A Review of Citizenship by Étienne Balibar

Lorenzo Buti

Research Institute in Political Philosophy Leuven, KU Leuven

lorenzo.buti@kuleuven.be

Étienne Balibar, (2015) Citizenship, translated by Thomas Scott-Railton, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Abstract

Citizenship contains the most updated version of Étienne Balibar’s theoretical investigations of the concepts citizenship and democracy. In an analysis covering multiple historical periods, Balibar shows that the insurrectionary capacity to found a constitution lies at the heart of every modern formulation of citizenship. Democracy puts pressure on the institutionalised form of citizenship by contesting its exclusions and relationships of domination. Democratic action forces political structures to reinvent themselves, restructuring the social environment in the process. After analysing how Balibar’s theoretical framework applies to the present constellation of national citizenship and its spectrum of social exclusions linked to race and class, this essay situates Balibar vis-à-vis Marxist accounts that remain sceptical towards the capacity to effect social change through the rights-based politics of citizenship struggles. It argues that this dialogue is still without definite conclusion, but that its key point of heresy – the role of rights in the struggle to go beyond capitalist social relations – remains of the utmost importance.

Keywords

citizenship – democracy – Marxism – Balibar – rights

In recent years, the English translation of three major books collecting the papers and essays of Étienne Balibar, Equaliberty, Citizen Subject andViolence and Civility, has set the stage for a renewed assessment of the French philosopher’s theories and his place within the broader philosophical canon.Balibar 2014; Balibar 2015b; Balibar 2016. It is easy to overlook the fact that a fourth book, originally published in Italian, has also been translated into English.Balibar 2012. At 145 pages, Citizenship is short and concise. That being said, its range is still impressive, as it analyses the misadventures of citizenship from its Ancient Greek conception to its predicament in the contemporary age. The primary topic thus revolves around the concept of citizenship, and more specifically its relationship to democracy.Citizenship elegantly gathers many of the central claims that Balibar has expounded over at least the last 30 years that, even if it does not represent Balibar’s definitive theory of citizenship (acontradictio in terminis), at least offers a timely and comprehensive analysis of the multiple dimensions of citizenship and democracy. For the most part, Balibar manages to combine a historical and philosophical commentary on citizenship and democracy with an investigation of the contemporary political conjuncture. Even though the content ofCitizenship spans multiple centuries and a diverse range of authors and constellations, it retains a persistent focus on the contemporary.

The Antinomies of Citizenship

Balibar’s philosophical theory of citizenship and democracy is guided by a methodology that is both historical and conjunctural. According to Balibar, the nature of citizenship contains no a priori essence. One can only study the different instantiations of citizenship throughout history. In doing so, we can identify what distinguishes different conceptions of citizenship, as well as what has been ‘transmitted under this name, through its successive translations’ (p. 2). This approach leads Balibar to commence his analysis with the Greek conception of citizenship and the way it has been theorised by Aristotle. Aristotle links citizenship topoliteia, which Balibar argues must be understood as ‘the constitution of citizenship’ understood in its full sense, meaning ‘the historical process of [the] constitution or of [the] societal and institutional social formation’ of citizenship (p. 12). This Greek constitution of citizenship was marked by a strong emphasis on equality between citizens and an attention to fair procedures of representation in public office which assured that the citizenry remained in charge. On the other hand, however, the liberty and equality that characterised Greek citizenship remained unavailable to those who did not meet certain anthropological criteria. A personal and social abyss loomed between the male Greek non-labouring citizen and everyone else, most notably women and slaves.

Although there exist qualitative differences between the ancient and the modern conceptions of citizenship, Balibar’s analysis of the former already highlights certain aspects of citizenship that will retain all their relevance for the contemporary situation, such as the issue of the representation of citizens, the equality and autonomy afforded by citizenship and by the active constitution of citizenship, and the problem of exclusions to citizenship. This combination of theoretical argumentation and historical analysis furnishes a conception of citizenship that is both unstable and multipolar. Citizenship can only be defined as an inherently unstable concept, whose multiple dimensions often directly contradict one another. For instance, within each historical instantiation of citizenship, equality exists alongside different exclusions, or citizen-sovereignty alongside its immediate circumscription through the delegation of power to representatives or law-makers. These contradictions function antinomically, by which Balibar means that one must think the concept of citizenship as permanently traversed by contradictions that nevertheless do not dissolve the concept altogether. In fact, these contradictions give citizenship a dynamism that explains its enduring relevance throughout history. Sometimes, as Balibar shows, they give rise to dialectical movements, at other times to undevelopedaporiae. Most important from the perspective of philosophy is that these relations are analysed fromboth a logical and a historical perspective. More specifically, the historical nature of citizenship never ceases to influence the logical analysis. One can only study the concept of citizenship through its successive iterations throughout history (such as Greek, Roman or national citizenship), and investigate the different pathways that flow from any specific conjuncture.

Constitution and Insurrection

The structural opposition that underlies most of Balibar’s theorisation of citizenship, and that which ties citizenship to democracy, is the one between constitution and insurrection. In the modern era, citizenship is most readily associated with the elaboration of a set of rights and duties. Following T.H. Marshall’s famous tripartite division, we can state that every citizen has civil rights (such as the right to free speech, freedom of religion and the right to property), political rights (such as the right to vote) and social rights (such as a right to education and a right to a minimum of social welfare in the form of pensions, health care, etc.).Marshall 1994. According to Balibar, however, this constituted form of citizenship does not entirely exhaust the content of citizenship. As we have already mentioned, the term ‘constitution’ itself already points in that direction. ‘Constitution’ does not merely refer to an ensemble of legal texts, rights, existing political institutions and forms of representation. It also refers to the act of constituting itself, which is that which underlies and founds the existing constituted constitution. Citizens (‘We, the people’) actively and performatively found constitutions, and any regime ultimately derives its legitimacy by reference to the sovereignty of the citizenry.

In the modern era, this dimension of the sovereignty of the citizen is shot through with internal paradoxes. On the one hand, Balibar interprets the revolutionary moment of constitution (such as the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789) as a moment of insurrection: A people rose up against the structural conditions of oppression inherent in monarchical absolutism and feudal relations that denied them freedom and equality. This insurrection proclaimed the modern ideal that Balibar calls ‘equaliberty’ (theportmanteau of the words equality and liberty), namely that ‘every individual is the equal of, if not similar to, any other, and that no one can exercise an arbitrary, discretionary, authority over another’ (p. 79). The principle of equaliberty is universal, in the sense that no individual can be excluded from the conditions of equality and liberty. Moreover, in the context of the establishment of a constitution, insurrection is a democraticpraxis, since it attempts to expand the group of individuals that can make public decisions. Insurrection is the democratic pole of the concept of citizenship.

On the other hand, however, the modern form of citizenship took shape within the national sphere. The sovereignty of the citizen was identified exclusively with nationality. It was the national people who proclaimed themselves a sovereign people. Thus, the insurgent demand of the universal principle of equaliberty was restricted in its constitution by the identification of citizenship with nationality. The struggles that led to the institutionalisation of social rights as a compromise between masses that organised around ‘socialism’ and ruling classes only served to strengthen the identification of citizenship with nationality. Social rights provided democratic legitimacy to the national state in a double sense. Firstly, they were the product of a democratic struggle for equality and public autonomy (Balibar speaks here of a ‘democratic conquest’ (p. 59)). Secondly, the mechanisms of social solidarity succeeded, to a certain extent, in achieving conditions of equality between national citizens: ‘The mechanism of solidarity that was established to varying extents by the welfare state concerned virtually every citizen and covered all of society, which is to say, the rich and the poor had equal right to it’ (p. 49). However, social citizenship was always also national social citizenship. The postwar consensus took the form of the ‘national-social state’, a constellation that proved one of the most powerful of modern politics and in whose historical shadow we still situate ourselves to a large degree.

This paradox of modern citizenship, namely the combination of its insurrectional universality on the one hand (that is, the fact that in principle no one can be denied the same rights as anyone else), and the immediate positing of exclusions on the other, guarantees that every attempt to institutionalise citizenship is in principle always in danger of being overturned. Every constituted form of citizenship violates the principle of equaliberty to some extent, and hence makes its own existence precarious, which means that it can always be put into question. According to Balibar, this does not entail that we should strive for a world without borders. As he puts it in another text, in this globalised world marked by the competition of major private actors, such a world ‘would run the risk of being a mere arena for the unfettered domination of the private centers of power which monopolize capital, communications and, perhaps also, arms’.Balibar 2002. Rather, we must think of it in terms of a dialectic of citizenship that plays out as much in history as it constitutes its logical structure. Every insurrection (both revolutionary and reformist) has as its aim the realisation of a constituted form. And every (democratic) constitution is the result of a history of insurrections: ‘We must place the insurrectional power to emancipate at the core of political constitutions’ (p. 18). Insurrection lies at the heart of constitution, and constitution lies at the heart of insurrection.

A Theory of Democracy

Balibar thus theorises citizenship as something that always escapes its form of institutionalisation to some extent. According to Balibar, the same fate befalls the concept of democracy. On the one hand, in order for democracy (which Balibar tends to equate with ‘egalitarian sovereignty’) to be more than a fleeting revolutionary moment, it must find a constitutionalised expression. Only within some kind of institutions can democratic decision-making become an effective form of political governance. In the modern era, democratic decision-making requires, for instance, an independent press, universal suffrage, the regular election of representatives, minimal campaign costs and the monitoring of the involvement of economic interests during elections.Jacques Rancière, the main theoretician of democracy as something that escapes every institutionalisation, has proposed these measures. See Rancière 2006, p. 72. Democratic regimes also regulate the process of public deliberation and ensure that political conflict expresses itself in a non-violent and ‘legitimate’ manner (p. 87).

On the other hand, every constituted regime also antagonistically excludes certain political alternatives. In the case of the national-social state, one such antagonistic exclusion is the extension of equal and full-fledged citizenship to non-nationals. In these situations the democratic state no longer presents itself as an impartial arbiter between contesting political views, but emerges as an ‘interested party to the conflict, taking sides or at least becoming predisposed towards certain solutions rather than others’ (p. 93). When certain political options threaten the existing institutions, one cannot guarantee that the pluralistic ‘rules of the game’ will be followed. This is where the permanent possibility of democratic insurrection comes in once more. Political alternatives that attempt to expand the spaces of liberty and equality often have no other choice than to position themselves against the existing institutions, since these same institutions have an interest in maintaining the existing system of power relations and constellations of in- and exclusion. Insurrection in the form of antagonistic confrontation must remain a permanent possibility, indeed in many cases even the democratic practicepar excellence.

By having both democracy and citizenship oscillate between constitution and insurrection, and by articulating both terms with each other, Balibar offers a multi-layered political theory that places him at the forefront of original thought in political philosophy. Balibar opposes the overly reductionist visions of both T.H. Marshall, who defined citizenship as a (constituted) status, and Jacques Rancière, whose neglect of the term citizenship leads him to overemphasise the anarchic nature of democracy. It also places him at odds with Habermas’s critical theory that attempted to translate political conflict into the exchange of rational arguments in an open public sphere.

Balibar also problematises Chantal Mouffe’s distinction between an agonistic and an antagonistic politics. Mouffe states that every hegemonic regime, even the most democratic one, must antagonistically exclude certain political alternatives as fundamentally incompatible with its workings. The problem therefore lies in identifying which political alternatives can justifiably be excluded and which cannot. Mouffe argues that modern democratic regimes allow for agonistic competition between all views that make use of the imaginary of freedom and equality to formulate their political programme (such as liberalism, libertarianism, socialism, ecologism, feminism etc.). Political alternatives that explicitly oppose these values, such as fascism or Islamic terrorism, however, should be antagonistically excluded.Mouffe 2000. For a summary of her views on this topic, see Mouffe 1996.

Balibar does not explicitly reject this view, but he clarifies that the only political actor capable of making the ‘Mouffeian’ decision of exclusion, namely the state, can never fully be trusted to make this decision. That is because, as noted above, the state itself can become a partial actor vis-à-vis certain political actors. The antagonistic exclusion of legitimate political alternatives is a permanent possibility. One might even wonder whether this is not the shape most meaningful political struggle takes! In conclusion, Mouffe’s agonistic theory of democracy can never translate itself into a fully constituted political regime, since that risks prioritising the will of the state over other legitimate political actors.

Citizenship and Exclusions

Throughout his analysis, Balibar shows that exclusions are inherent to every political constitution. This statement does not lead to a relativistic conception of politics, however. On the contrary, it leads Balibar to a detailed investigation into the specific modalities of exclusions in contemporary societies. The rightlessness of non-nationals in a conjuncture where national citizenship remains hegemonic is one such instance of exclusion. In Citizenship, Balibar addresses a different but related phenomenon of such an exclusion, based on the convergence and overlap of race and class in contemporary Europe.

In the imaginary of the nation state, there exists a certain symmetry between nationals, who receive the privilege of political, economic and cultural inclusion within the nation state. Those excluded from the mechanisms of the nation state were situated ‘outside’ its borders, both historically and symbolically. The ‘other’ did not belong to the national community. This situation has changed dramatically in the contemporary conjuncture. Histories of empire, colonisation and migration have placed the ‘foreigner’ at the centre of the political scene in European societies. Not only do they contest dominant notions of the national community on cultural and political grounds, they also overlap to a high degree with the class divide, in such a way that class and race overdetermine each other. Balibar calls the form of exclusion that corresponds to this situation ‘internal exclusion’, which signifies that ‘the condition of foreignness is projected within a political space or national territory to create an inadmissible alterity’ (p. 69).

It is necessary to develop this concept in more detail, however. Formally, the second- or third-generation youth of immigrant descent that reside in thebanlieues of Paris or Brussels do not lack the rights that are awarded to the other national citizens (this generally still holds, even though we have seen incursions on this terrain in recent years). However, what the internally excluded lack is the capacity toactively make use of their rights. Whether this takes the form of unemployment and economic precarity, or of projecting youth of immigrant descent still as foreigners who must attempt to ‘integrate’ into civilised European society, the consequence is that they take on the role of politicalsubjects, not of activecitizens. Passive citizenship, a condition reserved for women in the early modern European space, now forms a primary means of exclusion for these groups as well.

Within a globalised context, the political question that follows from this discussion, according to Balibar, is the following: ‘The whole question rests in knowing whether the collective “actors” of globalization … will as a majority search for a transnational model of “governing” discriminations and exclusions, or, on the contrary, for a new universalism that would be as “egalitarian” as possible’ (p. 82). Balibar makes clear that this political dilemma must be understood within a context that exceeds the national exclusions of race and class, to encompass the predicament of citizenship within the neoliberal age.

Rhetorically, contemporary neoliberalism often dresses itself up in the language of governance and technocracy. It presents itself as the only method capable of finding efficient solutions to technical problems, able to satisfy all the ‘stakeholders’ in contemporary society whilst remaining fundamentally a-political. In this discourse, the enemy has become the unsavoury and unknowing masses who flock to populist leaders intent on destroying the core foundations of our society. In this sense, neoliberalism’s specific threat to citizenship is not simply that elected officials have become corrupt by failing to represent their constituency and instead serve economic interest-groups or state power-holders, which is surely a phenomenon of all ages. Instead, the specificity of neoliberalism is that it threatens to disqualify ‘the very principles of representation itself’ (p. 118; emphasis in original). Elected officials do not view themselves as representatives of the citizenry anymore, thus disqualifying the principle of citizen sovereignty altogether. When the representative function of those in government disappears in the age of neoliberalism, one is left with the governing of exclusions, exporting conflict and violence outside the sphere of politics, if not outside one’s own territorial boundaries (p. 118).

With this analysis of neoliberalism, Balibar offers an original perspective on the question of the current predicament of democracy and citizenship in the world today. Most importantly, it highlights the threat posed by the disqualification of the democratic power to constitute a constitution. Balibar’s argumentation feels incomplete, however, and in my view suggests the need to develop its different facets. Balibar offers no conclusive answer to the question of whether neoliberalism’s threat to democracy is guided by the material interests of capital, or whether we are dealing with a dynamic that operates mostly at the level of politics and ideology. From this perspective, it is worth taking a detour in order to relate Balibar’s theory to Marx and recent discussions in post-Marxist thought, where Balibar has been reproached for undertheorising the role of capital in the constitution of citizenship.

Balibar and (Versions of) Marxism

Balibar has continuously engaged with the texts of Marx from his earliest writings.Althusser and Balibar 2009. Most often this took the form of a problematisation of key Marxist ideas or concepts, such as ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’, the idea of revolution or the concept of ideology. Although Marx is often mentioned in Citizenship, he only becomes the main focus of interest once. In the chapter on neoliberalism and de-democratisation, Balibar comments on the properly apocalyptical vision that Marx expressed in a chapter he chose to omit from the first volume ofCapital. In this ‘nightmare’, capital has fully achieved a ‘real subsumption of the labor force’ under its own logic (p. 108). This entailed that capital not only succeeded in maximising the productivity of the worker, but that the labour force was also entirely reproduced as commodity. The capitalist system thus tended fully to the reproduction of the labour force, managing its skills and capacities as well as its needs and desires. Balibar then proceeds to draw a continuity between Marx’s prognosis and contemporary ‘eschatological’ predictions, be theynegative, such as Agamben’s theory that biopolitical forces strip humanity of every quality so that it is reduced to ‘bare life’,Agamben 2005. or positive, such as Hardt and Negri’s theory of the contemporary formation of the ‘multitude’ as the product and gravedigger of capitalist relations of production.Hardt and Negri 2000.

More importantly, however, some of the ideas Balibar expresses in Citizenship allow us to reflect on a discussion within Marxist circles that is of particular relevance to our contemporary predicament, namely the role of citizenship in the transformation of social structures within our capitalist societies. In this book, Balibar again makes clear that citizenship and democracy (or the ‘democratisation of democracy’, as we shall see) provide the unsurpassable horizon of progressive social and political transformation. This means that one can achieve social progress only through the invention of new forms of citizenship and the elaboration of new rights. The inherent instability of citizenship provided by its relation to the ideal universality of equaliberty guarantees that citizenship be permanently open to ‘democratic inventions’ that build upon (and in that sense surpass) the history of citizenship (p. 18).

Balibar therefore clearly disagrees with Marx’s famous comments on the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in ‘On the Jewish Question’.Marx 2000. Here, Marx argues that the Declaration makes a distinction between the rights of the citizen (which are strictly political rights) and the rights of man (which in the final analysis can be reduced to the right to property). According to Marx, the Declaration thus naturalises the human being as an egoistic man, that is, the man of capitalist social relations. Citizenship, as a political construction built upon this foundation, covers up its intrinsic ties to capitalism and is therefore fundamentally unable to challenge it.

It is clear that today, Balibar’s theory of citizenship is of sufficient power that one cannot be as dismissive of citizenship as Marx. In recent years, however, in typically hauntological fashion, the Marxist argument seems to have returned to oppose Balibar once more. Stathis Kouvelakis, for instance, has argued that, although ‘struggles in the realm of right and for rights are constitutive dimensions of class struggle’, there is, in fact, an internal limit to citizenship.Kouvélakis 2005. According to Kouvelakis, struggles that centre around citizenship can indeed bring about progress (something Marx also affirmed), but they cannot fundamentally threaten the structure of capitalist domination. In other words, progress in the realm of citizenship ‘is not the final “form of human emancipation,” but it remains “the final form of human emancipationwithin the hitherto existing world order,” the “partial emancipation” that “leaves the pillars of the house intact”.’Kouvélakis 2005, p. 717; emphasis in original. At the conclusion of an excellent analysis of Balibar’s dialectics of citizenship and equaliberty, Svenja Bromberg has similarly criticised Balibar for insufficiently taking into account the role of capital.Bromberg 2018. I refer to Bromberg for an investigation into the different strands of Marx’s thought that Balibar identifies and engages with. At worst, according to Bromberg, this gap in his theoretical framework risks jeopardising the political relevance of his endeavour:

While Balibar identifies infinite contradictions between structures and actions, one wonders if the global zones of non-reproduction, the forms of hyperexploitation, the unattainability of citizenship have not developed into violent closures of what it means to be human or ‘[w]hich men are citizens?’ that might have catapulted us into a political moment where social citizenship needs to be abandoned as a valid objective of communist struggle.Bromberg 2018, p. 221.

Christopher R. Cox, University of Washington, Seattle

Jimmy Hendrix famously played the American National Anthem out of tune, with distortion, and added an improvised section. Donna Haraway dared to use the image of the cyborg as the canvas on which to paint a radical feminist theory of gender that is non-binary to the point of being posthuman.1 In both cases, there are those who seek to suppress the creativity and originality of thought at the root of these interventions. Squashing creative and original work has always been a tool of the elite establishment to keep itself secure in its place of power. Alf Hornborg has shown himself to be a leading member of this establishment in his willingness to smear those he sees as his opponents in his viewing of world environmental history, Jason W. Moore and presumably myself, being two of them.

            Hornborg outright condemns what he sees as a “fashionable posture” among the many students who have found interest in reading Moore. I will give him the benefit of the doubt here and suggest that he is having bout of “explicit frustration,” because there is a clear absence of what is usually thought of as “rigorous analysis”.2 At the foundational level, we can all agree that opinion does not equate to analysis, no matter how strongly it is held. Nevertheless, Hornborg seems content to suggest that all the students who are reading Moore – many of whom, I might add, are finding their way to Marx through Moore – are all just useful idiots in a grand scheme of dumbing down the level of analysis in Marxist circles. To put it more bluntly, I will use Hornborg’s own words. He claims these students all over the world that are reading Moore’s work are but a “category of students who have been persuaded that a revolt against the injustices of capitalism must entail jettisoning rigorous analytical thought”.3 When I first read that sentence I was tempted to put down the essay and just let him have the last word in this rather unproductive debate we are having. Nevertheless, there is more to attend to. Hornborg’s ‘rigorous analysis’ was apparently suspended when he stated that Marx failed “to see that exploitation could also take the form of draining another society’s natural resources”.4 With a statement like that I am left wondering how he could call himself a Marxist.

