen lines of force, I have no hesitation in deciding with Foucault.
• 58. Chitty, Sexual Hegemony, 188.
• 59. Ibid., 180.
• 60. Ibid., 191.
• 61. Ibid., 174.
• 62. Ibid., 192.
• 63. Ibid., 24.
• 64. Ibid., 111, 120, 135-6.
• 65. Ibid., 173.
• 66. Ibid., 151.
• 67. Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”, ed. Arnold I. Davidson and trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 170-3; « Il faut défendre la société » (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 152-4. See also Sexual Hegemony, 152, 155. On this point, I draw on Alain Badiou, “Foucault: Continuity and Discontinuity” in The Adventure of French Philosophy, ed. and trans. Bruno Bosteels (New York: Verso, 2012), 87.
• 68. I attempt to demonstrate aspects of this reading in “The Absence of Work.”
• 69. Chitty, Sexual Hegemony, 146. The repoliticisation of this already double politicisation of homosexuality, however, also takes place within the AIDS crisis. Thus two politicisations are happening simultaneously, alongside both repoliticisation and depoliticisation, and we are confronted with the absent question of this historical temporality, in which repoliticisation is contingent and both politicisation and depoliticisation are structural.
• 70. Ibid., 178. Note that the causes of social and economic disenfranchisement are structural, while politicisation is conjunctural.
• 71. Ibid., 191.
• 72. Ibid., 188.
• 73. Ibid., 189. I employ here the term of Foucault, applied to prisons through his work in the Prisons Information Group; see “Sur les prisons,” “Enquête sur les prisons: brisons les barreaux du silence,” and “Préface” in Dits et écrits 3, ed. Daniel Defert and François Ewald (Paris: Gallimard, 1994).
• 74. Ibid., 191.
• 75. Ibid., 189-91.

By Gavin Walker

There is no such thing as the ‘spontaneous knowledge’ of the dominated classes; or, more exactly, we could say that any such ‘spontaneous knowledge’ has no fixed meaning that would tie it to this or that form of politics.

Didier Eribon, Retour à Reims

 

The question of fascism today is no longer of a principally theoretical character for thinkers of the Left, as it often has been since the upheavals of the long 1968, the “revolutions of 1968” in Immanuel Wallerstein’s terms. Today, it is rather a question not only of history and theory, but of practical political stances in the immediate moment, insofar as openly fascist political formations currently enjoy more currency than they have for decades in the advanced capitalist countries. From the global left, and especially in Europe and North America, our moment has seen remarkable new theorisations of fascism, from Enzo Traverso’s important discussions of “post-fascism” to Ugo Palheta’s new and powerful text here in Historical Materialism on “Fascism, Fascisation, Antifascism,”1 along with his major recent work in French, La possibilité du fascisme. I am in a strong agreement with Palheta’s theses, not least because they place into dialogue a three-fold process expressed in his title: a reflection in theory (the concept of ‘fascism’ as such), a reflection in history (the process of what he calls ‘fascisation’, the ‘becoming-fascist’ of social and political phenomena), and a reflection on the immediate political situation (the tasks of contemporary ‘anti-fascism’, how it can be politically built and organisationally sustained).

Where I want to offer a contribution to this debate – for whose organisation and coordination I would like to thank Historical Materialism and for his invitation particularly Alberto Toscano, in his own right an important theorist of the new fascisms – is, fundamentally, not a rejoinder to or criticism of Palheta’s formulations, which I find both original and productive. Instead, I would rather simply to point to a missing or somewhat invisible element of this broad debate in texts from Palheta, Traverso, and many others: the relationship between fascisms today and the specific character of imperialism, both as a geopolitical force for the organisation of relations between states and national entities, and as ametapolitics derived from imperialism’s specific character as one historical regime of accumulation within the development of capitalism.

In thinking through the transformations of contemporary fascism – or ‘post-fascism’ – in relation to the question of imperialism, we would do well to remember a key watchword of Lenin:

Recognition of the present war as imperialist and emphasis on its close connection with the imperialist era of capitalism encounters not only resolute opponents but also irresolute friends, for whom the word ‘imperialism’ has become all the rage. Having memorized the word, they are offering the workers hopelessly confused theories and reviving many of the old mistakes of the old economism.2

The reason I want to think through the metapolitics – “whatever consequences a philosophy is capable of drawing, both in and for itself, from real instances of politics as thought”3 – of imperialism here is precisely to refuse it as an economism, in which we would simply say that fascism is a domestic political correlate to monopoly concentration and the export of capital to the colonies. Although a concrete economic imperialism persists as the broad stage of accumulation of world capitalism at present, and although this exerts an important effect on the geopolitical arrangement of the world, what interests me is why fascism should re-appear now, in the wake of decolonisation and the national liberation struggles, why fascist solutions appear to be on the agenda all over the advanced capitalist countries. And this, in my view, requires that we think about what happens when imperialism experiences a kind of cultural boomerang effect of many decades, when the consequences of the colonial laboratory of modernity transversally bisect the metropolitan political situation, a process in which we might even say tentatively that the metapolitics of imperialism is itself the process ofracialisation.

I. The Relapses of Imperialism

In the opening lines to his Fascism and Dictatorship, Nicos Poulantzas famously replied to an injunction central to the theorisations of the Frankfurt School, and particularly one of its ‘master thinkers’, Max Horkheimer:           

Horkheimer, reacting early against the whole conception of ‘totalitarianism’, wrote, ‘Anyone who does not wish to discuss capitalism should also stay silent on the subject of fascism’. Strictly speaking, this is incorrect: it is he who does not wish to discuss imperialism who should stay silent on the subject of fascism.4

As Poulantzas argues, the problem of dealing with fascisms can only be posed correctly when we take stock of “the political crisis to which the exceptional state is a response, and the particular kinds of political crises to which its specific forms correspond.” And this in turn requires “an analysis of the question of the historical period of capitalist formations within which these political crises and exceptional regimes occur.” (16) Echoing the demand for an approach structured by differing levels of analytical abstraction, Poulantzas emphasises that “the analysis of general historical periods to which exceptional regimes belong […] affects theconjuncture of the class struggle (political crisis), which alone provides an answer” to the question: why now? Why fascism? (16). And he delivers the fundamental crux of this parallel conception of imperialism’s relation to fascism in the following formulation:

Imperialism, considered as a stage in the ensemble of the capitalist process, is not in fact just a question of modifications in the economic domain, such as monopoly concentration, the fusion of industrial capital into finance capital, the export of capital, and the search for colonies for purely ‘economic’ reasons, etc. These ‘economic’ factors actually determine a new articulation of the ensemble of the capitalist system, thereby producing profound changes in politics andideology. (19-20)

Poulantzas’s work is decisive, not least because he understood the crucial nature of this relationship between fascism in its expanded sense and the specific political and ideological character of the historical stage of imperialism as a regime of accumulation. However, Poulantzas did not fully carry through the determination of this question. His analysis, in Fascism and Dictatorship, is concerned principally with two factors: 1) the pressures exerted by imperialism on thedomestic working class and its susceptibility to fascist solutions to the social and national questions and 2) the historical demonstration of the roots of this tension in the German and Italian experiences of fascism as a concrete problem of mass politics.

Where, however, there is an unspoken question, is precisely in the more general relationship between imperialism and fascism at the level of politics and ideology, not only for the domestic working class, but for a new relationship that characterises our contemporary moment: that between the general postcolonial condition, migration (and so-called ‘labour segmentation’) as a key element of working-class composition globally, and the political technologies of racialisation in the core imperialist countries. What precisely remains to be thought is this question for which Poulantzas’s work provided a historical analysis, but which remained an open problem in his thought: how to clarify the ways in which “these ‘economic’ factors actually determine a new articulation of the ensemble of the capitalist system,” not only in a directly economic manner, but also in more diffuse metapolitical terms, in which the nexus of imperialism as a historical regime of international references and hierarchies thereby assists in the production of new fascisms that are the results of “profound changes inpolitics andideology,” not only in the ‘exceptional state’ but in the everyday ‘normality’ of the contemporary moment.

            Certainly, his former teacher Louis Althusser would have been familiar with Poulantzas’s Fascisme et dictature, published first by Maspero in 1970. Some years later, as the European conjuncture was transformed by the movements of decolonisation sweeping Africa in the early 1970s, Althusser entered into a little-known written dialogue in 1975 with the Portuguese playwright Luiz Francisco Rabello. Exchanged some months after the Portuguese ‘Carnation Revolution’ put an end to theEstado Novo, and thereby one of the longest-lasting fascist governments in Europe – a situation that came to a head under the influence of the guerrilla struggles for independence in Angola, Mozambique, and elsewhere in Lusophone Africa – this important series of letters was published the subsequent year asCartas sobre a revolução portuguesa, and to my knowledge, never subsequently released in French or English. In his letter of 17 August 1975, Althusser wrote:

It is thought with excessive complacency, in certain layers of the bourgeoisie and among certain intellectuals, that fascism (in Spain, Portugal, Greece) had become, from the point of view of imperialism, its monopolies and states, an "archaic", "outdated", "cumbersome" and "costly" process which no longer corresponded to the interests of an active and enlightened "neo-capitalism". Behind this judgment, it is easy to get the idea that a "normal" form of "modern" capitalism (i.e. monopolist capitalism or imperialism) would exist in itself, i.e. in all circumstances: the form of bourgeois parliamentary democracy, guaranteeing a certain number of individual and political freedoms. Now, I think that this judgement and this idea do not correspond to reality.

Fascism is by no means in itself an 'abnormal' or 'rendered abnormal' form of bourgeois rule. Historically, Italian, German, Japanese fascism, etc., constituted a bourgeois solution to the contradictions of imperialism between the two wars, especially after the crisis of the 1930s, and was mainly the instrument of the imperialist class struggle against the working class. Historically, fascism developed exploitation and accumulation prodigiously: it served the monopolies. After the war, fascism continued to be, albeit in a less visible way, one of the necessary forms of bourgeois rule: in certain defined conjunctures. Certain fascisms undoubtedly give particular features to the economy of the country they dominate, holding back the development of certain sectors, forcing workers to emigrate, and subjecting the working class, rural workers and poor peasants to unbridled exploitation. However, this fascism in no way prevents the national and international monopolies from developing and prospering: it even provides them with exceptional conditions of security and profit through the intense repression of the working-class struggle and the consequent increase in exploitation.5

This remarkable letter of Althusser, which should be more widely known, links together both the full-blown function of the high point of imperial-colonial power (the institutional existence of the formal colonial system) with its aftermath, what Sandro Mezzadra has long named ‘the postcolonial condition’. Althusser takes one step beyond Poulantzas’ analysis in emphasising not only the form of fascism as a political orientation of the ‘exceptional state’, but also as a generic solution in the domestic sphere for imperialism and its after-effects: migration, the creation of mass politics, forms of territorial and capitalist securitisation and more.

In this regard, we might recall the fact that the last 30 years have seen a renewed interest in the juridico-theoretical work of Carl Schmitt, but the focus of this attention has largely been on his famed reading of the political as a sphere of the friend/enemy relation. Less attention has been paid to his quite complex discussions of the specificity of colonialism and imperialism, discussions which in essence constitute a form of fascist introspection on thespeculative future of the history of imperialism.

The special territorial status of colonies thus was as clear as was the division of the earth between state territory and colonial territory. This division was characteristic of the structure of international law in this epoch and was inherent in its spatial structure. Clearly, to the extent that overseas colonial territory became indistinguishable from state territory, in the sense of European soil, the structure of international law also changed, and when they became equivalent, traditional, specifically European law came to an end. Thus, the concept of colonies contained an ideological burden that affected, above all, European colonial powers.6

Now, the notion that the colonial sphere contained an ‘ideological burden that affected, above all, the European colonial powers’ appears at first glance to be a kind of inverted narcissism of the West, a fantasy that places the point of emphasis on the loss of a worldview for the colonizer, rather than a confrontation with the injustice of domination on the part of the colonised. But Schmitt’s statement bears some interesting connection to Poulantzas’s broader point: in the wake of the formal colonial system, the collapse of a clear political distinction between the legal status of the ‘mother countries’ and the ‘colonies’ augurs a new moment of civilisational, political, economic, and cultural contradictions. If the racial taxonomy of the world found its supposed ‘proof’ in the institutional division between metropole and colony, the only function of imperialism’s worldview that would remain in the wake of its institutional breakdown is the application of its techniques of division, taken from the macro-level of states and territories, to the micro-level of bodies, categories of citizenship, the policing of language, physiognomy, and markers of difference. In this sense, Schmitt, in exposing the fascist sentiment of the changing forms of ‘politics and ideology’ produced by the articulation of imperialism and fascism, shows us precisely that there is a clear historical pathway fromformal imperialism andformal fascism to a new andinformal post-fascism, whose essence is theinternal application  of previouslyexternal modes of governance, where the technologies and apparatuses ofracialisation come to replace the former spatial imaginary of the earth. In this sense Traverso is correct to emphasise, in his formulation of ‘post-fascism’, the often-peculiar “contradictory co-existence of classical fascism with new elements that do not belong to its tradition.”

            In turn, these technologies of racialisation, generated in the colonies within the imperialist regime of accumulation, today are re-routed to apparatuses of domestic control, none more central to imperial modernity than the police. Today, it is clear that policing is no longer simply an arm of governance, to be deployed as sovereign power sees fit in service of the social peace. Quite to the contrary, the last ten years in the advanced capitalist countries have shown us a form of the institutional unmooring of the police-function, and an intensification of its violence as an apparatus in the service of detecting ‘abnormalities’, ‘dangerous’ racial subjects, and ‘unruly’ workers. “In other words,” Palheta writes, “the police are becoming increasingly emancipated from the state and the law, i.e. from any form of external control (not to mention the non-existent popular control).” The colonial character of police power was once expressed in the typical division of the military dealing with the foreign, police with the domestic. An era of mass migration and postcolonial integration means that the police function is now a kind of centripetal military itself, spiralling inwards from the military “foreignised” exterior into the domestic interior, now a zone of the state hierarchisation that used to be applied to the “other space”. The antecedent of this process was the imperial reach of the colonial police – as imperialism transferred both those ‘exceptional spaces’ of its domestic sphere to the colonised territory, it also transferred its policing apparatus in a centrifugal movement, spiralling outwards from the policing of the interior of the “homeland” to the hierarchised militarisation of occupation, wherein the tasks of policing were no longer the enforcement of domestic law and daily regulations, but the physical-force shepherding of the ‘target population’ into a new status as colonised labour and colonial subjects of a second-class nature.

            Ishay Landa, in a magisterial contribution to the thinking of fascism historically and theoretically, reminds us not only of the origins of fascism in liberalism, but, more specifically, the origins of fascism in a worldview and set of forces nurtured by the nexus of liberalism and imperialist expansion:

Tocqueville’s belligerent and expansionist foreign policy outlook cannot be separated from his understanding of internal social policies, allegedly benign and moderate. We should rather stress the symbiosis—indeed, one that would come to typify fascist practice—between imperialism abroad and severe social repression at home, embodied in the figure of the French general Cavaignac, whom Tocqueville supported almost unreservedly. Combating the insurgents of the 1848 June revolution, Cavaignac introduced in France the ruthless repressive methods he and other French military men first used in fighting the Arab ‘rebels’ in North Africa, and which were unprecedented in the history of European civil wars. In that way, the struggle against the actual Algerian Bedouins, in aims and methods, was transferred onto Paris, against the figurative ‘Bedouins of the metropolis.’7

The racial figuration of the object of police-military repression has been emphasised in recent anti-racist movements, from Black Lives Matter in the streets to new perspectives in political and social theory on the racial character of governance. We might even say, following Landa, that this relapse of imperialism onto the domestic scenario is the fundamental structural feature of fascismtout court.After all, we know that fascism’s greatest force lies not in charismatic leaders or prophetic visions, but in the everyday forms that allow it to capture the sphere of the normal, rather than the exceptional: “the true problem, the central secret of the political is not sovereignty, but governance, is not God, but the angel, is not the king, but the minister, is not the law, but the police — or, the governmental machine that these form and keep in movement.”8

2. The Lumpenproletariat Dreams of “Great Politics”

Lump ist sein Ideal, Lumpe sollen Wir alle werden.

(The lumpen is its ideal – we shall all become lumpen)9

            -- M. Stirner

At the level of psychic tropes, two fundamental directions in the evaluation of contemporary fascism co-exist today: the first, which attempts to locate the roots of fascism in the material substratum, and the second, which attempts to understand or conceptualise the psychological and affective structure of adhesion to fascist ideas. The material substratum of the development of fascism – a form of politics inseparable from the transformations of a capitalist commodity economy – is a given for Marxists. But this does not mean that the second question is unimportant. After all, the material substratum of class positions is precisely what exerts an effect at the level of cognition, a kind of grammar of the psyche. And perhaps the most important sentiment of youth adhesion to fascism is a projected sense of loss. What distinguishes this attitude from forms of oppression or deprivation characteristic of adhesion to radical sensibilities otherwise expressed is that this, rather than an experienced loss felt in concrete material terms (to be poor, to be discriminated against, to be the target of racism and exclusion), is a loss that is anticipated, which induces paranoia, hysteria, a desperate search for solidity, and, above all, a kind ofpsychic creation of the loss itself as an act of recuperating something that has not yet been experienced.

            If the ‘anticipated loss’ expresses to some extent the particular admixture of ressentiment, fear, and projection that characterises the psychoanalytic adherence to fascist solutions10 – the “ideology” in Poulantzas’s terms – the “political” side of this equation is often linked to the status of the nation. In commonplace utilisations of the term, the new fascisms of our moment are frequently expressed as one possible polarity of ‘ultra-nationalism’, an excessive and even racialised fixation on the national essence, with ‘nationalism’ in general here playing the role of the nurturing force of fascism. Palheta, for instance, sees fascism in its fundamental state as a “a political project for the ‘regeneration’ of an imaginary community – generally the nation,” a loose definition that is probably widely shared, at least in its broadest sense. But is this really the case? Perhaps this easy correspondence between fascism and the nation is not as straightforward as we might like, not least because the contemporary liberal or centrist appeals as much to the nation as the fascist, albeit for different reasons: one to emphasise the ‘normality’ of the typical function of the state, the other to appeal to a figure of legitimation purportedly dwelling in the misty historical past that could provide proof positive for the image of the socially-permissive, administrative liberal state as a betrayal of the national destiny. But where the Marxist tradition has always distinguished itself from the purely speculative character of other theories of social development, is precisely in its insistence that political-ideological forms are, one way or another, part and parcel of the historically-determined regime of accumulation and mode of production that dominates the social formation. In this sense, the Marxist clarification of fascism’s roots must take into account, but not begin and end with features of psychic life that are ungrounded in the conjuncture, but rather with concrete forces of social change, expressed in the hegemony of ideas that themselves depart from the material substratum. Landa reminds us of a crucial fact related to the historical function and emergence of fascism, when he remarks:

In the fascist axiological hierarchy […] the nation comes only after a fetishized Nature, whose graces are conferred upon those who are successful in the business of imperialism and capitalism, those “strongest in courage and industry.” […] The notion of “nationalism” or “ultra-nationalism” as defining “the fascist minimum” is thus largely devoid of meaning, unless one is willing to acknowledge the concrete class content of such “nationalism,” and the way the national “palingenesis” was itself predicated on the bedrock of imperialistic-capitalistic triumph.11

This point incisively recalls for us that, rather than simply a mystified theory of origin based on the national community, the ultimate figure of fascism is a fantasy of a Law of Nature, a sort of evolutionary narrative inhabited by “winners” and “losers,” whose positions are not historically mutable but rather etched in destiny by the great objective force of this “Law of the Strong,” which is nothing other than the modern conception of the market. To put it succinctly, it is not nationalism that is to blame for the rise of fascism, but capitalism, and especially a libertarian fixation on the quantifiability of all social phenomena, reduced down to the zero-sum sphere of a pure market, in which “winning” and “losing” can be the sole criteria of all social forms. Of course, it might well be argued that, in the fascist discourse, this ‘natural law’ is typically given its basis in a national or civilisational essence, made to correspond to “the colour line” of which DuBois so powerfully spoke. But in its most fundamental form, what preceded Trump in the United States, for example, was not waves and surges of fetishisation of the nation, but decades of libertarian political and ideological struggle towards the economisation, the quantification, of every aspect of life in terms of the Manichean scene at the foundation of the market. This discourse of the capitalist triumph, traceable, of course, to the neoliberal turn of the 70s, found its major spur in the turn of the centre-right to the literal denigration of ‘society’, a concept perhaps forever marked by the doctrine of communism, at least for the Reagans, Thatchers, Pinochets and others of our world.

            This hatred of society – of ‘socialised’ Man, society as a miscegenated zone of non-quantifiable ‘encounters’, ‘mixtures’, losers copulating with losers, potentially corrupting ‘winners’ with their non-market life – is no direct derivation from the category of the nation; it is an effect of the telescoping of the concept of ‘the market’ into a kind of alternate form of sociality, in which there are nothing but ‘winners’ and ‘losers’. In such a schema, the Lump that we are all becoming can only dream of ‘winning’, not of emancipation, not of freedom, but only of a dwarfish and stunted vision of the classic Spenglerian (or Nietzschean…) “Great Politics,” the comic-book versions of ‘the imperialist-capitalist triumph’, whose rhetoric and figures of speech now trickles down to the lumpen masses: the politics of great achievements, proof positive for ‘virtue’, a kind of quasi-religious piety whose God is literally Mammon, and most importantly, for contemporary fascist tendencies, a form of racial taxonomy as a kind of ‘measure’, even itself a form of ‘money’ or ‘wealth’ – the proof of being a ‘winner’, and the fear that, since Natural Law dominates all, we might all become losers.

For the young American fascists of our time, Trump unleashed their imagination, and let them dream - dreams of winning, of being a ‘winner’, of triumphing over everything that stood in the way of the sentiment of accumulation. It was not enough just to ‘win’: the ‘losers’, whose communitarian belonging, etched into their bodies, had to be brought to heel, ‘civilised’ and adapted to the one true fascist God, the market. The ‘decent’ liberals, ever fearful of any break with the status quo, could not recognise that they shared the same God with Trump’s troops: the dollar, the number, the market, the empire. Of course, this love of ‘triumph’ and ‘winning’, this  feature of making outlandish political claims solely on the basis of desire and the anticipated loss is not only a sign of collective delusion, social hysteria, and so on - it is also a symptom of an overall mass of immiserated people desperate for an idea, any idea, any myth, anything to feel part of a collective experience of politics, of life, after decades of austerity, the destruction of the trade-union movement, the wholesale devastation of communities by means of the emptying out of the last vestiges of the welfare state, the annihilation of any provision of means of subsistence outside the firm. Now, they see their fantasies and aspirations to be part of some grand narrative of human redemption crashing back into the timidity and hopelessness of centre-right technocracy. So long as the doctrine of the market – and its racialisation of the sphere of circulation as a relapse of imperialism’s predation of the rest of the world – remains at the centre of institutional politics, fascist solutions will emerge from this ground.It is in this sense that, even if the abandonment of myth and dreams to the Right by the Centre is nearly complete, the Left should refuse to fully cede this ground.

The good liberals will tell us: that is all well and good, but the young fascists, the Trumpists, the new FN voters, and more are overwhelmed with ‘misrecognitions’, they do not ‘understand’ the situation they are in, they refuse all ‘understanding’ and ‘deliberation’. They have no ‘rationality’. But is not emancipatory politics also a ‘misrecognition’, a refusal to make the status quo the measure of politics? A refusal to accept the capitalist rationality that would entomb any transversal line of emancipation from the existing order? Who would not want to ‘misrecognise’ this miserable society, the banality, cruelty, and evil of its ‘normal’ function? We must have an answer that does not negate the force of misrecognition, but that harnesses it to a principle of equality, a destruction of the market so that society can live, and a doctrine of communism, which means nothing other than: “freedom.”

Gavin WALKER is Associate Professor of History at McGill University, the author of The Sublime Perversion of Capital (Duke, 2016), and a member of the editorial collective ofpositions: asia critique. He is the editor ofThe End of Area (Duke, 2019, with Naoki Sakai),Marx, Asia, and the History of the Present, a special issue ofpostions: politics (positionspolitics.org, 2020), and The Red Years: Theory, Politics, and Aesthetics in the Japanese ‘68 (Verso, 2020),as well as editor and translator of Kōjin Karatani’s Marx: Towards the Centre of Possibility (Verso, 2020). His new book,Marx et la politique du dehors, is forthcoming from Lux Éditeur.

