Richard Seymour

"The discovery of personal whiteness among the world’s peoples is a very modern thing — a nineteenth and twentieth century matter, indeed. The ancient world would have laughed at such a distinction."

Alexander Billet

America is crossing the Rubicon. From the outside, it appears that the richest and most powerful nation in history has simply given up the fight against coronavirus. From the inside, the reality is far more chaotic, far grimmer. In a matter of months, Covid-19 has killed more Americans than the past sixty years of military conflict combined. A third of all cases worldwide are within the country’s borders. And yet, with no vaccine or comprehensive tracing apparatus, the country has barrelled ahead into reopening. On June 24^th there were almost 38,000 new cases reported, breaking the record of the previous peak in late April. We should expect more records to be broken in the coming weeks.

There is palpable indifference, often confusion, among “leaders” both elected and unelected. In May, Donald Trump said the US should prepare for 3,000 deaths a day – as many as died on September 11^th – and called the high number of cases a“badge of honor”. Now he is telling country that we are going to have to “live with it.” He has withdrawn federal funding for test sites while Anthony Fauci has announced plans to ramp testing up.

In late May it came to light that two of the state governments leading the charge to reopen – Georgia and Florida – deliberately manipulated data to justify their case. Georgia literally flipped around charts that made it seem cases were declining when they weren’t. In Florida, the employee who built the software that enabled the state to track cases was fired after she reported that her higher-ups were forcing her staff to deliberately delete the record of deaths.

Texas, whose governor Greg Abbott has been one of the loudest voices in the reopen chorus, is now quickly and sheepishly re-shuttering bars and restaurants after cases skyrocketed. Lieutenant governor Dan Patrick, who several weeks ago insisted seniors would rather die than hurt the economy, has dismissed the prospect of another full lockdown. So, for that matter, has Trump.

Nurses and doctors have warned for months how ill equipped our hospitals are. In some areas, intensive care units are already at capacity, soon to be overwhelmed. Before the state of California quickly moved to re-shutter restaurants and bars in early July, it was found that more than half of those in Los Angeles weren’t following basic safety guidelines. (LA county, where this writer resides, is currently the epicenter of California’s surge in Covid-19 cases. It is the most populous county in the United States.)

Servers and retail workers are assaulted or even shot and killed for asking patrons to wear masks. Teens in Alabama have thrown beer pong parties where a payout is promised to the first one to contract the virus. Even with several states and cities and counties quickly re-closing their beaches and parks, there were still large and crowded gatherings across the country over the long July 4^th weekend, including mass fireworks displays in Washington and in front of Mount Rushmore in South Dakota, spearheaded by Trump himself. Both aresuper-spreader events, essentially declarations of independence from medical science and basic decency.

European sources have watched in horror, and now the EU has closed its borders to the US. Some Mexican states are doing the same, an irony that likely either infuriates the right-wing or goes over their heads entirely. This is what it looks like for an empire to be finally unmoored.

Thankfully, the (re?)normalisation of mass death in the United States it is not entirely unopposed. The nationwide rebellion for Black lives – the largest and most militant we have seen in decades – has conjured a different vision for life, one that isn’t dominated by cruel necropolitical calculi. As the editors of Spectre argue, it has drawn stark battle lines, making it clear that in this moment people will ultimately have to choose between a “disorder of life” and “the capitalist order of death.” Trump’s stroll across Lafayette Square, where cops teargassed mask-wearing protesters so that he, Bible in hand, could bluster about sending in the military, dramatises this description.

War comparisons are trite, even tiresome, but they are apt. Indeed, this is the most naked episode of class war many Americans can remember. Wars don’t just change people. They change places, landscapes, geographies. And with them our sense of what might take root in them, the futures on offer. When people die en masse, so do the spaces they inhabit and maintain. They become estranged, otherly, unheimlich. Scars linger, places that hummed with life become graveyards. Still others are reinvented in vain attempts to act like nothing happened. To rebel in this context is not just to refuse. It is to revive narratives obscured through time, to make vivid and apparent the death drive nascent in capital and empire.

When EP Thompson coined the term “exterminism” in 1980 to describe the irrational logic of the nuclear arms race, it carried with it a latent but strong geographic connotation. For him, 1945 loomed large; the atomic annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of that year was “the first annunciation of exterminist technology.”

As the Second World War made way for the Cold War, as eastern and western blocs competed in building up their stockpiles of this same technology, it was increasingly feasible to picture that mass devastation recreated elsewhere. Thompson recounted in his “Notes on Exterminism” that US generals were remarkably cavalier about the possibility of Europe reduced to wasteland: huge cities reduced to rubble, radioactive winds traveling across borders, whole countries transformed into “theatres of apocalypse.”

The Bomb was a dramatic distillation and obvious avatar, but the truly dreaded development was the willingness to use it, to give into its logic and accept the scenario of society destroyed wholesale. Exterminism was, therefore, bigger than the Bomb itself. It was, in Thompson’s words, “characteristics of a society – expressed, in differing degrees, within its economy, its polity, and its ideology – which thrust it in a direction whose outcome must be the extermination of multitudes.”

The year 1945 should loom large for us too. Though debates among climate scientists continue, many see it as the inaugural year of the Anthropocene. It makes sense. The boom in industrialisation since the end of the war has spewed 75 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere, the fastest pace in recorded history. Any system willing to split the atom for the sake of mass destruction is easily able to undo the balance of global ecology for the sake of growth, human consequences be damned. 

The results are what we live with now: erratic weather patterns, floods, wildfires, crop failures. It is not for nothing that the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (also founded in 1945) now factors climate change in its annual calculations of the Doomsday Clock. That clock currently stands at 100 seconds to midnight, the closest to Doomsday it has ever been.

What Peter Frase describes in his book Four Futures is, therefore, not a freak reintroduction of exterminism into the American zeitgeist. Frase’s adaptation of Thompson’s term is appropriate precisely because the climate crisis has, since the end of the Cold War, supplanted the arms race as the primary avatar of exterminism. It is an evolution, a deepening of its phenomenological structure even if the shape of that structure has changed.

In a recent article for Jacobin, Frase further updates the framework to include the American approach to Covid-19. He argues the pandemic brings the impulse further out of the shadows and places it right at the centre of American polity. “The rise of the Party of Death” is what he calls it. Dramatic it may be, but it is a sound argument. While it would be overly-simplistic to lay blame for the outbreak of Covid at the door of climate change itself, the same widening of the metabolic rift that has exacerbated climate change is also at fault for outbreaks such as this. Deforestation and other disruptions to nature release and spread previously contained pathogens. Ecologists and epidemiologists alike are warning that Covid is merely the first of many pandemics unleashed as climate change accelerates.

In hindsight it seems obvious that much of the relief intended for workers in the CARES Act was intended not as preparation for quarantine but to prime us for an early return to work. The added $600 a week in unemployment benefits that Bernie Sanders and others raised hell for is set to expire in July. Trump and congressional Republicans have promised that any extensions of this provision will be dead on arrival. Even the paltry $1200 relief checks seems to have come with certain loopholes, as immigrants and their families well know. (A second round of relief checks is included in the HEROES Act, passed by the House in May. The bill explicitly includes payments to undocumented individuals, but it still has yet to be passed by the Republican-dominated Senate. The White House has promised to veto it.)

In many states, workers who are offered their jobs back will also have their unemployment benefits withdrawn. Ohio’s state government initially encouraged employers to report employees who refuse to come back out of concern for their safety. This was scrapped thanks to public outrage and a very skilfull computer hacker, but Trump and his administration are encouraging companies and bosses to engage in the practice. The Department of Labor has specified that states are legally permitted to kick workers off unemployment so long as their employer makes “reasonable accommodations” for social distancing. Provisions for personal protective equipment are similarly vague. With already-paltry eviction moratoria set to expire soon, a third of all renters may be facing legal action – including eviction – from their landlords. Remdesivir, recently discovered to be an effective treatment in lessening Covid’s symptoms and quickening recovery, is going to cost $3,000 for a full round – and that is for those who already pay for a private insurance plan. As others have already argued, workers are faced with the impossible choice between their livelihood and their health as well as that of their families. By the time this is all done, a great many will have neither.

We should be clear that is it not just Republicans responsible for this. Yes, it is conservative politicians and other officials who are the most brazen in their rhetoric – Texas lieutenant governor Dan Patrick’s declaration that “some things are more important that living” comes to mind. But on the other side of the aisle, Democratic governors are making cuts to Medicare and other parts of the social safety net. New York governor Andrew Cuomo says we should “reimagine” a post-Covid economy, with Bill Gates and other tech billionaires backing him up. Their excuse is the continued observation of social distancing, but their practical vision is to eliminate as many jobs as possible, replacing them with labor-saving technology.

Automated “smart cities” are seen as a desirable solution. “Humans are biohazards,” says Steer Tech CEO Anuja Sonalker, “machines are not.” Healthcare and education, arguably the two most unavoidably social keystones of social reproduction, are the first mentioned for transformation. Transport is also in their sights. Even as the content moderation centres and lithium mines expand, workers in these and other fields will find themselves either out of work entirely or forced to work in hazardous “essential” fields.

What awaits these workers dropped to the bottom of the labour pool is illustrated in New Orleans. Here, city sanitation workers striking for hazard pay and better protections have been replaced by prisoners. The virus is already thriving in prisons, and inmates have little recourse to protect themselves in any event. Those who get sick or die are easily replaced. When death is prevalent and labour easily automated, those performing even the most indispensable tasks become disposable. Surplus life provides for a bottomless resource pool.

To put it in starkly Marxist terms, government and employer alike are using Covid pandemic as an experiment in the organic composition of capital, an opportunity to see just how much of the working class they can do without. This fits with a key component of climate exterminism, in which automation renders large swathes of the working class superfluous. As Frase writes:

A world where the ruling class no longer depends on the exploitation of working-class labour is a world where the poor are merely a danger and an inconvenience. Policing and repressing them ultimately seem more trouble than can be justified. This is where the thrust toward “the extermination of multitudes” originates. Its ultimate endpoint is literally the extermination of the poor, so that the rabble can finally be brushed aside once and for all, leaving the rich to live in peace and quiet in their Elysium.

This puts a twist on the traditional geographies of social control. Rather than an emphasis on who is isolated, “locked in,” be it in prisons, detention centres, or ghettoes, there is a shift toward who is “locked out.” Prisons and jails are now hotspots for the virus. So are nursing homes, warehouses, meat packing plants. These are not places designed to be isolated from the rest of the population and. Many rely on a steady connection with the world at large as a core part of their function. As these spaces become increasingly hazardous – perhaps ultimately uninhabitable – protection of the rich morphs into what Frase calls “an inverted gulag.” The gated community, the fortress-like penthouse, the tropical island bunker.

The divisions of these inverted gulags are bound to trace along the lines of racism, segregation, empire and, of course, class. In early May, the city of Gallup, New Mexico went on total lockdown after its Covid-19 outbreak spread to levels that city officials described as “uninhibited.” All roads in and out of the city were closed, and residents were ordered to stay indoors save for emergencies. Gallup, a city of 22,000, is on the edge of the state’s Navajo reservation. Almost half of its population is indigenous.

In subsequent weeks, South Dakota governor Kristi Noem declared illegal the Sioux tribal leadership’s checkpoints in and out of their reservations, ordering them taken down. In Chicago, African-Americans account for 60 percent of all Covid deaths, despite making up about a third of the city’s population. In Alabama, a quarter of all Covid deaths have been in its rural Black Belt. Meanwhile, a full 60 percent of all those tested in ICE detention facilities are testing positive for Covid.

It is, with this in mind, entirely appropriate to speak of eco-fascism. And it is similarly appropriate to use the term in relation to the anti-lockdown protests that proliferated throughout April and May. Their demands for golf and reopened country clubs – absurd though they may be – are bound up with an insular, consumption-based anxiety that is a fixture of the contemporary white middle-class. Their casual dismissal of deadly disease comes off as a celebration of death, not only in their willingness to spread the virus, but their demands to “sacrifice the weak,” and in their obvious placement of convenience and creature comfort over the lives of workers. Many of them are funded by billionaires and big business. Plenty are armed, and a few openly harkened back to the words displayed over the gates of Auschwitz and Dachau.

One of the more curious yet telling actions in these protests came early on, when the Michigan Proud Boys participating in an anti-lockdown protest at the state capitol in Lansing actively blocked ambulances from pulling into a nearby hospital. It was an action that lasted for at most a few minutes, but it was telling. What could possibly be gained from blocking a hospital? To avowed white chauvinists like the Proud Boys, the answer is very straightforward: the medical resources being used in the “world at large” are going to waste, they are better hoarded for those most deserving (read: white, straight, and so on).

These are now some of the most emboldened and confident elements in American society now. Trump has openly encouraged these protests, using them as leverage to push states to reopen. Now, they have received a huge boost, a de facto promotion to exterminism’s street team. Some of them have returned to the state capitols to throw “Bar Lives Matter” rallies, a fairly unmistakable signal of their priorities: property and commerce over lives of colour. Still others are setting upsniper outposts at Black Lives Matter protests, carrying out lone wolf attacks on demonstrators, issuing violent provocations while cops turn a blind eye.

The ferocity of the initial explosion against the police, the quickness with which it spread from Minneapolis to the rest of the country, is at least partially explained by how apparent this exterminist streak has been made through the course of the pandemic. The disproportionate impact that Covid has had in communities of colour isn’t only in the number of cases or deaths. In some ways, the pandemic has provided a new platform on which the violence of police racism and vigilantism can be enacted. Signs declaring racism its own pandemic aren’t just clever reference but an acknowledgement that the order of death can take many forms.

In the weeks leading up to the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, we saw several reminders of the racist and repressive role police play in America, many of them tightly wound up with the fallout from Covid. In New York, police handed out masks to white people in parks while violently pummelling to the ground Black men standing fewer than six feet apart. In Wood River, Illinois, a police officer stopped and questioned two Black men for wearing masks inside a WalMart. And then there was the video of a white Central Park dog-walker calling the police on African-American science writer and birdwatcher Christian Cooper in retaliation for telling her to put her dog on a leash – which went viral just as protests in Minneapolis started to gain momentum.