Crucially, he does not even attempt to analyse my arguments, or, for that matter, Moore’s arguments, yet he assumes that I must engage all his. He seems to want to subject to critique only the phraseology that Moore uses, and then just moves back, repeatedly, to the work of this mysterious group of students of Moore’s who are ruining Marxism for him. Who are they? What exactly is their research doing and not doing? He claims it is “posthuman”, but, again, does not define this term in the context of his critique. I pointed out his willingness to shame these unnamed people as “deeply unprofessional,” which he took offence to. Point taken. Perhaps the more appropriate term would be amateurish, because what I called unprofessional was his willingness to treat Moore, a highly competitive colleague in the field, as some sort of fraud with a large and sycophantic following of students. It is, indeed, an amateur move to downplay the work of people you have clearly not even read. I maintain my questioning of how much he has read of Moore’s work. For example, the first fifty pages ofCapitalism in the Web of Life reads like a critique of Latour, whom Andreas Malm (Hornborg’s past student) claims Moore is somehow mimicking.5 Let me be clear, I did, in fact, suggest that Moore and Latour harmonise around the idea of breaking down the Cartesian divide between humans and nature, but is far from stating that Moore is some sort of Latourian.

Hornborg’s rebuttal of my assertion that he is “reluctant to allow Marxism to take on new vistas” was to remind me, as though I surely must have read everything he has ever written, that he produced three articles in Capitalism, Nature, Socialism that specifically argued that Marxists should “take on new vistas”. Perhaps a keyword search of Hornborg’s many published works would have been in order there? On the other hand, if I had done that, I might claim a bit of sarcasm, since my point was clearly missed. He then says something interesting that we might both agree upon: “Marxist theory certainly deserves to be calibrated with new theoretical approaches –whenever they add clarity to its core concern with exploitation.” Except, he then states, amazingly, that his chosen approach – the ‘theory of ecologically unequal exchange’ – adds clarity, while posthumanism does not. What this has to do with Marxism is a mystery to me. As Moore wrote, long ago in response to Hornborg: “Capital accumulation has many faces but only onelogic—expand or die. It exploits the environment only through the exploitation of labor power.”6 Sadly, this is a crucial area of Moore’s work that Hornborg has refused to engage with. That is, the notion that labour is performed not only by humans in society, but by nature itself (i.e. the work of the river, the tree, the soil). Moore utilised the term work/energy to analytically separate human labour from extra-human labour.7 Whereas Hornborg would likely point to this as evidence of Moore’s posthumanism, Moore would simply posit this as a reality of capitalism as environmental history, as opposed to the environmental history of capitalism.8

Writing in the last paragraph of his rejoinder that “much of the humanities and social sciences have submitted to a cult of the preposterous posthumanist argument that there is no such thing as “nature” or “society”, we begin to see what he means by “posthumanism”. Is he serious here? Maybe some citations of so-called ‘posthumanists’ who have suggested that both analytical categories do not exist would help his argument. Otherwise, I will just have to assume that he has not read the long list of historians, political ecologists, philosophers, and postcolonial theorists who have spilt truck-loads of ink explaining why the categories ‘nature’ and ‘society’ are merely social abstractions that allow for the continuance of the annihilation of all that stand in the way of capital accumulation.9 Very few writers of the Marxist persuasion have suggested that “nature” and/or “society” do not exist, while I know of many who have written that perhaps they ought not, because their mere existence perpetuates the ongoing environmental history of social and ecological annihilation.10 The early imperialist adventures of capitalism, in other words, could not possibly exist without the social constructions of “nature” and “society”. This is another way of saying that capital’s exterminist logic falters where there is not an implicit understanding that “nature” is the storehouse of land, labour, and resources that “society” is free to appropriate. It is only possible if “nature” and “society” are accepted as, at the least, analytically discrete categories. If the goal is to challenge capitalism, it would seem we ought to challenge the continued use of these categories. But that would be ideological, and ideology seems to be something that Hornborg is against?11

Hornborg claims that I did not understand his point about the difference between Cartesian dualism and binary analytical distinction, because I argued that nature is inclusive of capital, while, at the same time, capital makes nature work for it – an argument that is threaded throughout all of Moore’s work. He clearly does not understand the point I was trying to make either, which is this: binary analytical distinction is an abstraction from the whole. Cartesian binary distinction suggests material separation, as well as categorical separation. In my view – and perhaps this is just an area of distinction between Hornborg’s and my own interpretation of the dialectic – analytical distinction is always brought back to the whole when doing the analysis. Thus, capital is indeed always in nature and nature is alwaysin capital, but that does not mean we cannot consider them as analytically distinct categories when attempting to analyse how one is affected by the other. Hornborg seems to not like the messiness that this implies. However, in the real world, messiness is everywhere. Clarity is frankly nowhere. It is glaringly obvious that Hornborg does not understand this basic premise of what I was writing. This is made clearer when he strangely asserts that implicitly claim that capital isnot a phenomenon contained in nature, yet he provides not evidence for this statement.

There are many other claims made in Hornborg’s response to my initial rebuttal, but, in the interest of time, I will end by addressing only one more. As is the case with several other statements I made in the rebuttal, there was no direct interaction with my argument beyond suggesting that there is something Hornborg wrote that I should go read. He writes: “A third irony is that Cox appears to think that he needs to remind me that the “humans” responsible for the Anthropocene are a global minority. He is obviously not aware of the article that Andreas Malm and I wrote for The Anthropocene Review, currently cited over 700 times, which makes exactly this point.” Incredibly, this comes presumably as a response to the paragraph in which I point out that Hornborg had written in the past that“to transcend this paradigm will be possible only through the kind of post-Cartesian perspective on material artefacts that has been championed by Bruno Latour”.12 In that same paragraph, I point out that Hornborg’s overly-simplified reading of Moore makes him appear like many of the Anthrpocenics who do not possess the analytical rigour necessary to move beyond the behaviour of human beings in absentia of the systems under which they operate. Absurdly, he then suggests that I am unaware that Moore did not “invent” the termCapitalocene. This blatant pettiness is uncalled for and quite ironic, considering one of the better outlines of the origin of the wordCapitalocene comes from Donna Haraway.13  

If there is one lesson I have learned in this intellectual dance, it is that the attack of yet another senior scholar telling a new generation of scholars that their work is not ‘rigorous’ enough needs to be retired. The suppression of creativity and originality of thought in academia (and beyond) has no place in a world where existing scholarship has thus far had a net zero effect on the footprint of the capitalist system. Let the siren call be heard: the new generation of Marxists will not be deterred from exploring all possible ways forward, even if it marks them as unworthy in the eyes of the academically established elites.

References

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Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Bender, Frederic L. 2003, The Culture of Extinction: Toward a Philosophy of Deep Ecology. Amherst, N.Y.: Humanity Books.

Brantlinger, Patrick 2003, Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800-1930. Ithica and London: Cornel University Press.

Braun, Bruce 2002, The Intemperate Rainforest: Nature, Culture, and Power on Canada’s West Coast. U of Minnesota Press.

Bucher, B. 2014, “Acting Abstractions: Metaphors, Narrative Structures, and the Eclipse of Agency.” European Journal of International Relations 20 (3): 742–65.

Cox, Christopher 2015, “Faulty Presuppositions and False Dichotomies: The Problematic Nature of ‘the Anthropocene.’” Telos, no. 172: 59–59.

Cronin, William 1996, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.” In Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, 69–91. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

Haraway, Donna 2015, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin.” Environmental Humanities 6 (1): 159–65.

Hornborg, Alf 1998, “Ecosystems and World Systems: Accumulation as an Ecological Process.” Journal of World-Systems Research 4 (2): 169-.

Malm, Andreas. n.d. “In Defence of Metabolic Rift Theory.” Versobooks.Com. Accessed September 27, 2020. https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3691-in-defence-of-metabolic-rift-theory.

Merchant, Carolyn 1980, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution. 1st ed. San Francisco, CA: Harper and Row Publishers.

Moore, Jason W. 2000, “Commentary.” Journal of World-Systems Research, 133–38. doi:10.5195/jwsr.2000.234.

Moore, Jason W. 2003, “CAPITALISM AS WORLD-ECOLOGY: Braudel and Marx on Environmental History.” Organization & Environment 16 (4). Sage Publications: 431–58.

Moore, Jason W. 2015, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. 1st edition. New York: Verso.

Morton, Timothy 2013, Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality. Ann Arbor, Mich.: Open Humanities Press.

Narchi, Nemer E. and Beatriz Canabal Cristiani 2015, “Subtle Tyranny Divergent Constructions of Nature and the Erosion of Traditional Ecological Knowledge in Xochimilco.” Latin American Perspectives 42 (5): 90–108.

Neumann, Roderick 1998, Imposing Wilderness: Struggles over Livelihood and Nature Preservation in Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Pierotti, Raymond, and Daniel Wildcat 2000, “Traditional Ecological Knowledge: The Third Alternative (Commentary).” Ecological Applications 10 (5): 1333.

Preston, Christopher J. 2012, “Beyond the End of Nature: SRM and Two Tales of Artificity for the Anthropocene.” Ethics, Policy & Environment 15 (2): 188–201.

Spence, Mark David 1999, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks. OUP E-Books. New York: Oxford University Press.

Image:"pisces" bynarghee-la is licensed underCC BY 2.0

• 1. Haraway [1991] 2016.
• 2. He uses this phrase but does not attempt to define it for the reader. Further, “rigorous” is a term frequently used to suppress creative intellectual work in all fields of academia.
• 3. Ibid.
• 4. Hornborg 1998: 72.
• 5. Malm 2018. I should point out, however, that I think Malm is a very gifted writer. His unwillingness to engage in a generative way with Moore is, in my view, a lost opportunity.
• 6. Moore 2000: 138.
• 7. Moore 2015: 14-15, 29. I also wrote at length about this in my original review essay.
• 8. Moore 2003.
• 9. Bakker and Bridge 2006; Barad 2007; Morton 2013; Bucher 2014; Cox 2014. Then there is the lively ongoing discussion about what constitutes “wilderness,” which also challenges many understandings of “nature.” See Cronin 1996; Neumann 1998; Spence 1999; Pierotti and Wildcat 2000; Braun 2002; Narchi and Cristiani 2015.
• 10. Merchant 1980; Brantlinger 2003; Bender 2003; Preston 2012.
• 11. It strikes me as highly ironic that someone who claims to be a Marxist is wagging his finger at another Marxist who he claims is putting ideology to work.
• 12. Hornborg 2014.
• 13. Both Haraway 2015 and Moore 2015 explain the role of Malm in the origins of the term. Additionally, in my forthcoming dissertation The Productivore’s Dilemma, I also go into some depth about this.

Alf Hornborg, Lund University

Christopher Cox has responded to my critique of his eulogical review of Jason Moore’s posthumanist brand of Marxism.1 His response is even more revealing than his review, because it candidly illuminates why Moore’s deliberations on “world-ecology” have been so widely endorsed among a category of students who have been persuaded that a revolt against the injustices of capitalism must entail jettisoning rigorous analytical thought. If my explicit frustration with this fashionable posture is “deeply unprofessional,” as Cox asserts, it is because I am troubled by the number of students who seem to think that Donna Haraway’s musings on the “Chthulucene”2 will somehow further the political critique of capitalism.3 While innovative thinking is crucial to revolutionary social change, there seems to be a widespread misconception among posthumanists that unconventional thinking is itself inherently emancipatory. This distorted logic is the core fallacy on which much posthumanist thought is founded. But, although abandoning logic and conceptual consistency as “sclerotic” may seem a worthy confrontation with the capitalist establishment, it is of no use at all in challenging its asymmetries and injustices.

It is deeply ironic that I should be criticised for being reluctant to “allow Marxism to take on new vistas” and for serving as a “hall monitor” for Marxism. I have recently published three articles in Capitalism, Nature, Socialism that precisely urged Marxists to “take on new vistas”.4 Marxist theory certainly deserves to be calibrated with new theoretical approaches – whenever they add clarity to its core concern with exploitation. The theory of ecologically unequal exchange does add such clarity, but posthumanism does not.

On reading Cox’s rebuttal, it becomes very clear that he has not understood my point about the difference between “Cartesian dualism” and binary analytical distinction.5 He says that “nature is either inclusive of everything, or exclusive of humans” and advocates “internalising capital to nature”. But, if so, how can he later say that, for Moore, “nature is always ‘analytically distinct,’ because he is constantly asking the question, how does capital make nature work for it?” What does it mean to acknowledge, as Cox asks us to do, that “capital demands the resources and ecological work of nature”? If nature is everything, does it not include capital? Did not Cox explicitly suggest that we should “internal[ise] capital to nature”? How would Cox define this “nature” that he keeps referring to? Cox’s inconsistencies are as glaring as Moore’s.

If capital is understood to denote a phenomenon that is not included in the category “nature”, as Cox implicitly (and inconsistently) concedes, to grasp its logic we must look for conceptual tools beyond natural science. Such tools have been developed by the social sciences, importantly the study of political economy. More fundamentally, to abandon the analytical distinction between natural and social aspects of socioecological processes is to blur the boundary between thermodynamics and semiotics. Is this what Cox is asking us to do? The distinguishing feature of human social phenomena is their reliance on symbolism.6 As the Marxist anthropologist Leslie White (1940) showed, the symbol is what makes us human.7 The natural sciences do not have the tools to analyse symbolic systems, because they do not need them: symbols are found nowhere else but in human societies. In this sense, nature is not “inclusive of everything”, but indeed “exclusive of humans”. To deny “society” a distinct analytical existence is to deny the unique capacity of human symbolism – as in language, culture, and economy – to infuse the remainder of nature. It is to deny the justification for social science, no less.

Cox misquotes me as having written that we ought to “‘sort’ the interconnections between ‘nature and socioecological processes’”. I said nothing of the kind. As anyone can check, I wrote that we should “sort out the ways in which societal and natural aspects of socioecological processes are entwined in capitalism” (emphasis added).8 Cox’s use of quotation marks is dishonest or careless, or both. For decades having emphasized the relevance of natural sciences such as thermodynamics for our understanding of the logic of capitalism, I am amazed by Cox’s conclusion that I seem “unable to think about nature as such”.

Another irony is that Cox believes that he has discovered my “underlying motive” (an allegiance to J.B. Foster?) when I observe that Moore’s thinking made more sense twenty years ago, when it was founded on Foster’s concept of the metabolic rift.9 He is apparently unaware of my long-standing disagreement with Foster about Sergei Podolinsky, Howard T. Odum, and the role of thermodynamics in Marxist value theory.10 When I use the word “reconcile” to describe Cox’s self-professed aspiration to bring Foster to “break through the line in the ether that divides world-ecology and ecological Marxism,” Cox inexplicably rejects my narrative as “absurd” and “patently false”. Apparently, we are now to understand that the line identified by Cox can only be crossed in one direction.

A third irony is that Cox appears to think that he needs to remind me that the “humans” responsible for the Anthropocene are a global minority. He is obviously not aware of the article that Andreas Malm and I wrote for The Anthropocene Review, currently cited more than 750 times, which makes exactly this point.11 Nor is he probably aware that the word “Capitalocene”, which Moore picked up while employed as lecturer in Human Ecology in Lund, was invented by my former student Andreas Malm at a seminar in 2009, precisely to make the same point.12 To emphasiae that the ecological transformations of the Anthropocene are primarily propelled by a global elite is not to blur the analytical boundaries between nature and society, but to acknowledge the power of societal algorithms like capitalism to pervade the planetary biosphere.

Cox asks, “Since when [are] astronomical phenomena of no influence upon the Earth?” This is in response to my observation that Moore’s term Oikeios can only exclude “astronomical phenomena at sufficient distance from the Earth to not exert any influence on it” (emphasis added). My point was that it should include as unlikely components as the sun and the moon – but not, for instance, Alpha Centauri (unless we believe in astrology). This is yet another example of Cox’s careless reading and sloppy thinking.

It is deeply disappointing to find Cox completely ignoring the most central part of my critique: Moore’s flawed framing of ecological degradation in terms of a monetary metric. The extent to which Marxist value theory risks leading to notions of global flows of “underpaid” values deserves to be unpacked and critically discussed. The assumption of a measure of value applicable to all commodities – in relation to which anything can be objectively assessed as “cheap” or “under-valued” – is an example of our conceptual confinement to the historically recent idea of what economic anthropologist Karl Polanyi called “all-purpose” money. It is ultimately an artefact of the market. A challenge for historical materialism is to understand how this semiotic innovation has shaped global socioecological relations and our understanding of them, including aspects of Marxist value theory. This is a topic that would have deserved debate.

In conclusion, I am sincerely dismayed at seeing the conceptually amorphous claims of the posthumanists being championed as significant arguments emerging from some of the humanities and social sciences. Having encountered the likes of Haraway and Moore, mainstream economists and natural scientists will be even less likely to take these humanities and social sciences seriously. I have spent three decades vainly trying to convince the guardians of business as usual that we need to integrate rigorous transdisciplinary understandings that respect both the natural and the societal aspects of socioecological processes.13 In the meantime, much of the humanities and social sciences has submitted to a cult of the preposterous posthumanist argument that there is no such thing as “nature” or “society”. This argument has made Latour and Haraway into superstars within the human sciences, even though – or more likely because – it is politically useless. It is difficult to think of a more effective way of silencing truly critical insight. This is ideology at work. And now, with Moore, its siren call is recruiting a new generation of Marxists.

References

Haraway, Donna 2016, ‘Staying with the Trouble: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene’, in Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, edited by Jason W. Moore, 34-76. Oakland: PM Press.

Hornborg, Alf 2014, ‘Ecological Economics, Marxism, and Technological Progress: Some Explorations of the Conceptual Foundations of Theories of Ecologically Unequal Exchange’, Ecological Economics, 105: 11-18.

Hornborg, Alf 2015, ‘Why Economics Needs to be Distinguished from Physics, and why Economists Need to Talk to Physicists: A Response to Foster and Holleman’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 42(1): 187-192.

Hornborg, Alf 2016, ‘Post-Capitalist Ecologies: Energy, “Value” and Fetishism in the Anthropocene’, Capitalism Nature Socialism, 27(4): 61-76.

Hornborg, Alf 2017a, ‘Dithering While the Planet Burns: Anthropologists’ Approaches to the Anthropocene’, Reviews in Anthropology, 46(2-3): 61-77.

Hornborg, Alf 2017b, ‘Artifacts Have Consequences, Not Agency: Toward a Critical Theory of Global Environmental History’, European Journal of Social Theory, 20(1): 95-110.

Hornborg, Alf 2019a, ‘The Money-Energy-Technology Complex and Ecological Marxism: Rethinking the Concept of “Use-Value” to Extend Our Understanding of Unequal Exchange, Part I’, Capitalism Nature Socialism, 30(3): 27-39.

Hornborg, Alf 2019b, ‘The Money-Energy-Technology Complex and Ecological Marxism: Rethinking the Concept of “Use-Value” to Extend Our Understanding of Unequal Exchange, Part II’, Capitalism Nature Socialism, 30(4): 71-86.

Malm, Andreas and Alf Hornborg 2014, ‘The Geology of Mankind? A Critique of the Anthropocene Narrative’, The Anthropocene Review, 1(1): 62-69.

Moore, Jason W. 2015, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital, London: Verso.

Moore, Jason W., ed. 2016, Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, Oakland: PM Press.

White, Leslie A. 1940, ‘The Symbol: The Origin and Basis of Human Behavior’, Philosophy of Science, 7(4): 451-463.

• 1. See Cox’s review, http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/book-review/resuscitating-dialectic-moores-capitalism-web-life-ecology-and-accumulation-capital, Hornborg’s critique http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/blog/dialectical-confusion-jason-moores-posthumanist-marxism and Cox’s response http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/blog/fear-post-human-rebuttal-to-alf-hornborg.
• 2. In an incoherent edited collection called Anthropocene or Capitalocene?, Moore (2016) gives Part I the subtitle “Toward Chthulucene?”
• 3. Cf. Hornborg 2017a.
• 4. Hornborg 2016, 2019a, 2019b.
• 5. While, in his review rejecting Foster’s assertion that Moore is influenced by Latour as “baseless” (n. 65), he now concedes that Moore “harmonises quite well” with Latour’s crusade against the nature/society distinction.
• 6. Hornborg 2017b.
• 7.
• 8. For some obscure reason, Cox calls this phrasing “a reductionist statement if there ever was one.” This assessment is simply bewildering.
• 9. Cox, in the same paragraph, contradicts himself by complaining that I have ”glaringly omitted” Moore’s debt to Foster.
• 10. See Hornborg 2014, 2015.
• 11. Malm and Hornborg 2014.
• 12. This fact has been acknowledged both by Donna Haraway (2016: 72, n. 42) and by Moore himself (2016: xi).
• 13. can thus only shake my head at Cox’s allegation that my role is that of an academic “hall monitor” and “intellectual gate-keeper.”

Abstract: Critically discussing Malm’s (2018) The Progress of this Storm, this review article directly relates to a recent discussion inHistorical Materialism concerning a major epistemic rift in the eco-Marxist debate (Cox vs Hornborg). The article provides an overview of Malm’s argument to subsequently refute his definition of historical materialism in terms of an abstract ‘substance monist property dualism’ as a relapse into a traditional materialism, the critique of which defines historical materialism since theFeuerbach Theses. This relapse is expressed in a false equation of nature and environment, a ‘fossil fixation’ of sorts that is criticised on the basis ofNegative Dialectics (Adorno 2004) uncovering, furthermore, an authoritarian streak that leads to problematic political consequences. Malm’s book does not have it all wrong, however; its insistence on urgency as well as on the difference of nature and society are also valid. Even its misunderstandings correctly, if unintendedly, call for more prudence and precision in using terms like nature, construction or dialectics. Further on, collaboration of leftist theory-activists is favoured over their division into opposing intellectual camps – a division that is potentially deepened by the imbalance in the book between strong rhetoric and comparably weak content.

