Shades of Green
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 8th 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.
Understanding Struggles Over the Virtual City: Marxism, Psychoanalysis, and Videogames
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,
Many of these questions were taken up in Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter’s Games of Empire,
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’.
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.
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.
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[
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.
Fascism is a Reaction to Capitalist Crisis in the Stage of Imperialism:
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.:
- 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
- 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.
Universal Fascism? A Response to Ugo Palheta
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.
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- 1. https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/blog/fascism-fascisation-antifascism
What is the Traditional Working-Class?
The Problems of Tradition
By Alex Maguire
To paraphrase Marx who, like Lucifer, has all the best lines: a spectre is haunting political discourse – the spectre of the Traditional Working-Class. By Traditional Working-Class (TWC) I do not mean the class itself, instead I mean the typical concept and collection of common misunderstandings that underpins the popular understanding of this class. In the years since the 2016 Brexit Referendum, the term ‘Traditional Working-Class’ has become endemic in political and cultural discourse in Britain.1 Prior to this the term was seldom used, though it did exist as a category in the BBC 2013’s class survey. The term is now probably the most used class descriptor in common discourse (its only rival would be ‘white working-class’ which is used either as a pejorative or a badge of honour); however, it has not been defined who and what this class are. What is this class’ relationship to production, consumption, and other classes? Does the TWC exist, and if so where? What precisely makes them traditional, and what are these traditions? It is necessary to investigate these questions to properly understand what precisely this class is. It should be emphasised that interrogating the concept of the ‘traditional working-class’ is not the same as interrogating working-class traditions. The English working-class has a rich and varied history of traditions. This is indisputable. What is open to question is the precise nature of the TWC.
There have been substantial changes in the material reality of working-class life, and, just as the concept of tradition must be investigated, material changes must also be recognised. There have been substantial demographic changes in many of England’s communities in the last fifty years, capitalism has provided new industries such as platform and call centre work, and working conditions have rapidly declined in the last ten years. The working-class looks quite different today than it did thirty years ago.
In the face of these changes, a common construction of the TWC is that it resides in ex-industrial and mining towns in the North,Midlands, and South Wales, is largely comprised of white male labourers, skilled or unskilled, and is often ignored by metropolitan society. The precise geographic location of this construction is largely a product of Labour’s 2019 electoral defeat in many of these constituencies, and partly accounts for the distinctly English character of this class, even if occasional acknowledgements are made of the impacts of deindustrialisation on towns and villages in Wales.2 This is a glib description that has taken root on both the right and the left. This construction marginalises women, ethnic minorities, and the working-class located in urban centres, particularly those associated with the new industries of the inter-war period, such as electronics and electrical engineering, vehicle construction, chain retailing and bulk clothing production, artificial fibres, aviation, cinema in places such as Coventry and Oxford. While not all uses of this term are as simplistic, most are.3
The description used for the Great British Class Survey is equally problematic. Mike Savage et al. argue that one of the defining characteristics of this class is that ‘old-fashioned’ occupations such as lorry driver, cleaner, electrician, and factory worker, are over-represented in its number. Effectively, they are arguing that these jobs are traditional working-class jobs. ’.4 However, Savage et al. argue, class is not just the job one does, but the specific labour relations that are part of that job. These labour relations are the social relations of production. The authors go on to state that:
‘we might see this class as a residue of earlier historical periods, and embodying characteristics of the TWC. We might see it as a “throwback” to an earlier phase in Britain’s social history, as part of an older generational formation’.
When history is invoked, it must be asked who is invoking it, why are they invoking it, and which specific construction of history are they invoking. Furthermore, the specific notion of tradition is a historically difficult term. Hobsbawm noted that traditions ‘which appear to claim to be old are often quite recent in origin and sometimes invented’.5 While all traditions are at some point invented, and most enjoy liberal relations with historical veracity, unlike Hobsbawm’s traditions, the TWC has not been ascribed a delineated set of actual tradition (such as a common dress sense akin to the early twentieth century ubiquity of the flat cap). Instead, ‘traditional’ is a collection of common ideas that individuals ascribe to and identify, even if these ideas are not materially grounded. Indeed, Hobsbawm observes that the recently invented notions of tradition tend to “be quite unspecific and vague as to the nature of values, rights and obligations of the group membership they inculcate’.6 Perhaps it is this vagueness that has made the TWC such a potent rhetorical device.
To better underline what I think the problems with the concept of the TWC are, I shall provide a brief definition of what I think the English working-class is. The working-class has always constituted an array of relationships and employment conditions. After all, no class is homogeneous and the working-class is made up of different overlapping fractions with their own nuanced relations to production. It is the relative precariousness of these fractions that ensures they regularly overlap. As Satnam Virdee wrote, the ‘labour process imparts on [the working-class] a fractional character, which, in turn, means that at any one moment in time, the class consciousness of the aggregate working class is unlikely to be identical’.7 The English working-class is large and, in some instances, has a significant liminality with parts of the middle-class in terms of relation to production and income. An example of this is how most of the NHS’ junior management is drawn from the shop-floor, meaning that staff are promoted from engaging in production to managing production. Equally, a few high earning members of the labour aristocracy, such as very successful self-employed plumbers and carpenters, will be able afford a middle-class quality of life and often live-in middle-class neighbourhoods. In this sense, the TWC differs from a class such as the British landowning aristocracy which is small enough to regulate entry and can selectively reproduce itself.
The overlapping fractions that constitute the bulk of the English working-class (excluding children and retired pensioners) are: the proletariat, labour aristocracy, organised labour, unorganised labour, wage labourers (who’s employment may be relatively stable but is still tied to a wage), and unpaid domestic labourers. Indeed, throughout their lives, most members of the working-class will have been part of many, and some even part of all, of these fractions. This list is by no means complete, and while it is possible to identify other groups, I think that these categories account for the majority of the working-class and sufficiently illustrate the nuances of this class’ internal relationships. I define the proletariat as being the part of the working-class whose employment conditions are characterised by insecurity, and therefore their employment conditions (though not their culture, sense of class, and assets) may have more in common with some precarious members of the middle-class, for instance actors, than other members of the working-class.8
The term labour aristocracy requires clarification. I do not mean it in the Leninist sense, which refers to the working-class of the western world who benefited from the spoils of nineteenth and twentieth century imperialism. I use the term to describe a group similar to Hobsbawm’s Labour Aristocracy who are ‘better paid, better treated and generally regarded as more “respectable”’, though I reject Hobsbawm claim that this group is innately more politically moderate than the ‘mass of the proletariat’.9 The labour aristocracy are the ‘upper strata of the working class’ who have more control over their processes of production, on account of their skilled labour, which better enables them to navigate the working day.10 Richard Price provided a good description of the Labour Aristocracy when he wrote:
‘the labour aristocracy may be seen not as a fixed group, dependent upon a certain kind of industrial technology or organization, but as encompassing those who were able to erect certain protections against the logic of market forces on the basis of the spaces provided by aspects of segmentation. Thus, to admit the many lines of segmentation within the working class is not to dispose of the problem of the labour aristocracy; it is, rather, to drive it back to its original location in the sphere of production. A fundamental line of cleavage within the working class is between those who are able to realize some protections against market vulnerability and those who are not. In the mid-nineteenth century, this cleavage attained a particular importance and prominence because, in the absence, for example, of political democracy, it provided one of the few ways by which sections of the working class could assert their influence and self-conscious identity in society.’11
As a result of this privileged relation to productive forces, usually on account of possessing specific skills, the labour aristocracy has often organised itself into craft unions. These craft unions, for instance the Fire Brigade Union, Bakers Unions, and the Associate Society of Locomotive Engineers and Fireman, until the rapid reversal of the forward march in the eighties, exerted considerable control over the labour market as they were able to regulate the supply of labour by regulating entry into their specific craft. Although this still exists in part, the trajectory of trade unions in the United Kingdom is towards general unions, for instance UNISON, Unite, and GMB, meaning that the labour aristocracy may continue to decline.
Organised labour means workers who are part of labour organisations, most importantly trade unions, while unorganised labour means those who are not. Even within the distinction of organised labour there are further divides: some trade unions may be open (general) while others may be closed (craft) unions. Not all these categories are mutually exclusive, and some will go hand in hand, for instance a labour aristocracy operating a closed union, but they are useful distinctions to keep in mind. Thus, it is evident that even the supposed traditions of a class are complex and varied, and this is before the splits between the workplace, the home, and public life are taken into account. Therefore, ascribing one group as the sole TWC, without accounting for the different social relationships that define this class, is a flawed exercise.
While it is important to note the distinctions between different types of working-class existence, it is equally important not to become lost in these distinctions. Edward Thompson argues that:
‘“Working classes” is a descriptive term, which evades as much as it defines. It ties loosely together a bundle of discrete phenomena. There were tailors here and weavers there, and together they make up the working classes.”12
This is where it is important to draw the distinction between the objective situation of a class and a groups’ subjective awareness of its situation. While it is true that many people consider themselves/are considered to be part of the TWC and, if coverage of the 2019 General Election is to be believed, voted for the party they believed best represented them, their relations to production have too little in common for them to be considered a class.13 The act of self-identifying as part of a class is not enough in and of itself to qualify for class membership.
As highlighted above, the historical construction of the ‘traditional’ omits many groups of people from working-class history, and particularly women, immigrants, and the urban working-class. It also too often ignores the traditions of workers’ organisation. All of these have been integral to the English working-class since its inception. Even if these omissions are not conscious or deliberate, they are significant. Too often the historical and current importance of these groups is not sufficiently expressed. It is not enough to avoid their exclusion, instead their historical significance should be actively highlighted.
Tradition’s Omissions:
A women’s place?
Too often there is the underlying assumption that women do not work and are exclusively what Richard Hoggart termed “the pivot of the home”.14 While the significance of working-class women to the family and the home, either as single mothers or as part of a partnership, is often noted, their status as workers is too often ignored. While the unpaid domestic labour of working-class women has, as noted by Lisa Vogel, been integral to the social reproduction of the working-class, the nature of this socially reproductive labour is disputed. Some, such as Vogel, argue that it is ultimately unproductive labour as it does not generate surplus-value, while others such as Sylvia Federici and Alessandra Mezzadri have exposed the potential limitations in Marx’s theory of value and argued that, in Federici’s words, ‘those who produce the producers of value must be themselves productive of that value’.15 The scope of this debate, interesting and challenging as it is, is beyond the parameters of this article.16 What I want to highlight is that working-class women, as well as undertaking vital unpaid domestic labour, have always functioned as conventional workers selling their labour power.
Work is a fundamental part of working-class life; as long as the working-class has existed working-class women have been workers. However, working-class women have often been much more limited in how, and the extent to which, they sell their labour power. They have typically had to navigate more complex and arduous relationships with production and capital. This makes their contribution to the development of the working-class particularly important as it adds a different and more complicated dimension to the formation of this class.
Perhaps the underlying assumption about working-class women and work has not been helped by famous historical texts, such as The Making of the English Working-Class, which fail to adequately account for the role of women in this process. For example, in the nineteenth century many working-class women worked as domestic servants. Laura Schwartz notes how research conducted by Leonore Davidoff demonstrates that a gendered division of labour relegated women’s economic activity to a theoretical private sphere, resulting in domestic labour (the majority of which was female) being devalued and regarded as unproductive, even though this low paid domestic labour was integral to nineteenth century capitalism and social reproduction.17 Schwartz also highlights that servants were excluded from Marx’s analysis of contemporary capitalism. Since their work was viewed as unproductive they were considered unimportant to the development of the working-class. 18
However, women were not solely engaged in domestic labour, whether paid or unpaid, in the nineteenth century. Many women and children worked in the textile industry, and still do today in sweatshops across the globe. In this industry, they had a more straightforward relation to production and the creation of surplus value. The experiences of these women are still often ignored in the descriptions of the TWC, which consistently situates women in the home, and focusses on an almost fetishised construction of the male worker. Textiles as an industry is an interesting case study. It is the one major industry from which women (and children over 12 with a ‘leavers certificate’) were not excluded by male unions/legislative provision, perhaps because of its relative ‘domestic’ nature.
Women’s work being theoretically, if not practically, relegated to the home (despite the brief interruption of the First World War) continued into the twentieth century. This does not mean that women did not work, just the opposite in fact. Dolly Wilson points out that, prior to the growth of part-time women workers in the post-war period, as many as 40% of women in Edwardian working-class communities were engaged in petty home-based capitalism.19 Their economic activities included washing, child-minding, and selling homemade food and drink, and were part of ‘the underground economy of sweated labour, casual and home-work’.20
Even though in the post-war period the work done by working-class women has become more visible, as some moved away from the shadow economy and into the recognised labour market, they are not typically recognised as working-class workers. This is despite active participation in the labour movement, and multiple high profile industrial disputes, the most famous of which are probably the successful 1968 Ford sewing machinists strike that lead to the 1970 Equal Pay Act, and the unsuccessful Grunwick dispute in 1976.
Although, as Johnathan Moss notes, women ‘presented themselves on the labour market on different terms to men’, they have still indisputably been an active part of the working-class and organised labour since 1945. Any conception of the working-class that does not take into account that not only have working-class women always worked, but also that they have often experienced distinct and more arduous conditions of employment, is counter-productive to recognising the many facets of working-class existence and experiences. 21 Moss also argues that labour force participation in this period ‘was often experienced or viewed as claim to political citizenship’. Just as engaging in industrial disputes proved that working women were political citizens, it can also be interpreted as demonstrating that women were fully conscious and active members of their class, as this participation highlights that industrial militancy was not just the preserve of men22
The tradition of working-class women working has continued in the twenty-first century, their position in the labour market has become more entrenched, so it is odd that they are often tacitly excluded from the descriptions of ‘traditional’ workers. The improved (though by no means perfect and now worsening) position of working-class women in the labour market is the outcome of an important tradition of struggle. Women are also now more established in the labour movement and are responsible for 57% of Britain’s trade union membership.23Indeed, in the sixties and seventies they accounted disproportionately for the rapid increase in union membership. However, an indication of how far they still have to go is that UNISON, with a membership of 80% women, has only just elected its first female general secretary: Christina McAnea, who was born into a working-class family in Glasgow.
Furthermore, the current pandemic has highlighted the amount of working-class women that are key workers (largely as a result of women being concentrated in frontline industries, such as health, childcare, and education).24 However, the pandemic has also highlighted the precarious nature of female employment as during the first wave of the pandemic, ‘more working class women than men or women in middle-class jobs saw their already shorter weekly hours cut back’.25 Thus, while it is important to recognise that working-class women will often have a different relationship to production than their male counter-parts, they have traditionally been engaged in one form of production or another and their work has, and continues, to be a vital component of working-class self-making.
Location, Location, Location
Situating the traditional working-class exclusively in ‘left behind’ towns in the North, Midlands, and Wales is also historically inaccurate. Firstly, ‘left behind’ areas also exist in the south. Secondly, doing so ignores the material conditions of the working-class located in the cities, which are traditionally as much a part of the working-class as their counterparts in provincial towns or villages. Hobsbawm notes the centrality of cities to the development of the working-class in the late nineteenth century, as they were the site of ‘the rise of large industrial concentrations where none had existed before’.26 This is not to say that the urban working-class were the sole proprietors of their class’ existence, as Hobsbawm also notes that in the same period of substantial urban growth the number of miners more than doubled. Many of these miners would not have lived in cities but in towns and villages.
However, the ‘traditional’ descriptor acknowledges the significance of towns and villages but ignores the importance of cities. This is despite industry being integral to the growth (and in some cases, existence) of cities across Britain. For instance, Middlesbrough housed industry based on iron and later chemicals, Manchester was a centre of cotton merchanting (and surrounded by a ring of cotton producing towns such as Bolton and Bury), Bradford was built on its wool industry, Sheffield and Merthyr Tydfil were founded on the steel industry, Glasgow became synonymous with shipbuilding, while London’s East End, prior to the expansion of its financial services, was a heartland for manual labour – also centred around shipping.
An important difference between the contemporary working-class and that of the nineteenth century, is that whereas in the nineteenth century many villages, towns, and cities provided opportunities for work (though the work itself was dangerous and physically exhausting), now it is predominantly cities that house new job-creating industries. As capitalism has developed so too have the types of jobs available to working-class people: delivery work, call centres, and fast food have all become typical working-class jobs. Although these jobs will be substantially different from those available to the working-class in the nineteenth century, the conditions of employment are increasingly similar as a result of the growth of the gig economy and erosion of organised labour.27
However, a key difference is that much of this labour, particularly that which is contracted and administered via online platforms, is fragmented. This is helping to create a more atomised working-class, whose work is less social. The consequence of less social processes of production is that this class may find it harder to exercise its power as a collective because the process of ‘socialisation’, that Marx described as an integral part of capitalism and vital to class organising, are absent or minimal.28 In this sense contemporary labour strongly contrasts with the collective industrial processes of the nineteenth century. Although this is not true for all the working-class jobs provided by the modern economy, it is potentially significant for the future of this class.29 The deciding factor as to whether there are different relationships between workers will be the extent to which workers exercise their agency and organise themselves. Only time will tell whether workers will form new social relations with each other and create a collective identity in spite of, indeed in opposition to, the nature of their work. This will be one of the key determinants of the working-class’ future in the twenty-first century.
Regardless of the future alienating and de-socialising effects of working-class work what is evident is that cities are the centre of most working-class people’s relations to production and consumption. Perhaps it is this that is the problem, and why the term TWC strikes such a chord in the ‘left behind’ towns. It is these places that are characterised by the forced deindustrialisation of the mining and manufacturing sector. Consequently, they have undergone significant demographic changes in the last thirty years, not least in youth emigration, which also indicates that the experiences of class will vary considerably depending on age.30 In contrast to cities, these towns are not occupied by multigenerational working-class communities, but by their ghosts. They are places where, borrowing once more from Marx, the memory of life prior to de-industrialisation and the ‘tradition’ of dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living as a misremembered past.
The collective sense of longing is even more important when it is considered what many of these towns have now become. They have not become centres of the lumpen proletariat. Instead, capitalism has filled the vacuum and made use of the surplus labour power.31 The larger mining towns (not the pit villages) and ex-industrial centres now house many new industries, for instances delivery work, warehouses, and call centres.32 As noted above, this work is not as innately social as the ‘traditional’ work of mining and the factory production line, and does not give the town the same sense of identity and community. Thus, the current state of working-class existence in former industrial/mining communities is not part of a tradition. It is a consequence of the death of tradition. The class was permanently estranged from the work that defined it.
One hundred percent Anglo-Saxon, with perhaps just a dash of Viking
Just as women are ignored, and the experience of the urban working-class marginalised, so too is the role of racialised immigrants in shaping working-class history. While the issue of race and racialisation is inexorably tied to migration, it is not only relevant to migration and is not unique to the history of the working-class. The aim of this section is primarily to focus on the impact of migration as the arrival of additional, often racialised, labour that has, through its own organisation and self-making, been integral to the development of the English working-class. The English working-class has never been completely British and has always benefited from substantial immigration. Satnam Virdee points out that the ‘English working class in particular was a heterogeneous, multi-ethnic formation from the moment of its inception’.33 However, many common formulations of the TWC present it as not just white, but as something distinctly British, the understanding of which seems to be based on a historically grotesque conception of the Anglo-Saxon.
The integration of immigrants into the working-class, and society, has never been seamless and they have often been faced with racialised discrimination by local communities and the state. The struggles of this racialised labour has defined the contours of the working-class in the face of oppression from society and the state. A reality once more underscored by the recent expulsion of members of the Windrush Generation in 2018.
The struggle of minorities to be granted the same rights as part of British society and the English working-class, is one of the fundamental processes of the dialectic of working-class self-making. For, on one side, there are groups and forces that attempt to force migrant workers out of the working-class or the labour movement, on the other side there are the migrant workers who, with help from supporters and capitalism’s need for labour power, fight to root themselves in the English working-class. Virdee argues that it was precisely because of their status as racialised outsiders, and their need to assert collective action, that migrants, ranging from Irish Catholics in the nineteenth century to Asian immigrants in the late twentieth century, were able to effect significant changes in the condition of the working-class.
An example of this is the process, set-out by Virdee, in which he details how black members of the working-class, and their struggles, became an important part of the considerations of organised labour in the nineteen seventies and resulted in the articulation of a distinct anti-racist class consciousness in many of the industrial disputes of that decade.34 Although I think that Virdee’s presentation of industrial disputes is too schematic, and the apparent ideological left wing surge in organised labour is overstated, he irrefutably demonstrates that the agency of racialised labour, and its relations to the wider labour movement, are intrinsic components of the self-making of the English working-class.
Racialised immigrant labour influencing the lives of the wider working-class is also evident at the start of this class’ existence. When the working-class came into existence in the nineteenth century much of this immigration was Irish, to the extent that Thompson describes Irish immigration as integral to the making of the English-Working Class.35 Virdee, demonstrates how the Catholic Irish were quickly racialised. This occurred not just in the nineteenth century but also in the twentieth during the inter-war period.36 Despite being racialised and discriminated against, Irish Catholics were fundamental in negotiating with the Admiralty for improvements in pay and conditions and heavily involved in the corresponding societies which provided ‘artisans, shopkeepers, mechanics and general labourers’ – the heroes of Thompson’s incipient working-class – with substantial support.
One of the main charges brought against immigrant labour, and one that fuels its racialisation, is that it is unskilled and drives down the price of indigenous labour, therefore acting as a reserve army of labour and impoverishing the class as a whole. This is often said to have had a particular grievous impact on the TWC.37 This claim is spurious. Thompson notes that in the nineteenth century Irish labour was not particularly cheaper than its English counterpart.38 In fact the Irish often functioned as the ‘unskilled’ labour compared to the ‘skilled’ labour of their English counterparts, in this sense the presence of the Irish may actually have increased the price of English labour, and at the very least allowed English labour to take on what were often more favourable jobs.39 Equally, the substantial immigration from Europe and former British colonies in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War would not have driven down wages overall because there was an acute labour shortage, and the British state was actively recruiting immigrant labour. What is more likely to have happened is that non-white labour will have been artificially devalued. Furthermore, the immigration that was a result of Britain’s membership of the European Union is equally unlikely to have depressed incomes.40
The tensions and racialisation that arise over immigrant labour demonstrate how a class is never completely homogenous and the experiences of its members will vary. However, migrant labour is undisputable part of the English working-class. While some of its experiences will be distinct from other fractions within this class, in practice it does not exist as an isolated group and labours within the same relationships of production. The work performed by the English working-class has depended on the work of immigrants. Any actual traditional working-class must not only take account of the existence of immigration but also of the efforts and struggles of these immigrants to establish their legitimacy and right to exist and work in British society.
Women, immigrants, and the urban working-class chart a course through the history of the English working-class and their tradition of workers’ organisation, as an expression of a class moving from – in the words of Marx – a class in itself to a class for itself.
Conclusion
The above analysis has attempted to provide a brief, and by no means conclusive, sketch of the historic aspects of the self-formation of a multi-faceted class. There are many people who will feel a genuine connection to the conception of the TWC. However, I think that were this term applied with greater historical accuracy rather more people would feel represented by it. Working-class history has affected, and been affected by, women, immigrants, and members of the urban working-class, just as much as any other members of this class. It is important to recognise these traditions, and the various relationships that they entail. Equally, it should be recognised that the rhetorical potency of the term TWC exists precisely because so many working-class traditions have been lost or removed from history. It is an expression of a sensation of loss and awareness of declining material conditions. While the term is often a misremembering of the past it needs to be understood that this misremembering has precisely been enabled by the silencing of historical actors and the destruction of working-class institutions to the extent that large segments of the working-class have been alienated from their own history.