The two white men who shot and killed Black jogger Ahmaud Arbery in Brunswick, Georgia, displayed much of the same violent, racialised anxiety as many of the armed conspiracists demanding an end to the lockdown. Gregory McMichael, a former police officer himself, and his son Travis profiled Arbery because they saw him as a racialised threat to the small, mostly white and insular unincorporated community they belonged to, which had experienced a short spate of burglaries earlier that winter. Travis is on video calling Arbery a “fucking n*gger” as he stands over his dead body. Details of the February murder came to light concurrently with a rise in anti-lockdown protests. Police had treated the McMichaels with kid-gloves, initially refusing to arrest them. Just as they had the armed protesters, even as they stormed state capitols, calling for disproportionately Black and brown workforces to be tossed back into the breach. The affinities are easy to see.

The multi-racial crowds that have flooded onto American streets since Minneapolis have watched all of this unfold, more or less helplessly, over the past four months. Many have lost their income or healthcare, been evicted or threatened with eviction, or forced to work in infectious and unsafe conditions. They’ve had loved ones and coworkers hospitalised, even dying, unable to visit in the hospital or even hold anything like a proper funeral.

Uncertainty, frustration, the profound melancholy and precarity that come with working-class existence in America; all have been sharply attenuated. And with that, the particular necropolitics experienced by marginalised communities have been generalised. This is not to suggest that white workers are suddenly subject to everything endured by communities of colour. Merely that, on a long enough timeline, every working and poor person can be easily disposed of, and this has become blatant.

Frequent invocations on marches that we “say their names,” shouting out that of Floyd, Taylor, Arbery, Freddie Gray, Michael Brown, Tony McDade and so many others; this has served the purpose of not just in the observation of a deflected mourning but also in reckoning with these same politics of death.

By that same token, there is also an unmistakable rejection of these politics. The ethos of mutual aid has clearly travelled from buildings and neighbourhood networks into the protests, as indicated by the widespread distribution by volunteers of masks, water, even baking soda and antacid to counter the effects of teargas and pepper spray. The bus drivers who have refused to transport arrested protesters have also been among the most exposed to Covid. Teachers now calling for cops out of schools were in many cases the same ones demanding their schools be closed at the beginning of the pandemic, often against the wishes of city officials.

This ethos is translated even further into the improvised autonomous zones that the protests have inspired, from the now sadly dismantled Capitol Hill Organized Protest in Seattle to Camp Maroon in Philadelphia. All are experiments in demanding a new paradigm from their cities – from abolition of police to the provision of decent housing – while simultaneously attempting to prove tangible alternatives are possible. The repression and violence they have faced, though, show that there remain significant obstacles. The order of exterminism still has an upper hand.

Re-reading his “Notes on Exterminism” today, it is apparent that Thompson felt overwhelmed in writing it. By his own admission, the essay could only be “notes” due to the enormity of what he was asking his audience to face. Parts of the article feel as if he is pleading with readers to stare down a vengeful and destructive Old God starting to awake. Governments had deployed a mountain of propaganda designed to put people at ease with the possibility of annihilation Cartoon turtles urged TV audiences to “duck and cover.” In the UK, programs and pamphlets titled “Protect and Survive” made survival of a nuclear attack seem relatively easy. Thompson and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament rightly argued that these informationals only increased the likelihood of nuclear war, trading vigilance for a false sense of security.

The rhetoric of elected officials and media both exhibit this same bad optimism around Covid today. Lest this seem an unfair comparison, we only need to reference the words of Las Vegas mayor Carolyn Goodman, who in April dismissed the need for greater coronavirus testing with her own experiences from the age of nuclear tests: “I know over the years, going back to the 1950s with the atomic bomb, ‘Don’t worry about more testing in Nevada. You’ll all be fine. Take a shower.’”

(Goodman would be brave indeed to say that to any of the Downwinders, those residents of the southwest exposed to fallout during the thousand-plus nuclear tests conducted in the region from 1945 to 1992. Incidence of leukaemia and other cancers are several times higher in these communities. Conservative estimates have tens of thousands dying as a result. Most of them probably showered regularly.)

Now, the Vegas casinos are reopening. The city’s advertising campaigns are attempting to allay potential tourists’ fears. If these same iconic casinos and hotels become viral hotspots, it will be interesting to see whether Goodman refers to it, as she did before, as “free enterprise.”

Local news stations are running segments on workplace safety literally scripted by Amazon. Blue Angels fly over hospitals thanking “hero” healthcare workers as state medical budgets are slashed. Television commercials talk reassuringly of “uncertain times,” to the point where they have become virtually identical. They are run alongside promotions and statements declaring empty solidarity with Black Lives Matter from many of the same companies, the kind that never seem to bring with them calls to abolish police or empty out the now Covid-ridden prisons.

This is the hangover of capitalist realism, which, though bruised and battered, continues to shuffle along in terms of structural policy even as it attempts to speak out of a different face. Congressional Democrats don Kente-cloths and take a knee, but refuse to entertain defunding police. They denounce the ineptitude of Trump’s Covid plans but reject calls for universal healthcare. In fact, it is fair to say that while they may disagree with certain details regarding Republicans’ push to reopen, they are willing to go along with the general thrust of it.

Meanwhile Trump has signed an executive order promising federal prosecution for leftists who damage statues of racists. In addition to raising the possibility of protesters serving life sentences for property damage, it serves to energise and rally his already armed and dangerous hardcore. To them, this is red meat, and it may get enough of them to the polls to easily defeat the doddering Joe Biden in November. Should a second round of lockdowns be in the offing, it will also be enough to pull them out yet again, clinging with even more tenacity to their “social distancing = communism” formulations.

Counterintuitive as it may seem, we might take a cue from this actually-existing-dystopia. Five years ago it seemed beyond the pale that Trump would win an election, let alone that he could rally a gaggle of stochastic fascists in front of state capitols in the middle of a pandemic. But here we are. Leaving aside any value judgments, we can say that the horizons of the possible have been expanded. And if they can do so in one direction, why not the other?

In fact, it is no exaggeration to say that the resurgence of Black Lives Matter has done just that. If the ethics of protest and autonomous zones have given us messy and flawed visions of utopia, if city councils are now arguing (albeit insincerely) the disbandment of police departments, then what else can happen? Can teachers, in coalition with BLM and other anti-racist formations, push back against the premature reopening of schools? Can the healthcare workers who have spent these past few months sacrificing so much, against such incredible odds, also lead the herculean push needed to win Medicare for all? How does the anti-racist resurgence bode for organising and unionisation efforts among Amazon workers or other vulnerable essentials?

We can no longer act as if such scenarios or projects are beyond our reach. Rather, we must ask what needs to happen for them to be placedwithin our reach. Streets that were virtually deserted in the early days of quarantine are now frequently flooded with people calling for the dead to be redeemed and the living to be valued. Boarded up stores have been converted into murals, theatres of apocalypse transformed into experiments in solidarity. Things can change, dramatically at that, and it is our obligation to make them change. Against the dominance of exterminism, utopia is no longer an indulgence. It is a necessity.

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Alexander Billet is an artist, writer, and cultural critic based in Los Angeles. His work encompasses topics concerning artistic expression, radical geography, and historical memory. He is a member of the Locust Arts & Letters Collective and an editor at its publication Locust Review. He also regularly contributes articles on music to Jacobin, and has appeared in Chicago Review, In These Times, and other outlets. His blog is To Whom It May Concern…

Allen Ruff

Abstract

The appearance in English of the three volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital, published by the Chicago-based socialist publisher, Charles H. Kerr & Company between 1906 and 1909, marked a significant event in the global dissemination of socialist thought. That project would not have taken place without the conscious internationalist commitment of Kerr & Co.’s activists to provide the key works of Marxism to the US working class movement.  As such, the publication of Kerr’sCapital, a standard throughout the English-speaking world until the mid-1960s, cannot be fully appreciated without some understanding of those who carried it out and how the undertaking came about.

***

Born in 1860, Charles Hope Kerr apprenticed in Chicago’s publishing trade in the early 1880s after graduating from the then State University of Wisconsin. He started the firm bearing his name in 1886 and gradually turned his energies toward the publication of radical titles as his social and political consciousness evolved due in large part to the Windy City’s harsh social and political realities and glaring contradictions.1 Attracted during the depression ridden 1890s to the populist reform movement with its utopian hope of building of a ‘Cooperative Commonwealth’, Kerr published an increasing array of books and pamphlet tracts on monetary reform, railroad regulation and government control of the banking industry, as well as the monthly New Occasions, ‘a magazine of social and industrial progress’.

During the latter part of that decade, the company published an expanding list of titles by utopian socialists, radical feminists, anarchists, single-taxers, bimetallists, Fabians, freethinkers, evolutionists as well as a number of utopian panacea novels. In 1897, Kerr launched The New Time: A magazine of social progress which he later described as a ‘semi-populist, semi-socialist magazine’. Along contributions from a who’s who of turn-of-the-century American reform, its pages carried occasional communications from socialist labour champion Eugene Debs, as well as a regular ‘Scientific Socialismcolumn of news and views on the progress of Social Democracy in the US and abroad.2

Kerr’s connection with the Socialist International had roots in 1899. The Chicago branch of the Socialist Labor Party (SLP), one of the earliest organisational expressions of Marxian socialism in the US, launched the weeklyWorker’s Call that March and Kerr soon cultivated fraternal relations with the paper’s editor, Algie M. Simons.3

Like Kerr, an alumnus of the University of Wisconsin, Simons initially became acquainted with Marxist thought while a research assistant to the progressive professor of political economy, Richard T. Ely. Upon graduating in 1895, he took a job with the University of Chicago settlement house on the city’s South Side, where he researched working class living conditions in the stockyards districts for the Municipal Board of Charities. Simons’ experiences and observations in the ‘Back of the Yards’ left him morally outraged and disillusioned with gradual liberal reform efforts and he moved leftward. He joined the SLP in 1897 and became editor of the Worker’s Call.4

Simons’s vigorous commitment to ‘scientific socialism’ had immense impact on Charles and his wife, May Walden Kerr. She later recalled that the two of them had ‘sopped up a lot crazy ideas that we had to give up to make way for Marxism’ and how the articulate, analytical strength of Simons’s arguments among the small circle of activists who regularly gathered at the Kerrs’ home engendered an enthusiasm ‘that nearly set the house afire’.5

As her husband later put it, ‘like numerous other Americans, we were looking for real socialism, but as yet knew little about it’;Kerr, Charles H. ‘Our Co-operative Publishing Business: How Socialist Literature Is Circulated is Being Circulated by Socialists,’ International Socialist Review (HenceforwardISR) 1, 9: pp. 669–72.6 that he had not been ‘inside the movement’ before 1899 ‘due to the accident of its not being presented to me’ but that he ‘had not the slightest difficulty in accepting the logic of the socialist position when once perceived’.7

While there already was a long history of socialist activity, largely but far from exclusively of a utopian variety in the US, the Marxist-based socialist movement in the United States at 1900 lagged far behind its European counterparts.  Simons and Kerr attributed such ‘backwardness’, in part, to a lack of awareness and resources. Kerr later recounted that ‘when we began our work the literature of modern scientific socialism was practically unknown to American readers …’ and that what was available was largely ‘… of a sentimental, semi-populistic, character … of doubtful value to the building up of a coherent socialist movement’. As Simons put it, ‘…American socialist literature has been a byword and a laughing stock among the socialists of other nations’.8

Determined to remedy the situation, the duo embarked on a number of collaborative publishing projects as Kerr announced in June 1899 that ‘the course convinced us that half-way measures are useless, ... our future publications will be in the line of scientific socialism’.‘Socialist Books’, Worker’s Call, June 24, 1899.9Simons became vice president of the company in January 1900 and editor of the company’s monthly, the International Socialist Review (ISR), a ‘magazine of scientific socialism’, launched the following July.10

Under Simon’s editorship until 1908, the monthly aired socialist perspectives on a broad range of political and social questions. With articles by a veritable ‘who’s who’ of the national and international movement, it became the most important socialist theoretical publication in the country. Regular features included monthly column reports on the ‘World of Labor’ by the socialist trade unionist Max Hayes, and ‘Socialism Abroad’, a digest of movement developments in Europe and elsewhere edited by Ernest Untermann, the German-born emigré and future translator of the Kerr editions of Capital.

The ISR functioned as the primary promotional vehicle for the venture as Kerr utilised its pages to offer deep discounts on its titles to those subscribing to the monthly, investors in the company, and to Socialist Party locals or individual ‘socialist sales agents’ purchasing bundled quantities. A baseline source of company support, alongside minimal sales revenue and an occasional personal loan, came primarily from hundreds, then thousands of shareholder investors whose only ‘dividends’ remained generous discounts on the firm’s list of books and pamphlets.