Keywords: climate change, critical theory, historical materialism, metabolic rift, negative dialectics, world-ecology

Author: Dr. Michael Kleinod

Affiliation: Department of Southeast Asian Studies, Institute for Oriental and Asian Studies, University of Bonn

Research interests: critical theory, Marxist sociology, postcapitalist transformation, praxeology, societal nature relations

It is eminently possible to be Marxist and mistaken. (A. Malm)

Only the will’s a priori ontical nature, which is extant like a quality, permits us, without being absurd, to make the judgment that the will creates its objects, the actions. It belongs to the world it works in. (T.W. Adorno)

Impending climate collapse testifies to capitalism’s metabolic rift, and it produces a rift in current eco-Marxist thinking. Definite identifications with either the oneor the other side of this latter rift obstruct the view on a meaningful overcoming of the former. This review essay concerns one recent and rather extreme case of such dogmatic partisanship, Andreas Malm’sThe Progress of this Storm (2018; henceforthStorm), which has received praiseE.g. Wilén 2018, Robbins 2018, Angus 2018, Sheehan 2018. as well as criticism,E.g. Douglas 2018, Morris 2019, Martindale 2018, Oppermann 2018. and both for good reason. For its explicit and (supposedly) radical style of distinction, this book expresses certain fallacies of current eco-Marxism in a paradigmatic fashion. I will elaborate on some of the criticisms, namely, the shaky intellectual groundMorris 2019, p. 83. and the problematic politics that tend to come with it.

In a first step, the general argument of the book is presented, followed by a brief dissection of some of its central claims in order to subsequently delve into central epistemological flaws and resulting political conclusions. Some of the book’s positive teachings are appreciated further on in order to conclude on a less divisive style of eco-Marxist debate-in-action.

Storm

As the climate heats up and thoughts turn feverish, Malm rolls up his sleeves to declutter the fundaments of social theory. The overall argument is as straight as it is principal: ‘[…] any theory for the warming condition should have the struggle to stabilise climate  – with the demolition of the fossil economy the necessary first step – as its practical, if only ideal, point of reference. It should clear up space for action and resistance’ (p. 18). Theory has a role either in prolonging and deepening or in overcoming ‘the warming condition’, and Storm is to set our heads straight. As climate change proves that nature and society are ‘colliding forces’ (p. 16), any claims which blur the distinction, such as on the social constructedness of nature, are blatantly false. Rather, ‘the more problems of environmental degradation we confront, the more imperative to pick the unities apart in their poles’ (p. 61; emphasis original) in order to inform ‘revolutionary ecological practice’ (p. 174). Siding with the metabolic rift camp against Bruno Latour, Jason W. Moore and others, the theoretical stance most conducive to the central target of ‘taking down the fossil fuel economy’ (p. 175) is climate realism based on a ‘substance monist property dualism’ (p. 59). Malm is consequently credited by metabolic rift proponents as saviour of ‘historical materialism as the only credible alternative’ from ‘those fashionable ecological philosophies clouding our understanding’.See Ian Angus’ and John Bellamy Foster’s respective cover praises. At least Malm has found an intellectual home, good for him. But whether the book’s argument is able to live up to its rhetorical force and fervour is indeed rather questionable.

Headwind

(i) Empty abstractions

Contrary to what one would expect from an update of historical materialism, and for an acknowledged historian of capitalismSee Malm 2016. rather surprising, Malm bases his argument and analysis on abstract philosophical speculations, rather than on established notions of capitalist value, relations of production, or materialist history. Numerous mentions of the word notwithstanding, history comes in substantially only as the idea that ‘[…] the storm of climate change draws its force from countless acts of combustion over, to be exact, the past two centuries’ (p. 5). Overall, however, historical materialism is redefined metaphysically as ‘substance monist property dualism’ for which nature and society are not different substances but different properties of the same substance. Along the lines of substance-property and monism-dualism, Malm positions himself by declaring ontological dogmas like ‘nature and society are material substances tout court, but the one cannot be equated with the other’ (p. 57). Nature-society dialectics are philosophised (rather than historicised) in abstract naturalist images, such as,

Nature is a soil for society, the fold out of which it grew and the envelope it can never break out of, but just as a tree can be told from its soil, society can be differentiated from nature, because it has shot up from the ground and branched off in untold directions over the course of what we refer to as history. (p. 58, emphasis original)

Panagiotis Sotiris

Rossana Rossanda, who passed away on 20 September 2020, exemplified the combination of a profound intellectuality and an equally profound political but also moral commitment that marked the best moments of European communism of the 20^th century. With a long militant engagement and, at the same time, a very important politically-informed intellectual contribution, Rossanda escaped the contemporary stereotypes of both the academic intellectual and the militant activist, at the same time always remaining a critical voice, not by means of a critique based on a certain distancing, but, in contrast, on being immersed in the questions, contradictions and, in certain cases, tragedies under discussion.

What characterised Rossanda – but also the other members of the original il manifesto group – was that, although they were part of the broader current of the revolutionary Left that emerged around 1968, she did not come from some of the varieties of communist heterodoxy, with the mentality of the small group or sect, but from the tradition of Italian Communism. Because, however common it is today to discard the Italian Communist Party as simply an expression of the kind of reformism that led to its full social-democratic transformation, along with the tendency to view Togliatti’s conception of the ‘partito nuovo’ and the ‘Italian road to socialism’ as the ‘primal sin’ of Communist reformism, the actual history of Italian Communism is much more complex. Despite the dominant reformist line, for hundreds of thousands of militants, it offered a unique experience of a ‘parallel’ world marked by strong and bitter struggles, especially during the 1950s when Italian capital made sure that it regained control of factories and workplaces, but also of a parallel culture, a distinctciviltà that incorporated strong elements of a revolutionary tradition, accentuated by both the collective memory and experience of former partisans but also maintaining of classical organisational practices.

At the same time, it gave a certain impression of certain openness. Especially in the early 1960s, the PCI seemed, to the eyes of many militants and intellectuals of Communist parties in Europe, as the paradigm of a party with an actual culture of intellectual debate and research. The il manifesto group was formed by militants deeply immersed in this political culture that combined elements of classical Leninism, Togliatti’s reading (and use) of Gramsci and an attempt to face the complexities of post-WWII capitalism. Although critical of the main line of the Party in the early 1960s, and part of the left current associated with Pietro Ingrao, in contrast to theoperaisti, another current that emerged in the early 1960s, the members of the futureil manifesto group did not focus only on the dynamics of class antagonism in the factories but also on the questions of political strategy, trying to chart a potential left version of the PCI’s strategy to undermine the ability of Christian Democracy to form a broader social alliance and work towards the formation of a new historical bloc in the conditions of advanced capitalism (or ‘neocapitalism’, to use a term from those debates). However, the catalyst and the turning point was the enormous dynamic of the 1968-69 student and workers’ struggles in Italy, combined with the inspiration offered by the particular experience of the French May 1968.1

Moreover, it was exactly at that moment that the absolute limits of the PCI became evident. Already in 1966, the defeat of Ingrao (and of the ‘Ingraoists’ like the future il manifesto group) made it obvious that the PCI would not make a left-wing turn and follow the dynamics of the movement. The inability of the PCI to think the crisis of hegemony emerging after the eruption of the 1968-69 struggles, was, in a certain way, proof that the PCI had longed ceased to be the terrain for the potential elaboration of a revolutionary strategy. This would more tragically evident in the 1970s, when the PCI would move more to the right, avoiding facing the challenge offered by the continuous radical politicisation and advance of the movement in the 1969-73 period, adopted the strategy of the ‘Historic Compromise,’, offered indirect support (by not giving a no confidence vote) to the 1976-78 ‘government of national solidarity’, and accepted the logic of ‘anti-terrorism’ and the authoritarian measures this would entail. Berlinguer’s attempt at a left-wing turn from 1979 onwards did not manage to create a broader radical dynamic, capitalist restructuring was underway and, after the death of Berlinguer, the PCI moved even further to the right up to the formal disengagement with the communist identity in 1989.

Rossanda was formed within this broader historical experience. Her choice to join the Resistance during the German occupation represented, in a certain way, an existential choice. Her political engagement in the PCI would mean that her life in the 1950s and 1960s was that of communist cadre. Although her main duties related to questions of culture, beginning with turning Milano’s Casa della Cultura into an important and prestigious space for discussion and debate, and later in Rome, where she had the responsibility of the PCI’s Culture Commission, at the same time she also had to carry out everyday political work in Western Europe’s largest Communist party (she was a member of the Central Committee and also a member of parliament from 1963 to 1968), something which meant actually coming into contact with the realities of Italian society but also having some kind of knowledge of what was going on in the ‘People’s Democracies’. At the same time, she came to realise the limits of the PCI, along with the other members of theil manifesto group.

All these attest to the fact that Rossanda’s (but also the rest of the future il manifesto group’s) move to positions to the left of the PCI and their realisation that a left-wing turn was necessary in the 1960s, including a more critical position against the failure of ‘actually existing socialism’, came as a result of their engagement in the Communist movement and its experience. In a certain way, this was also acknowledged from the leadership of the PCI in the symbolism of the decision to exclude (radiare) not expel theil manifesto group. However, the very fact of the 1969 rupture and ejection ofil manifesto meant that the PCI was no longer capable of having an actual debate on revolutionary strategy.

This gave a certain quality to Rossanda’s interventions, but also the collective work around il manifesto. In contrast to many interventions coming from the 1968 revolutionary Left that comprised a certain imaginary projection of a working class in full revolutionary mode and an equally imaginary conclusion that now was the time of the historical justification of one or the other heterodox position, here was an attempt to think how the particular connection between the Communist movement and the popular masses could take a different route, actually confronting the challenge of a new historical bloc and a feasible revolutionary strategy for advanced capitalist societies.

At the same time, it was obvious that the catalyst for Rossanda and the rest of the il manifesto group was indeed the workers’ and student’s radicalism of the 1960, what we call ‘1968’ despite it being a much broader process. As Rossanda put it in the introduction of a 1971 collection of texts byil manifesto

Il manifesto is a left-wing dissidence. Although it matured, as we shall see, all through the sixties, it exploded and reached the breaking point at the moment of the movements of workers and students from 1968-69. Is it then a regime crisis or a system crisis?

A system crisis, insisted the promoters of il manifesto: the revolution is back on the order of the day in the West, again ‘spectre haunts Europe’. If it wants to avoid the defeat of the movement but also its own loss, the Party must accelerate the formation of a revolutionary bloc, adapt its strategy to the needs expressed in every ‘hot point’ of social struggles, support the development of vanguard social forces as protagonists of struggle, and challenge not only its own line but also its very institution: the Party needs a ‘cultural revolution.’2

The results of this collective work were evident in the pages of il manifesto. One need only look at the 200Theses on Communism that were published in October 1970,3 one the most important strategic texts to come out from the European revolutionary left. The main point of text is the insistence on the maturity of communism, in sharp contrast to the official position of European communist parties that the conditions had not ripened yet. In this conception and the strategic lessons incorporated in it, one can find echoes of the both the Chinese Cultural Revolution as self-criticism of ‘actually existing socialism’, the experience of the post-WWII building of the big communist parties but also an acute realisation of the challenges posed by the new radicalism of the workers’ and students’ struggles which pointed to a conception of a transition to communism as intensified class struggle. In this sense, it represents one of the most coherent attempts to actually confront the question of the ‘Revolution in the West’, the tragically unanswered since the 1920s question, in a novel way, that, although reclaiming a certain Leninism, was not simple advocating for a repetition of October 1917.

69. Abolishing the capitalist division of labour and its alienated character becomes a real need for a growing mass of workers: those who are condemned to the most unbearable and repetitive tasks, but also those who are required to be highly qualified and who find in their work no expression of their personality. A need is created to live in a different urban setting, to participate in to the overall social management, to consider the problem of health from a new angle; it becomes an implicit critique of the individualist model of social life, of the productivist character of the economic structure, of the absence of a collective planning of development. One cannot conceive of a consumption model different from the absurd multiplication of illusory goods, or from the exhausting pursuit of false needs born of development itself, without a modification of the very nature of work, a multiplication of free activities, going beyond the individualistic character of social organization. The critique of authoritarianism and the concentration of power necessarily affects their economic roots, the type of organization of production and society, the mystified character of delegated democracy, the separation between the political and the social. The fight against inequality – not only economic, but also the inequality of culture, of functions and of power –, the fight against arbitrary statutes and hierarchy, the fight to guarantee everyone a real possibility of expression, is directly linked to the principle : from each according to his capacities, to each according to their needs.

[...]

71. All this means that, for the first time in history, communism in the radical sense, and therefore socialism as a transition phase, have matured and constitute a possible political programme. For the first time, the working class and its party can struggle no longer by adopting the demands historically elaborated by other social strata and by expressing themselves as a subaltern, but by presenting themselves and progressing as an autonomous, force, the bearer of a new global relation of production and a radically different model of social organization. In this profound sense, the revolution can once again be, as it is for Marx, a ‘social’ fact before being a ‘political’ fact: The conquest of state power becomes the means of affirming a new social hegemony in its totality; there is no longer any contradiction or gap between power and programme; the proletariat is able to express and realize the content for which it claims power. In this new and infinitely rich way of making the revolution, also resides the value of a hundred years of history of the workers’ movement, of a century of struggles which have pushed the system to its end, while preventing it from expressing its permanent tendency to disaster. This is the key to a new strategy for the revolution in the West.4

It is true that this political line was never full put in practice, although il manifesto took the initiative of a dialogue with other tendencies of the Italian revolutionary Left. Perhaps it was the fact that it was impossible to create this revolutionary bloc with the important segments of the popular masses and their collective experience still attached to the PCI. Perhaps it was the inability of the revolutionary Left to actually put in action the political dialectic that could combine the emphasis on popular struggles and the force of autonomous movements with the necessary political and cultural articulation that would create a broader historical dynamic. Perhaps it was the success of subsequent capitalist restructurings that undermined the material conditions that had made possible the idea that factories could be the bases of a new communist offensive. Perhaps it was the fact that different tendencies opted to answer the contradictory co-existence of a continuous rise of mass struggles with a strategic impasse (accentuated by the PCI adopting the ‘Historic Compromise’ line) with simply opting for various forms of ‘one-sidedness’: from a certain underestimation of the question of political organisation by at least some of the autonomist tendencies, and the re-immersion in electoral politics by groups such as PDUP, to the tragedy of the armed groups and the fantasy of an attack on the ‘heart of the state’ that underestimated the very complexity of capitalist power. Of course, along with this, there were myriads of struggles, experiments, theoretical contributions, acts of heroism, that made the Italy of the 1970s a unique political laboratory, but still the question of strategy remained open. This was evident, above all, in the movement of 1977. On the one hand, a vast radical movement faced off not only Christian Democracy, but also, to a certain extent, the PCI. On the other hand, the radicalism and the creativity unleashed in the movement were combined with the crisis of post-1968 organisations and the lack of any coherent strategic proposal, with the armed groups trying to fill in the void.

Rossanda was a central figure in the debates around these challenges. She devoted energy to the transformation of il manifesto into a daily newspaper, and she was part of the attempt to turnil manifesto into a political organisation and later to the formation of PDUP, although, from some point onwards, she would make sure that the newspaper was not a ‘party organ’, remaining a ‘communist daily’.

From the late 1970s onwards, Rossanda’s work would be mainly associated with the newspaper, becoming one of the most respected critical voices not only within the Italian Left but also the entire Italian press, whereas other members of the il manifesto group remained more politically active, such as Lucio Magri and Luciana Castellina up until their participation toRifondazione Comunista. Rossanda managed, in a certain way, to be the critical voice of the Left, the voice that could highlight the contradictions and the complexities and at the same time defend left perspectives. Her famous ‘family album’ editorial on the Moro kidnapping and the Red Brigades is in this sense exemplary, since, in the same short text, she managed to both criticise the BR for their simplified conception of the polarisation between the people and Christian Democracy, a conception reminiscent of 1950s communist rhetoric, and to criticise the currents of the Left for having abandoned the attempt to actually dismantle the social and political bloc around Christian Democracy.5 The same ability to problematise and think through the very complexity of political sequences such as the cycle of armed struggle is also obvious in the introduction to the long interview she and Carla Mosca conducted with Mario Moretti on the history of the Red Brigades.6

Rossanda also made an important intellectual and theoretical contribution, even though she was never a classical academic intellectual. One can see this in the complex and critical stance of her essays. In ‘Class and Party’,7 she offers a profound rethinking of the very notion of the party-form, going beyond the simple call for a repetition of an imaginary Leninism, at the same time suggesting a return to Marx.

However, what separates Marx from Lenin (who, far from filling in Marx's outlines, oriented himself in a different direction) is that the organization is never considered by Marx as anything but an essentially practical matter, a flexible and changing instrument, an expression of the real subject of the revolution, namely the proletariat.8

This line of thinking led Rossanda to insist to on the need to rethink the very relation between the political organisation and mass movement.

[T]he tensions which are present in the historic institutions of the class, whether trade unions or parties, do not only result from the subjective limitations of these institutions. They are also the product of a growth in a political dimension ever more closely linked to the achievement of consciousness, and ever less capable of being delegated. In effect, the distance between vanguard and class, which was at the origin of the Leninist party, is visibly shrinking: Marx's hypothesis finds new life in the May movement in France, in many of the confrontations which occur in our societies, and which tend to escape from the control, however elastic and attentive it may be, of purely political formations. It is in terms of this fact that the problem of organization may now be posed again. From Marx, we are now returning to Marx.9

In the text on ‘Mao’s Marxism’,10 Rossanda offered a very interesting reading of both Mao’s thinking and the experience of the Cultural Revolution, suggesting that their more important aspects imply a left-wing critique of Stalinism.

It is true that, looked at from this standpoint, the Chinese experience calls in question in a fundamental way the whole traditional strategy of the Western working-class movement. It gives us a key for interpreting the defeats suffered by the Third International and its reformist or "Popular Front" efforts. It helps us to grasp the complex character of the "socialist" societies, rising above the Stalinist or revisionist explanations of them. Finally, it exposes the objectively counter-revolutionary nature of the links binding the Western Communist movement to the present leadership of the USSR.11

In her intervention on ‘Revolutionary Intellectuals and the Soviet Union’,12 Rossanda began with the question of the different attitudes of intellectuals facing the contradictions and tragedies of ‘actually existing socialism’, before moving on to a critique of the varieties of the ‘deformed socialist state’ position, suggesting instead the need to rethink the transition process as a constant struggle against the persisting capitalist elements both in the structure and consequently the superstructures and also the need to rethink socialist revolution as profound transformation and not simply change in ownership.

The result is that the stake of the “socialist revolution” is very different from a change in the ownership of the means of production pure and simple, with the fairer distribution of profit that follows and without all the other relations of commodities and reification being touched. What is at issue is a total decomposition and recomposition of the relations between men, between men and things, the revolutionisation of the “social mode of production of their existence”.13

In her opening address in the famous conference on ‘Power and Opposition in Post-revolutionary Societies’ in 1977,14 she attempted to stress the need for a Marxist analysis and critique of the reproduction of oppressive and exploitative social relations within ‘real socialisms’, a critique that starts from the relations of production.

We who would like to remain Marxists, however – which, despite everything, is easier in our societies – we maintain, on the contrary, that whatever the nature of the post-revolutionary societies, they can and must be interpreted and that Marxism offers a reliable instrument for doing this. Marxism tells us that in the last instance the nature of a society, its consciousness of itself, and its political expression are always determined by the social relations of production (although not one-sidedly and without mediation). We believe that the analysis of the relations of production in the USSR, Cuba, and the East European countries is the key that will enable us to penetrate the mechanisms of these societies.15

In her dialogue with Althusser on the critique of politics,16 she offered an overview of the debates around the state in Italy, in the aftermath of the ‘Historic Compromise’ and, at the same time, attempts to think beyond Althusser’s critical interventions on the crisis of Marxism as ‘finite theory’

If this is the case, the blind spot in the theme of the state, the point on which Marx stopped in the Critique of the Gotha Programme (and you really see him, in these pages, moving hesitantly, stopping, deferring) can only take form together with the withering away of ‘the mode of men to organize their existence’ proper to capital, that is with the beginning of the end of commodification and alienation. There is no right, Marx says, which precedes social forms. And it is because we are at this point, on the verge of a change of these dimensions – and it is not an accident that we are living at as an acute cultural crisis – that we feel we are finishing a history, we feel the emptying of its forms, we just barely sense new forms: of production and of the state, or neither one nor the other.17

In her contribution to a collective volume in the memory of Nicos Poulantzas,18 Rossanda took up again the question of the crisis of the party-form and the emergence of new movements, by means of an overview of the Italian experience of the 1960s and 1970s, drawing a line of demarcation with all those that were starting to deny the centrality of the workers’ movement.

The real question is rather: for those who deny the centrality of the working class [centralité ouvrière], where is the epicentre? For the centrality of the working class is not merely ‘sociological’: it is an image of the centrality of the modes and relations of production with multiple social and ideological formations which intersect and contradict each other. Or further: where would movement come from in a system without an epicentre? How would the need for change be articulated, and on what basis? As for those who still consider the relation and mode of production as central: after a century of the workers’ movement, what has changed? Or, how has society changed? And what about in the contemporary international situation, where one pole is ‘actually existing socialism,’ and the other is the radical modification of subjectivities and subjects themselves?

Without these questions, without the sketch of a response, the problem of the dual crisis of parties and movements will not surpass the horizon of a more or less ideological [ideologisée] description.19

Rossanda’s texts that deal with questions of feminism are also of great interest because they represent the confrontation between her more ‘universalist’ approach to social change and emancipation and those approaches to feminism that were stressing more the element of difference, a confrontation that however remained dialogical with Rossanda not only acknowledging the many ways that women were oppressed but also trying to grasp the significance of radical feminism, something particularly evident in her dialogue with Lea Melandri.20

And, of course, her autobiography, The Comrade from Milan,21 offers a unique reflection on not only on a personal trajectory but on the very essence of European Communism and the unique experience of being a cadre of the PCI in the 1950s and 1960s, plus important insights into the political debates of the 1960s and broader atmosphere that led to the formation of il manifesto.