Only by recognising and celebrating these elided historical experiences can any accurate notion of tradition begin to be constructed. This is of paramount importance. If the working-class is to thrive and reverse the decline of its material conditions, then an accurate version of its history needs to be formulated and understood. The past, or rather how people interpret and understand the past, is a powerful source of inspiration and motor for change. In order to affect the right sort of change, and one that is beneficial to this class, it is vital to ensure that an accurate rendition of the past is celebrated.
I have not included any significant analyses of working-class organisations and movements, for instance the trade union and co-operative movements, because the focus of this article was intended to be the categories of individuals, not institutions, that the TWC excludes. As it happens, I do think that the TWC excludes working-class organisations and their integral impact on working-class history. For instance, successes such as the Mechanics’ Institutes of the nineteenth century, the establishment of Ruskin and Plater, and the original iteration of History Workshop are too often forgotten despite them being evidence of the working-class’ capacity for educational self-improvement.
Equally, the fundamental impact that the trade union movement has had on the relations of production cannot be understated. Achievements of sick pay, the eight-hour day, the weekend, paid holiday and parental leave, the minimum wage, protection from discrimination, and equal pay have fundamentally transformed many workers’ relationship with capital. Furthermore, the creation of the Labour Party, born out of the Labour Representation Committee, as a direct product of the trade union movement has also fundamentally shaped the course of British history. While the Labour Party, much like organised labour, cannot claim to have found universal acclaim with the English working-class, the impact its presence has had on this group is as undeniable as is the fact that it would not exist without organised labour. All the above institutions are part of a working-class tradition of establishing movements and organisations for the sake of class advancement and enrichment, but they are seldom incorporated into the popular understanding of working-class tradition.
Just as it is obligatory to investigate the notion of tradition and identify what it includes and excludes, it is just as necessary to recognise what has genuinely changed. For instance, the demographic changes in many of Britain’s communities, the new industries provided by contemporary capitalism, and the declining conditions of employment. These changes lend credence to the superficial construction of the TWC. Classes are in flux and constantly subjected to processes of making and un-making.41 As it stands, the conception of ‘tradition’ does not tell us anything about this class’ relationship to production or other classes, nor does it provide genuine insights into the relationships that constitute the inner-workings of this class. Whereas if we focus on what it omits, we can see that women and immigrants typically experience different relations to production and other members of this class, the same is true of the working-class who reside in cities and are exposed to the latest of capitalism’s machinations.
Meanwhile, the decline of organised labour means that the working-class is now in a more exploitative relationship with capital. Without these qualifications the TWC is a hollow shell of a concept, which does not allow us to compare an accurate construction of the past with the present. The TWC is what Benedict Anderson described as an imagined community. It is a relatively recent invention that makes claims to historical heritage, and its rhetorical potency severely contrasts its intellectual poverty.42
Image "Working Class Hero (Revisited)" byFouquier ॐ is licensed underCC BY-NC-ND 2.0
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Schwartz, Laura, 2019, Karl Marx and Domestic Servants: A historical overview of Marx's and Marxist thinking on domestic workers, reproductive labour and class struggle, available at:https://www.academia.edu/42641042/Karl_Marx_and_Domestic_Servants_A_historical_overview_of_Marxs_and_Marxist_thinking_on_domestic_workers_reproductive_labour_and_class_struggle
Smith, Dave 2020, ‘Cheap migrant labour is a myth and so is its effect on productivity’, The Times, available at:https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/cheap-migrant-labour-is-a-myth-and-so-is-its-effect-on-productivity-hv3s8vt8x
Thompson, Edward 1964, The Making of the English Working Class, New York: Pantheon Books.
Thorpe, Keir 2000, 'Rendering the Strike Innocuous': The British Government's Response to Industrial Disputes in Essential Industries, 1953-55’, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 35, No. 4 (Oct. 2000), pp.577-600.
Toscano, Alberto and Woodcock, Jamie 2015, “Spectres of Marxism: A Comment on Mike Savage’s Market Model of Class Difference”, The Sociological Review, 2015, available at:https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1111/1467-954X.12295
Unknown 2019, Trade Union Membership, UK 1995-2019: Statistical Bulletin, available at: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/887740/Trade-union-membership-2019-statistical-bulletin.pdf
Virdee, Satnam, ‘A Marxist Critique of Black Radical Theories of Trade-union Racism’, Sociology, August 2000, Vol. 34, No. 3 (August 2000), pp. 545-565
Virdee, Satnam, Racism, Class and the Racialized Outsider, (London: Red Globe Press, 2014)
Vogel, Lise, Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory, (Boston: Leiden, 2013)
Walker, Martin 2012, “The Origins and Development of the Mechanics’ Institute Movement 1824 – 1890 and the Beginnings of Further Education”, Teaching in Lifelong Learning 4(1), available at: https://www.teachinginlifelonglearning.org.uk/article/id/136/
Wilson, Dolly 2006, ‘A New Look at the Affluent Worker: The Good Working Mother in Post-War Britain’, Twentieth Century British History, 2006, vol.17(2), pp.206-229.
- 1. Some of the examples of the term from across the political spectrum are: Labour is no Longer the party of the traditional working-class, available at: https://www.economist.com/bagehots-notebook/2018/07/06/labour-is-no-longer-the-party-of-the-traditional-working-class (accessed 15.01.2021) To win back the working class we must ditch identity politics, available at: https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/f/win-back-working-class-we-must-ditch-identity-politics (accessed 15.01.2021) Robert Ford and Matthew Goodwin, ‘Different Class? UKIP’s Social Base and Political Impact: A Reply to Evans and Mellon’, Parliamentary Affairs, Volume 69, Issue 2, April 2016, pp. 480–491. Owen Jones, There’s a fight over working-class voters. Labour must not lose it, available at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/oct/06/fight-working-class-voters-labour (accessed 15.01.2021) Craig Berry, The proletariat problem: general election 2017 and the class politics of Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn, available at: http://speri.dept.shef.ac.uk/2017/07/05/the-proletariat-problem-general-election-2017-and-the-class-politics-of-theresa-may-and-jeremy-corbyn/ (accessed 15.01.2021).
- 2. Although the trials and tribulations of the British Labour Party do not have a monopoly on class discourse in the UK they still have a considerable effect its contours.
- 3. Paul Embry, ‘Why does the Left sneer at the traditional working class?’ UnHerd, available at: https://unherd.com/2019/04/why-does-the-left-sneer-at-the-traditional-working-class/, (accessed, 21.02.2021). I disagree with much of Embry’s construction of class here, but he deserves acknowledgement for putting more thought into the term ‘traditional working-class’ than most.
- 4. Mike Savage, Fiona Devine, Niall Cunningham, Mark Taylor, Yaojun Li, Johs. Hjellbrekke, Brigitte Le Roux, Sam Friedman, and Andrew Miles, ‘A New Model of Social Class? Findings from the BBC’s Great British Class Survey Experiment’, Sociology, 47(2), 2013, pp. 219-250, p.240.
- 5. Eric Hobsbawm, ‘Inventing Traditions’, in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds) The Invention of Tradition, pp.1-15, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p.1.
- 6. Ibid, p.10.
- 7. Satnam Virdee, ‘A Marxist Critique of Black Radical Theories of Trade-union Racism’, Sociology, August 2000, Vol. 34, No. 3 (August 2000), pp. 545-565, p.560.
- 8. Marc Mulholland, Marx, the Proletariat, and the “Will to Socialism”’, in Critique, 37:3, pp. 319-341. Michael Simpkins’ What’s My Motivation? provides an insight into the life of an actor in a precarious labour market selling their labour power for very little.
- 9. Eric Hobsbawm, ‘The Labour Aristocracy in Nineteenth-century Britain’, in Labouring Men: Studies in the History of Labour, (London: Weidenfeld, 1964), p. 272.
- 10. Tom Bottomore, Laurence Harris, V.G. Kiernan, and Ralph Miliband (eds.), A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, (Oxford: Blackwell 1994), p. 296.
- 11. Richard Price, ‘Review: the Segmentation of Work and the Labour Aristocracy’, Labour / Le Travail Vol. 17 (Spring, 1986), pp. 267-272.
- 12. E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Pantheon Books, 1964) p.9.
- 13. A demonstration of the difficulties with identifying class membership detached from productive forces is the Guardian’s North of England Editor claiming an artisanal pizza shop owner and retired nurse unquestionably part of the same class: available at https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/jul/08/imagine-the-state-wed-be-in-if-corbyn-had-been-in-charge-the-view-from-the-red-wall (accessed 15.01.2020)
- 14. Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (London: Chatto and Windus, 1957) p.16. One of the main flaws with Hoggart’s presentation of the working-class family is that it is built on the assumption of marriage; that it does not account for single parent families, even though they are an equally legitimate form of family.
- 15. Lise Vogel, Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory, (Boston: Leiden, 2013), pp. 152-154, Alessandra Mezzadri, ‘On the value of social reproduction: Informal labour, the majority world and the need for inclusive theories and politics’, Radical Philosophy 2.04, (Spring 2019), pp.33-41, and, Silvia Federici, ‘Social reproduction theory: History, issues and present challenges’, Radical Philosophy 2.04, (Spring 2019), pp. 55-57.
- 16. While the debate around whether social reproduction is productive or unproductive labour is interesting from a theoretical standpoint, I think that it does not particularly matter. The fundamental conditioning factor of the relationships that create the material reality of social reproduction is that the labour itself is unpaid and built on institutionalised social norms and is these factors that have resulted in it not being regarded as proper work and not adequately compensated/supported by the state/employers.
- 17. While the debate around whether social reproduction is productive or unproductive labour is interesting from a theoretical standpoint, I think that it does not particularly matter. The fundamental conditioning factor of the relationships that create the material reality of social reproduction is that the labour itself is unpaid and built on institutionalised social norms and is these factors that have resulted in it not being regarded as proper work and not adequately compensated/supported by the state/employers.
- 18. Ibid, p.1.
- 19. Dolly Wilson, ‘A New Look at the Affluent Worker: The Good Working Mother in Post-War Britain’, Twentieth Century British History, 2006, vol.17(2), pp.206-229, p.222.
- 20. Ibid.
- 21. Jonathan Moss, Women, workplace protest and political identity in England, 1968-85 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019), p.165.
- 22. Ibid, p.164.
- 23. Trade Union Membership, UK 1995-2019: Statistical Bulletin, https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/887740/Trade-union-membership-2019-statistical-bulletin.pdf (accessed 16.01.2021). This report states that women account for 3.9 million of British trade unionism’s 6.44 million members. (3.9/6.44)*100 = 57.
- 24. Clare Lyonette, and Tracey Warren, Are we all in this together? Working class women are carrying the work burden of the pandemic, available at: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/covid19/2020/11/12/are-we-all-in-this-together-working-class-women-are-carrying-the-work-burden-of-the-pandemic/
- 25. Ibid.
- 26. Eric Hobsbawm, Worlds of Labour, (London: George Weidenfeld and Nicolson Limited 1984), p.197.
- 27. Richard Partington, ‘Gig economy in Britain doubles, accounting for 4.7 million workers’, The Guardian, available at: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jun/28/gig-economy-in-britain-doubles-accounting-for-47-million-workers (accessed 17.01.2021).
- 28. Paul Adler, ‘Marx, Socialisation and Labour Process Theory: A Rejoinder’, in Organisation Studies, Volume: 28, Issue:9, pp.1387-1394, p.1387.
- 29. Industries such as fast food are still part of a socialised labour process. A good example of this is McStrike. On 18 November 2019 McDonalds workers in South London commenced industrial action the latest in a series of global industrial action by fast food workers. The main demands of the strike were pay rise to £15 an hour and secure terms of employment in the form of a forty-hour week. A significant enable of this labour militancy was that the relevant workplaces were located relatively close together and that the labour itself was still a collective process.
- 30. Jonn Elledge, ‘How demographics explains why northern seats are turning Tory’, available at: https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/staggers/2019/12/how-demographics-explains-why-northern-seats-are-turning-tory (accessed: 18.01.2021). Young people having to leave home and travel to the city looking for work is in fact one of the great traditions of working-class existence as economic necessity drives internal migration.
- 31. By lumpenproletariat I mean a group of people who exist outside typical relations of production, as is detailed here: Nicholas Thoburn, ‘Difference in Marx: the lumpenproletariat and the proletarian unnamable’ Economy and Society Volume 31 Number 3 August 2002: 434–460, pp. 443-444.
- 32. Christina Beatty, Stephen Forhergill, and Anthony Gore, The state of the coalfields 2019: Economic and social conditions in the former coalfields of England, Scotland and Wales, pp.21-25, available at: https://shura.shu.ac.uk/25272/1/state-of-the-coalfields-2019.pdf, (accessed: 09.02.2021)
- 33. Satnam Virdee, Racism, Class and the Racialized Outsider, (London: Red Globe Press, 2014) p. 162.
- 34. Satnam Virdee, ‘A Marxist Critique of Black Radical Theories of Trade-union Racism’, Sociology, August 2000, Vol. 34, No. 3 (August 2000),
- 35. The Making of the English Working Class, pp.429-437.
- 36. Racism, Class and The Racialized Outsider, pp.14-17, and Tony Murray, ‘No reason to doubt No Irish, no blacks signs’, The Guardian: available at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/28/no-reason-to-doubt-no-irish-no-blacks-signs (accessed 18.01.2021).
- 37. I think that quite often distinctions of skilled vs unskilled (particularly now when skill is normally qualified by a level of qualification) are misleading and often a means of trying to control the supply and direction of labour, this also complicates the applicability of the Labour Theory of Value. A more useful way of deciding the value of labour would perhaps be to examine the use value of the products of specific labour power, though this would of course be subjective. The Making of the English Working Class, pp.433.
- 38. The Making of the English Working Class, pp.433.
- 39. A modern equivalent of this can be found in the predominantly immigrant labour that works as picking jobs in the UK’s farmer’s industry. For most indigenous workers, working as a food picker does not offer better pay to working in a supermarket or café, though for many migrant workers it offers better pay than many of the jobs in their previous country. Thus, the job of food picking is done by a majority migrant workforce, enabling the indigenous labour to seek marginally better/more enjoyable jobs, and that food prices can stay relatively low. Sarah O’Connor ‘“Lazy” Britons aren’t the reason for the UK migrant workforce’, Financial Times, available at: https://www.ft.com/content/eb5e3bd7-c8bf-4934-b60e-0e49152183a5 (accessed 11.02.2021).
- 40. Dave Smith, ‘Cheap migrant labour is a myth and so is its effect on productivity’, The Times, available at: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/cheap-migrant-labour-is-a-myth-and-so-is-its-effect-on-productivity-hv3s8vt8x (accessed 18.01.2021).
- 41. Alberto Toscano and Jamie Woodcock, “Spectres of Marxism: A Comment on Mike Savage’s Market Model of Class Difference”, The Sociological Review, 2015, available at: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1111/1467-954X.12295, (accessed 19.01.2020).
- 42. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, (London: Verso 2006), p.5.
On Violence: A Reply to Ugo Palheta’s ‘Fascism, Fascisation, Antifascism’
David Renton
Thanks are owed to Historical Materialism for publishing Palheta’s piece, which is wide-ranging and compelling.1 I have learned from it, and I am sure other readers feel the same. His article begins from an instinct that we have to explain the crisis of the present, rather than merely repeat models developed from the past. Like him, I despair of the tendency of the left to assume that, because some writer in the distant past said that fascism must take certain forms, so it is necessary to read those forms into the present, even where they do not exist. In what follows, I will take issue with one part of Palheta’s argument in particular, his fifteenth thesis – on violence. My criticisms are narrow and formulated in a spirit of gratitude to him for his contribution.
“It is undeniable,” writes Palheta, “that extra-state violence, in the form of mass paramilitary organisations, has played an important (though probably overestimated) role in the rise of fascists.” It seems to me that, from this point onwards, there are two processes of historical revision in his work. First, Palheta reduces the utility of violence to fascism, seeing it as something which contributed only prior to the fascist take-over of power. There is no reason to make that assumption. If other writers were to follow him, we would miss what most contemporaries saw as the distinctive acts of fascism: the willingness of states to employ violence (war) against the other states around them, and to carry out racial genocide in Europe. “Other reactionary movements” have employed violence, Palheta states. This is true, but only to an extent. Since 1918, however, Italy and Germany are the only countries from what we used to call the First World to have employed war against other states, or genocide against citizens, in the global core.2
Second, Palheta raises the possibility of a fascism without armed bands, or without violence at all. “But neither the constitution of armed bands, nor even the use of political violence, is the hallmark of fascism, either as a movement or as a regime.” If it is possible to imagine a successor to Hitler or Mussolini without violence, and who will not reduce Europe or the world to genocide or war, then in what meaningful sense would that successor still be fascist? If they were going to be a fascism not in discontinuity with ordinary centre-right government3 but in continuity with it, then why have anti-fascism? For, 70 years of political campaigning has been premised on the assumption that fascism marked a change from normal politics to something worse.
The most sophisticated attempt to explain how fascism operated, as a series of political strategies employing violence in different ways as fascism evolved, belongs to the historian of French fascism Robert Paxton and his model of the five stages of fascism.4 In their initial stage, fascists won recruits through mass demonstrations, through military training and attacks on their opponents. In the second stage, when fascist parties were contending for power, they needed to challenge the state’s monopoly of violence. Yet fascism, at this stage, also typically sought to govern in an alliance with other right-wing parties, hence there was a tension between the interests of the party and of its militia. On taking power, both fascist parties partially relegated their militia structures and promised to rely on the existing structures of the state to punish any remaining left-wing opponents. As fascism became more radical in office, a much more ambitious kind of violence became available to it: the use of military power in war, to create new forms of colonial rule, and to enact genocide against fascism’s racial enemies. In this model, which applies just as well to both Italy and Germany, as well as to the fascist parties which never captured power, fascism is distinguished by violence and it is recurring, however the form in which violence is expressed in changes in fascist tactics at each stage.
There is a reason why Paxton’s model of fascism has been cited from liberals through to Marxists and by everyone in between. It makes sense of the very high levels of political violence in Italy prior to Mussolini’s seizure of power, the use of torture and murder in the consolidation of that regime (the murder of Matteotti), etc. Compared to it, Palheta’s insistence that “The most visible dimension of classical fascism, its extra-state militias, are, in fact, an element subordinate to the strategy of the fascist leaderships, who use them tactically,” is much thinner. Yes, of course, the fascist militia were used selectively: the political leaders would on occasion distance themselves from them.5 After all, there was more than one potential source of violence available to them. Ultimately, the German and Italian armies were a greater prize to Hitler or Mussolini than the fascist bands. But that it no way invalidates the general point that fascism without political violence is like Marxism without the working class.
Palheta notes that neo-fascist parties (including the Rassemblement National), have given up the aspiration to build a militia. He gives five reasons for that process. He knows the politics of the RN far better than I do and from this distance, his explanations seem compelling. He is certainly correct, for example, to refer to a long historical process of the delegitimisation of political violence, which is both a product of the fascist experience, and was a major obstacle to an earlier generation post-war fascist parties (such as the National Front in Britain) who rapidly lost popularity after they became publicly associated with street violence.6
What he does not go on to ask is whether that choice, the deliberate disavowal of the possibility of violence, or its concomitants (a willingness to accept ordinary electoral conflict as the sole legitimate terrain of political competition), have any effect on the neo-fascist party. For, once a tradition steeped in violence and the rejection of ordinary politics, gives up the possibility of taking power through a coup and insists on its “normality”, the customary path is for that politics to become more moderate and ultimately indistinguishable from the parties around it.
This was a question I posed in my book The New Authoritarians.7 In the past century, there were repeated examples of parties which had at one time challenged the state monopoly of violence, only to relinquish that challenge. Such parties have tended to become more moderate over time. Those parties have been seen on both the left (the Communists) and the right (the Italian MSI/AN). Are there reasons to expect that the Rassemblement National will follow a different trajectory in power?
This question is a difficult one. I can think of affirmative answers relating not so much to the RN specifically, but to the period we are in, and the part played within the far right by fascism, which causes such politics to recur.8 No doubt, other writers can come up with better answers, more rooted in the history of that particular formation. But the question cannot be evaded by writing about Mussolini or Hitler in a way which makes their politics unrecognisable.
Palheta’s writing is shaped not merely by the experience of the RN in opposition, but also of Emmanuel Macron in power. His category of “neo-fascism” is broad enough to take in both “fascism” (the RN as an outsider party) and “fascisation” (En Marche in office). It seems to me that there are other political theories which might make just as well explain the latter: a form of leadership which charges itself as an emergency regime necessary to prevent what would otherwise be the rise of fascism, and uses the threat of the far right to justify its own form of authoritarian rule has a very obvious counterpart in history, not in fascisation (i.e. Third Period Comintern fantasies about the authoritarianism concealed in liberalism and social democracy),9 but in the failed “preventative” dictatorships of Papen and von Schleicher in Germany.10
While we are in a period advantageous to many different styles of politics which are comfortable with forms of semi-authoritarian rule, the balance of forces varies from country to country. The example of France is relatively untypical, in at least three ways: in the political hegemony of a party of fascist origin on the right; in the irreconcilability of that party to any offer of coalition with a more moderate partner, and in the measures adopted by the political system to find an alternative to what otherwise seems inevitable government by that party.
By contrast, in Britain, a more militant right-wing politics has grown by capturing the main right-wing party, or in America, a Republican President reached the limits of what was possible without summoning an army of his supporters into the street. The deaths in the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 show that, as distant as political violence has seemed for most of the past four years, in circumstances of authoritarian advance that option can return.11
In conclusion, I agree with Palheta in his project of treating the authoritarian politics of the present as a coherent whole. I think, most importantly, that he is right to urge anti-fascists to turn their attention from the street groups to the people holding power. But, if the word “neofascism” is to have real meaning – then that is itself a warning that France may well be set on a path of mass suffering, from which she can only be saved by concerted political action. If that prediction is true, then all of us need to develop a more sophisticated explanation of how the seeming absence of violence in the present forms the mere prelude to its ubiquity in the near future.
- 1. https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/blog/fascism-fascisation-antifascism
- 2. Palheta’s seventeenth thesis rightly addresses the relationship between fascism and the legacy of colonialism.
- 3. Plainly, ordinary capitalist government of the centre-right or centre-left already assumes a degree of violence – in British terms, the attack on the miners, the Falklands war, or the Iraq war. To speak of fascism or even neo-fascism requires more than this.
- 4. R.O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (London: Penguin, 2004).
- 5. One example of such disassociation, Hitler’s distancing himself from his party’s use of murder in early 1930s Berlin, is at the core of B. C. Hett, Crossing Hitler: The Man Who Put the Nazis on the Witness Stand (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
- 6. This is one of the themes of D. Renton, Never Again: Rock Against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League 1976-1982 (London: Routledge, 2018).
- 7. London: Pluto, 2019.
- 8. D. Renton, 'Will Fascism Return to the Far Right?', Jacobin, 10 February 2019.
- 9. For this genre and its insistence that even after 1933 social democracy remained Communism’s first antagonist, R. Palme Dutt, Fascism and Social Revolution: A Study of the Economics and Politics of the Extreme Stages of Capitalism in Decay (London: Martin Lawrence, 1934), p. 112.
- 10. And behind them, chapter 7 of Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.
- 11. For a case study of radicalisation among Trump’s supporters, C. Sheets, 'The Radicalization of Kevin Greeson,' ProPublica, 15 January 2021.
