A Response to Cummings and Shoikhedbrod: Towards Decolonizing the Jewish Question?
Igor Shoikhedbrod’s reviews of Shlomo Avineri’s and Enzo Traverso’s works on the “Jewish Question”2have sparked a meta-review by Jordy Cummings, who accuses Shoikhedbrod of misrepresenting Traverso.3 Shoikhedbrod and Cummings are invested in these debates and texts for their relevance to contemporary politics, including the recent resurgence of anti-Semitism. The Jewish Question asks how Jews, as a community (or communities) of people who faced (and face) discrimination and disenfranchisement in different spheres, were and are to emancipate themselves. Here, I offer some questions as a meta-meta-review of sorts, insofar as the discussion veers into examining Zionism (Jewish statehood) as a possible response to the question. I offer that their framing of the Jewish experience, the specificity of the “figure of the Jew,” remains bounded by the European experience. Palestine and Palestinians barely figure, and if they do the specificity of their struggle is ignored, and, importantly, so is the meaning of actually-existing Zionism as a form of settler-colonial apartheid in the formation of Jewish identity in Europe and North America—and perhaps more broadly. This leads to a particularism or provincialism in both of their writings. Their discussion of identity and emancipation could be better served by an expanded worldview.
Shoikhedbrod reads Avineri and Traverso to contend with the question of Jewish identity and emancipation as articulated by Marx in his 1843 essay, “On the Jewish Question,” and to think through its relevance to the question of identity and emancipation today. Shoikhedbrod is somewhat equidistant from both Avineri and Traverso. He disagrees with Avineri’s embrace of Zionism as emancipatory and rejection of proletarian internationalism—the idea that working people must transcend their particularities (e.g., nationality) to create a political unity because they hold common class interests. Yet, Shoikhedbrod is also skeptical of Traverso's embrace of internationalism, because here it appears more like assimilationism which wants to transcend particularities by dissolving them. He is also skeptical of Traverso’s rejection of Zionism, especially its socialist variants, because here Traverso equates Zionism with colonialism. Thus, Shoikhedbrod expresses his sympathy with a certain kind of Zionism, but ultimately comes out against nationalism in general, in part because statehood in the form of Israel has nevertheless not succeeded in emancipating the Jews from discrimination or prejudice. It remains unclear who, exactly, these Jews are.
Cummings asserts that Shoikhedbrod is an “anti-anti-Zionist,” analogous to Jean-Paul Sartre’s adopted position of “anti-anti-Communism.” That is, Sartre had serious problems with the ruling Communist Parties, but he was also—and perhaps more so—skeptical of the anti-Communists and the reactionary bases of their critiques. Cummings sees Zionism, in all its variants, as being a colonial enterprise. I think Cummings is correct, on which more below. The prefix of “socialism” may have made for a Zionism with a human face, but it was still a chauvinistic project predicated on displacement and dispossession of an indigenous people, specifically, Arabs.
It is perhaps in response to this question about the legitimacy of Zionism that Shoikhedbrod points to Avineri’s diplomatic manoeuvres at UNESCO against a Soviet delegate—raising a little remembered article that Marx wrote on matters in the Ottoman Empire.4Marx asserted that of all groups in Jerusalem, the most poorly treated were the Jews, who constituted the majority of its residents at the time. Here Shoikhedbrod echoes Avineri’s Marxological gesture toward some of the premises of Zionism—Jews have always (at least since the 1850s) been a majority in Jerusalem: even Marx recognized this fact. There is a fundamental question for Shoikhedbrod, one Cummings does not contend with: do Jews as a nation not have a right to statehood? This concern exists in a dialectical tension with Shoikhedbrod’s ultimate disagreement with any form of nationalism being emancipatory, which is why he returns to Marx's universalism.5
Some of what I have laid out above has to be excavated from or read into what Shoikhedbrod has written—by way of a symptomatic reading, if you will—and perhaps for this reason, Cumming’s critique often exceeds what Shoikhedbrod himself may actually believe, and could perhaps show greater consideration for the specificity of what Shoikhedbrod has written (as opposed to what he has not). I am sympathetic to Cumming’s substantive claims, if not his method of attack, but perhaps diverge in terms of his claims’ underspecified nature. Again, despite the discussion of contemporary politics, both Cummings’ and Shoikhedbrod’s framings remain particularistic, or rather, provincial, insofar as they remain bounded by Europe (and Russia). Cummings certainly gestures toward the broader world, and for that, incorporating a wider worldview is more damaging to Shoikhedbrod’s position.
Do Jews not have the right to statehood? Shoikhedbrod is no fan of nationalism, so his implied question must be understood: Do Jews not have the right to statehood, just like every other oppressed nation? I think to pose the question in this way is to engage in equivocation and a misreading of the specificities of different sequences of nationalism. Not all nationalisms are the same, despite formal resemblances, nor can they be, and if Marxism has a problem it is its attempt to apply conceptual apparatuses from European nationalisms to the rest of the world. This is a problem that has been confronted by many Marxists in the Third World and that is unavoidable given the history of imperialism from which these nations emerge.6
The thinking around nationalism in Europe was that there are “naturally” existing nations7 that deserve their own states, i.e., that the “political and national unity should be congruent”—the rulers of the political unit should not belong to a nation other than the majority ruled.8 And so it is worth asking from the jump if Jews constitute such a nation. But this may be beside the point, since we know from the historiography of nationalism that nationalist movements seeking states create nations out of diverse communities, more often than some entity resembling a coherent nation creates a state – to use one of Joseph V. Stalin’s examples, the Italian nation was formed from “Romans, Teutons, Etruscans, Greeks, Arabs, and so forth.” (Zionism certainly fits the bill insofar as it has sought to forge a unitary Jewish nation-state out of a diverse set of communities.) But in the logic that emerges to justify European nationalisms, all nations must have their own states in order to avoid—or at least to mitigate—the discrimination and prejudice that is attributed to being rootless, stateless.
Let’s accept the European principle and apply it to Jews, that Jews were a nation who deserved, for the sake of argument, a state. (Let us be clear, however, that this was not the majority opinion amongst politically engaged European Jews in the early twentieth century.) In that case, Jews certainly ought to have a state. But not in Palestine. The nationalisms in Europe bear greatest resemblance to anti-colonial nationalism when we can speak of an attempt at separation from an empire, e.g., Poland’s independence from Russia, Austria and Prussia. But establishing a Jewish state in Palestine meant making Palestinians pay the costs of Jewish emancipation from European oppression. Jews may feel some kind of spiritual attachment to the land of Palestine, which is fine, no Arab politics has ever denied that spiritual attachment—the spiritual claim is not, however, a political one. The question is how that translates into a political right to displace an actually existing indigenous population of that land. This is not merely a cultural question or one of identity, the struggle over the land entails political and economic conflict and violence. That, in turn, reshapes identity and culture.
This is also why it is insufficient to speak of the figure of the Jew now (and therefore of anti-Semitism also), as perhaps Cummings does, without talking about the “figure of the Palestinian.” The entry of Jews into whiteness needs to be understood not only in relation to dynamics of upward mobility or ethno-racial dynamics in Europe and North America, but also to the colonization of the Palestinians. Jews did get over some form or aspect of discrimination and prejudice, but not merely through their statehood, as such, but through colonialism in Palestine that marked their entry into the comity of whiteness.
But this entry to whiteness is even more complex: Ashkenazi Jews from Europe, a minority within Israel, are socially, politically and economically dominant compared to the majority Mizrahi Jews of Arab origins and it is the Ashkenazi aspiration to whiteness that has driven Zionism. Mizrahis have experienced de-Arabization, a process in which they have by and large participated, to act white—meaning to act like Ashkenazis.9 Much of the virulent anti-Arab discourse in Israel comes from Mizrahi Jews10— they are to identify not as Arab Jews but Jews who just happened to be in Arab lands.11 Meanwhile, and one would say ironically if it were not so predictable, Ethiopian Jews are at the bottom of this Israeli Jewish pecking order, their skin colour an ultimate barrier to their entry into any kind of whiteness and even Jewishness12—they continue to be severely marginalized in Israel.13
And so Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Jews share, albeit differentially, in aspiring to whiteness, brought together by the settler-colonial project of Jewish nationalism in Palestine, one of dispossession and dislocation that is by definition anti-emancipatory. Or, rather, it imbibes a similar kind of self-delusionary narrative of liberty and emancipation that is the hallmark of US nationalism: we are the true defenders of liberty, having set the foundation for it through genocide, ethnic cleansing and subjugating othered populations as labour reserves (and later, when we have no need for their labour, a more protracted genocide).
That is exactly what Zionism has been, and, Cummings is right to note, it has been so in all its variants. Shoikhedbrod raises the question of “socialist” Zionism, saying to Traverso that perhaps here is something worth being more sympathetic with. But this is insufficient. Cummings is correct to point out that much of European socialism was racist, chauvinist and colonialist (it is also worth noting this is still the case)14. The groups that went on to form the Third International broke with those who became contemporary social democrats, not merely on the question of war nationalism, but crucially also on the question of colonialism. V.I. Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, even Karl Kautsky to his credit, saw no room for colonialism in the socialist movement.15 But there it was, and there it continues to be today, albeit disguised in humanitarian concerns and/or a cultivated ignorance of the dynamics of imperialism.16 The specificity of communism as a separate trend in the working-class movement has to be understood as being, from its birth, anti-colonial.
And this is why Isaac Deutscher’s quotation, “As long as a solution to the problem is sought in nationalist terms both Arab and Jew are condemned to move within a vicious circle of hatred and revenge,” is not as prescient as Shoikhedbrod would have it, but rather obtuse, for two reasons.17
The first is that one set of hatreds is based on an aspirant white supremacy, it is racist in the structural sense, the other is based on being subject to colonialism, ethnic cleansing and a protracted genocide. To equate these two is disingenuous. It is like equating the hatred that comes out of the German/Nazi ideology of the Übermensch (the master race) with the hatred that drove Jewish and/or Soviet resistance to German invasion and occupation.18 Recognition of Zionism as settler-colonialism would help Shoikhedbrod in nuancing his misplaced admiration for Avineri’s anecdote and reference to Marx’s recognition of a Jewish majority in Jerusalem in the 1850s—though Marx did note that those Jews were “not natives, but from different and distant countries.” Avineri notes that the “Soviet Union does not exist anymore, but the Jewish majority in Jerusalem does.” But for the Zionist this means erasing the backstory. How did the Jews get there? How did they maintain their majority in Jerusalem? Does a majority in a city entail the legitimacy of an ethnically exclusive minority rule over all of Palestine and Palestinians? Again, it is the very European logic of racial supremacy by dint of conquest that Zionism (and Avineri) channels, both in its stated aims and in its omissions.
This leads us to the second reason why Deutscher’s quotation is obtuse. Writing in 1954 while on a trip to Israel, his skepticism of Zionism was premised on both the nation-state and nationalism being obsolete, and so as obsolete for the Jews as for the Arabs. Incidentally, the USSR initially, and very wrongly, supported the formation of Israel in 1948. That by 1976 the USSR’s position appears to have shifted has less to do with any fidelity to Marxology and more to do with the real and actual movement of anti-colonial national liberation struggles which asserted the centrality of decolonization and national liberation to the moment. This was not nationalism as particularism.
Rather, it is through the particularity that the generality was to be achieved, something Frantz Fanon points out when he says that, “National consciousness, which is not nationalism, is the only thing that will give us an international dimension.”19 But what does national consciousness here mean? Is it the same conceit as the European one, that there exists a naturally existing nation that seeks a state? This notion has been attempted in South Asia, with Jawaharlal Nehru’s Discovery of India, or Mazdoor Kisan Party leader Ishaq Muhammad’s attempt to provide an alternative to Muslim nationalism, in the wake of the separation of Bangladesh, by arguing that West Pakistan had a natural cultural unity20 (I should note that these sets of arguments are far more complex than simply asserting that cultural unity entails an identity of cultures). But, at least as far as Nehru was concerned, there was a certain “derivativeness” to this discourse insofar as it entailed an appeal to the logic of the colonizer to recognize that we, too, are nations who deserve independence.
For Fanon the kind of historical justification was beside the point, “a national culture is not a folklore.” Rather, the question was one of constructing anew a sense of unity that would incorporate and not supersede differences, and not just at superficial culture day events, rather than seeking to incorporate them under the sign of any naturally or even historically given cultural unit. To the extent that there was a cultural unity to be forged, it was to be entirely new, borne of the anti-colonial struggle for freedom; and the pre-condition for national consciousness was the question of political and economic sovereignty.
A recognition of this problem of filling in the abstract borders of newly decolonized states with the content of a homogenous nation also led to internationalist projects in the form of pan-Africanism, pan-Arabism, and so on. Interestingly, these were at times far more serious attempts at political interdependence than those exhibited by states ruled by communist parties (in the Far East they almost all fought with each other at various times). More recently Adom Getachew has argued that anti-colonial national liberation entailed “worldmaking”—forging “juridical, political, and economic institutions in the international realm that would secure non-domination.”21 This is also clear when the Palestinian leader George Habash says the road to Jerusalem lies through all the other Arab capitals, Palestinian national liberation has no choice but to be internationalist.22
But no such incarnation of internationalism is evident in anything the Zionist project has ever put forward. On the contrary, Israel’s internationalism has always identified with imperialism and whiteness, including in apartheid South Africa and in facilitating the near-genocide of indigenous campesinos in Guatemala. Israel is an aspirant part of Europe, somewhat inconveniently located amidst (or rather, on top of) Arabs, just as Mizrahi Jews were somewhat inconveniently located in other Arab lands.
Zionism is not a reaction to the poor treatment of Jews in Palestine under the Ottomans, and here to rely on one thing Marx wrote at the end of a rather long piece of journalism is insufficient: let us actually engage in the historiography of the Ottoman Empire from which we learn that even the valence of discrimination against Jews there was not straightforwardly comparable to what was happening in Europe. Rather, Zionism is a reaction to the poor treatment of Jews in Europe and Russia, but which takes its discontent to “the Orient”. It is why Zionism is indefensible, and it is why any ongoing discussion of the Jewish Question has to be reconfigured in light of the Palestinian Question. I have also suggested that Zionism, because it is colonialism, has played a role in enabling Jews to enter into whiteness—although this whiteness remains a contested terrain both inside and outside of Israel. If one wants to assess the adequacy of Zionism and entry into whiteness as a response to the Jewish Question, it is surely worth interrogating phenomena like anti-Semites in the West who are also ardent supporters of Israel. Yet, one also needs ask its victims, the Palestinians, how well it functions to do that.
Noaman G. Ali is assistant professor of political economy at the Lahore University of Management Sciences, with research interests in agrarian studies and peasant struggles, the political economy of development, and discourses of regime types. He also hosts the podcast, Introduction to Political Economy. His research has been published in Rethinking Marxismand the Journal of Agrarian Change.Follow him on Twitter: @noamangali
- 1. This write-up has benefited from feedback from Rabia Ashraf.
- 2. https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/18380_the-jewish-question-history-of-a-marxist-debate-by-enzo-traverso-reviewed-by-igor-shoikhedbrod/ and https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/17417_karl-marx-philosophy-and-revolution-by-shlomo-avineri-reviewed-by-igor-shoikhedbrod/
- 3. https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/blog/anti-anti-zionism-and-bad-faith-critique-refuting-misrepresentation-enzo-traverso
- 4. Avineri’s story is available here: https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/138/karl-marx-the-jews-of-jerusalem-and-unesco/
- 5. Here also comes Shoikhedbrod’s second move in his reading of Avineri, which is to understand that Marx’s universalism is informed not only by a distant yet studied consideration of the Jewish question but also through some degree of engagement with actual Jewish politics, at least in Germany. As far as that goes, it is an interesting addition to the historiography of Marx’s Marxism.
- 6. For a fairly comprehensive overview, see Robert J.C. Young’s Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (2016, Wiley-Blackwell).
- 7. While a “nation” implies a political community, this does not always take the form of a state – for example, the Kurds identify as a nation yet they are split across four states (Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran). The nation as a phenomenon defies definition, and I think that few have managed to do worse (or better) than Josef Stalin’s 1913 definition, “A nation is a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture.” Any one or more of these conditions could be missing and a nation could still be considered a nation, for which Benedict Anderson’s classic definition is useful: “an imagined political community—and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.” See Imagined Communities (1983, Verso).
- 8. Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (1983, Basil Blackwell).
- 9. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/264373157_Passing_as_NonEthnic_The_Israeli_Version_of_Acting_White
- 10. See https://forward.com/opinion/335609/the-mizrahi-palestinian-intersectionality-nobodys-talking-about/
- 11. See for example: https://www.israelhayom.com/opinions/the-myth-of-the-arab-jew/
- 12. https://www.timesofisrael.com/top-state-rabbinical-body-reinforces-ruling-that-ethiopian-jews-are-jewish/
- 13. See https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/fr/node/251592
- 14. See for example: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/09/france-insoumise-islamophobia-racism-melenchon-pena-ruiz
- 15. See https://cosmonaut.blog/2020/04/18/colonialism-and-anti-colonialism-in-the-second-international/
- 16. See, for example, Max Ajl’s criticisms of the Green New Deal and other forms of socialist eco-modernism in the Global North: https://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/magazine/entry/clean-tech-versus-a-peoples-green-new-deal/
- 17. Quoted in https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/18380_the-jewish-question-history-of-a-marxist-debate-by-enzo-traverso-reviewed-by-igor-shoikhedbrod/
- 18. As Aimé Césaire notes and it is well worth recalling, Nazism was an application to Europe of “colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the ‘coolies’ of India, and the ‘niggers’ of Africa”—and we must add the Indigenous of the Americas. See Discourse on Colonialism (2001, Monthly Review Press).
- 19. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1963, Grove Press), p. 247.
- 20. See Ishaq Muhammad, “Culturally, West Pakistan is a Natural Unit,” in Circular no. 24, c. 1972. The Circular was the monthly internal bulletin of the Mazdoor Kisan Party (Workers Peasants Party) in Pakistan.
- 21. Adom Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-determination (2019, Princeton University Press), see also Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations (2007, The New Press) and Young cited above.
- 22. https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20181222-the-road-to-the-liberation-of-palestine/
A Precarious Game: The Illusion of Dream Jobs in the Videogame Industry
Jamie Woodcock Reviews Ergin Bulut, A Precarious Game: The Illusion of Dream Jobs in the Videogame Industry, London, ILR Press, 2020.
Videogame production has been back in the news with stories of the working conditions at CD Projekt Red and the upcoming – delayed again – Cyberpunk 2077. While there have been campaigns around “crunch”, or overwork, in the industry going back to the 2003 “ea_spouse” open letter.
Beyond these headlines, comparatively less is known outside of the industry about the working conditions of videogames studios. This is particularly the case within academic research on work or wider Marxist analysis. However, since 2018, there has been a growing critical voice from workers within the industry, increasingly covered by some of the now-unionised videogame press. Workers have joined or formed unions in France, South Korea, the USA, Canada, Ireland, and the UK, amongst others. Within this fast-moving context (which will hopefully have more developments by the time this review is published) there is a growing interest in what happens in the ‘hidden abode’ (as Marx referred to
A Precarious Game by Ergin Bulut’s is an important contribution to the growing field of critical and Marxist influenced scholarship on videogame work. At its core, the book is a detailed and engaged ethnographic account of a videogame studio, pseudonymously referred to as ‘Desire’, and the dynamics that developed there over time. Bulut focuses on four process: ‘rationalization upon acquisition, spatialization, financialization, and precarization. Among these, precarization anchors the whole story’ (p. 4). This means much of the book unpicks the ‘immaterial labor’ involved in the production of AAA (large, mainstream) videogames. However, it does not fall into the trap of focusing solely on the white-collar employment in the studio, drawing back at points to consider the other kinds of work involved, both along the supply chain and in other aspects of production like videogame testing.
