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.

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.

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 35^th 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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Pavlov, Evgeni V. 2012. ‘Review Article: Perepiska [Letters], Mikhail Lifschitz and Gy.rgy Luk.cs, Moscow: Grundrisse, 2011;Pisma V. Dostalu, V. Arslanovu, M. Mikhailovu [Letters to V. Dostal, V. Arslanov, M. Mikhailov], Mikhail Lifschitz, Moscow: Grundrisse, 2011’,Historical Materialism, 20.4, 187-98

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

(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

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.

A Review of Citizenship by Étienne Balibar

Lorenzo Buti

Research Institute in Political Philosophy Leuven, KU Leuven

lorenzo.buti@kuleuven.be

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

Abstract

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

Keywords

citizenship – democracy – Marxism – Balibar – rights

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

The Antinomies of Citizenship

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

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

Constitution and Insurrection

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

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

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

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

A Theory of Democracy

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

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

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

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

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

Citizenship and Exclusions

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

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

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

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

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

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

Balibar and (Versions of) Marxism

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

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

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

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

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

Christopher R. Cox, University of Washington, Seattle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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.

Alf Hornborg, Lund University

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Author: Dr. Michael Kleinod

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

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

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

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

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

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

Storm

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

Headwind

(i) Empty abstractions

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

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

Panagiotis Sotiris

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[...]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alex de Jong

International Institute for Research and Education, Amsterdam, the Netherlands

alexdejong@iire.org

Abstract

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

Keywords

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

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

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

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

The Birth of the Communist Left

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Breaking with the Bolsheviks

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

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

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

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

Collapse and Transformation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

War and Occupation

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

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

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

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

An Unfinished History

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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