National Identity and Pre-Capitalist Europe
Mike Haynes and Ilya Afanaysev discuss the problems of understanding ‘national’ identity in pre-capitalist Europe
This discussion that follows began as a response to a challenge posted on Facebook which then developed into a set of private exchanges that seem worth making more widely available. The issue is how to understand the idea of national identity in the period before the rise of capitalism.
Mike Haynes is an historian who was a written widely on the modern history of capitalism and especially Russia.1He is currently trying to draw his ideas together for a book on the history of capitalism built around the role of states. Ilya Afanasyev is a medievalist historian, researching the concepts of nationhood and their discontents; more recently, he has been working on ‘dynasty’ as a ‘modern’ historical and political concept arising in the context of capitalist and colonialist hegemony.2
The exchange began with Haynes summarising some ideas and posing them as challenge for comment. Afanasyev was the only person to focus on the question of identity in pre-capitalist Europe. The exchanges developed from there.
Mike Haynes: I began by wanting to write 2-3 pages on the history of the idea of the nation and its link to the idea of the ‘state’ for a chapter of a book I have been working on. I have now got 30-40,000 words! I am an economic and social historian – essentially of the period after 1750. I am familiar with outlines of earlier history but I have never given it enough attention.
My argument, at the moment, (broadly following the ‘modernist approach) is that the idea of nation and national identity begins to emerge in Netherlands, British Isles, France from sixteenth century. It turns into nationalism in the late eighteenth century and the national model is then generalised. In Russia (as elsewhere), at least at the top, the modern idea of a Russian nation develops very quickly from say 1800 to 1830s but it takes much longer to sink roots and never does so as consistently as some western ideas of nation.
This is not at all new but I am trying to work through it so I can see the mechanisms more clearly.3 I have yet to achieve originality and probably never well but clarity would be a good gain. Below is a crude diagram that I am working with at the moment.
Structural Elements Explaining Development of National Identities and lack of them in Medieval Times
If this is correct, then much of the earlier history that is built around the idea of the ‘nation-state’ or even the ‘proto-nation-state’ is wrong. The trick of national history writing for the most advanced ‘nation-states’ is to give the impression that these ‘countries’ have always existed rather than being modern creations. Something as simple as pushing back the naming areas of land and the peoples on them further than is really justified creates a false sense of continuity.
Any comments on the following would be helpful.
1. Often (always?) it seems names start as geographical expressions loosely linked to peoples and given to them by more powerful outsiders. They are then later appropriated internally and imposed back.
2. Britain derives from the Roman name for the province it ruled as part of the Roman Empire. We have no idea what the peoples of the islands called themselves or the lands they were on. Similarly, during the Roman era, we do not know what concepts survived in non-Latin vernaculars.
3. The name England refers to name later Latin writers gave to the land of the AnglesIn the mid fifth century AD a series of population movements began of peoples from areas of modern-day Denmark and Germany to the land of modern-day England. We call these peoples the Angles, Jutes and Saxons etc. We do not know
(a) What these people called themselves?
(b) What varieties of languages they spoke?
(c) The degree of mutual intelligibility?
It is said that 85% of the words they spoke do not appear in modern English and the remaining 15% will form a much smaller part of the huge vocabulary of English today so any continuity is very limited.
4. In the 6th century, when Latin speaking missionaries arrived their concepts and naming became the high-status ones. By the 7th century some Latin speakers in ‘Europe’ were naming a still vague geo-political space – ‘Anglia’. The name England therefore derives from Latin and it may have been a Latinised version of one of the several names used by these peoples.
5. People in ‘Anglo-Saxon’ England spoke a variety of vernacular languages – we tend to know the higher status ones because these were embodied in writing. England is therefore an ‘Anglo-Saxon’ appropriation and domestication from Latin. Things became more complex from 789AD with the beginnings of Viking invasions. They controlled large parts of ‘England’ (Danelaw) this led to new shifts via ‘Old Norse’ (words like ado, anger, berserk, billow, blunder, cake, fog).
6. ‘Anglia/ England’ ceased to be a geographical expression when some degree of feudal unity was imposed from the late 10th century. But this was a loose top down unity.
7. It was disrupted by the Norman Conquest which created another top down ‘Anglo-Norman’ polity for several centuries so that the concept of England still remains a problem because of internal disunity and unifying elements across the channel.
Ilya Afanasyev: I think, your number 7 is a good example of the potential pitfalls in this kind of argumentation. 'Anglo-Norman' is much more of a retrospective historiographical projection for post-1066 England than 'English'. There is, I believe, one twelfth-century text that does use 'Anglo-Norman' as a term, but it is an idiosyncratic exception, while the post-Conquest kings did rule as 'the king of the English', and 'England' (in Latin, French, or English) was the most common term to describe the land they claim in the British Isles. In terms of 'unity' of this polity (whatever that means), the Norman conquest didn't disrupt it, but, instead, intensified it (while of course creating the situation of overlapping power structures with the continent).
My point – and I can't emphasise this more – is not to argue for some real continuity of 'England' or essential 'Englishness' or any such methodologically and politically nationalist nonsense. It's really about the fact that this kind of modernist critique of national narratives doesn't go far enough. Even if there is one 'name', what does it prove really? Nothing but the fact that subsequent state systems successfully reproduced a certain hegemonic nomenclature. The continuity of a name should not be taken as a proof of the country's continuous existence in the first place – this leads straight into methodological nationalism, just with a shorter projected history of a given nation (but why should that matter?).
As a side note, in my experience, more and more nationalists (at least, nationalist intellectuals) are very comfortable with modernist view of 'the nation', so disproving some simplified version of the nineteenth-century mythologies of national continuity seems to miss the point in any case.
Mike Haynes: On the issue of Anglo-Norman – yes. I think the problem is that people talk as if there was a self-evident English nation-state after 1066. If they recognise the cross-channel nature of the polity (I prefer that word at the moment) then they treat the ‘Norman’/‘French’ bits as an appendage. But we lack a language to capture what existed.
For example, John Gillingham is a historian who stresses the cross channel Anglo-Norman/ Angevin polity but he cannot escape using national terms. Thus, he writes that after 1066 ‘the English resented becoming an oppressed minority in their own country … England received not just a new royal family but also a new ruling class, a new culture and language. Probably no other conquest in European history has had such disastrous consequences for the defeated’.4 Here, England appears as the Cheshire cat – almost but not quite there. It is this problem that I am trying to work through.
Ilya Afanasyev: As for that nationhood theme, well, a problem with Gillingham (and many other historians who started writing about 'ethnicity' and 'national identity' in the middle ages from 1980s, and especially in the 1990s and 2000s) is that they want to have it both ways (at times, I think, without even seeing a contradiction).
On the one hand, they want to distinguish themselves from earlier scholarship – traditional nationalist historiography that allegedly took 'nations' for granted (typical nineteenth-century national meta-narratives, origins & continuity stories and all of that). To do that, they use some rhetoric along broadly constructivist lines: more empirical types (like Gillingham) would simply say that 'nationality' is 'subjective', 'a matter of identification, etc', not a given, more theory-oriented types would talk about 'social constructs' etc.
On the other hand, they still write about 'peoples' and 'countries' as if they are bounded entities that do exist out-there-in-the-world in some kind of objectively measurable way and can even be presented as agents of continuous historical process: 'the English' did this and that, etc. The passage from Gillingham you quoted is very typical of this tendency.
My impression is that this, in general, corresponds to the centrist confusion around 'the nation', this kind of centrist attempt to square the circle of treating nationalism as bad but still accepting the nation-state as legit. Now, of course this still leaves us with the question of what to do with all the references to 'peoples', 'nations', 'the English', 'the French' etc, etc. in medieval texts and documents (in that sense, I would disagree with the thesis that the idea of the nation develops in the sixteenth century). I don't think that the modernist response to this – either these words meant something totally different or even if they meant the same or something similar, they didn't matter – is satisfactory.
It's not even a question of empirical evidence (albeit one can go on and on about all sorts of evidence, including non-literary evidence for the social and political uses of 'national', 'ethnic' terms in the middle ages) – for me it's a political question: my impression is that this kind of view (modernist view, I mean), somewhat ironically, takes many of modern nationalism's claims at face value (e.g. 'the nation' is a new type of state – radically different from 'feudal/dynastic monarchy', nation is horizontal, democratic, nation is about equal citizenship, etc., etc.).
So, I have spent quite a few years thinking about how we can make sense of medieval evidence in such a way that neither dismisses it as irrelevant nor ‘gives in’ in any way to any kind of essentialist, primordialist, methodologically nationalist nonsense. Not sure, I am fully happy with the results, but if you're interested, I can send you the introduction to my thesis which tries to sort out this debate. Meanwhile, there is a very good recent book by Geraldine Heng on the invention of 'race' in the European Middle Ages, which in many ways pursues a similar project to what I've been trying to do, but focusing more on 'race' than on 'nation'.5 Perhaps, this may be helpful. I hope Heng’s book will have some influence beyond medieval studies.
And to reply to your comment elsewhere – yes, indeed, it was largely in conversations with Russian nationalists that I discovered that quite a few of them actually like modernism (and even Anderson in particular!) a lot. First, I found that surprising, but then I thought that this makes some sense. These were of course 'intellectuals'. It would be interesting to know if this kind of appropriation of modernism exists among nationalist ideologues elsewhere.
Mike Haynes: Many thanks I would love a copy of the thesis. At the moment, I am trying to put some numbers to the structural issues I am discussing. I am using the work of van Zanden who does neo-classical economic history but is still interesting.6 I am reading some medieval stuff in English but cannot get too sucked into it as other things to do in terms of later period. I am interested at the moment by impact of Walter Scott and music in St. Petersburg and court in 1820s and 1820s in terms of crystallising an idea of nation in Russia. I have some court memoirs in translation which are fascinating in terms of asides which show how quickly ideas moved – the paradox of the international opening spaces for the national.
One of the big things about Scottish nationalism today is its urban/ modern focus. Dressing up in invented kilts is for more for tourists. There is a similar element to Ireland. Better to be a Dublin focused Celtic tiger than in the countryside running around imagining links to a mythical past. So, in that sense, some similarity to Russian nationalism perhaps?
Ilya Afanasyev Yes, it is indeed very interesting how much various forms of international structures can enable 'the national'. In some ways, we can see the same with medieval Church – a pan-European (and beyond) structure, it did spread ethnicising discourses throughout polities that were part of it. It was the same with medieval universities – another fairly international/interregional institution that was a hotbed for 'national' stereotypes and rhetorics. Anyhow, I am attaching the introduction to my thesis – with two banal caveats: a) it's unpublished work and b) due to the constraints of the genre it of course contains lots of random technical stuff. But perhaps the general framework may be of some distant interest. Meanwhile, may I ask you what your project is about in general? It looks very interesting.
Mike Haynes. That is great – just opened it and I see you are engaging with the claims of the Welsh medieval historian R.R. Davies who I have devoted several hours to today.7 I thought it very poor but in a fascinating way. I see there is also Gillingham and some stuff I know but haven't read as well as stuff I do not know.
Ilya Afanasyev: Yes, Davies and Gillingham actually form a rather curious pair of key scholars in this subfield: the latter parading some kind or hegemonic but ironic 'Englishness', the former – subaltern 'Welshness'.
Mike Haynes: My aim (see below) is with the attempt to create master narratives of nation, state etc that exist to an extent outside history (or crudely the feudalism-capitalism divide). This does not mean that elements of these did not pre-date capitalism but it does mean that we cannot read them through a master narrative. I would argue that we need to understand how such elements as existed were reconstituted and built up from the late fifteenth century onwards as feudalism gave way to capitalism. Material conditions shifted to enable concepts to be developed and acquire an intensified significance and be generalised across large populations in a way that was not possible before. In one sense this aspect is not so different from Anderson but although print capitalism was involved so was a lot else.
On the bigger question of what am I doing? Well, I am now more or less retired but spent my career at a low status UK university teaching lots of different things. I had no real opportunity to specialise. Russia for a long time was a key interest but there have been lots of other things too. [Many of my pieces are on Research Gate] I was asked to collect some published essays in a book for Brill with an introduction but I foolishly said no. Instead, I would write a book drawing it altogether. Sadly, I am way behind and finishing it is a long way ahead but I do hope to do so. And I am continually writing stuff – some of which gets published.
So what is the theme? When it comes to Russia, I am a state capitalist. There was a genuine revolution in 1917 but it degenerates into state capitalism by first Five Year Plan. I have argued this in books and papers on Russia but my interest has always been much wider.
Most of the left think that state capitalism is a stupid idea – a special theory for a special place – Stalin’s Russia.
But, from the very start, the idea of state capitalism seemed to me to be a key element of capitalism (my master narrative) everywhere and this is what I am trying to write about. and to produce the historical scaffolding for. But to do this I have to slice through key debates you are familiar with. So
- Can we analyse capitalism nationally or do we have to see it as a global system? If a global system – how do the national and the international relate to one another. Answer they are mutually constituted.
- In particular is the inter-state system part of capitalism or something that exists side by side with it. Answer it is part of capitalism. (So Benedict Anderson is wrong here, for example.)
- What is the state – is it simply a supporter of capital or an active force? Answer it is an active force.
- What about free labour versus coercion? Answer those who reduce capitalism to free labour are wrong. I am a big Banaji fan.
- How does economic competition relate to militarised force? Such force is not separate from capitalist competition.
- So how does war relate to capitalism? It is central to it. We can neither ignore it nor argue that it somehow occurs outside of capitalism.
I put these crudely but you will see the ambition and how this underpins some of the things I write or ask questions about – especially about early and late capitalism.
Now, my problem is that I do not want to produce an abstract theory but a concrete historical analysis and a lot of the information is scattered. I am trying to be strong empirically which I am finding very demanding – I feel very lonely on this mission! I keep hitting walls that I need to overcome or – just as often – get led down sideroads which take on a life of their own. I am sure as a historian you can appreciate this. My interest in the medieval issue is only the latest example. I wrote a critique of political Marxism and Tsarist Russia8 which really helped in lots of ways but it took almost a year which, with hindsight, was a bit stupid.
During it, I discovered that, before 1914, Russia was exporting 4 billion eggs a year to the UK. I thought that is extraordinary and I spent several weeks researching this and then got stuck because I could not get hold of a contemporary book.
When I was employed, I had to move on. Now I want ‘to do stuff right’. I hope that this doesn’t sound too stupid. I want to produce a manuscript that has a really powerful empirical dimension – like the Heng book and I am guessing your whole thesis has. Although I have written several books, I feel that I have only achieved the depth I now want in occasional pieces.
I do have to contain my concerns with the medieval period but it would be great to keep in touch as your interests seem wide too.
Ilya Afanasyev: Many thanks for this detailed explanation of your project. This sounds really wonderful and extremely interesting. But, yes, I totally understand how difficult it is to assemble the necessary empirical data for this kind of investigation. In some ways, I'm facing a not so dissimilar problem: I've got quite interested in 'dynasty' – not as a paradigmatic premodern concept/institution (curiously, the word was barely used before the late eighteenth – early nineteenth centuries, and usually in a very different meaning from what we mean by it), but as, on the one hand, a modern conceptual invention (why suddenly 'dynasty' got such purchase as a historical and political concept from the nineteenth century onward?) and, on the other hand, as a specifically early-modern 'political form' – in fact innovative one and directly related to capitalism, ‘primitive accumulation’ and all of that.
But, while it's easier to get data for the first – largely intellectual history/ideology question, I am still not sure how to go about sorting out evidence for the second – political economy/state-form question. I am very interested in the question of 'state capitalism' beyond the debate about the USSR. In fact, we had a little argument with a colleague and comrade about whether Peter I's Russia, for example, should be conceptualised as 'state capitalist'. Is this the kind of direction you're going?
On the medieval aspect, yes, I got it that it's really a side issue for your project, so would only briefly note that I see this slightly differently. My impression is that any state system is actually fairly effective in imposing some form of identification on the 'territory' and population it claims to control; to me this seems like a direct instrument of making both humans and non-human animals, land into something legible for exploitation, extraction, etc. In that sense I see capitalism and the 'modern' interstate-system of so-called nation states as an intensification of earlier dynamics rather than something completely unprecedented. And, more specifically, we do have quite a lot of evidence for this kind of 'ethnicising' language spreading on the ground before the fifteenth century – not least, exactly because people, including commoners, had to deal with state systems and their ideologies (to give just one excellent example based on the very interesting work of my colleague Eliza Hartrich, merchants in Irish towns controlled by the English crown in the late Middle Ages were trying to present themselves as 'English' in order to get urban citizenship because that gave them economic and social rights in both Ireland and in other lands controlled by English kings, especially 'England').
Mike Haynes:Peter the Great and state capitalism – in theory yes, in practice not sure. State capitalism was a part of the rise of capitalism in the west. I am sure it is in Russia in the nineteenth century but the key issue is when does ‘capitalism’ come to be the determining factor. What I take from Banaji is that this is not an issue of the purity of form since forms are always impure but an empirical question of what determines what? 9 And this is another avenue (Petrine Russia) that I haven’t yet worked through I have a small library in my attic but it sadly does not include the translation of Tugan Baranovsky. So I need to know a lot more about serf ‘factories’ and mines etc.10
Ilya Afanasyev: Would you know why they needed all those eggs in the UK, by the way? I guess, it should be for some industrial purposes (some paint?), not for consumption? 11 Yes, see your point about the empirics of the regime initiated (or perhaps intensified) under Peter. I don't know the details myself, unfortunately, but an important question to keep in mind.
Mike Haynes: I am still working on my big project but the section on nation identity has had to more or less go. But I have come across an issue that I want to ask you about. I have just read about the idea of Angelcynn as a term to describe many of the local inhabitants in the late ‘Anglo-Saxon period’. I am reading people like Sarah Foot 1996 who want to make it the basis of English identity. So, for example, she writes, ‘For the year 886 the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle reported that King Alfred had occupied London and that all the English people (all Angelcyn) who were not under the subjection of the Danes, submitted to him’.’12
I am struggling even more with this than later stuff. I wonder what your view is? They keep translating it as English or even England whilst acknowledging its meaning is more about kinship. This just seems to me to be a sleight of hand. Am I wrong?
Ilya Afanasyev: As for Angelcynn, I would say that translating it as 'the English' is not so misleading. Yes, ‘cynn’ refers to kin/family, but kinship metaphors are central to many ethnicising nomenclatures and meta-terms. Most relevantly to this case, we can look at the Latin vocabulary of 'gens' and 'natio' – both words are etymologically connected with 'birth', and 'gens' was often used to denote kinship groups, like lineages, families etc.; so perhaps whoever coined this term was simply thinking of how to say 'gens Anglorum' in Old English. So I guess I would not think that there is any sleight of hand as such if one claims that when tenth- and eleventh-century texts used the word 'Angelcynn' they meant something like 'the English'.
Now, that said, I think there is still often a problem with the historiography that deals with these topics. I mean I haven't reread this stuff for ages, since it's a bit too early for (what used to be) my proper research focus, but I think some of these people seem too keen to jump towards all sorts of teleological and methodologically (if not politically) nationalist conclusions by writing about late Anglo-Saxon England as a 'nation-state' (or even – not uncommonly – 'the first nation-state').
Predictably, I think, one should not take this kind of ideologies expressed in medieval texts at face value and turn them into any kind of objectified reality. This is not to say that by definition 'Englishness' didn't matter to anyone on the ground (quite likely it did). So, in my view, a leftist response to this default national orientation of the mainstream historiography shouldn't be any kind of rigid rejection of the possibility of these categories mattering or even existing at all before so called 'modernity'. Rather, we should be able to understand these phenomena as what they are (and were) – ideological claims, often but not exclusively emanating from 'the state' (albeit Anglo-Saxon England does seem to be a good example of 'the Church' being maybe even more central to the initial formation of an ethnicising discourse and of national categories, like 'the English'). This is to say (at the risk of repeating myself in a convoluted manner), that I think that the weakness of the mainstream historiography is not so much in projecting anachronistic meanings onto the words used in sources (e.g. translating Angelcynn as 'the English'), but in ignoring – unwittingly or not – any gap between these words as discourses/ideology and social reality as a whole, while being only too willing to turn the discourse/ideology of ethnicity/nationhood into the objective existence of 'nation-state' as a thing (a typical reification of course).
Doing that is not only politically problematic (naturalising nations, etc.), it's also not good for research, since by equating ideology and reality one forecloses (or at least obstructs) the main/most important question: what was the effect of ideology? Did it matter on the ground? How? To whom? How it was reproduced? What did this ideology do from a materialist point of view? Etc., etc. Sorry, this may not be a very clear reply, but I hope you see what I mean – the real issue is not so much how one translates Angelcynn, but what one then does with this and other such terms.
Mike Haynes: You have given me a lot to think about as I try to formulate my ideas. The other day I was trying to explain to someone that the famous debate between E.P. Thompson and Perry Anderson was partly about how to do history. Thompson wanted it to be rooted in ‘experience’ while Anderson insisted on theory.13 Thompson was not anti-theory but wanted it to be grounded in something and felt that Anderson did not do that. I want that grounding in my own work but when I move outside of the period and places that I am familiar with it becomes harder. This is why I have enjoyed your attempts to deepen my understanding of something that is unfamiliar to me. In the book I am working on I cannot do justice to these arguments about the period before 1800 let alone the medieval one but I hope that I can emulate the care with which you have considered the issues I have raised.
Image from anonymous (Queen Mary Master) - this file: scan dated 2009, uploaded (without identification of the source) 12 May 2010 by Ann Scott
Public Domain
- 1. Mike Haynes has written widely on the history of modern global capitalism and Russia including Nikolai Bukharin and the Transition from Capitalism to Socialism, London: Croom helm, 1985; Russia Class and Power,1917-2000, London: Bookmarks and more recently Productivity, Newcastle: Agenda, 2020. He has co-edited with Jim Wolfreys, History and Revolution. Refuting Revisionism, London: Verso, 2007.
- 2. Ilya Afanasyev specialises in medieval and early modern history. His PhD was on Nationcraft in Twelfth-Century England. University of Oxford, 2020. He has also published on the notion of ‘dynasty’ and its genealogy as a ‘modern’ political and historical concept: Ilya Afanasyev & Milinda Banerjee. ‘The Modern Invention of ‘Dynasty’: An Introduction’, Global Intellectual History (2020): 1-14.
- 3. The argument put by Haynes here is a merging together of the arguments of Benedict Anderson about the links between national identity and print capitalism and the arguments of those like Ernest Gellner about the central role of the French Revolution and what he saw as modernity in general but which Haynes thinks is of as capitalist modernity. On the importance of Anderson see ‘Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: A Symposium’, Nations and Nationalism, vol. 22 no.4, 2016.
- 4. John Gillingham and Ralph A. Gittings, Medieval Britain. A Very Short Introduction, London: OUP, 1984, p. 2.
- 5. Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.
- 6. Eltjo Buringh and Jan Luiten Van Zanden. ‘Charting the ‘Rise of the West’: Manuscripts and Printed Books in Europe, a long-term Perspective from the Sixth through Eighteenth Centuries’, The Journal of Economic History 69.2 (2009): 409-445. Van Zanden is a leading historian of the Low Countries in fourteenth to eighteenth centuries.
- 7. R.R. Davies, ‘Nations and National Identities in the Middle Ages: An Apologia’, La Revue belge d’Histoire contemporaine, 34 (2004), pp. 567–79;
- 8. See https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/articles/problems-political-marxism-and-its-application-to-russian-question; https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/articles/revisiting-peasant-question-victory-stalinism-and-problem-alternatives
- 9. Jairus Banaji, Theory as history: Essays on modes of production and exploitation. Brill, 2010.