The book builds upon a growing literature of critical game studies, including, as Bulut notes, Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter’s excellent Games of Empire (which has recently been revisited in a special issue of the journalGames and Culture on the tenth anniversary of its publication)
The book builds on some of the weaknesses of more mainstream scholarship on work, which often has less interest in detailed workplace investigations. Workplace ethnography is, unfortunately, becoming increasingly more difficult to pass through ethics review boards. It is even rarer within studies of the videogames industry.
The book is full of examples of how this is worked out in practice, from the informality of the workplace and Nerf gun fights, to the huge additional pressures this informality introduces, both during work hours and the reproduction of labour power outside of it. Here, precarity is not understood only as ‘the top-down imposition of insecurity’ as it can so often be understood. It is worth quoting Bulut at length:
Rather, the government of subjects – in our case, video game developers – actively depends on workers’ participation from below, which is enabled by their creative autonomy, passion for work, the ethos of hard work, and game development’s cool status; these aspects not only empower the workers in their everyday practices but also deepen precarization. Simply put, precarity is productive of subjectivities especially because it is entrenched in love. It doesn’t exist just because there are fewer jobs. On the contrary, precarity is strong especially due to the game developers’ ideological tendency towards abstract promises of play and the materiality of glamorous employment (p. 6)
This chimes with my own research with game workers, drawing out the complex experience of working practices that can be both precarious but also desired, exploited and enjoyed.
The importance of this kind of detailed ethnographic research is that it can shed new light on the processes of worker organisation that are beginning to unfold in the industry. As Bulut notes, ‘game workers’ organizing attempts suggest that contemporary capital’s strategy to enlist subjectivity for work is likely to face resistance’ (p. 7). While the new focus on organising in the industry is exciting, it is important to remember that below the surface of work there is always resistance, which as Braverman explains, is like ‘a subterranean stream that makes its way to the surface when employment conditions permit, or when the capitalist drive for a greater intensity of labor oversteps the bounds of physical and mental capacity.’
In the short conclusion, Bulut outlines how for game workers, ‘doing what one loves can be a mixed blessing; joyful as it is, love can be precarious and alienating … a critique of love, then is in order’ (p. 160). This involves a critique of the specific kinds of work that is carried out, taking into account the role of gender, race, disability, sexuality, as well as why some kinds of work are said to matter or not, stay hidden, or become visible. While Desire was not the site of open worker organising – with some participants even voicing opposition to the idea – Bulut does not fall into the trap of writing off worker power in the industry. Reading this chapter reminded me of an encounter I had with a game studies professor who critiqued my writing on game worker struggle,
In summary, this book is an excellent contribution to the growing critical scholarship on videogame work. It takes seriously the experience of workers in the sector, combines ethnographic detail with a political economy of the industry, and uncovers dynamics that play out in these workplaces. While this close focus is needed for understanding videogame workers, the videogames they make, and their role in contemporary capitalism, the book maintains a critical vision beyond the workplace itself. As Bulut argues ‘it’s ironic that, although video games are mostly marketed as digital venues where players’ dreams and utopias are realized through interactive technology, the industry becomes suddenly serious when workers start daydreaming’ (p. 173). This is part of the challenge of both researching and organising in new sectors of work: connecting the big questions of power and transformation to the smaller specificities and peculiarities of the workplace.
References
Badger, A. and Woodcock, J. (2019) 'Ethnographic Methods with Limited Access: Assessing Quality of Work in Hard to Reach Jobs', in D. Wheatley (ed) Handbook of research methods on the quality of working lives, 135-146. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
Braverman, H. 1999. Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. London: Monthly Review Press.
Dyer-Witheford, N. and de Peuter, G. 2009. Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Videogames, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Hardt, M. and Negri, A. 2000. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Jaffe, S. Forthcoming, 2021. Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone.
Kerr, A. 2017. Global Games: Production, Circulation and Policy in the Networked Era. New York: Routledge.
Kücklich, J. 2005. ‘Precarious playbour: Modders and the digital games industry’, Fibreculture Journal, 5:1
Marx, K. 1867 [1977]. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Volume 1. London: Penguin Books.
Meija, R. 2012. “Playing the Crisis: Video Games and the Mobilization of Anxiety and Desire.” PhD Dissertation, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
Nakamura, L. 2009. ‘Don’t Hate the Player, Hate the Game: The Racialization of Labor in World of Warcraft’, Critical Studies in Media Communication, 26(2): 128-44.
Ruffino, P. and Woodcock, J. 2020. ‘Game Workers and the Empire: Unionisation in the UK Video Game Industry’, Games and Culture: a journal of interactive media.
Terranova, T. 2000. ‘Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy’, Social Text, 63 (18, 2): 33-58.
Thompson, P., Parker, R., and Cox, S. 2015. ‘Interrogating Creative Theory and Creative Work: Inside the Games Studio’, Sociology, 50(2): 316-332.
Woodcock, J. 2016. ‘The work of play: Marx and the video games industry in the United Kingdom’, Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds, 8(2): 131-143.
Woodcock, J. 2019. Marx at the Arcade: Consoles, Controllers, and Class Struggle, Chicago: Haymarket Books.
Woodcock, J. 2020. ‘For Video Game Companies, “Crunch” Working Conditions Are Increasingly the Norm’, Jacobin: https://jacobinmag.com/2020/11/video-games-cyberpunk-2077-crunch-overwork/
Lockdown Politics: A Response to Panagiotis Sotiris
Gareth Dale
In ‘Thinking Beyond the Lockdown: On the Possibility of a Democratic Biopolitics’,1 Panagiotis Sotiris has provided a critical analysis of the Covid-19 pandemic, covering its pathogenesis, sociology and the implications for socialist strategy. His essay (and, with added emphasis, his social media posts) draw a line in the sand: lockdowns are repressive, iniquitous and should be opposed. In this response, I take issue with his analysis. The line in the sand, I shall argue, is muddying the waters, not least because it is organised around the concept of a “lockdown strategy” which has little relation to reality. Sotiris identifies lockdowns with neoliberalism and calls for anti-lockdown resistance – without so much as a glance at the right-wing libertarian camps that are also staked out on this terrain.
Before expanding on these objections, I should summarise a few of the many strengths of Sotiris’s essay. The first is in his identification of the social within the natural, in the aetiology of the virus and its epidemiology. On the former, he follows Rob Wallace and Mike Davis in elucidating the part played by capitalism in the origin of Covid. In a general sense, the social structuring of disease is of course not new to this virus. Even in the earliest agrarian civilisations, the mingling of people alongside livestock facilitated the transmission of pathogens and parasites and the mutation and transmission of a multitude of zoonotic diseases. To borrow a phrase from James Scott, the late Neolithic hosted a “multispecies resettlement camp”. As homo sapiens settled into agricultural production and town life we became more herd-like—indeed at the very moment that we were becoming parasitic on other herd creatures. Amidst the fraternising of herds, a Great Zoonosis took place, spewing out a succession of world-transforming diseases: smallpox, bubonic plague, typhus, cholera, measles, mumps and maybe malaria too. But, recently, under the force of the law of value, the pathogenic soup has been heating up. The coronavirus pandemic is not ‘natural’; it arose within a natural realm that is being ripped apart by profit. This is Marxism’s rewriting of Ulrich Beck’s ‘risk society’ thesis. Human destiny is becoming ever more powerfully shaped by global risks that are thrown up not by ‘the natural environment’ but as blowback from the short-sighted attempts by capitalist states and businesses to occupy and ‘master’ it.
Secondly, and in greater depth, Sotiris provides a socio-epidemiological survey. He tracks the roles of deprivation, dispossession, wealth inequality and socio-economic stress in the spread and lethality of Covid-19. Socialists have long emphasised that improvements to human health rely on provision of infrastructure (sanitation, fresh water, good housing, etc.) and on improving the social matrix (equalisation of income and status) more than on innovations in medical science. As the epidemiologists Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson have shown, as inequality grows, those who require healthcare the most are less likely to receive it. Social inequality varies directly with rates of infant mortality, obesity, homicide, imprisonment, mental illness, drug addiction, and length of working hours, and inversely with childrens’ educational achievements, life expectancy, and levels of trust. Why should this be? Rising inequality heightens social evaluation anxieties. We come to see social position as a more important feature of a person’s identity; those in the upper echelons feel greater insecurity, those in the basement feel devalued and demeaned. The resulting perceptions of competition and threat, and perceptions of social inferiority, create subjects who are less affiliative and empathetic, less healthy of mind and body.
Sotiris’s essay is at its most powerful when diagnosing the weakening of society’s immune system as Covid negotiates its way through capitalist social structures, widening hierarchies of race, class and gender as it goes. In Britain, it first nested in the posh quarters, as skiers flew home from Ischgl and Obergurgl to Westminster and Chelsea, and only later spread to the poor areas where it became endemic in its preferred habitat of high-density housing containing high proportions of ‘essential workers’ (often black and Asian) who cannot work from home, multigenerational households, and individuals with diabetes, obesity and other co-morbidities.
Consequently, to effectively tackle Covid – and future epidemics – requires class struggle (broadly conceived). Sotiris rightly stresses the need for social movements that push for greater equality, resist precarious labour and demand full access to health care. He identifies practical objectives that can be fought for, to make workplaces safer. For example, older and other vulnerable people could be retired from frontline duty, with those at lower risk stepping into their shoes. More immediately, the right to public protest and expression must be defended, as a cornerstone of society’s “collective resilience”. My own workplace offers an illustration of the link between class struggle and human health. Although most faculty have been forced to teach on campus each week despite the lockdown, our BAME colleagues are classed as vulnerable and may teach all classes online if they wish. There is no doubt that this year’s resurgent Movement for Black Lives (BLM) contributed to the decision. In this small example, BLM has directly helped to limit the spread of Covid-19, through fostering a recognition that racism is itself a deadly ‘underlying health condition’.
BLM was inspirational in many ways, but one in particular is germane to Sotiris’ argument. Despite Covid, tens of millions of people gathered in the streets and squares of US cities, making it possibly the largest movement in US history. They demonstrated, and shifted the political terrain. They did all this safely: outdoors, and mostly masked. According to a report in Nature, the BLM protests, “did not seem to trigger spikes in infections”. This contrasted, the same report goes on, with other outdoor events in the same period, notably a Georgia summer camp where “the virus ran rampant”. (At the camp, the children were not required to wear masks and they shared cabins at night.)
Evidently, BLM is the act to follow. With the exception of especially vulnerable groups, to stay away from street protest would be a wretched mistake. If class struggle is the way to combat Covid and future pandemics, demonstrations are indispensable. They can be undertaken safely: outdoors, masked, and – especially when levels of UV light are low – with social distancing. The latter illuminates the protestors’ care for others, etching a visible line of demarcation from protests organised by conspiracy fruitcakes and the far right.
With this, we arrive at a puzzling aspect of Sotiris’s essay. It defines its case in relationship to a so-called “lockdown strategy” but without mentioning the far-right forces that are voicing a similar critique. In Britain, for example, Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party has changed its name to Reform UK and will be campaigning against the lockdown. Farage proposes that “the UK should follow the Great Barrington Declaration, which calls for ‘focused protection’ for the elderly and other groups particularly vulnerable to Covid-19, while others continue to live relatively normally.”
Non-strategic lockdowns
Before returning to the far right and the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD), we should unpack a few problematic aspects of Sotiris’s analysis. We can begin with his insistence on “challeng[ing] the lockdown strategy”. This implies that such a strategy actually exists. He pits lockdowns (which, he believes, gain their force from the “dominant discourse of apocalyptic projections and social distancing”) versus test-trace-isolate as alternative strategic options. Thus, “countries that did not enforce a lockdown strategy but opted for a strategy of testing, tracing and isolating cases, such as South Korea, had comparable or even better outcomes than countries that opted for lockdowns”. It is far more plausible, I think, to see lockdown not as an alternative to a viable strategy of test-trace-isolate but as an admission of failure, a desperate tactic resorted to when escalating hospitalisation rates overwhelm all preferred strategies. It is absurd to suggest that some states opted for “a lockdown strategy” while others opted fortest-trace-isolate. Take Britain for example. The government’s initial strategy was to “contain” the outbreak through test-trace-isolate, and only when they failed was a lockdown imposed. Then, in autumn 2020, the government’s scientific advisors repeatedly urged implementation of a “circuit-breaker lockdown”, advice that the donkeys in Downing Street disregarded, leading to soaring hospitalisation rates and a panicked partial lockdown: an abject strategic failure, in other words. Throughout, they absolutely didnot follow “apocalyptic projections.” Their instinct, rather, was to ignore dire warnings – whether feverishly hyperbolic or grimly accurate.
Secondly, Sotiris highlights the “coercive character of the lockdown strategy”. The “lockdown strategy,” he goes on, “is related to a conception of health that has more to do with ‘security’ rather than public health”. Up to a point, this is uncontentious. The term lockdown was coined in the 1970s to refer to enforced isolation of inmates of prisons and psychiatric hospitals on ‘security’ grounds. The recent ‘public health lockdowns’ have penalised those in overcrowded housing and without gardens, they have abetted domestic abuse and the double burden of working mothers, and have been conducive to authoritarianism. The mobilisation of the security forces as agents of public health predictably led to crimes and injustices, and ramped up surveillance and institutional racism. In locked-down London, racist stop and search operations by the cops increased sharply. In Nigeria, the government used post-lockdown conditions to ban the End-SARS protests. In Kenya, partial lockdown rules led to Covid-19 coming to be seen as “a law enforcement issue rather than a health promotion concern”, such that, within days, “the fear of Covid-19 was replaced by fear of the police.”
However, as these last two examples suggest, using public health as a pretext for authoritarian crackdowns goes beyond states in lockdown. We should also look more closely at the country that Sotiris cites as an alternative to “the lockdown strategy”: South Korea. There the government set up apparatuses of mass surveillance. It was not merely the temperature detectors set up at airports to filter out possible individuals to test, but the passing of GPS and payments data from the credit card companies and phone companies to government, allowing individuals’ every movement to be tracked. CCTV from restaurants and other venues was pored over by government employees. Individuals were ordered to self-quarantine. Text alerts were pinged by the authorities to all those living in the neighbourhood of persons testing positive, informing them of the person’s occupation, what venues (e.g. bakeries, cafes, motels) they had visited and at what time of which day. In many places they published detailed maps of the movements of patients. Attendance at political events (including protests) was limited to a maximum of 100. And when the test-trace-isolate strategy was overwhelmed in Daegu, it went into a lockdown in which people “closed their businesses, worked from home, refrained from all social activities, and limited having family gatherings”. (That the Daegu lockdown was relatively voluntary has been variously attributed to South Korea’s recent experience of SARS and MERS, its robust ethic of social solidarity, its citizens’ familiarity with digital technologies, and the legacy of Park-era authoritarian rule.)
Thirdly, Sotiris’s argument tends to assume that any alternative “strategy” will be largely free of the specific ills of lockdown. It is indisputable that lockdowns impact negatively on unemployment, on childrens’ education (especially among oppressed groups), on mental health and on general health through cancelled appointments; that lockdown programmes have failed sufficiently to protect essential workers or occupants of nursing homes; and that, especially when coercive, they undermine the capacity of subaltern classes to resist. Lockdowns are dreadful and they exacerbate inequality. But so too does the spread of Covid. All of these just-listed evils, and more, result from the crashing of hospital capacity that is occasioned by the epidemic running riot. That Sotiris omits to mention this is striking. In terms of the ‘lockdowners vs libertarians’ debate – in the British context this is exemplified by the SNP, the Guardian and mainstream epidemiologists versus backbench Tories, theTelegraph and GBD signatories—Sotiris rains blows on the former while leaving the latter unscathed.
Fourthly and relatedly, Sotiris presents the “lockdown strategy” as the culmination of a neoliberal agenda. In the neoliberal era, a “bio-security approach” has come to prevail, one that treats the pandemic as an “external other” and configures solutions reductively in terms of “social distancing” and vaccine development, rather than in terms of the complex social determinants of health and disease. He concedes that shutting down “large parts of the economy in the name of a broader necessity … seemed to run contrary to the basic tenets of neoliberal governance” – but the image is deceptive. The underlying ethos of lockdown is neoliberal. Indeed “the very notion of ‘social distancing’” embodies a “suspension of sociality”. Social distancing reflects “a neoliberal disciplinary worldview, in the sense of a mentality that in general people must ‘stay at home’ and ‘mind their own business,’ not engage in social interactions apart from work and market transactions, and ‘listen to the experts’ instead of debating political decisions”. Lockdowns play to a culture of fear, one that has been historically constituted over the grinding decades of neoliberalism. “Fear and risk” govern the neoliberal order, in sharp contrast to the previous era which featured a much stronger “sense of social safeguarding”. This is why the Hong Kong flu pandemic of 1968–69, “despite its severity and significant loss of lives, did not create the same reaction of generalised fear” as we have experienced in 2020.
Sotiris is playing fast and loose with the Hong Kong flu data, which should not be likened to the Covid pandemic in terms of lethality, but of more immediate relevance to my argument is that he gives a one-sided reading of the popular response to social distancing and lockdowns. We can agree that life under neoliberalism pulverises people into atoms and that this is conducive to ‘security’ paranoia and authoritarianism. But the lockdown sensibility was cross-hatched with collectivist altruism and solidarity. Social distancing, for many, attests to care for the lives of others – this is not suspended sociality but the reverse. Conversely, lockdowns can be opposed on impeccably neoliberal grounds. Consider the reason cited by the Confederation of Italian Industry, Confindustria, for resisting lockdown: because “the global market demands it.”
The panopticisms of everyday life
The downplaying of the contradictory interests and motivations at work within lockdowns – the collectivist altruism among sections of the public, the coercive instincts of political elites, etcetera – is reinforced in Sotiris’s essay through an extensive borrowing from Foucault. In the chapter entitled ‘Panopticism’ in Discipline and Punish, Foucault explores the Great Confinement of seventeenth-century Europe, which included “lock ups” aimed to prevent the spread of plague. He describes a plague-stricken town that was “traversed throughout with hierarchy, surveillance, observation. … Everyone locked up in his cage, everyone at his window, answering to his name and showing himself when asked”. In the lock up, Foucault continues, “each individual is constantly located, examined and distributed among the living beings, the sick and the dead—all this constitutes a compact model of the disciplinary mechanism”. This marked an epistemic revolution. Such administrative responses to infectious disease were moments in the crystallisation of a new regime ofdisciplinary power. Disease and deviance were no longer constituted and branded primarily through “rituals of exclusion” as lepers once had been. Instead, “the plague gave rise to disciplinary projects [which] called for multiple separations, individualizing distributions, an organization in depth of surveillance and control, an intensification and a ramification of power”. As Foucault puts it in Abnormal, it was “not exclusion but quarantine”; it was “not a question of driving out individuals but rather of establishing and fixing them, of assigning places”. All became the subjects of utilitarian and forensic disciplining: a winnowing and ordering and making-productive of bodies through tools of classification, administration, and scientific discourse. In such ways the disciplinary response to the plague laid the foundations for the Panopticon of Jeremy Bentham. It, in turn, symbolises the modus operandi of modern power: what Foucault in Discipline and Punish terms “the panoptic machine,” or the “panopticisms” of everyday life—the mechanisms of disciplinary power (in prisons, schools, lockdowns, hospitals, etc) that regiment us, render us docile, orchestrate our bodies and fabricate our subjectivities and which we all help to sustain.