Kerr began offering a lengthy list of 32-page duodecimo five cent pamphlets, ‘The Pocket Library of Socialism’ starting in March, 1899 with Woman and the Social Problem by Simons’ wife, the socialist feminist May Wood Simons.11 Wrapped in red glassine and priced as low priced $6 per 1,000 copies to company shareholders, the series contained thirty-five titles by 1902 and sixty plus by 1908 including Marx’s Wage-Labour and Capital, translated by the English socialist J.L. Joynes and issued as number seven of the series in1899 and Marx on Cheapness, number fifty, appearing in 1907. The Library by that time had reached a circulation in the hundreds of thousands.12

The company employed a number of different strategies to expand its lists of socialist titles. Kerr, for instance, purchased imprints, plates and copyrights of works previously published in the US. The firm, for example, obtained rights to titles previously issued by the International Library Publishing Company, the SLP’s New York-based operation, among them A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Kerr edition,1904). In 1907, Kerr purchased the copyrights to additional titles including Marx’s Civil War in France and The Eighteenth Brumaire and Paul Lafargue’s The Right to Be Lazy from the Debs Publishing Company, which had acquired them in 1901 from the International Library.13

In 1899, the Simons’s young son died accidentally. To help them recuperate from their loss, a circle of the couple’s Chicago associates contributed funds to send the them to Europe toward the end of the year.  Given the opportunity and with letters of introduction in hand, they met with a number of European socialist notables. In France, they met with Jules Guesde and Paul Lafargue. In England, they spent time with Keir Hardie and H.M. Hyndman and became acquainted with the leader of the Belgian movement, Emile Vandervelde. In possession of numerous publications and a list of newfound correspondents as well as ideas for a number of publishing projects, the couple returned to Chicago late May 1900.14

An extended list of adaptations and translations began to appear in the company’s catalogue soon afterward as Kerr translated French and Italian titles and the Simonses worked from the German. May Wood had already translated Karl Kautsky’s Frederick Engels His Life, His Work and His Writings (1899) and Algie Simons assisted in the translation of Wilhelm Liebknecht’s No Compromise-No Political Trading. Kerr meanwhile translated Vandervelde’s Collectivism and Industrial Development as well as the first of several works by Paul Lafargue, who gave the company permission to publish his Socialism and the Intellectuals (1900) shortly after meeting the Simonses. The couple also translated Kautsky’s The Social Revolution (The Erfurt Program). The company would also issue works from the Italian, most significant among them Kerr’s translation of Antonio Labriola’s Essays on the Materialist Conception of History.15 Kerr had established trade connections prior to the turn of the century with the London firm of Swan, Sonnenschein, the publisher in 1887 of the authorised English edition of Capital, Volume I. The company in 1900 issued an edition of Frederich Engels’s Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, translated from a French edition by Edward Aveling and published by Sonnenschein in 1892, and Kerr proudly advertised it as the company’s ‘first cloth bound socialist book’. The Kerr lists soon included additional standard Marxist works such as the Communist Manifesto, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, and Engels’ Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, the latter translated by Ernest Untermann.16

By 1905, the company’s catalogue also included a number of works by some of the key figures of Britain’s broader socialist movement. Kerr had already issued serialisations of William Morris’s News from Nowhere, published by Sonnenschein in 1893, and Robert Blatchford’s Merrie England in The New Time. He issued both works in updated book form and also published Blatchford’s Imprudent Marriages and Morris’s Useful Work versus Useless Toil as part of the Pocket Library series. Kerr subsequently published Blatchford’s other works, Britain for the British (1902) and God and My Neighbor (1904). The Pocket Library also included Hyndman’s Socialism and Slavery, a critique of Herbert Spencer. The company issued Edward Carpenter’s Love’s Coming of Age (1903), and in cooperation with Sonnenschein, imported his Towards Democracy (1905). The Kerr list also came to include Socialism, Its Growth and Outcome by E. Belfort Bax and William Morris (Sonnenschein,1893/ Kerr, 1909).17

Capital comes to America: the forerunners

The 1867 edition of Das Kapital bore the names of the Marx’s Hamburg publisher, Otto Meisner as well as ‘New York: L.W. Schmidt, 24 Barclay Street’ on its title page and the work quickly became available to the small circles of German socialists in the US. Excerpts of it were published in the Arbeiter Union, edited by the German ‘Forty-Eighter’ Adolph Douai between October, 1868 and June 1869. A first English extract, a broadsheet published by the ‘First International, New York Section’ appeared in 1872.18

Beginning in April 1876, the English language weekly organ of the then-named Social Democratic Working-Men’s Party, The Socialist (New York), began running a series of chapter by chapter summaries of Capital accompanied by quotes from Marx. The installments, thirteen in total, continued after The Socialist became the Labor Standard with the formation of the Workingmen’s Party of the United States and ran through August 19, 1876. The apparent editor and translator of the series was Douai, a contributing editor of the Labor Standard who at the time had begun work on a full translation of Kapital.19

Marx, in October, 1877, had prepared revisions with the intent of having it translated and published in the US and had actually sent them to Sorge at Hoboken, New Jersey. Writing to Sorge earlier, Marx passed along instructions for Douai to compare the 2nd German edition with the more recent, revised French edition and he promised to send the updated French volume for Douai. But the project fell through, according to Engels, ‘for want of a fit and proper translator’.20

An early English-language abridgment of Capital translated by Otto Weydemeyer, son of the German revolutionary Joseph Weydemeyer, was published at Hoboken by Sorge, c. 1875, as a 20cm, forty-two page pamphlet,‘'Extracts from the Capital of Karl Marx’. Weydemeyer’s source was a summary of Capital by Johann Most published at Chemnitz in 1873, a text which Marx and Engels found unsatisfactory and disappointing.21 Those ‘extracts’ were later serialised in the Labor Standard beginning on 30 December 1877 as well as in the Chicago Socialist, and the New Haven Workmen’s Advocate.22

Writing under the pseudonym of John Broadhouse, H.M. Hyndman carried out an English translation from the extant German edition of Das Kapital’s first ten chapters, published in October, 1885. Engels, writing to Sorge in April, 1886 described the work as ‘nothing but a farce’ and ‘full of mistakes to the point of ridiculousness’.23

Regardless, in late 1885, the publisher, union job printer and home of the ‘Labor News & Publishing  Association’, Julius Bordollo & Company at 705 Broadway, New York began offering installments of the Broadhouse-Hyndman work, apparently re-set in-house, of a ‘first English translation … in 27 parts at 10 cents; subscription price for the whole work, $2.50.’ The source for the Bordollo reprint evidently was To-Day - a monthly magazine of scientific socialism imported from London and distributed by Bordollo.24 The monthly, initially edited by J.L. Joynes and E. Belfort Bax and purchased by Hyndman in 1885, carried forty installments of the Broadhouse-Hyndman work between October, 1885 and May, 1889, publicised as the‘First English translation of Karl Marx’s Capital’.25

Then, in early January, 1887 what was then ‘Swan, Sonnenschein, Lowrey & Co., London’ issued 500 copies of the first authorised English edition of Capital, a critical analysis of capitalist production. Translated from the third German edition by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling under Engelsssupervision, the work initially appeared as a two volume octavo set. Its first run sold out within two months and an additional five hundred appeared that April, as half the total number went to the US.

Shipped as publisher’s sheets printed at Perth by S. Cowan & Co. and the Strathmore Printing Works and bound upon arrival, two separate shipments made their way to New York. One appeared with a tipped-in imprint bearing the name ‘New York, Scribner & Welfored’.26 A presently unknown quantity went to Bordollo who issued the two octavo volumes bound in green cloth with ‘J. Bordollo, New York’ gilt stamped on the feet.27 Bordollo inserted a separate title page announcing…

THE GREATEST WORK OF THE AGE ON POLITICAL ECONOMY. CAPITAL, A CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF CAPITALIST PRODUCTION, BY KARL MARX. Only authorized translation by the life-long friends of the author, SAMUEL MOORE, assisted by EDWARD AVELING, AND EDITED BY FREDERICK ENGELS. In 2 vols., Demy 8vo. Cloth, $700(Sic). Sent post-paid, $7.20. JULIUS BORDOLLO […], 104-106 East Fourth Street, NEW YORK.” [Emphases in original.]28

Contemporary back matter advertisements in the company’s pamphlets proceeded to list the firm as the work’s ‘American Agent’.29

Swan, Sonnenschein & Company went on to publish single-bound editions of Volume I in 1889 and 1891, printed at Aberdeen University Press by John Thompson & J.F. Thomson.30 They were distributed in the US through a formal arrangement with Appleton & Company at New York, with the latter’s name appearing on the title page above Sonnenschein’s. Of the 1,500 copies issued in London between 1887 and 1891, 794 were sold in Britain; and 700 made their way to the US.31. (Sonnenschein would subsequently issue The First Nine Chapters of Capital, a separate volume “reprinted from the stereotype pages of the complete (sic) work,” in 1897.)

Using the Sonnenschein Lowrey two volume 1887 edition and the joint Appleton & Co. 1889 imprint, the Humboldt Publishing Company at New York completely reset and released its own edition.32 That version initially appeared between 1 September 1890 and 15 October 1890, serialised as numbers 135 thru 138‘double number’ issues of the ‘Humboldt Library of Science’. Binding the four installments together, the company then proceeded to issue its single volume the following year, which Engels criticised as an unauthorised ‘pirate’ upon receiving word of it from Sorge. Bound in red cloth and stamped on the front cover with the Humboldt trademark, the volume was promoted as a book showing ‘how to accumulate capital’ and reportedly sold some 5,000 copies.33

The Kerr project

The Kerr publication was truly an internationalist effort. The company, in cooperation with the Worker’s Call, had initially imported a number of the Sonnenschein single volume edition in October 1901 and in May, 1902 sent a cash order to London for two hundred and fifty additional copies. Informing the ISR’s readers that the ‘inferior American edition’ was no longer available, Kerr offered generous advance sale discounts on the volume’s regular price of $2.50 since ‘the co-operative house of Charles H. Kerr & Company was not organized to make profits, but to serve the interests of Socialism…’.34

In December 1902, Kerr informed his readers that a third shipment of the work, ‘complete so far as it has yet been translated into English’, had come from London; that the first shipment, arriving the preceding June, had sold out ‘in a very few short weeks’, and that the company had placed a second order that arrived the month before, but which quickly went to filling back orders.35

At that time, Volumes Two and Three did not exist in English and Kerr, as early as November 1902, expressed the desire to translate and publish a complete three volume edition. He wrote that such a project would cost over $2,000 and expressed the hope that the necessary funds could be raised through the sale of company stock. He promised that the work would begin as soon as enough stock subscriptions were pledged.36

When that funding did not materialise, he set out to find other support for the project as well as a competent translator, one not only fluent in German and English but also well versed in Marxist economic theory. The company, through Simons, asked H.M. Hyndman in London for assistance, but when that did not happen, Kerr then turned to Ernest Untermann.37

Born in Brandenburg, Prussia in November 1864, Untermann had studied paleontology and geology at Humboldt University in Berlin and upon graduating, was ‘drafted into the great army of the unemployed’ before becoming a merchant seaman. He first arrived in United States in1881 and spent most of the next decade travelling the world aboard various merchant vessels. Following a short radicalising stint in the German military and a brief return to Humboldt, during which time he became a socialist, he made his way back to New York where he became a US citizen in1893.

A member of the SLP in the late 1890s, he contributed regular columns to an assortment of socialist periodicals, including the Worker’s Call under Algie Simons’s editorship and its successor, the Chicago Socialist. Joining the Socialist Party of America at its 1901 inception, he was a signatory of the 1905 founding manifesto of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), went on to serve on the Party’s National Executive Committee in 1908-10 and ran as the SP candidate for Governor of Idaho in 1910 and the US Senate from California in 1912.38

Already associated with the Kerr Company, he had previously written various pieces for the ISR, translated European articles for its pages, and compiled a monthly international update on ‘Socialism Abroad’. He also did the translations from the German and Italian for a number of Kerr titles, including, as mentioned, Engels’s Origin of the Family (1902) and, from the Italian, Enrico Ferri’s The Positive School of Criminology (1906) and Antonio Labriola’s Socialism and Philosophy (1907).

In April 1900, Kerr announced the first title of the ‘Library of Science for the Workers’, a series of primarily German works on natural science and evolution, issued with the intent ‘to silently undermine the theological prejudice against socialist principles’, several of which Untermann translated. The series also included his own Science and Revolution (1905) and Kerr soon published his original work of political economy, The World’s Revolutions (1906).39

Untermann’s previous translations had been done without compensation, but with a wife and daughters, he required some sort of support if the monumental task of revising volume one and translating volumes two and three was to proceed. To assist in the undertaking Kerr finally secured the financial assistance of Eugene Dietzgen, by way of Wiesbaden, Germany, and Zurich, Switzerland.40

Eugene’s father, Joseph Dietzgen, a leather tanner by trade, was an autodidact well-versed in materialist philosophy and political economy, and a First Internationalist comrade of Marx and Engels. He first migrated to the US after 1848 and moved back and forth across the Atlantic on several occasions. During a third US sojourn in the 1880s, he became active in New York’s German emigré socialist circles and in 1885 became the editor of Der Sozialist, the ‘central organ’ of the German language section of the Socialist Labor Party. Following the Haymarket bombing of May 1886, he moved to Chicago and took up the editorship of the Chicagoer Arbeiterzeitung after its anarchist editor August Spies, eventually one of those hanged as an alleged conspirator in the bombing, was arrested.41 Two of his own works, both translated by Untermann with financial backing from Eugene, The Positive Outcome of Philosophy (with an introduction by Dutch socialist Anton Pannekoek) and Philosophical Essays, were issued by Kerr in 1906.

Upon his father’s urging, Eugene Dietzgen moved to the US in 1881 after completing his formal education in the classics, philosophy and the natural sciences at Berlin. Settling in Chicago, he went on to head an industrial firm bearing his name that specialised in the production of drafting and engineering tools, and did quite well. He also was active in socialist circles in Chicago and nationally and was selected to represent the Social Democratic Party of America (a forerunner of the Socialist Party) at the International Socialist Congress in Paris, 1900.42

Sometime after the turn of the century, he contracted tuberculosis and retired from the business world and returned to Germany and then Switzerland. From there with the surplus extracted at Chicago, he became the patron of various publishing ventures of the Second International, including Karl Kautsky’s Die Neue Zeit, the foremost theoretical journal of German Social Democracy. Kerr had known Dietzgen before he left Chicago and Algie Simons reestablished connections with him on successive trips to Europe and through a correspondence with Kautsky. Untermann was an admirer of the elder Dietzgen and also apparently had some earlier connection to Eugene, who agreed to subsidise Untermann’s translation of Marx’s opus.43

Untermann set to work on the massive project during the first half of 1905 while living on a chicken farm in Orlando, Florida. He later recalled that,

I couldn’t have done it on what Kerr paid me…, but Eugene Dietzgen paid me a total of $5.00 per page, so I built up a little chicken ranch that panned out well enough to keep my family and myself in groceries. I did the translating after I got through fighting skunks, opossums, snakes, and hawks and for a while it was doubtful whether the chicken business belonged to me or to preying animals. But I won out after a while….44

As he proceeded, he also found time to do an eight-part series of articles on ‘The second, third and fourth volumes of Marx’s Capital’ for the Chicago Socialist that appeared between February and April 1905.45 Those installments became the bases for his Marxian Economics: A Popular Introduction to the Three Volumes of Marx’s Capital, released as volume thirteen of the company’s ‘International Library of Science’ series in 1907.