"Defend DC Against Facism Rally 4" byStephen D. Melkisethian is licensed underCC BY-NC-ND 2.0

• 1. https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/blog/fascism-fascisation-antifascism
• 2. V.I. Lenin, “A Caricature of Marxism and Imperialist Economism,” originally published in Zvezda, nos. 1 and 2 (1924), reprinted in Collected Works, vol. 23 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964), 28-29.
• 3. A. Badiou, Metapolitics (Verso, 2005).
• 4. Nicos Poulantazas, Fascism and Dictatorship: The Third International and the Problem of Fascism (London: Verso, 1974), 17.
• 5. Louis Althusser and Luiz Francisco Rabello, letter of 17 August 1975 in Cartas sobre a revolução portuguesa (Lisbon: Seara Nova, 1976). See reprinted excerpts from this letter at: <https://www.marxists.org/portugues/althusser/1975/08/17.htm>. My emphases.
• 6. C. Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum (Telos Press, 2006), 199.
• 7. Ishay Landa, The Apprentice’s Sorcerer: Liberal Tradition and Fascism (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 233.
• 8. G. Agamben, “Appendix: The Economy of the Moderns” in The Kingdom and the Glory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), p. 276.
• 9. Stirner, Der Einzige und sein Eigentum [The Ego and Its Own, 1845] (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1972), 129. I owe thanks to Yutaka Nagahara for reminding me of this remarkable formulation.
• 10. On especially the ressentiment of contemporary fascisms, see Harry Harootunian’s important essay “A Fascism for Our Time” in Mass Review, January 2021.
• 11. Landa, The Apprentice’s Sorcerer, op. cit. 320.

Professor Anwar Shaikh is professor of Economics in the Graduate Faculty of Social and Political Science at The New School for Social Research in New York City, where he has taught since 1972. He is actually one of the most prominent heterodox economists in the world. In the conversation that follows, Pablo Pulgar Moya sits down with Anwar Shaikh in Santiago de Chile to discuss heterodox economy, politics, concept of profit and social contradictions of capitalism.

Pablo Pulgar Moya:Good afternoon, professor Shaikh.It is a pleasure for me, the possibility of this interview. First of all, I think it is worthwhile to start with your intellectual biography, if you can shortly tell us about your theoretical work and the last years, especially considering that your fantastic book Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Prices which will soon appear in Spanish.

Anwar Shaikh: Good afternoon, Mr. Pulgar Moya. In Spanish, yes. I was born in Pakistan, my interest in development was natural so to speak. And my family travelled, so I lived in different countries including Malaysia, Canada, Kuwait and Nigeria for sometimes. And it’s very clear that there are big levels of differences in development. And eventually, though I started studying as an engineer, I eventually switched to, after my graduation, to economics. And the question that I came with is: how do you help development and how do you explain these differences? And I thought that economics was the way to go. But when I got there, to Columbia graduate school, I discovered that development people were supposed to take the standard theory and use it to explain development. And the standard theory made no sense to me. Utility maximizing, optimizing, rational expectations, perfect competition just didn’t seem to me explain or even represent the world.

So, I became involved in trying to consider some other foundations. And that lead me to read Joan Robinson and then Luigi Pasinetti, both Cambridge economists, and then from there, to go back to Marx and Smith and Ricardo. And as I did that I began to see that there was in this alternate tradition a way forward, one that began from a completely different beginning, which is how people actually behave, and from that one could derive all the basic tools of micro, and then talking about how economies behave, and having a macro story. But all the story had to be fit together and be consistent from one level to the other. And had to be consistent with empirical evidence and observations on capitalism. That took me a long time, a long, long time. It was a long time because I had to fill gaps. If you read Marx, there’s nothing about trade. If you read Ricardo, there’s nothing about class struggle, so you can’t just add them together. Sraffa has nothing about money. I had to develop a framework  that it was internally consistent and could answer empirical questions about the modern world. And that took many years of research, and almost 20 years just to produce the book. I started writing in 1997 and it came out in 2016.

In the past conference, on Monday, you said you don’t build a new theory only by destroying the old theory, and you can’t just destroy the old theory by showing its mistakes. You must start always with a different foundation. Do you understand your own book as a new economic paradigm, as a new mode of systematizing, what capitalism is. What background was the most important for building your own model?

Anwar Shaikh: Well let me start with the paradigm question, is this a new paradigm? I think it is but it’s not mine. It is the one that in my opinion was implicit and perhaps buried in Smith, Ricardo, Marx, and Keynes. They studied different aspects of the economy. Smith believed that the market is a kind of a balancing mechanism, and Ricardo developed the theory of relative prices, and then Marx the theory class struggle and the surplus product, surplus value as the foundation of profit and so on. And Keynes introduced effective demand and macroeconomics. But to put these together in a way that’s coherent, in my opinion, is a new paradigm. And I was influenced, when I was younger, by Kuhn’s idea that new paradigms arise, from the accumulation of deficiencies of the old paradigm. But, of course, it doesn’t follow that the deficiencies will self-assemble themselves into a new paradigm. They signal that you need a new paradigm. And whatever comes from that is motivated, but it is not given, by the deficiencies. For instance, Einstein’s development of science of the physical world was certainly motivated by the rising problems in Newton’s framework. But it didn’t mean that the Theory of Relativity was produced by just altering Newtonian mechanics around the edges and all that. Einstein changed it fundamentally.

Pablo: In your Capitalism book, you remarked that the profit motive drives capitalism and drives its advances, but at the same time, also builds and leads to its worst crisis. Can you discuss some, for example, political implications that come from the theories that you present in your book?

Anwar Shaikh: Yes, one fundamental aspect of my book is that we have to understand how people and firms actually behave. You just have to look in the mirror to see how people behave, right? So, you know they don’t behave the way that the neoclassical story is told. But then the task remaining is to explain how to derive observed laws of demand from the actual behavior patterns of people. That’s one task. The other task is to show how the market creates supply. There the most important point is that production is driven by profitability and that the system balances through trial and error. In a firm, for example  if you start a business, you don’t know who will come to your restaurant, you make a guess. And if you’re lucky, maybe in six months, a year, two years enough of a reputation comes up and you start making money. But before that you lose money. So, that kind of behavior means that a theory of the firm depends very much on expectations of profitability arising from the expectation of demand, because if people are coming but not paying, or they’re paying too little, it doesn’t matter that they’re coming, they have to pay enough to make a profit. And the second is that the balance between your supply, which in the case of the restaurant is all the meals you’re offering, and the demand, which is the customers, is never an immediate balance. If you don’t have enough customers, you cut back. If you have too many, you hire more people and make more food. So, this balancing process implies constant fluctuations. Your production, your supply food, also generates demand. Because when you hire more people, they demand more goods from their wage income. When you buy raw materials, the things you need for cooking, that is demand for inputs that affects the supply of materials. And your profits go into your income, or into the income of your creditors, landlords, etc. Maybe if things are going well, you decide to expand the business, i.e. invest in bigger facilities, etc. This is investment demand, motivated by longer term profit expectations. Thus both sides, supply and demand, reflect the profit motive in different ways. And there is no reason why these millions of individual supply and demand actions will balance. On the contrary, these things are always trying to seek a balance and always going off the balance. And that means that for me, a lot of turbulence, what I call turbulent regulation.

The point is that real competition is completely different from the fiction of perfect competition. Real competition is a war, and competitors use whatever means they can. By the way, for instance, if you know history, then you know some businesses seduce away the customers from other firms, spread lies and disinformation about other brand, and at the constantly advertise that they are better than others – even if they are not.  All of these are tools of competition, the propaganda of its war. In real competition, firms set the prices. Orthodox economics says that perfectly competitive firms receive prices, take them as “given”, when in reality firms set prices and as  they are need to, they change them.

The last point is that within real competition, in any given industry competition leads to firms to set roughly similar prices for a given quality, since that is what customers look for. But if the newer firms in some industry have higher profit rates than newer firms in another industry, then the capital moves from a low-profit industry to the high-profit industry. Which is another kind of turbulent process. It creates more supply when the profit rate is high, drives the price down, therefore makes the profit rate lower. In the industries in which the profit rate was relatively low, supply contracts relatively, and the price goes up. You never get exact equalization, but constant adjustments and fluctuation because everything you do causes effects somewhere else. And that means that that capitalism is constantly moving, constantly adjusting, never in balance. Yet these processes have moving centres of gravity. That in my opinion is the classical notion of competition.

Pablo Pulgar Moya: Your concept of profit as the key force, as driving force of capitalism. In this context, how important is this concept to explain the contradictions between, for example, the private aims and the social goals of the community?

Anwar Shaikh: So, this is exactly the question that is on our current agenda in regard to climate change. But it’s always been there. If you gave firms the choice, they will naturally try to have the lowest cost, in order to make the most profit. Because they cannot just charge any prices, other firms will force them towards some common price. So how do you get a low cost? One way is to push down the wages of the workers. Another is to push up the length of the working day, make them work harder and longer. In addition, firms can mechanize and lower unit labor costs. These are central to Marx’s ideas of absolute and relative surplus value. And of course firms will try to use natural resources in the cheapest way possible. And that means, in this whole process, that pollution is profitable. If you don’t prevent it, the firm is driven through competition and through the motive of profit to pollute the environment, to damage workers, to damage customers. We know that if we don’t have safety regulations, firms may put poisonous things into their products, not because they are bad, but because it will make their products cheaper and hence given them an advantage in competition.  Obviously, this incentive for profit is not at all the same thing as a social goal. We know historically that cigarettes, forms of tabaco, were widely sold, and those companies knew perfectly well, years and years before they were caught, that this causes cancer. So, what did they do? They hid the information, because of course they would lose a lot of profit if people knew. And of course, governments were complicit everywhere.

In that sense, I believe that profit-making has a dynamic and rational component, not in the sense of perfect rationality, but there’s a rationale for pushing all these bad effects onto other people so you can get the benefit. And that for me, means that the interaction between firms and the environment, between firms and the way they pollute, or between firms and other people, is an internality. The claim that it an externality is an absurd proposition. Of course, it’s internal and not external, you don’t say a war is internal when you win and it’s external when you kill other people. It’s part of the war! It’s internal to the war. So, this separation is false. Also “efficiency” is not the efficiency of use of resources for social good, it is efficiency of use of resources for profit. And then it’s efficient to pollute, unless you’re stopped, because otherwise you would have higher costs. It’s efficient to have people with very low wages, because you make more profit. Unless they fight back. The history of labor and class struggles is part of the struggle against the capitalist notion of efficiency, about its logic of  profit benefits and our notions of social benefits.

Pablo Pulgar Moya: The next question is, in the actual context, many economics departments in the world are dominated by the ideas of orthodox economics. On the other hand, heterodox economics survives in some universities and often outside universities and formal institutions. But after the crisis 2008, it appears that neoclassical economics was unable to explain the crisis itself. For you, recognized as one of the few economists who predicted the crisis in 2008, how did you read a possible situation that the crisis ends in a systematic collapse?

Anwar Shaikh: Well, first of all, heterodox economists, it’s true, are locked out of most economic departments, all across the world. But that doesn’t mean that there are no places for heterodox economists. If you go across Europe, there are several spaces still open. England for instance has several universities with heterodox economists, and so does Australia, Germany, France, Italy, and the Unites States, etc. And across the world, there are universities that still have heterodox spaces. The United States has at least three or four departments where there is a substantial number or even the majority of heterodox economists. In mine, the New School for Social Research, we are mostly heterodox economists, so that’s one example. We are, it’s true, outside, but we are not gone, we are not dead.

And we are growing since the crisis, precisely because people are asking, well why was the standard framework not able to explain the crisis and not able to anticipate it? Because in the orthodox economics framework, crises are outside of the system, because inside the system it is all perfect and calm, a ballet of consumers and firms dancing in perfect harmony. So, it’s only when something lands on the stage from outside this ballet, they  say ‘Oh my God, what happened here?’ From the heterodox point of view, crises an inherent tendency. If the system builds up but over-extends, it comes down. People who observe capitalism always know this, the billionaire investment banker George Soros for instance says, if you overshoot you will undershoot.

But it is not just about crises. The difference between heterodox and orthodox economics has to do with how you represent capitalism itself, at the ground level. Orthodox economics says you make optimal choices. Gary Becker says you do that in in marriage, in choosing to have children, etc. I ask people, I ask people here at this conference, how many people chose their husband, or wife, partner or child by rational choice? And any one is going to raise their hand it is because they are insane. Nobody makes that kind of life decision, or even on what food to eat, in the manner claimed by orthodox economics. So, we already know that it doesn’t fit at the micro level, it doesn’t fit at the macro level.

Orthodox economics covers up that lack of fit with mathematics. People get intimidated with the math and they think, it must be rigorous. But anybody who knows math knows that math cannot be any more rigorous than the question that you are asking, right? And many times, math not appropriate at all So, there is no reason to worship math. It is merely a tool, to be utilized when appropriate to the structure and application of a particular framework. And often, it is less important than history, social observation, etc.  

On crises, there is the question of whether they come from the outside or the inside. I believe that they mostly come from the inside. So, I began to study stories of inside crises, of course there are business cycles which are fairly regular, in the sense that they recur, not in the exact time periods but they happen again and again. They are like waves in the ocean. You’d be very silly to think that one wave will come, and no others will come, it’s an underlying dynamic. You also know that in the ocean there are much deeper movements, longer cycles. And that in the history of economics there is also something called long waves. Long waves are associated with Kondratieff, and all that seemed to work pretty well, until about the 1930’s or 1940’s. Yet after that they seem to have disappeared, it seemed that you never found them. Well, I went and read Kondratieff and I found something very interesting. His data that he presents on long waves is in terms of prices. But he presents it in the text of the book is in terms of nominal prices. In the back of the book, he has another series which has prices expressed in gold, because gold is sort of a universal commodity. Not because it’s the foundation of money, but because it represents a reference for money. So, I plotted that data. And lo and behold, everything that Kondratieff said was true in terms of prices relative to gold, including the present. And on that basis, I began to be interested in the fact that crises occur around the middle of the downturn of these long waves. You can see that for 1814, 1847, 1873, you can see it in 1929, you could see it in the 1980’s which was the so-called Great Stagflation. In the 1920 and 1962 wave peaks, a crises came approximately 8-9 years after a peak. I began to observe that around 1999-2000 the smoothed price curve had peaked again. On that approximate basis I estimated that if this pattern held, the next crisis would appear around 2008-2009.  It came in in 2008 as we know. That was a rough calculation, but it’s not so bad if you think of movements of the ocean and waves. Waves are never exactly alike. You would be very foolish to think that last wave that came is the only wave or that the next one would have precisely the same interval. So, then the question arises, what drives such a recurrent process? Deeper underlying processes. And that’s part of another part of my research.

Pablo: That is the last question. Here, we Chileans have a traumatic experience with neoliberalism, as you well know. In the specialized literature Chile is presented as an experiment of Chicago Boys policies and shows enormous contradictions between social goals and private aims. How do you read the Chilean case as an example of polarization and deepening of these social contradictions of capitalism?

Anwar Shaikh: Let me start by saying that I believe that the Chicago Boys committed a crime against humanity, and that I have no doubt in saying that whatever their motivations, it was a criminal act and a violent act. Not because they the only ones involved, but because they were so eager to support it. I understand that from their point of view, and this is the orthodox theory, that the market works best if the State is least involved. They take that to justify dictatorship to preserve the market freedom. Though, in the United States, the State is involved in everything, as Trump points out. Tariffs and subsidies to agriculture, but then they tend to forget that. And the second thing is that if you approach it from that point of view, then the question is, what is the cost of this so-called adjustment, of the shock and awe that Jeffrey Sachs used to talk about? It seems to me that when people talk about how Chile has done so much better after that, no one takes into account the cost. Where in the welfare economics is the cost of the people who were killed, the people who were tortured, the people who were driven away, the children who were taken away? What if I said to a Chicago Boy, congratulations, just to let you know, your family has been kidnapped, they have been killed, their possessions money taken away, and that we invested their money in a business which is doing really well, so therefore the economy is now better off. You don’t measure the pain and misery and blood of the losers, but you measure the gain in terms of profit? They make it seem as if it had a good effect, but none of those same people would be willing to sacrifice their families for such a good effect. So, it’s hypocrisy in my opinion, of the deepest sort. And the people involved, whatever their motivations, committed a crime.

Pablo Pulgar Moya: Thank you, very much.

Anwar Shaikh: My pleasure.

Image taken from: http://socialresearchmatters.org/anwar-shaikh-and-an-economic-analysis-of-modern-capitalism/

Rohini Hensman

Preface

This article was published in the Bulletin of the Communist Platform No.2, June–September 1978, as a contribution to an ongoing discussion on trade unions that was being conducted in the Platform Group. We read and discussed Marx on trade unions and their role in determining the value and price of labour power, in converting workers from atomised individuals to an organised force, and in creating the conditions for more human relationships in the family as well as a healthier and educated working class. Among many other texts, we read Vladimir Akimov’s A Short History of the Social Democratic Movement in Russia 1904/5 and The Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (1904), and fully agreed with his critique of Lenin’s assertion in What Is to Be Done? that ‘Spontaneous development of the labour movement leads precisely to its subordination to bourgeois ideology. The spontaneous labour movement is trade-unionism, it is Nur-Gewerkschaftlerei (mere trade-unionism), and trade-unionism means the ideological enslavement of the workers by the bourgeoisie’. We read and discussed Franz Neumann’s European Trade Unionism and Politics, in which he notes the link between the triumph of democracy and the recognition of trade unions, and the inherently two-fold aim of the unions ‘not only to secure high wages and decent conditions of work for the worker but also to win for him a new social and political status,’ which is why unions have to be destroyed under fascism.

The practical outcome of these discussions in Bombay was what we called a ‘workers’ inquiry’ into the existing condition of the working class, and the formation of the Union Research Group (URG). We moved widely around Bombay and its surrounding areas meeting worker-unionists in factories and offices, bringing out a Bulletin of Trade Union Research and Information for them, and organising workshops and conferences in which the specific problems they faced and possible responses were discussed. Two of us, with help from other women activists, also conducted research into the condition of working-class women who were not employed in large-scale industry, and tried to help them to work out strategies to tackle the numerous difficulties they faced.

This still left the question of how the working class would arrive at an understanding of the ways in which capitalism itself was responsible for their problems, and how they would work out an alternative organisation of society and production. Even Akimov did not believe that trade unions could carry out a socialist revolution, nor did he deny the need for Social Democracy to accelerate the development of the proletariat’s class consciousness. But what organisational form would the transition take?

For the Bolsheviks, the revolutionary party representing the working class would capture state power, nationalise all means of production, and carry out the transition to a socialist/communist society. But, even at the time, there were dissident voices who saw this as a dangerously substitutionist strategy, which could lead the party to rule over the workers while workers themselves would continue to be exploited. Antonio Gramsci, in his article ‘Unions and Councils’ (L’Ordine Nuovo 11, October 1919), saw the factory council as an alternative to the bureaucratised trade unions and as the basic unit of the proletarian state, which could then react back on the trade unions and transform them into instruments for the abolition of all classes, which, according to him, ‘is what the industrial unions in Russia are doing’. This, too, seemed unsatisfactory, because it left out, for example, proletarian women who were not factory workers. Neither of these models suggested a procedure for ascertaining human needs, the satisfaction of which would be the goal of production in a communist society.

The analysis of the relation between theory and practice that impressed me most was Michael Vester’s The Emergence of the Working Class as a Learning Process, extracts from which were translated for us by Jairus Banaji.1 Vester makes an extremely illuminating interpretation of E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, supplemented by the work of other historians like Eric Hobsbawm as well as Marx’s own work, as cycles of struggle which were followed (especially after failure) by reflection on those struggles by leading theorists, journalists and organisers of the movement. Struggle and reflection together comprised a cycle of learning, which was followed by a new cycle of struggle informed by that learning process. Later, I used this framework to understand our work in Bombay, in the context of the labour movement in India and the response of unions around the world to globalisation, in my book Workers, Unions, and Global Capitalism: Lessons from India. A strong point of Vester’s framework is that he allows for regressive learning processes and for different sections of the working class engaging in different forms of struggle even in the same country: observations that are even more important when looking at the working class globally.         

Rohini Hensman, February 2021

I

For over a century, trade unions have been the organisations by means of which the workers have fought for their interests. When we compare the condition of the working class as a time when trade unions were in their infancy with the condition of the working class where strong trade unions exist, it has to be acknowledged that they have been formidable weapons of struggle. And yet it has also become apparent that they suffer from limitations, which at certain points have led workers to reject or go beyond them in a search for alternative forms of organisation. What are these limitations and why do they exist? Can they be overcome, or are they inherent in the structure and mode of functioning of trade unions? Given both their efficacy as organs of struggleand their limitations, it is important to determine their role very exactly. It is this role which is responsible both for their historical genesis and their ultimate disappearance, and which makes it necessary for the working class both to defend them and to supersede them. We begin, therefore, with an examination of the social relations of production within which trade unions first make their appearance.

A word of explanation as to why the example of England is taken. Firstly, because this is the example used by Marx in Capital, which remains the most profound and comprehensive theoretical examination of the capitalist system which has yet been made. Therefore, the development of various theoretical points is made easier if the exposition inCapital is followed. But secondly, the example of England is used because it is the first country in which this struggle takes place. ‘Since the contest takes place in the arena of modern industry, it is fought out first of all in the homeland of that industry – England. The English factory workers were the champions, not only of the English working class, but of the modern working class in general’ (Capital Volume I, Pelican edition, p. 412). In other words, the struggle did not follow the same stages in all countries where capitalism developed: legislation which was introduced in England was introduced subsequently in other countries even without the same protracted struggle of the working class within those countries, as in the case of India. The creation of a capitalist world economy thus resulted in the generalisation not only of capitalist relations of production, but also of the gains of the working class. As Marx puts it, the English factory workers were the champions not only of the English working class but of the modern working class in general; their gains were the gains of the working class of the whole world, and we therefore examine their history as an integral part of the history of the international working-class movement.

II

The working day of the wage-labourer is divided in two portions. In the first, necessary labour is performed – labour whose equivalent in value is paid to the labourer as wages. The second portion is characterised by the performance of surplus labour, and the value created in this time is appropriated by the capitalist without equivalent. The labourer sells labour-power to the capitalist for the length of the whole working day, and receives in return value produced in the necessary labour-time. According to the laws of commodity production and exchange, what is sold must be equivalent in value to what is received in exchange. Hence the struggle over the value of labour-power is in practice a struggle over the length of the working day on one side, and the quantity of wages (the necessary labour-time) on the other. Less obviously, it is also a struggle over the intensity of work. For an increased intensity of work means an increased rate of consumption of labour-power, which must be compensated either by a reduction in the length of the working day, or by an increase in wages, if the price of labour-power is not to fall. A further complication is the fact that the value of labour-power is itself a variable quantity. Thus, the struggle of the working class over the value of labour power is a struggle both to determine the value of labour-powerand to prevent its price from falling below this value, and this in turn is achieved by regulating the length of the working day, the intensity of work and the level of wages.

From the standpoint of the capitalist, on the contrary, the aim is the maximum production of surplus-value, and Marx distinguished two major forms in which this could be achieved. The first is the production of absolute surplus-value. ‘The prolongation of the working day beyond the point of which the worker would have produced an exact equivalent of the value of his labour-power, and the appropriation of that surplus labour by capital – this is the process which constitutes the production of absolute surplus value’ (Capital Vol I, p. 645). Although he states that ‘the production of absolute surplus value turns exclusively on the length of the working day’ (p. 645), it is apparent it can be increased in other ways also. A prolonged depression of wages which leads to their new average level being accepted as the value of labour-power would lead to a shrinking of the necessary labour-time and an extension of the surplus labour-time without either a lengthening of the working day or any technical change. Intensification of labour, too, if it becomes accepted and is not compensated by a shortening of the working day or an increase in wages, would lead to an increase in absolute surplus-value production. But the length of the working day remains a crucial area around which struggle takes place.

All three methods of absolute surplus-value production increase the quantity of surplus-value (s) relative to the variable capital paid out as wages (v), and thus increase the rate of surplus-value (s/v). This increase is accompanied by a deterioration in the condition of the working class, either through a fall in their living standards, or through more intensive or extensive exploitation of their labour-power.

The second and higher mode of surplus-value production is relative surplus-value production. ‘The production of relative surplus value,’ writes Marx, ‘completely revolutionises the technical processes of labour and the groupings into which society is divided’ (p. 645). In order that relative surplus-value should be produced, ‘the rise in the productivity of labour must seize upon those branches of industry whose products determine the value of labour-power, and consequently either belong to the category of normal means of subsistence, or are capable of replacing them’ (Capital Vol. 1, p. 432). The same effect ‘is also brought about by an increase in the productivity of labour, and by a corresponding cheapening of commodities, in those industries which supply the instruments of labour and the material for labour, i.e. the physical elements of constant capital which are required for producing the means of subsistence’ (p. 432). The effect of these changes in productivity is that the same quantity of means of subsistence can be produced with less socially necessary labour than before, and consequently its value falls so that less of the working day has to be spent in producing value equivalent to it. Here, too, the surplus labour-time is increased at the expense of the necessary labour-time without any extension of the working day. But there is no fall in living standards: since the commodities necessary for the reproduction of labour-power have become cheaper, a lower wage can buy the same quantity of commodities as before, or possibly even more. Thus, the production of relative surplus-value by itself, although it increases surplus-value relative to variable capital and thus the rate of surplus-value, does not result in the deterioration of the condition of the working class.