Foucault’s insight is that modern states are constructed through forms of disciplinary power (and its close cousin, biopower) that organise people, exercise control, administer life and death, and above all implement strategy, in the field of welfare as much as in warfare. Welfare, you might say, is the continuation of war by other means, and the welfare-warfare analogy was peculiarly vivid in March this year as the pandemic exploded: in its suddenness, strangeness and universal effects, in the sense of risk, fear and the fixation on death, in the violent lurch of social coordinates and in the dramatic intervention of the state in all spheres of life. But this was a health emergency, not a war, and protests cannot realistically gather around the simple demand of ‘stop the lockdown!’ The side of the state that comes to the fore in a health crisis, however haltingly and blunderingly (or worse), is organisation to save lives, not to take them. In crisis the state presents itself as the protector of society, with ritual presidential addresses and the incantation by politicians of all stripes (Ireland’s Leo Varadkar, Britain’s Matt Hancock, etcetera) of our collective sacrifice for the good of the nation. Nationalism becomes a vital part of the state of emergency, stifling critique, naturalising relations of power, sanctifying the state, and excluding non-national denizens.
Foucault’s disciplinary biopolitics sheds light on the martial codes and strategies that course through society, constituting “the very principles upon which social relations form”. He teaches us of the microphysics of modern state formation, its intricate construction through fields of specialised knowledge, rationalities and strategies. But Sotiris has not convinced me to take Foucault as our pilot through the shoals of lockdown. Lockdowns are shot through with contradictions and contestation. They involve human actors (individuals and movements) as they struggle and negotiate, and as they form cultures of solidarity around social groups formed through kinship and friendship, social reproduction, and collective labour. They are imposed by authorities which, the force of Foucault’s insights into the microphysics and miniaturised moments of coercion notwithstanding, remain concentrated within “the grand and obdurate apparatus of the centralised state itself”. And states, subject as they are to continual pressure from the populace, justify lockdowns not only through reference to bloodless scientific discourse but in the banal-and-emotional language of nationalism, the religion of state. Foucault’s analytical toolbox contains none of the above concepts. Further, his principal target was repressive-welfarist reformism, personified in Bentham, the patron saint of liberal lockdowns; this left libertarianism relatively unexplored. InThe Birth of Biopolitics he does comment, in passing, on “so-called libertarian American liberals” – advocates of laissez faire economics and the withdrawal of states from any welfare role – in a phrase that has resonance today. The libertarians, he warns, justify their preferred policies as defences against any slipping from free-market society toward the various new serfdoms: “socialism, fascism, or National Socialism”. But, he asks, do not the libertarians’ own policies “surreptitiously” introduce modes of action that are just as harmful as the tyrannies they fear? The relevance to debates over pandemic politics consists in the fact that, at least in Britain and the US, the major opposition to lockdowns comes not from Marxists such as Sotiris but from libertarians. And, for epidemiological warrant, the libertarians look above all to the GBD.
The GBD was supported from the get-go, indeed its opening event was hosted at its Great Barrington base by, the American Institute for Economic Research, a Koch-funded libertarian think tank. The GBD’s core message is that lockdowns should be lifted except for vulnerable populations; for these, they should be ratcheted up and lengthened. The GBD’s lead signatories have attracted widespread critique, which need not detain us. Briefly summarised, it includes their misrepresentation of the long-term damage that the virus can inflict on those it infects, their underestimation of its danger to children and working-age adults (including ‘long covid’), their sanguine predictions (e.g. already in May that Covid in Britain had “largely come and is on the way out”), and their assumption that vulnerable groups can be accurately identified and hermetically sequestered from the rest – around a third of the population of many countries. The idea that we can siphon all the vulnerable people away from the rest of the population cannot work in practice, and precisely who is vulnerable to this novel disease is hard to say, not to mention the logistics of breaking up multigenerational families and ensuring they somehow live apart for months or years.
I do not know whether Sotiris has signed the GBD but there is a resemblance between its policy proposals and some of his own – notably the talk of “fostering” of elderly people, and of the need to protect the vulnerable with little consideration of how amidst rising infection rates that can be done without some restraints on the liberties of those thought to be non-vulnerable. Sotiris has been circulating the writings of George Nikolaidis, the GBD signatory who translated the declaration into Greek, and he invited him to act as discussant for his Politics of the Pandemic session at the Historical Materialism conference. There, Nikolaidis pitched a GBD line: oppose all lockdowns, downplay the failures of Sweden’s pandemic response, frame policy responses as strengthening “resilience” (thatbuzzword again) rather than avoiding needless deaths.
The magical thinking of the GBD lends legitimacy to libertarians agitating for a lifting of all restrictions. In a general sense this is not new. In the nineteenth-century, opponents of smallpox vaccination presented themselves as defending “personal liberty” against the tyranny of government. The rugged individualism and Social Darwinism of libertarians in the USA in particular open doors to the alt right – some have dubbed it the libertarian-to-alt-right pipeline.They are the ones who seek a suspension of sociality. For libertarians, mandatory mask rules represent an infringement on constitutional freedoms, and the planet can go fry before we’ll relinquish our God-given right to SUVs and pick-up trucks. For them, the politics of the pandemic is framed as personal liberty versus the tyranny of government: ‘lockdown: for or against?’ But their own policies, to paraphrase Foucault, would wreak greater harm than the tyranny against which they rail.
Conclusion
2020 should be remembered as the year of extraordinary anti-police uprisings in the USA and Nigeria, but it has also seen a carnival of repression, some of which has been spawned by lockdowns. These have fostered authoritarianism, with police powers augmented and a ubiquitous government-led mistrust, which at street level takes the form of snooping and finger-pointing at “other people”. (In Britain, it has come as no surprise to learn that, after the initial uprush of mutual aid had abated, neighbourhood cohesion actually declined.) Opposition to these iniquities should not be left to the libertarians and the far right. I share Sotiris’s unease, his call for a revival of demonstrations, his emphasis on mutual aid and civic mindedness, on empowering communities and social-reproduction class struggle as the foundation of a socialist anti-pandemic strategy, and his long-term vision for a ‘democratic biopolitics’ that can challenge the biopolitics of capitalist states. But what is the capitalist biopolitics of the pandemic? It is not constituted by a binary of repressive “lockdown strategies” and Korea-style test and trace. There is no “lockdown strategy”, and the upward-twist in repressive power, notably the infiltration of the tech giants into powerful political positions through the pretext of assisting states in a public health emergency, have been introduced under states with widely different responses to the pandemic. No survey of pandemic politics, moreover, would be complete without mention of thelaissez faire model associated with Sweden (on which Sotiris voices criticism, but only of its failure to protect the vulnerable) or its formalisation in the GBD (on which he remains silent).
In framing lockdowns as an uncomplicatedly authoritarian strategy, one thatfeatures a “comprehensive stay-at-home order with extreme restrictions on movement and face-to-face communication, with all use of public space prohibited, and most of social and economic life shut down”, Sotiris neglects to consider the full range of actually existing lockdowns and the messiness and contestedness of each. Lockdown is a loose label for rafts of rules geared to viral suppression that usually penalise the poor but can be relatively consensual and humane, as Daegu and Kerala have shown. (Even Britain’s preposterously corrupt and inept lockdown programme included one commendable element: the ‘Everyone In’ policy which provided hotel and hostel accommodation for homeless people.) I am not advocating the statist, social-democratic biopolitics which calls for “complete lockdown now”, but, instead, in line with the Zero Covid campaign, that any realistic left response should centre on “collective discipline and social solidarity” but, where necessary, with lockdowns too. Labour activists are at the forefront of pressing for safety at work and social distancing measures, and for lockdown-related demands too. These should include the full financial support—with full pay for workers obliged to isolate and pandemic pay for essential workers—that can help enable any temporary acceptance of restraints on liberty in the interests of suppressing infection rates to the point where a find-test-trace-isolate-support method can kick in. Only the state can disburse resources on that sort of scale. In organising to push it to do so, sparks of Sotiris’s ‘democratic biopolitics’ may be seen.
"Lockdown Commuter" byR~P~M is licensed underCC BY-NC-ND 2.0
- 1. Panagiotis Sotiris, ‘Thinking Beyond the Lockdown: On the Possibility of a Democratic Biopolitics’, Historical Materialism 28.3 available at: https://brill.com/view/journals/hima/28/3/article-p3_1.xml. Acknowledgments: I am grateful to Tithi Bhattacharya, Andreas Malm, and Sara Farris for comments on an earlier draft.
Espionage and Intrigue in Babylon Berlin: The General’s Daughter
Ralf Hoffrogge
The German neo-noir television series Babylon Berlin, based loosely on the best-selling novels of Volker Kutscher, has spurred a wave of nostalgia for the1920s since Netflix aired the first season in 2018. In the latest season three, a young woman enters the scene: Marie Louise Seegers, daughter of the highest-ranking General of the German Reichswehr – and a devoted communist, ready to spy on her father’s secrets. The character looks so obviously made up that it has escaped most viewers that Marie Louise is based on a historical figure.
Berlin Babylon – Babylon Berlin
Unlike other pieces of German popular culture, Babylon Berlin does not shy away from politics: its main plotline is a military conspiracy by elite reactionaries in armed forces, police and politics that want to get rid of the young republic’s democratic system. The only discussion point seems to be whether those street-fighting Nazis can be of any help in this effort – or whether they are simply proletarian troublemakers. One of the main agents of the plot against democracy is General Seegers, head of the armed forces. Season three introduces his daughter Marie-Louise Seegers, who is shown as enthusiastic Marxist. The attractive and intelligent young women reluctantly gives in to the general’s request to entertain his friends on the piano – only to confront the reactionary clique with her critique of the capitalist system during dinner afterwards. Well-informed viewers have recognised quotes of Walter Benjamin in her replies. But not many identified the real woman serving as role model for the character: Marie Luise Baroness of Hammerstein-Equord (1908–1999).
Marie Luise was the daughter of General Kurt von Hammerstein and indeed a member of both the Communist Party and its secret intelligence apparatus. She and her sister Helga were involved in leaking crucial information about the Weimar Reichswehr. This started in 1929 and in 1933 they transferred intelligence about Hitler’s planned invasion of the Soviet Union to the Soviet authorities – years before the attack was carried out. The figure of Marie Luise, sometimes varied as “Marie Louise” or “Marieluise”, has captured the collective imagination of prominent German novelists such as Franz Jung, Alexander Kluge or Hans-Magnus Enzensberger – but with rather mixed results. Marie Luise, who died in 1999 in Berlin as a decorated anti-fascist veteran, is mostly portrayed as a naive student whose Marxist convictions did not derive from own reasoning, but from the seduction by an older man – Werner Scholem (1895–1940).
Scholem was a left-wing Communist, expelled from the German Communist Party due to his opposition to Stalin in 1926. He had indeed met Marie Luise when both studied law at Berlin University around 1927. So far, the novelists got it right – but, after that, imagination takes over, and it is as sad as it is telling how the roles are juxtaposed: while, in real life, Marie Luise was the driving agent and Scholem only got caught up in the case, in the realm of literature, Werner plays the active part and Marie Luise is reduced to his sidekick. But, where high culture has distorted historical reality, popular culture sets the record straight: In the series Babylon Berlin, there is no mention of Werner – only in one scene does Marie Luise mention a man, Oskar, mocking him an “unreliable subject”. This seems intentional, Marie Louise acts on her own. But why did her story go wrong in the first place? Based on my biography of Werner Scholem published with theHistorical Materialism book series,1 this article will help you to tell the difference between fiction and reality around the drama of Werner and Marie Luise.
Strong men and seduced women – Marie Louise in Literature
The first writer working with the espionage drama around Werner Scholem and Marie Luise von Hammerstein was Arkadij Maslow, a left Communist and close acquaintance of Werner Scholem.2 Exiled from Germany, Maslow conceived an entirely new life story for Scholem. Completed in 1935, his first and only novel was titled Die Tochter des Generals [‘The General’s Daughter’]3 and revolved around the exploits of ‘Gerhard Alkan’, an allusion to Scholem. Although the novel went unpublished for decades, Maslow’s manuscript circulated in literary circles and was revisited and adapted several times, making its author the originator of both Marie Luise and Werner’s duplications as a fictional character.
A university lecture by the boring ‘privy councillor’ Triepel at Berlin University’s law school in the year 1927 – this is how Maslow introduces his main female character, Marieluise von Bimmelburg, the ‘General’s Daughter’ – a malapropism of Marie Luise von Hammerstein. Whether Bimmel or Hammer, Marie proved to be much more than just another daughter of noble upbringing, both in the novel as well as in real life. Her father was the head of the so-called ‘Troop Office’, a covert name for the German general staff, and thus the highest-ranking military officer in the Weimar Republic. Ultimately, however, it is Marieluise who is taken in by the older man’s exciting life. The young woman is keen to break free from the constraints of her family background and virtually forces Alkan into an affair. Marieluise seeks to demonstrate that even an aristocrat can serve the revolution. Sometime in early 1933, the General’s daughter of Maslow’s tale, sneaks into her father’s study and steals a file – in the novel, a document without significance. Marieluise’s amateurish theft, however, brings Alkan and his lover into the Nazis’ sights, and thereby pulls Scholem’s Doppelgänger into a plot to oust the General – who, as a conservative, is not fully in line with the Nazis. Marieluise is subpoenaed, intimidated, and wilts under pressure. Unaware that she had only stolen planted, irrelevant documents, the young woman signs a confession. Alkan, aka Scholem, is arrested shortly afterwards and presented with a fabricated charge. While Alkan is caught in an unending limbo of indecision and uncertainty, his lover’s end is definitive: the General’s daughter is beheaded at Plötzensee Prison in Berlin.
The real Marie Luise von Hammerstein was spared decapitation. She would outlive Maslow by decades, dying in 1999 at the age of 91. In the novel, her fate is mixed with that of Renate von Natzmer, an employee at the Reich Ministry of Defence who was executed on charges of espionage in 1935. Maslow took even more liberty in devising his characters than he did with regard to his plot. In Maslow’s novel, Alkan and other characters created with this amalgamation technique vacillate between caricature and tragedy, supplemented with a pinch of Boudoir-esque eroticism. The latter is almost exclusively to the detriment of the main female characters throughout, whom Maslow models as naïve and seducible victims of their own desires. The actual Marie Luise von Hammerstein relinquished the privileges of her noble family background, risked her life for her beliefs and faced significant political persecution during the Nazi era. In the novel, she becomes the unremarkable Marieluise von Bimmelburg, whose political acts depend entirely on her current love affair. Maslow’s male characters, by contrast, appear as active protagonists, in spite of their general pettiness and malice. Neither Maslow nor his life partner, the former KPD-chairperson Ruth Fischer ever found a publisher for the novel. For decades, the manuscript gathered dust in an archive at Harvard University, before being published in an annotated German edition in 2011.
But, long before, through Maslow and Ruth Fischer, the motif was passed on to exiled writer Franz Jung. Fischer and Jung had known each other since 1919 and remained friends after Ruth Fischer distanced herself from Stalinist Communism. Jung, after all, was anything but a hack. He was expelled from the KPD as a left deviationist already in 1920. It was Fischer who introduced Jung to Maslow’s literary legacy after the latter’s death in 1941. Jung recognised the material’s potential and worked on a ‘radio novella’ from the mid-1950s onward, and later on a TV movie, but his impressive manuscript would ultimately fail to bear fruit. Jung died in Stuttgart in 1963, his manuscript ‘Re. the Hammersteins – The Fight for the Seizure of Command over the German Army 1932–7’, was only published posthumously in 1997.4 Jung’s narration is essentially a condensed and politicised version of Maslow’s novel. He reduces the private dramas and anecdotes, guided by the structure of classical drama, whose characters inescapably head towards catastrophe against their own better judgement. Furthermore, he refrained from using pseudonyms: his main characters were not Alkan and von Bimmelburg, but Scholem and von Hammerstein. In Jung’s account, there are similar attempts to compromise the General through his daughter’s Communist involvement. Werner Scholem appears not as a victim, but as a willing protagonist. His appearance is of fascinating ambivalence, combining dry rationalism with communist passion. Marie Luise, who Jung refers to only as ‘the daughter’, is impressed and seeks to get to know Scholem better, but is received coolly: ‘Scholem had already made an ironic joke of this. He talked about his family, wife and children, his understanding of family cohesion, his view on marital and extra-marital relationships, the overratedness of sexual intercourse, the glandular functions and secretions, all in a style resembling the interpretation of an article in a legal brief’. But, nevertheless, ‘the tragedy ensues and takes its course’. The two begin an affair, and Marie Luise once again forces documents from her father into Scholem’s hands, although, this time, the material is not irrelevant, but rather explosive: contingency plans for war with the Soviet Union. Marie Luise and Scholem are arrested and subjected to harsh intimidation. But, unlike in Maslow’s telling of the story, in Jung’s version, Marie Luise shows backbone and defends her lover vigorously without giving away any secrets. Scholem also remains stubbornly silent. The Gestapo is forced to pursue other strategies, Scholem grows useless to them and is soon taken to a concentration camp: filed under the ‘typical reference number’: ‘Return undesired’. What Maslow presents as a tragic comedy about human cowardice, Jung turns into a drama in which the harshness of reality overwhelms the individuals involved. Despite his private affairs, Jung’s Werner Scholem is a thoroughly political person, experienced and perceptive, yet also powerless vis-à-vis the conspiracies closing in on him. Marie Luise is part of the tragedy – with more moral backbone, but still second to Scholem, who is the main actor on the stage set by Jung.
Scholem’s and Marie Luise’s colourful literary phantasms free themselves from the biographical limitations even further in the work of a third author, the narrative Lebendigkeit von 1931 [‘Vitality of 1931’] by Alexander Kluge, published in 2003.5 This tale did not draw from Maslow’s novel, but directly from Franz Jung’s text, rounded out with observations from contemporary witness Renee Goddard, Scholem’s daughter. Kluge had managed to convince her to conduct a film interview with him. In Alexander Kluge’s story, Werner Scholem joins the KPD’s military-political apparatus in 1929: ‘His task is to subvert the army, to obtain illegal state secrets’. To Kluge, however, the matter at hand is more than just a spy thriller. Instead, the motif of a ‘secret life’ becomes a metaphor for the contradictions of the human psyche as such. Kluge hints at the dilemmas of biographical writing, which entails constantly searching for a ‘red thread’ to unite the narrative, despite the fact that real people never actually follow a single path in life. Therefore, Kluge takes even more liberties than Maslow, presenting Scholem as some kind of Communist version of James Bond, who tries to win over the proletarian rank and file of Hitler’s street fighting organisation SA to the Communist cause. Once again, Scholem is the master spy while Marie Luise is more or less a source for secrets Scholem wants to obtain.
A fourth and final author boils the matter down to an essence: Hans Magnus Enzensberger in his 2009 account, The Silences of Hammerstein.6 Ultimately, what emerged from his through collaboration with historian Reinhard Müller is a hybrid, a non-fiction novel which interprets history and fills in the gaps with anecdotes and fictional elements. Despite the great temporal distance that had since developed, Enzensberger’s version also bases itself on oral accounts, which he first encountered in 1955 during his time at the Süddeutscher Rundfunk:
One day there appeared in the Stuttgart office […] an elderly man, in poor health, from San Francisco, small and shabbily dressed but with a pugnacious temperament. At the time, Franz Jung was one of the forgotten men of this generation. […] The visitor made suggestions, and I still remember that Hammerstein and his daughters were also mentioned. I was fascinated by what Jung told us and scented an exemplary story. In my naivety, I also took everything I was told at face value and overlooked the cheap novel elements of Jung’s hints and suggestions.