Untermann not only translated Volumes Two and Three, but also revised and edited a new edition of Volume One. In his ‘Editor’s note to the first American edition’, penned at Orlando and dated July 1906, he explained the reasons for redoing the work.

As he recounted it, more or less, the first English translation of Capital, Volume I, had appeared in January 1887. Overseen by Engels, its translators, Moore and Aveling utilised the third German edition that had integrated changes made by Marx for the second edition (1872) along with the first French edition appearing that same year. In 1890, Engels, using notes left by Marx, edited the proofs for a fourth German edition and comparisons with the French version. But Swan Sonnenschein did not adopt the changes in its subsequent English issues.

Untermann’s Volume One utilised that revised fourth German edition. Comparing the Swan Sonnenschein version page by page in the process, he found some ten pages of additional text not present in the earlier English rendering and integrated those. He also revised the volume’s footnotes.46

Selling for $2.00 and $1.20 to shareholders by Kerr, the first 2,000 copies of Volume One, ‘… revised and amplified by Ernest Untermann …’ appeared in December, 1906, with new, added features — an appendix of ‘Works and Authors Quoted in Capital’ and a topical index done by Untermann.47 Promoting the three volumes later on, Kerr would note the index of some 1,400 topics as ‘the best economic dictionary available in any language.’48

That first run sold within the year and the company issued an additional 2,000 copies in late 1907.49 Kerr could inform his ISR readers that the company had sold a total of some 8,000 copies by November 1909. With Volumes Two and Three available by that latter date, he began offering the complete set, ‘by express, prepaid, as a premium to anyone sending six dollars for the Review six years to one address, or for six copies one year to six NEW names…’.50

Translated from the second German edition, Volume Two, ‘The process of circulation of capital’, appeared in July 1907. Sonnenschein had placed an advanced order for 500 copies for it and a London edition, bound in red cloth and embossed on the front cover and spine with ‘Half Guinea, International Library’ and ‘Sonnenschein’, and ‘Charles H. Kerr & Company, Chicago’ and ‘Swan, Sonnenschein, London’ on the title page soon appeared.

Translated from the 1st German edition, Volume Three, ‘The process of capitalist production as a whole’ was originally scheduled for printing in early 1908. While noting that the translation was paid for by Dietzgen ‘as a gift to the American socialist movement’ and that the Second International patron had pledged additional monthly sums to secure articles from European socialists and to help out with the company’s deficit, Kerr wrote that an additional $2,000 was needed to cover production costs. He requested that his readers order the volume in advance to help defray that expense.51

Volume Three finally appeared in July 1909 and Kerr began offering the volumes singly and as a complete three volume set. All three volumes bore the union ‘bug’ of John F. Higgins, the company’s long-time printer and as such became the first ‘authorized’ edition produced in a union shop. The Kerr edition immediately became the accepted English version, as Swan, Sonnenschein, in conjunction with Kerr, began to distribute it throughout the English-speaking world.

The Kerr edition of Capital passed through a number of separately dated print runs through the 1910s and imprints appeared as late as 1933. In 1936, the company sold its original plates of Volume One to the Modern Library and the New York house issued its own hardback imprint, with ‘Charles H. Kerr & Company, 1906’ remaining on the copyright page (a source of future confusion for bibliographers and antiquarian booksellers, alike).52

That volume’s dust jacket noted that, ‘With one-sixth of the habitable world actually governed by Marxian doctrines and with the rest of the world increasingly agitated over the possible spread of communistic social orders, an acquaintance with the fundamental principles of Karl Marx becomes more and more essential to every person who is genuinely interested in world history today and in the forces behind the ever sharpening clash between fascism and the Left…’  Successive Modern Library editions appeared in 1945 and after.

While other English editions of Capital appeared, such as the translation done by Cedar and Eden Paul published in London by Allen & Unwin in 1928, Kerr’s three volume edition in one form or another remained the standard English text until the appearance of the Progress Publishers edition in 1967, superseded in 1976 by the Penguin edition translated by Ben Fowkes.

As for the Kerr Company, it experienced various ups and downs including an onslaught of government repression including the suppression of the International Socialist Review, vital to its functioning, during World War I. The company survived that period’s ‘Red Scare’ and continued on well after its namesake retired in 1928 after passing its reins on to a next generation of socialist activists associated with the Proletarian Party, an early communist grouping that arose out of the splintering of the Socialist Party in 1919.53 Holding on through the bottom of the 1950s McCarthy era, the venture was saved from passing out of existence in 1971 by yet another generation of socialists, anarchists and labour activists committed to its project. It experienced somewhat of a revival in the 1980s, passed its hundredth anniversary in 1986, and continues its existence as the oldest socialist publishing house in the world.  

On his regularly appearing “Publisher’s Notes” page of the ISR,  Kerr would often emphasise that the company was organised to do just one thing — to bring out books valuable to the international socialist movement and to circulate them at prices affordable for working class readers.54 Certainly, the publication of the full English edition of Capital remained the crowning achievement of that project.

References 

Primary:

Bax, E. Belfort and J.L. Joynes, To-Day: the monthly magazine of scientific socialism. London: 1884–1889. ‘Index of articles’. Available at: <http://www.marxistsfr.org/history/international/social-democracy/today/index.htm>

Charles H. Kerr & Company Archives, Chicago: Newberry Library.

Curry, Lily 1886, Anti-syllabus New York: Julius Bordollo and Company. (Available at:<http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/digital/collections/cul/texts/ldpd_6516724_000/pages/ldpd_6516724_000_00000014.html?toggle=image&menu=maximize&top=&left=>

Ernest Untermann Papers, Madison, WI: Wisconsin Historical Society.

Morris Hillquit Papers, Madison, WI: Wisconsin Historical Society, Box 1, Folder 5: Charles H. Kerr to Morris Hillquit, Oct. 4,1905.

International Socialist Review, Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Company, 1900–1918.

Kerr, Charles H. [1903], Cooperation in Publishing Socialist Literature, Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Co.

Kerr, Charles H.1904, A Socialist Publishing House, Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Company.

Kerr, Charles H. 1924, Radical Books on Economics, History, Social Science, Psychology and Evolution, Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Company.

Marx, Karl 1875, Extracts from the Capital of Karl Marx, Hoboken, N.J.: F.A. Sorge. [https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/005751722]

Marx, Karl 1887, Capital. A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production, Volume I (trans. from 3rd German edn. by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling. Swan Sonnenschein, Lowrey & Co., London.) Two volumes. 8vo. xxxii, 364; (ii), 365-816 pp.

Marx, Karl 1889, Capital; a Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production. Translated from the third German edition, by Samuel Moor and Edward Averring. Edited by Frederick Engels, New York: Appleton & Company, London: Swann Sonnenscehin. <https://www.raptisrarebooks.com/product/capital-a-critical-analysis-of-capitalist-production-karl-marx-first-edition-rare/>

Marx, Karl [1891], Capital: Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production,New York: Humboldt Publishing Co. Large 8vo. xviii, 506, (52).

Marx, Karl 1906, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One. The Process of Capitalist Production. Translated from the third German edition, by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling and edited by Frederick Engels. Revised and amplified according to the Fourth German edition by Ernest Untermann. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Company.

Marx, Karl 1907, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Volume Two: The Process of Circulation of Capital. Ed. Frederick Engels. Trans. from the 2nd German edition by Ernest Untermann. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Company.

Marx, Karl 1909, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. III. The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole. Frederick Engels, ed. Ernest Untermann, trans.. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Company; Library of Economics and Liberty [Online] http://www.econlib.org/library/YPDBooks/Marx/mrxCpC.html.

May Walden Kerr Papers. Chicago: Newberry Library.

Morris Hillquit Papers. Madison, WI: Wisconsin Historical Society.

Most, Johann, Kapital und Arbeit: Ein Populärer Auszug aus "Das Kapital" von Karl Marx [Capital and Labour: A Popular Excerpt from "Capital" by Karl Marx]. Chemnitz: G. Rübner, n.d. [1873]. Revised 2nd edition, 1876.

‘Pocket Library of Socialism’ (1899–1910), Charles H. Kerr & Co., Chicago. http://www.beasleybooks.com/home/plscatalog.pdf.

Untermann, Ernest 1907, Marxian Economics — A popular introduction to the Three Volumes of Marx’s ‘Capital’, Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Company.

Secondary:

Adams, Frederick B., Jr., 1939, Radical literature in America: an address… to which is appended a catalogue of an exhibition held at the Grolier club in New York City, Stamford, CT: Overbrook Press.

Buhle, Mari Jo 1981, Women and American Socialism 1870–1920, Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Buhle, Paul 2013, Marxism in the United States: A History of the American Left, 3rd. Edition. (London: Verso).

Buhle, Mari Jo; Paul Buhle & Dan Georgakis, eds. 1998, Encyclopedia of the American Left, 2nd Edition, London: Oxford.

Carter, John & Percy H. Muir, eds.. 1967, Printing and the Mind of Man: A Descriptive Catalogue Illustrating the Impact of Print on the Evolution of Western Civilization During Five Centuries, New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

Cochran, David. ‘A Socialist Publishing House,’ History Workshop, 24 Autumn, 1987, pp.162–165.

Commons, John R., et.al., History of Labor in the United States, Volume II New York: MacMillan, 1935.

Easton, Lloyd D.1958, ‘Empiricism and Ethics in Dietzgen’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 19, pp. 77–90.

Foner, Philip S. 1967, ‘Marx’s ‘Capital’ in the United States’, Science & Society, 31, 4, pp. 461–466.

Foner, Philip S. 1947, History of the Labor Movement in the United States: Volume 1: From the Colonial Times to the Founding of the American Federation of Labor, New York: International.

Hillquit, Morris 1910, History of Socialism in the United States, New York: Funk and Wagnalls.

Karl Marx Memorial Library, Luxembourg 2017, ‘Karl Marx, Capital, first American editions’ [typescript]. Available at <http://karlmarx.lu/CapitalUS1.htm>

Kipnis, Ira. 1972, The American Socialist Movement 1897–1912, New York: Monthly Review.

Kreuter, Kent and Gretchen Krueter 1969, An American Dissenter: The Life of Algie Martin Simons, 1870–1950, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.

Pittenger, Mark 1993, American Socialists and Evolutionary Thought, 1870–1920, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Martinek, Jason D. 2010, ‘Business at the Margins of Capitalism: Charles H. Kerr and Company and the Progressive Era Socialist Movement’, Business and Economic History On-Line  8: <http://www.thebhc.org/sites/default/files/martinek.pdf>

Martinek, Jason D. 2012, Socialism and Print Culture in America 1897–1920, London: Pickering & Chatto.

Ruff, Allen 1993, ‘A Path Not Taken: The Proletarian Party and the Early History of Communism in the United States’, in Ron C. Kent, et.al.,          eds., Culture, Gender, Race, and U.S. Labor History, Santa Barbara:Praeger, 43–57.

Ruff, Allen 2011,‘We Called Each Other Comrade’ - Charles H. Kerr & Company, Radical Publishers Oakland: PM Press, [Chicago: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1996].

Uroyeva, A. [Anna Vasilʹevna] 1969, For All Time and All Men, Moscow: Progress.

Image: Portrait published in The Free Thought Magazine [Chicago], vol. 14, no. 1 (Jan. 1896), pg. 1.; Digital editing by Tim Davenport ("Carrite") for Wikipedia, no copyright claimed for the work, file released to the public domain without restriction.