III

The struggle over the value of labour-power is as old as capitalism itself, and can be divided into three major phases. The first is the period of ‘so-called primitive accumulation’, the period in which the proletariat is first formed. The process is a violent and bloody one, for this class of independent producers turned proletarian has yet to be made to accept the discipline of the capitalist enterprise. Marx writes,

The class of wage-labourers, which arose in the latter half of the fourteenth century, formed then and in the following century only a very small part of the population, well protected in its position by the independent peasant proprietors in the countryside and by the organisation of guilds in the towns. Masters and artisans were not separated by any great social distance either on the land or in the town. The subordination of labour to capital was only formal, i.e the mode of production itself had as yet no specifically capitalist character. The variable element in capital preponderated greatly over the constant element. The demand for wage-labour therefore grew rapidly with every accumulation of capital, while the supply only followed slowly behind. A large part of the national product which was later transformed into a fund for the accumulation of capital still entered at that time into the consumption-fund of the workers. (Capital Vol. 1, p. 900.)

With the balance of forces so decisively weighted in favour of the proletariat, the state had to step in on the side of capital. First and foremost, it was a question of increasing the supply of labour-power, that is, not only of expropriating the direct producers but of ensuring that they entered the wage-labour force instead of becoming beggars, robbers or vagabonds. Accordingly, legislation was passed to this end; vagabondage was to be punished by whipping, branding, ear-clipping, slavery, imprisonment and execution. ‘Thus were the agricultural folk first forcibly expropriated from the soil, driven from their homes, turned into vagabonds, and then whipped, branded and tortured by grotesquely terroristic laws into accepting the discipline necessary for the system of wage-labour’ (Capital Vol. 1, p. 899).

Secondly, it was necessary to drive down wages, and, here too, legislation was enacted from the fourteenth century onwards, forbidding the payment of wages above the statutory limit. ‘It was forbidden, on pain of imprisonment, to pay higher wages than those fixed by the statute, but the taking of higher wages was more severely punished than the giving of them… The spirit of the Statute of Labourers of 1349 and its offshoots shines out clearly in the fact that while the state certainly dictates a maximum of wages, it on no account fixes a minimum’ (Capital Vol. 1, p. 901).

Thirdly, the enactment of legislation compulsorily prolonging the working day also began in the fourteenth century. ‘Of course,’ Marx remarks, ‘the pretensions of capital in its embryonic state, in its state of becoming, when it cannot yet use the sheer force of economic relations to secure its right to absorb a sufficient quantity of surplus labour, but must be aided by the state – its pretension in this situation appear very modest in comparison with the concessions it has to make, complainingly and unwillingly, in its adult condition’ (Capital Vol. 1, p. 382). Nonetheless, modest though it appears by comparison with its later exactions from the working class, capital initiates the struggle over the length of the working day with this legislation.

Marx refers to this period as one of formal subsumption of labour-power to capital, i.e. the technical conditions of production are not transformed but remain the same as before. Thus, the only means of extracting surplus-value is through absolute surplus-value production, and all the legislation referred to above is directed to this end. Firstly, against those who are not disposed to produce surplus-value at all, to force them to become wage-labourers, i.e. to produce absolute surplus-value. Secondly, to increase the production of absolute surplus-value by driving down wages, thus increasing surplus labour at the expense of necessary labour. And thirdly, to increase absolute surplus-value production by extending the working day. During the period of the formation of the working class, when it has not come to accept capitalist discipline as the order of things, the state comes to the rescue of the individual capitalist, prescribing by law the necessity for the dispossessed to produce surplus-value at a sufficient rate to allow the accumulation of capital.

The resistance of the workers to being totally subordinated to the needs of capital lasts right up to the advent of large-scale machine industry. Even in the period of manufacture,

the full development of its own peculiar tendencies comes up against obstacles from many directions… Since handicraft skill is the foundation of manufacture, and since the mechanism of manufacture as a whole possesses no objective framework which would be independent of the workers themselves, capital is constantly compelled to wrestle with the insubordination of the workers… Hence the complaint that the workers lack discipline runs through the whole of the period of manufacture. Even if we did not have the testimony of contemporary writers on this, we have two simple facts which speak volumes: firstly, during the period between the sixteenth century and the epoch of large-scale industry capital failed in its attempt to seize control of the whole disposable labour-time of the manufacturing workers, and secondly, the manufactures are short-lived, changing their locality from one country to another with the emigration or immigration of workers. (Capital Vol. 1, pp. 489-90.)

Workers remain, in other words, the dominant element in production throughout the period of manufacture. The immanent laws of capitalist accumulation in this period, ‘its own peculiar tendencies’, cannot be realised because of the resistance of the workers; the balance of class forces is such that this resistance constitutes an insurmountable barrier to the tendency of capital to push the rate of surplus-value to its maximum upper limit.

IV

The second phase begins with the introduction of machinery, which has a devastating effect.

The instrument of labour, when it takes the form of a machine, immediately becomes a competitor of the worker himself. The self-valorization of capital by means of the machine is related directly to the number of workers whose conditions of existence have been destroyed by it… The section of the working class thus rendered superfluous by machinery, i.e. converted into a part of the population no longer directly necessary for the self-valorization of capital, either goes under in the unequal contest between the old handicraft and manufacturing production and the new machine production, or else floods all the more easily accessible branches of industry, swamps the labour-market, and makes the price of labour-power fall below its value. (Capital Vol.1, p. 557.)

Thus, machinery, by competing with the workers, compels them to compete with one another and with the unemployed, driving down the value of labour-power to the physiological minimum, and the price of labour-power even below this minimum. ‘The instrument of labour strikes down the worker’ (p. 559); by means of the machine, capital is finally able to batter down the resistance of the workers and thus to realise for the first time its own immanent laws of motion. ‘Machinery does not just act as a superior competitor to the worker, always on the point of making him superfluous. It is a power inimical to him, and capital proclaims this fact loudly and deliberately, as well as making use of it’ (p. 562). The machine enables the capitalist to wield the power of life and death over recalcitrant workers by threatening to replace them; it is consciously used as an instrument in the class struggle. No wonder, then, that workers first turned their fury against this inanimate thing which oppressed them, and attempted to safeguard their livelihood by smashing machinery. ‘It took both time and experience,’ Marx remarks, ‘before the workers learned to distinguish between machinery and its employment by capital, and therefore to transfer their attacks from the material instruments of production to the form of society which utilises those instruments’ (pp. 554-5).

This is a strange and paradoxical result. The introduction of machinery, which revolutionises production techniques and thus makes possible the large-scale production of relative surplus-value, is the occasion not for a decrease but anincrease inabsolute surplus-value production. This compulsion to increase absolute surplus-value is felt by the individual capitalist in various ways, but the fundamental reason for it is that ‘there is an immanent contradiction in the application of machinery to the production of surplus value, since, of the two factors of the surplus valve created by a given amount of capital, one, the rate of surplus value, cannot be increased except by diminishing the other, the number of workers… It is this contradiction which drives the capitalist, without his being aware of the fact, to the most ruthless and excessive prolongation of the working day, in order that he may secure compensation for the decrease in the relative number of workers exploited by increasing not only relative but also absolute surplus value’ (p. 531). This point is expounded in greater detail in Volume III ofCapital. The rate of profit (p’), which capitalists use as an index of ‘profitability’, is the ratio of surplus-value (s) to the total capital, both constant (c) and variable (v). Surplus-value is produced by variable capital alone. Therefore, the increase in the weight of constant capital compared with variable capital, which occurs with the production of relative surplus-value, leads to a fall in the rate of profit. The increase in the rate of surplus-value (s/v) partially compensates for this fall, but cannot fully do so. (See pp. 530-1 ofCapital Vol. I, also Ch.13, especially p. 222, ofCapital Vol. 3, Moscow edition.) Hence the compulsion to produce absolute surplus-value in order to compensate for the decline in the rate of profit becomes felt ‘as soon as machinery has come into general use in a given industry, for then the value of the machine-produced commodity regulates the social value of all commodities of the same kind’ (Vol. 1, p. 531).

The important point is that the compulsion to produce absolute surplus-value by no means ceases when relative surplus-value begins to be produced. On the contrary, this compulsion on the capitalist class is a constant one and becomes an over-riding obsession at times when the decline in the rate of profit is rapid and cannot easily be compensated in any other way. The compulsion resolves itself into the necessity to prolong the working day, reduce wages and intensify labour, since ‘a prolonged working day (or a corresponding increase in the intensity of labour) and a fall in wages… increase the amount, and thus the rate, of surplus value by increasing the production of absolute surplus value’ (Capital Vol. 3, pp. 51-2).

For some reason, Marx does not in Volume 1 consider the increase in absolute surplus-value production which results from the lowering of the value of labour-power through the reduction of the commodities socially accepted as being adequate for subsistence, although this is not a phenomenon which falls outside the assumed framework of a schema within which all commodities sell at value. Yet, clearly, this is the process he is describing when he writes that ‘In the period between 1799 and 1815 an increase in the prices of the means of subsistence led in England to a nominal rise in wages, although there was a fall in real wages, as expressed in the quantity of the means of subsistence they would purchase’ (p. 665). And again, ‘it is apparent that the piece-wage is the form of wage most appropriate to the capitalist mode of production… In the stormy youth of large-scale industry, and particularly from 1797 to 1815, it served as a lever for the lengthening of the working day and the lowering of wages… We find documentary evidence of the constant lowering of the price of labour from the beginning of the Anti-Jacobin war. In the weaving industry, for example, piece-wages had fallen so low that in spite of the very great lengthening of the working day, the daily wage was then lower than it had been before’ (pp. 697-8). It is evident that what is being referred to is not a mere temporary or sectoral decline in wages, a fall of the price of labour-power below its value, but a secular decline in the value of labour-power itself. What is happening here is that the value of labour-power becomes historically and morally determined at the lowest possible level, the physiological minimum, and the price falls even below this level. And this is achieved not by a cheapening of the means of subsistence but by a reduction in their quantity, so that the result is a catastrophic decline in living standards, malnutrition, lack of sanitation, disease and premature death.

While absolute surplus-value is increased by pushing the necessary labour-time ever lower, it is simultaneously increased by pushing the length of the working day ever higher, and this, too, is finally achieved with the birth of modern large-scale industry. ‘After capital had taken centuries to extend the working day to its normal maximum limit, and then beyond this to the limit of the natural working day of 12 hours, there followed, with the birth of large-scale industry in the last third of the eighteenth century, an avalanche of violent and unmeasured encroachments. Every boundary set by morality and nature, age and sex, day and night, was broken down. Even the ideas of day and night, which in the old statutes were of peasant simplicity, became so confused that an English judge, as late as 1860, needed the penetration of an interpreter of the Talmud to explain “judicially” what was day and what was night. Capital was celebrating its orgies’ (pp. 389-90). For capital, the answer to the question ‘What is the working day?’ is that the working day contains the full 24 hours minus the few hours of rest without which it is absolutely impossible to resume work. At a time when the working class was in no position to resist such encroachments, it was possible for the capitalists to extend the working day far beyond the maximum length that is compatible with health, converting into labour-time time which was needed for education, intellectual development, fulfilment of social functions, social intercourse, free exercise of mind and body, recreation, consumption of fresh air and sunlight, and even, to whatever extent it could, time needed for meals and sleep. Inevitably, the reproduction of labour-power was impaired and could not fully take place. ‘By extending the working day, therefore, capitalist production, which is essentially the production of surplus value, the absorption of surplus labour, not only produces a deterioration of human labour-power by robbing it of its normal moral and physical conditions of development and activity, but also produces the premature exhaustion and death of this labour-power itself. It extends the workers production time within a given period by shortening his life’ (pp. 376-7). This, too, is an increase in absolute surplus-value production by reducing the value of labour-power, for even if there is no reduction in wages, the same wage is being paid for a greater expenditure of labour-power than before. Hence, the value per unit of labour-power falls.

Thirdly, ‘that mighty substitute for labour and for workers, the machine, was immediately transformed into a means for increasing the number of wage-labourers by enrolling, under the direct sway of capital, every member of the worker’s family, without distinction of age or sex’ (p. 517). When carefully examined, it is evident that this extension of wage-labour to all members of the proletarian family involves the increased production of absolute surplus-value by a reduction of the individual wage on one side, and extension of the collective working day on the other. This becomes clear if the working-class family is considered as the unit of labour-power (see ‘Wage-Labour: The Production and Sale of the Commodity Labour-power’, reproduced in Bulletin of the Communist Platform 1). Formerly, the wages of a single worker realised the value of the labour-power of the family. Now, many wages – say, on average, four – are necessary in order to realise the value of the labour-power of the same family. Thus, each wage realises only part of the value of the labour-power of the family unit – that is, the value of the individual wage has fallen. At the same time, the amount of labour-time which the whole family must expend both in order to reproduce its own labour-power and to produce surplus value for the capitalist is multiplied several times over. ‘In order that the family may live, four people must now provide not only labour for the capitalist, but also surplus labour’ (p. 518). This means the extension of the collective working day of the family. The value of labour-power falls because the slight increase which may occur in the collective wage of the family is more than offset by the increased expenditure of labour-power which must be made in order to secure it.

The consequences of the extension of wage-labour to all members of the proletarian family combined with a maximum extension of working hours for all of them were far-reaching and drastic. One result was the destruction of family life, which led Marx and Engels to write in the Communist Manifesto of the virtual non-existence of the family amongst the proletariat. One aspect of this destruction was a further deterioration in health and living standards as the domestic labour which had previously helped to sustain the family ceased to be performed. Marx writes that ‘Compulsory work for the capitalist usurped the place, not only of the children’s play, but also of independent labour at home, within customary limits, for the family itself.Note: during the cotton crisis caused by the America Civil war, Dr Edward Smith was sent by the English government to Lancashire, Cheshire and other places to report on the state of health of the cotton operatives. He reported that… the women now had sufficient leisure to give their infants the breast, instead of poisoning them with “Godfrey’s Cordial” (an opiate). They also had the time to learn to cook… From this we see how Capital, for the purposes on its self-valorisation, has usurped the family labour necessary for consumption’ (p. 517). Even if we reject the implicit assumption that labour such as cooking has to be performed within the family, it is clear that its cessation, so long as it is not substituted by socialised labour, must lead to a deterioration in living standards. Nor can it entirely cease, since at least part of it is necessary for the reproduction of labour-power even in a stunted condition. Hence the work-load of the women, who are mainly considered responsible for the household work, is raised even above the already heavy work-load which is imposed on them at the place of work.

A second result was the brutalisation of human relationships, between men and women, adults and children, which inevitably followed from the abolition of time, leisure or conditions in which family relationships could develop. For example, an official medical inquiry in 1861 into infant mortality rates of around 25,000 deaths for every 100,000 children alive under the age of one year showed that ‘the high death rates are, apart from local causes, principally due to the employment of the mothers away from their homes, and to the neglect and maltreatment arising from their absence, which consists in such things as insufficient nourishment, unsuitable food and dosing with opiates; besides this, there arises an unnatural estrangement between mother and child, and as a consequence intentional starving and poisoning of the children’ (p. 521).

Perhaps the children who died in infancy were the luckier ones, for those who survived were subjected from the earliest possible age to monotonous and unremitting toil, wretched living and working conditions and brutal ill-treatment. Under such circumstances, not only was their normal development hampered, but even their potential for development was gradually lost, so that they would never in later life be able to make up for what they had missed at this early stage. So severe was the loss in terms of capacities that even the government was forced to take notice: ‘the intellectual degradation artificially produced by transforming immature human beings into mere machines for the production of surplus value.... finally compelled even the English Parliament to make elementary education a legal requirement before children under 14 years could be consumed “productively” by being employed in those industries which are subject to the factory Acts’ (p. 523). But the implementation of this legislation at that time was so poor that it might as well not have been passed.

A fourth means of increasing absolute surplus-value production is through intensification of labour, by means of which a greater amount of surplus-value can be exacted in the same time as before because the speed of work is increased. To a limited extent, this occurred immediately after machinery was introduced as workers became more accustomed to using these new means of production. As Marx remarks,

It is self-evident that in proportion as the use of machinery spreads, and the experience of a special class of worker – the machine worker – accumulates, the rapidity and thereby the intensity of labour undergoes a natural increase. Thus in England, in the course of half a century, the lengthening of the working day has gone hand in hand with an increase in the intensity of factory labour. Nevertheless, the reader will clearly see that we are dealing here, not with temporary paroxysms of labour but with labour repeated day after day with unvarying uniformity. Hence a point must inevitably be reached where extension of the working day and intensification of labour become mutually exclusive so that the lengthening of the working day becomes compatible only with a lower degree of intensity, and inversely, a higher degree of intensity only with a shortening of the working day. (p. 533.)

Thus, it is only when the working-class movement has gained sufficient strength to win from capital a shorter working day that the real drive for intensification begins. We will therefore return to it somewhat later.

The third phase of the struggle over the value of labour-power is characterised by the struggle of the workers against their reduction to a mere means of producing surplus-value, a mere appendage of capital. The trade-union movement is the form taken by this struggle of the working class to wrest back from capital its own life, to reverse the terms on which it relates to capital – i.e. to make the production of capital a mere means of its own life, which it attempts to determine autonomously and without reference to the needs of capital. What was yielded up to capital all at once has to be won back inch by inch and by dint of bitter struggle, failure and self-education. The first step in the process is to overcome their isolation and associate together.

The first attempts of workers to associate among themselves always takes place in the form of combinations. Large-scale industry concentrates in one place a crowd of people unknown to one another. Competition divides their interests. But the maintenance of wages, this common interest which they have against their boss, unites them in a common thought of resistance – combination. Thus combination always has a double aim, that of stopping competition among the workers, so that they can carry on general competition with the capitalists… In England they have not stopped at partial combinations which have no other objective than a passing strike, and which disappear with it. Permanent combinations have been formed,trades unions, which serve as ramparts for the workers in their struggles against the employers. (Poverty of Philosophy, Moscow Edition, pp.150, 149.)

Trade unions, then, are the organisations formed by the working class as an instrument in their struggle over the value of labour-power. By combining, they are able to dictate terms of sale to the capitalists, whereas in isolation, being under the compulsion to sell their labour-power in order to live, they have to sell at any price. In practice, the struggle is concentrated around wages and the length of the working day, and therefore constitutes a fight to reduce absolute surplus-value production by these means. Through the trade-union struggle, the working class radically alters itself and circumstances. From an atomised mass, it constitutes itself as an organised force; it wins the abolition of child labour, the normal working day, wage increases which allow a raising of living standards as well as a further reduction in the collective working day, education, social welfare measures. The character of the working class is substantially altered.

First and foremost, trade unionism establishes the principle of combination as a necessity for the very survival of the proletariat. ‘If the first aim of resistance was merely the maintenance of wages, combinations, at first isolated, constitute themselves into groups as the capitalists in their turn unite for the purpose of repression, and in the face of an always united capital, the maintenance of the association becomes more necessary to them than that of wages. This is so true that English economists are amazed to see the workers sacrifice a good part of their wages in favour of associations, which, in the eyes of these economists, are established solely in favour of wages’ (Poverty of Philosophy, p. 150). The trade unions proved in practice that the particular interests of individual workers are not in conflict with those of others but can be realised only together with them, and thus firmly established the principle of solidarity. Hence solidarity, instead of being a mere means of obtaining wages, became an end in itself to such an extent that material sacrifices were willingly made in the interests of maintaining it. The first step was made towards the self-constitution of the proletariat as a class for itself, a class ready to undertake its historic tasks; and the proletariat forced bourgeois society too to record this first step insomuch as the right to form combinations was legally established.

The laws protecting child labour and ultimately abolishing it, together with laws making education compulsory for children below a certain age, had far-reaching consequences. The physical and intellectual deterioration produced by ‘transforming immature human beings into mere machines for the production of surplus value’ was stemmed and halted; although the type of education introduced still involved an enormous wastage of the capacities of proletarian children by failing to develop them, these capacities were not actually destroyed by premature wage-labour. Moreover, a real development of capacities did become possible. Apart from the limited contribution made by formal education, the time spent in play, interaction with other children, the free exercise of their muscles and imaginations, contributed significantly to the physical, intellectual and emotional development of children. The conditions for the emergence of a literate working class with a basic education, intellectuals of the working class on a mass scale, the beginnings of the abolition of the division of labour between mental and manual workers, were created by the struggle to abolish child labour and obtain an education for proletarian children. This was one way in which the trade unions combatted the production of absolute surplus-value through fighting for a reduction in the collective working day of the proletarian family.

The struggle for equal pay, legal protection, maternity benefits, etc. for female labour also had far-reaching though less unambiguous consequences. While these did not exist, the bourgeoisie had no shibboleths about the sanctity of proletarian family life, no qualms about breaking up the families of proletarians and dragging all members of them into the labour market, sexually abusing proletarian women and depriving proletarian children of parental care and affection. But, to the extent that female labour became as expensive as male labour, and, moreover, demanded extra privileges, male labour was preferred, with the result that female labour tended to be thrown out of work. This was supplemented by voluntary withdrawal as male wages were pushed up to a level where they could support a whole family. Like the withdrawal of children from the wage-labour force, this represented a reduction in absolute surplus-value production resulting from a reduction in the collective working day of the family.

On one side, this made possible the constitution of the proletarian family. The higher individual wages that made it possible for women to withdraw from wage-labour created conditions for an improvement in childcare and a partial reversal of the brutalisation of human relationships which had earlier taken place. On the other side, however, this family was burdened with all those functions in the reproduction of labour-power where it was most difficult to replace living by dead labour, and these fell mainly on the women. They therefore were compelled to work in isolation, performing work organised on an irrational, individual basis, without any social control over their hours of work, conditions of work or remuneration in the form of means of subsistence.

The proletarian family requires deeper examination from the standpoint of an understanding of the family as such. Engels’s attempt to understand this relationship by delving into the distant past bears more resemblance to mythical explanations like, for example, the one in Genesis. While the ‘original sin’ may be different – in Genesis Woman allows herself to be beguiled into eating the forbidden fruit of the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, in The Origin of the Family she allows herself to be beguiled into withdrawing from socialised production – the ‘curse’ is much the same: she is condemned to bear children in pain and to remain subordinate to Man. If, however, ‘human anatomy contains a key to the anatomy of the ape,’ and bourgeois society, as the most developed form, allows insights into earlier forms, (Marx,Grundrisse, Pelican edition, p. 105), then it is the proletarian family which contains the key to earlier forms, not vice versa, and it is in ‘the huddled dwelling-places of the working class’ that ‘the springs of life are welling up’ (A. Kollontai, ‘Sexual Relations and the Class Struggle). Here is a family which is propertyless, divested of all ownership or possession of means of production, a family which is not in any meaningful sense a unit of production, and progressively loses its productive functions as society, through schools, laundries, pre-cooked food, etc., takes on functions previously performed in the family. Its tendency of development, therefore is towards a unit which is held together purely by the personal relationships within it, a sphere in which relationships of love can most fully and deeply be realised, in which children can first develop a consciousness of their own personalities along with the capacity to love. But capitalist relations of production constitute a barrier to the final working out of this tendency, as they also constitute a barrier to the tendency for greater and greater socialisation of labour to be carried to its limit. Capitalism imposes on the family the responsibility and labour necessary for its reproduction; also, the sexual division of labour, which impoverishes both men and women, as the mental/manual division of labour impoverishes both mental and manual workers; and as a consequence of these, a hierarchical structure where women are subordinate to men and children to adults. There results, inevitably, a corrosion and distortion of the relationships within it; and this cannot entirely be overcome without the socialisation of housework, the abolition of the sexual division of labour, and the dissolution of all relationships of domination and subordination, not from the standpoint of the bourgeois principles of formal equality and independence, but from the standpoint of the proletarian principles of solidarity, comradeship and perfectly balanced mutual dependence where affirmation of oneself is equally an affirmation of the other (Marx,Early Writings, Pelican edition, p. 277). The development by the proletariat of its own sexual morality is an important step in its formation into a class, for as Marx correctly noted, the relationship of man to woman ‘reveals in asensuous form, reduced to an observable fact, the extent to which the human essence has become nature for man or nature has become the human essence for man. It is possible to judge from this relationship the entire level of development of mankind’ (Early Writings, p. 347).