That said, it took Enzensberger more than forty years to process the material and publish his own version. Here, Werner and Marie Luise again play prominent roles. Her classmate’s political background impresses the General’s daughter, and their liaison initially takes the path familiar from previous accounts. Her father was aware of the relationship, but ‘passed over [it] in silence’. In Enzensberger’s narration, Marie Luise fulfils KPD ‘party duties’ independently of Werner from 1930 onward – just like the real Marie Luise did, with the only inaccuracy that she started in 1929. The General, although increasingly suspicious, protects her from repression. This does not stop her from sending further documents to far off Moscow. In Enzensberger’s story, however, they are neither plans for a coup d’état nor trivialities, but rather confidential documents relating to German foreign policy. First, she smuggles out a transcript of Hitler’s inaugural speech to army generals on 3 February 1933, delivered after a formal banquet at Hammerstein’s official residence. This meeting did in fact occur, and was tremendously important to Hitler’s consolidation of power. His aim was to commit the leaders of the military to the new regime. Apart from Marie Luise, her sister Helga is also said to have overheard Hitler elaborate his agenda to the officials present. Hitler’s words have been recorded in various transcripts later published by historians. Hitler presented his vision of expanded Lebensraum in Eastern Europe, calling for Germanisation of conquered territories and the expulsion of native populations. The Führer was straightforward, promising rearmament and a new war. His adversaries soon had knowledge of the impending danger, for a transcript of Hitler’s remarks would reach the Comintern in Moscow only three days later. Enzensberger, like many historians asks himself: Who was behind this masterpiece of KPD intelligence? Had Marie Luise been the leak, and Scholem her contact?
Enzensberger, for his part, believes ‘this can with good reason be doubted’. Instead, he brings up Marie Luise’s sister Helga’s relationship with a Communist – Leo Roth, an agent of the KPD’s ‘N apparatus’ who intercepted all sorts of crucial information for the party. Roth is a historical figure, his biography exhibits parallels to that of Werner Scholem. Born in Russia but raised in Berlin, he joined the Left-Zionist group Poale Zion as a teenager before switching to the Communist youth organisation in 1926. Although Leo Roth, born in 1911, did not belong to the war generation, his youthful radicalisation very much resembled Werner’s. A supporter of Karl Korsch, Roth was driven out of the ranks of the KPD, joined the Lenin League and became involved with Ruth Fischer and Arkadi Maslow. But, unlike Scholem, Roth was not a leading member of this group, so he was re-admitted to the KPD in 1929 . Operating under the codename ‘Viktor’, he built a career in the party’s intelligence service, serving as a leading functionary by 1933 at the uncommonly young age of 22.
After having introduced Roth, Scholem’s connection to KPD espionage strikes Enzensberger as rather implausible. He declines to investigate the matter further, as Kurt von Hammerstein and his family are the main subjects of the story. Unlike Maslow in 1935, Enzensberger depicts von Hammerstein against the backdrop of World War and Holocaust, allowing him to appear as a possible alternative to the coming horror. The General almost appears as a resistance fighter, although Enzensberger cannot avoid reference to Hammerstein’s initially positive view of the Nazis. ‘We want to move more slowly. Aside from that, we’re really in agreement’, the historical Hammerstein is purported to have said to Hitler in 1931.
Nevertheless, Hammerstein did attempt to appeal directly to Hindenburg in the final days of January 1933 and prevent Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor. Hindenburg, however, ignored his advice, and Kurt von Hammerstein quietly resigned as chief of command in September 1933. Open resistance would come neither from him nor from any of the other generals over the next decade. It was not until the defeat at Stalingrad that a handful of officers dared to strike a blow against the Führer, whose uniform they had worn loyally for over a decade, in the summer of 1944. Two of von Hammerstein’s sons were among these ‘men of 20 July’. The General himself, however, was not: Kurt von Hammerstein died in the summer of 1943. Werner Scholem lived to see only the first year of this new war, detained in the Buchenwald concentration camp where he was murdered in 1940.
The Hammerstein Case: Fiction and Reality
In the universe of Babylon Berlin, the story ends in 1929 and only the next season, which is said to be staged in 1931, will show us how the story of Marie Louise Seegers unfolds. But what about the real Marie Luise – and Werner? A glimpse at Werner Scholem’s police and court files, now kept in the BerlinBundesarchiv, is actually rather sobering. One finds no mention whatsoever of Marie Luise or her father, nor of stolen military documents or secret telegrams to Moscow. Instead, the main points of concern are some remarks made during a quite trivial conversation over drinks at a bar. Some military men were indeed present, although they were not generals, but rather a horde of drunken infantrymen. Neither was Scholem ever charged with espionage. Rather, Werner supposedly attempted to ‘incite discontent among Reichswehr soldiers and provoke their insubordination towards their superiors’. Werner Scholem as subverter of German army discipline? The strange prose referred to an incident in early 1932 when Werner and his wife Emmy were said to have met with former KPD parliamentarian Wilhelm Koenen in a bar in Stromstraße 62 in Berlin’s Moabit district. The establishment was run by Paul Schlüter and called ‘Zum Bernhardiner’, named after the famous St Bernhard dog breed. Its patrons, however, fondly referred to it as the ‘Dirty Apron’. The indictment brought against Scholem recounts what allegedly conspired:
The three culprits mentioned sat at a table in the tavern together with four Reichswehr soldiers […] All three tried to convince the soldiers they ought to bring together the Communist-oriented soldiers in special cells so as to further infiltrate the Reichswehr. Furthermore, they insisted that the soldiers of the Reichswehr should not, under any circumstances, shoot at workers if they were to be deployed against them. During their conversation they passed newspapers and hand-written or hectographed leaflets titled “Reichswehr Soldiers – Comrades” to the soldiers.
The matter seems laughably trivial compared to its dramatic literary counterparts. Nonetheless, urging German soldiers not to fire on civilians in the case of an uprising did in fact constitute high treason. The corresponding law, dating from the Kaiserreich, remained in effect during the Weimar Republic and was attached to more severe punishments after 1933. The investigation was conducted by Section IA of the Berlin police – i.e. the political police of the Weimar Republic, not the Gestapo. Only a letter written by Werner’s mother Betty Scholem in May 1935 hints to the General’s daughter. She wrote:
The Hammerstein story goes something like this: Werner, in his profound cleverness, persuaded General von Hammerstein’s daughter to join the Communist Party. When they arrested her in April 1933, she of course changed sides and did her best to wash herself clean through accusation – more specifically, by claiming that Werner had seduced her (hopefully only to Communism!). I heard about this girl only once, when Werner bragged that an aristocrat had gone over to their side. He really is a jackass of historic proportions!
Betty received her information second-hand from Scholem’s wife Emmy, who had been arrested, but later was released due to her bad health. She fled to Britain in 1934 and was firmly convinced that Marie Luise had incriminated Werner. There is, however, no evidence for this in any of Scholem’s police and court files, nor does it seem particularly likely given that essentially any fellow student enrolled during the summer semester of 1927 at Berlin University could have observed and reported their contact. Neither is there any indication of espionage activities on Werner’s part anywhere in the Scholem’s testimony – Emmy denies them, Betty does not mention them at all, and no evidence can be found in the archives. After taking all available facts into account, a different story appears far more plausible: after 1926 Werner was alienated from the ‘Stalin Communists’, as he called them, but he remained faithful to the Communist idea, and it would have come naturally to him to discuss politics when meeting an interested young woman, demonstrating his extensive knowledge on the topic in the process. Marie Luise’s interest had been piqued by Werner’s knowledge and experience in political work; the intelligence services had little to do with their contact, to which Marie Luise von Hammerstein herself ultimately testified.
If one follows the court files, Werner was arrested not because of his connection to Marie Luise – he fell victim to a police informer called Willi Walter, who simply invented Scholem’s meeting with the soldiers at the “Dirty Apron” in 1932. The files reveal that Scholem’s wife was a regular there – it was the local hangout for communists in the Hansaviertel-neighbourhood where the Scholems lived. When communist and anti-militaristic graffiti popped up in the area, police started an investigation – and pressed local residents to identify potential agitators by showing them archived photographs. Among those were photographs of Werner shelved during former confrontations with the political police. Willi Walter, as a diligent informer, ultimately “identified” more than a dozen people. Werner therefore fell victim to his past – in 1932, as a prominent former Reichstag deputy, communist dissident and follower of Trotsky, it was impossible for him to work for Stalin’s intelligence service. Even the Nazi “Volksgerichtshof” in 1935 found this unlikely – Scholem was acquitted. But this was of no use for him: while other culprits walked free, Werner, as a communist of Jewish descent, was transferred to a concentration camp. He was murdered in Buchenwald in 1940.
But who leaked Hitler’s speech to Stalin? Was it Marie Luise then? Despite maintaining a steadfast public silence throughout her life, a government questionnaire from 1973 sheds more light on her involvement. The document in question is Marie Luise’s application to be recognised as a ‘Persecutee of the Nazi Regime’ under East German law. Here, Marie Luise admits, for the first time, that she worked as a member of the KPD’s intelligence service from 1929 onward. Her duties were strictly conspiratorial:
At the same time, I was instructed to cease all public party activities. Neither was I allowed to carry my party book with me any longer […] I was urged to mingle in my father’s social milieu. My task was to immediately pass on the content of any conversation I overheard. It was then forwarded to my closest colleague, Comrade Leo Roth. There were frequent meetings at brief intervals with him […] I also sought the aid of my sister who is five years younger than me […] My tasks furthermore included monitoring my father’s written correspondence. For this purpose I received a duplicate key to the desk in the private residence. Any letters of concern were then photocopied at night and returned immediately.
Enzensberger, who must have known this file via his co-writer Reinhard Müller, presented the accurate version: Leo Roth was the Hammerstein sister’s KPD go-between. In a letter intercepted by the East German Stasi in 1985, Marie Luise explicitly denied the notion that Werner Scholem recruited her: ‘I was already a Communist when I met Werner at university […] Through his wife, Emmy Scholem, I came into contact with the locally responsible neighbourhood group. There can be no question of my “recruitment” to the party by either Werner or Emmy Scholem’.
Werner and Emmy supplied contacts and perhaps even ideas to a young student whose political engagement was nevertheless self-motivated. Marie Luise had previously been active in the ‘unpolitical youth movement’, but was left unsatisfied with the generational rebellion and sought out socialist theory: ‘I found the answer in Marx and Engels’, she wrote in a 1964 article in the East German daily Neues Deutschland recounting her adolescent politicisation. Both Marx and Engels, as well as Werner Scholem had a certain influence on Marie Luise. Werner must have seen something of himself in her when they met in 1927: a young woman, alienated from her family, involved in the youth movement and in search of deeper meaning in life. She struggled with her transition to adulthood, hammered out her own worldview and searched for her path into a new society – in short, Marie Luise found herself at the same point in life in 1927 as Werner Scholem had in 1912, when he converted to socialism. The two travelled this path together for a brief period, full of enthusiasm and evidently somewhat in love with each other. But Werner’s cynicism vis-à-vis the Stalinised German Communist Party was anything but compatible with Marie Luise’s youthful optimism towards that party. Werner remained a renegade in the eyes of his former comrades, while Marie Luise quickly ascended into the inner circle of the KPD intelligence gathering service – without Werner’s protection. From then on, their lives would follow different paths, as not only Emmy, but also her daughter Edith Scholem confirms – she was born in 1918 and a teenager when her father was arrested. Edith states that Marie Luise was ordered by the KPD to end all contact with Werner, with which the young Communist complied. Marie-Luise survived fascism and war, working as a lawyer in East Berlin from 1952. In 1973, she was awarded the “Medal for Fighters Against Fascism” by the East German authorities.
Leo Roth had a more tragic fate. The Nazis were never able to trace him, and he managed to stay in Germany under a false name until being recalled to Moscow in 1935. Despite his service to the Soviet Union, he quickly became a target of Stalin’s secret police, the NKVD, who were suspicious of his contacts with foreign embassies and the Germany army, amplified by his links to Karl Korsch and other ‘renegades’. Roth’s name was placed on an NKVD list of ‘Trotskyites and other hostile elements’ even prior to the first show trials in Moscow. Arrested on 22 November 1936, Roth was sentenced to death on charges of ‘espionage’ by a military tribunal after a year of imprisonment, and executed by firing squad on 10 November 1937. He was 26 years old.
The intelligence Roth provided was ignored and left to collect dust in an archive. Stalin would conclude a pact with Hitler partitioning Eastern Europe in 1939, even though, thanks to Roth and the Hammerstein sisters, he knew of Hitler’s plans for conquest and extermination in the eastern territories first hand. Stalin’s characteristic paranoia when it came to imagined domestic threats found no equivalent in foreign policy, where the logic of the balance of forces had long superseded the revolutionary idea. That the Nazis might strike a different balance between reasons of state and ideological fervour seems not to have occurred to the Soviet leader.
Image By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=56738759
- 1. Ralf Hoffrogge, A Jewish Communist in Weimar Germany – the Life of Werner Scholem (1895–1940), Haymarket Press, Chicago 2018. This article is based on Chapter 7 of the book, all references and sources and an in-depth discussion of the case based on the juridical records can be found there. This article owes much to the work of Loren Balhorn and Jan-Peter Herrmann, who did a fantastic job in translating the German original of the Scholem biography into the English Language.
- 2. Mario Kessler, A Political Biography of Arkadij Maslow, 1891-1941: Dissident Against His Will, Cham 2020: Palgrave.
- 3. Arkadij Maslow, Die Tochter des Generals, Bebra: Berlin 2011 (original manuscript 1935).
- 4. Jung, Franz 1997, ‘Betr. Die Hammersteins – Der Kampf um die Eroberung der Befehlsgewalt im deutschen Heer 1932–1937’, in Franz Jung Werkausgabe, Vol. 9/2, Hamburg: Nautilus.
- 5. Kluge, Alexander 2003, ‘Lebendigkeit von 1931’, Die Lücke die der Teufel läßt, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, pp. 25–30.
- 6. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, The Silences of Hammerstein, Seagull Books, London 2009.
A Religion for the Unbelieving: Review of Mikhail Lifshitz, The Crisis of Ugliness
Mikhail Lifshitz
translated from the Russian and edited by David Riff
The Crisis of Ugliness: From Cubism to Pop Art
Chicago, IL: Haymarket, 2019
153 pp, 28$ pb.
ISBN 9781642590104
Reviewed by: Edward Lee-Six
Abstract
This article reviews The Crisis of Ugliness, a polemic against modern art by Mikhail Lifshitz (1905-1983). The Soviet scholar and critic, best known for his collaboration with Georg Lukács, attempted to steer a middle course in Soviet aesthetic theory, between socialist realism and avant-gardism. The present review article sets out – as sympathetically as possible – the arguments ofThe Crisis of Ugliness, one of Lifshitz’s best known works, before offering some evaluative comments in the conclusion. Given that, by today’s standards Lifshitz says the unsayable (“What? Picassonot a great artist?!” we instinctively respond), it is at least interesting to hear him out and to try to understand the epistemology and conditions of possibility for an anti-modernist discourse.
Introduction
One of the first cultural achievements of the Soviet Union was the founding in 1920 of the Moscow Vkhutemas: an art school and technical college in whose workshops thousands of students from varied social backgrounds studied the history of Western art alongside subjects such as woodwork and geometry. It was a crucible for the development of the early Soviet Union’s most daring experiments, such as constructivism and suprematism: indeed, Rodchenko and Malevich were members of the Vkhutemas teaching staff. And among the first generation of students at the post-revolutionary Vkhutemas was one Mikhail Aleksandrovich Lifshitz, a young man from a middling town north of the Sea of Azov. More than half a century later, this same Lifshitz was honoured by being elected to the USSR Academy of Arts. In the intervening years, Lifshitz had reacted against the modernist fashions of the Vkhutemas where he received his training; survived the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union (he volunteered in the Red Army and fought his way out of an encircled position); escaped the Stalinist purges of the 1930s; and, in turn, also escaped the de-Stalinisation that began in the late 1950s. He had befriended and influenced the writer Andrei Platonov, the philosopher Evald Ilyenkov, and, most famously, Georg Lukács, Lifshitz’s colleague at the Marx-Engels Institute. With such a biographicalparcours, Lifshitz can be described as the ultimate Soviet citizen, an embodiment of Soviet cultural and intellectual life. He was a witness to, or participant in, the pivotal moments of the USSR: the ebullience of the post-revolutionary years before Lenin’s death and the NEP; the purges; the Great Patriotic War; Glasnost. Everything but Perestroika. He is the USSR at its most cultured, innovative, and humane; and also at its most dogmatic and sectarian.
If Lifshitz is known today, it is for his critique of modernist art, which he considered to be incurably regressive. This is a position that he shared, mutatis mutandis, with Lukács: the two thinkers influenced one another in the development of an aesthetic theory suspicious ofl’art pour l’art and the avant-gardes. Needless to say, the prestige of modernist art (including its precursors such as Flaubert, and its successors such as Beckett) is as robust now as ever. Meanwhile, even on the left, Soviet socialism is largely discredited. Lifshitz – Picasso’s antagonist and Stalin’s defender – could hardly seem less relevant, appealing, or useful to us now. Is there any reason to read Lifshitz, beyond a historical curiosity about the more recondite areas of aesthetic theory? The present article will attempt to present the recently published English translation of Lifshitz’s 1968The Crisis of Ugliness: From Cubism to Pop Art as clearly and sympathetically as possible. The conclusion will then offer some evaluative thoughts on how Lifshitz’s legacy can be assessed in 2020, suggesting that it has at least the merit of challenging some of today’s received ideas and that there is scope for us to engage with it productively.
The Crisis of Ugliness consists of three principle chapters: ‘Myth and Reality: The Legend of Cubism’; ‘The Phenomenology of the Soup Can: The Quirks of Taste’; and ‘Why Am I Not a Modernist?’. (The original Russian edition also contains an essay by Lidiya Yakovlevna Reyngardt, ‘Modernism After the Second World War’, which is omitted from the new translation; in that original edition, but not in the translation, Reyngardt co-signs the first essay, too.) The chapters are really semi-independent essays which share a cause: the critique of non-realist visual art. Indeed, ‘ugliness’ translatesбезобразие,bezobrazie. The Russian word, as the translator David Riff explains, ‘has nuances that the English ugliness does not, connoting infantile, even carnivalesque foolishness’ (8). One could even go further:безобразие consists of the prefixбез- (bez-), meaning without, and the wordобраз (obraz), meaning ‘form’, ‘image’, or ‘appearance’. In the context of Lifshitz’s polemic against cubist and abstract art, this morphology is pertinent and functions almost as a pun: abstraction (image-less-ness) is ugliness, the title hints.
Cubism versus philistinism
The first essay begins by arguing that Cubism is a movement with a founding myth. According to Lifshitz’s polemical historicization, Cubism in its infancy faced stiff opposition from a philistine establishment, deeply wedded to a narrow orthodoxy, and set on ignoring or suppressing the subversive new art of the young Cubists. ‘Such a beginning’, writes Lifshitz, ‘predisposes us in Cubism’s favour’ (p. 23). This is partly because of a natural sympathy for the under-dog, bolstered for Lifshitz and many of his readers by a rather more politicised allegiance to oppressed revolutionaries against bourgeois elites. Moreover, it is a narrative which has an in-built, persuasive logic: today’s recognised masters were, only yesterday, shunned subversives. In other words, the cubists could remind their contemporaries that the impressionists, by then revered, were once reviled. Anyone rejecting the cubists, this reminder implied, was as foolish as those who once condemned impressionism, and by extension was failing to recognise tomorrow’s artistic heroes. This founding myth has been widely accepted in mainstream culture from its inception to the present. Thus, for example, the archetypal cubist revolutionary striving against the stubborn and philistine elites is very much the protagonist of Arté’s recent television documentary Picasso, Braque & Cie: La Révolution cubiste (2018).