• 1. Ruff 2011, pp.1–55.
• 2. Ruff 2011, pp. 56–81.
• 3. Kerr 1903; Kerr 1904.
• 4. Kreuter & Kreuter, pp. 42–5.
• 5. May Walden Kerr Papers, Newberry Library, Chicago. Box I, Folder 2, and ‘diary for 1944’, box 10.
• 6. Kerr, Charles H. ‘Our Co-operative Publishing Business: How Socialist Literature Is Circulated is Being Circulated by Socialists,’ International Socialist Review (Henceforward ISR) 1, 9: pp. 669–72.
• 7. Kerr 1904.
• 8. [Algie Simons] ‘Salutatory’, ISR 1, 1: p. 54.
• 9. ‘Socialist Books’, Worker’s Call, June 24, 1899.
• 10. [Algie Simons] ‘Salutatory’, ISR 1, 1: p. 54.
• 11. On May Wood Simons: Mari Jo Buhle, pp.166–8; Ruff 2011, p. 235, n.13.
• 12. Ruff 2011, p.85.
• 13. Contract between International Publishing Company and the Debs Publishing Company’, 31 May 1901; Box 3, Folder 43, Charles H. Kerr & Company Archives, Newberry Library, Chicago. Cited in Martinek 2012, p.167, n. 53.
• 14. Kreuter & Kreuter, pp. 46–54.
• 15. Ruff 2011, pp. 87–8.
• 16. Ruff 2011, p. 88.
• 17. ISR 2, 6: p. 479; Ruff, p. 86.
• 18. Foner 1967.
• 19. Foner 1967.
• 20. Marx, 1889: Engels, ‘Preface to the English edition’; Marx to Friedrich Sorge, September 27, 1877 and October 19, 1877, Marx-Engels Collected Works: 45: pp. 276-7, 282-3. On Douai, see: Commons, History of Labor I, 224, n. 39.
• 21. Kapital und Arbeit: Ein Populärer Auszug aus "Das Kapital" von Karl Marx (Capital and Labour: A Popular Excerpt from "Capital" by Karl Marx). Chemnitz: G. Rübner, n.d. [1873]. Revised 2nd edition, 1876.
• 22. Marx 1875; Uroyeva, p. 235; Foner, p. 464.
• 23. ‘Engels to Sorge’, Science and Society 2, 3.
• 24. Curry, 1886: Backmatter.
• 25. Bax, E. Belfort and J.L. Joynes, 1884-1889.
• 26. Foner 1967, p. 466.
• 27. Description available at: <https://www.vialibri.net/552display_i/year_1887_0_1104215.html>
• 28. ‘Karl Marx, Capital, first American editions’ [typescript], Luxembourg: Karl Marx Memorial Library, 2017. https://karlmarx.lu/CapitalUS1.htm
• 29. Foner 1967, p. 466.
• 30. See: inside front flyleaf, available at: <https://archive.org/details/capitalcriticala00marx/page/n7/mode/2up>
• 31. Uroyeva, pp. 227–8; Marx1889.
• 32. Marx 1891; Uroyeva, p. 235.
• 33. Uroyeva, p. 235–6.
• 34. ISR, 2, 11, Dec. 1902: p. 830. That ‘inferior edition’ was most likely the Humboldt version or conceivably the English edition of Gabriel Deville’s The People’s Marx — a popular epitome of Marx’s capital, translated by the future Kerr company associate Robert Rives LaMonte and issued by the SLP’s International Library Publishing Co at New York in 1900. For the Deville work, see: https://www.marxists.org/archive/deville/1883/peoples-marx/index.htm.
• 35. ISR 3, 6 Dec. 1902: pp. 379–83.
• 36. ISR 3, 5 Nov. 1902: pp. 317–18.
• 37. H.M. Hyndman to Simons, April 3, 1902, Box I, Folder 3, Algie M. Simons Papers, Wisconsin State Historical Society, Madison.
• 38. Untermann, Ernest. ‘How I Became a Socialist’, The Comrade, 2, 3, Dec. 1903. For a sampling of Untermann’s writings, see: ‘Anarchism and Socialism’, The Comrade 3, Oct. 1903: p.18; ‘The Decline of Capitalist Democracy’, Chicago Socialist, Jan. 1901: p. 4; ‘The Tactics of the German Socialist Movement’, Chicago Socialist, 26, 1903; ‘Mind and Socialism’ ISR 1 April 1901: p. 4; ‘Labriola on the Marxian Conception of History’, ISR 4 March 1904: pp. 548–52; and ‘An Endless Task’, ISR 7, Nov. 1906: p. 285. Ruff 2011, p. 89.
• 39. Ruff 2011, 86; 263, n. 27.
• 40. [Kerr, Charles H.] ‘Why We Need Your Stock’ ISR 3, 5 Nov. 1902, pp. 317–18; ‘Publisher’s Department’ ISR 7, 6 Dec. 1906, pp. 380–1.
• 41. Dietzgen, Eugene. ‘Joseph Dietzgen; A Sketch of His Life’, in Eugene Dietzgen, ed., Ernest Untermann. trans., Philosophical Essays of Joseph Dietzgen Chicago: Kerr, 1906; Ruff 2011, p. 238.
• 42. Kipnis, p. 88.
• 43. Ibid; May Walden, various recollections, Box I, folder 2, and diary for 1944, box 10, May Walden Kerr Papers; Charles H. Kerr to Morris Hillquit, Oct. 4, 1905, Box 1, folder 5, Morris Hillquit Papers.
• 44. Ernest Untermann to Marius Hansome, Feb. 28, 1938, Reel 1: ‘Correspondence,’ Ernest Untermann Papers, Madison: Historical Society of Wisconsin.
• 45. ‘The Second, Third and Fourth Volumes of Marx’s Capital’, Chicago Socialist, Feb. 22; March 4, II, 18, 25; April 1, 8, I5, 1905.
• 46. Marx, 1906.
• 47. [Charles H. Kerr] ‘Publisher’s Department’ ISR 7, 6 Dec, 1906: pp. 380–1.
• 48. Kerr, 1924.
• 49. ISR, 8, 7 Dec. 1907: p. 383.
• 50. ISR, 10, 5 Nov. 1909: p. 470.
• 51. ‘Marx’s Capital’, ISR 7, 3, Sept. 1907: pp. 188–9; 8, 11 May 1908: pp. 717–8. Re: Volume Three see: <http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/marx-capital-a-critique-of-political-economy-volume-iii-the-process-of-capitalist-production-as-a-whole>
• 52. See, for example, Marx, Capital : a critique of political economy …. New York : Modern Library, 1906: Haithi Trust Digital Library listing, available at: <https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/100334065> or, the OCLC World Cat listing: Marx, et.al, Capital : a critique of political economy … New York : The Modern Library, [1906]:<http://www.worldcat.org/title/capital-a-critique-of-political-economy/oclc/783523>
• 53. Ruff 2011, pp.198–9. On the Proletarian Party, see: Ruff 1993.
• 54. [Kerr], ‘Publisher’s Department’ ISR 6, 12, June 1906: p. 705; 7, 5 Dec. 1906: p. 380; 7, 10 April 1907, p. 637.

BY HELA YOUSFI

The two main demands of the Arab revolutions chanted from Tunis to Damascus via Bahrain - "The people want the fall of the regime" and "work, freedom, national dignity" – remain, nine years later, unfulfilled. On the ground, people are still struggling to find political, economic and social solutions to these problems, and several endogenous as well as regional explanations have been summoned to explain these difficulties.

The fact that these slogans make the state both the target of challengesand the provider of solutions, as employer and as guarantor of national sovereignty, further complicates the intelligibility of current dynamics.1

One can neither deny nor resolve this paradox. Yet, it has unfortunately produced a number of simplistic theses: one interpretation reduces the revolutionary process to issues of political and economic liberalisation, whilst another one focuses on the role of the state in the management of economic and social problems.

But these theses do not withstand a closer observation of the facts and raise two fundamental questions: what does the return of 'national sovereignty' mean for the political agenda of Arab countries? In a region suffering from wars and neo-liberal reforms, can the state (and what kind of state) still be a relevant subject of analysis? Above all: does the state have the political, economic and symbolic resources to respond to the emancipatory claims of the peoples of the region?

The Arab revolutions of 2011 have revealed that the national economies of the region suffer from the same dysfunctions, namely a dependency on a few economic sectors, unemployment rates that remain among the highest in the world, annuity management of natural resources, and high levels of corruption led and organised by the ruling clan oligarchies. The revolutions have also brought to the forefront a largely underestimated phenomenon, namely, the encounter between neoliberal logics and authoritarian and clientelist networks of power - a hallmark of all post-colonial states in the region.2

For a better understanding of the challenges facing Arab regimes, a twofold perspective can be adopted. On the one hand, the history of state formation in the region cannot be understood without tracing the impact of colonial histories on the movements of people across and within national borders. On the other hand, it is crucial to highlight the impact of the systematic external weakening of states caused by both wars and/or the various structural reforms imposed by international organisations and how these have transformed the political economy of the region. These processes need to be considered simultaneously if a full picture of the changes in the structures of Arab regimes are to be grasped.

In what follows, I will argue that even though the state cannot be the instrument of emancipatory social change, the history of struggles over the state nonetheless influences the balance of power between social classes and shapes the conditions for political action and social transformation in the region.

What does the Arab state stand for?

The state is a concept of European origin born between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries that accompanied the development of capitalism and the emergence of the bourgeoisie and landholding classes. Whether it corresponds, from a Weberian point of view, to the establishment of an administrative bureaucracy centralising power and monopolising legitimate physical and symbolic violence, or it is treated within the Marxist framework as a social relation formed alongside the development of class rule, these approaches are deeply rooted in a specific European history.  Polanyi has eloquently argued that the development of modern market economies was inextricably linked to the development of the modern state in Europe, since the state was needed to enforce changes in social structure and knowledge production that allowed for a competitive capitalist economy.3Even though in Europe the trajectories of state formation have been contradictory processes, rife with conflicts, diversions and tensions, the institutional construction of these highly integrated nation-states by the late-nineteenth century was carried out in an endogenous way and in accordance with a specific political culture and social hierarchies. However, this is not necessarily the case in the Arab states that emerged out of colonial partitioning.

Imposed by the Sykes-Picot agreements of 16^th May, 1916, and even more so by the Treaty of Sèvres in 1920, national borders in Arab countries correspond less to the emancipatory aspirations of the peoples than to the distribution of influence and natural resources between European colonial powers in the region. This has resulted in heterogeneous and ambiguous state trajectories: integrated states such as Tunisia, Egypt and Algeria; populations without states but seeking to build one (Palestinians, Kurds, and Saharawis of the Polisario Front); or dismantled states such as Lebanon since the start of the civil war in 1975. We can also cite the case of Libya after Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, then in power, launched the Islamic Cultural Revolution on the 16^th April 1973 and reorganised his country's institutions in 1977. In doing so, he subjugated the popular revolution to an authoritarian regime in which political, economic, military and diplomatic decisions completely bypassed the political institutions representing the "people". A similar process also took place in Northern Yemen.

Two economic structures have been superimposed on the post- independence Arab States: firstly, the capitalist-type structure, which prevails in the industrial sector after having been introduced by the colonial powers, before being transferred to the new ruling elite; and secondly, a structure characterised by relations of production that classically prevail in the world of the peasantry or handicrafts, regulated by community membership, and located outside the official economy. Thus, capitalist employer-employee relations based on salaried work became intertwined with pre-capitalist social relations organised by local communities. Bureaucratic elites became enmeshed with local, regional and tribal forms of solidarity that had a considerable influence on the development of rentier practices as well as on the emergence of the informal economy.4

These states also inherited the military-bureaucratic model of governance from their respective colonial administrations, maintained by local elites through mimicry in order to establish their dominance over rich regions and to deal with alternative tribal, religious and/or ethnic identities (the Berbers in Morocco, the Kurds in Syria and Iraq, the Shiites in Bahrain, etc.). Indeed, these identities were regularly mobilised to challenge the state and question its legitimacy in the absence of a unifying historical narrative.

From this history emerge "fierce" states – to borrow the expression of the political scientist Nazih Ayubi5 - characterised by the importance of security institutions in the maintaining of strong links between the army, the economically dominant clans and political power, and by a relative separation between local social and economic forces. These states suffer from a distortion inherent to their creation, namely the lack of a founding narrative historically legitimising their connection to society. The regular and instrumental recourse to ideologies such as Arab nationalism or political Islamism bear witness to these difficulties.

This history led to different approaches to state formation in Arab countries. One such perspective treats the state as a disconnected, all-dominating, imported body, an output of the imperialist expansion of the West and/or processes of globalisation. This perspective explores the history of state formation through contingent factors such as culture, religion, or leadership styles6. In contrast, within the Marxist framework, the analysis of state formation is based on the specific nature of capitalist accumulation in these societies. In what follows, I will show in echo to Nicos Poulantzas’ work, that the state is not simply a "tool" in the hands of the ruling classes7. It is a field of conflict, where the strategies of the ruling bloc and its international allies are organised, recomposed, and worked out. The state in the Arab region should no longer be viewed as a monolithic block or a foreign import, but through the diversity of its administrative, legal, cultural, educational, police, and ideological apparatuses as well as through the diversity of processes of resistance process and struggles against these apparatuses.

 “Rentier” and “Fierce” States as Key Players in Liberal Reforms

To stay in power, local elites have pursued economic policies based on a rentier logic. These policies are not limited to oil-producing countries. Most states have thus favoured increased consumption at the expense of developmental policies that are necessary for the diversification of the economy, but entail the risk of creating competitors to the ruling elite. This explains the very low diversification of the Arab economy, which remains highly concentrated in three or four sectors, often associated with the primary sector or manufacturing with low added value. This state of affairs further encourages the development of the informal economy. By way of illustration, Algeria, whose external revenues continue today to depend mainly on hydrocarbons, has even experienced a decline in its manufacturing sector, while agriculture suffered from inconsistent policies that failed to develop its full potential. The recent fall in hydrocarbon prices has caused a budget deficit of 6% of Algeria’s GDP in 2020.8

During the 1950s and 1960s, urged by a political elite with Arab nationalist or Soviet allegiances, most post-independence states adopted voluntarist policies directed at developing welfare states and developing public services. The latter became the main employer, thus enabling the ruling elites to maintain a certain "social peace" with the local populations.

The first waves of liberalisation in the 1970s, which became more pronounced towards the end of the 1980s and 1990s with the structural adjustment programs (SAPs) imposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB), broadly weakened the Arab economies. They undermined many of the achievements of the previous economic model, driving living standards down and poverty levels up, and led to several social movements (for example, Egypt in January 1977, Tunisia in January 1972 and January 1984) challenging the existing authoritarian systems. Moreover, the states of the region have all since signed – bilaterally and without cooperating with each other – free trade agreements (FTAs) with the European Union (EU), which were not in their favour.

The motivation of the Arab governing elites was mainly the search for international political legitimacy, at the risk of economic suffering for their populations and more uneven regional development.9  All this points to the fact that the reforms engineered by international institutions have been used not only to do away with the last remnants of the welfare state in favour of the market, but also to strengthen state elites’ intervention on the side of capital.

The consequences soon came to light: social and territorial inequalities widened, the unemployment rate increased, the quality of public services deteriorated, and public employment was limited, thus breaking the social contract that allied authoritarian powers to relatively politically submissive but relatively economically protected populations.10

"National sovereignty" challenged by "free elections, free market and free identities"

The Arab revolutions, calling for "the fall of the regime", not only caused an implosion of this weakened internal social contract between the elites and local population;11  they also broke the neo-colonial pact between the Arab states and their Western allies. The call for statehood by the various social movements has been embodied differently depending on the country: the claim of a secular state in Lebanon, the demand for the unification of the national liberation movement in the Palestinian case, or the demand for public service employment in Tunisia. Thus, on 17^th January 2019, the slogan "national sovereignty before wage increases" was adopted by the Tunisian General Labour Union during the general strike in the public service, expressing a radical opposition to the reforms imposed by the IMF. Regardless of these local differences, the objective is clear: overcoming the foreign political and economic dependency maintained by the local political and economic elites.

The aspiration is basically the same everywhere: the reconstruction of a state free of distortions which, while breaking with the authoritarian and clientelist legacy, must be able to redistribute wealth and guarantee political and economic emancipation to the peoples of the region. National Sovereignty is understood, and demanded, as the twin principle that 1) states should be free from external influence and (mainly) western domination, and 2) states should guarantee public services. Rather than a manifestation of state power, these public services are seen as limiting the ruling elite’s power. Far from being a favour that the state would do to the people, like in the formula of the "welfare state", these public services are owed by the state and its governors, to the governed.