What emerges from her more ‘theoretical’ texts is a critical Marxist position, which avoids simplifications and incorporates the basic tenets of the Marxist advances in the 1960s; the primacy of relations of production over forces of production; the emphasis on the constant efficacy of class antagonism; the attempt to rethink socialism as a transition process of intense struggles and profound transformation not only of the relationships of ownership but also of the productive model and of culture; the need to revolutionise the very notion and functioning of the party in light of the emergence of new movements, instead of searching for an imaginary ‘Leninism’ (a critical stance already evident in her text on ‘Class and Party’). Even the reference to the Cultural Revolution and the Chinese experience had nothing of the classical Maoist ‘enthusiasm’ and, at the same time, there is a constant apprehension and acknowledgement that the tragedies associated with the history of the communist movement, including the tragedies of ‘actual existing socialism’ were in certain way always our tragedies.

One might agree or disagree with one or the other position that Rossanda took in the various turning points of the Italian Left. However, the trace she left was much deeper. It was not limited simply to choices of political line. Rather, it had much more to do with a certain conception of communist politics: one that combined the heritage of historical Communism, in its particular European version, a heritage of moral commitment, intellectuality and insistence on the possibility of new historical blocs, with a sense of constant self-criticism and an openness to the experience coming from the new movements and the experiences of struggles. In this sense, although, to a large extent, she was the ‘ragazza del secolo scorso’, in fact her politics and thinking always pointed to the future.

The fact that, in today’s landscape of the radical Left, we can find the figure of the radical academic, that of the activist, or even that of the professional (and ambitious...) parliamentarian, yet not many examples of this new intellectuality that Gramsci had written about and which emerged in various instances in the history of the communist movement, makes perhaps the sadness about the loss of Rossanda greater. Yet, at the same time, it points to the extent that she set an example.

• 1. Despite the fact that they were coming from an older generation. As Rossanda would put it in a 2018 interview: ‘this revolt took place I was already old. I was 44 years old. And it was a great effort for me to keep up with the students in my heeled shoes.’ (‘Rossanda. Chi ero nel 68 et altre confessioni’, interview by Simonetta Fiori, Il venerdí / La Repubblica, January 5 2018).
• 2. Rossana Rossanda, ‘Introduction’, in Il Manifesto. Analyse et thèses de la nouvelle extrême-gauche italienne, Paris : Seuil, 1971.
• 3. In Il Manifesto, op.cit.
• 4. Il manifesto, op. cit., pp. 368-370.
• 5. Rossana Rossanda, ‘Il discorso sulla dc’, il manifesto 28 March 1978 (https://ilmanifesto.it/br-e-album-di-famiglia/), where the famous reference to the ‘family album appears’. See also Rossana Rossanda ‘L’album di famiglia’, il manifesto 2 April 1978 (https://ilmanifesto.it/il-veterocomunismo-della-lotta-armata/).
• 6. Mario Moretti, Brigades rouges. Une histoire italienne. Entretien avec Caria Mosca et Rossana Rossanda, Paris : Éditions Amsterdam, 2018.
• 7. Rossana Rossanda, ‘Class and Party’, Socialist Register 1970, (originally in il manifesto, n. 4, 1969). Also in Il Manifesto, op. cit.
• 8. Rossana, Class and Party, p. 218.
• 9. Op.cit, p. 230.
• 10. Rossana Rossanda, ‘Mao’s Marxism’, Socialist Register 1971 (originally in il manifesto, n. 7-8, 1970).
• 11. Rossanda, ‘Mao’s Marxism’, p. 79.
• 12. Rossana Rossanda, ‘Revolutionary Intellectuals and the Soviet Union’, Socialist Register 1974, (originally in Temps Modernes).
• 13. Rossanda, ‘Revolutionary Intellectuals..’, p. 4.
• 14. Rossana Rossanda, ‘Power and Opposition in Post-revolutionary Societies’ (1977), https://www.viewpointmag.com/2017/12/15/power-opposition-post-revolutionary-societies-1977/
• 15. Rossanda, ‘Power and opposition...’, op. cit
• 16. Rossana Rossanda, ‘The Critique of Politics and “Unequal Right”’ (1978), https://www.viewpointmag.com/2017/12/18/critique-politics-unequal-right-1978/
• 17. Rossanda, ‘The Critique...’, op. cit.
• 18. Rossana Rossanda, ‘The Crisis and Dialectic of Parties and New Social Movements in Italy’ (1981), https://www.viewpointmag.com/2017/12/18/crisis-dialectic-parties-new-social-movements-italy-1981/ (originally ‘Crise et dialectique des partie et mouvements sociaux en Italie’ in Christine Buci-Glucksmann (ed.), La gauche, le pouvoir, le socialisme. Hommage à Nicos Poulantzas, Paris : PUF, 1983).
• 19. Rossanda. ‘Crisis’, op. cit.
• 20. On this see cuerpo que mi abita (edited by Lea Melandri, Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2018). One can see this already in her book Le altre (Milano: Bompiani, 1979) based on her radio discussions on the relation between women and politics and the emergence of feminist struggles
• 21. Rossana Rossanda, The Comrade from Milan, London: Verso, 2010 (originally published as La ragazza del secolo scorso, Torino: Einaudi, 2005).

A Review of The Dutch and German Communist Left (1900–1968): ‘Neither Lenin nor Trotsky nor Stalin! All Workers Must Think for Themselves!’ by Philippe Bourrinet

Alex de Jong

International Institute for Research and Education, Amsterdam, the Netherlands

alexdejong@iire.org

Abstract

Left-communism was initially a response to setbacks faced by the communist movement after the failure of the German Revolution. The movement put its hopes in workers’ self-activity, yet remained apart from most of the working class. In this book, Philippe Bourrinet discusses the history of this movement, from its roots in the Dutch and German revolutionary Left before and during the First World War to its final evolution. The book provides a detailed overview of its theoretical debates, and traces how left-communist ideas evolved into council communism. However, the strong focus on theoretical debates means the reader learns little about the movement’s relative weight in the workers’ movement or about its social composition. Ultimately, the left-communists hit a dead-end as the movement was caught in its own contradictions.

Keywords

left-communism – council communism – KAPD – Group of International Communists

Philippe Bourrinet, (2017) The Dutch and German Communist Left (1900–1968): ‘Neither Lenin nor Trotsky nor Stalin! All Workers Must Think for Themselves!’,Historical Materialism Book Series, Leiden: Brill.

As a movement the Dutch and German Communist Left took shape in the first years after the October Revolution, and largely disappeared after the defeat of the socialist revolution in Germany. Today it is mainly remembered as a target of Lenin’s polemic in Left-Wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder (1920), and its specific political ideas often disappear when lumped together with other movements as ‘ultra-left’.

          In The Dutch and German Communist Left (1900–1968): ‘Neither Lenin nor Trotsky nor Stalin! All Workers Must Think for Themselves!’, Philippe Bourrinet discusses the history of this movement, from its roots in the Dutch and German revolutionary Left before and during the First World War to its evolution into council communism after the Russian and German revolutions. Especially in German-language works, various aspects of the movement have already been discussed and some of the writings of its theorists, such as part of the writings of Dutch Marxist Anton Pannekoek (the ‘Karl Horner’ attacked in Left-Wing Communism) have appeared in English.The most important English-language works are Pannekoek and Gorter’s Marxism (Smart (ed.) 1978), a selection of important texts by two important Left Communist writers with an extensive introduction, and Pannekoek and the Workers’ Councils (Bricianer (ed.) 1978), a compilation of excerpts with commentary by the editor, and the study by John Gerber, Anton Pannekoek and the Socialism of Workers’ Self-Emancipation, 1873–1960 (Gerber 1989). In German, Syndikalismus und Linkskommunismus von 1918–1923 (Bock 1969) is still one of the most extensive works. An extensive selection of original texts can be found in Die Linke gegen die Parteiherrschaft (Kool (ed.) 1970). But The Dutch and German Communist Left is the most extensive study of this movement to date.

The Birth of the Communist Left

The Communist Left can only be understood as a product of a specific historical moment: after the first setbacks of the Russian and German revolutions, but before the final defeat of the socialist revolution in Western Europe. Its political positions were a reaction to strategies developed in the Communist International after the setbacks for the revolutionary movement in Western Europe. In particular, the Communist Left opposed the orientation towards building united fronts adopted at the Third Congress of the Communist International in 1921.

An important theme in these discussions was the question of what kind of party was needed. In the words of one of the most important theorists of the Communist Left, Dutch poet Herman Gorter, the Communist Left proposed to form ‘very firm, very clear, and very strong (though at the outset perhaps quite small) parties, kernels’. Such ‘kernels’ had to be ‘hard as steel, clear as glass’.Gorter 1920. Those were Gorter’s words in his Open Letter to Comrade Lenin. This response to Lenin’s Left-Wing Communism was a founding document of the movement and a clear rejection of politics aimed at winning over parts of left-wing Social Democracy, such as the left wing of the German USPD.

          Instead of mass movements, revolutionary politics had, according to Gorter, for the time being to consist of small elites. Instead of taking joint action with reformists, they should set an example to the rest of the working class through their actions: ‘they see our strikes, our street fights, our councils. They hear our watchwords. They see our lead. This is the best propaganda, the most convincing.’ The essential element in the agitation of these groups would be the immediate call to hand over all the power, political and economic, to the workers’ councils. In order to maintain the ‘purity’ that would be needed to be an effective example, any involvement with trade unions, or alliances with parties that still saw a role for parliaments or elections, needed to be rejected.

As a matter of principle, then, the Left Communists rejected compromise. An organisation such as the Kommunistische Arbeiter-Partei Deutschlands (KAPD), founded in 1920, had an apocalyptic world view. It stated that ‘the final phase of the struggle between capital and labour has begun’ and that ‘the decisive battle is already underway’. There could ‘be no compromise with the enemy, only a struggle to the death’. Tactics such as participation in elections or trade unions were nothing but ways to ‘avoid serious and decisive struggles with the bourgeois class’.Kommunistische Arbeiter-Partei Deutschlands 1920. This, of course, led to an extremely sectarian approach. Gorter’s friend Karl Schröder, at the time one of the KAPD’s most influential theorists, wrote in the same year that Gorter wrote the OpenLetter that there was no ‘substantial difference’ between the various parties, ‘from the [German National People’s Party] to the Spartacus League’, as they were all characterised by ‘capitalist methods’ of organisation.Karl Schröder, Vom werden der neuen Gesellschaft (Alte und neue Organisationsformen) (1920), in Kool (ed.) 1970, pp. 338–55 (p. 343).

          In his Open Letter, Gorter stated that the proletariat in Western Europe had no allies, and he employed a very narrow definition of ‘working class’. Shopkeepers, poor farmers, artisans, but also lower-ranking servants and employees, such as shop clerks and civil servants – Gorter considered them all to be enemies of the working class. Gorter’s argument for this view was that such layers are employed by big capital or otherwise ‘depended’ on capital, and they would therefore take its side – a strange view for a Marxist to take.

          The early Communist Left was a body with two souls. On the one hand, there was the deliberate formation of small elite groups, who refused compromise or alliances with others. In his historico-sociological study of workers’ radicalism during the German Revolution, Erhard Lucas described the activists of the Communist Left as a ‘major problem’ for the movement after the defeat of the 1920 uprising; ‘because they saw armed struggle as the only option, and they saw all political discussions within the movement as weakening it, and negotiations with the government as treason. When the [armed] struggle was apparently lost, they acted according to the motto “victory or death”’.Lucas 1976, p. 259. A 1927 article of the KAPD stated that it would have been better if the Bolsheviks, faced with the choice of defeat or the compromises of the NEP, had perished while retaining their ‘political honour’.[Lucas 1976, p. 259.

          The elitism of small groups, ‘hard as steel, clear as glass’, characterised one of the souls. The insistence on small nuclei that would take exemplary, revolutionary actions meant that actions were taken that were not supported by the majority of workers.

The other soul of the Communist Left, however, expressed a boundless faith in the spontaneous development of revolutionary beliefs, and a rejection of the ‘leadership politics [Führerpolitik]’ of the KPD and the Social Democrats. In the previously quoted text, Schröder gave a broad definition of the working class and an optimistic assessment of the possible spread of revolutionary ideas among the working class. He wrote that support for the rebuilding of society on the basis of workers’ councils would ‘reach ever wider circles, as the consciousness of all those who are addressed as proletarians will develop at an ever-increasing rate, whether they are saleswomen or professors, artists or civil servants’.

          Spontaneous actions and daily experiences would, according to the Left Communists, make workers understand the need for a dictatorship of the proletariat in the form of workers’ councils. In the same year that the KAPD was founded, the General Workers’ Union of Germany (Allgemeine Arbeiter-Union Deutschlands, AAUD) was founded. The AAUD was intended to replace the trade unions and to be a unitary organisation of the working class. It defined itself as a class-struggle organisation (Klassenkampforganisation) that fights for ‘unification of the proletariat as a class’ – but it accepted as members only those who, in addition, accepted that the ‘next phase will be the dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e. the exclusive control by the proletariat over all the political and economic institutions of society through the councils’.Lucas 1976, p. 259.

Breaking with the Bolsheviks

Initially, Gorter and many other Left Communists had been prepared to admit that the strategy of the Bolsheviks had been suitable for ‘the East’, where there was a peasant class and a ‘desperate middle class’. The early KAPD considered itself the most militant ally of the Russian Revolution in Germany. But as their differences became clearer, the Communist Left became increasingly critical of the Russian Revolution and of the Bolsheviks. A year after the Open Letter, Gorter concluded that the Russian revolution was essentially a ‘democratic peasant revolution’.Gorter 1921. Given the fact that there were only ‘6 or 7 million industrial proletarians’, compared to ‘25 to 40 million peasants’, Gorter concluded that in Russia ‘communism was only a thin shell and the peasant democracy based on private property was the core’. Communism ‘was like a thin crust on a large deep sea’. Left-wing communists like Gorter held a self-contradictory criticism of the Bolsheviks. On the one hand, they criticised their authoritarian character, on the other, they criticised the Bolsheviks for letting their policies be influenced by the demands of the large majority of the population: the peasants.

          In a 1921 article, Gorter angrily attacked the Communist International for its ‘opportunism’ – the origin of which Left Communists sought in the influence of Russian peasants and their desire to become small property owners. Gorter claimed that if the Communist International had not gone astray, large revolutionary parties would have been possible in Western Europe, with in Germany a rapidly growing party of ‘at least one hundred thousand members’.Ibid.

          This was a complete reversal with respect to his Open Letter, in which he had criticised the Bolsheviks for their ‘impatience’ and stressed that there was not yet even a revolutionary ‘kernel’ in Western Europe. For the Gorter of the Open Letter, the era of solely propaganda for communism had only just begun in Western Europe.

          In 1921, Gorter apparently forgot the implications of an idea he had adopted from Anton Pannekoek. Pannekoek had concluded that the deep roots of the Western European bourgeoisie, as compared to those in Russia, meant that the revolution in Western Europe would become a ‘slower and more difficult process’.Anton Pannekoek, Weltrevolution und kommunistische Taktik, in Bock (ed.) 1969, pp. 123–62 (p. 127). Pierre Broué summarises Pannekoek’s analysis as follows: ‘The cause of the victory of the German bourgeoisie over the Revolution in 1918–19 lay in the “hidden power” of “the bourgeoisie’s ideological hold over the proletariat”. Pannekoek rejected the role of the “active minority”, and the “the thesis of the ‘active minority’” and the illusion that power was within the grasp of the revolutionaries. […] The only point which it shared with the ultra-left ideology as it had shown itself in the opposition so far, seemed to be its hostility to forming parties which recognised the role of “leaders”, and which admitted the possibility of revolutionary work in bourgeois parliaments and reformist trade unions.’Broué 2005, pp. 329, 330.
          In the following years, the character of the Russian Revolution remained subject to debate among the Communist Left. One point of view was that the Russian Revolution had a ‘dual’ character: a proletarian revolution, based on Russia’s small industrial working class, and a bourgeois and capitalist revolution, based on the peasant majority. The other point of view, and the position later adopted by the council communists, including Pannekoek, was that the Russian revolution had always been merely ‘bourgeois’. In the 1930s, Pannekoek argued in a strongly deterministic fashion that, since pre-revolutionary Russia was feudal, the Bolsheviks were from the beginning historically destined to carry out a bourgeois revolution – regardless of their subjective views. From within that perspective, it makes little sense to criticise specific Bolshevik policies, since those were historically inevitable.Pannekoek developed such views in his 1938 book Lenin as Philosopher (Pannekoek 1948).

Collapse and Transformation

For a short period, less than two years, the Communist Left was a mass movement, but its history is also one of divisions and rapid decline. When it was founded in 1920, the KAPD, with about 38,000 members, organised at least half of the people in Germany who considered themselves communists. In the following months this grew to more than 40,000 members. However, as the revolutionary tide turned, the KAPD was paralysed by its refusal to organise a strategic retreat, compromises or alliances: in short, by its refusal to engage in politics. This led to it being paralysed. The decline of the party accelerated after the defeat of the March Action in 1921. At the beginning of 1922 the KAPD branches in Altona and Hamburg, once strongholds with thousands of members, had a total of 13(!) members.Ihlau 1969, p. 26. At the end of 1924, various break-aways from the KAPD had a combined number of fewer than 3,000 members. A similar process of splits and rapid decline took place in the AAUD after the early 1920s.Ihlau 1969, pp. 29–35, and Bock 1969, pp. 319–34, describe the organisational decline of the movement.

          Only in Germany did the Communist Left briefly have mass influence. In the Netherlands it was marginal from the very beginning. According to Bourrinet, the Dutch sister organisation of the German KAPD, the KAPN, had 200 members. Even this modest number is doubtful; in Amsterdam, the stronghold of the KAPN, the group never had more than a dozen members. The number of 200 comes from a statement by the KAPD, but, as Bourrinet shows, this organisation tended to exaggerate the size of its international sister organisations; several groups that were supposedly ready to join their new international had ‘no real existence’ (p. 259), the Russian Communist Workers’ Party, for example, ‘consisted of two Russians who lived in Berlin’ (p. 269).

Out of KAPN circles, a new, pronounced ideology grew: council communism. Like its predecessor, council communism was marginal in terms of size and political influence. Bourrinet estimates that the most important council-communist organisation, the Group of International Communists (GIC), had about 50 members (p. 278). Its importance lies in the texts it produced, which were distributed via various radical journals. Pannekoek withdrew from political activism in the early 1920s, but as a writer he was in constant discussion with the GIC, without ever formally joining.

The GIC deepened the KAPD’s emphasis on spontaneous actions. The world view of the KAPD can be summarised by their emphasis on ‘the workers themselves’ taking action, organising councils and overthrowing capitalism. Council communists further deepened the rejection of trade unions and political parties already present in the early Communist Left. They saw these forms of organisation as inherently ‘capitalist’ and as remnants of an earlier period in history.

Bourrinet describes the attitude of the GIC as a refusal to act ‘within’ the proletariat, ‘for fear of imposing a political line on it’ (p. 378). It is a strange combination: on the one hand, the working class was supposed to have the potential to ‘spontaneously’ recreate society – on the other, the GIC apparently thought that workers could very easily be led astray. What is astonishing about the GIC is that, despite its rhetoric about the self-activity of the working class, it had little interest in much of what this class was actually doing. Different political parties and trade unions, for example, grew considerably during this period, but the GIC continued to see these forms of organisation only as remnants of the past, and as inherently ‘bourgeois’. For both the GIC and Pannekoek, the involvement of workers in such organisations apparently meant that they were no longer part of ‘the workers themselves’. The GIC was not only small, but also very isolated.

The GIC wanted to ‘enlighten’ the proletariat by means of discussion and publications and represented the class struggle ‘in an ideological form, as a struggle of ideas’ (p. 378), as Bourrinet puts it. Looking back, Cajo Brendel, a member of the GIC and a lifelong council communist, wrote that the GIC as a matter of principle committed itself to political activism.Cajo Brendel, Gruppe Internationale Kommunisten. Persönliche Erinnerungen, in Brendel 2008, pp. 34–47 (p. 36). Their activities consisted of publications, educational courses and discussions.

          How cut off from political reality the Communist Left had become was shown by its inability to react to fascism. Three years after the Nazis came to power in Germany, Pannekoek suggested that fascism had actually benefitted the workers’ struggle (unwittingly, of course). Instead of crushing the workers’ movements, fascism had only abolished ‘ineffective’ remnants of the past, such as political parties and trade unions. By doing so, fascism had removed the illusions of the workers in such organisations and ‘restored their natural class unity’.Anton Pannekoek, De rol van fascisme, in Pannekoek 1970, pp. 157–64 (p. 161). In his book The Workers’ Councils however, written during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, Pannekoek concluded that fascism meant making workers ‘powerless’ and the disappearance of ‘an independent workers’ movement’.Pannekoek 1946, p. 210. But he still could not explain what made fascism different for the working class. Pannekoek, after all, described the politics of fascism as a dictatorship that abolished parliaments, parties, trade unions and democratic rights, but at the same time considered such things to be useless to the proletariat anyway.

          As Bourrinet puts it, for the GIC there was ‘no significant difference between Nazism and the national socialism of social democracy and Stalinism’ (p. 388). Already in the 1930s, such a view was incredibly short-sighted; after the history of the unfolding of Nazi barbarism, especially the Shoah, it must be rejected outright.

War and Occupation

The last chapter in the history of the Dutch Communist Left showed a remarkable development. In the 1930s, the Netherlands was home to the Revolutionary Socialist Workers’ Party (RSAP). This party, led by Henk Sneevliet, was one of the largest anti-Stalinist, revolutionary socialist parties. Sneevliet was a member of the Communist Party of the Netherlands, but broke from it at the end of the 1920s. The RSAP, which was originally close to Trotskyism, was a revolutionary socialist party that at the end of the 1930s supported the Spanish POUM. When Nazi Germany invaded the Netherlands, a selected core of RSAP members went underground to form the Marx-Lenin-Luxemburg Front (MLL Front).The figure given in The Dutch and German Communist Left estimating the number of original members is incorrect; probably a misprint, it should be four to six hundred, not 4,600.