Lifshitz points out the falseness of the ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’ logic. ‘The philistines of yesteryear may have shunned Rembrandt and Delacroix, but that hardly means everything they cast aside is as good as the art of those great masters’ (p. 23). The point remains pertinent to our attitudes to modern art, as the rise and recent decline of Émile Nolde’s paintings in Germany illustrates: because Nolde was un-recognised and marginalised by the Nazi régime, he was long mistaken for a model artist of resistance and martyrdom. Angela Merkel hung a Nolde painting in her office: until the artist’s fascist enthusiasms and obsequious courting of the Nazi elite made it clear that Nolde was perhaps not the model martyr the West had taken him to be (see Tooze 2019). Lifshitz’s verdict remains true: ‘Modern mythology in its contemporary phase also involves the personal drama of the artist as he clashes with a crowd of philistines, followers of conservative traditions’ (p. 24).
It is a mythology which continues to be applied to art and culture, well beyond cubism. Sometimes the emphasis falls on martyrdom, as with Nolde; sometimes it falls on the originality of the misunderstood artist, bolstered by the twenty-first century cant of ‘innovation’, one of the magic words of post-industrial capitalism. Emmanuel Macron’s promise at ‘France Digitale Day’ [sic] – ‘la France va prendre le tournant de la 5G parce que c’est le tournant de l’innovation’ [France will take the turn towards 5G, because it is the turn towards innovation] (cit. in Marisall 2020) – and the conventional enthusiasm about Picasso’s iconoclasm are two facets of the same ideology. The conjunction of modern art and techno-utopia is well illustrated by the recent example of David Hockney’s iPhone and iPad art stunts, which prompted a predictably superficial enthusiasm on the part of the bourgeois commentariat (see Grant 2010). For Lifshitz, this myth is a product of capitalist ideology, both in the way it betrays the impoverishment of bourgeois culture, and in the way it makes manifest capitalism’s need for ceaseless advance. Thus, on the one hand, he builds on the criticism of conservative French art historian André Chastel to suggest that ‘the legendary figure of the struggling innovator [is] a psychological compensation for people oppressed by the absence of genuine popular creativity’ (p. 26). On the other hand, he discerns in the excitement about ‘new’ art a form of capitalist radicalism or right-wing progressivism: ‘The abstract opposition between “old” and “new”, all the way to the deceitful demagogic utopia of the “new order”, is a presence in the ideological lexicon of our century’s regimes, be they Bonapartist or far worse’ (p. 29).
Lifshitz follows his sober take on ‘artist hagiography’ (p. 25) with some comments on the conditions under which the art in question is actually produced, pointing out that however subversive and scandalous, Cubism ‘soon came into fashion in high society in the aftermath of the First World War. Today, it is accepted without question’ (p. 28). This is partly due to the sponsors who backed the first cubists, well-connected art dealers (such as Ambroise Vollard for Picasso, for example) or middle-class investors with inherited wealth to spare, such as Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, ‘Cubism’s main Minister of Finance’ (p. 30). These dealers were backed by rich business investors, who speculated on the rising value of art, which could be bought cheap because unrecognised before rising sharply in value with the Copernican turn of the movement’s breakthrough. The dynamic of an ever-advancing frontier of artistic innovation is perfectly suited to the business needs of an investor. ‘People think of this as an art movement, while actually there is movement on the market of painting’ (p. 31). The ‘dominant philistines adopted the spontaneous forces of revolt and even turned them into an area of capital investment, as one can see today’ (p. 39). According to Lifshitz not just the rise, but also the decline of the market for non-figurative art goes a long way to explaining the art itself.
The theory of Cubism
Alongside its genesis myth, Cubism rests on a theory of art. Indeed, Cubism was theorised from the first: Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger published the seminal Du Cubisme in 1912, the same year as André Salmon’sLa Jeune Peinture Française; in 1913, Apollinaire published his anthology,Les Peintres Cubistes (p. 33). The creators and the theorists of Cubism were contemporaries, often friends and colleagues. This, for Lifshitz, is part of a wider tendency in modern art towards the cerebral and the coldly theoretical: ‘the art of modernity,’ writes Lifshitz, ‘is gradually overtaken by reflection and abstract thinking, so that the line between art history and artistic practice becomes all too fine. And this really is the case, if we remember the role declarations and manifestos play in so-called modern art’ (p. 37). Not only then, is modern art characterised by a heavy and innate theoretical apparatus, it flirts with theoretical reflexivity in the works themselves.
What, then, is the theory of cubism? Its primary target is the claim made by realist art to represent objective reality and sense perception truthfully. For cubism, a two-dimensional, realist representation of an object is a betrayal of three-dimensionality and of the irreducible idiosyncrasy of individual perception. Against this, the cubists set themselves the task of representing the world in its multi-facetted fullness, without erasing the mediation of each individual’s – and each artist’s – way of seeing. What Lifshitz calls ‘the visual principle’ (p. 54), that is that paintings should look more or less like what they represent, is thus abandoned.
To renege on this principle, Lifshitz argues, is to withdraw into subjectivity, so that the artist’s only possible raw materials are ‘vacuous personal experience and morbidly fantastic concoctions’ (p. 53). Each individual becomes the measure of the outside world – as G.V. Plekhanov had argued before Lifshitz; more on this below – but this new aesthetic is elevated from subjectivism to theory and false objectivity, and combined with geometric rules and systems. The resultant cocktail is contradictory: on the one hand, ‘the hyperbolic activity of a strong will’, on the other hand, the subordination of ‘everything alive to the cold geometry of abstract form’. It is this contradiction that Lifshitz compares to the ideology of fascism throughout the book. For him, individualist revolt and conservative reaction are dialectically related:
the dominance of pure individualism […] easily turns into its own opposite. Moribund subjectivity’s complete self-denial favours the flattest system of patriarchal, antiquated ideas of heavy-handed discipline and everything the Germans call Zucht. The veneration of blood and soil, blind obedience and petit-bourgeois routine now gain the appearance of intellectual depth and become the last refuge of decadents in disguise. (p. 54)
It is not that Lifshitz is unaware of Picasso’s left-wing political sympathies or that he is a defender of high classicism. Rather, he sees modern art’s tendency towards abstraction and fascist reaction as two facets of the same decadence.
The decay of modernism: Pop Art
Lifshitz’s second chapter about Pop Art is the continuation of his chapter on Cubism, but it is a dialectical continuation. In other words, while Pop Art follows Cubism on the descending staircase of modernist art, taking its principles to a new extreme (‘the morbid desire to go beyond the boundaries of art’, p. 107) it is also the reversal or the contradiction of Cubism. Cubism refused the mimetic or ‘visual’ principle that art should resemble material reality. Having first represented reality in a distorted form, gradually reality became less and less recognisable: one sees, for instance, but the shadow of a woman in Picasso’s Standing Female Nude (1910). In this sense, Cubism cleared the way for abstraction. Pop Art, by contrast, is the tautology of realistic reality: ‘real objects now took the place of depicted ones’ (p. 110); a soup can becomes a work of art. Before the term ‘Pop Art’ was coined, Richard Huelsenbeck called it ‘factualism’ (cit. p. 111). From this perspective, Cubism is a step towards abstraction, and Pop Art a reactionagainst abstraction, preferring unmediated reality. Equally, however, as art becomes more abstract, so the materiality of the paint comes to the fore: daubs of paint do not represent; they are simply... paint. Pop is thus the continuation as well as the negation of abstraction. Lifshitz argues:
The most recent abstract painting yearns so for a confluence with crude matter and the spontaneous forces of nature that create optical effects without human help; it has come so far beyond the limits of figuration to the purely objective world that pioneers of the ‘new reality’ like Warhol have nothing left but to step across an almost non-existent boundary. (p. 130)
The evolution from Cubism to Pop Art via abstraction thus follows an aesthetic and ideological logic. It cannot, however, be explained without the catalyst of economic factors. Lifshitz links the soaring fortunes of Pop Art to a crash in the market for abstract art in 1962. Abstract art, which had once seemed like a well-oiled business enterprise and clever capital investment, had its confidence shaken. By 1963, the prices of abstract art in France had fallen 40% (p. 110). In the same breath, its aesthetic and cultural prestige came into question: one journalist opined that ‘abstract form is no longer innovative in art’, and that ‘non-objective’ painting was in decline. For Lifshitz, this is ‘a very striking example of capital’s dominance over all areas of human activity’ (p. 114-15). Inevitably, the cultural and the economic eventually are aligned: Paris, though no longer an economically dominant world centre, had remained a global cultural capital. With the triumph of Pop Art, we see New York claiming a cultural pre-eminence to match its economic hegemony. A certain amount of political hustling plays mid-wife to this economic ‘law’: Rauschenberg’s first prize at the 1964 Venice Biennale cannot be explained, Lifshitz points out, without the militant and chauvinistic support of the US Embassy. Writing at the end of the 60s, Lifshitz reflects:
The roles were reversed. By now, there is something academic about even the most aggressive forms of abstraction, such as ‘gestural painting’ or ‘action painting’, that is, the formless drips, lines, and mysterious dots of Jackson Pollock, Willem De Kooning, or Georges Mathieu, while the leaders of abstract painting consider themselves to be the last classics. Their piteous laments remind the world of the death of art under the pressure of Pop from America. (p. 109)
The stage is set for Pop Art’s huge commercial success (it is typical that a New York businessman now chose James Rosenquist’s F-111 1965 Pop Art colossus as the investment of choice) and international prestige (in the teeth of fierce criticism from Paris and the defenders of abstraction and modernism). But what were the conditions in America which determined Pop Art’s emergence and success?
Three inter-related factors come to the fore. The first is the increase in the place of retail in the American economy. Lifshitz points out: ‘In the USA, employment in the retail sector grew 30 times faster than in production between 1952 and 1962’ (p. 117). Retail is selling to many individual customers, customers who are ‘end-users’: it is directly dependent on the supply chain and on demand. An economy which is driven to a significant extent by retail is, therefore, one in which the creation of demand is of primary importance. Capitalist commodity production does not (contrary to its own myth) inflect supply to meet demand: it creates demand for goods which powerful producers want to market. The weapon for the creation of demand is advertising: this is the second factor Lifshitz identifies as at the root of Pop Art.
Modern advertising – as it came to exist in the second half of the twentieth-century, mobilising the gamut of psychoanalytic manipulation and multi-million dollar campaigns, under the guiding influence of the Freudian pioneer of ‘public relations’, Edward Bernaeys (see Adam Curtis’s 2002 documentary, The Century of the Self) – holds the key to Pop Art. The products advertised are not exclusively luxury commodities, but also simple goods of everyday life: a soup can, for example. Extravagant publicity can be devoted to marketing the most humble objects. Lifshitz remarks:
The Emperors knew that “bread and circuses” are what the throng really needs. In contemporary imperialist states dominated by production for the sake of profit, there is no difference between these two elements. (p. 118)
With product placement and TV advertising, consumption blends into entertainment: panem iscircenses. It is at this intersection of inflated consumerism and debased culture that a movement in which a soup canis a work of art can be born.
Simultaneously, consumption becomes ever more abstract and arbitrary. How can one choose between one brand of canned soup and another? Advertising’s role is to force a decision in this competitive and arbitrary panorama: the attack on objectivity is the third force that emerges from Lifshitz’s analysis.
The goal is to make the consumer believe in the miraculous qualities of one of the 279 brands of washing powder on sale. Of course, the consumer isn’t so stupid as to believe this good news with utter naïveté, but then again, he doesn’t have to. Influenced by all the collateral conditions grinding up any remaining belief in objective truth, denizens of “era of consumption” have already reached of level of doublethink where the existence of anything good is taken as a matter of pure convention. (p. 117)
Pop Art rushes into the breach opened by this attack on objectivity, on the notion that the objects of our sensory perception can be meaningfully ranked and differentiated. Lifshitz quotes Roy Lichtenstein: ‘Why do you think a hill or a tree is more beautiful than a gas pump?’ Capitalism’s indifference to the ‘real content’ (p. 115) or use value of the commodity, replaced by the rat race of marketing, makes possible an art form whose preferred subjects and material are the chaff of Western consumerism. How then do we know when Pop Art is art, and not merely the worthless materials of everyday banality? Convention, Lifshitz answers, is the deciding factor. Advertising hinges on the imposition of normativity: for Pop Art, too, it is an agreement amongst the cognoscenti that is required for the doors of an art gallery to open to a ‘readymade’. Thus, behind Pop Art’s populist accessibility lurks a dependency on elitist convention:
If you consider a soup can or a water faucet an artwork because the artist set these objects apart from their ‘usual context’, thus endowing them with new meaning, it should be completely clear that the proportion of convention in such works is far greater than in any other object ever known as painting or sculpture. After all, the crux of the matter is the act of separation, which must be recognised by the initiated. Neither the soup can’s substance nor its outer appearance have changed in the least. (p. 120)
The ‘mix of financial speculation, advertising, and coercion characteristic of everyday life in the epoch of imperialism’ (p. 121) converge in an attack on thought which leaves the consumer (of art or of commodities) dazed. The barrage of advertising and the commodity glut produce an experience of numbed exhaustion in the Western consumer. This final condition completes the appeal of Pop Art: for Lifshitz, the very inanimate muteness of the objects which constitute pop art is desirable. There is a perceived – but false – excess of consciousness, so that we see in a dumb box of Brillo pads a longed-for quietus. Lifshitz reminds us of Andy Warhol’s rhetorical question: ‘I’d like to be a soup-can, wouldn’t you?’ (p. 122). If Pop Art finds most dumb objects appealing because of their very muteness, then this is to be understood as a capitulation and retreat in the face of a reality which is intolerable:
If you cannot reach the desired degree of freedom, you have to kill the need for consciousness and debase the mirror reflecting such an abominable world, putting an end to any difference between consciousness and its object. Hence, the strange idea of replacing objects pictured on canvas with real objects and the most senseless ones at that. Figuration is cancelled as unneeded and secondary. (p. 126)
Ultimately, Lifshitz sees Pop Art (and Cubism before it) as a form of art which – though extensively theorised – is against thought. It registers that thought has become unbearable for those living under twentieth-century capitalism: reflexivity is crippling, as it is for Meyrink’s centipede who can no longer walk once it stops to think about what its 35th leg is doing (p. 123). An ‘overdeveloped intellect’ is blamed for the loss of touch with any vital principle and we reach towards the ‘utopia of a happy new barbarism’ in which ‘reactionary mythmaking’ is mobilised to stir up hatred against the intelligentsia (p. 123). It is this reaction against thought which ultimately convinces Lifshitz of the terrifying kinship between the evolution of twentieth century art away from figuration and a reactionary politics which ranges from fascism to the liberalism of the propertied classes.
Modernism and Fascism
The third chapter, ‘Why am I not a Modernist?’ (a play on Bertrand Russel’s 1927 essay ‘Why I am not a Christian’) clarifies and emphasises the link that Lifshitz posits between modernism and fascism. Lifshitz stresses that he does not think that Picasso was a fascist: ‘Of course not’ (p. 135). Equally, he recognises that there is no direct connection between modernist art and fascist violence: ‘Of course there isn’t’ (p. 137). But he is nevertheless determined to oppose modernismen bloc.
What do modernism and fascism have in common, then? Lifshitz underlines the following points: a cult of vitality; a disgusted rejection of modern civilization; distrust of the masses and their cultural aspirations; paired with a faith in the superman (an aesthetic leader for the modernists; a political leader for the fascists) (p. 136-37). The fundamental premise is the renunciation of reality in favour of enthusiastic fervour. The congregations who worship at the shrine of modernism may be intellectuals and artists, rather than peasant masses, the cult of modern art is no less an ersatz religion, with all its attendant irrationality: as Lifshitz writes in a letter, ‘Modernism is a religion for the unbelieving (and sometimes believing) intellectuals of the twentieth century’ (to V. Dostal, Lifshitz 2011, p. 40, cit. and trans. in Pavlov 2012, p. 191). Lifshitz describes a statement by Picasso (an apology for myth-making and enthusiasm, irrespective of truth), as:
the renunciation of realistic pictures, which Picasso sees as an empty illusion, that is, deception, and the affirmation of wilful fiction, designed to spark enthusiasm, that is, the conscious deception of mythmaking (p. 142).
Even Lifshitz’s detractors will have to recognise the presence of these elements in modern art, including the art of the committed leftists such as Picasso. Furthermore, Lifshitz reminds us that, despite the artists who inhabited the contradiction of a left-wing political commitment, combined with a modernist aesthetic commitment, many – if not most – modernists were sympathetic to or actively involved in the most reactionary political movements: Lifshitz cites Marinetti as an example, but the list could be extended to Dalí, Pound, Yeats, T.S. Eliot, and so on.
And what about the artwork itself? Is there such a difference between the experiments of the modernists, surrealists, and the avant-garde, and the academic classicism which found favour under the Third Reich? Lifshitz points out that ‘there was plenty of ordinary modernist posturing in the Third Reich’s official art’ (p.140). Meanwhile, we find a petit-bourgeois amateurism in Le Douanier Rousseau, and an academic fastidiousness in Surrealism’s hyper-real rendering of detail (p. 140). Here, Lifshitz is clearly mindful also ofсоцреализм, ‘sotzrealizm’, the social realism, which came to dominate official Soviet art from the late thirties to the post-Stalin period: he imagines the archetypal modernist as the ‘right-hand-man of Yezhov or Beria’ (successive directors of the NKVD under Stalin) (p. 140). In both ideology and in execution, the leaden régime realism of the Third Reich (or of the darkest years of Stalinism) and the fantastical inventions of the modernists are interdependent phenomena. The most pathetic of these reactionary artist figures is, of course, Hitler himself, the ultimate failed painter (p. 139).
Conclusion: Lifshitz then and now
What is the current state of scholarship and publishing on Mikhail Lifshitz in general? He made his first major contributions as an editor, meticulously organising a ground-breaking collection of extracts of Marx’s and Engels’s writing on art (in two volumes, Moscow, 1933), followed by Lenin’s writing on culture and the arts (Moscow, 1938). Although these books are out of print, they can be found without too much difficulty as PDFs, in libraries, or bought second-hand online. In the eighties, Lifshitz’s collected works were published in Moscow in three volumes. In the last decade, the study of Lifshitz’s thought has been given a major boost by the publication of his correspondence with Lukács (Moscow, 2011). If Lifshitz is known for anything it is for being Lukács’s colleague and primary interlocutor at the Marx-Engels Institute during the Hungarian’s Moscow years (1930-45) and they remained friends and correspondents until Lukács’s death in the seventies. This publication confirms that the two thinkers influenced one another reciprocally: it would be wrong to think of Lifshitz as Lukács’s disciple. The volume of correspondence with Lukács is accompanied by another volume of letters from Lifshitz to his colleagues, Arslanov and Mikhailov, and to his Czech translator, Dostal (Moscow, 2011).
The situation in English, unfortunately, is less promising. There is an English version of Lifshitz’s early anthology of Marx and Engels on art, under the title The Philosophy of Art of Karl Marx. This was published in the same year as the original (but there is a more recent edition from Pluto Press, London, 1973). Between 1938 and David Riff’s translation last year, no complete work by Mikhail Lifshitz appeared in English translation to my knowledge. One can only hope that the translation ofThe Crisis of Ugliness is symptomatic of a rekindling. In this connection, two recent academic articles are noteworthy: Evgeni V. Pavlov’s 2012 review of Lifshitz’s correspondence and Pavel Khazanov’s 2018 article on Lifshitz and Andrei Platonov. Both constitute valuable guidance to those interested in Lifshitz and the present article is much indebted to them.