The struggle for the establishment of the normal working day was protracted and bitter. ‘As soon as the working class, stunned at first by the noise and turmoil of the new system of production, had recovered its senses to some extent, it began to offer resistance to the forcible appropriation of its entire day minus a few hours of rest’ (Capital Vol.1, p. 390). It forced the passing of five Labour Laws between 1802 and 1833, but these were successfully evaded by the bourgeoisie. However, ‘the factory workers, especially since 1838,… made the Ten Hours Bill their economic, as they had made the Charter their political, election cry’ (p. 393). This agitation let to the Act of 1844, which extended and made more enforceable the provisions of the 1833 Act. There followed an Act of 1847, which was also sabotaged by the capitalists and finally virtually annulled by a Court decision. ‘But this apparently decisive victory of capital was immediately followed by a counter-stroke. So far, the workers had offered a resistance which was passive, though inflexible and unceasing. They now protested in Lancashire and Yorkshire in threatening meetings… The factory inspectors urgently warned the government that class antagonism had reached an unheard-of degree of tension’ (p. 405). This led to the supplementary Factory Act of 1850. Subsequently, the 12-hour working day and then the 10-hour day were brought into force.

The limitation of the working day of adult workers led to a spectacular improvement in their health, and allowed them leisure time for meeting each other, talking, discussing, reading newspapers and other literature. Combined with higher wages and better living conditions, as well as with education for children, this development enabled workers to deepen and widen their knowledge far beyond their immediate experience of work-place and living-place. The cultural level thus acquired is an essential condition for the formation of the proletariat into a class transcending workplace, industry, nationality and all other determinations which, to begin with, divide the proletariat and perpetuate competition within it. This is the culture and ideology of a class everywhere pitted against the same social forces and increasingly capable of reflecting on its own struggles. To assume that the ideas of the proletariat are identical with the ruling ideas, which are those of the bourgeoisie, is to forget that the practice which constitutes the basis of those ideas is a constant struggle against bourgeois society; a struggle which may pass through different phases and take different forms, which may remain implicit for a whole epoch, but which never ceases so long as capital and wage-labour continue to exist. It is apparent, then, that the establishment of the normal working day and higher wages enable the proletariat to undertake a deeper and more comprehensive investigation of its own situation and tasks, and thus directly contributes to the creation of a communist culture within the working class.

VI

Seen within the perspective of a whole historical epoch during which the proletariat, through successive cycles of struggle and self-education, constitutes itself as a class for itself, the trade union movement takes an important place. Even though it occurs in a period of capitalist expansion and development and does not directly take up the task of shattering capitalist relations of production, it does struggle against the immanent laws of capitalist accumulation, against the tendency of capital to appropriate the maximum amount of surplus value from the proletariat, against the negation of its humanity which results from the unfettered operation of those laws; it is the means by which the proletariat asserts its humanity in this period. This is why the ‘historical and moral element’ in the determination of the value of labour-power depends less on ‘the habits and expectations with which the class of free workers has been formed’ (Capital Vol.1, p. 275), which relate to the past, than on the struggles of the proletariat, which relate to its goals, so that it is never the case that the value of labour-power is once and for all determined, fixed and unalterable; on the contrary, the struggle for an increase in the value of labour-power must continue so long as wage-labour itself continues to degrade the human value of the labourers. In the course of this struggle, the proletariat alters circumstances, revolutionises itself; it emerges from the struggle different from what it was when it entered it. Thus, to see the working class of today purely and simply as the product of capital is one-sided. That capital produces the class of wage-labourers and determines the conditions of its reproduction is true; but the class of wage-labourers as it exists today is the product of over a century of struggleagainst capital, and would not have come into existence but for that struggle.

In altering the conditions of its own reproduction, the proletariat alters the nature of capitalist production too. The improvement in wages won by the trade union movement speeds up the introduction of machinery. ‘The use of machinery for the exclusive purpose of cheapening the product is limited by the requirement that less labour must be expended in producing the machinery than is displaced by the employment of that machinery. For the capitalist, however, there is a further limit on its use. Instead of paying for the labour, he pays only the value of the labour-power employed; the limit to his using a machine is therefore fixed by the difference between the value of the machine and the value of the labour power replaced by it’ (Capital Vol.1, p. 515). Where the value of labour-power is very low, machinery may not be substituted for it even though its application leads to a reduction in the labour-time necessary for producing the commodity; ‘the field of application for machinery would therefore be entirely different in a communist society from what it is in bourgeois society’ (p. 515n.). Marx cites two such examples where the low value of labour-power impedes the introduction of machinery. ‘The Yankees have invented a stone-breaking machine. The English do not make use of it because the “wretch” who does this work gets paid for such a small portion of his labour that machinery would increase the cost of production to the capitalist. In England women are still occasionally used instead of horses for hauling barges, because the labour required to produce horses and machines is an accurately known quantity, while that required to maintain the women of the surplus population is beneath all calculation’ (pp. 516-17). Conversely, an increase in the value of labour-power accelerates the introduction of machinery: when the working hours of children were reduced without a reduction in their wages, machinery was substituted for them in the wool industry, and when the labour of women and children in the mines was forbidden, their place was taken by machinery. The development of the productive forces is thus speeded up by the trade union movement although, as always under capitalism, this occurs at the expense of the proletariat inasmuch as it increases unemployment.

Secondly, the shortening of the working day creates ‘the subjective condition for the condensation of labour, i.e. it makes it possible for the worker to set more labour-power in motion within a given time’ (p. 536). This ‘results from the self-evident law that the efficiency of labour-power is in inverse ratio to the duration of its expenditure… In manufactures like potteries, where machinery plays little or no part, the introduction of the Factory Act has strikingly shown that the mere shortening of the working day increases to a wonderful degree the regularity, uniformity, order, continuity and energy of labour’ (p. 535). If the shortening of the working day produced an intensification of labour even in industries employing little machinery, in other industries capitalists consciously and systematically used machinery as a means of squeezing out more labour. ‘This occurs in two ways: the speed of the machine is increased, and the same worker receives a greater quantity of machinery to supervise’ (p. 536). So great was the increase in intensity which followed the introduction of the Ten-Hour Act that workers were now expending more labour-power in ten hours than they had formerly expended in twelve. The speed-up inevitably led to exhaustion, disease, psychological disorders and an increase in accidents, and these in turn resulted in agitation for a further reduction of the working day to eight hours. Ultimately, then, legal regulation of the working day benefited not only the workers but also the manufacturers into whose industries it was introduced; ‘their wonderful development from 1853 to 1860, hand in hand with the physical and moral regeneration of the factory workers, was visible to the weakest eyes. The very manufacturers from whom the legal limitation and regulation of the working day had been wrung step by step in the course of a civil war lasting half a century now pointed boastfully to the contrast with the areas of exploitation which were still “free”’ (pp.408-9).

To the extent, therefore, that the upsurge of the working class combatted the production of absolute surplus-value through extension of the working day both collective and individual, and a depression of living standards, ‘capital threw itself with all its might, and in full awareness of the situation, into the production of relative surplus value, by speeding up the development of the machine system’. At the same time, it imposed ‘on the worker an increased expenditure of labour within a time which remains constant, a heightened tension of labour power, and a closer filling-up of the pores of the working day, i.e. a condensation of labour’ (p. 434). There is an acceleration of the increase in the organic composition of capital and simultaneously an acceleration of the rate at which machinery transfers its value to the product as a result of intensified use. This in turn alters the nature of surplus-value production and of the labour-force itself.

VII

Altogether, the importance of the trade unions for the working class in immense. Yet it is not entirely accurate to say that ‘the value of labour-power constitutes the conscious and explicit foundation of thetrade unions’ (p. 1069). On the surface of bourgeois society, the value of labour-power appears as the price of labour, and it is this appearance which dominates the trade-union movement. This is quite evident from its slogans – a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work, equal pay for work of equal value and so on. In other words, the aim of the movement is the achievement of what is conceived of as an equal exchange between capital and labour; it does not explicitly recognise that even a ‘fair wage’ involves the exploitation of labour-power, the appropriation of unpaid surplus labour. Consequently, the movement suffers many limitations. Since it is ‘labour’ which is sold, the concrete form taken by the labour performed becomes an important consideration, and hence trade unions start as unions of workers in a particular trade. Competition between workers of different trades remains and is in some cases intensified. With the development of industrial and general unions, ‘labour’ comes to be marketed by larger and more comprehensive agencies, yet these, too, compete with one another on the capitalist labour market. Trade unionslimit competition between the workers, but cannot entirelyeliminate it. When labourers are thrown out of work, become unemployed, and are hence no longer involved in a direct exchange with capital, they automatically cease to be within the purvey of trade unions: hence these organisations are incapable of eliminating competition between employed and unemployed workers, and indeed at times raise this competition to a principle, as in the closed shop system. Again, the appearance that labour rather than labour-power is being sold conceals the social character of the labour of proletarian housewives, so that they too fall outside the scope of trade unions, and the conditions, hours and remuneration of their labour remain without legal regulation. For these and other reasons, trade unions can never be organs of the struggle of the working class as a whole.

Even with respect to the workers whom it directly represents, the trade union suffers from deficiencies. In the first place, although the fight to establish them involves a challenge to bourgeois legality, once established, they derive their strength from the fact that they are the agencies recognised in law as representatives of the interests of the proletariat. Retaining this advantage necessitates remaining within the framework of the law, and hence knowledge of the law and legal procedures. This is necessarily a function of specialists. Thus, the trade union leaderships inevitably become separated from the mass of the workers as a bureaucracy, so that the workers can no longer directly represent their interests through them. Intensification of labour is another example. From the standpoint of trade unionism, an increase in wages is adequate compensation for the increased labour that is extracted with intensification; the detrimental effects on labour-power – through fatigue, mental strain, accidents, etc. – are not sufficiently taken into consideration. This is why the intensification of labour which takes place in a period of capitalist expansion is compatible with trade unions and requires only the victimisation of class-conscious militants, whereas the wage-cuts and extension of the working day which the bourgeoisie have to carry out in a crisis demand the smashing of trade unions as occurred under fascism. (The fascist syndicates are in no sense trade unions – see F. Neumann, European Trade Unionism and Politics, extract reproduced inBCP 2.) This instance illustrates very clearly both the importance of trade unions for the working class and their deficiencies. For the drastic increase in the exploitation of labour-power which occurs under fascism demonstrates that it is not merely in the early stages of capitalism that the bourgeoisie opposes the existence of combinations of workers and strives in this way to increase the production of absolute surplus-value. Hence the importance for the proletariat of defending trade unions so long as wage-labour itself lasts. And yet, inasmuch as they are unable to unite the proletariat, the trade unions prove themselves unable to defend themselves against a determined attack; such a defence, like their original formation, requires the capacity and willingness to wage a ‘civil war’.

Ultimately, the limitation of trade unionism is that its basis is wage-labour: to undertake the regulation of the value of labour-power presupposes that labour-power is a commodity, presupposes the capital-wage-labour relation. As the working-class struggle enters a phase where it is pitted against capital itself, therefore, the trade unions become inadequate as instruments of struggle and the proletariat has to discover alternative forms of organisation through which it expresses its interests. However, prior to an examination of this transition, it is necessary first to understand the role played by the other major means through which the proletariat struggles for its interests under capitalism – the working-class parliamentary party.

"European trade union demonstration" byJoost (formerly habeebee) is licensed underCC BY-NC-ND 2.0

• 1. See https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/blog/emergence-working-class-learning-process

A Dialogue with Ugo Palheta

Valerio Arcary1

The Historical Materialism website has published a provocative essay by Ugo Palheta on contemporary neofascism.2 Over 22 theses, he develops a theoretical-historical analysis of fascism in its three dimensions: the ideology, the movement and the regime. Although the phenomenon is international, and there are common factors and elements to all, it seems inescapable that we look for the specific features that prevail in core countries, like the US or the countries of the European Union, and those that are characteristic of a nation such as Brazil, which – although in the periphery – is a society that made the passage from what was a predominantly agrarian society until the 1970s, to one with a high rate of urbanisation – something that distinguishes it from India or the Philippines, for example.

The first factor to be analysed is the meaning of the crisis of hegemony of the ruling class. Over the last 35 years, Brazil experienced its longest period under a democratic-electoral regime. In a historical perspective, this development would have been a surprise for the revolutionary Marxism that drew inspiration from Leon Trotsky’s approach of the 1930s, whereby he was sceptical about democratic regimes in peripheral countries.

Trotsky based himself on the tradition of the Third International, which, to summarise brutally, considered it improbable that there could be lasting liberal-democratic regimes, with an alternation of power, in South America. This applied even to a country such as Brazil, which has a peculiar semi-peripheral location in the world market and system of states, because it is a hybrid between a privileged semi-colony and a regional semi-metropole.

We were wrong. We were dogmatic (even if this prognosis held true, in its essence, until the end of the 1980s). We experienced two decades of military dictatorship after the victory of the Cuban Revolution. But the thesis was proven wrong after 1989-91, with capitalist restoration and the end of the USSR. The underestimation of this historic defeat, on a global scale, fed catastrophist prognoses that dismissed the possibility of the consolidation of a liberal-democratic regime, in a society that had undergone qualitative transformations, with the growth spurt that created the largest industrial complex of the southern hemisphere, and immense social changes.

From today’s perspective, after eight presidential elections, it is incontrovertible that the ruling class has overseen a relative stabilisation of the liberal-democratic regime. What remains troubling is that, after the institutional coup of 2016 and the election of a neofascist – in the context of primary-export recolonisation in the wake of the global depression after the 2008 crisis – the regime remains, to a high degree, threatened by Bonapartist blackmail.

There has been a debate in Brazil for at least three years about whether Bolsonaro is or is not a neofascist. This discussion is no mere dilettantism. It demands rigour. So, what should be the criteria for the classification of a political movement as neofascist, from a Marxist perspective? We should be very serious in studying our enemies. Those who do not know their enemy cannot win. There are three main narratives about the meaning of Bolsonarismo on the Left:

1. The first is predominant in the PT (Workers’ Party) and holds that the June Days of 2013 inaugurated a conservative wave and opened the path for an offensive that deposed the Dilma Rousseff government and arrested Lula. Bolsonarismo is, in this perspective, a reaction to the progressive reforms of the coalition governments headed by the PT, which is to say, it was born as a reaction to the PT’s successes.
2. The second prevails within a minority in PSOL [Party of Socialism and Liberty], in the PSTU [United Socialist Workers’ Party], and in small organisations of the far Left, and argues that June 2013 was a democratic, progressive movement; the anti-corruption mobilisation in 2015, propelled by the Lava Jato investigations, were up for dispute; and the Bolsonaro government is a result, fundamentally, of an electoral defeat, as a function of the treason of the PT governments, but that we are not in a reactionary situation.
3. The third, which is majoritarian in PSOL, holds that the June Days of 2013 were socially in dispute, but that the middle-class mobilisations of 2015-16 were reactionary. It argues that the pivot of the Dilma Rousseff government to fiscal austerity, which produced a catastrophic economic recession, provoked social demoralisation among workers; and concludes that the growth of Bolsonarismo was only possible as a function of the accumulation of defeats due to the capitulation of the leadership of the PT, but that its historical significance lies in bourgeois reaction, on a continental scale, driven by imperialism.   

What is certain is that the Bolsonaro government must be the worst in the world in combatting the pandemic. There may be other, mind-bogglingly bad, incapable and abject governments, but none worse than the Brazilian. The catastrophic management of the plague has led to apocalyptic situations, such as in Manaus, an acceleration of contagion due to new strains/mutations of the virus, and to the collapse of the health system. This situation can be explained, among other factors, by Bolsonaro’s orientation toward defending the interests of his social base in the propertied petty bourgeoisie who are desperately set against any restrictive, preventative measures, and hysterically hostile to any lockdown.

Obviously, the categorisation of any and all political currents or leaders of the extreme right as “fascist” is a sweeping generalisation and one which is historically incorrect and politically imprudent. Fascism is such a serious danger that we should be dispassionate in defining it. The entirety of the far Right is radically reactionary. But not all of the far Right is neofascist. Evaluating our enemies with care is required.

            The Bolsonaro government is a front that articulates four different wings of the far Right: the ultraliberal, the military, the parliamentary and the directly neofascist wings. It is not a fascist government. And the regime continues to be a liberal-democratic, presidential one, with institutional division of powers. Actually, today it is a hybrid, due to the strong presence of thousands of military officers in state management positions. The institutional conflict between the Supreme Court and Congress, on the one hand, and the executive and the Bolsonarista current, on the other, has sharpened.

            But Bolsonaro himself is a neofascist. Or a fascist of the kind that exists in the historical era in which we live, after capitalist restoration in the ex-USSR and China. This characterisation would evidently be insufficient without mediations. Mediations are not a recourse to “dialectical elegance”. To identify, for instance, that a paramilitary fascist party still does not exist is the sort of precision required of us, even if Bolsonaro’s alignment with paramilitaries formed by police officers is dramatically threatening. But those who think this is an exaggeration are deluding themselves. Bolsonaro is extremely dangerous. One of the core elements of his strategy is the “fascisation” of his political current.

            Bolsonaro is a caudillo. His leadership is an expression of a mass, middle-class, counterrevolutionary movement, supported by fractions of the bourgeoisie, who are driven by opposition to the egalitarian, albeit minimal, reforms carried out by the PT governments, a phobia of the Venezuelan experience, and the economic regression of the last six years.

Bolsonaro leads a real political movement, although he does not yet have a legalised political party. The fact it has not yet been formalised is not irrelevant, but this does not diminish his mass influence either. Bolsonarismo is, unequivocally, one of the two main political forces in Brazil. The other is the PT.

Bolsonarismo has support from the bulk of the bourgeoisie, although there is dissidence within the hard core of the ruling class. His wider social base are those exasperated sectors of the middle layers. And he has also reached an audience in the fringes of the working class. Bolsonarismo responds to a demand for strong leadership in the face of corruption; control in the context of the worsening public security crisis; resentment in the context of an increase in tax burdens; the ruin of small businesses in the context of economic regression; pauperisation in the context of inflation in the cost of education, health, and private security; order in the context of strikes and demonstrations; authority in the context of power conflicts between institutions; national pride in the context of the economic regression of the past six years.

            Even the presence of Venezuelan, Haitian and Bolivian refugees and immigrants has served to feed xenophobia. His movement is also driven by a fantasized nostalgia for the two decades of military dictatorship, in particular amongst the military and police forces, among which Bolsonaro wields great authority. If that were not enough, he has also gained visibility by giving expression to the hatred felt in retrograde and archaic social environments, especially in neopentecostal churches, for the feminist struggle, the black and LGBT movements, and even ecologists.

            The far Right is in government and the neofascist wing is in a struggle for power. Until now, its coup-mongering initiatives have been blocked, but not defeated. In this struggle for power the aim is to subvert the regime, or the balance of power between the institutions. The offensive, in the form of counter-reform of pensions, was a first step in a counterrevolutionary socio-economic programme that aims to ensure privatisations, fiscal reform and much else besides.

            Is a social counterrevolution without the destruction of freedoms possible? We should approach this question with an open mind. It is a theoretical-historical problem. We still do not have answers – which does not diminish the importance of the strategic question. The Bolsonaro government’s project is to destroy the few social advances of the last three and a half decades. They say, unabashedly, that the cost of maintaining a democratic regime has become too high. It has become too expensive. Minimum wages, formal employment, pensions, universal and public health, growing universal access to education, subsidies for public transport... everything has become too expensive. In sum, taxes are too high. They do not hide whom they serve.

This all returns us, once again, to the strategic question. Will it be possible to advance a programme for the recolonisation of Brazil, without destroying democratic liberties? We do not know the answer. But it is important to be aware of the potential danger of a political and even social demoralisation if Bolsonaro were to win a second term.

            Bolsonaro’s election was only possible after an uninterrupted process of accumulated defeats that consolidated a reactionary context. Defeats should be called by their name. There has been a qualitative change in the social relation of forces between classes. Those who think that to diminish the significance of defeats helps future struggles are wrong. This self-delusion feeds magical thinking, and conspiracy theories.

Of course, saying that the workers or the people were defeated because our enemies were stronger explains nothing. There are those who are responsible. As 2015 became 2016, the immense majority of the bourgeoisie broke with the Dilma Rousseff government and supported the mobilisations of middle sectors in favour of impeachment. And the PT discovered it no longer had the requisite social strength among workers to resist the offensive. After 13 years of collaboration with big capital – up to the absurd point of accepting a finance minister, Joaquim Levy, hand-picked by finance capital – the PT found itself impotent. The dramatic limits of the strategy of “reformism but with hardly any reforms” revealed themselves to be insuperable.

The political project of Bolsonarismo is to impose a historic defeat on workers so as to complete his project. Historic defeats are different to electoral or socio-political defeats. Just as there have been historic victories – the triumphs of anti-capitalist revolutions – there have also been historic defeats, such as with the 1964 coup in Brazil.

When a historic defeat occurs, a whole generation loses hope that life could improve through collective political mobilisation. It is then necessary that a new generation reaches adulthood and matures through the experience of social struggle. A historic defeat establishes an unfavourable relation of forces between classes over the long term. A historic break is then necessary for the working class to, once again, begin to move, as it did in 1978-79.

Bolsonarismo could never be the same as Nazism. Fascist movements in many other countries – including in Brazil, with integralism – existed in the same historical period. But, despite their nuances, they all deserved to be classed as fascist.

We are not in the same stage as during the 1930s, after the catastrophe of the First World War, the victory of the Russian Revolution, and the crisis of 1929. Neofascism in a dependent country such as Brazil could not be the same as the fascism of European societies in the 1930s. There is no risk of a new October Revolution today, even if the spectre of Venezuela has not failed to provoke the political neuroses of Bolsonarismo. This force responds to the economic stagnation of the last six years, the most significant in contemporary history, as well as to the movement of the mass of the bourgeoisie to the opposition during the PT governments, and to the socio-economic strangulation of sectors of the middle class.

            The antipetismo [hatred of the PT and, by extension, the Left] of the last five years is the Brazilian form of the anticommunism of the 1930s. Bolsonarismo was not initially backed by the main nucleus of the bourgeoisie, but, rather, was adopted as a lesser evil in the face of socio-economic crisis. There are many theoretical models to classify neofascism. Here is an outline of ten criteria: (a) the social origin of its leaders; (b) the trajectory of the movement; (c) its social base and the electoral dimension of its audience; (d) what it proposes: its ideology or programme; (e) its political project; (f) its position vis-à-vis the political regime, or its relation with institutions such as Congress or the Armed Forces; (g) its relation, respectively, to the ruling class and the working class; (h) the type of party or movement that functions as its instrument of struggle; (i) its relations and supporters internationally; (j) the origins of its funding.

Considering these ten criteria, we can conclude that:

1. Bolsonaro’s own social background is in the plebian petty bourgeoisie. The search for rapid social ascension via a career as an officer in the Army was, for generations, not uncommon, especially among euro-descendants. It demands lower educational attainment than medicine, law or engineering to enter public universities (as well as offering a salary from the start) and, in compensation, offers a level of stability and remuneration much higher than a physical education teacher. This class origin explains some of Bolsonaro’s obsessions: rancorous racism, paranoid misogyny, primitive homophobia, social resentment, ferocious anticommunism, radical militarism, nostalgia for the rural countryside, antipathy toward science, fascination with magical thinking, messianic religious references, primitive nationalism, awe of middle-class modes of consumption in North America, and aversion to intellectualism.
2. Over the last forty years, Bolsonaro has been a raving, insubordinate officer and then a marginal, folksy, and corporatist congressman on the bottom rung of the parliamentary “lower clergy”. What distinguished Bolsonarismo was always his unconditional defence of the military dictatorship and, specifically, its terrorist methods used against the threat of socialist revolution. Bolsonaro was always mediocre, crude, impudent, boorish. He was present in political battles for thirty years and had seven terms as federal deputy, so his existence in politics is no novelty.
3. It is impossible to understand how qualitatively different his role as president is without analysing the role of Lava Jato since 2014, and the appropriation of the historic banner of anticorruption by sectors of the ruling class. Fractions of the Brazilian bourgeoisie had already wielded anticorruption many times in their internal battles: in 1954, to depose Getúlio Vargas; in 1960, to elect Jânio Quadros; in 1964, to legitimate the military coup; in 1989, to elect Collor de Melo; and in 2016, as cause to impeach Dilma Rousseff. Bolsonaro emerged from obscurity in the pro-impeachment mobilisation, in 2015-16, when the demand for military intervention gained an audience of tens of thousands amidst the four million who took to the streets in more than 200 cities.
4. Bolsonaro’s political project is to carry out an “auto-coup” to install a Bonapartist regime. Since March, at the start of the pandemic’s devastating impact, when 100,000-200,000 deaths were projected, this plan has been falling apart. But, even if Bolsonaro has retreated, he has not been defeated. There have been various kinds of Bonapartism in peripheral countries. Bolsonaro’s project, supported by a mass counterrevolutionary movement, follows the plan of an authoritarian regime that, depending on the conditions of socio-political struggle, could come to acquire semi-fascist forms.
5. Bolsonaro’s relations with the Armed Forces and police, and his permanent confrontation with the upper courts and Congress, confirm his Bonapartist aims. Bolsonaro is not merely an authoritarian leader who could be neutralised through pressure from the ruling class. He advances and retreats, weighs up his strengths, provokes and negotiates, but he does not stop his offensive.
6. Bolsonaro has been cultivating a relationship with the big bourgeoisie through the nomination of Paulo Guedes as Economy Super-Minister. This was an improvisation on Bolsonaro’s part that has now accelerated. The economic plan is ultraliberal, with an emphasis on indiscriminate privatisation, a brutal fiscal shock, and a frontal attack on workers’ rights. His strategy is to reposition Brazil in the world market at the USA’s side, against China. He is relying on investment from the US, even after Trump’s defeat, in order to overcome stagnation.
7. This strategy is consistent with the plans of the most powerful nuclei of the bourgeoisie, but it cannot be applied without social confrontation, and this because there has not been, yet, a historic defeat of the Brazilian working class. What happened over a six-year period, since 2015-16 – the process that started with the institutional coup that deposed the Dilma Rousseff government – was not a historic defeat. What we have experienced has been an unfavourable reversal in the social relation of forces, a socio-political defeat that has inaugurated a reactionary situation. But we are not in a counterrevolutionary situation.
8. Bolsonaro is not yet supported by a paramilitary fascist party. He made use of a for-hire party as an electoral instrument, which he later discarded. But this organic shortcoming was compensated for by the mobilisation of a mass political movement, which has the largest presence on social networks. He will be able to build a party based on his control of the state.
9. To underestimate Bolsonaro, or his current’s ability to build links in the international arena, would be a grave error. There is a still-embryonic far-right International being constructed in the USA, with Steve Bannon, and sectors of the former Trump administration such as Mike Pompeo. It has significant financing from a few big economic interests who respond favourably to a project by a fraction of US imperialism to present resistance to China’s ascendance as a proto-imperialist power.
10. The financing of Bolsonaro’s electoral campaign remains essentially obscure. However, his strength on social networks, by far the largest in Brazil, suggests that there are business groups who are seriously, and criminally, engaged. Some of these groups are already well known and have an important presence in FIESP [Federation of Industries of the State of São Paulo].