- 10. Mikhail Ivanovich Tugan-Baranovsky, The Russian Factory in the Nineteenth Century, (translated by Arthur Levin), Homewood, Illinois: Richard D. Irwin, Inc. for the American Economic Association, 1970.
- 11. [MH] The eggs appear to have been sold primarily for food. Some were consumed ‘fresh’ and others used in baking. What is fascinating to me is the connection between peasant producers and their hens and the global market.
- 12. Sarah Foot, ‘The Making of Angelcynn: English identity before the Norman Conquest’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 6 (1996): 25-49.
- 13. E.P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays, London: Merlin Press, 1978; Arguments within English Marxism, London: Verso, 1980.
A Thinker’s Imperative
A Review of Ethiopia in Theory: Revolution and Knowledge Production, 1964–2016 by Elleni Centime Zeleke, Haymarket Books 2020
Susan Dianne Brophy
Associate Professor, Department of Sociology & Legal Studies, St Jerome’s University, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
susan.brophy@uwaterloo.ca
Abstract
This review of Ethiopia in Theory retraces author Elleni Centime Zeleke’s dialectical method. Necessary to navigate the full range of what this book offers, it is this approach that allows her to bring the poetic to bear against the programmatic and deliver a transfixing study of knowledge production. Zeleke’s revolutionary critique of revolutionary practice centres Africa as a site of knowledge production, the result of which is a multifaceted account of recent Ethiopian history that offers lessons for all critical thinkers.
Keywords
Ethiopia – state – revolution – knowledge production – social science – immanent critique
Elleni Centime Zeleke, (2020) Ethiopia in Theory: Revolution and Knowledge Production, 1964–2016,Historical Materialism Book Series, Leiden: Brill.
Released under the banner of the Historical Materialism Book Series, Elleni Centime Zeleke’sEthiopia in Theory stakes claims in various streams of Marxist scholarship. While it is the author’s prerogative to let the readers assess for themselves where in Marxist scholarship to situate this book, the signposts are plain to see in its dominant arc and supporting currents. The question then becomes: who is ignoring these signs? I offer this commentary to those who deem the work too niche for their purposes based on the title alone, but who otherwise seek to undertake or understand social change – the presumptive aims of all Marxist scholars. It is precisely because of that impulse to skip the book that you should not: the imperative that Zeleke advances applies most to those who believe themselves least in need of heeding it.
This book displays the best of Marxist scholarship. In the first part of this review, I identify the prevalent Marxist streams and note Zeleke’s contributions to critical areas. In the second part, I deploy a dialectical method that complements Zeleke’s approach, and which allows me to extract the text’s most remarkable elements.
Part I: Situating
The image that first comes to mind in the opening paragraph of Ethiopia in Theory is that of the Angelus Novus, long associated with Walter Benjamin.
Arc
Zeleke’s contribution to Marxist scholarship is a revolutionary critique of revolutionary practice that centres Africa as a site of knowledge production; more precisely, she looks to recent Ethiopian history to draw lessons for all critical thinkers. In the first half of the book, Zeleke studies the writings by leaders of the student movement, gathering evidence of the futility of pursuing revolutionary ends within a social-scientific programme. She is determined to understand the past without letting it dominate the present in the service of an unknowable future, and Benjamin is her reference point for how to approach history without committing the same sins as the student leaders.
In the first chapter she writes: ‘I take seriously Walter Benjamin’s idea that the future is a bit like a medusa – we cannot have an open future if we try to stare into it. It is better to spatialise history: explode the sediments (or here, the tapestry) of the past’ (p. 36). Zeleke elaborates on this in the sixth chapter, explaining how history treated as sediment ripe for purposeful excavation breeds conservatism, evinced by the rush to authenticity as the fount of truthmaking. Be it cultural traditions or revolutionary concepts, Zeleke insists that it is necessary to avoid fixing these abstractions as transhistorical ideals and instead understand ‘their genesis in social practice’ (p. 199). With references to the Frankfurt School throughout this chapter (pp. 188, 199, 249–51), this epistemological turn is anticipated in the subtitle of the book, Revolution and Knowledge Production, which promises a reckoning between the hubris of enlightened rationality and the materially constrained ‘ways of knowing ourselves’ (p. 192). This reckoning takes the form of an immanent critique – which I substantiate in the second part of the review – and shapes her contributions in other currents of Marxist scholarship.
Currents
With Ethiopia in Theory, Zeleke contributes a much-needed update on Marxist approaches to anticolonial studies. Afflicted to varying degrees by a romanticisation of the Non-Aligned Movement and the insidious Eurocentrism of settler-colonial studies, she raises the calibre of scholarship with a sharp historical-materialist eye. Zeleke’s willingness to indulge in the generative force of contradiction allows her to move past simplistic dichotomies such as internal/external, modern/traditional, core/periphery, and scientific/mythological (p. 83), but do so without dissolving the constitutive differences at work. These discreet adjustments are scattered throughout the text, although the best example is her use of the archives.
‘Dealing with African society’s historicity requires more than simply giving an account of what occurred on the continent; it also presupposes a critical delving into western history and the theories that claim to interpret it’ (p. 198). It is in this light that one must interpret both Zeleke’s archival findings and her motivation to undertake archival work in the first instance. More than a repository of artefacts and memories unique to a specific time and place, the journals of the student movement chronicle a dialogue between theory and practice. Provincializing Europe by Dipesh Chakrabarty helps Zeleke explain how the students’ epistemic practices domesticated external influences (p. 203), leaving in their wake journal entries that contain the sediments not only of Ethiopian realities and European ideals, but also of Ethiopian ideals and European realities.
The problematic conflation of ‘anti-colonial answers with post-colonial questions’ (p. 25) is detailed in the first half of the book, where Zeleke studies the archival records to chart the adoption of European conceptions of nation-statehood in the anti-colonial nationalism of the Ethiopian student movement (p. 42). To embrace the nation-state and repurpose it for revolutionary ends, the anti-colonial nationalist exercises a ‘functionalist reading of culture’ (p. 82), a point that Zeleke makes with reference to Partha Chatterjee. With the broader arc of the text in mind, she pushes this assessment further: the students were not merely instrumentalising concepts as an intellectual pose – their adoptive and transformative acts were ‘actually connected to social processes in the world’ (pp. 83–4). Here, Zeleke’s anti-colonial approach shows how ‘becoming’ is variably beset and propelled by the conceptual pillars of developmentalism: state, progress, and modernity.
What is interesting about Zeleke’s contribution on this front is not her exposure of the contingencies of anti-colonial thought, but rather her drive to understand how, why, and to what effect these contingencies are exploited and rationalised. For instance, she notes that in the citizen/urban versus tribal/rural divide that permeates the Ethiopian social, political, and economic landscapes, ‘race is veiled through a discourse of the city as modern or civilised’ (p. 231). The social-scientific rationalisations that simultaneously fetishise Africa (p. 200, n. 42) and champion modernity imbibe these contingencies of anti-colonial thought, which for Zeleke discloses the possibility that ‘state sovereignty is premised on being both anti-colonial and anti-black at the same time’ (p. 231). The terms of knowledge-production thus revealed, Zeleke raises the standards and stakes of studies situated at the crossroads of racism, colonialism, and capitalism, which shapes her contribution to the ‘transition debates’.
For readers puzzled by the complexity of this book’s content, its main point is made obvious in the form. Zeleke centres Africa and the specifics of the Ethiopian student movement as the site of knowledge production and decentres that ‘lively debate’ on the ‘world-historical transition from feudalism to the capitalist mode of production’ (p. 209). Although this book is very much a commentary on transitions to capitalism, anyone exhausted by Eurocentrism might have a fleeting sense of relief upon realising that the name ‘Brenner’ does not appear until page 209.
The arc of the book – emphasising the contingencies of social processes throughout history – leads Zeleke to reject the assumed linearity of the transition to capitalism. Instead, she draws from the debates, specifically from the contributions of Jairus Banaji and Henry Bernstein, an understanding that ‘customary social relations and the commodification of the peasant economy are not intrinsically opposed’, an opening she welcomes because of its potential for renewed inquiry (p. 222). While questioning the historical and explanatory necessity of a transhistorical concept of labour, she ponders whether it is possible to adhere to a vision of social progress while pursuing ‘a non-Eurocentric history of capitalist development’ (p. 243). She tests this hypothesis in her execution of an immanent critique, effectively situating herself, the student revolutionaries, and the tiller within a non-Eurocentric history of capitalism while also articulating a thinker’s imperative: the obligation to progress in the face of failure.
Part II: Moving
Ethiopia in Theory does not dwell for long on the common ground that exists between the author and the subjects of the text (p. 10); Zeleke’s ‘ghosts of the past’ are ‘not the same ones’ (p. 26) as the bygone student-movement leaders turned latter-day academics and politicians (p. 95). How she narrates this tension between familiarity and estrangement seems to anticipate the raw nerves of her readers, who are likely to have varied yet ardent ideas about this recent history. Zeleke’s attentiveness to this possibility may be why she appears willing to undertake this critique on ‘their’ (i.e. students’, academics’, and politicians’) terms, as if to quell the anxiety that inhibits immersion. Uninterested in passing judgement on the quality of the social-scientific outputs of the students and academics (pp. 11, 79, 98), she also agrees to take them at their word when the students claim to be ‘scientists’ (p. 98). Whether this overture is an act of condescension or concession is debatable. Either way, it is a trademark of immanent critique. As the methodological spine that connects what otherwise might be read as disparate theses, Zeleke’s execution of this immanent critique is brilliant – in part because of, not despite, its fallibilities.
The tripartite structure of this portion of the review (Intent, Failure, and Obligation) is inspired by a quote from the end of the book: ‘Obligation for the critical theorist must come from what is immanent to human knowledge – which is a social self that struggles to shape society and as such is aware of the relation between rational intention and its (failed) realisation’ (p. 252). Organised to reflect the progressive logic of dialectical analysis, this is an attempt to follow the signposts that Zeleke provides her readers to assist their interpretation of her work. This structure is also an apt way to draw knowledge from the quote itself, which I return to at the end.
Intent
There is a hint of exasperation throughout Ethiopia in Theory. With her attention to historical detail propelled by a sense that an explanation is overdue, Zeleke records educational trajectories (pp. 100–1) and discloses pen names (see for example: pp. 106, 110, 122, 123), tracking the rising and fading tendencies of the student movement during the last decade of Haile Selassie’s rule and in the midst of a cresting cold war. As she peels back the layers, Zeleke confiscates the reasons that excuse evasiveness among student-movement leaders and academics-turned-politicians, leaving only the demand for an answer to a simple question: What do you have to say for yourself?
That ideas-generating cadres have so little to say about the ideas themselves is at once a specific and a general problem. To keep in-check the suggestion that this is an incomparable shortcoming endemic to a given group of students, Zeleke moves nimbly across time, space, and analytical levels: from the local to the regional to the global and back; from the scramble to the Derg to the 1995 constitution and back; from the thesis to the antithesis to the synthesis and back. Fluidity of this degree is more than a methodological feat; it is also a commentary. To study the student movement is to understand it as in movement, which is to say that it is a study of the relation between theory and practice. Immediately this framing reveals what is at stake, calling forth charged ideas about how feudalism becomes capitalism, how peasants become proletarians, how the ancient state becomes a modern state, how colonial ideas become anti-colonial ideas, and how students become bureaucrats. That these ‘becomings’ could ever be thought of as settled – replete with fixed beginnings, endings, and meanings – is both absurd and assumed. How to ‘[tell] a story of how to tell the story of revolution in the Third World’ must then be, in a way, unbecoming (p. 1).
Zeleke communicates the book’s objectives with a measured dissection of the rationalised conformism that underpins social and professional politesse. By ‘measured’ I mean that instead of leading to an easy dismissal of supposedly co-opted minds, Zeleke’s suspicion of the students’ programmatic distortions of revolutionary ideas compels her to scrutinise how the students themselves are implicated in the solidifying of a hegemonic discourse. Reminiscent of the mode of inquiry common among the leading thinkers of the Frankfurt School, she does not gesture toward the need for more a comprehensive critique nor does she describe the criteria of such an undertaking – she performs it. Words become deeds.
The fluidity of her analysis speaks to an antipathy toward fixedness or closure. Revolutionary ideas born of the intercourse between the external and the internal (p. 10), once shielded from interrogation, become blunt, ahistorical instruments, or ‘usable past’ (p. 147). The making of useful history is the methodology of social-science data collection: aggregation without synthesis; a situation without situatedness; a glib answer without a good question (p. 23). The truth of the utility of history – which developmentalists will mistake for the truth of history as such – hangs on the scientific replicability of this methodology. The objectivity that authorises this history as truth is sanctioned through self-referential processes that transform contingency into necessity.
In narrating the contested history of uncontested ideas, Zeleke finds that it is the recourse to formalism that invites this closure (pp. 155, 239), offering false assurances of a knowable future (p. 148). The conceit involved in making a claim on the future is a measure of the deceit involved in, at the same time, declaring one’s allegiance to ‘revolutionary thought’ (p. 243). Instead of disputing the students’ insistence that they are ‘scientists’, therefore, Zeleke’s critique zeroes in on the linearity of scientific methodology as such. Whereas replicability of outcomes is a hallmark of scientific imperviousness (p. 13), she questions these processes of truthmaking as impossible claims on the knowability of the future, which comes at the expense of the past and in the service of the present.
With recourse to an Amharic ballad called ‘Tizita’ (Memory) as well as two novels, How to Read the Air by Dinaw Mengestu andBeneath the Lion’s Gaze by Maaza Mengiste, Zeleke develops a frame of reference for what it means to relate to history outside of social-scientific capture. The past is made present in one’s memory as a longing: that loss is its own experiential content and feeling is its immediate form (p. 23). Loss is not something that can be vanquished but realising the ‘ethical presence of ghostly absence’ invites the possibility of freedom (pp. 34–5). The undecipherability of the past results in its absolute mystification when it is robbed of its situatedness or relation to immanent human activity. It is critical theory that helps Zeleke hone the ability to translate memory into human knowledge (p. 13).
Dispossession tends to be the common theme across books grappling with the legacies of colonialism. But Zeleke writes about possession, specifically, what it means to be possessed by ‘ghostly absence’ (p. 35). Gone are the teleological pretensions of a knowable or even an inevitable future; gone too are cherished ways of understanding the past (p. 32). Faced with the reality of the unknowable future, the subterranean theme of this book is Zeleke’s quest for a method of remembering that is truthful in its aims and limits but that does not produce truth-claims on the past. While she avoids judgements on whether the students were good or bad Marxists, she brings into focus the imperatives of critical thought. In the process, she is tasking us all to think better, which is to do better. Her story is also our journey, compelling the readers who become implicated by their own interpretative acts.
Failure
Zeleke finds in the student journals ‘a profound sense that Ethiopia is not coeval with the rest of world’ (p. 102). The very contingencies that were the conditions of possibility for the student movement were seized upon, and in the journals’ pages the seeds for the 1974 rebellion were sown: modernisation was fated (p. 102), all that was necessary was ‘a clear-headed programme of social transformation’ (p. 109). The journals were venues for pronouncements and denouncements alike, where commitments to ‘revolutionary science’ transformed into intransigence (p. 92), then to wariness toward deviationists (p. 140), and eventually to an engendering of martial resolutions (pp. 91–2). Meanwhile, the gap between the programmatic impulses of the students and the needs of everyday people remained (p. 146).
The journal Challenge is, for Zeleke, evidence of an educated class that becomes overtaken with concerns about its own place and regeneration (p. 109), rather than with an interrogation of the idea of modernisation as such. For this first generation of self-conscious modernists (p. 146), incrementalism as reasonable lapsed into stagism as inevitable, which enclosed Ethiopia in a procrustean (i.e. European) developmentalist trajectory (p. 243). The programme of transformation included institutional mechanisms to address the national question, policies that in practice meant denying pathways to meaningful political engagement to those deemed not sufficiently anti-feudalist. The national question was answered not through radical democracy as unfettered self-determination, but by the selective recognition of cultural differences that also functioned to flatten these differences (pp. 141, 136). As the fragmentation of landholdings presaged the fragmentation of class (pp. 142, 218), the extant mode of production remained while the class structure changed (p. 142), and rebellion became difficult to distinguish from retrenchment (p. 95).
The failure, so to speak, of the students-turned-academics/politicians is their inattentiveness to that gap between their programme and actual needs. Exemplary in this regard is the 2002 survey included in the report, ‘Land Tenure and Agriculture: Development in Ethiopia’. A set of uniform questions were posed that assumed that respondents had in mind the same understanding of, inter alia, ‘private property or freehold’ (p. 157). Skewed questions were paired with a limited number of permissible responses, in some cases only a yes or no option, the data from which sufficing as a testimonial ‘that farmers are rational actors’ (p. 158). This outcome supports Zeleke’s earlier claim that, ‘For the social scientist, fortune-telling comes easily, since we have all become used to modelling the future as path-dependent’ (p. 38). To doubt such tactics amounts to a type of heresy: rejection of the scientific method is an affront to nature and reason, not to mention a pre-determined future the progression of which is both desirable and inevitable (p. 157).
For Zeleke, this social-scientific method reveals a penchant for self-validation that has little relation to reality and ripens as a ‘refus[al] to examine the form itself’ (p. 238). Under the weight of this ossification of thought, old questions persisted well into the 2010s, such as, ‘How then can we give political expression to the needs of ordinary farmers throughout the country?’ Zeleke’s point in all of this is that the region ‘desperately needs new questions’ (p. 174), and while her own approach provides such an opening, it must overcome two paradoxes to do so.
One paradox that runs through the first half of text is whether to take certain claims at face value. I have already referenced her decision to leave uncontested the students’ ‘self-description of themselves as “modern” and “scientific” thinkers’ (p. 98); what I did not note is a prior instance where she decries authors in the secondary literature for taking certain claims ‘at their word’ (p. 61). While the selective application of this special consideration may cause the reader to question the integrity of the methodological framing, the paradox is rectified by bringing two additional qualifiers into view. First, Zeleke takes the students’ self-description at face value only as a means of proving its absurdity; in other words, by taking it seriously and testing its limits, she shows that it should be questioned. Second, given the aim of taking the students’ self-description seriously as a means of submitting it to interrogation, the argument not to take the other claimants ‘at their word’ is consistent with her broader critical approach.
Another paradox has to do with Zeleke’s treatment of the ‘state’. In the middle portion of the text, the author subjects her readers to at least seven different typologies of state: military, authoritarian, revolutionary, modern, nation, quasi-, and ancient. This is paradoxical because Zeleke criticises others for their lack of conceptual clarity (p. 74), not least the students in their journal articles (p. 55). Once again, this paradox can be defused if understood as an offshoot of how she undertakes the immanent critique. Against the programmatic ‘formal definitions’ of the students, Zeleke offers no fixed definition herself, but follows the students’ arguments in such a way that lays waste to their supposedly tidy definition of state (p. 155). Formalism, she shows, is not synonymous with conceptual clarity in practice.
The overall effectiveness of this critical approach, however, may be undermined by a failure in the book’s structure. Zeleke claims that ‘African studies has been going through a crisis’ for the last fifty years (p. 192). Arguably, many among those she might consider most in need of this critical intervention may not read the second part of the book, where the ethical argument for this mode of interrogation culminates. Yet even if that is the case, it also proves Zeleke’s point: devotees to the programmatic approach cannot abide the unflinching accountability that she demands, and not reading the second part is an act of self-indictment. This structural ‘failure’ is the brilliance of her immanent critique.
Obligation
The evidentiary case against positivism concludes at the end of the first part, and the theoretical argument for a critical approach makes up the second. ‘I try not to fall prey to a method that invites an endless play of meaning’ (p. 15), Zeleke explains in the book’s introduction, preparing the reader for an eventual ethical rapprochement. For her, it is not about the objective processes that lead to truthmaking nor is it a rejection of truth as such; instead, it is in the act of ‘truth-seeking’ that there is potential to bridge objectivism and relativism (p. 33).
As much as Zeleke indulges in the thematic of mystification – with references to haunting and ghosts – it is neither as an empty signifier nor an absolute state. The mystification itself must always be understood as contingent (p. 243), and in this respect is a reminder that while knowledge is always historical and partial (p. 246) it is also irreducible to human causality (p. 201). One difficulty that results is the problem of constructing an argument for obligation without resorting to normativity born of assumed necessity.
Aware of this hazard, Zeleke develops a theory of knowledge based on memoir. As an experience of the past ‘in the key of’ the present (pp. 26, 143), a memoir is the feeling (as form) of loss (as content). This deeply human experience escapes facile categorisation, and by extension, usurpation in the name of a knowable future. If unthinking productivity is the domain of ‘silent compulsion’ in capitalism,
To push these overlapping spatial and temporal considerations further, it is worth exploring the ethical parameters that guide professional conservators or restorers. As temporary stewards of someone else’s creation, they have an obligation to truthful representation that they can never attain but to which they are beholden. Their intervention must be reversible and detectable, stipulations that make it impossible for them to claim the original vision as their own, discourage deceitful mimicry, and cement the contingency of their interventions in relation to the future.
Nineteenth-century social and art critic, John Ruskin, wrote of impossible permanence and the ‘lie’ of restoration: ‘Its evil day must come at last; but let it come declaredly and openly, and let no dishonouring and false substitute deprive it of the funeral offices of memory’.
Ruskin was one of the earliest adopters of photography for the purposes of documenting decaying architecture. On its utility he wrote in 1846: ‘It is certainly the most marvellous invention of the century; given us, I think, just in time to save some evidence from the great public of wreckers’.
The singular photograph can produce a relation of absolute mystification, but Zeleke and Cherinet do not pretend that history can be captured as a singularity. ‘[I]n these photos old and new dialogue with each other; the past is no longer silent, and any sense of a seamless transition between past and present is interrupted’, explains Zeleke, expressed even more succinctly when she describes the images of Addis Ababa as representing an ‘older modernity’ (pp. 187–8). Most radically, these images show the people in motion, and it is their movement that gives meaning to the images: ‘The everyday life of the uprooted continues: women still cook and prepare food; herders’ animals linger amidst new condominium-style housing developments’ (p. 187). At this stage it struck me that at no point in the book does Zeleke purport to speak for the people – a posture and tactic too commonly adopted by leftists, and often done instead of the labour of a trenchant (self-)critique. It is not until the reader sees the people in situ that it becomes possible to comprehend at a deeper level how the tiller haunts the student movement. Once again, Zeleke does not describe the critical thinker’s obligation as a social relation, she performs it.
In Ethiopia in Theory, Zeleke exposes programmatic thinking as dehumanising, trapped in the impossible campaign to achieve the unrealisable. Acknowledgement of the impossibility of the identification between subject and object is the source of the critical thinker’s obligation. In practice, the obligation is to question every attempt at closing the gap between the subject and the object, be that through the ignorance of false objectivity or the treachery of restoration. To paraphrase and extend Zeleke’s conclusion, we are all social selves that labour to shape society; the point for critical theorists is not to do right by our failed realisations but be obliged to labour as truth-seekers.
References
Benjamin, Walter 1968, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, pp. 253–64, New York: Schocken Books.
Davis, Alan 2015, ‘Technology’, in The Cambridge Companion to John Ruskin, edited by Francis O’Gorman, pp. 170–86, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, <https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781107294936.013>.
Donham, Donald L. 1999, Marxist Modern: An Ethnographic History of the Ethiopian Revolution, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Financial Times 2016, ‘Taking Down Rhodes’s Statue Would Be A Futile Gesture’, 13 January, available at: <https://www.ft.com/content/9abc8066-b91c-11e5-b151-8e15c9a029fb>.
Halliday, Fred and Maxine Molyneux 1981, The Ethiopian Revolution, London: New Left Books.