How could Lifshitz’s critique of modernism be evaluated today? Three main counters seem available. First, much of what Lifshitz has to say is not a critique of modernism, but of its reception. This is a potent demystifier when opposed to the pieties of liberal cultural waffle. But it is soon disarmed when faced with a materialist appreciation of modernism (say, the essays of Sergei Eisenstein), or simply with the classics of modernist aesthetic theory (for example, the young Beckett’s essay on James Joyce, or Ezra Pound’s ABC of Reading). We may need Lifshitz against the inanities of how modernism has been commercialised in the West, but there is more to modernism than that.
Lifshitz has a case against, not just modernism’s reception, but against modernism per se. This is the second issue. What is the substance of Lifshitz’s prosecution? Essentially, that modernism abandons the visual principle and so abandons reality. But this ‘and so’ is open to the charge ofnon sequitur. Surely, we might counter, the idea that paintings should look like what they represent is an impoverished and reductive notion of how a painting might relate to reality. Is any non-realist painting therefore inwardly turned and invested in the artist’s own morbid fantasies? A reader of Lifshitz could be forgiven for thinking so… But a work of art could be invested in reality in other ways than literal resemblance – at the level of affect, feeling, tone, intention. And how does Lifshitz’s denunciation of modernism-as-abstraction square with modes of creativity which are necessarily non-representative: music, for example? Are Stravinsky or Weinberg any further from reality than Bach? Clearly, there is a strong case to be made against art that has abandoned the terrain of reality and social life in order to plunge into an onanistic ego-centrism. But the synonymity of abstraction and ego-centrism is naïve and clumsy.
Furthermore, reading Lifshitz after Adorno and Jameson it is possible to turn his argument on its head. The modernist artist is too shocked by the barbarity of the contemporary world to be able to represent it as a coherent totality and retreats into a fragmented and disturbed inner life? Good! The worse the better, for it is precisely through such attitudes that we can grasp the experience of alienation and reification, of a monadic and isolated social life, of an exhausted popular creativity. In other words, it is precisely through everything that Lifshitz attacks in modernist art that we can grasp – and therefore oppose – what it means to live under twentieth- and twenty-first century Western capitalism. Lifshitz seems aware of this in his critique of Plekhanov, but he stops short of applying it to his own argument.
Third, and finally, the terms and stakes Lifshitz’s polemic have dated. Whatever we make of his conviction that modernist art is of a kidney with fascism, this claim has a different force and urgency made from the 1930s to the 1960s by a veteran of the Great Patriotic War than it does today. Despite the recent and irresponsible resurgence on the left of the term ‘fascism’ to denounce right-wing populism, fascism is no longer a relevant force in politics or culture. Meanwhile, Lifshitz wrote in a conjuncture which was – at least at the level of the USSR – in some senses revolutionary. That is, he – along with Lukács – was writing in the context of the forging of a revolutionary culture that would be worthy of the новый советский человек (novy sovetsky chelovek), the New Soviet Human. That time has passed, and the idea of attacking the great achievements of modernism in order to found a New Human on a higher plan of consciousness seems silly or utopian.
Bearing all that in mind, what sobre points can be made to give weight and relevance to Lifshitz’s thought? Certainly, Lifshitz’s contributions to aesthetic theory in the Soviet Union were significant. The mere fact of publishing The Crisis of Ugliness, complete with its illustrations, popularised previously unknown modern art behind the iron curtain. In general, he can be thought of as one of thepasseurs of Western culture to the other side of the iron curtain. Simultaneously, much of his work, includingThe Crisis of Ugliness, is a subtle but recognisable critique of Stalinism. More specifically, his ideas engage dynamically and thoughtfully with the early Russian Marxist, G.V. Plekhanov. Plekhanov, the ‘father of Russian Marxism’, as he is sometimes called, had already attacked cubism from a Marxist perspective as ‘ugliness cubed’. It would be a mistake to dismiss Plekhanov’s critique high-handedly, but there is no denying that it is, in some respects, crude. Lifshitz’s pages on Plekhanov (pp. 48-70) move his predecessor’s ideas up to the next level of the spiral. What Plekhanov failed to understand, Lifshitz shows, is the dialectical relation between inwardly turned subjectivism and a false objectivity which together form the contradiction of modernism’s ‘ideological chiaroscuro’ (pp. 55-56). Put differently, Plekhanov did not register the utopian element in Cubism, the desire to flee from this world and to create a new one, with its own rules, its own geometry, in art. This utopian flight, Lifshitz shows, is in turn the product of a modern bourgeois consciousness, ‘in constant conflict with itself’ (pp. 60).
As well as trying to renew early Soviet theory, Lifshitz navigated a delicate course through the troubled waters of Stalinism and spent his life struggling to balance criticism of and contribution to the USSR. In the Soviet Union, cultural production was subject to the same rules as industrial production: it was to follow a five-year plan and contribute to the creation of national wealth and the defence of socialism against Western aggression. Lifshitz was closely involved with this project of cultural production and was not afraid to get his hands dirty opposing a work which didn’t follow ‘the line’. Equally, however, he was tenaciously and courageously critical of bureaucratisation and the Stalinist version of state socialism, without lapsing into pro-Western dissidence. In aesthetic matters, he steered between the formalist experiments of early Soviet culture, on the one hand (Mayakovsky, Meyerhold, and so on), and Stalinist social-realism, on the other. Instead, Lifshitz – with Lukács – advocated a reappropriation of bourgeois high realism for socialist ends. There can be no doubt that, with hindsight, this third way seems richer and wiser than Mayakovsky’s showing-off or Zhdanov’s party art.
Meanwhile, in the West (and not just in the mainstream media), the norm is a contempt for and ignorance of Soviet culture and intellectual life. The usual narrative is one of the misunderstood artist (Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn often in the starring roles), oppressed by the leaden machinery of state dogma. ‘But the Bolsheviks had little interest in either the avant-garde or art free from state control’, sighs one article (Pinkham 2017), while another sneers at ‘the absurd and horrifying improbability of Bolshevik culture’ (Clark 2017). That the Bolshevik revolution was a huge and unique unfurling of popular creativity is a truth with which we have lost touch. There is all too little sense either of the lively and complex intellectual and cultural debates – undoubtedly richer between 1917 and 1991 than at any other point in Russian history – or of the fact that some Soviet ideas about art, including a suspicious attitude towards the avant-gardes, were not irrational and philistine dogmatism, but in many respects open-minded, creative, and progressive.
Second, we in the West have good reason to be dissatisfied with our current conceptual arsenal for understanding art in ideological and political terms. For a long time, bourgeois criticism had given up doing so at all: l’art pour l’art was the alpha and omega of literary criticism and art history, producing a narrative internal to the medium itself, as one formal innovation leads to the next in a predictable sequence of ‘ground-breaking’ artistic ‘revolutions’, autonomous from material conditions and social life, but for a few notable ‘events’, such as the First World War. This tradition of idealist and superficially contextualist criticism has more recently found a moralising edge: works of art, and especially artists, are judged on the ethical correctness of their opinions and whether a pantheon of cardboard cut-out identities have been duly represented. Meanwhile, a work of art can tick all the boxes of this moral inquisition and still contrive to be offensively reactionary, as the recent example of the stridently ‘woke’ yet flagrantly racist novel,American Dirt, amply illustrates. The propertied classes rush to prop up this moralising, subjectivist, and emotive idealism – from which any mention of the working class, exploitation, or capitalism has been expunged – hoping to gain from this pious posturing some veneer of moral legitimacy. It is difficult to imagine a paradigm in which works of art are more clumsily or counter-productively ‘politicised’. In such a conjuncture, Lifshitz’s project of a materialist aesthetic critique may not be as out-dated as all that.
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Pinkham, Sophie 2017. ‘When were you thinking of shooting yourself?’, London Review of Books, 39.4 (16 February)
Plekhanov, G.V., 1953, Art and Social Life, trans. Arthur Rothstein (London: Lawrence and Wishart)
Ramade, Frédéric dir. 2018, Picasso, Braque & Cie: La Révolution cubiste, ARTÉ [television documentary]
Tooze, Adam 2019. ‘To the Bitter End’, London Review of Books, 41.23 (5 December)
This article is indebted to Pavel G. Abushkin, who offered helpful guidance on Lifshitz’s place in Soviet culture. All errors, however, are mine.
Edward Lee-Six is Lecteur d’anglais at the École normale supérieure, Paris.
e.a.leesix@gmail.com
WOMEN AND THE CLASS STRUGGLE (1978)
(An attempt to synthesise the results of discussions held between the 3rd and 8th July, 1978)
Preface
This report was published in the Bulletin of the Communist Platform, No. 2, June–September 1978, and is an attempt to present the discussions of two socialist feminist workshops held in Bombay (a smaller,more theoretical Marxist discussion from 3 to 5 July, and a bigger discussion including a larger number of women activists from 6 to 8 July) in a coherent manner. It therefore involves some selectiveness in what is reported and what is not, which undoubtedly was influenced by our own standpoint.
We may not now agree with every word we wrote then, but looking back at it after a period of more than 40 years, one thing that strikes us is our prescience in identifying sexual assault as a major issue, and in attempting to accommodate it within a revolutionary socialist perspective. A new wave of the Indian women’s movement emerged after the Supreme Court in 1979 reversed a decision of the Bombay High Court and acquitted two policemen accused of raping a minor Adivasi (indigenous) girl, Mathura. Autonomous feminist groups were formed and erupted in protest up and down the country, and they continued to organise on various issues, particularly violence against women, with large-scale protest actions, sustained campaigns in support of victims, demands for legal action against perpetrators, and proposals for reformulation of patriarchal laws. We were involved in the earliest groups, the ‘Forum Against Rape’ – later renamed the ‘Forum Against Oppression of Women’ – in Bombay, and Stree Sangharsh and Saheli in Delhi. These groups were broadly socialist, but independent of political parties, including left parties.
However, this mass upsurge of women after the Supreme Court decision in the Mathura rape case also showed how short-sighted we had been at the time of our workshops in opining that large-scale feminist struggles might not arise in India. The Indian women’s movement surged ahead in subsequent decades, along with an upsurge in movements based on identity politics.
Secondly, we can identify an intersectional analysis (although of course we did not use the word), which sees gender and class oppression under capitalism as coming from different roots and producing a form of oppression of proletarian women that was different from the oppression of working-class men as well as upper-class women. This reflection was triggered by our experience in socialist groups where the ‘women’s question’ was seen only in relation to capitalism, ignoring the connected but independent structure of patriarchal oppression. By contrast with the mechanical materialist understanding of the Communist parties of that time, we were trying to develop a phenomenological understanding of the roots of women’s oppression, and to identify the intersection between gender oppression and class oppression in order to develop the elements of a socialist feminist perspective drawn from the experience of working-class women.
This also entailed going beyond the liberal, existentialist and radical feminist theories circulating at that time. In exploring the difference between bourgeois feminism and proletarian feminism, we discussed the issue of unwaged domestic labour and the daily and generational reproduction of the labour force, linking it with the reproduction of the capitalist system as a whole. The idea that men should share domestic labour so that more women can participate in wage-labour has been almost mainstreamed now, but the redistribution of resources to deal with class inequalities is not on the agenda. On the contrary, the effects of economic crisis for working-class women includes hidden costs in the form of an increase in the time spent in invisible labour: a reproductive tax paid by working-class women to sustain households in the face of cuts to the public sector, privatisation of public services, and macro-economic policies based on the assumption that the time women spend to sustain their families and the economy is infinitely elastic. The commodification of biological reproduction through the emergence of global birth markets and the renting out of wombs by poor women in the South raises further questions for a socialist-feminist perspective.
The question of what goes on in working-class households continues to be a matter of debate among Marxists, with some still holding that it is only a site of individual consumption and not of production, others holding that there is production of use-values but not of exchange-value within such households, and yet others arguing that both use-values and exchange-value are produced in them. We also tried to understand the complexity of the struggle of proletarian women trying to preserve a concern for personal relationships of mutual recognition and love, and how this needs to become a part of the working-class struggle rather than being seen as contradicting it.
What we – and the autonomous feminist groups that were formed in the 1980s – did not take up initially were the multiple intersecting axes of oppression affecting women from Dalit, Adivasi and minority ethno-religious communities as well as LGBT+ communities These were subsequently taken up self-reflexively and in action by members of autonomous feminist groups, albeit unevenly and not always to the satisfaction of the oppressed groups, and the debate continues even today.
The Indian women’s movement and the upsurge of movements based on identity politics have raised crucial issues, but at the same time there has been a shift away from class, with a narrow focus only on gender and other identities in analysis and action. This makes it all the more important to bring back and broaden the question we tried to tackle when we examined the interaction between class and gender. With right-wing ideologies relentlessly gaining strength, the need to identify the linkages as well as the contradictions between capitalism, patriarchy, heteronormativity, and caste and ethno-religious dominance becomes imperative.
Many of the issues we identified as requiring further research and analysis were ones we worked on in the following years and decades. In that sense, these workshops can be seen as setting out an agenda.
Amrita Chhachhi and Rohini Hensman, September 2020
***
Introduction
What is a revolutionary perspective for women? This is a question which communists have by and large evaded in one way or another. The most common mode of evasion is to say that the oppression of women is inevitable in capitalist society and can only be abolished when that society is overthrown. The conclusion: all efforts must be directed towards the overthrow of capitalist society, and women must be drawn into this effort wherever possible, or at least prevented from hindering it. Why this is an evasion is that it ignores the way in which the oppression of women is itself an obstacle to the overthrow of capitalism and why, therefore, a struggle against this oppression is an integral part of the struggle against capitalism. If the latter standpoint is accepted, then the elaboration of a revolutionary perspective for women can be seen to be a necessary task of communists. These discussions were an attempt to begin this task. To this end, certain fundamental questions were identified and sought to be answered: What are the roots of the oppression of women? What form does this oppression take in capitalist society? What movements have arisen in opposition to it, and what is the ideal tendency of these movements? What specific form does the oppression of women take in India? Have any movements arisen in opposition to it, and if so, what is their nature? It is out of the answers to these questions that the elements of a perspective would emerge.
The Roots of Oppression
The question we took up as our point of departure was: what are the roots of the oppression of women? The answer, proposed by Engels and subsequently accepted on the Left – that it is a consequence of the development of private property in the means of production – struck us as being inadequate. These roots, we felt, went deeper and originated earlier: the subjugation of women has been a feature of the most primitive and the most modern societies and appears to be rooted in some fundamental characteristic of the human race. What could this be?
One possible answer which was discussed was that this characteristic is the basic biological difference that makes it possible for a man to rape while a woman cannot. The implications of this can be drawn out by a comparison between human and animal sexuality. In animals, sexuality is linked with reproduction; likewise in human beings. But, in animals, a merely biological relationship is involved, while, in human beings, it is a human relationship. This means that, on one side, the relationship can rise far above what is possible for animals, to love; but, on the other side, it can also be degraded to a sub-animal level, to the forcible violation of another’s person, to rape. On one side complete mutual affirmation of each other; on the other, self-affirmation as the total negation of the other’s humanity, the reduction of the other to a passive object.
But the mere possibility of rape is not sufficient to account for itsoccurrence. The latter needs to be explained by the universal human desire for recognition. This can perhaps best be explained by an elaboration of Susan Brownmiller’s metaphysical parable in terms of Hegel’s Master/Slave dialectic. The primordial fight occurs not between a man and another man, but between a woman who rejects a man as mate and a man who tries to compel her to accept him. He seeks recognition of himself as a desirable partner, but can gain it only by negating her autonomy, which gives her the right to say no. Hence the fight, in which the woman is inevitably defeated, raped, reduced to the status of a thing. Thus, the first class division in society is that between men and women; women as slaves, objects to be possessed, and men as possessors. To begin with, women are ‘public property’, to be possessed, violated at will. It requires a higher development of man’s sense of his own individuality before the idea of permanent possession of women arises. (And, here, surely, language is very revealing. It is said that a man `possesses’ a woman when he sleeps with her; but never vice versa. In this one word is contained the whole idea of woman as a mere thing, a possession.)
What is being argued is not that the subjugation of women arises from some inherent male aggressiveness, but, rather, that this is the primary form in which the man seeks recognition. While the woman, by biological fiat, is compelled to recognise the other’s humanity and to depend on his volition as to whether he will recognise her or not, the man is bound by no such requirement. It is important to emphasis that the essential element is the desire for recognition, which here takes the form of domination, of compelling the other to concede recognition and thus of negating the other’s autonomy as a human being. Ultimately, it is a most inadequate form, for the recognition is accorded not by another who is in turn recognised as a human being but by a thing, a slave.
If this is correct, then it becomes much easier to explain why women have, until very recent times, accepted their subordinate status. To be reduced to the status of the possession of one man may constitute a denial of one’s full humanity, but it certainly carries many advantages. As owner, he has obligations as well as rights – first and foremost, the obligation to protect the woman from other predators. On the side of society, too, it is recognised that this woman, by virtue of belonging to one man, cannot be violated at will by others without fear of punishment. Secondly, within this stable set-up, however lop-sided it is, some degree of human affection is possible between the partners, and between them and their children or at least the woman and her children. These are compensations. So, she accepts defeat.
Here we have a situation far more complex that Hegel’s Master/Slave dialectic, some of the premises of which are distinctly dubious, although uncritically accepted by Simone de Beauvoir. To begin with, the assumption that the Slave gives up the fight because of the unwillingness to risk life, while the Master wins because he is prepared to risk his life. Here, on the contrary, the woman gives up precisely because she does not wish to lose what Hegel might call her `honour’, i.e. she does not wish to be subjected to a process of humiliation and dehumanisation worse than death. And secondly, we may question the assumption that to risk one’s life in order to kill, rape, torture, plunder and enslave, as in war – i.e. in order to destroy and degrade life – is really more human than to risk one’s life in order to give, preserve and protect life. For women are certainly capable of fighting to the death, or working and starving themselves to death, to protect the lives of those they love. It appears, at least, that de Beauvoir’s equation of killing withrisk of life is questionable. Yet the real loss of humanity involved for women in acceptance of their subjugation cannot be ignored either; the abandonment of the development of most of their capacities is a devaluation and mutilation of their individualities which produces its own special neuroses and distorted expressions of love – love as possessiveness of husband and children, slavish docility, an attempt to live a vicarious life through the male members of the family.
It is important to stress that we are here talking not about the historical origins but theroots of women’s oppression. In other words, this element underlies all oppression of women up to the present, although the oppression itself may take different forms in different epochs, and in a class society may take different forms for women of different classes. Just as ruling class power embodied in the state is not at all times experienced as naked coercion, the subjugation of women may not for long periods be felt as brutal oppression. Nonetheless, we found this element underlying many more subtle and insidious forms of oppression.
Very early, then, a certain role is allotted to women as a consequence of their biological difference from men. The same biological fact makes them an object of desire, the captive whose desire is desired, and an instrument of production of the most fundamental element of production – labour-power. Around these functions an institution grows up – the family. The second question we asked was: what is the location of the family within a materialist conception of history?
All societies, from the most primitive to the most advanced, must reproduce human life; hence in each society some specific social relations of human reproduction, a specific form of the family, must exist. The reproduction of human life is simultaneously the reproduction of the individuals between whom those relations are formed, and the production of labour-power, which enters as an element into the process of production. In all societies of relative scarcity, and especially in those where labour-power is a dominant element in production, there arises the necessity for social control over women, who are the reproducers of labour-power. It is evident, then, that the social relations of human reproduction, kinship and family relationships, are linked to the social relations of production, and that the form of the family is determined by the relations of production. We concluded that any definition of the mode of production must account for the relations of human reproduction and their link with the relations of production.