Yet the only path offered by international institutions is the twinning of “democracy promotion” with neo-liberal economic dictates. Although this is not a new recipe, it echoes the rhetoric adopted by the American President George W. Bush in his speech of the 11th September 2002 (commemorating the attacks of the 11th September 2001 and legitimising the war in Iraq): "We seek peace exactly where repression, resentment and poverty are replaced by the hope for democracy, free market and free trade". Such rhetoric is essentially aimed at exploiting the apparent support for "democracy" to further economic liberalisation such as austerity measures, public private partnerships imposed by the IMF and the WB, or negotiations to extend the EU’s free trade policy with Arab countries.12 This does not, of course, exclude the West's continuous support for authoritarian regimes, particularly in Egypt.

The challenge of decentralisation

At the heart of this new neo-liberal offensive, governance decentralisation is taking relatively violent forms, depending on the country. For example, it is radical and imposed by war in Iraq and Syria. In Iraq, a political and territorial reconfiguration of space inspired by the Lebanese model has been undertaken, under the principle of al muhâsasa – the sharing system of ethno-sectarian quotas.13 In Tunisia, if decentralisation is associated with a rhetoric of combating social inequalities, it is mainly aimed at establishing a direct competition between local communities/authorities for the distribution of resources.14  In both cases, decentralisation is a strategy that raises the possibility of eventual state fragmentation alongside economic liberalisation.

Reactivating the resurgence of ethno-religious identities, state disintegration is accompanied by an unprecedented attack on the very idea of national sovereignty, increasingly vilified as the remnant of a bygone past. At the same time, social struggles waged by the Arab revolutions contesting the hegemony of the ruling class are increasingly challenged by the emergence of new social movements, some of which mobilise individuals less on the question of wealth redistribution or class antagonism than on that of individual freedoms on ethnic, religious or sexual grounds. For instance, Tunisia has witnessed a massive influx of international NGOs, most of them based in the US or in Europe which intervene directly or indirectly by supporting specific struggles such as feminism, anti-racism, multi-culturalism and LGBTQ rights through their financing of the local associative sector. These new international NGOs are competing for political influence not only with the social movements focused on social and economic rights but also with elected bodies such as the Assembly of the People’s Representatives.15

These neo-liberal reforms and the focus on identity politics fits well with approaches that have already been adopted by Western countries (what Nancy Fraser calls “progressive neoliberalism),16and have been imposed on the Arab countries by international institutions and the major Western powers with unwavering determination.17  The purpose? To Neutralise the political character of collective identities and collective struggles and bring about the reign of market logics by making the Arab space a free market for goods as well as for identities, while diverting attention away from antagonistic class relations.

The large conglomerates closely linked to the state apparatus and to the ruling families of the Gulf, as much inserted in the circuits of the international economy as disconnected from their populations, are a good illustration of the project advocated for the entire region. As demonstrated by Adam Hanieh,18 the six states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC – Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, and Bahrain) are important logistics hubs and sites of intermediate supply chains, that have special linkages with global powers including the US, Israel, China and other Arab states.

While this offensive has slowed the reconstruction and liberation process in the Arab world, it does not seem to have halted it. While history shows that these various neo-liberal reforms have needed either violence or the complicity of the state elites in order to penetrate societies, it also proves that the solution to the current crisis must first come from a complete overhaul of  the state based on the reaffirmation of national sovereignty.  Thus, it becomes urgent for those interested in advancing political and economic emancipatory agendas in the region to envisage the state as "a strategic field”, to identify and dig into the cracks which appear across its apparatuses, to reverse the balance of power wherever possible in order to initiate and sustain a radical transformation of the state in a socialist sense.

Far from the reductive opposition that prevails in the West between reactionary nationalism on the one hand and postmodern globalisation on the other, national sovereignty as claimed by the Arab revolutions revives the self-determination and national liberation movements that prevailed in left-wing circles at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Without it being opposed to the struggle against racism and discrimination, the establishment of a new political and economic emancipatory regime and, more generally, the realisation of people's aspirations for social justice, require redefining the national state and rid it of the neo-colonial pact between local elites and their Western counterparts.

Such an undertaking faces a twofold challenge. First, it cannot be solely reduced to the resolution of political and socio-economic issues, but it should be grounded in a socio-cultural approach that not only sees the state as a historical social relationship, but integrates local expectations of what a 'good government' should be, based on a deep understanding of the political and ideological frameworks of the region’s social classes. On this depends the legitimacy of the institutions and their adoption by the populations. Second, nation-states in the Arab region must be thought of as interdependent political and economic entities that share – beyond a collective history, culture and language – not only a specific set of economic and political relationships but most importantly a community of common destiny.

HÉLA YOUSFI

Image: 

The original uploader was HonorTheKing atEnglish Wikipedia. - (Original text :en.wikipedia;Top left: File:Tahrir Square - February 9, 2011.png Top right:File:Tunisia Unrest - VOA - Tunis 14 Jan 2011 (2).jpg Bottom left:File:(Banyas demonstration) مظاهرات بانياس جمعة الغضب - 29 نيسان 2011.jpg Bottom right:File:Yemen_protest.jpg) CC BY-SA 3.0  File:Infobox collage for MENA protests.PNG  Created: 12 April 2011

• 1. Choukri Hmed (2016), « “Le Peuple Veut la Chute du Régime”. Situations et Issues Révolutionnaires lors de l’Occupation de la Place de la Kasbah à Tunis en 2011 », Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales, pp. 211-212.
• 2. Choukri Hmed (2016), « “Le Peuple Veut la Chute du Régime”. Situations et Issues Révolutionnaires lors de l’Occupation de la Place de la Kasbah à Tunis en 2011 », Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales, pp. 211-212.
• 3. Karl Polanyi et al. (1983) , La Grande Transformation: aux Origines Politiques et Economiques de Notre Temps. Paris: Gallimard.
• 4. W. J. Dorman (2013) ‘Exclusion and Informality: The Praetorian Politics of Land Management in Cairo, Egypt’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 37(5), pp. 1584-1610
• 5. Nazih N. Ayubi (1991), Overstating the Arab State. Politics and society in the Middle East, I.B. Tauris.
• 6. Bertrand Badie et Pierre Birnbaum (1982), Sociologie de l'État. Grasset.
• 7. Nicos Poulantzas, (2000). State, Power, Socialism. Verso.
• 8. https://www.lesechos.fr/monde/afrique-moyen-orient/petrole-lalgerie-va-devoir-se-serrer-la-ceinture-1183585
• 9. Mouhoud El Mouhoub (2011), ‘Économie Politique des Révolutions Arabes: Analyse et Perspectives’, Maghreb-Machrek, 4(210), Editions Eska.
• 10. Béatrice Hibou, Irène Bono, Hamza Meddeb, Mohamed Tozy (2015), L’État d’Injustice au Maghreb. Maroc et Tunisie, Karthala-CERI, Paris.
• 11. ACHCAR Gilbert (2013), Le Peuple veut, Une exploration radicale du soulèvement arabe. Paris, Sindbad, Actes Sud, 2013, 432 p.
• 12. ttps://www.peterlang.com/view/9782807602557/xhtml/chapter04.xhtml
• 13. Thomas Sommer-Houdeville (2017), Thèse de doctorat, ‘Remaking Iraq : Neoliberalism and a System of Violence after the US invasion, 2003-2011’.
• 14. Héla Yousfi (2017), ‘Redessiner les relations État/Collectivités Locales en Tunisie : Enjeux Socio-Culturels et Institutionnels du Projet de Décentralisation’, Papiers de Recherche AFD, no 2017-47, Juin.
• 15. https://orientxxi.info/magazine/civil-society-in-tunisia-the-ambivalence-of-a-new-seat-of-power,1677
• 16. https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/progressive-neoliberalism-reactionary-populism-nancy-fraser
• 17. William Mitchel & Thomas Fazi (2017), Reclaiming the State, a progressive vision of sovereignty for a post-neoliberal world, Pluto Press.
• 18. Adam Hanieh (2013), Lineages of Revolt: Issues of Contemporary Capitalism in the Middle East, Haymarket Books, Chicago.

Ahmet Tonak

There have been many urban legends about Marx’s life.An oft-repeated myth is that Marx attempted to dedicate one of the volumes of Capital to Darwin.This claim has been refuted, in my view rather persuasively, by M. Fay’s scholarly detective work in which she demonstrated that the attempt to dedicate a book (The Students’ Darwin) to Darwin was not made by Marx, but rather by Edward B. Aveling, the lover of Marx’s daughter Eleanor.1

Obviously not at the scale of the above myth, an interesting speculation has relatively recently been made by Sam Bowles, based on a conversation with William Jaffe: that Karl Marx and Leon Walras vacationed in the Summer of 1862 on the same lake in Switzerland.2

Here is the first dialogue in Sam Bowles’ play “Three’s a crowd: my dinner party with Karl, Leon, and Maynard”:

“KARL (warmly shaking Leon’s hand as he rises)

Leon [Walras], I am very sorry that we were not able to meet that summer in 1862 when we vacationed on the same lake in Switzerland. (Pause, Leon starts to say something but Karl continues) Perhaps I could have persuaded you that even your modest market socialist reforms could be implemented only by a revolutionary working class.”

LEON

Had I known of your interest in mathematics, Karl—may I call you Karl?—I certainly would have looked you up.” (Bowles: 13)

Bowles provided information about the facts described in his play at the end of the text.Regarding the claim that Marx and Walras vacationed on the same lake in Switzerland during the Summer of 1862, Bowles writes: “The playwright recalls that in his youth William Jaffe (Leon’s biographer3) mentioned this to him, but it may not have really happened.”

Let me first explore (and speculate on) the uncertainty of the above claim regarding Marx’s vacation in Switzerland during the Summer of 1862. Later, I will suggest a (speculative) explanation for W. Jaffe’s remark to Bowles concerning the Marx-Walras vacation.

Based on standard sources, namely Draper’s The Marx-Engels Chronicle4 and Gabriel’s Love and Capital,5 let me list some of Marx's activities during the months of June, July, and August 1862.

June:As usual, Marx experienced financial difficulties. The Vienna paper Die Presse did not publish enough of Marx’s pieces. His wife Jenny tried “in vain to raise money by selling part of Marx’s books.” (Draper: 112.)

July: Even though Die Presse published four articles by Marx, their financial plight continued.Engels helped them pay part of their debt. Lasalle came to London for the Industrial Exhibition and often met with Marx (July 9 – August 4). Draper writes: “Marx learns of Lasalle’s plan to launch a movement among German workers based on the demands for universal suffrage and producers’ cooperatives with state aid (by the Prussian state).Marx reached the opinion that Lasalle’s state-socialistic views are essentially reformist and reactionary.To Lasalle’s proposal that Marx be English correspondent for his planned organ, Marx replies he would be willing 'for good pay' but without political responsibility for the paper, since he and Lasalle 'agree politically on nothing' save certain distant objectives.” (Draper: 112.)

August: A day before Lasalle leaves, Marx reveals his financial difficulties. “Lasalle agrees to arrange for a loan of £15 [about $2300 today] plus possible future drafts provided Engels guarantees repayment.” (Draper: 112). Marx travels to Zaltbommel in the Netherlands “to ask his uncle Lion Philips for financial help, but Philips is away on a trip.”He then goes on to Trier to see his mother, and “on the way he stops in Cologne.” (Draper: 112.)

These activities and travels are also confirmed by Gabriel’s account for the same period.Although Marx visited a couple of places outside England in August, those were mostly related to securing financial help.During the month of July, Marx was also preoccupied with Lasalle’s visits.On these grounds, I highly doubt that Marx had the time and money to spend his vacation on a lake in Switzerland during the Summer of 1862, where he might have met Walras.

Regarding Jaffe’s passing comment on the vacation that Marx and Walras might have spent on a lake in Switzerland in 1862, I would suggest the slim possibility that Jaffe may have misread one of the most authoritative biographies of Marx published during the 1970s: D. McLellan’s Karl Marx: His Life and Thought (also published as Karl Marx: A Biography).There, McLellan discussed Lasalle’s visit to London and his meetings with Marx during July 1862.His description of Lassalle’s personality is in itself interesting: a "Don Juan and a revolutionary Cardinal Richelieu. And there is also his continual chatter in an unnatural falsetto voice, his ugly demonstrative gestures and didactic tone. And it must indeed have been difficult for Marx to tolerate long the company of a man who could, with complete self-assurance, begin a speech with the words: 'Working men! Before I leave for the Spas of Switzerland ...'”This quote from Lasalle mentioning “the Spas of Switzerland” comes from a book by R. Morgan, The German Social Democrats and the First International (Cambridge, 1965).

So, the year (1862), the season (Summer), and the lake in Switzerland (Spas of Switzerland) would seem to support that a vacation was indeed taken there.The only problem is that the person who may have taken that vacation was probably Lassalle, not Marx!

• 1. Margaret A. Fay, 1980. “Marx and Darwin: A Literary Detective Story” Monthly Review. March.
• 2. This speculation is tolerable because it is a part play about a fictional gathering of K Marx, L. Walras, and J.M. Keynes. Bowles, Sam. 2013. “Three’s a crowd: my dinner party with Karl, Leon, and Maynard” in Jeannette Wicks-Lim and Robert Pollin, eds. Capitalism on Trial: Explorations in the Tradition of Thomas E. Weisskopf. Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing.
• 3. Apparently, Jaffe only completed the first two chapters of Walras’s biography and was never able to finish it before he died in 1980. Walker, Donald. 1981. “William Jaffe, Historian of Economic thought, 1898-1980” American Economic Review. 71 (5).
• 4. Draper, Hal. 1985. The Marx-Engels Chronicle: A Day-by-Day Chronology of Marx and Engels’ Life and Activity. New York: Schocken Books.
• 5. Gabriel, Mary. 2011. Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution. New York: Little, Brown and Company.

