Rohini Hensman

Preface

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

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

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

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

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

Rohini Hensman, February 2021

I

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

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

II

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

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

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

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

III

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IV

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VI

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

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

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

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

VII

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

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

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

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

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

A Dialogue with Ugo Palheta

Valerio Arcary1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Considering these ten criteria, we can conclude that:

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

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

Translated by Alex Hochuli

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

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

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

Alberto Toscano

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

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

alberto_toscano@sfu.ca

Abstract

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

Keywords

Alain Bertho – riots – politics – violence – jihadism

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

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

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

I.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

II.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Panagiotis Sotiris

Hellenic Open University, Greece

panagiotis.sotiris@gmail.com

Abstract

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

Keywords

Gramsci – Marxism – Communism – Trotsky – hegemony – strategy

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

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

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

1.      Trotsky on Hegemony

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2.      Gramsci’s Critique of Trotsky Revisited

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

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

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

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

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

3.      The ‘Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci’ Revisited

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

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

Conclusion: Rethinking Revolutionary Strategy through with Gramsci

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oliver Eagleton

Assistant Editor, New Left Review

oeagleton@gmail.com

Abstract

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

Keywords

Ireland – Troubles – nationalism – anticolonialism – Trotskyism – IRA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jamie Woodcock

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

jamie.woodcock@open.ac.uk

Keywords

Marxism – videogames – psychoanalysis – cultural studies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Response to Ugo Palheta

By Ken Kawashima

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enzo Traverso

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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• 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.

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.

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.Zeleke’s archival-based yet theoretically-informed interrogation of foundational concepts in Marxism and development studies alike makes this text formidable. Her interdisciplinary scope and methodological attentiveness together offer the reader an intellectual challenge that sets her book apart from other works readers may be familiar with, namely Fred Halliday and Maxine Molyneux’s The Ethiopian Revolution (Halliday and Molyneux 1981), Donald L. Donham’s Marxist Modern: An Ethnographic History of the Ethiopian Revolution (Donham 1999), and Ian Scott Horst’s Like Ho Chi Minh! Like Che Guevara! The Revolutionary Left in Ethiopia, 1969–1979 (Horst 2020).

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.Benjamin 1968. Committed to telling the tale of revolutionary storytelling (p. 1), Zeleke projects onto the subsequent chapters an analytical structure that is self-reflective and far-reaching, setting a course that helps her expose progressive aspirations as regressive in practice. This is the arc of the book. Once immersed in the particulars of recent Ethiopian history, the consequences of this positioning become clear for other fields of Marxist scholarship, namely what I refer to as ‘anticolonial studies’ and the so-called ‘transition debates’.

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,Marx 1977, p. 899. Zeleke sees in memoir the practice of negation as thoughtful counterproductivity. The negation is the negation of the folly that the future is knowable, and, in that respect, is the submission to the limits of human knowledge, or rather, the realisation of unrealisability. Memoir operates in this realm: a retelling with no control over its interpretation – a giving over of a version of oneself to make sense of oneself as a human, that is, in relation to ‘historically situated, embodied knowledge’ (p. 201). To realise unrealisability is to remain possessed by the contingencies that shape human knowledge, namely the gaps between subject and object as well as intention and outcome (p. 248).

          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.Lamarque 2016.

          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 2011. Ruskin, a contemporary of Marx’s and a social reformer, delivered a 1870 lecture at Oxford that is said to have inspired Cecil Rhodes, who was then a student and would later become synonymous with the scramble for Africa.Notable today in the context of the toppling of statues, see for instance, ‘Taking Down Rhodes’s Statue Would Be A Futile Gesture’ (Financial Times 2016). Committed to the education of the labouring class and the labour of the educated class, Ruskin wrote: ‘the mass of society is made up of morbid thinkers, and miserable workers. Now it is only by labour that thought can be made healthy, and only by thought that labour can be made happy, and the two cannot be separated with impunity’.Ruskin 2009. This excursus concerning Ruskin ties together various threads from Zeleke’s book: memory, the scramble, Marx, and the corruption of critical thought. It also provides a chance to reflect on perhaps the least accounted-for and most at-risk of being overlooked aspect of Ethiopia in Theory, namely Zeleke’s collaboration with Loulou Cherinet.

          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’.Quoted in Davis 2015. Photography was a bane and a boon. It facilitated the labour of restoration that he also considered a lie; it was a ‘mechanistic’ memory aid that had documentary functionality but also froze the subject.Davis 2015. If deployed unthinkingly, it is an external object that produces truth-claims (or ‘Big Data’, p. 187) about the subject in a way that dissolves the obligation to make sense of the subject on its own terms, rather like the orthodoxy of the transition to capitalism as it was/is applied to Ethiopia, which Zeleke critiques in her book.

          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.