Finally, we should recall the “bending the stick” metaphor used by Lenin: when the stick is bent too far in one direction, if we wish to find the point of equilibrium, we need to bend it to the opposite extreme. This far-right government, led by a neofascist wing, was not a historical accident. Without mass mobilisation, Bolsonaro will not be stopped, and this demands the formation of a united left front capable of igniting workers’ willingness to fight, as well as that of the youth, black, women’s, environmental, LGBT and human rights movements.

Translated by Alex Hochuli

"Jair Bolsonaro (PSL) e Donald Trump encontram-se em Nova York, antes da abertura da Assembleia Geral das Nações Unidas. 'Obrigado pela consideração, presidente', disse Bolsonaro no Twitter (Foto: Alan Santos/PR)" byBrasil de Fato is licensed underCC BY-NC-SA 2.0

• 1. Full Professor at the Federal Institute of São Paulo (IFSP), PhD in History from the University of São Paulo (USP), author of The Dangerous Corners of History, among other books, and a Trotskyist militant since the Carnation Revolution
• 2. https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/blog/fascism-fascisation-antifascism

A Review of Le temps des émeutes andLes enfants du chaos by Alain Bertho

Alberto Toscano

Reader in Critical Theory, Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK

Visiting Faculty, Digital Democracies Institute, School of Communication, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada

alberto_toscano@sfu.ca

Abstract

This article explores the analysis of the present advanced by the French political anthropologist Alain Bertho. It focuses in particular on his diagnosis of the terminal crisis of modern politics, giving rise to a ‘time of riots’, of non-strategic collective uprisings and disturbances, as well as a ‘time of martyrs’, of anti- and ultra-political forms of violence.

Keywords

Alain Bertho – riots – politics – violence – jihadism

Alain Bertho, (2009) Le temps des émeutes, Paris: Bayard,

Alain Bertho, (2016) Les enfants du chaos. Essai sur le temps des martyrs, Paris: Éditions La Découverte,

Alain Bertho, (2018) The Age of Violence: The Crisis of Political Action and the End of Utopia, translated by David Broder, London: Verso.

I.

Though the progress of anti-systemic movements in the past decade has been halting, at best contradictory, a wide swathe of commentators, mainstream or otherwise, has noted a worldwide proliferation of riots, uprisings and myriad forms of collective violence and contestation. The French political anthropologist Alain Bertho has produced what is, to my knowledge, the first attempt to synthesise this phenomenon and this moment, what he calls – in a formulation also used in Alain Badiou’s later The Rebirth of History – a ‘time of riots’.Badiou 2012. His theses are worth revisiting now, in terms of the debate surrounding the writings of The Invisible Committee and especially Clover’s recent Riot. Strike. RiotThe Invisible Committee 2009; Clover 2016; Toscano 2016. – but also in light of Bertho’s recent attempt (in the second book under consideration here) to link the time of riots to a surge in the 2010s of so-called ‘jihadi’ violence.

          It would be imprecise to say that Bertho systematises the planetary upsurge in insurgent collective violence over the last decade or so, since Les temps des émeutes is in many ways driven by an ethical and methodological polemic against those social-scientific research programmes and political perspectives that would seek, respectively, causally to explain or strategically to instrumentalise riots. Yet Bertho’s anti-social science or social anti-science, in equal measures anti-sociological and anti-political (opposed to all variants of modern or contemporary political theory), does seek to assert a fundamental global commonality underlying these phenomena of collective action which, in his eyes, are either rendered invisible or traduced by dominant frameworks of analysis.Le temps des émeutes is an essay in what Bertho calls a political ethnography of the present, written in a fluid, at times impatient style, combining polemical aperçu with concise descriptions and enumerations of contemporary insurgencies; it is divided into three parts, which, roughly speaking, define the phenomenon, detail its varieties, and draw its political lessons. The approach is relatively loose, making for a quick and engaging read, albeit one sometimes marred by the repetitive and rather minimalist nature of Bertho’s political and theoretical assertions.  

          The starting point for Le temps des émeutes is the 2005 riots in France, grasped as a definitive sign of the obsolescence of the traditional reading frames, in both social theory and political strategy, through which putatively similar events were interpreted across political modernity. It is evident that Bertho’s polemical target is the belief that the lens through which to understand such movements is one of class, understood as a social, political and subjective category. Yet a tension is present from the outset: Bertho’s affirmation of the irreducible singularity of riots, in axiomatic excess of any explanatory or political frame, is coupled with a conviction that there exists something like a ‘subjective globality of revolt’. This welter of seemingly inarticulate and disjointed, if massively present actions, all, in a sense, tell us ‘the same thing’. Singularity ends up conveying a kind of univocity. Bertho’s methodological fiat leads to a kind of anthropologicalepoché – the presupposition that we already know the why and wherefore of this surge in riots and uprisings must be suspended, along with the frameworks of intelligibility (sociological, Marxist, humanist, liberal, or what have you) which we’ve grown used to handling. ‘To the riots themselves’, so to speak.

          For Bertho, these riots define our contemporaneity, as a kind of discontinuity. The crisis (Bertho finished the book in 2009) is primarily political. It is a crisis ofpolitics, of our very conception of what can be characterised as political. Riots are not archaic, but neither, and this is just as crucial, are they continuous with the history of revolutions.

          For Bertho, rather than the increase in phenomena of violent collective action signalling a return to ’68, the latter, understood in its wider connotation – les années soixante-huit – is whatclosed a long cycle of popular mobilisation around the watchwords of work, class, revolution, nation and state that began in 1848, and which can be divided roughly into two further blocs, pre- and post-1917. Our moment is one that began globally around 1975, as more and more events of collective action escaped the classical-modern reading frame, establishing a kind ofinterregnum in which riots linked to a variety of occasioning causes (the death of young men, communal conflict, price-hikes, as well as anti-globalisation agitation) proliferate. The beginning of the twenty-first century sees the establishment of something like a new paradigm – though admittedly, this seems more of a negative paradigm, inasmuch as the regular pattern of these actions and the discernment of something like a ‘global subjectivity of revolt’ is not matched by political or discursive forms that could signal a clear break from the past, except in the weakness or absence of the subjects and programmes of political modernity.

          To stress the discontinuity, Bertho notes how even past riots that would superficially appear to be almost indistinguishable from those of our political conjuncture demonstrate the shift in political framings. Accordingly, he asks us to compare the Watts uprising of 1965 to the LA riots of 1992 (we could add, Brixton 1981 to London 2011), to stress that the same type of politicisation and symbolic sanction is no longer available (though we could say this might be, at least in part, the wisdom or the distortion of hindsight). Quoting Tocqueville, Bertho enjoins us to accept that there are moments in which the past no longer shines a light on the future.

          In responding to and studying a revolt it is required, according to Bertho, to think the foundational potentiality and subjective discontinuity of a revolt, as well as its ‘alternative episteme’. The two obstacles to this understanding are political instrumentalisation and causal analysis. For the latter, an event is not an event, it is a confirmation or expression of the already-familiar. Here, Bertho follows a strain of French anti-theoreticism, present in a different variant in the writings of Jacques Rancière, according to which, in social science and political theory, actors tend to be dispossessed of their action by intellectuals (though it is disputable whether Bertho can evade this problem, as he too imputes meanings to actions that might not be those voiced by the participants themselves). At the core of this perspective is a critique of ‘sociologisation’, understood as that theoretical and practical attitude which treats any political anger that goes beyond reformable material conditions as unworthy of sustained scrutiny or sympathy. The consequence is that ideas, political principles, and subjectivity – obviously Bertho’s core concerns – are written out. (There is an intriguing parallel not just with the writings of James C. Scott on resistance, or William Sewell’s on events, or Rancière and Badiou’s on political subjectivation, but also with Charles Kurzman’s suggestive The Unthinkable Revolution in Iran.)Kurzman 2004.

          To counter the explaining-away (i.e. the explaining) of riots, Bertho argues that putting oneself, albeit momentarily, ‘on the side of’ the rioters is also an epistemic condition for understanding – though not by projecting one’s subjectivity onto that of the rioters, in a kind of wishful substitutionism. Against this, Bertho offers a research programme, ‘the political ethnography of the present’, aimed at exploring the ‘ethnoscape of riots’.

          The implicit call to suspend our sociological attitude and turn to the riots themselves does not remove their ‘symptomatic’ value, which is not only to provide a political perspective upon a multi-faceted global crisis, but to serve as a lens into ‘illegitimate’, ‘unrepresentable’ subjectivities. Here, of course, Bertho notes the methodological problems encountered by historians of insurgency, namely the fact that the history of riots, as noted by Ranajit Guha and E.P. Thompson, among many others, is a police history. This problem is compounded, given Bertho’s stress on singularity, by a kind of ‘Midas touch’ conundrum: the roots of the riot are in what is foreclosed by politics, but, once the riot is symbolised, rising into political speech or organisation, and the dominated becoming dominant, however fitfully, it is in some sense no longer a riot.

          He asserts, in fact, that one of the drivers of the riots comes from that which – in the political sphere – cannot be spoken about, the hidden. The riots that have gained in extension and incidence in this new millennium are ‘mute revolts’ against silence, grounded on a refusal of, and not an incapacity for, interlocution. Their modes of communication refuse a common symbolic space as defined by the state, as can be registered in the life and circulation of uprisings on YouTube and other Internet platforms (which play a large role in Bertho’s own website, Anthropologie du présent).<https://berthoalain.com/>. Bertho also places ‘anti-summit’ confrontations within this broader spectrum of non-interlocutory anti-state violence – but are riots really so anti-communicative? Should we not heed the lessons of Thompson’s ‘Moral Economy’ essay,Thompson 1971. and discern a kind of grammar and address to these actions? Were not the summit and other protests of the late 1990s and early 2000s, bunched in by Bertho into his panorama, extremely (even excessively) dialogical, not least in terms of the choice of places and forms of protest?

          In a leitmotiv that gives the book its cadence – that of the unmediated confrontation between (superfluous) people and the state – at the heart of these uprisings is the authorities’ contempt, a common element from France to Algeria to China; a kind of official disqualification of life which bears some kinship with recent arguments by the likes of Judith Butler and Zygmunt Bauman (and, in a Marxian register evaded by Bertho, by Michael Denning on ‘wageless life’ and Mike Davis on uprisings in the ‘planet of slums’). Whence the centrality of ‘dignity’, in these struggles against a state that does not count everyone equally (and does not count some at all).

          Resonating with other contemporary commentators, from Stephen Graham to Mike Davis, Bertho puts urban violence, and the struggles against increasingly militarised urban policing, at the core of the new modes of collective action. He notes the way in which riots, such as those at Paris’s Gare du Nord in 2007, can turn non-places into places; how transport becomes a crossroad of contentions (as we can also glean from The Coming Insurrection);The Invisible Committee 2009. the prominence of urban dispossession and gentrification as triggers of rioting worldwide (Istanbul’s Gezi Park protests of 2013 here playing a signal role), giving rise to a sub-type: ‘uprisings of urban renewal’. All of these insurrectionary phenomena raise the question of how the forms of anomalous collectivity born in uprisings can newly articulate the immemorial question as to what kind of collectivity can be born in urban space, the classical and modern site of politicisation since Ancient Greece within the European and Mediterranean political imaginary and beyond.

          Bertho places this multifarious but intimately unified pattern of revolts in the context of globalisation and the dislocation of the state–nation–people trinity. Though he scants analyses of neoliberalism that would give more precision to this conjuncture, especially in terms of the functionalities of ‘law & order’ agendas, or of authoritarian populism, like other authors critically analysing urban violence he underscores the way in which states have effectively declared war on (parts of) their internal populations. In this police logic, the enemy is never a future partner in negotiation, but a criminal to be summarily dealt with. In the same process, of triage and targeting, states also exacerbate identitarian strategies. Yet we may wonder whether there is not a political and analytical danger in joining together pogroms and anti-police demos, anti-austerity revolt and football riots, one that would return us, albeit with a changed valence, to the sociology of the crowd, lurking beneath an ethnography of the riot.

          The riot, Bertho affirms, speaks to us of the state in the language of the forgotten. But he also argues against a kind of ultra-left optimism – the riot is not the omen of a new age of revolutions. Rather, following Sylvain Lazarus and Badiou, we get an image of the riot’s possible politicisation – when it is not instrumentalised for electoral ends, as he interestingly recounts in the case of Madagascar in 2006 – as a ‘prescription’ ‘at a distance from the state’. This seems to suggest that there is no internal dialectic of power in the riot; to imagine that when power is re-articulated from and around such uprisings (say in Ukraine’s Euromaidan, or Egypt’s Tahrir Square) the subjectivity of the riot has simply been left behind. This perspective seems to approximate a more radical version of Fox Piven’s model of ‘disruptive power’ (see her Challenging Authority).Fox Piven 2006. But, whereas Piven’s horizon is explicitly that of radical reformism in parliamentary capitalist settings, Bertho’s orientation is to a kind of subjective autonomy of (a curiously de-socialised) politics from the officially-constituted political sphere, or, in his words, towards ‘the cultural constitution of shared subjectivities outside the state’. Again, in this notion that the question raised by these uprisings is no longer that of taking power, there are resonances with various trends in contemporary political thought, as emblematised in figures like James C. Scott or John Holloway – though the tone, language, concepts and framework are in other ways radically different.

          What then is the political status of this age of riots? Bertho argues against the characterisation – deriving from Hobsbawm’s work on millenarian movements, and refunctioned in Badiou’s work from the 1980s to the present – of riots as pre- or proto-political, but he also shies away from the notion, dear to some anarchist or gauchiste milieus, that they would immediately express another politics. He also recognises the position, shared in certain cases both by detractors and participants, that they may not be political at all. Temporarily, he seems to settle on the idea that they are post-political, inasmuch as we cannot but treat the political in terms either of the vocabulary of political modernity (liberal, conservative or revolutionary) or simply in relation to constituted power. But, for him, the lesson of the riots is that they bear no transitivity either to a political sphere as it currently exists or to a revolutionary (or indeed communist) movement. The reformist path is also closed: though coming from a radical outside to the state, riots are not simply a call for integration, but a symptom of a real exhaustion of modern notions of the public, the state, collective action, and so on, which have surged in the context of the rise of neoliberalgovernance rather than liberal or social-democraticgovernment. Today’s riots are against global governance, but not for integration.

          What Bertho presents us with then is both a massively global, if variegated, phenomenon, of epochal scale, and a rather pessimistic prognosis – which he thinks is grounded in an anthropology rather than a political theory or sociology of the age of riots – that homologies, patterns, shared imaginaries, and a common antagonism to the governance practices of exclusionary states will not give rise to an actually shared subjectivity, to real practices of solidarity, but at best to a ‘synchronicity of consciousnesses’. As he writes:

Propagation is not possible or rather is not thinkable, very simply because the subjective geography of the world is not spatial and linear but reticular and aleatory. Contagion is not possible because in the absence of a strategic finality, there is no cumulative process or ‘convergence of struggles’ according to the hallowed expression from the syndical and political world. Without doubt there are passages, effects of recognition very simply because the riot is the paroxystic language of a popular and youth world whose existence escapes the established gaze but whose subjective charge is borne by the demand for possibility.

 (This assertion of the ‘paroxystic language’ of the subaltern echoes, albeit with inverted valence, Thompson’s asseverations against the ‘spasmodic view of popular history’.)

          For Bertho, it is incontrovertible that neither classical political theory nor historical materialism can contend with these phenomena of collective action and violence. The traditions of political modernity fail the reality test, and a root-and-branch redefinition of what politics means is necessary. This appears to have to start not just from a distance from the state (à la Badiou), but from an existential, one might even say vitalist, politics of the body, confronting the state in a raw, unmediated fashion. The spectre that haunts the world, suggests Bertho, is the terminally disaffected mass of the young, confronting a hermetic and besieged state, with the pure positivity (or perhaps pure negativity) of their bodies, and their ephemeral antagonistic collectives. The state’s refusal of mediation is matched by that of its adversaries. Revolts are the sign of the absence of politics, of a desperate desire for politics, for common words. Ironically, having underscored the end of demands and the refusal of interlocution, Bertho ends on the possibility of a revival of collective political speech, revitalised by the riots, but also somehow (though he would never use the term) sublating them, in a new politics of peace, at a distance from the state, anchored in principles (all these are terms and themes present in the work of Sylvain Lazarus and first articulated in the context of the Organisation politique he animated with Alain Badiou and Natacha Michel).Michel 2020.

          The idea of a saturation of political modernity, this end of history in a subjective key, also blinds the analysis to a possible attention to cycles and circulation of strategies. In effect, one of the most interesting questions to ask of the book and of Bertho, is how it stands in light of the tenuous, contradictory, but very real link between the phenomena that make up this age of riots and more ‘macro’-political anti-systemic challenges, from Greece to Spain, from Egypt to Ukraine. In order to think this question, I would argue, we need to recover the concept of transition and move beyond the critique of representation that, for all of its uses, also runs the risk of paralysing anti-systemic thinking and practice today.

II.

As the subtitle of the second volume under review intimates, Bertho now wishes to extend the lessons and hypotheses of that earlier work, and of his ongoing online observatory on contemporary riots and related phenomena, Anthropologie du présent, into the analysis and response to the massive attraction that ISIS-type jihadism has for socially excluded and racialised youth. In other words, the proximate aim is to reflect on the connection between the generation of the 2005 French riots and the 2015 Charlie Hebdo and Bataclan atrocities (as Bertho tells us, writing ofThe Age of Violence was already under way when the latter attacks hit). The broader purpose, which prolongs Bertho’s effort to record and map riot-phenomena across the globe, is to define our political time as a time of catastrophic political disorientation, utter disjunction between people and governments, and a welter of morbid symptoms, particularly evident in the experience of marginalised youths, the ‘children of chaos’ of the book’s original French title.

          Bertho’s starting point is not just the subjective disorientation that manifests itself in an increase of antagonistic phenomena that struggle to find organisational or ideological cohesion (save for the fleeting ones of the assembly, the disappointing ones of parliamentarian recuperations, and the apocalyptic ones of jihadism); it is also the disorientation of our intellectual and theoretical discourse, which fails to discover the names and categories truly to think what are, to Bertho’s mind, massive planetary patterns of dissent, disaffiliation and destructiveness – patterns which he quickly, sometimes impressionistically traces, with his own quantitative charts, enumerations of significant or exemplary events, and anecdotal samplings from his field research (in France and Senegal, alongside Sylvain Lazarus). There is a tone of political urgency in this book, a desire to find practical and intellectual antidotes, which sets it somewhat apart from Les temps des émeutes, which was more of a cartographic rather than a prescriptive exercise. What is at stake is the pre-emption of what Lacan, in the epigram from the book taken fromSeminar VII, calls the ‘universal conflagration’ that would result from the victory of martyrs who have ‘neither pity nor fear’.

          The book is written in an engaging, brisk and accessible style, with but a sprinkling of theoretical references. It is an essay-intervention that presents itself as grounded in social-scientific research but uses the latter in a light manner, to sketch a composite portrait of a present adrift. The aim of the book is to draw the kaleidoscopic portrait of the global social and political suffering of vast populations treated as insignificant surplus, battered by financial crisis, manipulated by cynical media and bereft of representation, and to present this condition of exclusion and degradation as the background for the morbid politicisation represented by ISIS and its ilk. In this respect, in terms of recent debates, Bertho is firmly in the camp of those who present jihadism as an ‘Islamisation of radicalism’ (Olivier Roy’s formula) rather than a ‘radicalisation of Islam’, though he rightly questions this terminology in the plea for a different radicalism with which he concludes the book. As he writes: ‘We are dealing not with a radicalisation of Islam but with an Islamisation of the anger, disarray and despair of the lost children of a terrible era – children who find meaning and weapons for their anger in jihad’.Bertho 2018, p. 4.

          The image of the present that Bertho paints, though short on detail or texture, is impressive in its range and provocative in its insights. Though he does not skirt specificity – for instance that of the reactive nostalgia for the language of Republicanism or the confessionalisation of politics in France, or the specific motivations of riots across the world – his concern is to bring home the planetary commonalities. These are both aetiological – as in the remarkably consistent pattern across the world of riots originating in the police killing of a young man – and ideological – witness the contempt for ‘politics’ and distance from power and the state that manifest themselves across the most distinct of mobilisations, or the common lack of organisational cohesion that also marks them. Behind these commonalities is also a common loss, the loss of a political horizon of emancipation in which people and state could be organised in a futural nexus, and not be fated to collapse into atomisation or communalism. Far from being an anchor for politics, the ‘people’, when it is not a reactionary ethnic simulacrum, has become, in Foucault’s words, a ‘mute remainder of politics’. Rather than popular cohesion, collective phenomena are united more by a common repudiation of political power, by an ‘an unquenched anger, faced with the authorities’ autistic response to people’s real situations’.Bertho 2018, p. 26. It is this disconnection or disaffiliation, this absence of an affective or ideological cement, as well as of a strategic horizon, which dictates the conclusion that the mass mobilisations across the world in 2011 were in many ways on a par with those of 1848, 1917–19, 1968; they do not belong to the same ‘sequence’, they are ultimately discontinuous with those events. As Bertho observes:

across the world we are seeing the official establishment of a divorce between peoples and the powers that rule over them, whatever the nature of the states concerned. Given the lack of a common language, what we once called politics is no longer very useful for organising and giving sense to the relations between peoples and governments. This disappearance of politics is one of the characteristic traits of the transformation of the state’s role and the form it assumes in the context of globalisation.Bertho 2018, p. 31.

A Review of Hegemonía y lucha de clases. Tres ensayos sobre Trotsky, Gramsci y el marxismo by Juan Dal Maso

Panagiotis Sotiris

Hellenic Open University, Greece

panagiotis.sotiris@gmail.com

Abstract

Juan Dal Maso’s Hegemonía y lucha de clases. Tres ensayos sobre Trotsky, Gramsci y el marxismo represents an ambitious attempt to rethink the relation of Gramsci to the traditions of revolutionary Marxism, by means of a critique of those positions that emphasised the possibility of a reformist reading of Gramsci and of an attempt to suggest that Gramsci and Trotsky faced the same open challenges of redefining revolutionary strategy.

Keywords

Gramsci – Marxism – Communism – Trotsky – hegemony – strategy

Juan Dal Maso, (2018) Hegemonía y lucha de clases. Tres ensayos sobre Trotsky, Gramsci y el marxismo, Buenos Aires: Instituto del Pensamiento Socialista ‘Karl Marx’.