Barbara C. Allen

The Workers’ Opposition was a 1920-22 political faction in the Russian Communist Party that advocated trade-union management of the economy through a system of worker-elected representatives. It consisted of Communist metalworkers who led trade unions and industry. Its major centres of support included industrial areas of Russia and Ukraine (Kharkov, the Donbas, Odessa, Nizhny Novgorod, Samara, Omsk, Ryazan, Krasnodar, Vladimir, and Moscow). Regional nuances ran through the Worker Oppositionists’ proposals, analysis, and behaviour.1

The term ‘workers’ opposition’ in the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party historically originated in Ukraine in 1900, when radical intellectuals [intelligenty] applied it to uncooperative groups of workers in Ekaterinoslav and Kharkov. As a hostile term, the name drove a wedge between worker andintelligent socialists.2 The 1920s group’s most visible political work was in Moscow, the capital of the RSFSR. Its supporters in Ukraine were never as numerous as the supporters of other opposition movements there, such as the Democratic Centralists or Trotskyists. Nevertheless, study of Worker Oppositionists in Ukraine is essential to understanding oppositionism across Soviet space and the relationship between oppositionism and the party and police institutions.

Distinctive characteristics of the Workers’ Opposition in Ukraine included: 1) its members’ specific objections to the merger of the Borotbists (Socialist Revolutionaries) with the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine; 2) its multi-ethnic membership (Russians, Jews, and Ukrainians); and 3) the challenge it faced in the appeal of the Makhno anarchist insurgency to workers. The economic dilemmas its members faced as trade-union leaders and managers of Soviet industry undermined the vision of the Worker Oppositionists in Ukraine. This paper highlights some aspects of Worker Oppositionists’ activities in Ukraine before and after their defeat in 1921.

The idea for this project emerges from my 2015 biography of Workers’ Opposition leader Alexander Shlyapnikov,3 but the paper is based on research I conducted in summer 2017 in the Central State Archive of Public Organisations of Ukraine (TsDAHO) the Central State Archives of Supreme Bodies of Power and Government of Ukraine (TsDAVO), and the State Archive of the Security Services of Ukraine. I examined and took notes from about 200 files in the first two archives and took 1930 digital photos of pages from security service archive files on the case of the Workers’ Opposition in the 1930s and from personal case files of seven former Worker Oppositionists who were arrested in Ukraine in the 1930s and politically repressed (Petr Bykhatsky, Ivan Dudko-Petinsky, Moisei Goldenberg, Semen Kozorezov, Mikhail Lobanov, Grigory Sapozhnikov, and Isai Shpoliansky).

Worker Oppositionists in Ukraine confronted additional challenges to those facing the group’s supporters in central Russia. At a CP(b)U congress in March 1919 in Ukraine, Lavrentev, who would later join the Workers’ Opposition, caused a stir when he spoke of “completely new tasks for trade unions.” Yet he also acknowledged the challenge posed by Bolsheviks’ lack of a majority in Ukraine’s trade unions, which were controlled, he said, by Mensheviks who had been ousted from trade unions in Russia. When they would achieve this, he said, trade unions “organise the entire economy,” “compose the Council of Economy and the highest body of the economic policy in full,” “organise the Commissariat of Labour,” and assume “all the work of organizing production and labour.” He called for Bolshevik party committees to take control of trade union leading bodies at the upcoming All-Ukraine Congress of Trade Unions.4 He did not acknowledge the irony that this would set a precedent for Communist Party interference in trade union leadership matters.5

            The All-Russian Central Council of Trade Unions (VTsSPS) created a Southern Bureau (Iuzhburo) in 1920 to organise trade unions in Ukraine, but ongoing military conflict undermined its work and the composition of its leadership changed frequently. A Iuzhburo report also pointed to “banditry” as a “specifically Ukrainian phenomenon” and as harmful to the organisation of unions. Besides those, political authorities frequently changed, Finally, Menshevik influence was stronger far longer in parts of Ukraine than in the Russian centres. These conditions led to “lack of discipline” and “samostiinost” (Ukrainian separatism), according to Iuzhburo. Efforts were focused on the gubernias where heavy industry prevailed: Donetsk, Ekaterinoslav, Kharkov, Odessa, Kiev.6

Organizing a Bolshevik Southern Bureau (Iuzhburo) of the All-Russian Metalworkers’ Union in Ukraine was only possible after the Whites’ counterrevolutionary armed forces had been cleared from the territory in December 1919. As the Whites retreated, factory owners and directors left, too, which left management in the hands of worker organisations controlled by Mensheviks, which Bolsheviks “dispersed”. This seems to have been an overwhelming challenge to Iuzhburo VSRM. Lavrentev and other personnel returned from Moscow in February 1920 and undertook early organizational work. Lavrentev focused on wage rates. Leadership changed after the 3^rd All-Russian Metalworkers’ Union Congress. The new Iuzhburo leader, Mikhail Lobanov, who had arrived by June 1920, shifted his attention to organizing production and working through government economic bodies.7

Born in Moscow gubernia to parents who worked in weaving and woodcarving, Lobanov was educated at home and in revolutionary study circles. He joined the Bolshevik party in 1903 and the Metalworkers’ Union in 1905. Due to his exceptional talents, he was chosen to attend Maxim Gorky’s school at Capri in 1909-10. He also went to Paris and attended Lenin’s lectures (he is referenced as “Stanislav” in Lenin’s Sochineniia). In 1917, he helped organise the party and trade unions in Moscow. In 1918-20 he worked in the Commissariat of Labour, the Metalworkers’ Union CC, and the Soviet. In Ukraine, he worked in union, party, and economic bodies in Ukraine until 1929, when he was transferred to the Urals for economic work.8

            Other prominent Worker Oppositionists also operated in Ukraine in summer 1920. Flor Mitin was directed to chair the Lugansk gubernia trade union council on June 30, 1920.9 Iurii Lutovinov participated in a meeting of senior communists of Lugansk party organisation on 9 August 1920, where there was a report about the problem of communists leaving the party, ostensibly for family reasons, illness, or lack of time. Arguing against opinions that those who left were self-seekers or politically illiterate, Lutovinov argued that central party and state policy was at fault for being insufficiently communist, and that too many alien elements in the party pushed out workers and poor peasants. He called “to workerise the communist party” by bringing in a mass of new members from the working class “in such a way … that it would take the leading role in Management of the Soviet Republic.”10

By mid-September 1920, party leaders of Ukraine expressed concern to one another about Lutovinov having created organised support for the Workers’ Opposition in Donbas, which, in their eyes, had become mixed up with Nestor Makhno’s anarchism. They expressed the need for strong leadership and better organization at the uezd andvolost levels.11 Around the same time, Mitin, Lobanov, and some other Workers’ Opposition supporters spoke at an all-Ukrainian meeting of trade unions, where Mitin proposed a resolution, which was accepted, criticising the Council of Defense’s appointment of metals section chiefs and board chiefs without having consulted trade unions.12

The Worker Oppositionists met rude pushback from Ukraine party leaders. In October 1920, Andrei Ivanov, a former metalworker who had become a CP(b)U CC member and chair of the VTsSPS Southern Bureau, tried to assign Iuzhburo VSRM member Pavlov to work in committees of poor peasants, without the permission of Iuzhburo VSRM. He threatened to set the Cheka on Lobanov and others for not complying. Lobanov offered himself to Ivanov in Pavlov’s place. Ivanov took the bait, but this elicited the interference of the CC VSRM, because Ivanov’s order violated CC RCP(b) decision on how to mobilise Metalworkers’ Union personnel.13

On behalf of the Workers’ Opposition, Perepechko, Antonov, and Kuznetsov spoke at the 5^th CP(b)U conference in Kharkov, November 1920, supported by at least twenty delegates. They were especially aggrieved over the influence of former Borotbists (Left SRs) within the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine, which added a specific cast to the broader allegations of ‘petty-bourgeois’ elements flooding into the party that Workers’ Opposition leaders in Moscow and other areas lodged. Zinoviev spoke against them. Excerpts of their speeches were included in a document collection he edited, but I found the full versions in the Ukrainian archives.Perepechko felt that the CP(b)U was too invested in the work of committees of poor peasants and insufficiently seeking support among the proletariat.14 Antonov agreed with Perepechko on many points and faulted the CC CP(b)U report for not mentioning trade unions and connected it to neglect of the working class’s leading role. Controversially, he claimed that communist inattention to the working class allowed Makhno to gain support among factory and mill workers, who he said stood “in line for his assemblies by the tens of thousands.”15 Antonov read a resolution in the name of the Workers’ Opposition, but I could not find its text in the files.16

            Perepechko denied Zinoviev’s assertion that mobilisation of communists for the front contributed to a crisis in the party, for Moscow trade unions, he said, followed a proletarian class line. A “petty bourgeois element” “deeply hostile to the proletariat” was “inundating the party.” He denied that the Workers’ Opposition was hostile to the intelligentsia. The only way to ensure proletarian influence over the party and soviets was “to restore their rights to the trade unions.” He read aloud theses of the Workers’ Opposition.17

Kuznetsov spoke of the fear of reprisals for speaking freely in support of the Workers’ Opposition. The common expression for this was being “sent to eat peaches,” but he said that some were sent where there were no peaches at all. He referred to communists being shot in Volhynia. He complained that one could not voice criticism without being called a Makhnoist or Menshevik.18 Kuznetsov wound up by acknowledging that much of what the Workers’ Opposition wanted was in the conference’s common resolution, which it could support, but that it would “reserve the right to voice disagreement in the future.”19

On the eve of the 10^th All-Russian Party Congress, Workers’ Opposition representatives (Pavlov, Mitin, Polosatov, Kuznetsov) spoke out at the 4^th Donetsk gubernia CP(b)U conference in mid-February 1921.Polosatov struck many familiar notes of the Workers’ Opposition’s platform, such as that the party had become isolated from the working class. He called for struggle against engineers’ and technicians’ influence over the party. Not only the “vanguard of the working class” but the entire class down to the local level should build the economy. Involvement by trade unions and soviets would not weaken the party’s role, but strengthen it, for the party “will guide the trade union movement.” He spoke of linkinggubernia level party committees, trade union councils, and soviet executive committees, but without specifics. Isolation among these bodies he blamed on Trotsky and his supporters. He denied there was anything wrong with groupings in the party, which were always part of party life “both in the West and in Russia”, if they observed party discipline. Destroying groupings was “not a Marxist approach.”

At the same conference, Kuznetsov argued that the worker was basically a communist and could be drawn into the party and its work if the party would do more to attract workers. Workers, he said, ought to be united more broadly in trade unions, which should expand their work and channel workers into the party. Soviets used to be like a powerful parliament, but had become just an executive “troika”. Strengthening both trade unions and soviets would lead to a stronger party more anchored in the working class. The Workers’ Opposition just wanted to eliminate the party’s “illnesses”, not to oppose for the sake of opposition.20

At the Tenth Party Congress in Moscow, the Workers’ Opposition was censured and banned. Through 1921, party leaders engaged in a campaign of suppression to neutralise its influence within party and trade union organisations. Some of this is described in my biography of Alexander Shlyapnikov.

In Ukraine, the metalworkers’ inability to resist party leaders’ campaign of repression was hindered by poor communications between Iuzhburo and CC VSRM in Moscow.21 Party leaders’ efforts to quash oppositionism was phrased in terms of “strengthening” the unions, such as the Metalworkers, which harboured oppositionists.22 Politburo CC CP(b)U records contain frequent references to personnel transfers of Workers’ Opposition supporters. Fall 1921 transfers of people from Nikolaev was related to the strength of the Workers’ Opposition there. At the same time, distribution of bread to hungry workers in Nikolaev was meant to dilute their grievances.23

            The influence of the Workers’ Opposition within central bodies of the Metalworkers’ Union was reduced. At the same time, new issues related to the introduction of the New Economic Policy changed the terms of oppositionism. In August or September [?] 1921, Iuzhburo VSRM expressed concern to CC VSRM, VTsSPS leading bodies, and CC CP(b)U about Gosplan desires to lease large metals industrial enterprises and coal mining operations in Donbas to Belgian capitalists. Iuzhburo pointed out that it demoralised economy personnel to read in press articles that old private capitalist ‘bosses’ could return. Iuzhburo called for a special session of CC VSRM to discuss the matter. It claimed not to oppose “concessions in general or leasing” but did not want the entire economy turned over to capitalist entrepreneurs.24

By the 21 September 1921 session of Iuzhburo, Lobanov had been demoted to assistant chair, with [ ] Ivanov replacing him as chair. Nevertheless, former Worker Oppositionists still had a strong presence in the bureau (Skliznev, Tolokontsev, Mitin [and Poliakov, Prasolov?]).25 In late September 1921, they were debating the merits of collegial vs. one-man management for industrial combinations.26 In early October, Mitin informed the Iuzhburo VSRM that the CP(b)U Don gubernia committee had recalled him from the Don raikom of VSRM. They objected that this was not supposed to be done without the permission of the Union CC’s communist fraction bureau. They told Mitin to remain in his post until the CP(b)U Politburo would resolve the question upon an appeal through the Iuzhburo of VTsSPS.27

Yet it was difficult for Iuzhburo VSRM to protect former Worker Oppositionists when it faced even greater problems of scarce resources for union work, insufficient food and clothing for workers, and violations of wage rates agreements. Trade unions had to find food and fuel for workers, so that they could work and would not go on strike. In addition, trade unions often had to oversee enterprise leases, if sovnarkhozes neglected their duty. At one factory, the management was all arrested without consulting the trade union. Theft was also a problem in factories. The bad harvest stifled official bodies’ ability to show initiative.28 Finally, Iuzhburo VSRM had conflicts with sovnarkhozists about management of Iugostal and other trusts.29

            By December 8, 1921, Lobanov returned to his position as chair of Iuzhburo VSRM.30 But pressure contined upon Mitin, especially at the hands of CC member and formal metalworker Andrei Ivanov, who chaired Iuzhburo of VTsSPS. Mitin complained in a letter, with support from Lobanov, Perepechko, and others, that Ivanov denied Mitin’s nomination to CC CP(b)U. The denial was phrased in extremely offensive language, accusing Mitin of having been a Menshevik who joined the Bolsheviks out of self-seeking motives and of having demoralised the party and the Donbas.31 CP(b)U members in Iuzhburo CC VSRM wrote to Politburo to explain the detrimental impact that reprisals against Worker Oppositionists had on Metalworkers’ Union and trade union work generally. First, there were not enough communists in the trade union movement because trade unions had until only recently been in Menshevik hands and there were still many Mensheviks in the movement. Party bodies’ distrust toward Workers’ Opposition supporters in trade union leading bodies also hurt work among unions and in the economy. Metalworkers in large industrial centres were not allowed seats in gubernia trade union councils, which undermined work. They asked for party leaders in Ukraine to emphasise that metalworker representatives should be allowed ingubernia trade union council presidiums, to send them more senior metalworker communists, allow those purged from party to continue in union and economic posts until a replacement would be found, and insisted that members could not be removed from Metalworkers’ Unionraikoms bygubernia trade union councils and party committees without the permission of Iuzhburo VSRM. People should not be transferred just because they belonged to a pre-congress factional grouping.32

In January 1922, CP(b)U leadership blamed the Workers’ Opposition for the murder of an engineer in Donbas. A worker party cell meeting called for release of the party secretary who killed the engineer, because “proletarian instinct guided” him to carry out the act.33

On 10 January 1922 when Iuzhburo VSRM met, Lobanov was still chair and Skliznev was secretary. Others present included an Ivanov who was chair of the Metals Board of Ukraine and Kolesnikov from Iuzhburo VTsSPS. They objected to the VTsSPS order on wage rates as “completely unacceptable in Ukrainian conditions” and resolved “to energetically protest against its implementation at the current time in Ukraine.”34 This shows they still had fighting spirit. Nevertheless, they could not prevent reprisals against their comrades.