          After the Nazis arrested and murdered its original leadership, including Sneevliet, this organisation split. One part took up Trotskyist positions, while the other part evolved towards council communism. Together with former members of the GIC, this group formed the Communist Union Spartacus and continued the council-communist tradition. Unfortunately, Bourrinet repeats a member’s claim that Spartacus had about 100 members shortly after the Second World War and even published a daily newspaper. But the organisation only had several dozen activists and was unable to produce a daily newspaper (p. 466).

In the mid-sixties, Spartacus broke apart. One wing continued the tradition of the GIC. Former GIC member Cajo Brendel was one of the central figures of this group. Until 1997 Brendel and a small, shrinking group of comrades continued to produce a journal, Daad en Gedachte (Act and Thought), which commented on workers’ struggles. Another current rejected the attitude of the GIC and wanted to form an activist organisation that would participate in social struggles. In the wake of the protest movements of the 1960s, this group increasingly resembled an anarchist action group and finally merged into the radical activist milieu.

Towards the end of Spartacus’ existence there was a modest revival of interest in the Communist Left. After the radical ferment of 1968, texts of the Communist Left were reprinted and a number of studies were written about it. This representation of the Communist Left was often quite selective: its spontaneity and rejection of vanguard parties were popular among part of the new radical milieu, but its workerism and its historical determinism were incompatible with the voluntarism of the New Left activist circles.

An Unfinished History

Bourrinet is in agreement with many of the views of the Communist Left, especially its more political parts, although he is more critical of the ‘council-communist’ ideas of the GIC and of the older Pannekoek. He criticises the anti-organisational views of the council communists and their view that ‘communist ideas’ would automatically eliminate the difference between workers’ organisations and revolutionary organisations. The book also largely adopts the characterisation by the Communist Left of other socialist movements. All involvement in electoral politics after World War I is, for example, considered ‘electoralist’.

One conclusion we can draw is that the Communist Left, in its criticism of ‘leadership politics’, of bureaucrats and their stranglehold on the self-organisation of workers, raised essential questions that still haunt the revolutionary and radical Left.

However, despite Bourrinet’s sympathetic presentation of the movement, reading the book also leads to the conclusion that the Communist Left was unable to answer such questions. Faced with the limits of the revolutionary process in Western Europe and the Soviet Union, it retreated into the supposedly predetermined, inevitable self-activity of workers. In his memoirs written in the 1940s, Pannekoek described how he used to be plagued by doubts about what to do – until he ‘suddenly saw the simple answer’ and realised that this question simply did not need to bother him; ‘the workers themselves must decide and take full responsibility’.Pannekoek 1982, p. 215. The activity of the ‘workers themselves’ was the universal key. If the workers did not succeed in establishing communism, it simply meant that they were not yet ready to ‘take full responsibility’.

          The Dutch and German Communist Left tells the history of this movement mainly on the basis of documents and explanations. The core of the book consists of detailed descriptions of the debates in the movement and analyses of the most important documents. This focus on ideas and texts may seem paradoxical for a movement that, according to its rhetoric, focused on ‘worker self-activity’. But about half the book is devoted to the small Dutch Communist Left, especially the GIC, and the actual activity of this group indeed consisted largely of discussing and describing ideas.

Of course, this focus on publications also has drawbacks. We learn little about what the organisations actually did except publish, about who their members were, or what their lives were like. In an article from 2004 Marcel van der Linden remarked that ‘almost nothing is known about the practical and organisational functioning of the KAPD, its sister organisations and successors. We also know little about the social implantation of the KAPD and the sociology of its supporters.’van der Linden 2004.

          This book has its roots in a dissertation, and an earlier version was published under the title The Dutch and German Communist Left: A Contribution to the History of the Revolutionary Movement, 1900–1950. This edition has been considerably expanded and brings the history up to 1968. With several pages of photographs, and at more than 500 pages long with a bibliography of no less than 80 pages, this is clearly the product of years and years of work. Unfortunately, it does include some factual inaccuracies and questionable accounts of important events.A new French edition, dealing with some of the remarks made here, has been published under the title La Gauche Communiste Germano-Hollandaise des origines à 1968 (Bourrinet 2018).

          The descriptions of Dutch history and other movements contain several factual inaccuracies. Most of these errors do not affect the main subject matter of the book, but make it a little unreliable as a source. For example: the early Dutch socialist SDB did not nominate candidates for the parliamentary elections in 1897 after an internal debate had ‘led to a new political orientation’; it did not take part in elections at that time (pp. 22–3). The revolutionary Marxist SDP, in which Gorter and Pannekoek were active, did not have 5,000 members ‘on the eve of the First World War’ (p. 81). Rather, in 1914 there were about 1,200 members.Voerman 2001, p. 609. This book is cited several times as a source. And the German bombing of Rotterdam killed almost 1,000 people – not 30,000.There are other examples. The portrayal of the Indonesian independence movement contains numerous errors (for example, the Japanese occupiers did not transfer sovereignty over Indonesia to Sukarno in April 1945). Other inaccuracies concern the revolutionary socialist Henk Sneevliet and his party. Sneevliet did not ‘return’ to the Dutch East Indies in 1913 (he had never been there) and his son Pam was not killed in the POUM militia in Spain, nor did he possibly commit suicide there. His body was found in the water near Amsterdam, after an apparent suicide. In the 1935 elections, the RSAP did not win four seats in parliament. Only Sneevliet was elected to parliament for the RSAP, two years earlier. It would appear that seats in the national parliament and in the provincial councils have been mixed up here. A questionable statement about Dutch history is that the Dutch Nazi movement, the NSB, developed ‘quickly after 1932’. After 1936 until the German invasion it lost 20,000 members from its peak of 52,000, and in the only general election in which it participated it won just over four per cent. Jan Baars was not a leader of the NSB, but of another fascist group, and in the book’s index he is confused with Asser Baars, Sneevliet’s comrade. Eddy Wijnkoop was not a member of the MLL Front who led the underground Vonk (‘Spark’) group during the Nazi occupation ‘with the consent of Sneevliet and the central leadership’, but the other way around: he was a leader of Vonk who became a member of the central leadership of the MLL Front. He was arrested by the Nazis and died in 1942, not 1944. In addition, the German bombing of Rotterdam took place in May, during the German invasion, not the following month.

          More important are statements about the influence of the Communist Left. Some claims that play up the role of the Communist Left are questionable speculations, such as that it was the influence of council communists that led to the formation of an opposition in the Dutch Communist Party in the 1930s (p. 282).The literature cited gives no indication that this was the case. Another speculation is the claim that the future historian B.A. Sijes, then a council communist, played ‘a major role’ in the February 1941 strike (p. 447).Sijes took part in this strike, but he claimed not to have played a major role in it, and Sijes’s biography does not suggest otherwise; see Roegholt 1988. Roegholt writes that neither Sijes’s recollections of this period, nor his scholarly work, ‘show any sign of a leading role’ that he would have played (p. 76). Also problematic are some of the claims that are contradicted by the cited literature.An example is Spartacus, the newspaper of the MLL Front and later of the Spartacus group. This newspaper is said to have had the ‘largest’ circulation of illegal newspapers during the Nazi occupation. The given source, however, only makes the claim that the circulation was ‘very large’ in the beginning. Other newspapers, such as those of the CPN, indeed had a larger circulation. See Perthus 1976, p. 432. An example of this is the description in the book of the left-wing opposition in the Dutch Communist Party (CPH), from which the KAPN originated. This opposition is described as ‘solidly organised’ around ‘its organ De Roode Vaan’and supported by ‘just over a third of the party’ with ‘a great echo among the workers of the CPH’: ‘the departments in the industrial cities of Enschede and Zwolle were in its hands’ (p. 242). These claims contradict what is written concerning this opposition in the literature on the Dutch CP and in the biography of the leader of the group, Barend Luteraan, referenced elsewhere in the book. This biography describes De Roode Vaan as a ‘small magazine’, ‘published, edited and written’ by Luteraan himself. The group around him is described as ‘a small group of loyalists’ with two Amsterdam families as its ‘core’. Only individual supporters in Zwolle and Enschede are mentioned.See for this episode Bos 1996, pp. 50–5.

          Other times the book gives dubious accounts of important events in the development of the Left in the Netherlands. For example, the description of the attitude of the Dutch Social-Democratic SDAP before the First World War towards government participation is contradicted by the quoted literature. According to the book, in 1913 the SDAP was ‘ready to accept’ three ministerial posts in the new government (p. 63) after its success in the elections of that year. But the original position of the SDAP leadership was to remain outside the government. The offer of three ministerial posts was made in response to the party’s initial refusal and became the subject of intense debate before eventually being rejected. Bourrinet describes the attitude of SDAP party leader Pieter Jelles Troelstra at the congress convened to discuss the issue of government participation as ‘radical’, apparently in favour of joining the government. However, the quoted literature shows that Troelstra initially opposed government participation and then preferred the party to accept the three posts only under certain conditions, and only if the alternative was the formation of a right-wing coalition. In the end, Troelstra gave a speech at the congress in which he stated that he could not call on his party to accept the posts.de Wolff 1978, p. 121.

          The book also claims that this congress was ‘never even aware’ (p. 63) of an open letter from Gorter in which he urged the SDAP not to participate in the government. However, the literature cited for this claim describes how the president of the congress informed the attendees of this letter and offered to read this document to the congress. However, this proposal was received with ridicule.de Liagre Böhl 1973, p. 114. The dismissive response to the letter undermines the book’s claim that Gorter had a major influence on the congress’s decision to reject participation in government.

          Finally, two important events in the history of the Dutch labour movement need to be discussed. The description of protests in 1917 – a high point of social unrest in the Netherlands – states that after a ban on protests ‘the workers reacted immediately’ and a 24-hour strike was held by ‘20,000 Amsterdam workers’. This was supposedly followed by a ‘mass strike that spread like wildfire to most major cities in the Netherlands’ (p. 159). This massive wave of strikes never happened. The cited literature describes a ‘relatively successful’ 24-hour strike of ‘between ten and twenty thousand workers’ in Amsterdam as well as marches and gatherings in other cities.Burger 1983, pp. 88–9.

          Finally, there is the description of the famous February Strike of 1941. Bourrinet bases himself on the standard work on the strike by Bernard Sijes, De februari-staking. 25–26 februari 1941.Sijes 1954. When discussing the run-up to the strike, there are some incorrect claims concerning the extent of forced labour, apparently the result of a misreading. Bourrinet writes that the February Strike ‘had taken a mass-character, comparable in breadth with the great mass strike of 1903’ (p. 450) and spread to ‘The Hague, Rotterdam, Groningen, Utrecht and Hilversum, Haarlem and many other towns’ (p. 44) – it is said even to have spread to Belgium. The reference for this is the book by Sijes. However, Sijes writes that the rumour that the strike had spread so widely was false. Sijes shows in detail how the strike was essentially limited to Amsterdam and some neighbouring areas.Sijes 1954, pp. 138, 139: ‘Such rumours that strengthened the morale of the people on strike were, as will be shown, not in accordance with the truth’.

          The cumulative effect of such questionable interpretations is that the revolutionary movement in the Netherlands, and the Communist Left within it, is presented as more significant than it was. Because the book also pays little attention to the role of other socialist movements in the social struggle it discusses, the reader is left with a skewed picture of the relative importance of the Communist Left.

In conclusion: for readers who want to know the theoretical debates in the Communist Left, the book is crucial if read with a grain or two of salt.

References

Allgemeine Arbeiter-Union Deutschlands 1920, ‘Programm Der AAUD’, December, available at: <https://www.marxists.org/deutsch/geschichte/deutsch/aaud/1920/programm.htm>.

Bock, Hans-Manfred 1969, Syndikalismus und Linkskommunismus von 1918–1923: Zur Geschichte und Soziologie der Freien Arbeiter-Union Deutschlands (Syndikalisten), der Allgemeinen Arbeiter-Union Deutschlands und der Kommunistischen Arbeiter-Partei Deutschlands, Meisenheim am Glan: Anton Hain Verlag.

Bock, Hans-Manfred (ed.) 1969, A. Pannekoek, H. Gorter. Organisation und Taktik der proletarischen Revolution,Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Neue Kritik.

Bos, Dennis 1996, Vele woningen, maar nergens een thuis: Barend Luteraan (1878–1970), Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis.

Bourrinet, Philippe 2017, The Dutch and German Communist Left (1900–1968): ‘Neither Lenin nor Trotsky nor Stalin! All Workers Must Think for Themselves!’,Historical Materialism Book Series, Leiden: Brill.

Bourrinet, Philippe 2018, La gauche communiste germano-hollandaise des origines à 1968, Paris: Éditions Moto proprio.

Brendel, Cajo 2008, Die Revolution ist keine Parteisache: ausgewählte texte, edited by Andreas Hollender, Münster: Unrast.

Bricianer, Serge (ed.) 1978, Pannekoek and the Workers’ Councils, St Louis: Telos Press.

Broué, Pierre 2005, The German Revolution, 1917–1923, translated by John R. Archer,Historical Materialism Book Series, Leiden: Brill.

Burger, Jan Erik 1983, Linkse frontvorming: samenwerking van revolutionaire socialisten, 1914–1918, Amsterdam: Van Gennep.

de Liagre Böhl, Herman 1973, Herman Gorter: zijn politieke aktiviteiten van 1909 tot 1920 in de opkomende kommunistische beweging in Nederland, Nijmegen: Socialistiese Uitgeverij Nijmegen.

de Wolff, Sam 1978, Voor het land van belofte: een terugblik op mijn leven, Bussum: Ruys.

Gerber, John Paul 1989, Anton Pannekoek and the Socialism of Workers’ Self-Emancipation, 1873–1960, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic.

Gorter, Herman 1920, ‘Open Letter to Comrade Lenin, a Reply to “‘Left-Wing’ Communism, an Infantile Disorder”’, available at: <https://www.marxists.org/archive/gorter/1920/open-letter.htm>.

Gorter, Herman 1921, ‘De Internationale van Moskou’, available at: <https://www.marxists.org/nederlands/gorter/1921/1921internationale.htm>

Ihlau, Olaf 1969, Die Roten Kämpfer. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung in der Weimarer Republik und im Dritten Reich, Meisenheim am Glan: Anton Hain Verlag.

Kommunistische Arbeiter-Partei Deutschlands 1920, ‘Programme of the Communist Workers’ Party of Germany (KAPD)’, May, available at: <https://www.marxists.org/subject/left-wing/kapd/1920/programme.htm>.

Kommunistische Arbeiter-Partei Deutschlands 1927, ‘Die Russische Tragödie’, available at: <https://www.marxists.org/deutsch/geschichte/deutsch/kapd/1927/russische-tragodie.htm>.

Kool, Frits (ed.) 1970, Die Linke gegen die Parteiherrschaft, Freiburg im Breisgau: Walter Verlag.

Lucas, Erhard 1976, Arbeiterradikalismus: Zwei Formen von Radikalismus in der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung, Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Roter Stern.

Pannekoek, Anton [P. Aartsz] 1946, De arbeidersraden, Amsterdam: De Vlam.

Pannekoek, Anton 1948 [1938], Lenin As Philosopher, available at: <https://www.marxists.org/archive/pannekoe/1938/lenin/index.htm>.

Pannekoek, Anton 1970, Partij, raden, revolutie, Amsterdam: Van Gennep.

Pannekoek, Anton 1982, Herinneringen, Amsterdam: Van Gennep.

Perthus, Max 1976, Henk Sneevliet: revolutionair-socialist in Europa en Azië, Nijmegen: Socialistiese Uitgeverij Nijmegen.

Roegholt, Richter 1988, Ben Sijes: een biografie, The Hague: Staatsdrukkerij.

Sijes, Benjamin Aäron 1954, De Februari-staking 25–26 Februari 1941, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.

Smart, D.A. (ed.) 1978, Pannekoek and Gorter’s Marxism, London: Pluto Press.

van der Linden, Marcel 2004, ‘On Council Communism’, available at: <https://www.marxists.org/subject/left-wing/2004/council-communism.htm>.

Voerman, Gerrit 2001, De meridiaan van Moskou: de CPN en de Communistische Internationale, 1919–1930, dissertation, University of Groningen.

Giorgio Cesarale

Nancy Fraser’s positions have taken up a particularly important place in the contemporary debate on socialism. But we ought to evaluate both the merits of what she proposes, and its problems.

Nancy Fraser’s discourse on socialism, as espoused in ‘What Should Socialism Mean in the Twenty-First Century?’, has the merit of being historically situated and theoretically structured. It is historically situated because, right from the first paragraph, it declares its own belonging to a specific political context. Which is to say, that context determined by the powerful rise of the US socialist movement after the great crash of 2007-8 – not only in the version advanced by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (the left wing of the Democrats), but also that of the Democratic Socialists of America (currently the biggest independent socialist organisation in the USA). During the period in which we worked on these notes we saw the streets across America – in cities as in rural areas, North and South, East and West – inundated by a social and political movement, an anti-racist revolt which displayed even insurrectionary traits. Against this, there stood opposed a deaf reaction, a clownish yet also sinister gangsterism, casting off its “neo-populist” vest to don the sadly more recognisable clothes of fascist adventurism. These latter developments – a harbinger of further, unpredictable surprises that will need to be watched carefully over coming months – moreover shed light on thetheoretical importance of Fraser’s discourse on socialism.1

Indeed, her discourse rests on a rethinking of the “classic” separation – internal above all to a certain “orthodox” Second and Third-Internationalist Marxism – between the sphere of production and the sphere of reproduction, meaning, to be more precise, a separation between the realm of that which Marx called the “immediate process of production”2 and the conditions of the reproduction of the social relations which make this process possible. In Fraser’s theoretical vocabulary, the main conditions of possibility for the “immediate process of production” are “state power, nonhuman nature, and forms of wealth that lie outside capital’s official circuits, but within its reach”.3 As Fraser has argued elsewhere, it is necessary to go beyond the “hidden abode of production” from Volume I of Capital, which disclose the foundation of the exploitation of waged labour, and uncover what they conceal: namely, their “free-riding on unwaged carework, public goods, and wealth expropriated from racialized subjects and non-human nature”.4

Authoritarianism, racism, sexism, the predation on the natural environment – in short, all that which the American rebellion of recent days has, in large part, risen up against – would, then, be internal to capitalism, in a way that even Marx fell short of grasping. Yet, if that is how things are, then every struggle against the present socio-historical formation, every “socialism”, must change telos: the quite proper need to transform the “relations of production” – a task which cannot be put off any longer – must be combined with the need to change the “relations of reproduction” in what we could call, in all-embracing terms, a democratic direction.

In our view, this is a highly important theoretical-political move. For more than the late-Honnethian and late-Habermasian line, it reconnects with the still part-unexpressed potentialities of the “Western Marxist” turn launched by György Lukács already in the 1920s with the publication of History and Class Consciousness. But what, to be more precise, does “Western Marxism” mean? Perhaps it means that position which, in the era of Stalinist counter-revolution, deserted the field ofeconomic analysis andpolitical intervention to take refuge in the – in some aspects – self-referential practice ofphilosophical reflection?5 No, for if that really were the case, then there would be no cause to bring Fraser’s discourse on capitalism and its overcoming by socialism onto this field. For us, rather, “Western Marxism” is that theoretical-political current which extends the inversion between abstract and concrete which dominates the concept of the “commodity” – where a thing doesnot have value because it satisfies a need (the concrete) but only because it can bealienated according to determinate quantitative relations (the abstract) – to the society’s whole set ofreproductive andrepresentative operations.

In Western Marxism, therefore, is rediscovered the thesis, asserted and reasoned in various ways, that society is a totality. Society is not, then, an edifice with separate floors, such as the “orthodox” theory regarding the relationship between theeconomic base andideological superstructure had suggested. Instead, its elementary cell – the commodity – projects its inversion even within the way in whichconsciousness establishes connections withreality and seeks to make it intelligible. This means that, whereas for Second and Third-Internationalist “orthodox” Marxism, “consciousness” is a merereflection of the economic-productive structure, for which reason the sphere in which it is nourished – the sphere of social and ideological reproduction (as harboured by the state, by the means of communication, etc.) – is anappendage of the economic-productive structure, for Western Marxism the transmission mechanism between thecirculation of value and thereproduction of the overall social capital is devoid of any significant breaks.Circulation,reproduction andrepresentation have thus been articulated in acomplex, but for this no lessunitary hierarchy.

For illustrations of this, we can look, for instance, to Ernst Bloch in his The Principle of Hope, where he proceeded from the analysis of the expectant emotions to the analysis of their perversion in the heads of those (e.g. the petty bourgeoisie) that suffer under the iron heel of monopoly capital; or to Lukács, as he reprised the intuitions ofHistory and Class Consciousness inThe Ontology of Social Being, concerning himself with the objective forms of coordination between the various teleological positings of individuals (the division of labour, language, law, and world market); to the second Althusser, who developed the – for us, already “Western-Marxist” – theoretical model ofReading Capital in the work on “ideological state apparatuses”; and to the Frankfurt School, which gradually took form first with the Horkheimer and Adorno ofDialectic of Enlightenment and then with Habermas right up toThe Theory of Communicative Action, studying the instruments of the “colonisation” of the life-world.

Fraser’s “Western Marxist” vein is, however, enriched by her own deep relationship with the key theses of Karl Polanyi’s Great Transformation. More particularly, from this book Fraser borrows the idea that the economic and productive institution is always embedded in a wider socio-political context, even when – as in capitalism – there is a tendency to abstract from this dependency. Which is to say, the same abstraction which leads to the formation of what Polanyi calls “fictitious commodities”: labour, land, money. Capitalism renders possible the production of these commodities precisely by abstracting from their general conditions of existence – from what are, in Fraser, the “conditions of reproduction”:

The crucial point is this: labor, land, and money are essential elements of industry; they also must be organized in markets; in fact, these markets form an absolutely vital part of the economic system. But labor, land, and money are obviously not commodities; the postulate that anything that is bought and sold must have been produced for sale is emphatically untrue in regard to them. […] Labor is only another name for a human activity which goes with life itself, which in its turn is not produced for sale but for entirely different reasons, nor can that activity be detached from the rest of life, be stored or mobilized; land is only another name for nature, which is not produced by man; actual money, finally, is merely a token of purchasing power which, as a rule, is not produced at all, but comes into being through the mechanism of banking or state finance. None of them is produced for sale. The commodity description of labor, land, and money is entirely fictitious.6

As can easily be recognised, we are very close to Fraser, here: labour is confused with life itself, being an activity that stands out from the backdrop of other human activities (those which Fraser would call “care” activities); land becomes property only through its being-unbound from nature; and finally, money is governed bystate power relations. If we want to advance the transition to socialism, Fraser tells us, then all these abstractions, all these separations, will have to be rethought, unveiling their artificial character, and redesigned, by subjecting them to democratic regulation. Socialism must be not only “Marxian” but also “Polanyian”.