Opposing Gramsci to the traditions of revolutionary Marxism, and attempting to present his work as a kind of anti-Leninism, has been a commonplace in Marxist discussions ever since the late 1960s and Norberto Bobbio’s attempt to oppose Gramsci to some of the tenets of a classical Marxist theory of the state.Bobbio 1979. This was also a very strong element of the way Gramsci was perceived as offering a justification for reformist politics in the 1970s, exemplified in the use of Gramsci as a reference point within the debates on Eurocommunism and in particular in the debates within the Italian Communist Party.The exception was Nicos Poulantzas, who in State, Power, Socialism accused Gramsci of remaining basically within the contours of a very classical Leninist conception of dual power (Poulantzas 2000). The possibility of finding some connection between some of the tensions of Gramsci’s thinking and later variations of communist reformism was the central point of Perry Anderson’s well-known New Left Review article on the antinomies of Antonio Gramsci, recently re-issued.Anderson 2017. Louis Althusser was also in the late 1970s rather critical of the notion of hegemony, insisting that it could lead to a reformist conception of the state.See in particular his manuscript ‘Marx in his Limits’, published after his death (in Althusser 2006) and his manuscript Que faire? (Althusser 2018). In writers more sympathetic to the neo-anarchist currents emerging in contemporary social movements, such as Richard Day, we can find a criticism of the Gramscian conceptualisation of hegemony as representative of the broader problems of any potential Marxist conception of politics.Day 2005. On the other hand, we have had a series of readings of Gramsci, which, despite their different scope or political references, have all attempted to stress both Gramsci’s originality and even uniqueness but also his constant dialogue with the various traditions of revolutionary Marxism.These include the very rich Latin American Gramscian tradition, from José Arico, Juan Carlos Portantiero (see Portantiero 1981) and Carlos Nelson Coutinho to a younger generation, part of which is Dal Maso, to seminal books like Christine Buci-Glucksmann’s Gramsci and the State (Buci-Glucksmann 1980) or Peter D. Thomas’s The Gramscian Moment (Thomas 2009). See also Rosengarten 2014. All this attests to the extent to which Gramsci’s work remains a contested terrain of opposing readings.For the many readings of Gramsci in Italy, see Liguori 2012.

In this sense, Juan Dal Maso’s Hegemonía y lucha de clases is a more than welcome return to examining the relation between Gramsci and the traditions of revolutionary Marxism, and an important reminder of the pertinence of Gramsci to contemporary strategic debates of the Left. The book is comprised of three articles by Dal Maso, one on the uses of the notion of hegemony in the writings of Trotsky, the second on the references to Trotsky in Gramsci’sPrison Notebooks, and the third is a critical revisiting of Perry Anderson’s text on the antinomies of Antonio Gramsci.

1.      Trotsky on Hegemony

The first essay is an important addition to the literature on Trotsky and the notion of hegemony. As is well-known, the very notion of hegemony emerged in the debates of the Russian Social-democracy and represented an attempt to think the leadership of the proletariat over the peasantry and other strata in the struggle against tsarist oppression. Later this notion reappeared in the debates within the Bolshevik Party in the NEP period.For this particular debate, see Corney (ed.) 2015. It is from this period (and the critical references that Gramsci makes in regard to Trotsky in the Prison Notebooks) that the accusation that Trotsky did not have a strategy for hegemony comes. Here is how Bukharin formulated this accusation in that debate:

Thus, in spite of comrade Trotsky, Comrade Lenin considered that Trotsky’s theory did underestimate the role of the peasantry. And however much comrade Trotsky would like to avoid acknowledging this fundamental and cardinal error, he cannot. One cannot play at hide and seek. One must clearly, precisely and definitely say who is right. For it is perfectly clear that before us are two different theories: according to one theory, the peasantry is an ally, according to the other, it is an inevitable foe; according to one theory, we can conduct a successful fight for hegemony over the peasantry, according to the other theory, this must fail; according to one theory, a sharp conflict with the peasantry is inevitable, according to the other, this conflict may be avoided if our policy is cleverly conducted, etc.

Is it not clear that this ‘permanent’ question of a ‘permanent’ theory is the ‘permanent’ contradiction between Trotskyism and Leninism?Bukharin in Corney (ed.) 2015, p. 536.

Dal Maso takes up the task of answering this criticism. He stresses how hegemony has a long history in the debates of the Russian Social-democracy and how Trotsky was an important contributor to those debates, making complex use of the notion of hegemony to refer to international relations and interstate hierarchies but also to the questions of the peasant–worker alliance and the challenge of the leadership of the proletariat in this alliance. Dal Maso highlights the fact that Trotsky had a very interesting approach to the question of hegemony in regard to the relations between states on the terrain of modern imperialism. Referring to Trotsky’s description of American hegemony in terms not just of politico-military force but also technical and financial superiority, he highlights the dialectical relation of economics and politics on the international plane.

Dal Maso offers a very detailed and informed reading of the debates surrounding the 1905 Revolution and the question of proletarian hegemony. He stresses the importance of Trotsky’s observations apropos of the soviets, as institutions of struggle:

In Trotsky’s perspective, the soviet was constituted as an organ of revolutionary power which exercised hegemony in the city and guaranteed, in its turn, the hegemony of the proletariat in the revolution. (p. 48.)

Dal Maso returns to the notion of permanent revolution as it evolved in Trotsky’s thinking in the wake of the experience of the Russian Revolution but also in light of later developments, the debates inside the Bolshevik party and events such as the Chinese Revolution of 1925–7. He insists that the logic of permanent revolution is indeed a logic of hegemony.

In synthesis, maintaining the close connection between hegemony, class struggle, tasks of the democratic-bourgeois revolution and of the proletarian revolution, hegemony was an instance in the dynamics of permanent revolution, which, in its turn, was the only one that allowed hegemony not to stop, advancing towards the dictatorship of the proletariat supported in the peasant movement. (p. 59.)

Dal Maso stresses the importance of Trotsky’s writings on the united front, insisting at the same time that the question of socialist revolution poses the question of hegemony and is therefore not a refusal of hegemony, and stressing the significance of the opposition between united front and popular front upon which Trotsky insisted. Of particular importance is Dal Maso’s return to Trotsky’s conceptualisation of the notion of the duality of power and its relation to the question of hegemony. In regard to this point, Dal Maso also returns to the conceptualisations of dual power and the duality of power as part of any transition process, in the works of Carlos Nelson Coutinho, René Zavaleta Mercado, and in Daniel Bensaïd’s highly original contributions on this subject of the late 1970s, with Dal Maso critical of Zavaleta Mercado’s position concerning Trotsky’s tendency to generalise the notion of the duality of power.

Dal Maso connects Lenin’s ‘last battle’ to Trotsky’s analysis of the emergence of bureaucracy as attempts to think revolutionary strategy. His conclusion is that the notion of hegemony can be an integral part of a permanent-revolution strategy, and he makes the important point that the struggle for hegemony remains crucial in the process of transition, as opposed to any conception of hegemony as mere leadership before the revolution.

2.      Gramsci’s Critique of Trotsky Revisited

The second essay of the book deals with the question of how to read the references to Trotsky in the Prison Notebooks. This is an important essay with a solid ‘philological’ approach, which includes revisiting the open question of the extent of Gramsci’s actual knowledge of Trotsky’s writings after his imprisonment.The early contacts of Gramsci with Trotsky in the context of the functions of the Third International have been documented by Frank Rosengarten (Rosengarten 2014).

Dal Maso reads carefully the paragraphs of the Prison Notebooks in which Gramsci discusses some of Trotsky’s positions. He begins with Gramsci’s well-known critical references to the notion of permanent revolution and how it was ‘systematised, developed, intellectualised by the Parvus-Bronstein group’.Gramsci 1971, p. 85. Dal Maso stresses how this opposition between abstract theory and political realism in relation to the notion of permanent revolution will prove to be a recurring theme in Gramsci. He then moves on to Gramsci’s rejection of Trotsky’s criticism of Labriola, which he attributes to Gramsci’s opposition to any vulgar materialism such as Plekhanov’s. Taking as his starting point Gramsci’s critical references to Trotsky’s positions on the militarisation of work, Dal Maso insists that these were conjunctural interventions, and that in fact there are many more points of actual convergence between Gramsci and Trotsky on the relation between culture, industry, politics and hegemony in the transition period. Dal Maso attempts to answer Gramsci’s presentation of Trotsky as the theorist par excellence of ‘war of movement’ as opposed to ‘war of position’, by pointing to the fact that Gramsci probably did not have access to Trotsky’s later writings that offer a much more balanced approach to such questions. At the same time, Dal Maso stresses that Gramsci’s references to the first Five Year Plan and the way he insists upon a plan that ‘is executed democratically and with workers’ participation’ are also close to Trotsky’s critiques of Stalinism. Moreover, Dal Maso turns our attention to the importance of Q13, §14 where one can find a more positive appreciation of Trotsky, closer to Gramsci’s distinction between ‘East’ and ‘West’, ‘war of movement’ and ‘war of position’.

One attempt to begin a revision of the current tactical methods was perhaps that outlined by L. Dav. Br. [Trotsky] at the fourth meeting, when he made a comparison between the Eastern and Western fronts. The former had fallen at once, but unprecedented struggles had then ensued; in the case of the latter, the struggles would take place ‘beforehand’. The question, therefore, was whether civil society resists before or after the attempt to seize power; where the latter takes place, etc. However, the question was outlined only in a brilliant, literary form, without directives of a practical character.Gramsci 1971, p. 236.

This is a less negative vision of Trotsky and an acknowledgement by Gramsci that Trotsky was indeed considering the strategy and tactics of the United Front, namely the political strategy that is the reference point for Gramsci’s thinking of a ‘war of position’ aiming at proletarian hegemony. On the other hand, in Q14, §68 Gramsci is again more critical of Trotsky, insisting that, with the theory of permanent revolution, he could not hope to understand the importance of hegemony and the need for the working class to ‘nationalise’ itself (in the sense of the ‘national-popular’) as part of the struggle for hegemony. Dal Maso insists that such passages represent the weaker side of Gramsci’s critique of Trotsky, in the form of an association of permanent revolution with frontal attack and with the absence of a hegemonic practice of politics. Finally, Dal Maso deals with the famous paragraphs on ‘black parliamentarism’. These are some of the densest passages of Gramsci’s writings: a parallel theorisation of both the evolution of fascism but also Stalinism, with the expulsion of Trotsky presented as evidence of the Soviet Union’s moving beyond even the Soviet version of ‘black parliamentarism’.

Dal Maso insists that some of Gramsci’s criticisms of Trotsky were directed more at a certain caricature of Trotsky, whereas in fact both interventions emerged in the same historical context and dealt with similar problems. In particular, he stresses the fact that the theory and practice of permanent revolution require the problematic of hegemony, in the sense that a strategy for hegemony can not only strengthen the unity of the subaltern classes but also the potential to move towards revolutionary positions.

3.      The ‘Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci’ Revisited

Finally, Dal Maso turns to Perry Anderson’s text on the antinomies of Antonio Gramsci.Anderson 2017. Dal Maso stresses the importance that this text had, with its support for Trotsky over the supposed limitations of Gramsci and the ways that it enhanced the erroneous position that there is a strategic continuity between Gramsci, Togliatti and Eurocommunism. Dal Maso’s critique begins with a rejection of Anderson’s methodological choice to describe the antinomies in terms of slippages that bring Gramsci closer to reformist positions. Dal Maso does not limit his critique to the reproduction of Gianni Francioni’s demonstration[In Francioni 1984. See also the extended critique of Anderson’s positions in Thomas 2009. of the mistakes Anderson makes in his chronology of the passages from the Prison Notebooks upon which he bases his analysis of the three different approaches by Gramsci to the question of the relation between state and civil society. Instead, he wants to examine all aspects of Anderson’s argument. Dal Maso criticises Anderson for misrepresenting the depth and richness of Gramsci’s reading of the role of the state and the role of parliamentarism in enhancing the hegemony of the bourgeoisie. Similarly, and against Anderson’s critique, Dal Maso foregrounds the complexity of Gramsci’s theorisation of hegemony and the fact that, for Gramsci, hegemony is not only ‘ethical-political’ but also related to the economic structure, in the same sense that it is not only about the state but also the autonomous forms of organisation of the subaltern classes. In this sense, hegemony is directly linked to the question of political independence and the revolutionary party or the ‘Modern Prince’. Moreover, Dal Maso reminds us of the importance of Gramsci’s references to the ‘relation of military forces’,Gramsci 1971, p. 182. which also offers a way to appreciate that Gramsci had a rather dialectical approach to both hegemony and power. That is why Gramsci does not have a conception of ‘cultural hegemony’ but rather a complex conception of the state and hegemony that includes culture as a terrain of struggle.

Dal Maso insists that, in contrast to Anderson’s position, there is a distance separating Gramsci’s war of position and Kautsky’s reformist strategy. For Dal Maso ‘war of position’ does not refer to a parliamentary strategy, it is not about gaining the electoral support of the majority, but rather it is an all-encompassing process of mobilisation, both social, political and military, with the central role being played by the relation of political forces as they are defined by the relation of military forces. Moreover, for Dal Maso a close and attentive reading of the Prison Notebooks can highlight the complexity of the relation between war of movement and war of position, but also the importance of the linkage between the notion of the passive revolution and the strategy of war of position. It is precisely the notion of passive revolution that enables a rethinking of the emergence of fascism and its limits, the new forms of black parliamentarism and the new conditions of political struggle. All this, according to Dal Maso, suggests that, in contrast to Anderson’s position that Gramsci had somehow lost his way, in actual fact he opened up new ways

Conclusion: Rethinking Revolutionary Strategy through with Gramsci

In sum, we are dealing here with an important contribution. This book does not deal simply with philological questions or questions of interpretation. There are important strategic questions too, pertinent to contemporary debates. In this sense, it is a book with a scope broader than the question of the relation between Gramsci and Trotsky. In the same way that Dal Maso insists that some of the criticisms Gramsci raises have more to do with specific positions (or ‘caricatures’ of positions), rather than Trotsky’s actual intervention, we can say that Dal Maso’s book is not simply about re-establishing a dialogue between Gramsci and Trotsky or finding real affinities between their theoretical and political projects. It is also a book about insisting that Gramsci’s work should be an integral aspect of any attempt to rethink questions of revolutionary strategy today.

And I would suggest that there are aspects of Gramsci’s thinking that are crucial for any attempt to rethink the possibility of a revolutionary strategy today. Contemporary social and political dynamics, which include the crisis of neoliberalism, the return of mass politics in certain social formations, the fact that in some cases political crisis has turned into a crisis of hegemony of an organic character, the sharp changes in political representation, all these have made the question of a radical break and transition again pertinent. There have been attempts to suggest that this can take the form of a parliamentary translation of social and political dynamics and the emergence of forms of left governance, but at the same time the limits of left governance have been evident in many instances, Greece being one those examples with the debacle of the SYRIZA government.

What were these limits? On the one we hand, we had the absence of a strategy of ruptures, of deeper social and institutional transformation that would have affected aspects of the social relations of production and reproduction and the many linkages to imperialism. On the other hand, there was the relative absence of forms of popular power from below with a potential of mass mobilisation against both the blackmail of international capital and international organisations such the EU and the IMF and the constant counter-attacks from the forces of capital. All these contradictions and relations of forces were materially condensed in the state but also expressed in the actual political condition of the subaltern classes and the fact that they remained to a certain extent disaggregated. These called for a strategy of hegemony and of building a new historical bloc, in the sense of a deeper transformation of the relation of forces and the emergence of new forms of expansive politicisation, radicalisation and cultural transformation of the subaltern class, and a strategy for power which would not be limited to electoral dynamics but extending also to the emergence of new and original forms of dual power, in the sense of new forms of popular power from below, forms of self-organisation, self-management, solidarity, and in certain instances self-defence. This points towards the need for a ‘war of position’ that would not be a ‘long march through the institutions’ but rather the creation of conditions that would again enable highly original forms of ‘war of movement’, a war of position that would also continue after any political break as a lasting process of transformation and experimentation. This is precisely what renders urgent a return to Gramsci as part of a return to the question of revolutionary strategy. Not as a return to the fantasy of an idealised version of the ‘revolution’ but as a reconnecting with the traditions of revolutionary Marxism as a means to rethink the radical originality and the experimental character of any potential revolutionary process today.

References

Althusser, Louis 2006, Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978–1987, translated by G.M. Goshgarian, London: Verso.

Althusser, Louis 2018, Que faire?, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

Anderson, Perry 2017,The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci, London: Verso.

Bobbio, Norberto 1979, ‘Gramsci and the Conception of Civil Society’, in Gramsci and Marxist Theory, edited by Chantal Mouffe, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Buci-Glucksmann, Christine 1980, Gramsci and the State, translated by David Fernbach, London: Lawrence and Wishart.

Corney, Frederick C. (ed.) 2015, Trotsky’s Challenge: The ‘Literary Discussion’ of 1924 and the Fight for the Bolshevik Revolution, Historical Materialism Book Series, Leiden: Brill.

Coutinho, Carlos Nelson 2012, Gramsci’s Political Thought,Historical Materialism Book Series, Leiden: Brill

Day, Richard J.F. 2005, Gramsci Is Dead: Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements, London: Pluto Press.

Francioni, Gianni 1984, L’officina gramsciana. Ipotesi sulla struttura dei ‘Quaderni del carcere’, Naples: Bibliopolis.

Gramsci, Antonio 1971, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, London: Lawrence and Wishart.

Liguori, Guido 2012, Gramsci conteso. Interpretazioni, dibattiti e polemiche 1922–2012, Rome: Editori Riuniti.

Portantiero, Juan Carlos 1981, Los Usos de Gramsci, México, D.F.: Folios Ediciones.

Poulantzas, Nicos 2000, State, Power, Socialism, London: Verso.

Rosengarten, Frank 2014, The Revolutionary Marxism of Antonio Gramsci,Historical Materialism Book Series, Leiden: Brill.

Thomas, Peter D. 2009, The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism,Historical Materialism Book Series, Leiden: Brill.

A Review of One Man’s Terrorist: A Political History of the IRA by Daniel Finn

Oliver Eagleton

Assistant Editor, New Left Review

oeagleton@gmail.com

Abstract

This review of Daniel Finn’s One Man’s Terrorist identifies the unique features in its narrative of the Northern Irish Troubles: its emphasis on the distinct political factions within the nationalist movement, their relationships with smaller Trotskyist organisations, and the socio-economic factors that conditioned the permutable radicalism of the IRA. It evaluates the merits of this approach for understanding the twenty-first century resurgence of Sinn Féin as an electoral force in the Republic of Ireland.

Keywords

Ireland – Troubles – nationalism – anticolonialism – Trotskyism – IRA

Daniel Finn, (2020) One Man’s Terrorist: A Political History of the IRA, London: Verso.

Histories of the IRA are typically fixated on the violence of the Troubles: its 3,500 cadavers, 10,000 bombings and millions of pounds’ worth of property damage. There are lurid insider-accounts like Eamon Collins’s Killing Rage (1998), which charts the metamorphosis of Belfast teenagers into trained assassins, and journalistic studies like Brendan O’Brien’sThe Long War (1995), which reconstructs the Provos’ military campaign. Yet this focus on the IRA’s combat tactics tends to occlude its political context: the ideological landscape in which it operated, and the clashing forces – from cultural nationalists to labour activists – that sought to influence its programme. Notwithstanding the necessarily elliptical memoirs of its central figures, it has been hard to find a comprehensive survey of the group’s political mutations, from the civil-rights struggle of the 1960s to the Power Sharing Executive of 2007. What were the calculations involved in its decision to abandon armed conflict? How did it respond to Britain’s neoliberal turn? To what extent were its anti-imperialist aims able to redress domestic power imbalances? For many who lived through the conflict, the IRA’s circuitous political trajectory – and convoluted relationship with the insurgent republican socialist movement – remains opaque: an oversight that bolsters revisionist attempts to drain Ireland’s anticolonial struggle of ideological content, presenting its partisans as terrorists or psychopaths.

          In One Man’s Terrorist, the adapted doctoral thesis ofJacobin editor Daniel Finn, fine-grained archival research and first-hand testimonies of prominent republicans are used to fill in this historiographical lacuna. On one level, the book can be read as a straightforward primer on the Troubles: its opening pages offer an accessible summary of the Irish independence struggle before 1960, spotlighting the tension between its conservative and militant wings, while later chapters use that internal rift to assess the significant events of the IRA’s thirty-years’ war – civil-rights marches, internment, Bloody Sunday, prison protests and the peace process. Yet, to those familiar with the corpus of IRA literature, Finn’s text is also an original contribution which elevates neglected groups like People’s Democracy – the Northern Irish Trotskyist outfit led by Bernadette Devlin, Eamonn McCann and Michael Farrell, among others – to the status of protagonists, arguing for their central role in shaping the IRA’s political backdrop. For Finn, these small, radical organisations demonstrated the potential for ‘republican agitation to disrupt the status quo’ (p. 35), and exerted significant pressure on the Provos, even though the latter often exhibited a fierce hostility to socialism.

          The take-off point for Finn’s study is the IRA’s failed Border Campaign of the late 1950s: a landmark event that left its dwindling number of Volunteers dejected and adrift. This abortive attempt to galvanise armed resistance to the British occupation – met with little other than apathy on both sides of the border – convinced the new IRA leadership to change tack. Rather than recapitulating the covert guerrilla methods of its forerunner during the War of Independence, the group acknowledged the importance of winning grassroots support for a united Ireland. Its military operations would only be effective if complemented by a mass proletarian movement; and, by extension, a radical social programme was needed to supplant its narrow emphasis on British withdrawal. Such a movement already happened to be underway – kickstarted by Northern Irish leftists who, reading from the playbook of the American civil-rights struggle, used nonviolent resistance to challenge the anti-Catholic discrimination of the Orange State. The vehicle for this campaign was the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA), which was dominated by Republican militants from its inception. Finn quotes a young Gerry Adams, who, at the first NICRA meeting in January 1967, described a room ‘packed by republicans, who wielded the biggest bloc vote’ (p. 39).

          By embedding itself in the NICRA, the IRA intended to democratise Stormont and thus ‘prepare the ground for its destruction’. Finn terms this a ‘reformist strategy’ – although ‘stageist’ might be a more accurate characterisation. ‘First’, he writes,  

the civil rights demands were to be won through a peaceful but militant campaign of protest. Northern Ireland’s political system would be democratized, its unorthodox features swept away. That would open the way for the second stage, during which the republican movement and others would struggle to bring class politics to the fore. Only when this had been achieved and left-wing forces had come to power on both sides of the Irish border would it be possible to dissolve the border between the two states and establish an all-Ireland workers’ republic. (p. 47.)

Ending partition was no longer the IRA’s immediate demand, but the eventual outcome of their proposals: a side-effect of socialist transformation, rather than a singular goal. This relegation of the national question predictably alienated republican old-timers. Although the IRA leadership insisted it was not about to lay down its arms, many rank-and-file members saw its political activity as a distraction from the task at hand: expelling the colonial power, whose presence was an ineluctable barrier to meaningful reform. By the end of the ’60s, a split was unavoidable. The breakaway Provisional IRA cleaved to an ‘austere republican orthodoxy’, while the socialist Officials combined ‘armed struggle and political agitation’ (p. 95). The former was led by ‘militarists’ like Seán Mac Stíofáin and Jimmy Steele, who claimed that a successful ground war must precede political consciousness raising, while the latter used its weapons in a purely defensive capacity: protecting nationalist communities from sectarian attack while advancing its positive agenda through nonviolent ‘civil resistance’ (p. 104). Whereas the Officials believed that their leftist programme would remedy Ulster’s religious polarisation, undermining the investment of Protestants in the apartheid state and forging a cross-sectarian workers’ front, the Provos viewed the unionist population as a ‘fifth column’ with whom no accommodation was possible or desirable. These ‘planters’ would either accept a 32-county settlement, or they would emigrate; they would not be won over to the nationalist cause by a few Marxian pamphlets (p. 140). Whether there was any viable position beyond these poles of Official accommodationism and Provisional rejectionism is unclear from Finn’s analysis. The Irish Republican Socialist Party, founded by Seamus Costello in 1974, proposed a synthesis of the Official and Provo policies: an aggressive military strategy to extirpate the British alongside an inclusive and non-sectarian socialist platform; but the group was constantly beset by factional infighting and external attacks, which destroyed its chance to gain a foothold in the six counties.

          Although Finn is sympathetic to the Officials’ aims, he readily acknowledges the blind-spots in their strategy, whose greatest flaw was ‘the tacit assumption that the unionist population would remain largely passive’ in the face of a Catholic-emancipation struggle (p. 47). On the contrary, attempts to build a Gandhian resistance movement met with the full force of loyalist reaction, as Ian Paisley’s hardline unionists attacked NICRA protests with the support of the Royal Ulster Constabulary. For Finn, these clashes undercut the Officials’ reformist approach, since attempts to ‘democratise’ Stormont looked increasingly improbable amid raging communal violence, and a powerful armed force seemed essential for the beleaguered nationalist population. Ironically, the more the Officials pushed their peaceful mobilisations, the more they elicited a Paisleyite backlash that drove increasing numbers toward the Provos: a cycle that cemented the latter’s hegemonic position in the early ’70s. Though the Officials attempted to reach out across the sectarian divide, they could not make inroads into Communist Party-aligned trade unions, which were reluctant to endorse the civil-rights struggle for fear that it would incense their Protestant members. This led to an unlikely situation – impenetrable to unionist politicians at the time – where the Official IRA ‘demand[ed] equal rights under British rule’, parting ways with traditionalist republicans, ‘while their communist allies pleaded for caution and restraint’ (p. 43).