Horst, Ian Scott 2020, Like Ho Chi Minh! Like Che Guevara! The Revolutionary Left in Ethiopia, 1969–1979, Paris: Foreign Languages Press.
Lamarque, Peter 2016, ‘Reflections on the Ethics and Aesthetics of Restoration and Conservation’, The British Journal of Aesthetics, 56, 3: 281–99, <https://doi.org/10.1093/aesthj/ayw041>.
Marx, Karl 1977, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Volume One, translated by Ben Fowkes, New York: Vintage Books.
Ruskin, John 2009, The Stones of Venice, Volume II, available at: <https://www.gutenberg.org/files/30755/30755-h/30755-h.htm>, accessed 4 July 2020.
Ruskin, John 2011, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, available at: <https://www.gutenberg.org/files/35898/35898-h/35898-h.htm>, accessed 4 July 2020.
Zeleke, Elleni Centime 2020, Ethiopia in Theory: Revolution and Knowledge Production, 1964–2016,Historical Materialism Book Series, Leiden: Brill.
Fascism, Fascisation, Antifascism
Ugo Palheta
All over the world, from the United States to Brazil and India, Italy and Hungary, the question of fascism has returned to the forefront. Not just because of the advance – or electoral victories – of far-right organisations, but also because of undeniable authoritarian thrusts and accelerating policies of destruction of workers’ rights, coupled with the rise of identitarian nationalisms and processes of radicalisation and legitimisation of racism.
In recent years, this dynamic has been particularly visible in France: as witness the hardening of police and judicial repression (against migrants, immigrant neighbourhoods and social mobilisations), the systematic nature (and impunity) of police violence and the inability of the state to even acknowledge its existence, or again the media and political mainstreaming of Islamophobia even at the highest political level, as seen in the current pseudo-debate on ‘separatism’.
Ugo Palheta, author of La Possibilité du fascisme (La Découverte, 2018), offers elements for reflection on fascism (past and present), on processes of fascisation and on the antifascism that is needed, in the hope that this may contribute to a wider understanding of present and future battles.
1 – On fascism
Fascism can be classically defined as an ideology, a movement and a regime.
It designates above all a political project for the ‘regeneration’ of an imaginary community – generally the nation1 – involving a vast operation of purification, in other words, the destruction of everything that, from the fascist point of view, is seen as hindering its phantasmagorical homogeneity, impeding its chimerical unity, depriving it of its imaginary essence and dissolving its profound identity.
As a movement, fascism grows and gains a wide audience by presenting itself as a force capable of challenging ‘the system’ as well as re-establishing ‘law and order’. It is this deeply contradictory dimension of reactionary revolt, an explosive mixture of false subversion and ultra-conservatism, which allows it to seduce social strata whose aspirations and interests are fundamentally antagonistic.
When fascism succeeds in conquering power and becoming a regime (or more precisely a state of exception), it always tends to perpetuate the social order – despite its ‘anti-systemic’ and sometimes even ‘revolutionary’ pretensions.
This definition allows us to establish a continuity between historical fascism, that of the inter-war period, and what will be called here neo-fascism, that is to say, the fascism of our time. As we shall go on to see, asserting this continuity does not imply blindness to differences in context.
2 - Crisis of hegemony (1)
If its rise requires the background of a structural crisis of capitalism, economic instability, popular frustrations, deepening social antagonisms (class, race and gender) and identity panic, fascism is only on the agenda when the political crisis reaches such a level of intensity that it becomes insurmountable within the framework of established forms of political domination, in other words, when it is no longer possible for the ruling class to guarantee the stability of the social and political order by the ordinary means associated with liberal democracy and a simple renewal of its political personnel.
This is what Gramsci called a crisis of hegemony (or ‘organic crisis’), the central component of which is the growing inability of the bourgeoisie to impose its political domination through the fabrication of majority consent to the order of things, i.e. without a significant increase in the degree of physical coercion. In so far as the fundamental element characterising this crisis is not the impetuous rise of popular struggles, let alone an uprising that creates deep fissures within the capitalist state, this type of political crisis cannot be characterised as a revolutionary crisis, even if the crisis of hegemony can, under certain conditions, lead to a situation of a revolutionary or pre-revolutionary type.
This inability on the part of the bourgeoisie proceeds, in particular, from a weakening of the links between representatives and represented, or more precisely, of the mediations between political power and citizens. In the case of neo-fascism, this weakening results in the decline of traditional mass organisations (political parties, trade unions, voluntary associations), without which ‘civil society’ is little more than an electoral slogan (think of the famous ‘figures from civil society’), encourages the atomisation of individuals and thus condemns them to impotence, making them available for new political affects, new forms of enlistment and new modes of action. Yet, this weakening, which makes the formation of mass militias largely superfluous for neo-fascists, is precisely the product of bourgeois policies and the social crisis they unfailingly engender.
3 - Crisis of hegemony (2)
In the case of the fascism of our time (neo-fascism), it is clearly the cumulative effects of the policies carried out since the 1980s in the framework of ‘neoliberalism’, the response of the Western bourgeoisies to the revolutionary upsurge of 1968 and after, which led everywhere – at uneven rates depending on the country – to more or less acute forms of political crisis (increasing rates of abstention, gradual erosion or sudden collapse of ruling parties, etc.), creating the conditions for a fascist dynamic.
By launching an offensive against the organised workers’ movement, and methodically breaking all the foundations of the post-war ‘social compromise’, which depended on a certain relationship between classes (a relatively weakened bourgeoisie and an organised and mobilised working class), the ruling class became progressively incapable of building a composite and hegemonic social bloc. To this must be added the very strong instability of the world economy and the difficulties encountered by national economies, which deeply and durably weaken the credit of ruling classes among their respective populations, and the confidence of these in the economic system.
4 - Crisis of hegemony (3)
To the extent that the neoliberal offensive has made it more difficult to mobilise in the workplace, particularly in the form of strike action, weakening trade unions and increasing precariousness, this disaffection increasingly tends to be expressed elsewhere and in different forms:
– a growing electoral abstention everywhere (though sometimes less so when a particular election happens to be more polarised), reaching levels often never seen before;
– the decline, either gradual or sharp, of many of the dominant institutional parties (or the emergence of new movements and figures within them, such as the Tea Party and Trump in the case of the Republican Party in the United States);
–the emergence of new political movements or the rise of formerly marginal forces;
– the emergence of social movements developing outside traditional frameworks, i.e. essentially outside the organised labour movement (which does not mean without any link to the political Left and trade unions).
In some national contexts, neo-fascists manage to insert themselves into broad social movements (Brazil) or generate mass mobilisations themselves (India); their ideas may also permeate certain fringes of these movements. However, this is generally not enough for neo-fascist organisations to become militant mass movements, at least at this stage, and extra-parliamentary struggles tend more towards ideas of social and political emancipation (anti-capitalism, anti-racism, feminism, etc.) than towards neo-fascism. Although they lack strategic cohesion and a common political horizon, sometimes even unified demands, these mobilisations generally point towards the objective of a break with the social order and the practical possibility of an emancipatory advance.
In every case, the political order is profoundly destabilised. Yet it is clearly in this type of situation that fascist movements can appear – to different social groups and for contradictory reasons – as both a basically electoral response (at this stage at least) to the decline of the hegemonic capacity of the dominant classes and an alternative to the traditional political game.
5 - Crisis of the alternative
Contrary to popular belief (in part of the Left), fascism is not just a desperate response of the bourgeoisie to an imminent revolutionary threat, but the expression of a crisis of the alternative to the existing order and a defeat of counter-hegemonic forces. While it is true that fascists mobilise fear (real or simulated) of the Left and of social movements, it is rather 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), that allows the far Right to appear as a political alternative and win the adhesion of very diverse social groups.
In the present situation, as in the inter-war period, confronting the danger of fascism implies not only defensive struggles against authoritarian hardening, anti-migration policies, the development of racist ideas, etc., but also (and more profoundly) that the subaltern – exploited and oppressed – manage to unite politically around a project of rupture with the social order and seize the opportunity presented by the crisis of hegemony.
6 - The two moments of the fascist dynamic
In the first stage of its accumulation of forces, fascism seeks to give a subversive turn to its propaganda and present itself as a revolt against the existing order. It proceeds by challenging the traditional political representatives of both the dominant classes (the Right) and the dominated classes (the Left), all supposedly guilty of contributing to the demographic and cultural disintegration of the ‘nation’ (conceived in a phantasmagorical way as a more or less immutable essence). The Right is alleged to favour ‘globalism from above’ (to use Marine Le Pen’s words), that of ‘cosmopolitan’ or ‘stateless’ finance (with the anti-Semitic overtones that such expressions inevitably carry), while the Left supposedly fuels ‘globalism from below’, that of migrants and racial minorities (with the whole range of the far Right’s traditional and inherent xenophobia).
By making the ‘nation’ the solution to all ills (economic crisis, unemployment, ‘insecurity’, etc., being invariably attributed to what is considered foreign, especially everything related to immigration), fascism claims to be an ‘anti-systemic’ force and a ‘third way’: neither right nor left, neither capitalism nor socialism. The bankruptcy of the Right and the betrayals of the Left give credit to the fascist ideal of a dissolution of political cleavages and social antagonisms in a ‘nation’ at last ‘regenerated’ because politically unified (i.e. in reality under the control of fascists), ideologically unanimous (i.e. deprived of the means of publicly expressing any form of protest), and ethno-racially ‘purified’ (i.e. rid of groups considered intrinsically ‘allogenic’ and ‘unassimilable’, ‘inferior’ but ‘dangerous’).
In a second phase, however, when what could be called its ‘plebeian’ or ‘anti-bourgeois’ moment has passed (a character that fascism never totally renounces, at least in discourse, which is one of its specificities), fascist leaders seek to form an alliance with representatives of the bourgeoisie – usually through the mediation of bourgeois political parties or leaders – to seal their access to power and use the state for their own benefit (for political purposes but also for personal enrichment, as all fascist experiences have shown and as legal verdicts against figures of the far Right regularly illustrate), while promising capital the destruction of all opposition. Nothing remains of the initial claims to a ‘third way’, since what fascism proposes is precisely to make capitalism work under a regime of tyranny.
7 - Fascism and the crisis of relations of oppression
The crisis of the social order also presents itself as a crisis of relations of oppression, a particularly acute dimension in the case of contemporary fascism (neo-fascism). The perpetuation of white domination and the oppression of women and gender minorities is indeed destabilised and even endangered by the rise on a global scale (although very unevenly from country to country) of anti-racist, feminist and LGBTQI movements. By organising collectively, by revolting respectively against the racist and hetero-patriarchal order, by speaking with their own voice, non-whites, women and gender minorities are increasingly constituting themselves as autonomous political subjects (which in no way prevents divisions, especially if a political force capable of unifying subaltern groups is lacking).
This process inevitably arouses a reaction in terms of racist and masculinist radicalisations, which take various forms and directions but find their full political coherence in the fascist project. This project combines the delirious representation of relations of domination as being already reversed (with the various mythologies of ‘Jewish domination’, ‘the great replacement’, ‘reverse colonisation’, ‘anti-white racism’, ‘the feminisation of society’, etc.) with the fanatical desire of oppressor groups to maintain their domination whatever the cost.
While far-right extremists are everywhere opposed to feminist movements and discourses, and never break with an essentialist conception of gender roles, they may occasionally adopt, depending on political needs and national contexts, a rhetoric of defending the rights of women and sexual minorities. They may even go so far as to tone down some of their traditional positions (ban on abortion, criminalisation of homosexuality, etc.), so as to enrich the range of their nationalist discourse with new tones: in this way, ‘foreigners’2 and/or “muslims” are held responsible for the violence suffered by women and homosexuals. Femo-nationalism and homo-nationalism make it possible to target new segments of the electorate, to gain political respectability, and in passing to divert any systemic criticism of hetero-patriarchy.
8 - Fascism, nature and the environmental crisis
The crisis of the existing order is not simply economic, social and political. It also takes the form of an environmental crisis, particularly given the ongoing climate collapse.
At the moment, neo-fascism appears divided by the morbid phenomena associated with the capitalocene. A large part of neo-fascist movements, ideologues and leaders notably minimise global warming (or even deny it altogether), arguing for an intensification of extractivism (“carbo-fascism” or “fossil fascism”). On the other hand, some currents that can be described as eco-fascist claim to offer a response to the environmental crisis, but do little more than revive and disguise as ‘ecology’ the old reactionary ideologies of a ‘natural order’, still associated with ideas of traditional roles and hierarchies (such as gender) and of closed organic communities (in the name of ‘purity of race’ or under the pretext of ‘incompatibility of cultures’). Similarly, they often use the urgency of the disaster to call for ultra-authoritarian (eco-dictatorship) and racist solutions (a neo-Malthusianism that almost always justifies increased repression of migrants and an almost total prevention of immigration).
While the latter remain largely in the minority compared to the former and do not constitute mass political currents, their ideas are undeniably developing to the point of permeating neo-fascist common sense, so that an identitarian ecology emerges and environmental struggles become a crucial terrain of struggle for antifascists. This divide also refers to an intrinsic tension in ‘classical’ fascism, between a hyper-modernism that exalts heavy industry and technology as markers and levers of national power (economic and military), and an anti-modernism that idealises land and nature as the home of authentic values which the nation needs to reconnect with in order to find its essence.
9 - Fascism and social order
Especially when fascism is emerging and developing, it wants to appear as an alternative to the existing order (and it succeeds at least partially in this), even sometimes as a (national) “revolution”. But when it comes to power, fascism appears not simply as a spare wheel for the current state of affairs, but the means to suppress all opposition to ecocidal, racial and patriarchal capitalism; in other words, an authentic counter-revolution.
Unless we take literally – and thus validate – its claims to stand on the side of the ‘little people’ or the ‘unskilled’, to mobilise ‘the people’ and advance a programme of social transformation in their favour, or unless we adopt a purely formal/institutional definition of the concept of ‘revolution’ (reducing this simply to regime change), fascism cannot in any way be described as ‘revolutionary’. On the contrary, its entire ideology and practice of power tends towards the consolidation and reinforcement, through criminal methods, of relations of exploitation and oppression.
At a deeper level, the fascist project consists in intensifying these relations in such a way as to produce a social body which is extremely hierarchical (in terms of class and gender), normalised (in terms of sexualities and gender identities) and homogenised (in ethno-racial terms). Imprisonment and massive crime (genocide) are therefore by no means unintended consequences of fascism but potentialities inherent in it.
10 - Fascism and social movements
Fascism, however, has an ambivalent relationship with social movements. Insofar as its success depends on its ability to appear as an ‘anti-systemic’ force, it cannot be satisfied with frontal opposition to protest movements and the Left. Fascisms both ‘classical’ and contemporary constantly borrow some of their rhetoric from these movements to shape a powerful political and cultural synthesis.
Three main tactics are employed in this sense:
i) the partial recapture of elements of critical and programmatic discourse, but deprived of any systemic dimension or revolutionary aim. For example, capitalism is not criticised in its foundations, i.e. as being based on a relation of exploitation (capital/labour), presupposing private ownership of the means of production and coordination by the market, but only in its globalised or financialised character (which makes it possible, as mentioned above, to play on old anti-Semitic tropes of classical fascist discourse, which still have their appeal to certain sections of the population). From this point of view, it is understandable that criticism of free trade, and even more so the call for ‘protectionism’, if they are not coherently linked to the goal of a break with capitalism, have every chance of ideologically strengthening the far Right,
ii) hijacking the rhetoric of the Left and social movements for use as a weapon against ‘foreigners’, i.e. in fact against racial minorities. This is the logic of femo-nationalism and homo-nationalism referred to above, but also of the ‘nationalist’ defence of secularism. While the far Right has throughout its history opposed the principle of secularism as well as women’s and LGBTQI rights, some of its currents (notably the current leadership of the Rassemblement National but also the Dutch far-right) now claim to be its best defenders, which has meant a complete redefinition of secularism in an aggressive sense towards Muslims, including discriminations (inseparably ethno-racial and religious) that are unavowed and presented as a defence of major republican principles threatened by an alleged Muslim ‘separatism’ or ‘communautarism’.
iii) the reversal of feminist or anti-racist criticism, claiming that the oppressed have become the oppressors. Thus, we see the whole cloud of reactionary ideologues, at an international level, asserting not only that racism and sexism have disappeared, but that it is women, non-whites and LGBTQI who today not only exercise domination over men, whites and heterosexuals respectively, but also contradict the natural order of things. This type of discourse is the best way to call for a supremacist operation of white or masculine ‘reconquest’ without being too explicit.
11 - Fascism and liberal democracy
Liberal and fascist regimes are not opposed to each other in the same way as democracy and domination. In both cases, the submission of proletarians, women and minorities is achieved; in both cases interwoven relations of exploitation and domination are deployed and perpetuated, along with a whole series of forms of violence inevitably and structurally associated with these relations; in both cases, the dictatorship of capital over the whole of society is maintained. In reality, these are two distinct forms of bourgeois political domination, in other words two different methods through which subordinate groups are subdued and prevented from engaging in an action of revolutionary transformation.
The transition to fascist methods is always preceded by the successive abandonment of certain fundamental dimensions of liberal democracy by the ruling class itself. Parliamentary arenas are increasingly marginalised and bypassed, as legislative power is monopolised by the executive and methods of government become ever more authoritarian (decree-laws, ordinances, etc.). But this phase of transition from liberal democracy to fascism is above all marked by increased restrictions on the freedoms of organisation, assembly and expression, and on the right to strike, but also the development of state arbitrariness and police brutality.
This authoritarian hardening may take place without great proclamation, making political power rest increasingly on the support and loyalty of the repressive state apparatuses and dragging it into an anti-democratic spiral: increasingly tight patrolling of working-class and immigrant neighbourhoods; prohibition, prevention or harsh repression of demonstrations; preventive and arbitrary arrests; summary trials of demonstrators and increasing use of prison sentences; increasingly frequent dismissals of strikers; reduction of the scope and possibilities of trade-union action, etc.
To assert that the opposition between liberal democracy and fascism is between political forms of bourgeois domination does not mean that anti-fascism, social movements and the Left should be indifferent to the decline of public freedoms and democratic rights. To defend these freedoms and rights is not to sow the illusion of a state or a republic conceived as neutral arbiters of social antagonisms; it is to defend one of the main conquests of the popular classes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, i.e. the right of the exploited and oppressed to organise and mobilise so as to defend their basic working and living conditions as an indispensable basis for the development of a class, feminist and anti-racist consciousness. But it also means asserting an alternative to the de-democratisation that is the very essence of the neoliberal project.
12 - Fascism and liberal democracy (2)
Fascism characteristically proceeds by crushing all forms of protest, whether revolutionary or reformist, radical or moderate, global or partial. Wherever fascism becomes the practice of power, i.e. a political regime, within a few years, or sometimes just a few months, little if anything remains of the political left, the trade-union movement or forms of minority organisation, i.e. of any stable, lasting and crystallised forms of resistance.
While the liberal regime tends to deceive subordinates by co-opting some of its representatives, incorporating some of their organisations into coalitions (as a minor partner with no voice) or negotiations (so-called ‘social dialogue’ in which trade unions or voluntary associations play the role of stooges), or even by integrating some of their demands, fascism aspires to destroy any form of organisation which is unassimilable into the fascist state and to uproot even the aspiration to organise collectively outside the fascist or fascisised organisational frameworks. In this sense, fascism presents itself as the political form of an almost complete destruction of the self-defence capacity of the oppressed – or its reduction to molecular, passive or clandestine forms of resistance.
It should be noted, however, that in this work of destruction fascism cannot ensure the passivity of a large part of the social body purely by repressive means or discourse targeting this or that scapegoat. It only manages to stabilise its domination by actually satisfying the immediate material interests of certain groups (unemployed workers, impoverished self-employed, civil servants, etc.), or at least those within these groups who are recognised by the fascists as ‘truly national’. In a context of the abandonment of the working classes by the Left, the power of attraction of a discourse promising to reserve jobs and social benefits for the so-called ‘truly national’ (who, it cannot be sufficiently stressed, are defined in the fascist or neo-fascist vision not by a legal criterion of nationality but by an ethno-racial criterion of origin) cannot be underestimated.
13 - Fascism, ‘people’ and mass action
If fascism is sometimes falsely described as ‘revolutionary’ because of its appeals to the ‘people’, or because it proceeds by bringing ‘masses’ into action (in a superficial analogy with the workers’ movement), it is because very different things are mixed up under the terms ‘people’ and ‘action’.
The ‘people’, as the fascists understand the term, designates neither a group which shares certain conditions of existence (in the sense that sociology speaks of popular classes), nor a political community including all those unified by a common will to belong, but an ethno-racial community fixed once and for all, grouping together those who are ‘really from here’ (whether the criterion of belonging to the people is pseudo-biological or pseudo-cultural). This basically amounts to the social body stripped of supposed enemies (the ‘foreign party’, as the leading French neo-fascist ideologue Eric Zemmour follows the 19th century anti-Semitic polemicist Édouard Drumont in saying) and traitors (the Left) who have taken the side of this ‘foreign party’.
As for fascist action itself, it oscillates par excellence between punitive expeditions led by armed squads (extra-state gangs or sectors of the repressive state apparatus that are already or in the process of becoming autonomous),3 military-style marches and electoral plebiscites. If the first of these attack social struggles and more generally the oppressed (striking workers, ethno-racial minorities, women in struggle, etc.), in order to demoralise their adversaries and to clear the ground for fascist implantation, the second aim to produce a mass symbolic and psychological effect, in order to mobilise affects in favour of the leader, the movement or the regime, while the third aim to make a group of atomised individuals passively ratify the will of the leader or the movement.
If fascism does have this kind of a mass appeal, it is by no means by stimulating autonomous action on the basis of specific interests, favouring for example forms of direct democracy where people discuss and act collectively, but by enlisting support for fascist leaders and giving them a weighty argument in negotiations with the bourgeoisie for access to power. Popular participation in fascist movements, and even more so under fascist regime, is for the most part ordered from above, in its objectives as well as in its forms, and presupposes the most absolute deference to those chosen by nature to command.
Nevertheless, forms of mobilisation from below can be found in the initial moment of fascism, on the part of the plebeian branches of fascism that provide its shock troops and take seriously its anti-bourgeois promises and pseudo-anticapitalism. Nevertheless, when the political crisis deepens and the alliance of the fascists with the bourgeoisie is sealed, tensions inevitably arise between these branches and the leadership of the fascist movement. The latter then inevitably seek to get rid of the leadership of these militias,4 while at the same time channelling them by integrating them into the fascist state under construction.
In reality, fascism has never offered the masses anything in terms of action but the alternative between acquiescence, noisy or passive, to the desires of the fascist leaders, or the manganello,5 i.e. repression (which, in fascist regimes, often goes as far as torture and murder, even against some of its most fervent supporters).
14 - A posthumous and preventive counter-revolution
Fascism constitutes a ‘posthumous and preventive’ counter-revolution.6 Posthumous in the sense that it feeds on the failure of the political Left and social movements to rise to the level of the historical situation, to establish themselves as a solution to the political crisis and engage in an experience of revolutionary transformation. Preventive because it aims at destroying in advance everything that could nourish and prepare a future revolutionary experience: not just explicitly revolutionary organisations but also trade-union resistance, anti-racist, feminist and LGBTQI movements, self-managed living spaces, independent journalism, etc., in other words the slightest form of contestation of the order of things.