As we have suggested, Fraser’s initiative is largely to be welcomed and deserves further support. Nonetheless, it is undermined by a fundamental difficulty, which threatens to have ruinous effects also on the bid to set out a new outline of the transition to socialism. The fact that this is a difficulty which also cuts across the various fractions of contemporary critical thought, among neo-Marxist thinkers as among post-Marxist ones – especially the Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy – makes it no less serious. To what are we referring, here? We are speaking about the fact that, once the importance of extending struggles from the point of production to the point of realisation, distribution and reproduction has been registered, we also need to establish the mechanism for thearticulation of the former to the latter. While in these thinkers, struggles at the point of reproductionare added to the struggles at the point of production – either imbuing them with a political character they would otherwise not have (Laclau-Mouffe) or bringing into play their missing presupposition (Fraser) – for the Marx ofCapital the class struggle at the point of production is already itself based on a fundamental condition of reproduction. Which? Marx refers to such a condition of reproduction as soon as he begins to explain the reason why “labour-power” presupposes the reduction of its own capabilities to a commodity:

By labour-power or capacity to labour is to be understood the aggregate of those mental and physical capabilities existing in a human being, which he exercises whenever he produces a use-value of any description. … The exchange of commodities of itself implies no other relations of dependence than those which result from its own nature. On this assumption, labour-power can appear upon the market as a commodity, only if, and so far as, its possessor, the individual whose labour-power it is, offers it for sale, or sells it, as a commodity. In order that he may be able to do this, he must have it at his disposal, must be the untrammelled owner of his capacity for labour, i.e., of his person. He and the owner of money meet in the market, and deal with each other as on the basis of equal rights, with this difference alone, that one is buyer, the other seller; both, therefore, equal in the eyes of the law.7

In short – as Marx tells us just before this – labour-power is a “special commodity”8 precisely because the workers have become members of the sphere of circulation, have become free andequal owners of labour-power and thus able to pursue their own advantage in an autonomous manner, exchanging their own services for money.

But how is labour-power produced and reproduced; how was it possible for this to become part of the essentially modern sphere that is the sphere of the circulation of commodities? As Kōzō Uno has highlighted in a work of marvellous conceptual precision (Principles of Political Economy. Theory of a Purely Capitalist Society), the process of the production and reproduction of labour-power is a peculiar process because it is

a consumption-process of material things, not a production-process properly speaking. That is to say, labour-power as a commodity must be reproduced in the private life of the workers, not in the process of material production. However, the conversion of labour-power into a commodity compels the reproduction 'as a commodity' of labour-power through the individual consumption of wage-earners with the recurrence and regularity characteristic of a production-process. Thus labour-power is 'produced' by the consumption of material things just as material things are produced by the consumption of labour-power. Such an inter-relatedness, however, must not obviate the distinction between the processes of production and consumption. Labour-power and the means of production are sometimes said to be 'productively consumed,' though this does not make the production-process of material things their individual consumption-process.9

In short, labour-power is such not despite but precisely by virtue of the fact that it is reproduced outside the sphere of production, in family or private life. One can certainly imagine – Kōzō Uno says, alluding to the “Fordist-Keynesian” attempt to socialise control over the cycle of consumption and savings10 – a regulated reproduction of labour-power in the private sphere. But in any case, this remains but an analogy. If it were literally true that labour-power is produced like any other commodity, in a production process, the determination of the value of labour-power would have to conform to that of any other commodity. And, for Marx, as is well-known, the value of a commodity is measured by the socially necessary labour time to produce it. Yet, in

the case of labour-power, its value is determined indirectly by labour-time spent on the production of the means of livelihood required for the reproduction of labour-power. But this involves the practical problem of determining what quality and quantity of the means of livelihood should be deemed necessary for the reproduction of labour-power.11

The socially necessary labour time to reproduce labour-power is fixed indirectly and notdirectly, as in case of any other commodity. For it depends on an activity – the consumption of goods – which takes placeoutside of production, in family or private life, indeed, in the sphere ofreproduction. This is demonstrated, Kōzō Uno continues, by the variable unfolding of the determination of labour-power’s value: because it depends on an activity – i.e. the satisfaction of its own needs – which capital does notdirectly control, it is on this terrain that there takes root labour-power’s attempt to assert its particular prerogatives, free and equal, in the sphere of circulation. Labour-power – naturally in consonance with the cycle of the overall social capital – negotiates the value of its bodily and cognitive capabilities, of which it is the owner, in relation to what it has cost to replenish these capabilities, on each occasion choosing to narrow or widen the scope of its own needs that may be satisfied. So, as we can perhaps now better see, if one wants, like Fraser, to remain in some sense faithful to Marx’s theoretical acquisitions, it does not make much theoretical and political sense to make any firm distinction between struggles at the point of production and at others at the point of reproduction. Struggles at the point of production arecharacteristically conditioned by the way in which the sphere of reproduction is structured.

This allows us, finally, to resume our line of argument regarding the “Western Marxist” rethinking of the modern relationship between production and reproduction. Our thesis is that, in order to understand this relationship, it is necessary to bring the sphere of circulation into play right from the outset. So long as production and reproduction remained bound to one another in precapitalist societies, access to the means and objects of labour was mediated in political-juridical or religious terms, with the consequence that the extraction of surplus-value was anchored to directly political-juridical or religious etc. means ofappropriation – which thus took placedirectlyat the level of the community. But, when the productive and political community were pulverised thanks to the entrance of capitalist production relations, expropriating the worker of his traditional relations of possession, the individual began only to have access to the means of production by way of the market, as a member of the sphere of circulation (the seller or buyer of commodities and labour-power). And it is on this basis that the sphere of production itself began to reconfigure its tasks: if, in precapitalist modes of production, this sphere operated in function of an extra-productive appropriation, and was thus isomorphic to thedirect domination over the producers, now in capitalist modernity it must seek to re-conjugate thefree and equal individual of the sphere of circulation to the opposed – because antagonistic – production relations. With the disappearance of the communities that hadimmediately related him to the sphere of production, the individual is now prepared, moulded, and trained to participate in this sphere (e.g. by way of the family, school, job training courses, administrative processes, public opinion, etc.).12 The emergence of the sphere of circulation thus provides what the Hegel of the Phenomenology of Spirit would have called the “passing over into its opposite”:13 from the freedom and equality which connote the sphere of circulation, we pass to the asymmetries and inequalities immanent to the relations of production. Moreover, this cannot be an abrupt and immediate reversal, which would lead the socio-historical formation to collapse. Between these two spheres there must intervene – to construct a field of at least partial resolvability of their tension – the sphere of reproduction, with its promotion of the hierarchies of race, sex and nation, the same hierarchies which we tragically grew to know so well especially in the course of the twentieth century. In this schema, social reproduction remains – as in the old precapitalist modes of production – the hub of relations of domination, but now of an indirect domination which prepares for or ratifies the exercise of the power relations in the sphere of production.

This is also the basis on which we should acknowledge the need to reflect on the channels flowing between circulation, production and reproduction, and on the totalisation process of bourgeois society as a process marked by inversions. There are discrepancies between circulation, production and reproduction, i.e. between the normative promises of the first, the harsh inequalities of the second and the need for the democratic state (still today, the mean institution of reproduction) on each occasion to transform the obedience required on the basis of the relations of force into awilling obedience – i.e. because it is each time provided amidst political conflict, obtained in a wider discursive confrontation. It is by intervening in these gaps, exploiting these tensions, that socialism can win back what we see as its most peculiar aspect, namely, that of being the product of the self-critique of bourgeois society and bourgeois reason.14

This article is republished from http://filosofiainmovimento.it/, translation by David Broder

Giorgio Cesarale is Professor of Political Philosophy at Ca' Foscari University of Venice

                                                                                                (25 June 2020)

Bunnyfrosch / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)

• 1. European attention toward the tumultuous developments in US democracy following the great crash of 2007-8, with both its advances (the Sanders campaign in the 2016 Democratic primaries) and its failures (the Obama presidency) has generally been shamefully low. And it is worth noting: in a world in which the far East is letting off the spark of economic transformation and the far West the spark of political transformation, old Europe instead distinguishes itself with its fearful, torpid reaction to “the ever-present threat of total catastrophe” (Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, Continuum, London, 2002, pp. 243-244).
• 2. Karl Marx, Das Kapital, Vol. III, text from Marxists.org
• 3. Nancy Fraser, ‘What Should Socialism Mean in the Twenty-First Century’, in Socialist Register 2020: Beyond Market Dystopia. New Ways of Living, 56, 2020.
• 4. Ibid.
• 5. This is the position of Perry Anderson (in Considerations on Western Marxism, NLB, London, 1976) and, all things considered, also of Domenico Losurdo, in Il marxismo occidentale. Come nacque, come morì, come può rinascere (Laterza, Rome-Bari, 2017). The difference is that this latter work adopts a position within a framework purged of all anti-Stalinist polemic, and rather more characterized by the contrast established with an “Eastern” Marxism itself above all interested in developing the productive forces.
• 6. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, Beacon Press, Boston, 2001, pp. 75-76. In the Polanyi debate in recent years – of which Michele Cangiani provides a fine account in Quale Karl Polanyi? (http://ilrasoiodioccam-micromega.blogautore.espresso.repubblica.it/2020/03/06/quale-karl-polanyi/) – the dilemma is: mit oder gegen Marx? Cangiani clearly explains why that line of interpretation that sets Polanyi at a distance from Marx does not hold water.
• 7. Karl Marx, Das Kapital, Volume 1, Chapter 6, cit.
• 8. Ibid.
• 9. Kōzō Uno, Principles of Political Economy. Theory of a Purely Capitalist Society, trans. by Thomas T. Sekine, The Harvester, Brighton, 1980, p. 62.
• 10. Meaning, an organised, state-regulated capitalism; Fraser herself has provided a great deal of apt reflection on the effects which this has on the family, for instance in ‘Contradictions of Capital and Care’, New Left Review, no. 100/2016, pp. 99-117.
• 11. Kōzō Uno, Principles of Political Economy. Theory of a Purely Capitalist Society, p. 62.
• 12. It is starting from here that it becomes possible to rearticulate a constructive relationship with the theme of “biopower” introduced by Michel Foucault. Pierre Macherey demonstrated this in his ‘The Productive Subject’ (available at https://www.viewpointmag.com/2015/10/31/the-productive-subject/). See also, on this, Jacques Bidet, Foucault With Marx, Zed Books, London, 2017, pp. 19-57, and Mark Neocleous, Administering Civil Society. Towards a Theory of State Power, MacMillan, London-New York, 1996.
• 13. G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. by Terry Pinkard, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2018, p. 147.
• 14. Even if redefined in these terms, as a self-critique of bourgeois society and reason, the category “socialism” remains the prisoner of major ambiguities, which we will shortly return to address. If we wanted to adopt a less theoretically and politically compromised category we would have to speak of “transitional social formations” (Charles Bettelheim).

Translated by Loren Balhorn

When it comes to West German contributions to Marxist theory, most people think of the Frankfurt School of Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno. Yet just as influential, at least within the German-speaking world, was the ‘Marburg School’, which emerged in the early 1960s around the Marxist political scientist Wolfgang Abendroth at the University of Marburg. Abendroth and the other two members of the Marburg Triumvirate, Heinz Maus and Werner Hofmann, educated a generation of Marxist intellectuals who went on to dominate political science at the university for decades and in turn train hundreds of Marxist teachers and schools who continue to play a not negligible role in German intellectual debates to this day.

Long obscured from international debates due to a dearth of translations of its key publications, the Marburg School’s history was reintroduced to an English-speaking audience last year with the publication of Lothar Peter’s history of the school, Marx on Campus, in the Historical Materialism Book Series. Selim Nadi recently spoke with him about his own intellectual development, the history of the Marburg School, and his own place within it.

The interview originally appeared in French in Contretemps. Translation by Loren Balhorn.

Image: Wolfgang Abendroth addressing a student forum at the University of Marburg, 1972. (Photo: Dr Witich Rossmann)

Can you tell us a bit about your intellectual and political development?

I went to the University of Marburg in the early 1960s and first studied literature, but soon also political science with Wolfgang Abendroth. Like many other students, I was impressed not only by what he taught, but also his personality. Abendroth not only offered a substantially contrasting programme to the prevailing teachings of the day, but also captivated his audience with his combative attitude. As a resistance fighter and political prisoner, he had experienced the brutality of the Nazi regime first-hand but never capitulated to his torturers. He thus represented an absolute exception in the West German academic landscape – yet he was not publicly respected or honoured at the time, but, on the contrary, fought and slandered.

I encountered Georg Lukács while studying literature and political science. This was not the Lukács of History and Class Consciousness, but Lukács the literary sociologist who opened up a completely new perspective on literature, its social conditionality and function. Suddenly I learned that Hölderlin not only wrote aesthetically subtle poems, but that his novels, such as Hyperion orThe Death of Empedocles, cannot really be comprehended without taking the influence of the French Revolution into account. My new orientation towards Lukács led to my exclusion from a Hölderlin seminar, as my insubordinate questions disturbed the consecrated mood cultivated there.

Afterwards, I primarily studied political science and sociology. Under Abendroth’s influence, a group of assistants, doctoral candidates, and students emerged, all of whom came from SDS, which in 1968 became the driving force behind the student movement in the Federal Republic. SDS had two main currents, the ‘anti-authoritarians’ and the ‘traditionalists’. The strong Marburg group belonged to the latter, and thus I did as well. We had learned from Abendroth that intellectuals must seek a connection with the workers’ movement – its left wing, to be precise – if their socialist perspective was to be realistic. I therefore also participated intensively in trade-union education work alongside my SDS membership.

It was during this period, in the mid-1960s, that I began to read Marx, initially his early writings. I also discovered in Jean-Paul Sartre a dimension of intellectual commitment, the inextricable link between personal ‘choice’ – that is to say, non-delegable individual responsibility – and political partisanship that I had not yet encountered in this resoluteness.

With the collapse of the student movement – I had become a doctoral student under Abendroth in the meantime – I gradually approached the German Communist Party, or DKP, which was re-founded in 1968 due to the ongoing ban on the original Communist Party, the KPD, dating back to 1956. In contrast to the numerous ultra-left K-Gruppen, the DKP could rely on a considerable number of politically active workers.

In 1970, while still a student, I wrote and edited the book Die neue Arbeiterklasse together with Frank Deppe and Hellmuth Lange, which was published by the renowned Europäische Verlagsanstalt in Frankfurt am Main. After my doctorate supervised by Abendroth and Heinz Maus, a sociologist and another representative of the Marburg School, I worked as an assistant at the University of Paris, the Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris III), at the Institut d'Allemand in 1971–2. The director was Pierre Bertaux, a specialist in German Studies, a prominent member of the resistance, and a leading officer of the national police in France after 1945 who returned to the university after being dismissed due to a scandal – he had vouched for a bandit’s honour. During my time as an assistant in Paris, I worked intensively with the CGT on a voluntary basis and had good contacts to French Communists.

Beginning in 1970, I also worked closely with the DKP’s scientific institute, the Institut für Marxistische Studien und Forschungen (IMSF) in Frankfurt, where I published many of my articles, including a study on French trade unions during the Mitterrand era. In 1972, I was appointed as a sociologist at the left-leaning Bremen ‘Reform University’, where, now a DKP member, I formed a highly active political group that existed for almost two decades together with the outstanding Marxist economist Jörg Huffschmid, philosopher Hans Jörg Sandkühler, sociologist Susanne Schunter-Kleeman, and others. For a long time, I taught at the DKP’s Betriebsarbeiterschule (factory workers’ school) in Bremen, where the party was relatively strong.

After the collapse of state socialism, I left the DKP and have remained independent of any party ever since, but later on I served as an academic trustee at the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung, which is close to the party Die Linke. I also wrote in left-wing publications such as Z.,Das Argument, andSozialismus. Scientifically, I now tried to bring Marxist theory and other theories of social critique – above all Pierre Bourdieu’s but also those of ‘left’ communitarianism (Charles Taylor) and feminism – closer together. My intellectual affinity with France has remained unextinguished since my early readings of Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Merleau-Ponty.

Why call this current the ‘Marburg School’? Its founder, Wolfgang Abendroth, was undoubtedly a famous personality, but can one really speak of a ‘school’? What was the relationship between the Marburg intellectuals and Marxism more generally?

Abendroth was, without doubt, not only the outstanding charismatic personality of the University of Marburg but of the intellectual Left in West Germany as a whole. While Horkheimer and Adorno in Frankfurt may have met with greater resonance in intellectual discourse, Abendroth far surpassed the Frankfurters as an inspiration, tribune, and analyst of social and political struggles. The fact that the left-wing Marburg School – there was also a neo-Kantian ‘Marburg School’ around Hermann Cohen at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century – is often referred to as the ‘Abendroth School’ can be explained by his enormous charisma.

Despite Abendroth’s prominence, there are several reasons that justify speaking of a ‘Marburg School’. Abendroth was not alone, but rather part of the so-called ‘Triumvirate’ of Marxist thought in Marburg together with the sociologists Werner Hofmann and Heinz Maus. A circle of young Marxist social scientists formed around this ‘Triumvirate’, whose influence on teaching and scholarship in Marburg grew considerably beginning in the mid-1960s. Even after Abendroth’s retirement, the work of young Marxists continued at the University of Marburg for decades.

Abendroth’s understanding of Marxism was primarily shaped by his activity in the socialist workers’ movement. The theoreticians of the ‘united front’ between Communists and Social Democrats in the interwar period, August Thalheimer and Heinrich Brandler, played an important role. To the end of his life, the notion of the united front served as the compass of his political thinking and action. In Hofmann’s case, the acquisition of Marxist theory occurred largely along the path of intensive critical engagement with bourgeois economics, whereas Heinz Maus was primarily oriented towards Marx through the ideology-critical discourse of Max Horkheimer and the ‘Frankfurt School’. Coming from Frankfurt, Karl Hermann (Kay) Tjaden developed his own historical-materialist social analysis in Marburg, constituting a counterpoint to the systems theory of Talcott Parsons, Niklas Luhmann, and others.

The group of assistants, doctoral students, and co-workers around Abendroth included several scholars, like the renowned fascism researcher Reinhard Kühnl, who became university instructors themselves and taught critiques of fascism and capitalism to hundreds, if not thousands of students, especially future teachers. A group emerged from the previously rather pluralistic circle of students in the mid-1960s that began to advocate explicitly Marxist positions. Among them were Kay Tjaden, Margarete Tjaden-Steinhauer, Frank Deppe, Dieter Boris, Georg Fülberth and others, including me.

Heinz Maus, a former student of Max Horkheimer, was offered a professorship of sociology in Marburg in 1960 with Abendroth’s support. This strengthened Abendroth’s position, while the influence of socially critical and Marxist thought within Marburg sociology grew at the same time. Despite their different personalities, Abendroth and Maus – an excellent connoisseur of French sociology – shared political similarities and a collegial relationship. Relations between the Abendroth Institute and the ‘Sociological Seminar’ were quite close. They grew even closer when Werner Hofmann was appointed to a second chair of sociology in Marburg in 1966. With his appointment, Marxist thought at the University of Marburg underwent a further upswing. Although quite different from Abendroth, Werner Hofmann was also an impressive personality – albeit not entirely free of patriarchal traits. Nevertheless, he made a lasting impression on students. Abendroth also cooperated with him, and there was intensive exchange between the two institutes both professionally and personally.

Kay Tjaden, probably the most brilliant student of the ‘first Abendroth generation’, completed his doctorate under Abendroth but then became an academic councillor in sociology where he received a professorship in 1970, succeeding Werner Hofmann who died far too early in 1969. Later professors who completed their doctorates under Abendroth went into sociology temporarily or permanently. I describe this to show that sociology had played a role in conveying Marxist thought in Marburg since the mid-1960s. That is why I consider it justified, indeed necessary, to speak of a ‘Marburg’ rather than an ‘Abendroth School’. Moreover, Marxist scholarship, teaching, and political commitment in Marburg did not cease after Hofmann’s death, Abendroth’s retirement in 1972, or Maus’s retirement in 1976.

In Marx on Campus, you write that the ‘first phase of the Marburg School developed in the context of the reconstruction, stabilisation, and expansion of capitalist relations of property and production’ in West Germany after World War II. Can you explain the importance of the West German economic and social context for the development of the Marburg School?

The economic, social, and political development of the Federal Republic of Germany since the 1950s was characterized by the so-called ‘Miracle on the Rhine’, the political integration of the West, and the hegemony of the reactionary Adenauer regime, which partly began to take on characteristics of an authoritarian chancellor dictatorship. At the same time, the Social Democratic Party (SPD) drifted to the right step by step. With the ‘Godesberg Programme’ in 1959, the SPD finally made its peace with West German capitalism and transformed itself from a ‘class party’ into a ‘people’s party’. The KPD, the remaining fundamental opposition for the time being, was banned in 1956 – its members persecuted, condemned, and imprisoned by the thousands. This should always be remembered when the Federal Republic tries to act as a guardian of democracy and human rights today.

Despite the dominance of the ruling right-wing Adenauer bloc, the continuity of former Nazis in institutions, and anti-Communism as an unofficial state ideology, there were a few enclaves of anti-fascist attitudes within the political elite. This was true, for example, of the Social Democratic Minister-President of Hessia, Georg-August Zinn, without whom Abendroth’s appointment would not have been possible.