          Provisional recruitment soared with the introduction of internment without trial in 1971 and the shooting of 26 unarmed civilians by British soldiers the following year: events that seemed to legitimise Mac Stíofáin’s militarism. Yet just as the IRA of the early ’60s learnt that gunfights were useless without a broad support base, the Provos began to outgrow their ‘apolitical’, soldierly posture in the late ’70s, replacing their abstentionism with limited electoral engagement. In Finn’s account, the catalyst for this political turn was the prison protests of 1976–81, in which IRA inmates’ fight for special status provided the impetus for a pan-nationalist uprising. Prior to this, the left-wing activists clustered around People’s Democracy had accepted the Provos’ argument that the presence of foreign occupiers was a stumbling block to social change – and that British withdrawal should therefore be an urgent priority, rather than a distant goal. But, instead of falling wholly in line with the republican leadership, Devlin and McCann sought to ‘politicise’ the armed campaign: offsetting its ‘elitist’ tendencies by consolidating its connection with the grassroots, and combatting its military chauvinism with a popular anticolonialism. The prison protests were a perfect opportunity to advance this cause. The denial of special status was an injustice perpetrated against republican militants that chimed with the wider nationalist community – a symbol of British repression that captured the attention of hitherto lumpen working-class Catholics. It was the element that could turn the guerrilla war into a mass mobilisation: paramilitarism into people-power.

          There was only one problem: the Provos were, in Gerry Adams’s words, ‘temperamentally and organizationally disinclined’ to cooperate with other groups. So when PD ‘called for a broad campaign in support of the prisoners that would not be restricted to supporters of the IRA … Sinn Féin members greeted the proposal with suspicion’ (pp. 143–4). Many in their ranks were determined to keep the civil-rights veterans at arm’s length, with Martin McGuinness going so far as to heckle Bernadette Devlin with the aid of a megaphone as she canvassed in Derry during the 1979 European elections. It took ‘three years of foot-dragging’, and substantial pressure from their own men inside the H-block prison units, before the Provos realised the potential of the prisoner-solidarity movement and threw their weight behind it (p. 203). The results were astonishing: 17,000 turned out for the first pan-nationalist march, ‘the kind of mobilization that had not been seen since the heyday of civil resistance’, while Bobby Sands – an IRA member serving time for weapons charges – was elected to Westminster in the Fermanagh–South Tyrone byelection (p. 143). This gave the Provos a ‘tremendous political boost’ (p. 148), their popularity growing further still when Thatcher let Sands starve to death in his prison cell at the age of 27. At their next conference, Sinn Féin’s leadership gave ‘approval to contest every subsequent election, north and south’ (p. 155).

          With Adams installed as leader, the IRA of the early 1980s developed two strategic priorities: to reorganise the army along cellular lines in response to London’s security offensive (gearing up for a ‘long war’ of attrition rather than a return to intensive conflict), and to maintain Sinn Féin’s political momentum by formulating left-wing economic policies that would capitalise on nationalist antipathy to Thatcher (p. 157). This brought Adams into conflict with compatriots such as Ivor Bell, who became ‘concerned that he was diverting resources from the movement’s coffers to fund election campaigns’, and accused him of sabotaging a planned ‘Tet Offensive’ (p. 171) against the British (using weapons gifted by Libya’s Gaddafi). It also meant that, after years of rejecting the socialism of the Officials and People’s Democracy – sometimes using unabashed ‘Red-baiting’ (p. 244) against these Republican adversaries – the Provos hijacked their programme once it had become electorally expedient. The Officials, meanwhile, redoubled their irrelevance by adopting a quixotic brand of ‘Orange Marxism’ that repudiated anticolonialism wholesale in a spectacularly unsuccessful attempt to win the support of working-class unionists – a move that Finn rightly excoriates (p. 128).

          Yet, despite their belated adoption of progressive politics, the Provos’ electoral gains remained limited throughout the ’80s. Their attempts to win seats in the Southern parliament, and challenge the electoral supremacy of John Hume’s Social Democratic and Labour Party in the north, were non-starters. Unable to dislodge the stubborn 60:40 split in support for the SDLP and Sinn Féin, the Provos’ appeal seemed to have reached a permanent ceiling, which – as Finn writes – brought its leaders face to face with an uncomfortable reality: public opposition to IRA violence would block the party’s political ascent (pp. 163–4). The ‘Armalite and ballot box’ – the two pillars of the Provos’ post-abstentionist strategy – were no longer complementary: the first was constraining the second.

          This realisation opened the door to a ceasefire, which the Provo leadership believed to be the only means of surmounting its political stasis. As Hume and Adams embarked on behind-the-scenes peace negotiations, the IRA signalled its willingness to end the war – ‘as a matter of last resort’ – were there a ‘consistent constitutional strategy to pursue a national democracy in Ireland’ (p. 186). At the same time, Adams and McGuinness warned IRA Volunteers to avoid civilian casualties (disbanding a unit in west Fermanagh for ‘unethical behaviour’) and drummed up internal support for an ‘all-Ireland anti-imperialist mass movement’, bringing together ‘the broadest range of social and political forces’ in pursuit of a 32-county Republic (p. 181). Although the Provos had just recently absorbed the socialist rhetoric of PD, they now began to fear that it would impede an alliance with the SDLP, and alienate a Washington political establishment that was willing to support Irish nationalism so long as it bore no resemblance to its Third World counterpart. Adams thus started to advise against ‘the dangers of ultra-leftism’, urging IRA members to ‘beware of any tendencies which would narrow our demands and our base’, and reneging on electorally divisive policies such as Sinn Féin’s pro-choice stance (pp. 178–9). Having squeezed out its opponents on the left, the party was able to perform this volte face without fear of losing its social base. For the latter had no alternative political home, and felt an immovable attachment to the group that had banished loyalist paramilitaries and sectarian policemen from their neighbourhoods.

          In Finn’s assessment, one of the final steps in this process of unravelling IRA militancy came with the Adams–Hume peace plan, which overturned the Provos’ long-held attitude to unionists (pp. 194–5). Though Adams had previously rejected the right of Ulster Protestants to obstruct reunification, he was now willing to accept a unionist veto on ending partition with only two qualifications: first, the British government must sue for a united Ireland in the long-term; and second, the legislative basis for this ‘principle of consent’ must be provided by the Irish parliament, rather than the British. A watered-down version of these demands made its way into the 1993 Downing Street Declaration, which Adams accepted as the basis of a ceasefire, laying the foundations for a new Northern Irish state. This was a decisive break with the Provos’ foundational principle – that Stormont was inherently unreformable – and a reversion to the policy of the early Officials: winning democratic rights for the nationalist community and establishing cross-border institutions in the hope that this would eventually lead to Irish unity (p. 196). In a historic irony, the organisation set up to bury the ‘reformist strategy’ finally embraced it three decades later.

          Finn dismisses the Provo’s newfound reformism as ‘wishful thinking’: for him, the belief that 32-county institutions ‘would somehow unleash a “transitional dynamic” leading inexorably to Irish unity’ had ‘little objective basis’, as did the idea that Sinn Féin’s steady accumulation of political power, north and south, could eventually end partition (p. 217). With no route to unity in sight, the Provo leadership finally accepted a peace deal – the 1998 Good Friday Agreement – that jettisoned the Hume–Adams principles entirely, settling for a reformed Stormont in lieu of a ‘national democracy’. If this was the final repudiation of the IRA’s republican ideals, its sporadic commitment to socialism didn’t fare much better: Adams’s Sinn Féin tried repeatedly to form a coalition with Ireland’s centre-right parties, equivocated in its support for the anti-austerity movement of the 2010s, and failed to find a clear position on the Repeal the 8^th campaign – all for minimal electoral gain. ‘Having sacrificed principle for power’, Finn concludes, ‘Sinn Féin found itself with neither’ (p. 219).  

          Finn’s book was written shortly after Mary Lou McDonald replaced Adams as Sinn Féin leader, and its epilogue predicts that she will ‘likely continue a long journey toward the centre ground’ (p. 222). Yet the publication of One Man’s Terrorist virtually coincided with the 2020 general election campaign, in which Sinn Féin pledged to freeze rents, build social housing, reverse spending cuts and pour money into social services – making only glancing and self-apologetic references to its republican agenda. The party’s membership surged after it won the highest national vote share, recruiting activists who had participated in the water-charges and abortion-rights movements. While Adams’s personal history rendered him reluctant to endorse the civil-disobedience tactics of the anti-austerity movement (lest it validate the hysterical narrative that a Sinn Féin victory would spark a return to IRA lawlessness), McDonald, a post-Troubles politician elected to the Dáil in 2011, has no such baggage, and was therefore willing to embrace a confrontational left-populism that has shattered the country’s centre-right consensus.

          Granted, her party remains committed to keeping Ireland’s low corporation-tax rate, maintaining annual budget surpluses and forming a government with Fianna Fáil’s moribund clientelists, all of which is sure to frustrate its social-democratic ambitions. But if, as Finn argues, Sinn Féin’s stance on partition has reverted to something like that of the Officials (it now promises little more than a ‘white paper on Irish unity’ and a ‘Joint Oireachtas Committee’ to review the issue), then perhaps its ideological character could similarly evoke the IRA of the civil-rights era: a new leadership, unencumbered by the orthodoxies of its predecessor, putting social demands before questions of sovereignty in a pragmatic attempt to harness popular frustration at an ailing political order. If this is the case, then Ireland’s current far-left grouplets – Solidarity, People Before Profit, RISE – could prove instrumental in ‘politicising’ Sinn Féin’s adaptable nationalism and anchoring it in community-led activism, just as People’s Democracy did in the 1960s. Rather than perpetuating the erosion of republican radicalism, then, the 2020s might return us to one of its more hopeful iterations, albeit with significant distinctions: no imminent threat of armed conflict, no sectarian state on which to focus its attention, and a divided left dominated by Trotskyist front-groups (whose organising model is more insular and ineffectual than that of People’s Democracy).

          Then again, there is a recurring pattern in Finn’s narrative of the Troubles that may dampen this forecast. Irish nationalists have a historic tendency to broaden their appeal by veering left, increase their political capital, and then consolidate it by forging establishment alliances which require them to forego not only their permutable socialism, but the core tenets of their republicanism. This sequence of events unfolded with the SDLP rapprochement in the ’80s; it has animated Sinn Féin’s approach to governance in the north; and it may yet repeat itself with Fianna Fáil in the south. But readers of One Man’s Terrorist will at least be alert to such dangers – healthily sceptical of the Provos’ political descendants, anticipating their next lurch to the right, yet mindful to preserve the transformative potential that has been variously offered and withdrawn by this tradition.

A Review of Ideology and the Virtual City: Videogames, Power Fantasies and Neoliberalism by Jon Bailes

Jamie Woodcock

Senior Lecturer in Management, Faculty of Business and Law, The Open University, UK

jamie.woodcock@open.ac.uk

Keywords

Marxism – videogames – psychoanalysis – cultural studies

Jon Bailes, (2019) Ideology and the Virtual City: Videogames, Power Fantasies and Neoliberalism, Winchester: Zer0 Books.

Ideology and the Virtual City by Jon Bailes is part of the recent wave of critical works examining videogames. Its focus is upon a critical psychoanalytical account of Saints Row IV,GTA V,No More Heroes, andPersona 5, each involving the player navigating through virtual cities. Bailes justifies the psychoanalytic focus by arguing that there is ‘something especially significant in the way that many videogames function as power fantasies, which grant their characters, and through them their players, a sense of agency and control that they generally cannot experience in everyday life’ (p. 4). It is from this starting point that the book attempts to unpack these virtual cities, the opportunities and constraints they present for the player. Bailes elaborates on the neoliberal demand to ‘enjoy responsibly’ (returned to throughout the book) and how this relates to the roles of play within contemporary capitalism. What is particularly interesting about the book is its argument for how videogames involve ‘working through’ the antagonisms within these virtual cities, drawing attention to the importance of the interactivity within these representations.

Due to the specific history of the medium, particularly the focus of marketing attention upon the idealised figure of the teenage boy as consumer, many continue to dismiss videogames as a niche pursuit. In part, it can be easy to miss the widespread engagement with videogames in the home – as those who do not play them then have very limited exposure. Anyone who is in any doubt about the importance of videogames to understanding contemporary capitalism should be reminded of the sheer scale of the industry,Woodcock 2019a. with GTA V having sold 115 million copies. It has also emerged as a new battleground for worker-organising, with branches of Game Workers Unite springing up across the world, trying to build unions.Woodcock 2020. Videogames have become a mainstream cultural activity, and the site of recent struggles over ideology, capital, and working conditions.

Many of these questions were taken up in Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter’s Games of Empire,Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter 2009. an autonomist-Marxist inspired critical analysis of videogame production and play. This text, soon to be reappraised in a forthcoming special issue of Games & Culture, traces the roots of videogame production to the military and hackers, riffing-off Hardt and Negri’sEmpireHardt and Negri 2000. to develop a critical account of the medium and its role within capitalism. The work prefigured the rise of game-worker organising, although its post-workerist conceptualisation of resistance might be considered as too pessimistic. Following on from this, there have been some attempts to develop a Marxist theory of videogames,Kirkpatrick, Mazierska and Kristensen 2016. with attempts to revisit Roger Caillois in light of his engagement with Marxism.Kristensen and Wihelmsson 2017. Caillois’ engagement with Marxism was not previously discussed in game studies, despite the impact he has had on the theorisations of games.Caillois 2001. There is a similarity here with Terranova’s work on free labour and the InternetTerranova 2000. (much of which can be said to apply to online videogames) and Kücklich’s portmanteau concept of ‘playbour’,Kücklich 2005. used to discuss the practices of modifying videogames. Some aspects of critical theory have been adapted for use in game studies, but shorn of its radical intent. However, there has been a recent increase of Marxist criticism, including my own writings,Woodcock 2016; 2019a Marijam Didžgalvytė’s ‘Left Up’See: <https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcshwYnnTU-zGy9Ufv9N5UQ>. series, and the videogame criticism that features regularly in Jacobin, for example. This should be welcomed – particularly as aspects of play under contemporary capitalism have received little attention from Marxists. As I argued towards the end of my book,Marx at the Arcade: ‘Organizing at work is the key way that we can change the world, but that does not mean we should do so while leaving the dominant ideas in society unchallenged. Taking videogames seriously as part of this struggle is no longer something the left can ignore.’Woodcock 2019a, p. 159.

While it has not been a focus taken within my own research, Bailes’ book demonstrates what a psychoanalytical account of videogame play can add to our analysis. The book focuses on free-form games located in virtual cities, which treat this setting as the basis for a power fantasy. I have only played one of the games featured in the book: GTA V. The remaining games,Saints Row IV,No More Heroes, andPersona 5, remain a bit of a mystery to me. One of the challenges of writing about videogames is where to draw the line: what to consider, and what to leave out. However, the focus on cities experienced from the player’s perspective does provides a justification for the chosen focus. The inclusion ofGTA V makes sense, as is the most successful media commodity of all time, reaching into the homes of players across the world.

There are some expected parts to the analysis. For example, Bailes argues that despite many distractions within the games, ‘in the end, because the overriding objective is to win the game, I am implicitly encouraged to calculate risks and rewards around personal advancement, which naturalizes an extreme form of individualized instrumentalism’ (p. 9). This is part of an established critique of videogame play as shaped by the constraints and demands of neoliberalism. However, Bailes develops this in an interesting direction by considering the inclusion of ‘Utopian elements’. As Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter argue in their seminal book on videogames: videogames ‘tend to a reactionary imperial content, as militarized, marketized, entertainment commodities’, while simultaneously they also ‘tend to a radical, multitudinous form, as collaborative, constructive, experimental digital productions’.Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter 2009, p. 228. Thus, we often come across radical examples within corporate-produced videogames – from the hints of union struggle in Outer Worlds, and the critiques of nuclear warfare in the earlierFallout iterations, to the fourth-wall breaking critique of wargame violence inSpec-Ops: The Line, or indeed the appearance of Karl Marx himself inAssassin’s Creed: Syndicate. There are also plenty of examples of radical videogames, produced by indie developers likeMolleindustria with explicitly political aims. Bailes takes another important angle by examining ‘how the utopian element is often revealed precisely by a game’s “failure” to identify social antagonism in terms of the background neoliberalism’ (p. 9). Rather than having an explicit political content, the interactivity of the game can create a political – or potentially politicising – moment.

This critique is put forward first through Saints Row IV. However, given the bizarre plot twist (not to spoil it for anyone who might play the game!) this is a little harder to gauge. The argument develops most clearly in the chapter onGTA V. For those who have not played it, the game is presented as a neoliberal pastiche, and the developer has regularly courted controversy. As Bailes astutely notes, ‘its main ideological thrust [is] that of an unwavering cynicism towards modern life’ (p. 38). It has hints of critique that run through it, a ‘kind of socially aware pessimism, according to which the existing society is hopelessly corrupt, but cannot surmount that corruption because it is too deeply embedded, if not at the core of human nature itself’ (p. 39). However, it is important to remember that the game is a cultural commodity produced for mass consumption. Therefore, it should not be surprising to find that ‘all the elements in the game are calculated to fall within the targeted players’ comfort zones, and any social critique is not intended to present any kind of intellectual or ideological challenge’ (p. 46).

It is worth reflecting here on the dynamics that operate beyond the virtual city of GTA V. For example, the game attempts to lead the player to the conclusion that ‘we are all equally corrupt and worthy of scorn’ (p. 46). In a scandal that broke last year, it was revealed that Rockstar North (the company that madeGTA V) had paid no corporation tax in the previous ten years. From 2013 to 2019, it is estimated that the company had made an operating profit of £4 billion. More than just this, the company claimed £45 million in tax credits from a scheme designed to support the British videogames industry – taking 19% of the total fund, despite the game being set in a fictionalised California.MacDonald 2019. It is hard not to be left with the feeling that the underlying relationships of production have seeped into the ideology of the game and its characters.

Unlike the recent proliferation of so-called ‘production studies’ research coming out of games studies and adjacent disciplines, the focus of the book remains within the play space. While the constraints of the software come out at various points in No More Heroes, there are wider questions about why virtual cities have become such a focus in contemporary games. There has been an obsession with larger and larger open worlds, with more and more content stuffed into them, demonstrating the ‘cutting edge’ of gaming technology. However, in the process, some of these games appear emptier the larger they become. This can be seen in the development of sequels and the paint-by-numbers approach of the so-called ‘Ubisoft formula’, used inAssassin’s Creed and theFarCry series. These include patterns of large maps, locations to unlock, huge numbers of side-quests and collectibles. While these virtual environments present as complex ecosystems, they end up feeling like yet another mass-produced iteration. Increasingly large teams of game workers are involved, with the studio becoming more like a ‘production line’ of workers, each being ‘pigeon-holed’ into more specific tasks.Thompson, Parker and Cox 2015, p. 342.

Videogames like these are therefore major undertakings on the part of developers and publishers. Each of the four games follows the pattern of the individual player developing their own power fantasy in slightly differing ways. One of the major questions this left me with was thinking about how alternative forms of games could move beyond the player narrative like this within the city environment. For example, as Nanni Balestrini[Balestrini 2016. argued in an interview:

We Want Everything is the story of a real person, Alfonso; he told me everything that’s in the book. He is a collective character, in the sense that in those years, thousands of people like him experienced the same things and had the same ideas and the same behaviors. It’s for this reason that he has no name in the book. I am interested in collective characters like the protagonist in The Unseen. I think that unlike what happens in the bourgeois novel – which is based on the individual and his personal struggle within a society – the collective character struggles politically, together with others like him, in order to transform society. Thus his own story becomes an epic story.Kushner 2016.

A Response to Ugo Palheta

By Ken Kawashima

I want to thank Historical Materialism for allowing me to respond to Ugo Palheta’s article, ‘Fascism, Fascisation, Anti-Fascism’.1 In what follows, I would like to very schematically develop the meaning and implications of these three terms.

On fascism. Ugo defines fascism as ‘a force capable of challenging ‘the system’ as well as re-establishing ‘law and order’,’ and thus fascism is an ‘explosive mixture of false subversion and ultra-conservatism’. Fascism, in this regard, is a moving contradiction of capitalist society. One of the great problems with fascism, however, is that—and to borrow a term from the world of professional wrestling—fascism has a ‘full-nelson’ effect: with one arm, it locks the heads of workers in non-contradictions within the masses; with the other arm, it locks the heads of workers in class contradictions. Put differently,fascists (like Trump), who are bearers (Träger) of fascism, experience great pleasure, enjoyment, cult-like popularity, job security and wealth by ‘going out of their way’ to embody and vocalize the difference between (class) contradiction and (mass) non-contradiction. This is why fascistthought, while often sounding rebellious, is a fake rebelliousness. In truth, it is simply and only a pure eclecticism. As Lenin said, ‘The eclectic is too timid to dare to revolt… Let anyone name a single eclectic in the republic of thought who has proven worthy of the name rebel.’2

What we could call fascist eclecticism is nothing but a hodge-podge of theory that blurs the boundaries between class contradictions and mass non-contradictions, and that ‘seduce[s] social strata whose aspirations and interests are fundamentally antagonistic.’ Fascism thus neutralises (class) antagonisms through a mass-based seduction of attraction and repulsion, and it works by getting your attention, by ‘messing with you’ or by taunting you, e.g., ‘Heychink (or whatever racist term), whatcha gonna do, huh, hit me? maybe cut me down with yoursamurai sword, huh?!?’, etc., etc. Through tried and tested infantile tactics such as these, fascism-in-everyday-life tries to seduce, antagonise, and convince workers to divert theirclass antagonisms against capital, and to re-direct these antagonisms towards anattack on other races of people, all the while leaving the despotism and dictatorship of capital untouched. This is what we could call the racial ideology of fascism, as well.3

Ugo also speaks of ‘historical fascism’, especially of the interwar period, and essentially as a reaction formation to the ‘structural crisis of capitalism’. What is missing in this account of historical fascism, however, is the problem of capitalist crisis in the capitalist stage of imperialism. It is important to understand fascism as a reaction-formation to capitalist crisis in the stage of imperialism, specifically, and for three reasons.

First, broadly speaking, capitalism in the stage of imperialism is (supposed to be) capitalism’s last or final stage of development, and thus capitalistcrisis in the stage of imperialism is a crisis of capitalism in its final stage. Fascism, then, is a reaction-formation to capitalist crisis in its final stage. The problem here, obviously, is that the stage of imperialismcan last a very long time—partly because of fascism itself. Thus, fascism has to be understood as a problem that is designed to defer the end of the imperialist stage, and thus to defer the end of capitalism itself.

Secondly, capitalist crisis, which is fundamentally inevitable to capitalist society based on the commodification of labour power, is always a crisis of excess capital alongside surplus populations, i.e., a crisis of the impossibility of bringing capital’s products of labour into a union with the workers who produced them and with the surplus populations who are unemployed by capital.4 As a crisis of this kind (which is not just a crisis of overproduction and under-consumption, nor simply a crisis of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall), capitalist crisis is still inevitable in the capitalist stage of imperialism, but unlike capitalist crisis in the previous stage of liberalism (1820s to 1860s), capitalist crisis in the stage of imperialism impacts the whole world, more or less simultaneously, which is due to the dominance and emergence of finance capital and monopoly capital after the crisis of 1873.5 Fascism is a reaction-formation of disavowal and denial of the contradictions of capitalist society and of its inevitable crisis under the dominance of finance capital and the financial oligarchy. Thus, when fascism tries to look or sound ‘radical’, if often refers to working class victims of industrial capital, as if to appear critical of finance capital and the elites on Wall Street. This, however, is an illusion. Fascism is fundamentally financial in nature and it thrives on Wall Street.

Third, in the stage of imperialism, capitalism’s accumulation phase of depression, which necessarily comes after the accumulation phase of crisis itself, becomeschronic. In the previous stage of liberalism, the capitalist cycle of prosperity-crisis-depression abided by a cycle of ten years, or the so-called decennial cycles (Marx, 1990, Chapter 25). Imperialism distorts the duration of the phases of the accumulation cycle while keeping the cycle intact overall, and it does so by prolonging the phase of depression, such as the one after the crisis of 1929. The length of this duration is partly determined by the time it takes to sell-off old and out of datefixed capital, which becomes huge quantitatively in the stage of imperialism, and thus harder to sell-off quickly. This reveals thesalto mortale, or ‘leap of faith’ of the commodity-form itself in the stage of imperialism, which impacts not only capitalists but also workers, who now must chronically struggle to sell their labour-power as a commodity in the phase of depression. In other words, from the perspective of workers, chronic depression means chronic unemployment, so, in the capitalist stage of imperialism, the biggest problem for workers is chronic economic fear, chronic job insecurity (or ‘precarity’) and chronic unemployment.