15 - Fascism, neo-fascism and violence
It is undeniable that extra-state violence, in the form of mass paramilitary organisations, has played an important (though probably overestimated) role in the rise of fascists – an element that distinguishes them from other reactionary movements that did not seek to organise the masses militarily. Yet, at this stage at least, the vast majority of neo-fascist movements are not built on the basis of mass militias and do not have such militias (with the exception of the Indian BJP and to a lesser degree, in terms of mass implantation, the Hungarian Jobbik and the Golden Dawn in Greece).
Several hypotheses can be put forward to explain why neo-fascists are unable or do not aspire to build such militias:
– the delegitimisation of political violence, especially in Western societies, which would condemn political parties with paramilitary structures to electoral marginality;
– the absence of equivalent experience to that of the First World War in terms of the brutalisation of populations, i.e. habituation to the exercise of violence, which would provide fascists with masses of men willing to enlist and exercise violence within the framework of armed fascist militias;
– the weakening of workers’ movements in their capacity to structure and organise the popular classes, in trade unions and politically, which means that the fascists of our time no longer have a real adversary in front of them, which they would imperatively have to break by force to impose themselves, and which would necessitate equipping themselves with an apparatus of mass violence;
– the fact that states are much more powerful today and have at their disposal instruments of surveillance and repression of a sophistication that is out of all proportion to that of the inter-war period, so that the fascists of our time may feel that state violence is quite sufficient to annihilate all forms of opposition, physically if necessary;
– finally, the strategically crucial necessity for neo-fascists to distinguish themselves from the most visible forms of continuity with historical fascism, and especially this dimension of extra-state violence. In this connection, we should recall that parties such as the FN in France or the Austrian FPÖ were created on the basis of strategies of ‘respectabilisation’ developed and implemented by notorious fascists, who had collaborated very actively in Nazi domination during the Second World War.
These hypotheses make it possible to conclude that the formation of mass militias was made necessary and possible for fascist movements in the very particular context of the inter-war period. But neither the constitution of armed bands, nor even the use of political violence, is the hallmark of fascism, either as a movement or as a regime. While these were centrally present, other movements and regimes not belonging in any way to the constellation of fascisms also resorted to violence in order to gain or maintain power, sometimes by murdering tens of thousands of opponents (not to mention the legitimate use of political violence by liberation movements).
The most visible dimension of classical fascism, its extra-state militias, are, in fact, an element subordinate to the strategy of the fascist leaderships, who use them tactically according to the demands imposed by the development of their organisations and the legal conquest of political power (which presupposes, in the inter-war period and still more so today, that they appear to be somewhat respectable, and thus distance themselves from the most visible forms of violence). The strength of fascist or neo-fascist movements is then measured by their ability to wield, depending on the historical conjuncture, both legal and violent tactics, both ‘war of position’ and ‘war of movement’ (to use Gramsci’s categories).
16 - Fascism and the process of fascisation
The victory of fascism is the joint product of a radicalisation of whole sections of the ruling class, out of fear that the political situation is escaping them, and a social entrenchment of fascist movement, ideas and affects. Contrary to a common representation, well suited to absolve the ruling classes and liberal democracies of their responsibilities for fascists’ rise to power, fascist movements do not conquer political power by a purely external action, in the way that an armed force seizes a citadel. If they generally manage to obtain power by legal means, which does not mean without bloodshed, it is because this conquest is prepared by a whole historical period that can be called fascisation.
It is only through this process of fascisation that fascism can appear – obviously today without saying its name, and by disguising its project, given the universal opprobrium that has surrounded the words ‘fascism’ and ‘fascist’ since 1945 – both as a (false) alternative for various sectors of the population and as a (real) solution for a politically desperate ruling class. It is then that it can go from being essentially a petty-bourgeois movement to a real mass, inter-class movement, even if its sociological heart, which provides its cadres, remains the petty bourgeoisie: self-employed, liberal professions, middle management.
17 - The forms of fascisation
Fascisation is expressed in many ways, through a wide variety of ‘morbid symptoms’ (again using Gramsci’s expression), but two main vectors can nevertheless be highlighted: the authoritarian hardening of the state and the rise of racism.
While the former is expressed mainly through the repressive state apparatuses (the police trade unions being a specific actor of fascisation), we must not forget the primary responsibility of the ‘extreme centre’s political leaders. And, if police violence is part of the long history of the capitalist state and the police (generally welcoming the most racist and authoritarian elements), it is the crisis of hegemony, that is to say, the political weakening of the bourgeoisie, which makes it more and more dependent on its police and increases both the strength and the autonomy of repressive state apparatuses:7 the Minister of the Interior no longer tends to direct (and control) the police, but rather to defend them at all costs, increase their resources, etc.
The rise of racism also combines the long history of the state, particularly in the case of the old imperial powers in which colonial and racial oppression continues to occupy a central place, with the recent history of the political field. Faced with a crisis of hegemony, the far Right and sectors of the mainstream Right – on the understanding that these political forces represent distinct class fractions – have the project of solidifying a white bloc under bourgeois hegemony, capable of establishing a form of social compromise on an ethno-racial basis through a policy of systematic ousting of non-white people: in other words, racial preference. Moreover, by constantly pointing out the danger that migrants and Muslims represent for both public order and the cultural integrity of the ‘nation’, these forces justify the licence given to the police in immigrant districts, the increase in the repression of social movements, in a word, state authoritarianism.
We can indicate here what Aimé Césaire called a ‘savageification [ensauvagement]’ of the dominant class, visible above all through practices and mechanisms of repression aimed first of all at ethno-racial minorities and then at social mobilisations (gilets jaunes, trade unionists, anti-racists, antifascists, ecologists, etc.). However, thisensauvagement is also increasingly common in the form of public declarations of ideologists calling for the use of lethal weapons against social mobilisations and immigrant districts, and those who have turned media and editorial Islamophobia into a flourishing industry.
18 - What fascisation of the state means
The fascisation of the state should, therefore, under no circumstances be reduced, especially in the first phase before the fascists conquer political power, to the integration or rise of recognisable fascist elements in the apparatus of law and order (police, army, justice, prisons). It functions, rather, as a dialectic between endogenous transformations of these apparatuses, as a result of political choices made by bourgeois parties over nearly three decades (all oriented towards the construction of a ‘penal state’ on the ashes of the ‘social state’, to use the categories of the sociologist Loïc Wacquant), and the political power – mainly electoral and ideological at this stage – of the organised far Right.
To put it simply, the fascisation of the police is not expressed and explained primarily by the presence of fascist militants among them, or the fact that the police vote massively for the far right (in France and elsewhere), but by their reinforcement and empowerment (especially in those sectors assigned to the most brutal tasks of maintaining order: in working-class and immigrant neighbourhoods, against immigrants, and secondarily in mobilizations). In other words, 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).
So the police are not fascising in their functioning because they are gradually being subverted by fascist organisations. On the contrary, it is because the entire functioning of the police is fascisised – obviously to unequal degrees depending on the sector – that it is so easy for the far Right to spread its ideas and establish itself within them. This is particularly visible in the fact that the last few years (in France) have not seen a growth of the police union directly linked to the organised far Right (France Police-Policiers en Colère) but rather a double process: the rise of artificial mobilisations coming from the base (but shielded from above, in the sense that they have not been subject to any administrative sanctions) and the right-wing radicalisation of the main police unions (Alliance and Unité SGP Police-FO).
19 - A contradictory and unstable process
Insofar as it derives primarily from the crisis of hegemony and the hardening of social confrontations, the process of fascisation proves to be eminently contradictory and therefore highly unstable. There is by no means a royal road for the fascist movement.
The dominant class can indeed manage, in certain historical circumstances, to have new political representatives emerge, to integrate certain demands coming from the oppressed and thus build the conditions of a new social compromise (which allow it not to have to cede political power to the fascists in order to keep its economic power).8 It is nevertheless unlikely in the present context that the dominant classes will be led to accept new social compromises without a sequence of high-intensity struggles imposing a new balance of power less unfavourable to the working-class.
If the process of fascisation does not necessarily lead to fascism, it is also because both the fascist movement and the ruling classes face the political Left and the social movements. The success of the fascists ultimately depends on the ability – or, on the contrary, the powerlessness – of the subaltern to successfully occupy all the terrains of political struggle, to constitute themselves as autonomous political subjects and impose a revolutionary alternative.
20 - After an electoral victory of the fascists: three scenarios
If the fascists’ conquest of political power – and we repeat again, generally by legal means – constitutes a crucial victory for them, that is not the end of the story. A period of struggle necessarily opens up in the wake of this victory, which – depending on the political and social balance of power, on the struggles fought or not, on whether they are victorious or defeated – can end up with any of the following outcomes:
i) the construction of a dictatorship of the fascist or military-police type (when popular movements suffer a historical defeat and the bourgeoisie is politically too weakened or divided);
ii) bourgeois normalisation (when the fascist movement is too weak to build an alternative political power and there is a popular response that is strong but not enough to go beyond a defensive victory);
iii) a revolutionary sequence (when the popular movement is strong enough to coalesce major social and political forces around it and engage in a showdown with bourgeois forces and the fascist movement).
21 - Antifascism today (1)
If antifascism appears initially and necessarily as a reaction to the development of fascism, therefore as defensive action or self-defence (working-class, anti-racist, feminist), it cannot be reduced to hand-to-hand combat with fascist groups; all the less so since the tactics of building fascist movements in our time give less room for mass violence – except perhaps in India as mentioned above – than in the case of ‘classical’ fascism (see thesis 15). Anti-fascism makes the political struggle against far-right movements a central axis of its struggle, but it must also set itself the task of promoting the common action of the oppressed and halting the process of fascisation, in other words, undermining the political and ideological conditions in which these movements can flourish, take root and grow, and breaking down everything that promotes the spread of fascist poison in the social body. Now, if this double task of antifascism is taken seriously, it must be conceived not just as a struggle against the organised far Right, waged independently of other struggles (trade union, anti-capitalist, feminist, anti-racist, ecological, etc.), but as the defensive complement to the struggle for social and political emancipation, or what Daniel Bensaïd called a politics of the oppressed.
22 - On antifascism today (2)
There is obviously no question of making the constitution of an antifascist front conditional on adherence to a complete and precise political programme; this would in fact mean renouncing any unitary perspective, as it would then be a question of each force imposing its own political and strategic project on the others. It would be still more unwise to demand that those who aspire here and now to fight fascism or the dynamics of fascisation mentioned above should present proof of revolutionary militancy. However, anti-fascism cannot have as its sole compass opposition to far-right organisations if it really aspires to roll back not just these organisations, but also and above all the fascist ideas and affects that spread and take root far beyond them. It cannot renounce linking between the anti-fascist struggle with the need for a break with racial, patriarchal and ecocidal capitalism, and the goal of a different society (which we here call ecosocialist).
This is a complex matter, as it is not enough for antifascism to assert its feminism or anti-racism, to criticise neoliberalism or call for the defence of ‘secularism’, to make the reactionary character of neo-fascism apparent. Insofar as the far Right have taken over at least part of the anti-neoliberal discourse, increasingly tend to adopt a rhetoric of defending women’s rights, use a pseudo-antiracism of defending ‘whites’ and set themselves up as the protectors of secularism, anti-fascism cannot be satisfied with vague formulae in this area. It is imperative for it to specify the political content of its feminism and its anti-racism, and explain what it means by ‘secularism’, otherwise it will leave blind spots that neo-fascists unfailingly occupy (‘femo-nationalism’, denunciation of ‘anti-white racism’ or falsification/instrumentalisation of secularism), and will also risk following in the footsteps of the neoliberals (who have their own ‘feminism’, that of the 1 per cent, and their ‘moral anti-racism’, generally in the form of a call for mutual tolerance). Likewise, it must specify the political horizon of its opposition to neoliberalism or its criticism of the European Union, which cannot be that of a ‘good’ national capitalism that is properly regulated.
Moreover, the last few years have brought to light the need for antifascism to be fully involved in the political battle against the authoritarian thrust, which is necessarily a unitary one. Whether this is waged against thousands of Muslims, dragged through the mud, registered, surveilled, discriminated against, publicly discredited, sometimes imprisoned because they are suspected of ‘radicalisation’ (thus of being ‘enemies of the nation’, real or potential), against immigrants (disenfranchised and harassed by the police), against the inhabitants of working-class and immigrant neighbourhoods (policed by the most fascisised sectors of the forces of repression, who enjoy impunity in these areas), or against social mobilisations that are increasingly severely repressed by the police and the judiciary (movement against the French labour law, gilets jaunes, etc.).
We can see now how the challenge for antifascism is not simply to forge alliances with activists of other causes that leave each partner unchanged, but to redefine and enrich antifascism from the perspectives that emerge within the trade-union, anti-capitalist, anti-racist, feminist or ecological struggles, while nourishing the latter with antifascist perspectives. It is on this condition that antifascism will be able to renew itself and progress, not as a sectoral struggle, a particular method of struggle or an abstract ideology, but as a common sense permeating and involving all emancipation movements.
Originally published at:
https://www.contretemps.eu/fascisme-fascisation-antifascisme/
N.B. I would like to thank the members of the editorial comrades of Contretemps, in particular Stathis Kouvelakis, for their many remarks and suggestions based on earlier versions of this text.
Translated by David Fernbach
Image:
Modified from GeniesserGraz, CC BY 2.0
<https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
- 1. Civilisation – ‘white’ or ‘European’ – can also play this role, as can race (‘Aryan’ in Nazi ideology), even if the latter has been made politically untenable on a mass scale by the genocide of the Jews of Europe.
- 2. An eminently extendable category since it includes all those who, whether or not they have the nationality of the country in question, are not considered genuine natives (in the case of France the so-called ‘indigenous French’, ‘true French’, etc.). From this point of view, a recent European immigrant – whether naturalised or not – is viewed by the far Right as less foreign, at least if he or she is white and of Christian culture, than an individual born French in France to parents who were themselves born in France but whose grandparents came, for example, from Algeria or Senegal.
- 3. For example, in the contemporary French case, the ‘anti-criminality brigades’.
- 4. In this respect, reread Bertolt Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui.
- 5. The name for the club with which Italian fascists beat up working-class militants or anyone else who opposed them. The manganello and its use were the object of a kind of cult in fascist Italy.
- 6. Here we take up the formula of Angelo Tasca in his classic book The Rise of Italian Fascism, 1918-1922.
- 7. This allows them, in the French case, to attack political forces directly (for example, a demonstration by police unions in front of the headquarters of the main left organisation La France Insoumise), and to demonstrate without authorisation, often hooded, with weapons and service cars, without risking any administrative or judicial sanction.
- 8. For example, the case of Roosevelt and the New Deal in the United States in the 1930s, which did not really succeed in overcoming the crisis of US capitalism (that was not until the war), but suspended the political crisis.
A Dying Class: The Traditional Middle-Class in Britain 2020
By Alex Maguire
Introduction
All classes die eventually, the material reality of society shifts as quantitative changes become qualitative changes. Some classes fade away, others are actively removed by an opposing force, for instance the dismantling of Britain’s industrial proletariat under Margaret Thatcher’s leadership. Thus, changes in society’s class structure and the fortunes of each class provide a valuable insight into the nature of specific historical moments of capitalist society. The British traditional middle-class has elected to “die in silence”. This article aims to examine the increasing decline of the traditional middle-class after the 2008 financial crisis. For the purposes of this article, the term traditional middle-class must be clearly defined. However, as Edward Thompson noted, “the finest· meshed sociological net cannot give us a pure specimen of class, any more than it can give us one of deference or of love”.1 Class is a fluid relationship, not an ahistorical construct, and no definition will ever be perfect. The traditional middle-class is a fraction of the wider largely incongruous middle-class, but it is still possible to apply some general identifiers when defining it.
Before identifying the specificities of the traditional middle-class, it is necessary to outline what constitutes class. While no definition of class is perfect, and there will always be exceptions to codified rules of what constitutes class, it is possible to provide an outline of what is fundamental to constructing it. I suggest that class is shaped by the combination of an individual’s relationship to the means and processes of production and consumption as well as cultural practices. Furthermore, a class is also partially shaped by its relationship with other classes, as no class exists in a vacuum. As Thompson notes, class is not static, it is a collection of relationships that are constantly happening.2 It is evident that many of the relationships that maintain the traditional middle-class are changing, whether it is its relationship to capital, the labour process, cultural consumption, or its relationship to other classes within British society, as its relative privilege is being eroded. Alberto Toscano and Jamie Woodcock have explained how the important interventions of Thompson and, later, Mario Tronti highlighted the importance of interrogating the “processes of composition and decomposition that are continually taking place”.3
I define the traditional middle-class as being predominantly constituted of individuals (and their families) who work in old professions, meaning that most of these professions existed, in some form or other, in the nineteenth century. As a result of this longevity, these professions traditionally offered long-term job security and a high level of renumeration. These professionals have a particular cultural status and respect associated with their title, for instance the trusted position of doctors in society. This cultural status, often associated with a level of intellectualcapability and professional qualification(s), is an integral part of this class’ identity. Furthermore, to be a working member of this traditional middle-class, one must be in a profession that has a clear progression to a job which would place someone within the top 10% of earners in the UK (£54,900 per annum for the 2017-18 tax year).4
While material circumstances are not the only shaper of class, they are not insignificant, and wealth and privilege are an integral aspect of this class, transmitted from one generation to the next. Not everyone in this class will reach this level of income, though many will, but the opportunity for them to do so is a realistic aim, for instance progressing from junior doctor to consultant, or university lecturer to professor. It is the longevity of these professions and the consequent cultural status that gives this class its identity. Borrowing from Alex Callinicos’ distinction between the “old middle class” and the “new middle-class”, my traditional middle-class is historically “not subject to continuous surveillance and control at work”, and therefore has more freedom in how it exercises its productive processes.5 The members of this class may seldom own their means of production, but they often direct them. Although there will be other classes that meet some of these criteria, there are none that meet them all.
Another way of helping to define this traditional middle-class is to say what it is not. It is certainly not proletarian, meaning those who trade their work for wages and, with their employment characterised by insecurity, are therefore inclined to socialism.6 It is not the traditional landowning British aristocracy, nor is it part of the emergent financial class that are increasingly central to Britain’s economy. Equally, it is not the “traditional petty bourgeoisie of shopkeepers and artisans”, nor is it the small capitalist class that own the means of production.7 As well as this, the traditional middle-class is not the professional managerial-class/new middle-class that rapidly grew in the post-war period and was the subject of much debate amongst Marxists in the 1970s and 1980s and exists primarily to manage the relationship between labour and capital.8 The traditional middle-class predates the professional managerial-class; however, there is an increasing overlap between these classes, as the managerial-class grows in size and the children of the traditional middle-class join its ranks as they enter the job market.
This leaves us with a fraction of a class largely constituted of professions such as doctors, academics, lawyers, accountants, engineers, and senior civil servants. These professions would all be ranked in the AB social grade as is used by the National Readership Survey. Although they share this category with managerial jobs, these professions are distinct from high earning managerial positions as they have a different relationship to the processes of production.9 While not all of these professions were originally members of the traditional middle-class, by the end of the twentieth century they were inarguably part of it and, while there are exceptions, they would largely conform to the above definition.
This class fraction is something that has historically been an integral part of British society and used to receive a greater level of analyses than it currently does.10 However, most analyses of the group deemed the “middle-class” focuses on the managerial class that emerged in the 1970s or those who are deemed to earn a middle income. Although most of Marx’s analyses of capitalism focussed on landowners, capitalists and the industrial proletariat, this class is by no means immaterial to studying the capitalist process, and the nature of its decline provides valuable insights into the nature of
capitalism in Britain in the 21st century, and is deserving of study.11 In the years following the 2008 financial crises, this class, specifically the status and prospects of its young members have declined to the extent that this class now appears moribund.
We can trace the processes of decomposition of the traditional middle-class by examining its changing income, the changing nature of workplace dynamics and relations to capital, the increasing geographic fragmentation currently being experienced by this class, and the deterioration of its cultural institutions. Although none of these criteria themselves define class, they are useful indicators of the relationships that constitute class and its historical fortune. For instance, the deteriorating income of the traditional middle-class is a consequence of the increasing fragmentation and casualisation of labour and the resultant change to their relationship to the processes of production. Furthermore, although income alone does not define a class, it is an important consideration when analysing class because of whatit facilitates or prevents a class from doing. With their higher income, the traditional middle-class have previously been able to pay for a level of education, cultural consumption, and a better standard of living compared to most classes. Effectively, the consciousness of aclass informs how a class will spend its income, but different levels of income influence the extent to which this consciousness can be manifested and reinforce its own existence. Thus, income, and how it is used or not used, is an important consideration when analysing the relationships that give a class its meaning. For instance, the geographic fragmentation of this class is a result of its incomes’ inability to keep up with house prices, meaning that the many members of the traditional middle-class now have a distinctly different geographical relationship to their own and other classes. For when any class is geographically fragmented it loses a vital institution of class that helps it to physically demarcate class membership and socialisation: the neighbourhood.
Throughout this article another important demarcation line is age, as the young who were born into this class largely have different material experiences and relations than their parents as a result of the changing nature of this class. This effectively raises the question of whether age itself is becoming a determinant of class. I do not think it is, as while the material conditions of one generation may be grouped together these generations have not made themselves into a class per say. They have not undergone the necessary process, outlined by Thompson, of identifying common experiences and interests between themselves and against others, therefore they do not act as a group for itself although they can be observed to be acting as group in and of itself.12 Therefore, I suggest that analysing the state of different generations within a class is a useful portent as to the future trajectory of that class. While the majority of people born into the traditional middle-class cannot hope to have the material advantages associated with this class and the professions that constitute its productive processes until their mid-thirties, they are imbued with the consciousness of this class from birth, often articulated through education. They are raised with the expectation of achieving at least parity with their parents and enter professions that have a clearly charted course of material and cultural progression, subconsciously considering themselves immune to downward social mobility.
Thus, while age is not a perfect facsimile for class, it is important to examine the prospects of the young members of the professional middle-class, as it appears that they will not achieve the same relations to production and consumption that the older members of this class did; consequently, it is possible that a new middle-class is in the process of being made, one with a dysphoria between the expectations it was raised with and the material processes to which it is subjugated. When the older members of this class die, the distinct social positions and relations that define their class may well die with them. However, there is a slight complication here as when they die their offspring could inherit their assets, with inherited wealth being an engine for class regeneration.
Towards Death
The eventual result of the global supremacy of markets was the 2008 financial crisis, as the internal contradictions of the market negated themselves causing it to short-circuit. The aftermath of this had a severe impact on the traditional middle-class and was the collapse of the specific variant of capitalism that was the unsustainable compromise of social democracy and unregulated marketisation; as Brecht observed, capitalism is permanently revolutionary.13Since 2008, capitalism has morphed into something less restrained and more brutal, and spawned the gig-economy. In this sense, it more closely mirrors the economic system contemporary of Marx that was fuelled by the insecurity of the proletariat. The aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis exacerbated an existing trend underpinned by Thatcherite economics and ideology. Deregulation of the marketfacilitated deregulation of the professions so Boots or SpecSavers could subsume opticians, ‘no win no fee’ lawyers undercut solicitors, jobbing traders replace stockbrokers etc. From the early 1980s, attacks on professional ‘monopolies’ increased substantially, and the bargaining power of professionals increasingly diminished as did their cultural status. This decline began to alter the relationship that the traditional middle-class had with the rest of British society, as its expertise became less valuable, both culturally and economically. As professional monopolies were undermined, so too was the importance of professions to maintaining important services in society. Thus, a fundamental difference between now and the capitalism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century is that the traditional middle-class, on a material level, is no longer secure and shielded from the worst of capitalism's vicissitudes. It is this exposure and insecurity that is undermining the material base of the traditional middle-class. The consequences of this are being born by Generation Y/Millennial members of the traditional middle-class (those born between approximately 1981 and 1996), and it is they who are living through the death of their class.