The fact that, in a country contaminated by anti-Communism in the middle of the ‘Cold War’, a resistance fighter and socialist intellectual received a professorship in deeply reactionary Marburg, where the fascist Martin Heidegger had once taught, was tantamount to a political miracle. For years, Abendroth remained the only Marxist holding a university chair in West Germany, combining his academic work with a decisive commitment to building the Left in the Federal Republic. Although the SPD refrained from fundamental criticism of the West German social system, its members and voters had not yet lost their class character. This was an important point of departure for Abendroth’s educational work, which was primarily oriented towards the left-wing social-democratic and trade-union forces that were still present.

Where did Wolfgang Abendroth stand in the political and theoretical landscape of West Germany in the 1950s and 1960s? Who were the other important personalities at the beginning of the Marburg School?

Compared with other schools of social science, Abendroth found himself in a downright depressing minority position in the 1950s. This did not, however, dampen his élan or his courage. Until the 1960s, the West German academic scene was dominated by the state-oriented ‘Freiburg School’ in political science, the empirically oriented ‘Cologne School’ in sociology, the conservative social anthropological thinking of Arnold Gehlen, the integration sociology of Helmut Schelsky, etc., and from outside by American structural functionalism. Marxism appeared before this academic horizon as a threat and a relapse into totalitarianism. Abendroth stood alone in Marburg until 1960. Moreover, he had been expelled from the SPD for supporting the party’s student union, SDS, which was in conflict with the party leadership.

Only to the extent that the first generation of his students, such as Reinhard Kühnl, Kay Tjaden, Arno Klönne, and others became academically and politically active themselves did Abendroth’s isolation begin to loosen somewhat. I already mentioned Heinz Maus and Werner Hofmann. Hofmann in particular stood out with impressive scholarly achievements. Coming from the field of economics, he built a bridge to sociology and distinguished himself with his profound criticism of the unhistorical and apologetic character of contemporary economics, his studies of the Soviet employment regime, and the sociology of Stalinism and anti-Communism.

Like Abendroth, Hofmann was an impressive speaker. At the end of his life, cut short by his tragic early death, he attempted to create an electoral alliance including the Communists for the 1969 parliamentary elections: the Aktion Demokratischer Fortschritt (ADF). Despite the support of prominent intellectuals like Ernst Bloch, Martin Niemöller, and Martin Walser, the ADF was a failure. It only managed to win just under 200,000 votes.

Although Heinz Maus remained more or less in the background, he certainly had his merits academically and supported the fight against the Emergency Acts, which shaped the political climate in the mid-1960s. His contribution to the ‘prehistory of empirical social research’ is still standard social science literature in Germany today.

What were intellectual relations like between the Marburg and Frankfurt schools? In Marx on Campus you write that the differences between the two mainly concerned three points: the question of capitalism and class relations, the debate around the student movement, and finally their respective understandings of science. Could you delve into that a bit further?

 At first glance, it seems surprising that relations between the Marburg and Frankfurt schools remained weak and sporadic. Two schools based on Marx, in the midst of an ocean of pro-capitalist and anti-socialist ideology – also and especially in the universities of the Federal Republic. One could expect that both schools would have worked together closely, carrying out shared projects and jointly defending themselves in solidarity against attacks.

But this was not the case. Although the representatives of both schools had suffered Nazi persecution, albeit individually in very different ways, no productive cooperation took place. Too great were the differences on questions of principle. The Frankfurters believed that technological progress had undermined Marx’s theory of surplus value, meaning that the working class could no longer be considered a ‘revolutionary subject’. The Marburgers, by contrast, held fast to the contradiction between capital and labour as the foundation of social change.

Added to this was their differing attitudes towards the student movement in 1968. With the exception of Herbert Marcuse, who lived in the US, Horkheimer, Adorno, and Habermas – although they had inspired the movement – feared the students’ actions would have totalitarian consequences. Habermas even went so far as to accuse them of ‘left-wing fascism’. The Marburgers, on the other hand, despite their criticism of the students’ provocative techniques and revolutionary behaviour, emphasised the movement’s overall progressive function.

Ultimately, the two schools had different understandings of science. For the Frankfurters, the alienating and reifying character of ‘late capitalism’ stood in the foreground, whereas the Marburgers sought, in a more traditional Marxist manner, to derive possibilities for political change from a ‘real analysis’ of social development. In the words of Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, one could say that the Frankfurters practiced an ‘artistic critique’, while the Marburgers pursued ‘social critique’.

However, both schools also shared certain deficits. Neither school formulated anything substantial on the problems of gender relations and ‘masculine domination’ (Pierre Bourdieu), the ecological crisis, or conditions in the ‘Third World’. This only began to change – at least in part – in the early 1970s. Nevertheless, it was Abendroth who habilitated Jürgen Habermas in 1961 in Marburg, because Habermas was ‘too left-wing’ for the two protagonists of the Frankfurt School, Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno.

How did the Marburg intellectuals relate to the parties of the Left in West Germany, such as the DKP?

 The actors of the Marburg School criticised the system-compliant orientation of Social Democracy and the majority of the trade unions on the one hand, while seeking to find common ground with left-wing Social Democrats and trade unionists on the other. That was extremely difficult. There were good contacts with the DKP from the very beginning. The DKP advocated an ‘anti-monopoly democracy’ (similar to the PCF’s démocratie avancée). In contrast to the numerous ultra-left groups and parties post-1968, some of which adopted the KPD’s ‘social fascism’ thesis from the late Weimar Republic, the DKP advocated an alliance of all left-wing forces. Although it never counted more than 40–45,000 members, it represented a politically relevant factor for the left wing of the West German workers’ movement. It was the party most feared and fought against by the ruling class.

Criticism of the ultra-left, usually Maoist groups and parties was part of the Marburgers’ self-understanding, but did not play a primary role. The debate with Social Democracy and the defence of the principle of the Einheitsgewerkschaft (one big union), which also included Communists, was much more prominent.

A few words about the relationship of the Marburg Marxists to the DKP: almost all of them worked more or less closely with the DKP’s research institute in Frankfurt, the IMSF, whose director Professor Josef Schleifstein had been abused by the Gestapo as a young Jewish Communist and was later able to emigrate to England. Abendroth and others from Marburg, including me, were members of the IMSF’s academic advisory board for years.

In the 1970s and 1980s the Marburg School turned to new problems, especially with Reinhard Kühnl’s work on fascism. What was special about Kühnl’s position – whose books, despite their importance, have still not been translated? Beyond his work on interwar fascism, Kühnl wrote a study on the neo-fascist National Democratic Party (Die NPD. Struktur, Ideologie und Funktion einer neofaschistischen Partei) with Rainer Rilling and Christine Sager in 1969, which was published by Suhrkamp Verlag. As you write inMarx on Campus, this publication can be explained above all by the success of the NPD in the mid-1960s. What was the methodological particularity of this study?

The fascism debate was already one of the main focuses of the Marburg School during the Abendroth era – that is, until 1972. Abendroth gave lectures on German ‘National Socialism’ and several of his doctoral students studied the resistance. Reinhard Kühnl himself received his doctorate under Abendroth with a dissertation on the ‘left wing’ of the Nazi Party. As an academic instructor, Kühnl was enormously successful pedagogically and very popular with students. His lectures always attracted a large audience. Later, his studies on fascism reached print runs of up to 200,000 copies. The fact that Kühnl, together with Christine Sager and Rainer Rilling, published an analysis of the neo-fascist NPD with the renowned Suhrkamp publishing house in 1969 underlines the operative character of the Marburg School’s academic work.

The NPD achieved spectacular success in several elections beginning in the mid-1960s. With their book, Kühnl and his co-authors provided a well-founded analysis and answer to the question of what the NPD actually was and how its worrying rise could be explained. They were not content with the usual interpretation of intellectual history, as exemplified by Ernst Nolte’s The Three Faces of Fascism. Rather, Kühnl and his co-authors chose a complex research approach that established connections between the different levels of the NPD phenomenon. The study used a number of methodological means such as primary source analysis, empirical social research, investigation of socio-structural changes, and took differing theories into account. This ‘mix of methods’ was innovative for the Marburg School, but was hardly continued later on.

I would also point out Kühnl’s involvement in the so-called Historikerstreit in the mid-1980s, which became a political issue of the first order in the Federal Republic. While conservative historians such as Ernst Nolte, Michael Stürmer, and Andreas Hillgruber sought to relativize the total terror of fascism as a logical reaction to Communism, thereby trivialising it, Jürgen Habermas in particular contradicted this position decisively. Kühnl sided with Habermas on many points, but at the same time criticised his idealisation of the Federal Republic’s ties to the West.

What other research topics were particularly important for the Marburg School in the 1970s and 1980s?

The 1970s marked a turning point for the Marburg School in that Abendroth retired in 1972 – Hofmann had already died in 1969 – and Heinz Maus was hardly ever seen again prior to his retirement in 1976. But their former students and staff who, like Kühnl, Tjaden, Deppe, Boris, and Fülberth had been offered chairs in political science or sociology at the University of Marburg, intensively and unwaveringly continued the work of the Abendroth, Hofmann, and Maus ‘Triumvirate’ despite fierce hostilities within and beyond the academic sphere.

Tjaden worked on a system-theoretical foundation of historical materialism, Kühnl continued to work on the study of fascism, Deppe devoted himself to Marxist trade union analysis, and Fülberth to the history of German Social Democracy. Peter Römer continued Abendroth’s work on constitutional law. Dieter Boris created a new focus in the Marburg School with his studies of Latin America. Following the ‘epochal rupture’ in 1990, Fülberth posed the question of why ‘actually existing socialism’ had failed. That said, both he and the other representatives of the post-Abendroth generation held fast to the necessity of a socialist alternative.

As signs of crisis in post-Fordist capitalism grew more prevalent, the thinking of the Marburg School also met with growing resonance. Fülberth attracted a great deal of attention with his original study G Strich – Kleine Geschichte des Kapitalismus in 2004, at least among the Left. Frank Deppe’s wide-ranging presentation of political thought in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries also found many readers. WithBolívars Erben, published in 2014, Dieter Boris put out what is probably the most thorough analysis of the now-interrupted growth of the Latin American Left available in the German language.

Can you comment on the controversy between the journal Das Argument, particularly its founding editor Wolfgang Fritz Haug, and some Marburg School authors? In what sense did it represent a disagreement regarding the ‘identity’ of Marxism?

Beginning in the 1960s, Wolfgang Fritz Haug’s journal Das Argument was for a long time the most influential, highest-quality left-wing periodical in the Federal Republic. Marburgers like Tjaden, Deppe, Steinhaus, and Boris also published articles in it. The relationship began to sour when the Marburgers approached the DKP on the one hand, while, on the other, theArgument editors argued for a ‘pluralistic Marxism’ constituting a mosaic of different Marxist points of view. This attitude on the part ofDas Argument implied a sometimes harsh rejection of any orthodoxy in Marxism, but politically it was directed above all against the DKP and Marxism in the countries of ‘actually existing socialism’, and particularly against intellectuals who were close to or members of the DKP.

Nevertheless, the critical reflections from Haug and other Argument authors held numerous insights concerning the ‘identity’ of Marxism that would have been worthy of thorough examination by the Marburgers. What does ‘scientific socialism’ mean? Can there be a hegemonic actor in the Marxist movement? Is Marxism as a closed scientific system possible? What does the ‘identity of Marxism’ mean for intellectuals? In 1984 representatives of the Marburg School – especially the philosopher Hans Heinz Hölz, who taught in Marburg for several years – responded to these and other questions with what were sometimes extremely dogmatic reflexes. I myself was also partly responsible for the intensification of antagonisms between the Marburg School andDasArgument.

The violent animosities disappeared after 1990, and afterwards I myself wrote in Argument several times. In 2002, for example, Frank Deppe and I participated in a discussion project initiated by Wolfgang Fritz Haug and Frigga Haug, which was then published as a book under the titleUnterhaltungen über den Sozialismus nach seinem Verschwinden.

To what extent does the Marburg School still exist?

As I described above, the Marburg School continued to exist for more than three decades after Abendroth’s retirement in 1972. But what has remained of it today? Fülberth, Boris, and Deppe continue to stand out with numerous publications, lectures and statements. They participate, for example, as speakers at the ‘Marxist Week’ that takes place annually at different locations in the Federal Republic and is attended by a predominantly younger audience, such as members of the Die Linke student organisation. Yet at the university itself, only John Kallankulam continues to represent Marxist thought as a professor in the social sciences. He, however, came to Marburg from the Frankfurt School milieu.

Students of the post-Abendroth generation such as Klaus Dörre, who built up a renowned stronghold of German sociology in Jena, and the political scientist Hans Jürgen Bieling in Tübingen are active as professors, while some of Frank Deppe’s students try to strengthen the left current in their organisations as trade union functionaries. Many former students of the Marburg Marxists now work as school teachers, where they act as disseminators of what they learned during their studies in Marburg.

The representatives of the post-Abendroth generation participate in international Marxist debates and maintain contacts with their protagonists. In this respect, the Marburg School’s influence on socio-critical and left-wing political thought continues in one form or another today.

Daniel Tutt

George Washington University

tutt@gwu.edu   

The recent English translation of Domenico Losurdo’s The Aristocratic Rebel:Intellectual Biography and Critical Balance-SheetLosurdo, Domenico Nietzsche, the Aristocratic Rebel. With an Introduction by Harrison Fluss, Translated by Gregor Benton, 2019. ISBN: 978-90-04-27094-7. Series and Volume number: Historical Materialism Book Series, Volume 200. List price EUR: 373 / List price US$: 448 represents a watershed moment for philosophical studies of Nietzsche across the wider Anglo-American scholarly community. Originally published in Italian in 2002, this in-depth biographical portrait offers up an entirely new way of reading the legacy of Nietzsche’s impact on social and political thought. Losurdo presents an argument often neglected, if not outright ignored by philosophers, literary theorists and general readers of Nietzsche; namely that he is best read as a deeply political and reactionary thinker who, over the course of four key stages of his career, develops a reactionary political agenda that is inseparable from the development of his moral and metaphysical thought.

With the historical and biographical tools Losurdo brings to bear, central Nietzschean concepts such as the will to power, perspectivism, eternal return, and his critique of morality are given a crucial biographical and historical point of origin and evolution. As a result, the genius of Nietzsche is given a missing historical context and the otherwise timeless metaphysical concepts he developed are urgently called into question and offered up for re-appraisal. But perhaps more importantly, the method by which philosophers and writers apply Nietzsche’s ideas to social and political problems is also thrown into question, especially left-Nietzscheans, given the aristocratic agenda so deeply woven into his thought. The text is an impressive tour de force of over 1,000 pages, pulling together several decades of research and seminars the author offered on Nietzsche. It tracks the social, political, cultural and interpersonal forces of Nietzsche’s life in a chronological fashion, delving deeply into the political and cultural arguments and polemics that shaped Nietzsche throughout his life. The result of this wide-context approach is a highly convincing portrait of the thinker who is without doubt one of the most important and misunderstood theorists of modernity.

The author Domenico Losurdo was a renowned Marxist historian and philosopher (1941 – 2018) who pioneered a distinctive method of historiography and intellectual history. A committed political militant throughout his life and active member of communist parties in Italy, Losurdo made his scholarly mark in philosophical works as well as historical studies of important thinkers from John Locke and Hannah Arendt, to biographical and historical studies of Joseph Stalin.For a summary of the reception of Losurdo’s work on Stalin and for a more in-depth analysis of his militant political commitments and how those commitments linked to his scholarship, see Guido Liguori’s tribute to Losurdo, “Domenico Losurdo, A Marxist Philosopher Against the Current” Verso Blog, 01 July 2018 (https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3903-domenico-losurdo-a-marxist-philosopher-against-the-current). His scholarship on Hegel and modernity is considered an exemplary contribution to Hegel scholarship and he has published widely on topics such as conceptions of class struggle throughout history and the evolution of nonviolence in modern political life. Widely known for his critique of nineteenth century liberalism as an ideological system implicitly in support of elements of slavery and imperialism,Losurdo, Domenico Liberalism: A Counter History, translated by Gregory Elliott. Verso Books, New York, NY, 2014 Losurdo’s work on liberalism has provided an important corrective to contemporary debates about the legacy of liberalism, helping readers to better distinguish socialist thought from liberal thought. In addition to its critical analysis of Nietzsche’s philosophy, The Aristocratic Rebel presents readers with a distinctive window into nineteenth century liberal thought, showing how Nietzsche held deep sympathies with liberal thinkers of his time and indeed forged much of his thought in line with many liberal ideals. Situating Nietzsche in the political context of his time helps readers to locate and bring Nietzsche to life in our present day when the debates between liberal and socialist conceptions of justice, equality and emancipation remain ever pertinent questions.

One must read Losurdo’s Aristocratic Rebel by staying true to his own method, that is, the political context of Losurdo’s debates and polemics on the Italian left shape much of his critiques of Nietzschean thought in the contemporary world, especially left-Nietzscheanism. Nietzschean thought and its influence on the left is a major problem in Losurdo’s view because it hollows out rationalist-oriented socialist thought and praxis and it often leads to an abandoning of universalism in favor of “spiritual” interpretations of political struggle. Losurdo’s critique of left-Nietzscheanism emanates from the application of Nietzsche by Italian leftists such as Gianni Vattimo and Giorgio Colli,See Aristocratic Rebel, Pgs. 991 – 992 although he considers left-Nietzscheanism far beyond just the Italian setting. While Losurdo’s comments on contemporary left-Nietzscheanism are brief, the convincing portrait of Nietzsche the book details generate ample material by which a new generation of Marxist philosophers and historians can begin to re-visit Nietzsche and the tradition of left-Nietzscheanism in particular.

This review consists of six sections, beginning with a description of Losurdo’s distinctive “wide-context” method as an intellectual historian and Marxist reader of Nietzsche. It is then followed by two sections that present an overview of the key stages of Nietzsche’s thought including an analysis of how key metaphysical concepts: perspectivism, eternal return, and the critique of morality are fundamentally shaped by an aristocratic political orientation. The objective of these sections is to assist readers in situating Losurdo’s arguments by explicating the chronology of Nietzsche’s life and the generation of his thought in relation to the political events of his time. In these sections, I aim to offer a concise overview of the book for readers intimidated by the length of the book and to offer a primer to readers before delving in. I then discuss how Nietzsche’s political praxis played a seminal role in the development of 20^th century fascism and I examine how the perpetuation of the popular, or “timeless” image of Nietzsche persists in American philosophy and popular culture. I conclude with some brief suggestions for how left-Nietzscheans can begin to grapple with Losurdo’s work and what his new reading of Nietzsche portends for future work that aims to combine Marx with Nietzsche.

The Importance of Losurdo’s Wide-Context Method

Losurdo’s biographical and historiographic method provides what I call a wide-context approach to Nietzsche’s intellectual development, incorporating analysis of his primary writings, letters and correspondence with family and friends, diaries, notes, and related documents, i.e. all the necessary biographical material any competent biographer would bring to bear. But Losurdo goes further than this biographical portrait by providing a deeper context to the political situation of Nietzsche’s time, placing the thinker in relation to the intellectual trends he swam in, many of which he did not ever mention in his writings explicitly. Losurdo frequently reveals how Nietzsche’s ideas on issues such as imperialism, slavery or nationalism overlap in surprising ways with the liberal currents of thought in his time. This insight is only afforded by the wide-context approach, and this approach paints a picture of Nietzsche’s intellectual influences that give the reader a feeling for the wider intellectual milieu he operated in, the prominent debates that captured his time and attention and formed his thinking.

Losurdo’s method is biographical without psychologizing Nietzsche. He does not provide any psychological or psychoanalytic assessments of Nietzsche; however, he does suggest influences and motivations for the development of key ideas, more of which I discuss below. The wide-context method is useful in the case of an elusive thinker such as Nietzsche because so much of the meaning of his thought has come into question following his death and the censoring of his work in translations, most notably his sister. Against the common understanding of Nietzsche’s sister’s role in politicizing his work in the name of German nationalism, Losurdo shows that her translations omitted explicitly political content, most notably Nietzsche’s support for eugenics.See pages 730 – 732 of Aristocratic Rebel What Losurdo’s method additionally suggests is that to truly grasp the breadth and depth of any thinker’s contributions and wider intellectual project, one must consider that thinkers silent partners and influences: figures of thought who may occupy seemingly marginal, or even unsaid points of influence, who never receive a citation or who are never discussed outright. It is said, for example, that Heidegger hugely influenced Foucault although anyone who has read Foucault will know immediately how little, if at all, Heidegger is mentioned. The task of a biographer or intellectual historian, as Losurdo’s method indicates, is to parse out the intricate intellectual context in which a thinker was working, to present a fuller context of the ways that thinker negotiated the complex web of orthodoxies in their time.

Nietzsche in His Time:

The Struggle Against Socratism and Socialism

We can summarize Losurdo’s invitation to Nietzsche scholars in the following way: one can only fully appreciate the metaphysical and philosophical import of Nietzsche’s genius by reading him as a philosopher of counter-revolution, that is, as a philosopher for whom the post-French Revolutionary situation in Europe had to be dealt with by way of the invention of a comprehensive philosophy committed to aristocratic reaction. Losurdo identifies four stages of Nietzsche’s thought: stage one or the “metaphysical” stage was sparked by the Paris Commune and was marked by a radical anti-revolutionary agenda, stage two, the “solitary rebel” stage was influenced by Edmund Burke and German romanticism in which Schopenhauer’s tragic worldview was the model. The third stage Losurdo names the “anti-moralist” stage in which Nietzsche attacked the passions and morals of the Enlightenment siding with Voltaire as the key figure of the Enlightenment. The fourth and most mature of Nietzsche’s stages, “aristocratic radicalism” was set on affirming the innocence of becoming, wherein his more refined ideas such as the eternal return are developed. In this stage, the solitary rebel is now transformed into an explicitly anti-masses figure incapable of calling on a popular community.For a description and summary of the four key stages of Nietzsche’s thought see pages 348 – 349 Importantly, each intellectual stage is tied to a consistent commitment to an anti-socialist, anti-egalitarian, and pro-slavery aristocratic agenda. Losurdo shows how the very origin of Nietzsche’s genealogical method as a young philologist, through to his more mature thought, consisted of a continuous commitment to addressing the roots of a perceived crisis of Europe opened by the French Revolution. At the heart of the crisis of Europe Nietzsche diagnosed the egalitarian ideals of “Socratism” embodied by the lingering influence of Rousseau’s egalitarian political philosophy and socialist movements from the Paris Commune to the Utopian Socialism of Henri de Saint-Simon.