In imperialism, the capitalist state has to use everything it has to prevent unemployedlabour power from forming solidarities and alliances with employed workers and into a unified and antagonistic proletarian class force against the dictatorship of capital. If we fail to grasp this aspect of imperialism’s chronic depression, the historical and materialist source of fascism’s seductive power over (unemployed) workers is largely lost. Put differently, fascism, as a reaction-formation to capitalist crisis and chronic depression in the capitalist stage of imperialism, tries to make imperialism itself chronic, thereby prolonging and deferring the inevitable death of capitalism.

On fascisation. According to Ugo, the main forms of fascisation are an authoritarian hardening of the state and the rise of racism. Ugo also writes of thefascisation of the state in terms of how ‘the entire functioning of the police is fascisised’, which allows the ‘far Right to spread its ideas and establish itself within them’. Again, the inter-war period is indicative of these problems. I will mention two points.

First, when we consider fascism as a reaction to capitalist crisis in the stage of imperialism, one of the clear, ideological characteristics of fascisation is what I will call thefeudal unconscious of fascism, which is peculiar to capitalism in the stage of imperialism. This is a problem of the interwar period, which is also a problem of the stage of imperialism. In other words, in the capitalist stages of mercantilism and liberalism that preceded imperialism, feudal customs, sentiments and practices were repressed in order to allow for the development of the capitalist mode of production based on the commodification of labour power. Archetypically, this took place in the stage of liberalism (1820s-1860s) and in England. However, these same feudal customs, sentiments and practicesreturn with a vengeance in the wake of capitalist crisis in the stage of imperialism, the last stage of capitalism, and specifically in the interwar period of so-called late-developing countries like Japan, Germany, and the US.6 In these countries, it was not hard for the hegemonic ruling bloc to strategically re-introduce feudal customs, sentiments and practices in order to defeat modern proletarian struggles because these forms of feudality still survived within social formations on the level of custom, sentiment, and practices.7 Capitalist crisis in the stage of imperialism thus brings about a nasty return of repressed feudal customs, sentiments and practices—archaisms— as a reactive and defensive mechanism to save capitalism from its inevitable demise in the stage of imperialism. Fascisation prefers to re-code feudality, which it already knows and which it actively archives, instead of confronting an uncertain future after capitalism. We can site two examples of fascisation as a re-feudalisation in imperialism in two countries, Japan and the U.S.A.:

1. Interwar Japan: feudal practices originating in the Tokugawa period (1603-1868) were used after World War I to organise day workers for large public works projects, which expanded especially after the crisis of 1929. The difference in the 1930s is that Japanese fascism re-feudalised colonisedlabour from Korea, China, Taiwan, and Okinawa, and not simply that of nativeprisoner labour, which the Tokugawa regime used for its public works projects.8

2. Interwar U.S.A.: the systemic racism of the era of Jim and Jane Crow in the 1930s has roots in the pre-Civil War era of feudal slave-labour, as well as in the Slave Codes and then the Black Codes. As W.E.B. Dubois’ Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 showed so powerfully, the racist conditions of Jim and Jane Crow in America in the 1930s have their origins in theBlack Codes of the Reconstruction era (1865-1880s); the Black Codes themselves simply re-codified the feudalSlave Codes. Thus, when Dubois speaks of capitalism in the US after the crisis of 1873, and of the counter-revolutionary movement that defeated the dictatorship of the black proletariat that had momentarily emerged at the beginning of the Reconstruction, Dubois refers to the ‘new feudalism based on monopoly’ that came into being after the crisis of 1873.9

The second point about fascisation is the problem of racism and policing. In the stage of imperialism, the repressive state apparatus (RSA) tends to become more and more autonomous from the ideological state apparatus (ISA, which focuses more on the Mind and the imagined community of the Nation). The relative autonomy of the RSA, which focuses more on the Body, is one important reason how, and why, racial ideology became the official philosophy of the police system itself. On this point, the interwar periods in Japan and the US are instructive once again. In Japan, the police system underwent radical transformation during the chronic depression after the end of WWI, and revealed how (colonial) racism was spread through the work of the police, specifically by extending police work into welfare organisations, as well as to immigration police offices around the Japanese empire. Extending police work to welfare work was a practice that was first used in England in the 1840s (with Edwin Chadwick’s idea of ‘preventive policing’) and then by the New York City Police Department after World War One. In Japan, the new police slogan of the interwar police was thus: 警察の民衆化・民衆の警察化, or ‘the massification of the police and the policification of the masses’.10

In the case of the USA, Dubois’ Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 again shows how the modern police system of the 1930s inherited the legacies of the feudal Slave Codes and the Reconstruction-era Black Codes, and recruited poor whites into the ranks of the police in order to repress, criminalise and incarcerate black workers, ultimately as a means of regulating the formation of the national labour market according to what Dubois called ‘the shibboleth of race’ and ‘the race philosophy’. In this way, racism became the official philosophy of the police.

On Anti-Fascism. Ugo’s article importantly identifies the ‘crisis of the alternative’ to the existing order of capitalist society as one of the basic causes of the rise of fascism, fascisation, neo-fascism, and the new Right. The question ofanti-fascism, therefore, is one that should begin by asking how to overcome the crisis of articulating the alternative to capitalism, which has led to, ‘the inability of the exploited class (proletariat) and oppressed groups to constitute themselves as revolutionary political subjects and engage in an experiment of social transformation (however limited)’. This inability has allowed ‘the far Right to appear as a political alternative and win the adhesion of very diverse social groups’. Ugo thus emphasises the need for the proletariat, defined as ‘the exploited’, and the subaltern, defined broadly as the oppressed, to ‘unite politically around a project of rupture with the social order and seize the opportunity presented by the crisis of hegemony’. Finally, Ugo reminds us to never renounce the construction of links of solidarity between (a) anti-fascist struggles and the need for a break with racial, patriarchal and ecocidal capitalism, and (b) ‘the goal of a different society (which we here call ecosocialist).’

In other words, the struggle against fascism should not limit itself to overthrowing the most egregious aspects of fascist expression and dominance only, as if fascism could be defeated by merely eliminating racism, patriarchy, ultra-nationalism and ecocide. Rather, to truly overcome fascism, and to prevent even the possibility of a future return of new forms of fascisation, the anti-fascist struggles have to aim and shoot higher, as it were, i.e., to aspire to the higher goal of creating a new society altogether. Overthrowing merely the forms of fascisation without overthrowing capitalism’s class dictatorship in the stage of imperialism has only led to forms of identity politics that simply reproduce what Tosaka Jun, writing in 1933, called cultural liberalism, i.e., one of the epistemological conditions of fascist thought itself.11

To develop Ugo’s notion of anti-fascism further, I would conclude by emphasising two points. First, Ugo tends to emphasise a conception of the proletariat as the exploited, and combines and contrasts it with the ‘subaltern’ and ‘the oppressed’. A problem, however, is in the conception of the proletariat simply as the exploited, which of course refers to Marx’s analysis of the exploitation of the workers’ surplus-labour time in the labour and valorisation process of capitalist production, which produces absolute and relative surplus value for the capitalist class. It must never be forgotten, however, that this definition of the proletariat (as the exploited) itself rests upon a repressed conception of the proletariat-as-the-expropriated, which is the result of so-called primitive accumulation, i.e., the expropriating process led by the state (and not by capital). The proletariat-as-expropriated needs to be liberated from its theoretical repression in today’s political and economic unconscious of Marxist theory, which is often only (orstill only) conscious of the proletariat as the exploited.

To rethink the proletariat from the perspective of the expropriated is to think of the capitalist mode of production from the perspective of its conditions of possibility, not from the perspective of itsinevitable results. This is what Althusser emphasised when he wrote:

When Marx and Engels say that the proletariat is ‘the product of big industry’, they utter a very great piece of nonsense, positioning themselves within the logic of the accomplished fact of the reproduction of the proletariat on an extended scale, not the aleatory logic of the ‘encounter’ which produces (rather than reproduces), as the proletariat, this mass of impoverished, expropriated human beings as one of the elements making up the mode of production. In the process, Marx and Engels shift from the first conception of the mode of production, an historico-aleatory conception, to a second, which is essentialistic and philosophical.12

To think of the proletariat equally as the expropriated not only brings into focus the conditions ofcapitalism. It also reveals the perspective of dialectically negating capitalism by constructing conditions for ecosocialism and communist society. This perspective thus approaches communism not as an accomplished fact, but rather as the fact to be accomplished. In other words, ‘the most beautiful sea hasn’t been crossed yet’.13

Thus, secondly, to think of an ecosocialist revolution and a new communist society from the perspective of the fact to be accomplished, and not from the accomplished fact, is the task at hand. This is also the task of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, an idea that needs to be renewed today, especially after official communist parties abandoned it in the mid-1970s, much to the delight of the newly emerging dictatorship of neoliberal capital.14 I thus conclude my response to Ugo’s article with the eternal question of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and with a quote from Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme:

The question then arises: what transformations will the state undergo in communist society?

…Between capitalist and communist society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. There corresponds to this also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.15

In thinking of anti-fascism, a basic task and state function of the dictatorship of the proletariat in the socialist period of the revolutionary transformation from capitalist to communist society is, and cannot avoid: the negation and sublation of the commodification of labour power (or 労働力商品化の無理・止揚), its aufheben in new forms of communist sociality and intercourse.16

To eradicate systemic racial ideology that underpins fascist racism today, it is necessary more and more to overcome and negate the commodification of labour power itself.

To be, or not to be, a commodity of labour power, that is the question. It is the question of LP-X,17 of the General Strike, of the revolutionary transition from capitalism to communism, and of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

References

Althusser, Louis 2006, Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978-1987, Verso.

Balibar, Etienne 1977, On the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, NLB.

DuBois, W.E.B. 1992, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880, Free Press.

Haider, Asad 2018, Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Era of Trump, Verso.

Harootunian, Harry 2015, Marx after Marx, Columbia UP.

Kawashima, Ken 2009, The Proletarian Gamble: Korean Workers in Interwar Japan, Duke UP.

________, Fabian Schaeffer and Robert Stolz 2013, Tosaka Jun: A Critical Reader, Cornell UP.

Kawashima, Ken and Gavin Walker 2018. ‘Surplus alongside Excess: Uno Kozo, Imperialism and the Theory of Crisis,’ in Viewpoint Magazine dossier on imperialism,https://viewpointmag.com/2018/02/01/surplus-alongside-excess-uno-kozo-imperialism-theory-crisis/

Lenin, V.I., Book Review: Karl Kautsky. Bernstein und das sozialdemokratische Programm. Eine Antikritik, Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, vol. 4. 

Marx, Karl 1990, Capital, Vol. 1, Penguin.

______. Critique of the Gotha Program (1875), in The Marx-Engels Reader, edited by Robert Tucker, Norton, 1978.

Sotiris, Panagiotis 2020, A Philosophy for Communism: Rethinking Althusser, Brill.

Uno, Kōzō 1953, Theory of Crisis, translated by Ken Kawashima, forthcoming, Brill.

__________1958 Shihonron to Shakaishugi, Uno Chosakushu, Vol. 10, Iwanami, 1973.

Walker, Gavin 2016, The Sublime Perversion of Capital: Marxism and the Politics of History in Modern Japan, Duke UP.

Ken Kawashima is Associate Professor, Department of East Asian Studies, University of Toronto. He is author of The Proletariat Gamble: Korean workers in interwar Japan (Duke UP, 2009), co-editor ofTosaka Jun: A Critical Reader (Cornell UP, 2014), and the English translator of Kōzō Uno’sTheory of Crisis, forthcoming (Brill). He is also Sugar Brown, a blues musician, composer and recording artist.

"File:QAnon Trump supporter - JFK, Jr version (48555417926).jpg" byMarc Nozell from Merrimack, New Hampshire, USA is licensed underCC BY 2.0

• 1. https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/blog/fascism-fascisation-antifascism
• 2. Lenin, V.I., (1899), Book Review: Karl Kautsky. Bernstein und das sozialdemokratische Programm. Eine Antikritik.
• 3. On racial ideology, Haider 2018, pp. 42-64, and DuBois 1992.
• 4. See Uno 1953; and Kawashima and 1Walker 2018.
• 5. Lenin 1916.
• 6. Uno 2018.
• 7. On the question of ‘feudality’, see Walker 2016, 28-74; and Harootunian 2015, pp. 153-196.
• 8. Kawashima 2009, pp. 67-94.
• 9. DuBois 1992, pp. 583-84.
• 10. Kawashima 2009, pp. 130-168.
• 11. Tosaka 2013.
• 12. Althusser 2006, p. 198.
• 13. Sotiris 2020.
• 14. Balibar 1977.
• 15. Marx (1875), 538. See also Lenin 1917; DuBois 1935; Balibar 1977; Sotiris 2020.
• 16. Uno 1953; 1958.
• 17. Kawashima, Ken, ‘On the Negation and Sublation of Labour Power as a Commodity, or LP-X’, forthcoming.

Enzo Traverso

In recent years, the dramatic rise of extreme right movements on a global scale has put the question of fascism at the core of the political agenda. Fascism is coming back: nobody could seriously pretend that it belongs exclusively to the past as an object of historical study alone, and it has not been so intensely discussed in the public sphere since the end of the Second World War. We must be grateful to Ugo Palheta for clarifying the terms of this necessary debate.1 His text includes an analytical dimension on both the causes and the features of this new ‘fascist’ wave, and a programmatic conclusion on the means to fight it. I agree with many aspects of his diagnosis but I remain sceptical with respect to some others. Here, I will try to explain my reasons, in the hope that this will stimulate other contributions.

Ugo Palheta defines fascism as a project of ‘regenerating’ the nation considered as an imagined community built around homogeneous ethnic and racial features. This imagined community possesses its ‘positive’ and negative myths. It designates a supposedly original purity to be defended or re-established against its enemies: immigration (‘the great replacement’), ‘anti-white racism,’ feminist and LGBTQI corruption of traditional values, Islam and its allies (‘islamo-leftism’), etc. The premises for the emergence of this neofascist wave, Palheta argues, lie in the ‘crisis of hegemony’ of the global elites whose ruling tools inherited from the old nation-states appear obsolete and increasingly ineffective. As Gramsci explained, revisiting Machiavelli, domination is a combination of repressive apparatuses and cultural hegemony that allows a political regime to appear as legitimate and beneficial rather than tyrannical and oppressive. After several decades of neoliberal policies, the ruling classes have enormously developed their wealth and power but have also undergone a significant loss of legitimacy and cultural hegemony. These are the premises for the rise of neofascism: on the one hand, the growing ‘descent into savagery’ (ensauvagement) of the ruling classes and, on the other, the general authoritarian tendencies (fascisation) that their domination engenders. Therefore, Palheta points out, fascism is shaped by a structural contradiction: it pretends to offer an alternative to neoliberalism and, at the same time, claims the reestablishment of a threatened order. Like classical fascism, which depicted itself as a ‘third way’ against both capitalism and socialism, liberal democracy and Bolshevism, neofascism pretends to struggle against the ‘establishment,’ but it also wishes to restore law and order. Historically, this was one of the features of the Conservative Revolution.

I agree with Palheta’s definition of fascism as a project of ‘regenerating’ the nation, but it does not seem to me complete or satisfactory, insofar as it does not grasp the ensemble of fascism’s constitutive elements. Viewed with historical lenses, fascism was more than a form of radical nationalism and a racist idea of the nation. It was also a practice of political violence, a militant anticommunism, and a complete destruction of democracy. Violence, especially directed against the Left and communism, was the privileged form of its political action, and wherever it came to power—either legally, as in Italy and Germany, or through a military putsch, as in Spain—it destroyed democracy. From this point of view, the new movements on the radical Right have a different relationship with both violence and democracy. They do not possess armed militias; they do not claim a new political order and do not threat the stability of traditional institutions. If they pretend to defend ‘the people’ against the elites and to re-establish order, they do not wish to create a new order. In Europe, they are more interested in implementing authoritarian and nationalist tendencies within the EU rather than destroying its institutions. This is the posture of Victor Orban in Hungary and Mateus Morawiecki in Poland, as well as the orientation of Vox in Spain, the Rassemblement National of Marine Le Pen in France, and Matteo Salvini’s Lega in Italy, three political forces that finally accepted the Euro. The Italian Lega recently entered a coalition government led by the former ECB director Mario Draghi, the symbolic embodiment of neoliberalism and the financial elites. In Austria, the Netherlands and Germany, the countries that most benefited from the Euro, the far right is certainly xenophobic and racist but not particularly anti-EU, anti-Euro or opposed to neoliberalism. Its political profile is much more grounded on cultural conservatism. In India, Brazil and the United States, extreme right leaders came to power and developed authoritarian and xenophobic tendencies without putting into question the institutional framework of their states. Bolsonaro and Trump not only were unable to dissolve parliament but finished or are finishing their mandates facing several impeachment procedures.

The case of Donald Trump, the most spectacular and discussed in the latest months, is particularly instructive. His fascist trajectory clearly appeared at the end of his presidency, when he refused to admit his defeat and tried to invalidate the election result. The folkloric ‘insurrection’ of his partisans who invaded the Capitol was not a failed fascist coup; it was a desperate attempt at invalidating the elections by a leader who had certainly broken with the most elementary rules of democracy—which makes it possible to depict him as a fascist—but was unable to indicate a political alternative. The Capitol events incontestably revealed the existence of a mass fascist movement in the United States, but this movement is far from conquering power. Its immediate consequence was putting the GOP into a deep crisis. Trump had won the elections in 2016 as a candidate of the GOP: a coalition of economic elites, upper middle-class interested in tax cuts, defenders of conservative values, Christian fundamentalists, and marginaliSed and impoverished white popular classes attracted by a protest vote. As the fascist leader of a movement of white supremacists and reactionary nationalists, however, Trump does not have much chance of getting elected. The fascist movement behind him is certainly a source of political instability, which can lead to violent clashes against BLM and other left movements, but should be understood in its proper context. Differently from the fascist militia in 1920-1925 or the SA in 1930-1933, which expressed the fall of the state monopoly of violence in postwar Italy and Germany, the Trump militias are the legacy of the history of the United States, a country that for centuries considered individual weapons as a fundamental feature of political freedom.

Classical fascism was born in a continent devastated by total war, grew up in a climate of civil wars, within states deeply unsettled and institutionally paralysed by sharp political conflicts. Its radicalism came out of a confrontation with Bolshevism, which gave it its ‘revolutionary’ character. Fascism was a utopian ideology and imagination, which created the myth of the ‘New Man’ and national greatness. The new far right movements lack all these premises: they come out of a ‘crisis of hegemony’ which cannot be compared with the European collapse of the 1930s; their radicalism contains nothing ‘revolutionary’ and their conservatism—the defence of traditional values, traditional cultures, threatened ‘national identities,’ and a bourgeois respectability opposed to sexual ‘deviancies’—does not possess the idea of futurity that so deeply shaped fascist ideologies and utopias. This is why it seems to me more appropriate to depict them as ‘post-fascist.’

Considering the ideology and propaganda of contemporary radical right movements, Palheta pertinently emphasizes their strong anti-cosmopolitan trends, in which he grasps some elements of continuity with fascist anti-Semitism. This is certainly true, but he curiously neglects a major change that has occurred in the last two decades and that significantly distinguishes them from classical fascism. Their main targets are no longer the Jews—most far-right movements have very good relationships with Israel—but rather the Muslims. Islamophobia has replaced anti-Semitism in post-fascist rhetoric: the mantra of the struggle against Jewish-Bolshevism was replaced by the rejection of ‘Islamo-leftism’ and ‘decolonial’ or anticolonial movements. Since the influence of contemporary left movements—particularly antiracist, feminist, and LGBTQI—is certainly significant but not comparable to the impact of Bolshevism during the interwar decades, when the alternative was embodied by the USSR, post-fascism brings to mind much more ‘cultural despair’ (Kulturpessimismus) than historical fascism.

Speaking of the new extreme Rights as ‘counterrevolution’—either ‘posthumous’ or ‘preventive’—does not seem to me useful or clarifying, since it simply transposes historical fascism onto an ensemble of movements which have explicitly abandoned this ideological and political reference. Depicting fascism as counterrevolution was meaningful in the 1920s and 1930s, in a European context shaped by the October Revolution, the Italian biennio rosso (the factory occupations of 1919-20), the January 1919 Spartacist uprising in Berlin, the civil wars in Bavaria and Hungary in 1920, and the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, but becomes an almost incomprehensible catchword when applied to Marine Le Pen, Matteo Salvini, Victor Orban, Jair Bolsonaro or even Donald Trump. Counterrevolution does not exist without revolution.

Palheta is right in pointing out a tendency to reinforce social control and surveillance technologies, and to extend the scope of police repression. This tendency, he argues, shapes most contemporary states and expresses a general ‘descent into savagery’ (ensauvagement) of the dominant class. These changes, however, belong to most liberal democracies and cannot be related to the rise of fascism. In the United States, Obama expelled more undocumented immigrants than Trump, and the exacerbation of police racist violence led to the creation of Black Lives Matter in 2013, three years before the election of Donald Trump. In France, exception laws were promulgated under Hollande’s presidency after the terrorist attacks of 2015 and a dramatic increase of police violence against social movements, notably the Yellow Vests, has taken place since the election of Macron in 2017. All these tendencies do not mirror a ‘dynamic offascisation’ but rather the emergence of new forms of authoritarian neoliberalism. In most cases, far right parties support these changes without managing their application. In the 1930s, the European industrial, financial, and military elites supported fascism as a solution to endemic political crises, institutional paralysis, and foremost as a defence against Bolshevism. Today, the dominant classes support the EU rather than populist, nationalist and neofascist movements claiming a return to ‘national sovereignties’. In the US, the dominant classes can support the Republican Party as a customary alternative to the Democratic Party, but they would never endorse white supremacism against Joe Biden. Not because they believe in democracy, but because Biden is incomparably more effective than white supremacism in defending the establishment itself.

Does this mean that there is no fascist danger? Not at all. The dramatic rise of far-right movements, parties and governments clearly shows that fascism can become an alternative, especially in the case of a general economic crisis, a prolonged depression of the US economy or a collapse of the Euro. Such developments could radicalize those movements toward fascism and give them large mass support. Their relationship with the dominant classes would inevitably change, as happened in the 1930s. But this tendency is far from prevailing today. It is interesting to observe that the Covid pandemic did not produce a wave of xenophobia or a search for scapegoats. In the US, it led to the electoral defeat of Trump (despite the radicalization of Trumpism), in Brazil to growing difficulties for Bolsonaro, and on the continent to a reinforcement of the EU, which mitigated its usual neoliberalism by adopting unexpected neo-Keynesian policies. The ‘possibility of fascism’ remains, but the economic crisis engendered by the pandemic did not reinforce it. In Italy, during the worst months of this health emergency, hate against refugees and immigrants was replaced by spontaneous solidarity and the popular welcome of Chinese, Albanian and African doctors who came to help their exhausted colleagues. This tendency is certainly not irreversible, but it shows that we are not facing an irresistible process of fascisation.

Till now, neofascist and post-fascist movements are caught in the contradiction described by Palheta: either they appear as an ‘anti-systemic’ alternative and remain excluded from power; or they participate in re-establishing law and order by accepting the ‘system,’ with its rules and institutions. In this case, however, they become part of the establishment they previously rejected. Palheta himself indicates ‘bourgeois normalisation’ as a possible outcome of the current ‘crisis of hegemony’ of neoliberalism. But ‘bourgeois normalisation’ is incompatible with a general ‘dynamic of fascisation.’ This trajectory—what some scholars have called a ‘Bonapartist’ turn ordefascisation—usually occurred after the establishment of a fascist regime (think of late Francoism). If this ‘normalisation’ shapes a fascist movement before conquering power, this means that a ‘dynamic offascisation’ did not exist. In Italy, the ‘bourgeois normalisation’ of the Lega took place without any ‘strong popular response’ (which is the condition Palheta indicates for such a ‘normalisation’). In other countries, the spectre of fascism could be used by the elites themselves in order to contrast their ‘crisis of hegemony’. For Biden, Macron and Merkel, it could be a convenient pretext to silence any left-wing opposition.

Palheta’s conclusion is a plea for antifascism, an antifascism conceived of not as ‘a sectoral struggle, a particular method of struggle or an abstract ideology,’ but rather as a central dimension of left politics, as something ‘permeating and involving all emancipation movements’. A Left provided with historical consciousness and a memory of the past cannot but agree with this proposition. Despite Palheta’s sensitivity to this need for a heterogeneous antifascist ethos rather than a monolithic antifascist ideology, his account of fascism itself risks occluding some of the unique post-fascist dynamics against which we are struggling today. Antifascism is not the panacea for a universal ‘process of fascisation’; rather, it must be adapted and displayed according to the diversity of national contexts.

"IMG_6140" byElvert Barnes is licensed underCC BY-SA 2.0

• 1. https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/blog/fascism-fascisation-antifascism