The domination of women now becomes a more complex affair. Initially it was undertaken in order to ensure a captive source of recognition for the man’s individuality; but this very act gives him control over the production of labour-power, the most important means of production. This control in turn is a source of social recognition, recognition by society as someone of worth and value. There is a distinction between these two forms of recognition, although they are interdependent. Suppose, for example, that X is an excellent musician, who for some reason suffers a paralysis and can no longer perform. For the public who admired his performances, he may cease to exist; but there is something in his personality, an inner core, which survives this loss, and for someone who loves him ‘for his own sake’ he certainly would not have ceased to exist. Conversely, if his performances have been recorded, he may continue to get social recognition long after he is dead. But someone who loved him can no longer recognise his individuality, because as a person he has ceased to exist. For a living individual, both forms of recognition are essential. Lacking individual recognition in a close personal relationship or relationships, he or she becomes a complex of social attributes – citizen, doctor, athlete, carpenter, mechanic, entertainer or whatever – but without any centre which can integrate these attributes into a single personality. And since consciousness of oneself is dependent on recognition by the other, the self will also be cognised as a disintegrated self. This will inevitably reflect back in a negative fashion on the individual’s contribution to society as a whole. On the other hand, for an individual to express and gain recognition for all his or her capacities within one or a few relationships is impossible; many capacities require a wider social context for expression at all, and lacking this, simply will not develop. An individual deprived of this wider social context will thus likewise be crippled, and the sense of loss of oneself which results from this crippling must inevitably distort and corrode all close personal relationships.
Social recognition is accorded to individuals for some supposed or real contribution to society, and two major forms have existed historically: the performance of labour, which results in the production of a service or a material product; and the ownership of property, which, if separated from labour-power, becomes a condition for the performance of labour. In all societies where labour-power is the dominant element in production, control over its production – i.e. control over women – would be an important source of social recognition and power (e.g. tribal societies where women and grain – means of reproduction and subsistence – were in the control of elders). Here, too, it is important to note, is a different form of achieving recognition through domination: social status as power, control over other human beings.
Once again, where does this leave women? On one side their subordination is necessary in order to guarantee individual or personal recognition to the male half of society; on the other side their subordination is also necessary in order to ensure social control over the production of labour-power as an essential means of production. When these two sides come together, they neatly trap women in a cage. But – and this is an important consideration – it is a gilded cage. So long as she produces children to the required extent and in the required manner, so long as she single-mindedly recognises the man she has accepted as her Lord and Master, so long as she cares for and looks after the whole family, she is adulated and idealised as the repository of all virtue and honour, goodness and beauty, the conscience of society, selfless devotion, and so on and so forth. Even though this hardly counts as recognition of her individuality, it is still better than nothing. Challenge this role, however, and she runs the risk of the most brutal punishment – being burned as a witch, perhaps, or gang-raped, a form of punishment which we found has been used both in the most primitive tribal societies and in contemporary capitalist societies.
It is not surprising, then, that most women do not challenge; they accept the role, and the necessary crippling of their capacities and personalities that goes with it. An example of this is the vast number of love-poems written by men to women extolling their beauty, goodness, etc. and the relatively insignificant number of such poems written by women to men, although love is supposed to be their sole end and aim in life. The point is that a love-poem, although addressed to an individual, is a social form of expression; and women, although they are expected to express love in their person, are not encouraged to express themselves in a wider social context. Their creativity must adapt and limit itself to expression within the confines of the family. This exposes the admiration they are accorded as admiration for some treasured article of property like a fine work of art. The relationship of possession in marriage is once again underlined in the fact that marital rape is not considered to be a possibility: clearly, one cannot steal one’s own property.
Oppression under Capitalism and the Feminist Movement
The fundamental relation of production of bourgeois society is that between the bourgeoisie and proletariat. The relations of reproduction must therefore reproduce these two basic classes; that is, they must produce human individuals belonging to these classes, and therefore constitute a system of human relationships within which they can be produced. (For the moment, we left out of consideration intermediate and disintegrating strata.) This, then, is the function of the family in bourgeois society. This discussion raised many questions. Two basic questions seem to be involved. (1) What is the adequate form of the family in the capitalist mode of production? (2) Is it identical in the bourgeoisie and the proletariat?
The bourgeoisie, according to the Communist Manifesto, tears away the sentimental veil from the family, and reduces all relationships to relations of cash. In tearing away the individual from all bonds of a communal nature, capitalism does not spare the family community; the war of each against all of bourgeois society is the war of the lone individual against all other lone individuals. All relationships are mediated through the universal mediator, money; and all individuals, relating to one another and to society through money, are equal. The ideal tendency of bourgeois relations of reproduction, therefore, is towards the destruction of all sentiment within such relationships and their reduction to the exchange of equivalent for equivalent. i.e. sex for sex or sex for money. Children are the heaviest losers in this system; having nothing of value to exchange, and no means of struggling for their own individual interests, they are inevitably pushed to the margins of society, and only tolerated even there because they perpetuate the race. A magnified and more comprehensive boarding-school system would perhaps be the most adequate form of bourgeois child-upbringing. As for the principle of inheritance, the inheritance of power was already being challenged by bourgeois thought in the eighteenth century, and there is no reason to believe that the inheritance of property by relatives is an absolute necessity in a world of share capital and public property; at any rate, the perpetuation of capitalist property can easily be conceived of even without such a system. Conversely, property itself is often an agency in breaking bonds of sentiment within the bourgeois family (one need only think of the bitter struggles over property which are well known to occur within such families).
Obviously, the existence of such relationships on a large scale in their extreme individualistic form is unthinkable. This is because social relations of reproduction are also human relations, relations within which human beings seek recognition of their value as individuals. There is surely a contradiction inherent in bourgeois individualism: individuality is sought to be expressed in the form of individualism, which is precisely a form in which it can never be realised because it negates the other, whose recognition is the condition of self-consciousness, consciousness of one’s own individuality. Yet this tendency is perhaps what is at work in the progressive dissolution of all community ties, including those of the family, in bourgeois society. At least, we can question the idea that the nuclear family is the adequate form of the bourgeois family.
In the proletarian family, it was agreed, there existed the material basis for superior human relations in the absence of property and the constant struggle against capitalist exploitation; but how exactly these manifested themselves was not clear. One thing seems to be apparent: that the relations in a proletarian family cannot be relations of competition, of a war between the individuals in it. The very survival of the proletariat depends on the limiting of competition within it, and this is more than a formal matter: a sense of solidarity and comradeship is an essential emotional condition for the proletarian struggle. If these were to be eroded at their most vital point, the results could be drastic. This is perhaps the source of the violent opposition initially offered by male workers to the entry of female workers into the labour-force as competitors with them on the labour market, thus bringing competition into the family itself. This opposition takes a reactionary form at first; but the impulse behind it is as much a resistance to the break-up of human relationships that offer some emotional sustenance as an effort by the men to preserve a hierarchical family structure. If only the latter element were involved, it would be impossible to explain why proletarianwomen also seek to perpetuate the family, sometimes going through struggle and hardship in order to do so. They would not so easily become deluded victims of ‘bourgeois ideology’ unless it in some way, however inadequately, met their own needs. When we discussed this question it became apparent that in withdrawing from the wage-labour force, women workers were not merely a passive object of technological change, pressure from their menfolk or bourgeois ideology; rather that this, like absenteeism, was a form of protest against the alienation of factory labour, the extra burden it constitutes for them, as well as a positive assertion of their concern for their children’s welfare. The major factor seemed to be that in housework, however backbreaking, protracted, boring and isolated the work itself, they could see the products of their labour doing some good to people they cared about, instead of being sold on an impersonal market for the profit of an oppressive employer.
In fact, an examination of the history of the working class shows that it was the bourgeoisie who uprooted and tore apart the proletarian family, and the proletarians, both male and female, who won it back through struggle. Having been forced to concede it, as they were forced to concede trade unions, the bourgeoisies then proceeded to make use of the family, as it also made use of the trade unions, as a means of controlling the working-class struggle. Perhaps they did even more. It is possible that it used the form of the family won by the proletariat as a model for its own relations of reproduction. The nuclear family would then be a much more complex phenomenon than simply the bourgeois form of the family. It would be the form of the family won by the proletariat under conditions of capitalist production (e.g. mobility of labour-power), and then incorporated and institutionalised by bourgeois society. It would be an example of the way in which the proletariat, even though as yet incapable of achieving a revolutionary transformation of society, nonetheless acts as a subject of history, leaving its mark on bourgeois society even while it is shaped by that society.
The family in capitalist society has a measure of stability inasmuch as it reproduces the classes of that society and provides personal recognition for one half (the male half) of the society. But it comes under attack long before capitalist relations of production themselves begin to disintegrate. This attack has come from the feminist movement, whose birth takes place under capitalism. Why?
This question we could not adequately answer, although some tentative ideas were put forward. The development of the productive forces under capitalism has two important consequences for women. Firstly, the development of effective methods of birth control, which has released them from almost continuous childbearing throughout their years of maximum activity. With this has come the recognition that a condition which appeared to be natural, ordained by God, is in fact a matter of human choice. With the possibility of control over their own bodies in this area has come the demand for such control, which no amount of religious bigotry has succeeded in stopping. With the greater part of their lives freed from childbearing, the idea that this alone is the natural function of women ceases to have any material basis.
Simultaneously the enormous development of the productivity of labour under capitalism for the first time makes labour-power a subordinate element of production. As the creator of surplus-value it of course still plays a crucial role; but in terms of quantity, the need for it diminishes with each technological advance. After the major periods of primitive accumulation are over, there is not so much a shortage of labour-power as a surfeit of it: the necessity for social control over reproduction in order to ensure an adequate supply of labour-power disappears. Just when women become capable of controlling their reproductive functions, society ceases to need to compel them to do otherwise. Conversely, the periodic necessity for capitalism, especially in the early stages, to incorporate large masses of women into the wage-labour force undermines from another side the idea that the role of women is exclusively in the sphere of reproduction. In these developments, perhaps, can be found the material basis for the development of the feminist movement.
The feminist movement is directed against the inadequacies of bourgeois social relations of reproduction; but it attacks these from different standpoints. There was a problem in identifying different currents within the feminist movement. If the criterion used is the method of struggle, the main divisions appear to be between an individual, existential mode of struggle through an attempt to create new types of personal relationships, and a political mode of struggle. Alternatively, if the criterion is thegoal of the struggle, then the main distinction would be between bourgeois and socialist goals, and within these there could be attempts to change relationships between individuals as well as attempts to change relationships between or within social classes. If we provisionally adopt the latter, we could tentatively divide the feminist movement into two major currents – revolutionary and bourgeois – although in any movement both currents may be closely intertwined.
Bourgeois feminism which adopts political methods is aimed mainly at the achievement of equality of women within bourgeois society. Its major demands have been that women should have equal political rights (right to vote and stand for election), equal rights to the ownership of property (and thus also to the exploitation of the labour-power of others), right to work and equal wages (i.e. the right to sell one’s labour-power and be exploited to the same extent as men), and equal opportunities for getting an education, jobs, etc. It appeared that this movement could both advance andhinder the achievement of socialist goals and the interests of women. For example, the right to employment and the right to vote could result in the growth of confidence, consciousness and self-activity amongst women; but the right to equal exploitation, which meant abandoning demands for special protection for female labour, and the right to serve the nation and make equal sacrifices for it in time for war, injured the interests of the working class as a whole, and especially the female portion of it. Assessing this current from the standpoint of the total emancipation of women is therefore a complex matter; one cannot simply write off the movement as bourgeois and therefore useless, nor can one adopt a simple stageist view that it necessarily precedes and leads to the further development of a revolutionary feminist movement.
The existentialist attempts to achieve the same goal have ranged from Simone de Beauvoir-type attempts to discover new forms of relationships between individuals (no marriage, no children), to the extreme solutions of radical feminists like Shulamith Firestone, who see the solution in the complete cutting-off of stable human relations between men and women, reproduction and childcare reduced to purely technical functions, and so on. Here, the problem that is sought to be resolved is the crippling of the individuality of women which inevitably occurs under the existing system of relationships. But the solution is seen in terms of female individualism which is opposed to male individualism. As in the case of bourgeois feminism which takes a political form, the premises of bourgeois relationships are taken for granted, so that equality is the equality to compete; in the bourgeois war of each against all, it is assumed that the assertion of individuality must be at the expense of other individuals. The inevitable conclusion must be sex war.
A thorough analysis of these movements would be necessary before any definitive evaluation of them can be made. But it appears that from such a standpoint the emancipation of women can never be achieved. For, if the problem is one of recognition, then the achievement of a competitive equality is no solution. Women may achieve the same degree of social recognition as men – which is in any case very limited for the vast majority – but by refusing to concede personal recognition to men, they do not thereby gain it for themselves. At best, they can return to an original state where institutionalized forms of domination have been eliminated and only brute force can subjugate them. This is perhaps the condition that exists in America, where equality for women has progressed far, women form almost half of the labour force, millions of women beat their husbands, and yet women are daily subjected to the most brutal assaults. However much they arm themselves against such assaults, the threat of them must always be there, and with it the danger of being overcome by superior force.
Thus, two criticisms can tentatively be made of bourgeois feminism. Firstly, that its tendency is towards pure individualism, and, in this direction, there can be no solution to the problem of recognition, neither social nor personal, which we found to be at the root of the oppression of women. Secondly, that it still views the problem from the standpoint of a concealed male chauvinism. The effort is directed towards making women the same as men; in this effort it is overlooked that some of the values that go into the definition of `masculinity’ may well need to be rejected by men and women alike (e.g. aggressiveness, competitive individualism); likewise, that some of the values which are supposed to be `feminine’ are in fact human qualities which should be common to both men and women. Thus, they negate the contribution which women can make and have made to human culture. The love of children, for example. Marx once said that he could forgive Christianity all its sins because of the love of children which it introduced into human culture. But to this day, this is by and large considered to be a feminine attribute. To assert it as a human quality is to acknowledge one aspect of the contribution women have, despite tremendous disadvantages, made to human culture. To seek to eliminate it from women and from human culture is implicitly to accept the values of a male-dominated, achievement-oriented, commodity society, where human qualities which neither win fame nor make money are considered to be inferior or useless. Only on some such assumption could radical feminists characterise child-rearing asanimal activity – presumably implying that children are little animals who could just as well be brought up in menageries. Paradoxically, then, this current of feminism asserts that women can become human only by ceasing to be women, by rejecting female sexuality, mutilating themselves in a different way, becoming female eunuchs. In its essence it is therefore anti-female and anti-human, and makes no contribution to the abolition of the dehumanised relationships which lie at the root of the oppression of women, but rather takes them to their logical conclusion.
The movements which have grown up around the demand for abortion, protests against rape and wife-beating, demands for the recognition of the social importance of housework, are potentially revolutionary although revolutionary goals may not explicitly be stated. The demand for abortion, although it may itself be met within bourgeois society, is in fact an assertion of the right to control one’s own body, which in bourgeois society is constantly violated, sometimes systematically and outrageously as in the case of torture and rape (which we felt were closely linked) perpetrated through the state (police and army). Thus all these demands – free abortion, no rape, no wife-beating – point towards a system of human relationships free from coercion and domination even if this aim is not consciously articulated.
The Proletariat and Feminism
The recent importance being given by Marxists to the significance of housework perhaps expresses an increasing opposition on the part of working-class housewives to this specific form of oppression. Although this cannot be seen as the root of their oppression, yet it is an important form in which oppression is experienced, as well as constituting the material link in bourgeois society between relations of production and relations of reproduction, and hence clarification of the relations involved is a necessary task for Marxists. The socially necessary and value-creating character of housework establishes on a scientific basis the roots of this domestic slavery in capitalist production relations; and the demand for wages for housework, however we assess it, at least expresses an awareness that this is a social problem which cannot be resolved on an atomised basis (e.g. sharing of housework between men and women). The question as to why so many processes of production closely connected with reproduction have remained unsocialised was not resolved, although it was pointed out that partial socialisation has taken place – e.g. schools, laundries, processed foods etc. An answer may lie in the large portion of unpaid labour which can be concealed in housework, as well as the necessarily labour-intensive nature of the work involved. Both of these factors, as Marx pointed out inCapital, make it less profitable for capitalists to produce the same goods and services by means of wage-labour engaged in large-scale production. If this is the case, the demand formore wages for housework (forsome wages are already provided in means of subsistence) may be one of the most effective means of obtaining socialisation of housework, since the history of trade unionism has shown that an increase in wages is one of the major motive forces pushing capitalists to rationalise production. But the question remains: how would it be possible to fight for such a demand or related demands, given the isolated nature of the housewife’s labour?
There are two reasons given for the generally low level of militancy among women, and although they are often assimilated to one another, it is important to distinguish them. One is that the nature of household labour, the fact that it is carried out in isolation, makes it impossible for housewives to develop a collective consciousness or participate in social struggles except as appendages of their menfolk who engage in socialised production. This idea stems from a conception which sees class consciousness as determined by the nature of the labour process. Thus, housewives can achieve only a family consciousness, since their labour is confined to the family; workers can achieve a collective consciousness, but one which is confined to the corporate group to which they belong, the workplace or trade union: thus trade union consciousness, syndicalism. The logical conclusion of this conception, which was asserted by Kautsky and emphatically repeated by Lenin inWhat Is to Be Done, is that the working classcannot, by its own efforts, achieve class consciousness or revolutionary consciousness. It is only the bourgeois intelligentsia, by virtue of its own mental labour-process dealing with abstractions like society, state, production and classes, which can achieve a revolutionary consciousness which they then inject into the proletariat.
This is a fundamentally false conception of class consciousness, which remains at the level of the most superficial determinants of consciousness and fails to comprehend how consciousness develops through the striving to understand struggles whose nature is determined by the totality of social relations and not simply by relations in the workplace. Thus, it is completely unable to explain important periods of working-class history: for example, how it was that one of the most advanced forms of struggle and organisation, the workers’ government, was discovered in 1871 by a Paris proletariat consisting largely of small-scale producers with a significant proportion of women, and without the help of a bourgeois intelligentsia giving them class consciousness from outside.
The other reason commonly given is that women, having the responsibility of maintaining the home due to the sexual division of labour, are emotionally far more vulnerable to the hardships of their children, and therefore unwilling to engage in any action which endangers the family welfare and income. This condition would apply not only to housewives, but also to women workers, and appears far more plausible than the first reason. We have reason to believe, for example, that where women are unwilling to go on strike, or to let their husbands go on strike, or act as strike-breakers, the reason is their commitment to the family’s welfare. Likewise, the extent to which they drive themselves on a piece-rate system, sometimes competitively excluding casual workers in the process, is also a function of devotion to their families. They thus act in the interests of a corporate group – the family – without taking into account the interests of the class as a whole, just as for long periods the workers struggle for the interests of a wider corporate group (based on workplace, industry, etc.) without taking into account the interests of the class as a whole. In both cases there is an adaptation to bourgeois individualism, inasmuch as competition between these sub-communities within the working class continues to occur; but also an adaptation of individualism to the needs of the working class, inasmuch as competition within these sub-communities is eliminated.
But this is not a static contradiction requiring an external agency (the bourgeois intelligentsia) to break it. Rather, the dynamics of the class struggle itself lead to situations where the apparent contradiction between the interests of particular groups of proletarians and the class as a whole disappears and the entire proletariat is able to constitute itself as a community, a class for itself. And it is surely not accidental that it is in such periods that women have been most active, shown the greatest initiative and courage in struggle. At any rate, one of our tasks would be to study such situations from the standpoint not of a theory of class consciousness which views the proletariat as a passive object of bourgeois ideology, but a theory which conceives of the proletariat, including the female portion of it, as conscious subjects struggling to define and achieve their historical tasks.