That Nietzsche must be read as intensely committed to the political questions of his time will come across as an easily dismissible claim for many contemporary scholars of Nietzsche given that he seldom discussed socialism or the politics of his own time. In Beyond Good and Evil, for example, only a handful of aphorisms about Bismarck’s Germany and the political movements of Social Democracy are mentioned. But this lack of reference to the politics of his time does not mean that Nietzsche’s thought was not forged in reaction to a much wider crisis in European culture—keep in mind Nietzsche is writing in a Europe after the worker revolts of 1848, which were centered in Germany, and as he is writing his most important early workThe Problem of Socrates, the Paris Commune of 1871 erupts. The political force of Social Democracy in the Second Reich in the Germany of his time along with a diverse array of socialist movements across Germany were a significant influence on German liberalism, and Nietzsche always remained a close interlocutor with liberal thought. Throughout the text Losurdo reveals the influence liberal thought had on Nietzsche; instead of an anti-liberal thinker many of us have come to know, Losurdo shows the surprising similarities Nietzsche’s thought had with mainstream liberals such as John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville. What made Nietzsche’s reactionary political views sympathetic to liberalism were their mutual disdain for socialist leveling and equality. This similarity led Nietzsche to endorse many of the same pro-imperial and anti-egalitarian sentiments that liberals of his time adopted. We must read Nietzsche’s political thought in the wake of the Napoleonic conquests of Germany for which the German liberal establishment agreed that the influence of the French ideals of egalitarianism and equality were foreign impositions on German culture, stripping it of its vitality.

As a young man Nietzsche willingly signed up to fight in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. This was not a neutral or obligatory form of state duty, but rather the brilliant professor of classical philology momentarily abandoned a coveted university post to fight in the war, a decision driven by an explicit political ideology, namely the restoration of a lost German national pride following several generations of the Napoleonic incursion into Germany. One must keep in mind the political orientation of the young Nietzsche was German National Liberalism which saw in the Napoleonic conquests of Germany a form of cultural colonialism, imprinting French egalitarian influences across Germany. The lingering influence of the French “Rousseauist” influence on Germany had created a wider “Optimistic Worldview” which was spreading throughout Europe, finding its most egregious presence in the socialist and budding communist movements. Writing in the wake of the seismic worker revolts of 1848 that led Marx and Engels to pen the Communist Manifesto, Nietzsche saw in the socialist movements of his time, “the pretension of terrestrial happiness for everyone, which more and more characterized the modern world, was thus revealed as madness.”Pg. 30

In order to cure Europe of the madness of egalitarianism, Nietzsche turned to Greek culture where a similar crisis of egalitarianism was brought about by the figure of Socrates. The young philologist wrote, “we need to see in Socrates the vortex and turning-point of so-called world history.” Losurdo shows how Nietzsche’s early work on morals, The Problem of Socrates was projecting onto the Greece of the sixth to fifth century BC an event that primarily took place in Europe between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Thus, ‘Socratic culture’, with its optimism, its belief in the originary goodness of the human being (virtue can be taught to anybody and everyone can learn it), and its faithful expectation of a happy world was reemerging in Nietzsche’s time.Pg. 31

But Socratism was not isolated to the post—French Revolutionary scene of Nietzsche’s time; the same leveling and originary goodness doctrines were promoted in Judaism, Christianity and more recently in the thought of Rousseau. Socratism presented a genealogical line of continuity: each system of thought promoted the idea that “virtue can be taught to anybody and everyone can learn it, with its faithful expectation of a happy world.Pg. 31” One year after eagerly joining the Franco-Prussian war rumors broke out that the Paris Communards had burned down of the Louvre museum in Paris in a riotous orgy, an event that Nietzsche commented in a letter to a friend:

I was for some days completely destroyed and drenched in tears and doubts: all scholarly and aesthetic experience seemed to me an absurdity. Never a deeper pain.

A Review of Global Crisis and Reproduction of Capital by Stavros Tombazos

Michel Husson

Institut de recherches économiques et sociales, Paris

michel.husson@ires.fr

Abstract

In the book under review, Stavros Tombazos deals with the reproduction of capital in its neoliberal phase. It is based on a theoretical schema inspired by Marx, with a particular emphasis on the different rhythms of capital. This allows him to identify the specific discordances of neoliberal capitalism, notably between profit and accumulation or between exploitation and outlets. Tombazos rejects any monocausal theory of the crisis based, for example, on the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, and he insists on the role of credit in the realisation of value. Informed by a review of the Greek crisis based on his experience with the Greek Truth Committee on Public Debt, Tombazos concludes by showing that the reproduction of the system is possible only through severe periodic recessions, social regression, and political crises. The principal merit of Tombazos’s book is that it combines a rigorous theoretical framework with an equally rigorous statistical analysis.

Keywords

Tombazos – temporalities – rhythms – neoliberalism – fictitious capital – credit – tendency of the rate of profit to fall

Stavros Tombazos, (2019) Global Crisis and Reproduction of Capital, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

In 1994, Stavros Tombazos published a book entitled Le temps dans l’analyse économique. Les catégories du temps dans le Capital.One may refer here to two reviews, that of Daniel Bensaïd, ‘Le sens des rythmes’ (Bensaïd 1994), and that of Maxime Durand, ‘Les temps du capital’ (Durand 1995).  His most recent book,Global Crisis and Reproduction of Capital, was published in 2019.

The 1994 book has stood the test of time: twenty years after its initial appearance, it was translated into English and published under the title Time in Marx: The Categories of Time in Marx’s Capital. In this book, Tombazos proposed a new reading ofCapital as the articulation of three temporalities:

The categories of the three theoretical volumes of Capital fit differently in time. The categories of Volume I obey a linear and abstract temporality, homogeneous, a time that is supposed to be calculable, measurable. We call the latter ‘the time of production’. The determinations of Volume II fit into a cyclical temporality. The various categories of ‘the time of circulation’ concern the turnover of value. Finally, Volume III is the volume of capital’s ‘organic time’, the unity of the time of production and the time of circulation.Tombazos 2014, p. 3.

A Review of Working-Class Politics in the German Revolution: Richard Müller, the Revolutionary Shop Stewards and the Origins of the Council Movement by Ralf Hoffrogge

Christoph Jünke

Independent Researcher, Bochum, Germany

Christoph.Juenke@ruhr-uni-bochum.de

Abstract

If Rosa Luxemburg was the brain of the German Revolution of 1918–19 and Karl Liebknecht its face and mouth, then Richard Müller was the heart that determines circulation within the proletarian body. He was, as Hoffrogge says, the man behind the November Revolution, one of the most important figures of the German labour movement in the decade between 1915 and 1925. In a close interlocking of individual and social history, Hoffrogge has written not only a biography of its protagonist but also a biography of the genesis, the course and the decline of the German Revolution.

Keywords

socialism in Germany – history of the German Revolution – Council Movement – biography

Ralf Hoffrogge, (2014) Working-Class Politics in the German Revolution: Richard Müller, the Revolutionary Shop Stewards and the Origins of the Council Movement, translated by Joseph B. Keady,Historical Materialism Book Series, Leiden: Brill.

Biographies were once reserved for the great men of history and were considered to be – depending on one’s world view – either the culmination of the art of historical scholarship or their negligible backside. With the long-term collapse of a historiography ‘from below’, questioning structural class boundaries and aiming towards universal human emancipation, and with the parallel, occasionally overlapping, ascent of a historiography concentrating on structures, biographies have largely gone out of fashion. But fashions change, of course, and biography is now in vogue again. The recent return to biography, however, which has now been going on for several years, will probably not act as a simple pendulum swing backwards. More likely, it will serve as at least a partial overcoming of the two old dichotomies. For what characterises a large number of these diverse new efforts is precisely their combination of social and individual history. There is an unmistakable tendency to break down history on the structural level to focus on real people and their role in history – a goal that may also be linked to changing expectations about our own place ‘in history’ and our own ability to ‘make history’.

          Methodologically speaking, this opens up an ambitious vision of the interconnectedness of the individual and the collective in the totality of human history. A vision that no longer needs to ascertain whether the object of contemplation is one of the predominantly nameless representatives of the human species, making history without leaving many traces in it, or one of those great men (or, more rarely, one of those great women) of history, whose names we’ve learned to pronounce in awe or disgust – depending on one’s world view.

          This intertwining of social and individual history may be most obvious when exemplified in the history of revolution. The history of revolution, as one of its great activists and historians in the twentieth century put it, is above all ‘the history of the violent invasion of the masses into the sphere of determination over their own destinies’ (Leon Trotsky). And it is only at first glance that this contradicts the other dictum, that revolutions must also be made by people. The biography of a man in which these two aspects of revolution almost prototypically mingle, the social as well as his individual history, has been presented by the young and talented historian Ralf Hoffrogge. Richard Müller – even the ordinariness of his name seems programmatic – really existed. And he was one of those nameless people who made history in the truest sense of the word. If Rosa Luxemburg was the brain of the German Revolution of 1918–19 and Karl Liebknecht its face and mouth, then Richard Müller was, as it were, the heart that determines circulation within the proletarian body. He was, as Hoffrogge says, the man behind the November Revolution. The fact that Hoffrogge was able to bring his biography to life is a special merit, as Müller was one of the most important figures of the German labour movement in the decade between 1915 and 1925. Moreover, beyond this decade, Müller’s life and work reflect an otherwise repressed but highly stimulating part of Germany’s fateful social and historical development.

          Richard Müller was born in 1880 in Weira, Thuringia, the fourth of seven children. His father kept an inn with an adjoining farm. One brother died in 1882 and his mother died in 1888, just before Richard’s eighth birthday. His father remarried two years later. Two more siblings were born and Müller, at fifteen years old in 1896, lost his father as well. Without having completed a secondary education, he left for the big city – first to Hannover, then Berlin, as a destitute apprentice in heavy industry. More precisely, he went to work at an electric lathe in a large, technologically-advanced modern factory. It was the time of big industry’s stormy development in Germany. Müller educated himself in the counterculture of the Wilhelmine workers’ movement and became a skilled worker, but only joined the union and the Social-Democratic Party in 1906. Müller’s work, requiring learned and not readily replaceable knowledge gained through experience, can be said to have rendered him and his colleagues craftsmen. Hoffrogge writes, ‘Integration into large factories with an extensive division of labour and often several thousand employees, however, ensured that lathe operators, particularly in the larger cities, gave up their identity as skilled craft workers relatively quickly and for the most part developed a higher level of class consciousness’ (p. 13). A true reflection of his class, or, rather, of his class fraction, Müller seems to have been a bit more talented than others and brought this, along with a gift for organising, to his trade-union position as branch manager of all Berlin lathe operators in 1914, under the freelance German Metalworkers’ Association.

          He was thus part of what would later be disparaged as the ‘labour aristocracy’, and he dedicated himself ‘with a scientific precision’ (p. 19) to workflows, equipment and wage trends. Even before the First World War, he attempted a sharp critique of the new Taylorist working methods, but politically was regarded as rather unremarkable. This, however, would change with the circumstances and the violent intrusion of the masses into history with the First World War. As an avowed opponent of the war as well as a critic of the social-political peace declared by union leaders and the SPD right at the beginning of the war (‘Burgfrieden’), Müller the middling trade-union official was not alone, as the comparably more well-placed skilled workers of big industry were at that time a locus of trade-union political radicalism.

          Müller, then, knew his base when, soon after the beginning of the war, he started organising smaller strikes and developing himself into an oppositional trade-union networker. He became the head of the clandestine Revolutionary Shop Stewards [Revolutionäre Obleute], the third germ cell of German left-wing radicalism formed during the war, alongside the Spartacus League and the Bremen left-wing radicals. Hoffrogge follows his path as accurately as he can – a large part of this story happened in secret and in the absence of eyewitnesses – and makes it clear that the Revolutionary Shop Stewards took their organisational role models from the specifically German traditions of widespread local syndicalism under the Anti-Socialist Laws of 1878–90. He emphasises, not entirely justifiably, that despite the similarities, the organisational approach here is not a Leninist one, as Leninist organisational principles actually drew from similar sources. There was a comparable experience and comparable traditions of worker radicalism in semi-absolutist conditions, in which the lack of a tradition of ‘civil society’ – something which Russia had not quite developed, while in Germany the institution of theBurgfrieden had fallen back into ruling statehood – led to similar results in organisational policy.

          In any case, the leaders of the Shop Stewards in the German capital were quickly, comprehensively and very successfully politicised and radicalised by their first experiences of the war: ‘Their forum was the factory and their form of political action was the general strike. Although they could lead hundreds of thousands of workers in a strike, the Stewards’ organisation and their mode of operation were known only to their members’ (p. 62). It was Müller and the Shop Stewards who, in June 1916, organised the first mass political strike in German history: the Berlin mass strike in solidarity with the antimilitarist Karl Liebknecht, who had been subjected to state repression. And it was Müller and the Shop Stewards who became the main pillars of support during the formation of the Independent Social-Democratic Party (USPD) in 1917. It was there, in the USPD, that Müller met and came to appreciate the socialist intellectual Ernst Däumig, who went on not only to work with him in organising the Shop Stewards but also, in 1918–19, to become a pivotal champion of a specifically German council system.

          It was not the Spartacists around Liebknecht and Luxemburg who ‘made’ the November Revolution of 1918: that autumn, Richard Müller and the Revolutionary Shop Stewards delivered the decisive blow against the only half-reformed Wilhelminian government. But Hoffrogge also describes how, even in those decisive days and hours, they were themselves more ‘driven’ to act than ‘drivers’ of the events. In the political agenda of the Spartacus League on the whole, the left-wing of the USPD explicitly rejected the revolutionary impatience of the Spartacus League, particularly dismissing Liebknecht’s tactic of permanent action as a form of ‘revolutionary gymnastics’. Müller later wrote that Liebknecht, in his ‘conception of revolutionary imperatives, betrayed the strong will of a revolutionary filled with lofty ideals, but one who saw things as he wanted to see them, and not as they really were.’

          The Stewards, as a socially-anchored vanguard of the workers with many years of experience, had a significantly better sense for the ripeness of the impending revolution, in comparison to the small Spartacist group led by socially ‘free-floating’ cadres and intellectuals. They hesitated to move into Berlin’s citadel of power after receiving the first reports from the provinces of revolts in Kiel and Munich. Are we ready to topple the old order here as well? Do we not need a broader social base and, above all, more weapons, to disempower the military guardians of the establishment? And are we not jeopardising the economic foundations of any new power by moving too quickly? Müller as a chief organiser, equal parts radical and pragmatist, wavered and hesitated, but Hoffrogge sees this as a reflection of objective conditions, not as a political failure. There were, moreover, profound rivalries and animosities between the Spartacists and the Shop Stewards, who rejected the ‘Russian way’ as incompatible with the specific traditions of the workers’ movement in Germany. Müller and Liebknecht in particular seem to have had a real problem dealing with one another. In their rivalry one can recognise the sweeping social and psychological distance that separates the workers’ vanguard and left-wing intellectuals, which, even decades later, must be taken into account when doing research on the German left. The November Uprising brought them together objectively and made Richard Müller the chairman of the Berlin Council of the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils, and thus the head, as it were, of the ‘German Socialist Republic’ proclaimed by Liebknecht.

          In Hoffrogge’s description, however, it becomes clear that the deep divide remained between the various wings of the revolution, a divide equally apparent in Müller’s own three-volume history of the revolution from the 1920s. The widespread resignations at the very first council congress in December 1918 set the stage for a serious defeat and disappointment for Müller, Däumig and the Shop Stewards. In the ensuing fights in December and January, Müller railed, not without justification, against the left-wing ‘Spartacus putschists’ and against Liebknecht as their leader. The attempts toward a unification of the Stewards and the Spartacists failed because pragmatic radicalism and left-wing radicalism could not find common ground under the rising onslaught of the counterrevolution. ‘The Shop Stewards, on the other hand, were in limbo: they could not work with the KPD, they were isolated in the USPD, and they were reluctant to create a new schism within the labour movement by establishing a third party’ (p. 100). The bloody decapitation of the revolutionary forces in January, symbolised by the murders of Liebknecht and Luxemburg, reverberated through the local council republics in Bremen and Munich and their panicked, ‘headless’ efforts to direct the course of events, and also completely stunned the more modest Shop Stewards.

          With his strong connection to the shop floor, Müller quickly recognised that the so-called Spartacist uprising – which was more of a spontaneous revolt by independent revolutionary forces that the leadership of the Spartacus League rejected – was the decisive battle of the revolution: ‘The defeat of the January Uprising’, he later wrote in the third volume of his history of the revolution, ‘completely destroyed the front line of the determined revolutionaries. The wavering masses, still caught up in the illusions of the first weeks of the revolution, were deprived of their leaders, and the social-democratic leaders understood how to create sympathy among the workers for the policies of Noske and the government.’ Müller’s hopes for trade-union unity and a united front were dashed soon after, simultaneously with the failure of the council system he and Däumig had advocated, based on the idea of comprehensive self-government in the hands of workers. In this plan for self-government, Hoffrogge identifies ‘a transitional form moving toward socialisation’ (albeit a fairly complex one) without, however, presenting and discussing this as much as one might like.

          After the failed strike movements of the spring of 1919, the council movement changed direction and became a mere works-council movement. Müller – for Hoffrogge, the eternal Sisyphus of the revolution – did not fit into this historical turn in the slightest. Nevertheless, he became a member of the Berlin Works Council Centre and placed his hopes on a return of a world-revolutionary moment. (The close interdependence of the German and international revolutionary process and its expression in Müller’s life and work does not, unfortunately, receive the attention it deserves from Hoffrogge.) He remained as the leading figure of the works-council movement and the leader of the left opposition in the German Metalworkers’ Association (DMV) until the end of 1920, edging closer and closer to the communists. In my view, Hoffrogge wrongly sees this as a contradiction, since he elides the communism of the German KPD with Leninism and with the ‘Marxism-Leninism’ which came later: that is, with Stalinist communism. However, the early communism of 1917 to 1921–3 provided an at-least partially conclusive answer to the strategic dilemma of social-revolutionary processes and the organisational weakness of the socialist council syndicalists – it is no accident that we find many of these revolutionary syndicalists on the side of this early communism.

          At the congress of the works councils in October 1920, however, Müller was defeated by his rival Robert Dißmann, who proposed subordinating the works councils to the trade unions. The path of an independent German council movement ends here, where Müller’s path into the KPD also becomes clear. He joined the KPD along with the left wing of the USPD, and supported their ‘right’ leadership under Paul Levi – like Müller himself, Levi was a kind of pragmatic radical – and even participated in the Third International in Moscow in 1921. He was removed from the party in 1922, however, after his bitter fight with the ultra-left voluntarism of the ‘March Action’ of 1921. He refused, all the same, to return to the deeply hated Social Democrats – unlike his comrade Däumig, who returned to the left wing of the SPD along with Paul Levi and many others (particularly intellectuals).

          Richard Müller thus finally fell victim to the polarisation inside the left between the KPD and the SPD. He largely withdrew from the public stage and in 1924–5 published his account of the ups and downs of the world-historical events of the previous years, an account equal parts embittered and combative and, moreover, a symbol of his life and work. Müller’s three-volume history of the German Revolution is, as Hoffrogge notes, not only the work of a gifted autodidact who, in a short period of time, applied the same meticulousness to the art of historical scholarship as he had to production processes and wage systems before the war. It is also a radical and original account of the ‘restorative’ state of affairs in the Weimar Republic, borne of a remarkable insistence on the necessary concomitance of democracy and socialism – a conception that makes Richard Müller an early representative of the ‘third way’ within the left.

          It is therefore no coincidence that Müller’s approach was suppressed not only in the polarised war-of-camps between the SPD and party communism in the 1920s and 1930s, but also in the decades following, as this polarisation between the SPD and the KPD/SED was further entrenched with the formation of two German states and the ‘becoming a state’ of both parties which this represented. Müller’s magnum opus was only rediscovered in the 1970s with the emergence of the ‘New Left’, and was reissued several times. Knowledge concerning his fate, however, remained elusive, and what happened to him later in life was considered unknown. As one oft-quoted statement by Wolfgang Abendroth from the late 1970s has it: ‘After that [1922–3] he is lost to history.’

          Hoffrogge offers a little help at this point. Just as he brings Müller’s early life out of the darkness, he also follows his remarkable path subsequent to his departure from the stage of history. Following the financial success of his history of the revolution, Müller founded a publishing house and became a bookseller, but floundered after a few years. At the end of the twenties he turned his publishing house Phöbus into a construction company, the Phöbus-Treuhand-Baugesellschaft. Müller became its managing director and thus a builder of social housing. He still saw himself as a socialist and remained involved in the German Industry Association, a left-wing trade union. In this milieu he met and socialised with, among others, Karl Korsch, the anti-Stalinist Communist-Party dissident, council socialist and pioneer of ‘Western Marxism’. Müller thus mixed revolutionary politics and business, and achieved success once again. ‘Dubious practices in public housing’, as Hoffrogge writes, made him a wealthy man (p. 225).

          The fact that the proletarian revolutionary eventually became an entrepreneurial building tycoon – this is also richly symbolic, both historically and socially, of the problems of worker radicalism under welfare-state capitalism. Hoffrogge explains this development by pointing to Müller’s social and political isolation and profound disappointment with the course of the revolution. This is mostly speculation, since the sources are extremely thin, especially for this period of Müller’s life. But since Hoffrogge understands how to reconstruct Müller’s time and milieu with care, and because he is able to treat Müller with critical empathy, his conclusions are comprehensible and compelling. He writes,

This withdrawal into private life probably increased the importance of material issues, including securing a future for his children, and was part of Richard Müller’s transformation into a businessman in his late forties [...] As such, his old political ideas fell by the wayside somewhere during that process. [...] There is almost no trace of Richard Müller after 1932. [...] [He] appears not to have offered any public resistance to Nazi rule. (p. 232.)