The declining prospects of the young is not unique to Britain, an OECD study of multiple developed countries reported that the quantity of young people, Millennials and Generation Z, in the middle-income bracket (defined as earning between 75% and 200% of the median national income) is declining.14 Although this group will typically earn less than the traditional middle-class, in Britain both are experiencing the same economic pressures. In order to qualify for the top 10% of income earners in Britain (the bracket in which most of the traditional middle-class reside) one would have to earn £54,900, per annum which is still less than the £58,000 that is 200% of national median income. Even though many within the traditional middle-class would expect to, and do, earn more than this, earning £80,000 per annum, and therefore being in the 97th percentile of UK earners, would still put someone closer to the 90th percentile than it would the 99.5th percentile which would require an income of £236,205 per annum.15 Thus, the young members of the traditional middle-class are subject to the same fall in prospects as those from classes just below them. In the future, the current children of the traditional middle-class and other less privileged classes may have a closer material relationship than their preceding generations did.
In the south of England (typically seen as the traditional middle-class heartland) house prices have dramatically increased, which has left many people, in rented accommodation, resulting in the rise of a rentier class. This means that, for the millennial members of the traditional middle-class, home ownership, once an important signifier of middle-class security, is now a distant ambition. A recent study of the ONS reported that in 2017 35% of 25-34-year olds live in the private rental sector. The increase in rented accommodation is largely due to a rise in house prices. The Institute for Fiscal Studies reports that mean house prices were 152% higher in 2015-16 than they were in 1995-96, while in the same period net family incomes of those aged 25-34 only grew by 22%. 16 Unless house prices significantly fall, members of the traditional middle-class will continue to be priced out of areas they would once have taken for granted. Thus, the class is becoming increasingly spatially fragmented, as its younger members move further afield to find affordable housing, and therefore it is losing its geographic centre. Daniel Dorling has examined the decline of the suburbs as an area of hope and prosperity that were previously home to an aspirational new middle-class, there is no reason to suppose that this geographical dislocation has not trickled up and affected the traditional middle-class also.17
While the cost of living rises, the labour dynamics of the professions that gave the middle-class their status, are themselves coming under attack, as the terms and conditions of employment – for instance, pay, time-off, and pensions – become less favourable. The gig-economy has well and truly arrived, and doubled in size in 2019.18The traditional middle-class are not immune from this proliferation of casualisation. For instance, there has recently been a rapid growth in ‘platform’ lawyers, with a 29% increase in 2018.19 Equally, many new university academics are on temporary, fixed-term, or hourly-paid contracts, the precariousness of which has been highlighted by the current pandemic, which has put approximately 300,000 jobs under threat. At the turn of the century this level of precarity in the academic profession would have been unthinkable.20 A consequence of increased precarity is that members of the traditional middle-class, robbed of the protection of a substantive salary, are forced to actively bargain over the selling of their labour power and navigate the working day in a manner that was previously alien to this class. This is a fundamental change in this class’ relationship to the process of production and therefore its essence.
The fall in professional incomes is not unique to Britain, the 2019 OECD survey from April 2019 claims that “skill levels are increasingly failing to yield entry into the income class with which they are traditionally associated. Highly skilled workers, for example, are less and less likely to belong to the upper income class in most countries”.21 What is undeniable is that, while traditional professional jobs may still bring with them a level of cultural capital, their material rewards are rapidly declining.22 As the conditions of employment decline, so too does the class’ relationship to capital and production. Insecurity of employment and falling renumeration decrease the level of autonomy that can be asserted over the labour process.
The gig economy may offer significant benefits for established older workers within their chosen field, as they are in a good position to sell their labour power and negotiate the working-day on a freelance basis. However, it is detrimental to the long-term interests of the young members of this class. The short-term and flexible hiring of proven experience and skill will only serve to limit the advancement of young professionals as there will be less of an incentive to develop and promote them. As well as this, because the professions typical of the traditional middle-class are not physically intensive, the working-life of the its members can often be longer, meaning that younger members of this class have to wait longer to move into a more secure and lucrative position.
The damage done to the traditional professions on a material level is demonstrated by the increased labour militancy in these professions. In 2016 Junior doctors launched an unprecedented wave of strike action over their new contract. In 2018, academics struck over a change to their pension scheme. While in 2019 Ryanair pilots in the UK went on strike, while British Airways pilots only climbed down at the last moment. Labour militancy does not manifest out of thin air, it is provoked.
Although labour militancy is not new in some parts of this class (for instance university lecturers engaged in industrial action as members of the AUT in 2006) what drives the current militancy is new and signifies a reaction to the changing relations of employment and production.
The 2018-2020 Higher education strikes were a direct result of the increased casualisation of labour and deteriorating terms of employment that are symptoms of the marketisation of higher education that came into existence in 2011 with the trebling of tuition fees and removal of government grants to universities. This was not the case in 2006. Currently UCU is taking strike action in an increasing number of universities against redundancies and pay cuts. As well as this, the civil service seems to be on a collision course with the British government over reform and safe working practices during the pandemic, with the First Division Association recently threatening strike action. Essentially, the government want the civil service to act as though they are members of the obedient professional managerial-class, instead of the traditional middle-class which has traditionally exercised greater autonomy in the workplace. This is a distinct development in the nature of civil service labour militancy, as the FDA’s only previous national strike action was the 2011 strike over pensions, meaning that it was about conditions of pay and employment and not obedience to the state and a loss of workplace autonomy.
That labour militancy, provoked by decline in employment conditions and workplace autonomy, has become increasingly common in professions that were previously antipathetic to it, is an indicator of the severity of the situation that the professions of the traditional middle-class now find themselves in. This is close, though not identical, to the proletarianisation predicted by Marx.23 For while the working-conditions of the traditional middle-class decline, and they experience increasing insecurity in their employment and diminishing renumeration, they still exercise a substantial (though decreasing) control over their processes of production, at least in comparison to other jobs. In addition, their distinct cultural capital still separates them from the proletariat, for the moment at least. However, it is evident that the traditional middle-class is now in desperate need of the "white-collar revolution" advocated by Clive Jenkins.
Accelerating the decline of the traditional middle-class has been the rise of the aristocracy of finance, by which I mean those who work in Britain’s financial services and banking sectors. It is a class born as a result of the latest manifestation of capitalism and raised to prominence as a result of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries’ reliance on financial markets. It is now central to Britain’s economy and society.24 Although these two classes are not mutually exclusive, and many of the initial members of the financial aristocracy will have been drawn from the ranks of the traditional middle-class, the material conditions they operate in are increasingly stratified. It is partly the injection of new levels of wealth from the financial class that have undermined the material base of the traditional middle-class. It is this money that has contributed to soaring house prices and squeezed the professions in other ways, such as rapidly rising private school fees pricing the middle-class out of schools that became a viable alternative to state provided grammar schools as grammar schools decreased in numbers.25 The importance of the school to the maintenance of a class, as a cultural and physical location, cannot be understated. Gramsci observed how “each social group has its own type of school, intended to perpetuate a specific traditional function, ruling or subordinate”.26 Since the decline of grammar schools in Britain, private schools have proven an important space for the children of the members of the professional middle-class to socialise almost exclusively with their own class, and to be advantaged in the pursuit of educational and professional qualifications. This privileged education has also, from a young age, culturally separated them from other classes in society, allowing them to maintain a social relationship with other classes that is characterised by distance and relative isolation.
The rise of the financial sector in Britain has dramatically changed the country’s means of production. It is at this point that some of Marx’s reflections are most apt. In The Civil War in France he observed how the rise of the financial aristocracy, supported by the July monarchy, meant that “the same unbridled assertion of unhealthy and viscous appetites broke forth, appetites which were in permanent conflict with the bourgeois law itself”.27 Essentially, an economic system which concentrates too much power in the hands of banks, for instance the significant proportion to which they fund the rest of the economy, will always tend towards excess, and chafe at any restrictions. The financial aristocracy should be anathema to the traditional middle-class as they are in direct competition with it. As Marx wrote, the financial aristocracy earns its wealth “not from production but by sleight-of-hand with other people’s wealth”. Thus, by its very existence, it challenges the relations of production and consumption that underpins Britain’s class structure.28 Rowland Atkinson et al. have explored how “by the late 1990s, London had become a city of the ‘middle-classes’ now it is a space increasingly made by, and in response to, the raw power of supremely monied individuals”.29 This observation further indicates the extent to which the traditional middle-class are becoming geographically fragmented.
Furthermore, as Atkinson et al. note, this new elite class of financiers is international, and its precise membership is opaque, as we know relatively little about it, however, its impact on the middle-class is evident:
“For the middle-classes the emerging story is of a kind of victimization from increasingly financialized forms of ‘gentrified gentrification’. This has produced a re-scaling of class changes in local neighbourhoods so that rather than the middle-classes displacing the working-classes it is often now the super-rich who are set against the local, long established, patrician elites in areas like Chelsea, Kensington, Highgate and so on”30
This geographic dispersion is most pronounced in the south of England due to the proximity to London which has the largest concentration of professions and is the heart of the financial services sector, thus this is where the new financial aristocracy are typically based and their expansion most rampant. However, this does not mean that the traditional middle-class will only be priced out of urban areas in the south, only that London is perhaps a sign of things to come. Manchester house prices are rapidly increasing and are projected to have increased by 57% between 2018 and 2028. The city is currently undergoing a radical transformation, not too dissimilar to the one experienced in London at the start of this century.31 There is no reason to suppose that this substantial urban redevelopment and rapidly increasing house prices will not exert a similar squeeze on the traditional middle-class in the North.
Indeed, the significant rise in house prices in towns near Manchester, for instance, Bolton, Sale, and Wilmslow indicates a rise in demand that could well be caused by people being priced out of Manchester itself.32 I think that this will be an observable occurrence across the country as more cities are redeveloped and shaped to the interests of capital and the new dominant class. The consequence of geographical dislocation and decline in employment conditions for the traditional middle-class is mainly born by its young members, as they have been brought up to expect a better quality of living and employment than many of them can now realistically expect to claim. The growth in homeworking caused by the current pandemic poses an open question as to whether this geographic fragmentation will continue. It is possible that some of the traditional middle-class will no longer feel the need to be as close to the city as their income allows. However, it is too early to attempt to answer this question, although I suspect that homeworking will not prove as prevalent once it ceases to be a necessity.
Just as the traditional middle-class is undermined materially, so too is it undermined culturally. Current indicators are that the pandemic will substantially damage Britain’s cultural and arts sector, as the government elects not to adequately support it, thus dismantling important sites of cultural production and consumption. Culture, including music and art, has always been an integral cornerstone for bourgeois society (of which the professional middle-class are an integral part, as is demonstrated by Hobsbawm’s analyses of the role of the piano, and what it represents as physical and cultural capital, in the bourgeois household).33 A class’ culture is a fundamental part of its formation and continued existence, as it informs not just a class’ relationship with other classes but also its relationship with itself, as it engages with, and learns its own cultural and historical references.
Brecht was adamant about the role art plays in directly shaping society, as it changes “the means of pleasure into an object of instruction”.34 Equally, Lucien Goldmann claimed that culture raises a class’ “collective consciousness to a degree of unity toward which it was spontaneously oriented but might never have attained in empirical reality”.35 Historically, the traditional middle-class, because of their relatively high disposable incomes, have engaged in copious cultural consumption. Therefore, the deterioration of the material base that produces this culture (the pandemic induced closure of theatres, museums, art galleries etc.) robs this class of vital outlets for the production and consumption of its culture, and consequently its consciousness. The high cost of cultural consumption also demonstrates the importance of income as a means by which a class maintains its collective consciousness and exclusivity.
As well as this, the status-quo that many would, rightly or wrongly, associate with the traditional middle-class in Britain, suffered a serious blow with the result and aftermath of the Brexit referendum. The result of the referendum was speciously presented as a victory for the neglected working-class of the north against the metropolitan elite of the south. While this is far from true, and many working-class people voted for remain and middle-class people for leave, the hegemonic nature of this myth, which has hardened in the last four years following the referendum result and the 2019 election, has increased hostility towards the traditional middle-class, by creating a caricature that is easily animated by populists. As a result, society is more divided and the traditional middle-class more isolated.
Conclusion
Above, I have attempted to provide a sketch of a particular fraction of the middle-class that has not received that much attention in recent analyses. However, the changes it is undergoing are significant for our understanding of the changing nature of society and capitalism in Britain today. The declining fortunes of the class’ young members demonstrate the extent to which the material reality of future generations from different classes is becoming increasingly similar – indicating that perhaps age in itself is starting to become a significant indicator of class. Were this to be the case it would call for a fundamental reanalysis of class relations and how the material conditions of different generations are able to react to changes in patterns of production and consumption. However, this particular rabbit warren is beyond the scope of this article.
Furthermore, the geographical dislocation being experienced by this class in the south of England, when analysed in conjunction with the similar displacement experienced by its neighbouring classes, is indicative of the spread of the new elite within urban centres and the extent to which they shape urban geography to their needs. As well as this, the increasing casualisation of labour and the resultant militancy in middle-class professions is symptomatic of the malignant spread of the gig-economy and the extent to which most of society has been left vulnerable to this new form of capitalist exploitation. That these processes can clearly be seen to affect a class whose members typically reside within the top 10% of earners, and have significant cultural capital, is a demonstration of the extent to which a new form of capitalism, supported by a compliant state, is adversely transforming British society.
Ken Roberts, when defining social class sets out three criteria for defining a class: that common positions in employment must be sustained, members of a class should have characteristic and distinctive social origins in classed families and education, and that a class’ children should enjoy class-characteristic life chances.36 Although this is perhaps an excessively schematic construction of class, it provides useful guidelines for assessing the transformation of the traditional middle-class as changes in these criteria are demonstrative changes in a class’ social relations and productive and consumptive processes. No longer does this class have consistent common positions in employment, on account of the gig-economy. Work has become casualised and workplace autonomy has decreased. While it still has distinctive social origins, the cultural base that supports these origins is gradually being eroded, as cultural establishments deteriorate and members of this class are increasingly priced out of private schools and homes that it would previously have found affordable. Finally, and most damningly, because of the changing nature of employment and rising cost of living, the children of this class no longer enjoy the same life chances.
That this class’ privilege has fundamentally changed shows the pernicious effects of contemporary capitalism. Indeed, Breman and Van der Linden have argued that the “Standard Employment Relationship”, constructed on a history of collective action and secure employment is a historical anomaly that is rapidly being eroded as capitalism returns to its normative state.37 While the decline of the institutions of labour and collective bargaining has been well documented, the decline of professional institutions and occupations has not. The erosion of the power and stability of the old professions within the traditional middle-class (a class in which, previously, unlike the working-class, precarity was largely unknown) is a sign of the extent to which stable employment relations, formerly considered as standard, are disappearing. It may well be the case that, without concerted collective action, the majority of generations Y and Z within the traditional middle-class, and the classes around it, will not experience stable employment relationships throughout the majority of their working life. This has the potential to fundamentally change class relationships in the future as deprivation squeezes more people into the same class and the conditions of their working life become increasingly similar.
With its material and cultural bases decaying, depravations that have been intensified by the current pandemic, the traditional middle-class’ fate appears sealed: it is in terminal decline. The relationships that underpinned this class have been fundamentally altered. Its younger members cannot hope to have the same security that their parents had, in the form of home ownership, secure jobs, and good pensions, while its cultural supremacy is rapidly eroded. Taking its place is a more ruthless class who are riding high on a newly invigorated form of capitalism, that benefits from a compliant state and the resultant insecurity in society.
While the professional middle-class will not disappear entirely, just as the industrial proletariat has not, it will only continue to exist as a parody of its former self haunted by the tradition of dead generations, as the perception of what it should be drifts further from the reality of what it is. Thompson claims that it is impossible to “locate and classify a class” because what is important is “not this or that part of the machine, but the way the machine works”.38 This is true. Were time to be frozen, it would be impossible to locate any given class in its entirety. However, one could still locate various institutions of class. The institutions of the traditional middle-class that would previously have been locatable are the profession, the neighbourhood, and various material manifestations of culture. All of these are now in decline and exhibit the extent to which this class is in decline.
The traditional middle-class is complicit in its own decline, it enabled the state to undermine the material and cultural foundations of its class. In the last twenty years of the twentieth century, many of its number embraced legislation that curbed the power of organised labour, which beforehand had provided a check on capitalism's excesses in the workplace. Equally, many, if not always consciously, embraced the products of burgeoning zero hours contracts across the economy in the 2010s. The result of this is now born by the young members of this class in their respective professions, as labour continues to be artificially fragmented and casualised. In the workplace, the traditional middle-class is being dismantled, just as the industrial working-class was. In the last ten years, successive British governments have disassembled the remaining institutions of the British welfare state, removing another check on capitalism. These governments would not have obtained office or legitimacy without substantial votes from the traditional middle-class.39
Although the passing of this class may not necessarily provoke sympathy – the middle-class does not benefit from the associated romanticism of the proletariat – its death is a clear indicator that the wheel of history has turned again, and once the wheel has turned, it cannot be turned back.40 As capitalism’s wheel turns, it appears as though the traditional middle-class is joining the proletariat beneath it.
Image "nothing hill" byAdriano Agulló is licensed underCC BY-NC 2.0
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- 1. E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, p. 9.
- 2. Ibid
- 3. Alberto Toscano and Jamie Woodcock, “Spectres of Marxism: A Comment on Mike Savage’s Market Model of Class Difference”, The Sociological Review, 2015, available at: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1111/1467-954X.12295, (accessed 29 November 2020)
- 4. Percentile points from 1 to 99 for total income before and after tax, available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/percentile-points-from-1-to-99-for-total-income-before-and-after-tax (accessed 1 November 2020).
- 5. Alex Callinicos, ‘The “New Middle Class” and Socialist Politics’, in International Socialism, 2:20, summer 1983, pp. 82- 119. P. 98.
- 6. Marc Mulholland, “Marx, the Proletariat, and the ‘Will to Socialism’”, in Critique, 37:3, pp. 319-341, p. 328.
- 7. Erik Olin Wright, “Varieties if Marxist Conceptions of Class Structure”, in Politics and Society, 9:3, pp. 323-270, p. 340.
- 8. Ibid, pp. 326-327.
- 9. Social Grade, available at: http://www.nrs.co.uk/nrs-print/lifestyle-and-classification-data/social-grade/ (accessed 1 November 2020).
- 10. As Richard Evans note, during the nineteenth century “urbanisation, industrial growth, the expansion of the state, the rise in population, all demanded the services of doctors, lawyers, engineers… as knowledge became more complex, training and validation became more important”, thus, the traditional middle-class were integral to the development and regulation of British society’s economy and culture and their professions became more significant. The Pursuit Of Power In Europe 1815-191, pp. 320-321.
- 11. Abram Harris, “Pure Capitalism and the Disappearance of the Middle Class” Journal of Political Economy, Jun. 1939, Vol. 47, No. 3, pp. 328-256, p.334.
- 12. The Making of the English Working Class, p. 4.
- 13. John Willet, Bertolt Brecht Journals 1934-1955, (Methuen: London), p. 43.
- 14. OECD (2019), Under Pressure: The Squeezed Middle Class, OECD Publishing, Paris. https://doi.org/10.1787/689afed1-en (accessed 9 October 2020)
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- 16. Jonathan Cribb, Andrew Hood, and Jack Hoyle, 2017, The decline of homeownership among adults, available at: https://www.ifs.org.uk/uploads/publications/bns/BN224.pdf (accessed 10 October 2020)
- 17. Daniel Dorling, “Dying Quietly: English suburbs and the stiff upper lip”, Political Quarterly, 2019, Vol.90, pp. 32-43.
- 18. Richard Partington, Gig economy in Britain Doubles, accounting for 4.7 million workers, available at: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jun/28/gig-economy-in-britain-doubles-accounting-for-47-million-workers (accessed 8 November 2020).
- 19. The ‘gig economy’ for lawyers continues to expand, located at https://www.globallegalpost.com/big-stories/the-gig-economy-for-lawyers-continues-to-expand-74886575/ (accessed 13 November 2020).
- 20. Jo Grady, Around 30,000 jobs may be on the line at universities. We have to fight back, available at: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/jul/28/around-30000-jobs-may-be-on-the-line-at-universities-we-have-to-fight-back (accessed 14 November 2020).
- 21. OECD (2019), Under Pressure: The Squeezed Middle Class, OECD Publishing, Paris, available at: https://doi.org/10.1787/689afed1-en (accessed 9 October 2020)
- 22. This increase in precarity can be also be placed in a global context, as Marcel van der Linden has demonstrated that “the standard employment relationship in the global North is now being broken down” and that “standard employment is becoming scarcer in advanced capitalist countries”, “San Precario: A New Inspiration for Labour Historians” Labour (2014) 11(1): 9-21, pp. 17-18.
- 23. Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto, (New York: Modern Reader Paperbacks, 1968) p.48.
- 24. Sami Fethi and Salih Katirciogly, “The role of the financial sector in the UK economy: evidence from a seasonal cointegration analysis”, in Economic Research-Ekonomska Istraživanja, Volume 28, Issue 1, pp. 717-37, p. 737.
- 25. Marianne Curphey, 2017, The spiralling rise of private education fees, available at: https://www.relocatemagazine.com/articles/uk-education-private-school-fees-rise-fivefold-in-twenty-years-1019-curphey (accessed 29 September 2020) and Sian Griffiths, 2016, Private schools price out middle class, available at: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/day-school-fees-squeeze-out-middle-class-nkwtn6lm3 (accessed 29 September 2020)
- 26. Harold Entwistle “Antonio Gramsci and the School as Hegemonic”, in James Martin (ed.) Antonio Gramsci: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers: Volume Three Intellectuals, Culture and the Party, pp.251-256, (London: Routledge, 2002), p.259.
- 27. Karl Marx, The Civil War in France, (London: Electric Books Co., 2001), 1977, p. 33.
- 28. It may be that Brexit significantly damages the British financial sector; however, it will probably not damage this sector as much as it will other sectors, meaning the financial aristocracy should remain the apex predatory class.
- 29. Rowland Atkinson, Simon Parker, and Roger Burrows, Elite Formation, Power and Space in Contemporary London, Theory, Culture and Society, 2017, Vol. 34 (5-6) pp. 179-200, p. 179.
- 30. Ibid, p. 191.
- 31. Kayleene Isherwood, Manchester house price growth top in UK for five of last six years, available at: https://www.buyassociation.co.uk/2018/11/21/manchester-house-price-growth-top-in-uk-for-five-of-last-six-years/ (accessed 29 November 2020), and This is Manchester: What’s behind the city’s building boom? Available at: https://www.building.co.uk/focus/this-is-manchester-whats-behind-the-citys-building-boom/5102434.article (accessed 29 November 2020).
- 32. K. Isherwood, North-west led the way in 2019 with strongest house price growth, available at: https://www.buyassociation.co.uk/2020/01/06/north-west-led-the-way-in-2019-with-strongest-house-price-growth/ (accessed 29 November 2020).
- 33. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital 1848-1875, (London: Routledge, 1992), p.272.
- 34. John Willett, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1997) p.42.
- 35. Lucien Goldmann, Cultural Creation in Modern Society, trans. Bart Grahl, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1976), p.78.
- 36. Ken Roberts, “Dealignment: Class in Britain and Class in British Sociology Since 1945”, Societies 2020, 10(4), 79. Available at: https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4698/10/4/79/htm (accessed 12 November 2019)
- 37. Jan Breman and Marcel van der Linden, “Informalising the Economy: The Return of the Social Question at a Global Level”, Development and Change, Volume 45, Issue 5, Forum 2014, pp.920-940, p.921.