From this standpoint, the struggle of proletarian women to protect the interests of their families takes on an entirely different significance; it is implicitly a struggle to preserve a concern for personal relationships, the love of children, mutual recognition and love, even if it takes on the appearance of passivity, docility or conservatism; it is therefore not to be negated, buttranscended and thuspreserved in the wider struggle for socialism. Without this contribution, socialism would appear as a society of socialised production in which there is comradeship and solidarity but no love: social recognition for the capacities of an individual, but no recognition for the individual’s personality as an integrated totality. This is probably the way in which socialism is conceived of by most proletarian women, which is why, possibly, they show little or no interest in struggling for it. The way in which collective struggles in their place of residence (against extortionate rents, eviction, neighbourhood rape, etc.) as well as attempts at cooperation and mutual aid begins to develop a collective consciousness in proletarian housewives, which is then further developed as these struggles mesh in with more generalised social struggles – this is a process which has not received even a fraction of the attention it requires. Such a study is necessary in order to understand why certain forms of organisation and struggle – e.g. trade unionism – have by and large received little interest from women, and to identify what forms of organisation and strugglecan fully involve them and historically have done so – e.g. the Commune, street committees, soviets, etc.
It is from this standpoint – the standpoint of the proletariat as a conscious subject struggling to constitute itself as a class – that the importance of specifically feminist struggles within the working class (e.g. against wife-beating, rape, the commercial use of the female body, etc.) can be gauged. For the working-class family is the sphere where wage-labourers are produced – i.e. not a thing, labour-power, but living individuals in which this labouring capacity is embodied. Hence it is important not only that a mere capacity to labour be reproduced, but that living individuals prepared to accept the system of wage-labour, of factory discipline, of enforced production of surplus value, be reproduced. And here the bourgeoisie has scored a success. Just as it was able to make use of trade unions to limit the class struggle after earlier having been forced to concede the right of combination, it has been able to use the proletarian family, won from it by bitter struggle, as a breeding place for `good' proletarians. The hierarchical structure which still exists in proletarian families – not merely because they are dominated by bourgeois ideology, but because the basis for this adaptation to bourgeois ideology exists in the continued search for recognition as domination – reproduces in the most intimate sphere of life the fundamental features of class society. Children who daily see their father giving orders to their mother, who see their father beating their mother and are themselves ill-treated, perhaps by both parents, can only grow up accepting it as a ‘fact of life’ that human society is inherently hierarchically structured with those above having the right to use and abuse those below them. The authoritarianism of factory and state becomes far more easily acceptable if authoritarianism is seen as an essential element of human relationships as such, and the reduction of human beings to mere embodiments of the commodity labour-power is so much the more credible when they see women being treated as possessions, use-values, objects, commodities, in their own homes and in society at large.
It follows that the acceptance by women of the present situation is a condition for the stability of the capitalist system, while struggles against these forms of oppression in fact strike at the roots of the reproduction of capitalist relations of production and reproduction. As Marx pointed out in relation to the English and Irish workers, it is inconceivable that the proletariat could overthrow the class domination of the bourgeoisie unless it has first eliminated all relationships of domination and subordination within its own ranks. Another way of putting this is to say that the constitution of the proletariat as a human community is the condition of its revolutionary success. So long as proletarians collaborate in suppressing the development of the capacities of other proletarians, they put obstacles in the way of these others participating in the class struggle and thus constituting working class solidarity. At the same time, they dehumanise themselves and thus render themselves less capable of struggling against the dehumanisation of bourgeois society. One example of this is the demoralising effect on themselves of the acts of rape and other atrocities committed by the Red Army in Germany. Another is surely wife-beating in the working class and other forms of male chauvinism, even if they are concealed under the cover of revolutionary phraseology. As Engels correctly remarked, in such families the man is the bourgeois, the woman the proletarian. The worker first has to fight the bourgeois in himself if he is to be successful in fighting the bourgeois class. Male chauvinism in the working class, like chauvinism in the working class, is a form in which bourgeois ideology enters the proletariat and dominates it.
The solution to the corporate (family) consciousness of the housewife cannot be the counterposition of another corporate interest (say, that of the factory or trade union), but, rather, itssubsumption into a wider class interest which does not oppose but preserves the interest of the family and especially of the children who may not be capable of directly fighting for their own interests. Where such a class interest is not constituted, hostility and suspicion between competing corporate groups, or mutual indifference, can arise. But it is important to understand that this is a contradiction inreality, and not merely a consequence of the backwardness or illusions of the women.
Thus the socialist-feminist struggle against dehumanised human relationships, against recognition as domination and for recognition as mutual affirmation, is an integral part of the struggle for socialism, a part without which that struggle cannot be successful; it is also a necessary struggle in the sense that male domination within the working class and passive female acceptance of it come directly into conflict with the tendency of the working-class struggle, which increasingly demands the solidarity, unity and active participation of the whole class. At the same time, the ultimate emancipation of women cannot be achieved without the abolition of the division of labour and the achievement of communist production, which will allow the full development of the capacities of men and women alike and accord them social recognition, at the same time abolishing class domination, one of whose forms of expression is the rape and torture of the dominated class.
The possibility of free expression of all capacities in socialist production and of social recognition of the individuality expressed in those capacities will eliminate the crippling effect of both domestic slavery and wage slavery, which is largely responsible for the morbid possessiveness in human relationships which is sought as a substitute. In a society where social recognition is gained not at the expense of others – through competition and domination – but through cooperation and mutual affirmation, any attempt to gain personal recognition through coercion, limiting or robbing the autonomy of the other, would be a contradiction. In bourgeois society, self-affirmation, both in social and in personal relationships, is necessarily at the expense of the other; in personal relations, self-affirmation of the man takes the form of egoism, negation of the other, while affirmation of the other by the woman takes the form of self-sacrifice, negation of the self; in society, self-affirmation takes the form of eliminating others from the competitive struggle, while the only affirmation of the other which is at all possible is the involuntary withdrawal from competition after a defeat – e.g. ‘one capitalist always kills many’. The proletarian struggle is directed against this principle in both personal and social relationships, and thus the revolutionary proletariat, which struggles to build a communist society, is the agent of the emancipation of women, and the women within it acquire an especially important role. This much at least can be said, although to attempt any further specification of the form which human relationships will take in a future society is difficult. Some such attempt, however, has to be made, since it is the task of communists to anticipate – not only in theory but also in practice – the relations of a society which has yet to be built.
Women in India
A very brief examination of the condition of proletarian women in India indicated that, in terms of living standards and hours and conditions of work, they were not far from the level to which women had been reduced by the onset of the industrial revolution; however that this degree of exploitation occurs in the context of an advanced capitalist world economy where it plays a specific function. The part played by the intensive and extensive exploitation not only of wage-labour but also of household labour in reducing the value and price of labour-power is an important element in the development of capitalism in India and needs to be further investigated. Here the relevance of establishing the social character of proletarian housework is once again felt, for unless household labour as well as wage-labour is included in the calculation of the working day, the true extent of the exploitation of female labour cannot be grasped.
Another peculiarity was the persistence of family relations characteristic of an earlier mode of production which, although breaking down, have not entirely disappeared. Again, the possibility that because this breakdown occurs not in a period of early capitalism but in the context of an advanced capitalist world economy, it could lead to a stabilisation of certain intermediate forms, cannot be discounted; at least, it is clear that the process of breakdown and reconstitution of the family does not take place in the same form as in Europe.
Conversely, however, bourgeois rights (the right to vote, etc.) have been granted to women in India without a struggle of their own, as a by-product of the struggle for bourgeois rights in other countries. These circumstances may account for the fact that a feminist movement such as arose in Europe and America has never arisen in India, and perhaps may never arise on a large scale; struggles of a bourgeois-democratic character have been short-lived and have never acquired a mass following. Thus, a situation exists in which an extremely high degree of exploitation of female labour-power is underpinned by social relations of reproduction which make it almost impossible for women to struggle effectively without risking social ostracism or worse. At the same time, there is strong pressure on them to participate in working-class struggles in order to make them more effective, and this pressure particularly comes to the fore at times of intensive working-class struggle. At such periods, then, these women would be subject to painfully contradictory pressures: between, on the one hand, their conception of themselves and their role in society, which has been instilled into them since childhood and which is reinforced by real concern for their families, and, on the other hand, the militant role they are expected to play on demand, which implies a sacrifice of family interest. A crisis of identity results; since the self is cognised only in relation to the other, the contradictory conceptions of herself which a woman is here presented with must lead to a questioning of her own identity. While this may be a creative contradiction if she is able to discover an identity in a higher level of self-activity than is involved in the role of either home-maker or manipulated support for some outside struggle, it can also be a painful and disorienting experience if such a solution is not found. It is also important to note that this is not a contradiction between individualism and class consciousness; for family consciousness is a form of corporate consciousness which in India often leads to an almost total negation of the interests of the woman, while the alternative that is posed by militant struggle, so long as it opposed to the interests of women and children, is not yet a class interest either, since it is not the interest of the proletariat as awhole. What the exact effect this contradiction has on the consciousness of women; how this can be resolved; whether struggles have occurred in which women have discovered ways and means of transcending their family interest without negating it, and simultaneously achieved a higher degree of self-identity and self-activity; if so, what form these struggles have taken, and what forms of organisation they have been embodied in -all these questions require answers in order that a systematic perspective be built, and they can be answered only through sensitive discussions and involvement with proletarian women and their struggles.
Conclusions
It is evident that these discussions posed many questions, most of which were answered only very tentatively or not at all. Yet they indicated that the problem of women’s oppression and hence the solution to it is a far more complex one than simply a matter of ‘equality’ and ‘economic independence’. Inequality and economic dependence on males are not the cause of oppression, but merely forms in which that oppression is manifested; the roots of oppression lie much deeper, and unless they are discovered and destroyed, the oppression of women will continue despite full employment and formal equality. At the same time, the forms of struggle and organisation through which women can fight for their emancipation, the transitional steps they must take, the relation of their struggle to that of other oppressed and exploited groups and to the working-class struggle as a whole – all these have to be determined far more concretely than they have been hitherto. Otherwise the assertion that the emancipation of women is inseparable from the socialist revolution remains a mere idea whose truth cannot be proved in practice. The process of resolving these questions is nothing but the elaboration of a revolutionary perspective for women.
Photo by Linda Napikoski - https://www.thoughtco.com/1960s-feminism-timeline-3528910, CC BY-SA 4.0,https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=78053903
Anti-Anti-Zionism and Bad Faith Critique: Refuting a Misrepresentation of Enzo Traverso
Jordy Cummings
Enzo Traverso is perhaps the finest Marxist scholar of the “Jewish Question”. Throughout his considerable amount of published work, notably the recently reissued The Jewish Question: History of a Marxist Debate, the “Jewish question” is a consistent point of implicit and explicit reference. For Traverso, Anti-Jewish violence is absolutely central to the project of modern reaction in both its conservative and fascist forms. From the Dreyfus affair to the pogroms, from the Shoah to the “great replacement theory”, the figure of the Jew in the reactionary imaginary bears far more inquiry beyond mechanical and stageist accounts. These stageist accounts, often focusing on the myth of the “economic Jew” prefigure “class reductionist” takes on anti-Black and anti-indigenous racism or queerphobia.
In the case of the Jewish question, this reductionism has served to reinforce on one hand, a more particularist approach than what is merited, such as in the later work of Norman Geras1 or Marxist Zionists like Shlomo Avineri. On the other hand, it has served to downplay or even erase historical antisemitism, leaving the broad Marxist Left with the lack of a supple analysis of the specificity of antisemitism and the uptick of anti-Jewish violence and conspiracism. This duality is what makes Traverso’s framing of the question quite useful. To this day, there is an ongoing oscillation between these two positions. There is a common sense belief, it seems, that antisemitism is a fading phenomenon and Jews being broadly assimilated, often middle-class white people no longer live in a skin of enforced particularity. This is not to say that there is denial of the current rise of anti-Jewish violence, rather there’s an implicit denial of the specificity of the “figure of the Jew”. In contrast, and equally problematic, there are those who make too much of this particularity, leading some younger progressive Ashkenazi Jews to deny their whiteness.
Traverso’s body of work makes a strong case that, as with other questions of particularity, Marxists have largely either misunderstood or downplayed the particularity of the Jewish question, and hence antisemitism. This is not to deny that Marxists to this day fight racism and antisemitism in all of its manifestations. It may well be an area in which, on the question of tactics, practice is ahead of theory. For Traverso, among some others, it is historical materialism that allows for a correction of past theoretical and practical errors. Perhaps, he implies, classical Marxism grew into fruition within a historical and temporal context in which history had not yet provided a solution to the riddle
Recently, the useful web journal, Marx and Philosophy Review of Books published a downright bad faith review of The Jewish Question: History of a Marxist Debate by Igor Shoikhedbrod of the University of Toronto.2 It is not that this review is uncharitable. Shoikhedbrod praises the book as a “welcome contribution” and lauds its inclusion of a wide range of sometimes neglected thinkers. It is that Shoikhedbrod, either wilfully or not, misrepresents the text in significant ways. His strongest charge is that Traverso “fails to see the ‘Jewish Question’ as an enduring controversy”. This is laughable, quite frankly, and offensive.
It is either Shoikhedbrod is entirely unfamiliar with Traverso’s body of work over many decades, or that he is all too familiar, and strongly opposes Traverso’s political and theoretical project. It is difficult to pin down why Shoikhedbrod would take such issue with this text so as to misrepresent it. A hint can perhaps be found in a review of Avineri’s work3 written for the same publication. In his fawning review, Shoikhedbrod expresses some degree of qualified sympathy for Zionism. In turn, in his review of Traverso is highly critical of Traverso’s anti-Zionism to the point of misrepresentation. He proclaims that “socialist varieties of Zionism complicate Traverso’s narrative somewhat … he generally associates all manifestations of Zionism with colonialism”. This is a sin of omission, not commission.
Of course, Traverso, like any good historical materialist is anti-Zionist. Yet this “anti-anti-Zionism”4 on Shoikhedbrod’s part does not merely register disagreement with the terms of how Traverso lays out the contours of the Marxist/Zionist hybrids that sprung up in East Europe. To situate Marxist Zionism as having an affinity in its early years with colonialism does not mark Zionism as entirely different from some elements of early century international social democracy, those that openly opposed anti-colonial politics. In the Avineri review, Shoikhedbrod makes the claim that the Israeli diplomat Avineri “has good reasons for critiquing Marx’s insensitivity to the relevance of national identity”. To wit, he even uncritically effuses about Avineri’s role as an Israeli diplomat. It is not that Shoikhedbrod is uncritical of Avineri. Yet the serious engagement with Avineri, as opposed to the misrepresentation of Traverso, show that Shoikhedbrod’s own project is perhaps far closer to the former.
Shoikhedbrod is critical of the fact that Traverso imposes a “...projection onto classical Marxism of a unilinear and teleological conception of historical progress”. It is surprising that the charge would be made as it is hardly a controversial point. From Kevin Anderson to Robert Brenner and so-called Political Marxists, the critique of “stageism” and emphasis on multilinearity is so generalised in Marxian historiography that it is not a “well worn narrative”. It is a frank acknowledgement of the limitations of (some) Marxian inquiry. Whatever one’s take on historical materialism as art and craft, Marxism, as Lukacs reminds us, is about method – the spirit, not the letter. In any case, the point itself is neither here nor there, a non-sequitur only included to poison the well, as there is no alternative approach on offer. Indeed, in a sense, Shoikhedbrod is laying down a gauntlet and denouncing Traverso’s project as such.
Contrary to Shoikhedbrod’s misrepresentation, what Traverso does with this text, is merely to elucidate in crisp prose the positions that Marxists have held on such questions, primarily, but not exclusively prior to the second World War. Traverso lets the figures under analysis speak for themselves. He reveals a rich tapestry of material, of errors of various degree, peppered with the odd incomplete insight. It is no accident that many of the figures under analysis were themselves assimilated Jews. Jewish Marxists in Central Europe largely operated within the intelligentsia, yet in Russia and the Pale of Settlement, a vast Jewish proletariat arose. The debates within the RSDLP and within the Bund, and indeed between both and the “Marxist Zionists” are retold with sympathy and attribution of good faith to all parties involved. It is rare to encounter a Marxist historical social theorist who is so charitable to those even subject to critique. By letting these figures speak for themselves, Traverso invites the reader to make up their own mind, while giving his proverbial “take”.
One would presume his take, which, as noted informs his entire body of work, would be uncontroversial. That is to say, Marxism has had insights as well as some tragic error in its historical relationship with the Jewish question. Unlike Shlomo Avineri, admired by Shoikhedbrod, this does not lead to Traverso effectively aligning with Moses Hess against Marx. As Traverso points out, if Marx did ever adopt the framework of the “Geldmensch” as applied to Jewish people, it was largely rooted in Hess. Hess, of course, was a foundational figure for what became Zionism. This is to say that to a large degree, Zionism itself is far more rooted in reductionist accounts of the Jewish experience than the many currents of Jewish Marxism catalogued by Traverso.
Perhaps it is Traverso positing an affinity of Zionism’s adoption of the Geldmensch framework with the other forms of unfortunate reductionism that troubles Shoikhedbrod. More to the point, it is that Traverso is able to glean historically specific insights in spite of this reductionism. Paradoxically, thus, Shoikhedbrod is replying to Traverso by making a crypto-Zionist case for reductionism. And it would be completely in keeping with Avineri and Hess, who saw Zionism and national self-determination as the only possible answer to the Jewish Question.
It is a shame that Shoikhedbrod did not at the very least situate his opposition to not merely Traverso but those with whom he aligns within a context of his own analyses. He could have made a strong, if wrongheaded “anti-anti-Zionist” case against Traverso. He could have situated Traverso’s background of having worked with the great theorist Michael Löwy, not to mention his affinity with the likes of Daniel Bensaïd and Ernest Mandel. It is also, of course, a shame that Shoikhedbrod failed to consult any of Traverso’s voluminous output. Marxist debates must be conducted in good faith. There is always room for polemics but misrepresentation is the book criticism of fools.
Jordy Cummings is a cultural critic and labour activist based in Toronto. He teaches in the Department of Social Sciences at York University and the coordinating editor of Red Wedge. He has contributed to Spectre, Jacobin, New Politics, and other outlets.
- 1. Geras’s Contract of Mutual Indifference (Verso, London) is a fantastic but theoretically pessimistic text. It is not altogether surprising that while never abandoning a claim on Marxism, Geras lived out the overdone stereotype of the Trotskyist-turned-neoconservative in a far more theoretically sophisticated, if unfortunate, sense than did the more famous example of Christopher Hitchens.
- 2. https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/18380_the-jewish-question-history-of-a-marxist-debate-by-enzo-traverso-reviewed-by-igor-shoikhedbrod/
- 3. https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/17417_karl-marx-philosophy-and-revolution-by-shlomo-avineri-reviewed-by-igor-shoikhedbrod/
- 4. Shoikehedbrod goes so far as to cite the bottom-feeding Robert Fine and Phillip Spencer, Zionist critics of the Left and participants in the smears of Jeremy Corbyn, smears that have now produced Fine and Spencer are affiliated with the “Decent Left” milieu, those who were once known to sign the now forgotten Euston Manifesto.
Spaces of Speculation: Movement Politics in the Infrastructure
Between Constitution and Insurrection
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.
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.).
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’.
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.
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.
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.
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’.
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.
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.
Rigorous Suppression of Intellectual Creativity: Responding Again to Alf Hornborg
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
Bakker, Karen, and Gavin Bridge 2006, “Material Worlds? Resource Geographies and the matter of Nature’”, Progress in Human Geography 30 (1): 5–27.
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.
The Siren Call of Posthumanism: A Rejoinder to Cox
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.”
Crossing a twister: On Malm’s The Progress of this Storm (2018)
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 praise
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’.
Headwind
(i) Empty abstractions
Contrary to what one would expect from an update of historical materialism, and for an acknowledged historian of capitalism
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)