- 38. The Making of the English Working Class, p.807.
- 39. How Britain Voted in 2015, available at: https://www.ipsos.com/ipsos-mori/en-uk/how-britain-voted-2015 (accessed 4 November 2019).
- 40. The Communist Manifesto, p.20.
A Response to Cummings and Shoikhedbrod: Towards Decolonizing the Jewish Question?
Igor Shoikhedbrod’s reviews of Shlomo Avineri’s and Enzo Traverso’s works on the “Jewish Question”2have sparked a meta-review by Jordy Cummings, who accuses Shoikhedbrod of misrepresenting Traverso.3 Shoikhedbrod and Cummings are invested in these debates and texts for their relevance to contemporary politics, including the recent resurgence of anti-Semitism. The Jewish Question asks how Jews, as a community (or communities) of people who faced (and face) discrimination and disenfranchisement in different spheres, were and are to emancipate themselves. Here, I offer some questions as a meta-meta-review of sorts, insofar as the discussion veers into examining Zionism (Jewish statehood) as a possible response to the question. I offer that their framing of the Jewish experience, the specificity of the “figure of the Jew,” remains bounded by the European experience. Palestine and Palestinians barely figure, and if they do the specificity of their struggle is ignored, and, importantly, so is the meaning of actually-existing Zionism as a form of settler-colonial apartheid in the formation of Jewish identity in Europe and North America—and perhaps more broadly. This leads to a particularism or provincialism in both of their writings. Their discussion of identity and emancipation could be better served by an expanded worldview.
Shoikhedbrod reads Avineri and Traverso to contend with the question of Jewish identity and emancipation as articulated by Marx in his 1843 essay, “On the Jewish Question,” and to think through its relevance to the question of identity and emancipation today. Shoikhedbrod is somewhat equidistant from both Avineri and Traverso. He disagrees with Avineri’s embrace of Zionism as emancipatory and rejection of proletarian internationalism—the idea that working people must transcend their particularities (e.g., nationality) to create a political unity because they hold common class interests. Yet, Shoikhedbrod is also skeptical of Traverso's embrace of internationalism, because here it appears more like assimilationism which wants to transcend particularities by dissolving them. He is also skeptical of Traverso’s rejection of Zionism, especially its socialist variants, because here Traverso equates Zionism with colonialism. Thus, Shoikhedbrod expresses his sympathy with a certain kind of Zionism, but ultimately comes out against nationalism in general, in part because statehood in the form of Israel has nevertheless not succeeded in emancipating the Jews from discrimination or prejudice. It remains unclear who, exactly, these Jews are.
Cummings asserts that Shoikhedbrod is an “anti-anti-Zionist,” analogous to Jean-Paul Sartre’s adopted position of “anti-anti-Communism.” That is, Sartre had serious problems with the ruling Communist Parties, but he was also—and perhaps more so—skeptical of the anti-Communists and the reactionary bases of their critiques. Cummings sees Zionism, in all its variants, as being a colonial enterprise. I think Cummings is correct, on which more below. The prefix of “socialism” may have made for a Zionism with a human face, but it was still a chauvinistic project predicated on displacement and dispossession of an indigenous people, specifically, Arabs.
It is perhaps in response to this question about the legitimacy of Zionism that Shoikhedbrod points to Avineri’s diplomatic manoeuvres at UNESCO against a Soviet delegate—raising a little remembered article that Marx wrote on matters in the Ottoman Empire.4Marx asserted that of all groups in Jerusalem, the most poorly treated were the Jews, who constituted the majority of its residents at the time. Here Shoikhedbrod echoes Avineri’s Marxological gesture toward some of the premises of Zionism—Jews have always (at least since the 1850s) been a majority in Jerusalem: even Marx recognized this fact. There is a fundamental question for Shoikhedbrod, one Cummings does not contend with: do Jews as a nation not have a right to statehood? This concern exists in a dialectical tension with Shoikhedbrod’s ultimate disagreement with any form of nationalism being emancipatory, which is why he returns to Marx's universalism.5
Some of what I have laid out above has to be excavated from or read into what Shoikhedbrod has written—by way of a symptomatic reading, if you will—and perhaps for this reason, Cumming’s critique often exceeds what Shoikhedbrod himself may actually believe, and could perhaps show greater consideration for the specificity of what Shoikhedbrod has written (as opposed to what he has not). I am sympathetic to Cumming’s substantive claims, if not his method of attack, but perhaps diverge in terms of his claims’ underspecified nature. Again, despite the discussion of contemporary politics, both Cummings’ and Shoikhedbrod’s framings remain particularistic, or rather, provincial, insofar as they remain bounded by Europe (and Russia). Cummings certainly gestures toward the broader world, and for that, incorporating a wider worldview is more damaging to Shoikhedbrod’s position.
Do Jews not have the right to statehood? Shoikhedbrod is no fan of nationalism, so his implied question must be understood: Do Jews not have the right to statehood, just like every other oppressed nation? I think to pose the question in this way is to engage in equivocation and a misreading of the specificities of different sequences of nationalism. Not all nationalisms are the same, despite formal resemblances, nor can they be, and if Marxism has a problem it is its attempt to apply conceptual apparatuses from European nationalisms to the rest of the world. This is a problem that has been confronted by many Marxists in the Third World and that is unavoidable given the history of imperialism from which these nations emerge.6
The thinking around nationalism in Europe was that there are “naturally” existing nations7 that deserve their own states, i.e., that the “political and national unity should be congruent”—the rulers of the political unit should not belong to a nation other than the majority ruled.8 And so it is worth asking from the jump if Jews constitute such a nation. But this may be beside the point, since we know from the historiography of nationalism that nationalist movements seeking states create nations out of diverse communities, more often than some entity resembling a coherent nation creates a state – to use one of Joseph V. Stalin’s examples, the Italian nation was formed from “Romans, Teutons, Etruscans, Greeks, Arabs, and so forth.” (Zionism certainly fits the bill insofar as it has sought to forge a unitary Jewish nation-state out of a diverse set of communities.) But in the logic that emerges to justify European nationalisms, all nations must have their own states in order to avoid—or at least to mitigate—the discrimination and prejudice that is attributed to being rootless, stateless.
Let’s accept the European principle and apply it to Jews, that Jews were a nation who deserved, for the sake of argument, a state. (Let us be clear, however, that this was not the majority opinion amongst politically engaged European Jews in the early twentieth century.) In that case, Jews certainly ought to have a state. But not in Palestine. The nationalisms in Europe bear greatest resemblance to anti-colonial nationalism when we can speak of an attempt at separation from an empire, e.g., Poland’s independence from Russia, Austria and Prussia. But establishing a Jewish state in Palestine meant making Palestinians pay the costs of Jewish emancipation from European oppression. Jews may feel some kind of spiritual attachment to the land of Palestine, which is fine, no Arab politics has ever denied that spiritual attachment—the spiritual claim is not, however, a political one. The question is how that translates into a political right to displace an actually existing indigenous population of that land. This is not merely a cultural question or one of identity, the struggle over the land entails political and economic conflict and violence. That, in turn, reshapes identity and culture.
This is also why it is insufficient to speak of the figure of the Jew now (and therefore of anti-Semitism also), as perhaps Cummings does, without talking about the “figure of the Palestinian.” The entry of Jews into whiteness needs to be understood not only in relation to dynamics of upward mobility or ethno-racial dynamics in Europe and North America, but also to the colonization of the Palestinians. Jews did get over some form or aspect of discrimination and prejudice, but not merely through their statehood, as such, but through colonialism in Palestine that marked their entry into the comity of whiteness.
But this entry to whiteness is even more complex: Ashkenazi Jews from Europe, a minority within Israel, are socially, politically and economically dominant compared to the majority Mizrahi Jews of Arab origins and it is the Ashkenazi aspiration to whiteness that has driven Zionism. Mizrahis have experienced de-Arabization, a process in which they have by and large participated, to act white—meaning to act like Ashkenazis.9 Much of the virulent anti-Arab discourse in Israel comes from Mizrahi Jews10— they are to identify not as Arab Jews but Jews who just happened to be in Arab lands.11 Meanwhile, and one would say ironically if it were not so predictable, Ethiopian Jews are at the bottom of this Israeli Jewish pecking order, their skin colour an ultimate barrier to their entry into any kind of whiteness and even Jewishness12—they continue to be severely marginalized in Israel.13
And so Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Jews share, albeit differentially, in aspiring to whiteness, brought together by the settler-colonial project of Jewish nationalism in Palestine, one of dispossession and dislocation that is by definition anti-emancipatory. Or, rather, it imbibes a similar kind of self-delusionary narrative of liberty and emancipation that is the hallmark of US nationalism: we are the true defenders of liberty, having set the foundation for it through genocide, ethnic cleansing and subjugating othered populations as labour reserves (and later, when we have no need for their labour, a more protracted genocide).
That is exactly what Zionism has been, and, Cummings is right to note, it has been so in all its variants. Shoikhedbrod raises the question of “socialist” Zionism, saying to Traverso that perhaps here is something worth being more sympathetic with. But this is insufficient. Cummings is correct to point out that much of European socialism was racist, chauvinist and colonialist (it is also worth noting this is still the case)14. The groups that went on to form the Third International broke with those who became contemporary social democrats, not merely on the question of war nationalism, but crucially also on the question of colonialism. V.I. Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, even Karl Kautsky to his credit, saw no room for colonialism in the socialist movement.15 But there it was, and there it continues to be today, albeit disguised in humanitarian concerns and/or a cultivated ignorance of the dynamics of imperialism.16 The specificity of communism as a separate trend in the working-class movement has to be understood as being, from its birth, anti-colonial.
And this is why Isaac Deutscher’s quotation, “As long as a solution to the problem is sought in nationalist terms both Arab and Jew are condemned to move within a vicious circle of hatred and revenge,” is not as prescient as Shoikhedbrod would have it, but rather obtuse, for two reasons.17
The first is that one set of hatreds is based on an aspirant white supremacy, it is racist in the structural sense, the other is based on being subject to colonialism, ethnic cleansing and a protracted genocide. To equate these two is disingenuous. It is like equating the hatred that comes out of the German/Nazi ideology of the Übermensch (the master race) with the hatred that drove Jewish and/or Soviet resistance to German invasion and occupation.18 Recognition of Zionism as settler-colonialism would help Shoikhedbrod in nuancing his misplaced admiration for Avineri’s anecdote and reference to Marx’s recognition of a Jewish majority in Jerusalem in the 1850s—though Marx did note that those Jews were “not natives, but from different and distant countries.” Avineri notes that the “Soviet Union does not exist anymore, but the Jewish majority in Jerusalem does.” But for the Zionist this means erasing the backstory. How did the Jews get there? How did they maintain their majority in Jerusalem? Does a majority in a city entail the legitimacy of an ethnically exclusive minority rule over all of Palestine and Palestinians? Again, it is the very European logic of racial supremacy by dint of conquest that Zionism (and Avineri) channels, both in its stated aims and in its omissions.
This leads us to the second reason why Deutscher’s quotation is obtuse. Writing in 1954 while on a trip to Israel, his skepticism of Zionism was premised on both the nation-state and nationalism being obsolete, and so as obsolete for the Jews as for the Arabs. Incidentally, the USSR initially, and very wrongly, supported the formation of Israel in 1948. That by 1976 the USSR’s position appears to have shifted has less to do with any fidelity to Marxology and more to do with the real and actual movement of anti-colonial national liberation struggles which asserted the centrality of decolonization and national liberation to the moment. This was not nationalism as particularism.
Rather, it is through the particularity that the generality was to be achieved, something Frantz Fanon points out when he says that, “National consciousness, which is not nationalism, is the only thing that will give us an international dimension.”19 But what does national consciousness here mean? Is it the same conceit as the European one, that there exists a naturally existing nation that seeks a state? This notion has been attempted in South Asia, with Jawaharlal Nehru’s Discovery of India, or Mazdoor Kisan Party leader Ishaq Muhammad’s attempt to provide an alternative to Muslim nationalism, in the wake of the separation of Bangladesh, by arguing that West Pakistan had a natural cultural unity20 (I should note that these sets of arguments are far more complex than simply asserting that cultural unity entails an identity of cultures). But, at least as far as Nehru was concerned, there was a certain “derivativeness” to this discourse insofar as it entailed an appeal to the logic of the colonizer to recognize that we, too, are nations who deserve independence.
For Fanon the kind of historical justification was beside the point, “a national culture is not a folklore.” Rather, the question was one of constructing anew a sense of unity that would incorporate and not supersede differences, and not just at superficial culture day events, rather than seeking to incorporate them under the sign of any naturally or even historically given cultural unit. To the extent that there was a cultural unity to be forged, it was to be entirely new, borne of the anti-colonial struggle for freedom; and the pre-condition for national consciousness was the question of political and economic sovereignty.
A recognition of this problem of filling in the abstract borders of newly decolonized states with the content of a homogenous nation also led to internationalist projects in the form of pan-Africanism, pan-Arabism, and so on. Interestingly, these were at times far more serious attempts at political interdependence than those exhibited by states ruled by communist parties (in the Far East they almost all fought with each other at various times). More recently Adom Getachew has argued that anti-colonial national liberation entailed “worldmaking”—forging “juridical, political, and economic institutions in the international realm that would secure non-domination.”21 This is also clear when the Palestinian leader George Habash says the road to Jerusalem lies through all the other Arab capitals, Palestinian national liberation has no choice but to be internationalist.22
But no such incarnation of internationalism is evident in anything the Zionist project has ever put forward. On the contrary, Israel’s internationalism has always identified with imperialism and whiteness, including in apartheid South Africa and in facilitating the near-genocide of indigenous campesinos in Guatemala. Israel is an aspirant part of Europe, somewhat inconveniently located amidst (or rather, on top of) Arabs, just as Mizrahi Jews were somewhat inconveniently located in other Arab lands.
Zionism is not a reaction to the poor treatment of Jews in Palestine under the Ottomans, and here to rely on one thing Marx wrote at the end of a rather long piece of journalism is insufficient: let us actually engage in the historiography of the Ottoman Empire from which we learn that even the valence of discrimination against Jews there was not straightforwardly comparable to what was happening in Europe. Rather, Zionism is a reaction to the poor treatment of Jews in Europe and Russia, but which takes its discontent to “the Orient”. It is why Zionism is indefensible, and it is why any ongoing discussion of the Jewish Question has to be reconfigured in light of the Palestinian Question. I have also suggested that Zionism, because it is colonialism, has played a role in enabling Jews to enter into whiteness—although this whiteness remains a contested terrain both inside and outside of Israel. If one wants to assess the adequacy of Zionism and entry into whiteness as a response to the Jewish Question, it is surely worth interrogating phenomena like anti-Semites in the West who are also ardent supporters of Israel. Yet, one also needs ask its victims, the Palestinians, how well it functions to do that.
Noaman G. Ali is assistant professor of political economy at the Lahore University of Management Sciences, with research interests in agrarian studies and peasant struggles, the political economy of development, and discourses of regime types. He also hosts the podcast, Introduction to Political Economy. His research has been published in Rethinking Marxismand the Journal of Agrarian Change.Follow him on Twitter: @noamangali
- 1. This write-up has benefited from feedback from Rabia Ashraf.
- 2. https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/18380_the-jewish-question-history-of-a-marxist-debate-by-enzo-traverso-reviewed-by-igor-shoikhedbrod/ and https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/17417_karl-marx-philosophy-and-revolution-by-shlomo-avineri-reviewed-by-igor-shoikhedbrod/
- 3. https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/blog/anti-anti-zionism-and-bad-faith-critique-refuting-misrepresentation-enzo-traverso
- 4. Avineri’s story is available here: https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/138/karl-marx-the-jews-of-jerusalem-and-unesco/
- 5. Here also comes Shoikhedbrod’s second move in his reading of Avineri, which is to understand that Marx’s universalism is informed not only by a distant yet studied consideration of the Jewish question but also through some degree of engagement with actual Jewish politics, at least in Germany. As far as that goes, it is an interesting addition to the historiography of Marx’s Marxism.
- 6. For a fairly comprehensive overview, see Robert J.C. Young’s Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (2016, Wiley-Blackwell).
- 7. While a “nation” implies a political community, this does not always take the form of a state – for example, the Kurds identify as a nation yet they are split across four states (Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran). The nation as a phenomenon defies definition, and I think that few have managed to do worse (or better) than Josef Stalin’s 1913 definition, “A nation is a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture.” Any one or more of these conditions could be missing and a nation could still be considered a nation, for which Benedict Anderson’s classic definition is useful: “an imagined political community—and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.” See Imagined Communities (1983, Verso).
- 8. Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (1983, Basil Blackwell).
- 9. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/264373157_Passing_as_NonEthnic_The_Israeli_Version_of_Acting_White
- 10. See https://forward.com/opinion/335609/the-mizrahi-palestinian-intersectionality-nobodys-talking-about/
- 11. See for example: https://www.israelhayom.com/opinions/the-myth-of-the-arab-jew/
- 12. https://www.timesofisrael.com/top-state-rabbinical-body-reinforces-ruling-that-ethiopian-jews-are-jewish/
- 13. See https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/fr/node/251592
- 14. See for example: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/09/france-insoumise-islamophobia-racism-melenchon-pena-ruiz
- 15. See https://cosmonaut.blog/2020/04/18/colonialism-and-anti-colonialism-in-the-second-international/
- 16. See, for example, Max Ajl’s criticisms of the Green New Deal and other forms of socialist eco-modernism in the Global North: https://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/magazine/entry/clean-tech-versus-a-peoples-green-new-deal/
- 17. Quoted in https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/18380_the-jewish-question-history-of-a-marxist-debate-by-enzo-traverso-reviewed-by-igor-shoikhedbrod/
- 18. As Aimé Césaire notes and it is well worth recalling, Nazism was an application to Europe of “colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the ‘coolies’ of India, and the ‘niggers’ of Africa”—and we must add the Indigenous of the Americas. See Discourse on Colonialism (2001, Monthly Review Press).
- 19. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1963, Grove Press), p. 247.
- 20. See Ishaq Muhammad, “Culturally, West Pakistan is a Natural Unit,” in Circular no. 24, c. 1972. The Circular was the monthly internal bulletin of the Mazdoor Kisan Party (Workers Peasants Party) in Pakistan.
- 21. Adom Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-determination (2019, Princeton University Press), see also Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations (2007, The New Press) and Young cited above.
- 22. https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20181222-the-road-to-the-liberation-of-palestine/
A Precarious Game: The Illusion of Dream Jobs in the Videogame Industry
Jamie Woodcock Reviews Ergin Bulut, A Precarious Game: The Illusion of Dream Jobs in the Videogame Industry, London, ILR Press, 2020.
Videogame production has been back in the news with stories of the working conditions at CD Projekt Red and the upcoming – delayed again – Cyberpunk 2077. While there have been campaigns around “crunch”, or overwork, in the industry going back to the 2003 “ea_spouse” open letter.
Beyond these headlines, comparatively less is known outside of the industry about the working conditions of videogames studios. This is particularly the case within academic research on work or wider Marxist analysis. However, since 2018, there has been a growing critical voice from workers within the industry, increasingly covered by some of the now-unionised videogame press. Workers have joined or formed unions in France, South Korea, the USA, Canada, Ireland, and the UK, amongst others. Within this fast-moving context (which will hopefully have more developments by the time this review is published) there is a growing interest in what happens in the ‘hidden abode’ (as Marx referred to
A Precarious Game by Ergin Bulut’s is an important contribution to the growing field of critical and Marxist influenced scholarship on videogame work. At its core, the book is a detailed and engaged ethnographic account of a videogame studio, pseudonymously referred to as ‘Desire’, and the dynamics that developed there over time. Bulut focuses on four process: ‘rationalization upon acquisition, spatialization, financialization, and precarization. Among these, precarization anchors the whole story’ (p. 4). This means much of the book unpicks the ‘immaterial labor’ involved in the production of AAA (large, mainstream) videogames. However, it does not fall into the trap of focusing solely on the white-collar employment in the studio, drawing back at points to consider the other kinds of work involved, both along the supply chain and in other aspects of production like videogame testing.
The book builds upon a growing literature of critical game studies, including, as Bulut notes, Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter’s excellent Games of Empire (which has recently been revisited in a special issue of the journalGames and Culture on the tenth anniversary of its publication)
The book builds on some of the weaknesses of more mainstream scholarship on work, which often has less interest in detailed workplace investigations. Workplace ethnography is, unfortunately, becoming increasingly more difficult to pass through ethics review boards. It is even rarer within studies of the videogames industry.
The book is full of examples of how this is worked out in practice, from the informality of the workplace and Nerf gun fights, to the huge additional pressures this informality introduces, both during work hours and the reproduction of labour power outside of it. Here, precarity is not understood only as ‘the top-down imposition of insecurity’ as it can so often be understood. It is worth quoting Bulut at length:
Rather, the government of subjects – in our case, video game developers – actively depends on workers’ participation from below, which is enabled by their creative autonomy, passion for work, the ethos of hard work, and game development’s cool status; these aspects not only empower the workers in their everyday practices but also deepen precarization. Simply put, precarity is productive of subjectivities especially because it is entrenched in love. It doesn’t exist just because there are fewer jobs. On the contrary, precarity is strong especially due to the game developers’ ideological tendency towards abstract promises of play and the materiality of glamorous employment (p. 6)
This chimes with my own research with game workers, drawing out the complex experience of working practices that can be both precarious but also desired, exploited and enjoyed.
The importance of this kind of detailed ethnographic research is that it can shed new light on the processes of worker organisation that are beginning to unfold in the industry. As Bulut notes, ‘game workers’ organizing attempts suggest that contemporary capital’s strategy to enlist subjectivity for work is likely to face resistance’ (p. 7). While the new focus on organising in the industry is exciting, it is important to remember that below the surface of work there is always resistance, which as Braverman explains, is like ‘a subterranean stream that makes its way to the surface when employment conditions permit, or when the capitalist drive for a greater intensity of labor oversteps the bounds of physical and mental capacity.’
In the short conclusion, Bulut outlines how for game workers, ‘doing what one loves can be a mixed blessing; joyful as it is, love can be precarious and alienating … a critique of love, then is in order’ (p. 160). This involves a critique of the specific kinds of work that is carried out, taking into account the role of gender, race, disability, sexuality, as well as why some kinds of work are said to matter or not, stay hidden, or become visible. While Desire was not the site of open worker organising – with some participants even voicing opposition to the idea – Bulut does not fall into the trap of writing off worker power in the industry. Reading this chapter reminded me of an encounter I had with a game studies professor who critiqued my writing on game worker struggle,
In summary, this book is an excellent contribution to the growing critical scholarship on videogame work. It takes seriously the experience of workers in the sector, combines ethnographic detail with a political economy of the industry, and uncovers dynamics that play out in these workplaces. While this close focus is needed for understanding videogame workers, the videogames they make, and their role in contemporary capitalism, the book maintains a critical vision beyond the workplace itself. As Bulut argues ‘it’s ironic that, although video games are mostly marketed as digital venues where players’ dreams and utopias are realized through interactive technology, the industry becomes suddenly serious when workers start daydreaming’ (p. 173). This is part of the challenge of both researching and organising in new sectors of work: connecting the big questions of power and transformation to the smaller specificities and peculiarities of the workplace.
References
Badger, A. and Woodcock, J. (2019) 'Ethnographic Methods with Limited Access: Assessing Quality of Work in Hard to Reach Jobs', in D. Wheatley (ed) Handbook of research methods on the quality of working lives, 135-146. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
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