In early 1922, two former Worker Oppositionists named Gorlovsky and Shpaliansky addressed higher party bodies (incl. the CC RCP(b), CC CP(b)U) explaining their decision to leave the party. Their first grievance was the pressure that the party leaders had placed on the 1921 congress of trade unions’ communist faction, resulting in the CC’s rejection of wage rates proposals passed by the congress communist faction, which “demoralised communist trade unionists.” But, they wrote, provincial party leaders exceeded central ones by exerting “the rudest, clumsiest, most tactless, and most unjustified pressure” on the communist faction at the third gubernia congress of trade unions in Nikolaev. The congress was so undermined that its communist faction did not want to vote and was only forced to do so by party discipline. Many of the congress’s faction members wanted to turn in their party cards right then. At first, reprisals came individually against Worker Oppositionists by removing them from posts or transferring them, then entire organisations were dispersed for spurious reasons. Manuilsky mobilised nearly all former Worker Oppositionists from the Nikolaev party organisation, including authors of this letter, to go to guard the Soviet border with Poland and Romania. But, in fact, most were sent not to guard the borders but to “diverse places”. That is how the authors landed in Omsk, Siberia, where they met suspicion that they might continue oppositionist factionalism. They believed the distrust shown toward them led to contradictions and sudden changes in their work assignments, which made it impossible for them to work within the party and motivated their decision to leave.35

At the same time, when Iuzhburo VSRM heard of and lodged protests about Donetsk party leaders forced re-election of delegates to Fifth Congress of Metalworkers’ Union, they also had to discuss factory debt, unemployment, clothing for employed workers, management’s failure to fulfil commitments to workers, etc.36 Iuzhburo VSRM leaders went themselves to conduct district conferences in Kharkov, Bakhmut, and other cities, but this was not enough to prevent irregularities.37

By summer 1922, Iuzhburo VSRM was overwhelmed by the crisis of indebtedness in the metalworking industry, which gave rise to strikes and disturbances.38 They attempted to arrange payment in kind by food supplies to workers of the Ukraine agricultural machinery trust.39 They were also attempting to cope with the reorganisation of metalworking industry in the conditions of the New Economic Policy and of a capital shortage.40

            By August-September 1922, members of Iuzhburo VSRM were being reassigned to work in metals and machinery trusts, at least partially according to their own wishes, because they found it impossible to carry out work in Iuzhburo. Lobanov was assigned by Sovnarkom to the Ukrainian Economic Council presidium, but remained chair of Iuzhburo until his replacement arrived. Iuzhburo VSRM nominated Mitin as a board member of the Ukrainian Metallurgical Trust.41 Kubyshkin and Skliznev became board members of the Ukrainian Trust of Agricultural Machinery. As Iuzhburo’s leadership broke down due to transfers and lack of replacements, the presidium relinquished initiative to district committees of Metalworkers’ Union to carry out their own wage rates negotiations with boards of trusts and with factory managements.42

By the end of September 1922, Iuzhburo VSRM had a new chair in Pavel Arsentev.43 But lack of money to pay workers’ wages continued to cause problems, especially in Nikolaev.44 This, along with the poor harvest, resulted in deaths of workers. In late October it was revealed in a Iuzhburo report that in Nikolaev factories, “400 skilled workers died of starvation from January to August.”45 Despite movement of Iuzhburo leaders into trusts, trade unions still could not work effectively with economic planning personnel, as reported by Skliznev at a meeting of VSRM Ukraine organisations in December 1922, and this exacerbated the problems with protection of the workforce.46

            Although dispersed from trade unions into economic bodies, former Worker Oppositionists continued to associate informally and to speak out during periods of open party debate in the 1920s. The evidence I have found indicates that they maintained a distinct identity based on their former coalescence as the Workers’ Opposition and did not merge with Trotskyist or Zinovievist oppositionist groups. Lobanov has been misidentified as a signatory of the Declaration of 46 in 1923, an act which led to the formation of the Trotskyist Left Opposition, but the signature on the statement does not look like his signature I have seen elsewhere. It must have been a different Lobanov.

At the October 1926 all-Ukrainian conference of the CP(b)U, Kaganovich and other speakers slammed Shlyapnikov, Medvedev, and connected the old Workers’ Opposition, which Lenin had condemned, to the United Opposition of Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev. Lobanov was among those demonised in Kaganovich’s speech.47 As a guest rather than full voting delegate, Lobanov managed with difficulty to obtain permission to speak and his appearance was “met with noise and laughter.”Defenders of the Soviet Party leadership’s line interrupted him nearly forty times, with mockery and ridicule. Sarcastically knocking his audience’s knowledge of party history, he complained that one could not criticise but could only “sing hosannas to our most supreme CC.” He defended his own history in the party as one of the “ants who assembled the party” in the underground before 1917. An audience member questioned why he still held an important work position, but Skrypnik interjected that Lobanov should not worry about being removed from his job. Lobanov asserted that the former Workers’ Oppositionists should be allowed to write their own history rather than be judged according to distorted textbooks on party history. His own account of the Workers’ Opposition’s origins lay in its discontent over the “nonproletarian element” in the party, the payment in gold roubles for foreign locomotive orders at a time when Soviet factories had too little work and workers were starving. He claimed that party leaders had accepted some Workers’ Opposition proposals, such as the purge, and that it had cancelled some foreign orders. He saw the Workers’ Opposition as having succeeded in convincing the 10^th party congress to pass a resolution “about democracy and about bringing the working class closer to the leadership.” He pointed out that Shlyapnikov had successfully parried Lenin’s charge of syndicalism at the 1921 Miners’ Congress by pointing out that the Workers’ Opposition could not be syndicalist, because production in the RSFSR was already in workers’ hands, whereas syndicalists pressed for workers to own production in capitalist society. He claimed that Lenin no longer used the term after the Miners’ Congress. Furthermore, he said, Lenin did not treat Shlyapnikov as an enemy. He portrayed Lenin and Shlyapnikov as equals in the party. Analysing the economy of 1926, he expressed scepticism about reported economic successes, for industrial capital was nearly exhausted, especially in Iugostal. Productivity could not be increased further without new machinery and new capital. He was concerned about the growth in unemployment: “who does not have an unemployed person in your family?” Yet beyond advocatingsovkhozes and sarcastically a medal for those who do not interfere in the work of the economy, he did not seem to offer brilliant solutions to acquire new capital.48 Lobanov was followed by a round of attacks upon him, his positions, and his version of party history.49

At the same conference, a reference was made to Sapozhnikov continuing to maintain oppositionist views (as having stated at a party committee plenum in Kiev that trade unions were deceiving the working class).50

Although the Worker Oppositionists seem to have ceased to make public critical comments by 1928, many of them were swept up into the Stalinist terror of 1935-8, arrested, interrogated, charged falsely, and tried in secret. It appears that the NKVD was attempting to assemble the elements for a show trial of the Workers’ Opposition, whether separately or together with other former oppositionist groups.

Lobanov left Ukraine for work in the Urals during the First Five Year Plan, but returned in the early 1930s to Kharkov, where he was arrested on the fabricated case of the Workers’ Opposition in 1936. Lobanov was arrested in Kharkov in August 1936 and sent by special convoy to Kiev. Accused on case of Workers’ Opposition in November 1936. The NKVD accusation against him of terror claimed he confessed to charge. He was condemned in Moscow in March 1937 by Military Collegium of Supreme Court. But when he appeared before the court, he retracted the part of his confession to terrorist activity. Said he did not belong to the Trotskyists, but that he was one of leaders of Workers’ Opposition in Ukraine and it created a bloc with Zinovievists but not with Trotskyists.51

The Ukrainian Bykhatsky was a young supporter of the Workers’ Opposition in 1921 who seemed to have regretted his ‘instinctive’ (his word) vote for Lenin’s platform on trade unions and determined to show more ‘political maturity’ as he continued to defend the views of the Workers’ Opposition later in the 1920s, even as he found social mobility in the Soviet system through education, becoming an engineer from his starting place as a metalworker. He visited Shlyapnikov and Medvedev in Moscow in the early 1930s, visits which the NKVD attempted to construct as conspiratorial encounters. Bykhatsky was arrested in 1934 and exiled to the Kazakh SSR, where he seems to have died in a prison camp sometime during World War II.52

Sapozhnikov was repeatedly interrogated and broke down from initial defiance to apparent readiness to testify with the most damning charges against Shlyapnikov, Medvedev, and other alleged members of a Workers’ Opposition ‘centre’ in Moscow. The NKVD took Sapozhnikov from Kiev to Moscow for closed trial, where he recanted the most damning charge he had made against fellow Worker Oppositionist Sergei Medvedev – about having approved individual terrorist acts. Although he was brought to Moscow to stand trial at a closed session of the Military Collegium of the USSR Supreme Court, he recanted the part of his testimony with the most damning charge against Medvedev, that of having urged individual acts of terror against Soviet leaders. This may have contributed, along with Shlyapnikov’s and Medvedev’s failure to confess and the death from heart failure of Mikhail Chelyshev during the investigation, to the unravelling of the NKVD’s case against the alleged Workers’ Opposition. 53

In the NKVD investigations of these individuals and others associated with them in the 1930s, Jewish Worker Oppositionists seem to have become more prominent as targets of repression. The NKVD preserved only one case file of interrogation protocols relating to the Workers’ Opposition in 1936, as compared to dozens of files on Trotskyists. Correspondingly, only a few dozen people in Ukraine seem to have been targeted as Worker Oppositionists, as compared to many thousands of Trotskyists. Trotsky supporter N.V. Golubenko was a major figure targeted in the NKVD case against the Trotskyists in 1935-8 in Ukraine. He was acquainted with some of the Worker Oppositionists targeted and his testimony against them played a key role in their arrests and convictions. The interrogators treated the former Worker Oppositionists as a subset of the threat they perceived from Trotsky supporters in the 1930s. Some of those they targeted became Trotskyists or had always been Trotskyists, while others had attempted to maintain a separate identity as former Worker Oppositionists while voicing support for Trotskyist proposals.

• 1. A shorter version of this paper was presented at the Study Group of the Russian Revolution Conference, Cardiff University, Wales, UK, 4-6 January 2018; and the Southern Conference on Slavic Studies, Charlotte, NC, March 22-24, 2018.
• 2. Allan Wildman 1967, The Making of a Workers’ Revolution: Russian Social Democracy, 1891-1903 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press), pp. 107–8.
• 3. Barbara C. Allen, Alexander Shlyapnikov, 1885-1937: Life of an Old Bolshevik (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2015; Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2016).
• 4. TsDAHO F. 1, op. 1, d. 15. ll. 91-93, March 5, 1919 session. During the discussion of the trade union question, the chair admonished delegates for “reading newspapers, carrying on conversations, and making noise” during the discussion, which to him indicated insufficient interest in the trade union movement’s work (l. 101). This comment, as well as a few lines from Lavrentev’s speech, were struck out in the stenographic record as if they were not to be published.
• 5. TsDAHO, f. 1, op. 1, d. 15, l. 105. The Third Congress of CP(b)U met from March 1-6, 1919, with a preliminary session on February 28. Most of the 170 delegates were from the Donbas, Poltava and Kiev gubernias.
• 6. TsDAVO, F. 2605, op. 1, d. 9, ll. 51-2.
• 7. TsDAVO, F. 2605, op. 1, d. 25, ll. 1, 45, 70-78; F. 2595, opis 1, d. 1, l. 4, l. 10.
• 8. TsDAHO, f. 23, op. 1, d. 56, ll. 1-22. Lobanov, Mikhail Ivanovich. 1932-34, Kharkov, application for membership in the Society of Former Political Prisoners and Exiles. He was on leave from an assistant manager in an economic trust. His application was approved.
• 9. TsDAVO, F. 2595, opis 1, d. 1, l. 14.
• 10. TsDAHO F. 1, op. 20, d. 213. l. 110 Protocol no. 1 of soveshchanie of senior personnel communists of Lugansk organization, 9 August 1920. 55 people attended. Chair was Razumov and secretary was Pogrebnoi. The meeting resolved to blame the “mass departure” on “lack of consciousness and political illiteracy.” They also called for a purge of petty bourgeois elements from the party and to “workerise the party and soviet bodies.”
• 11. TsDAHO F. 1, op. 20, d. 143, l. 96. Perepiska, zapisi razgovorov po priamomu provodu s Donetskim gubkomom KP(b)U…. 17 January – 30 December 1920. 19 September 1920 phone conversation between Akhmatov in Kharkov and Drobnis in Lugansk.
• 12. TsDAVO, F. 2595, opis 1, d. 1, l. 27, September 19, 1920.
• 13. TsDAVO, F. 2595, opis 1, d. 1, l. 29 October 5, 1920.
• 14. TsDAHO F. 1, op. 1, d. 42, ll. 61-2.
• 15. TsDAHO F. 1, op. 1, d. 42, ll. 65-9, I have found little biographical information about Antonov. He said about himself that he had belonged to the Bolshevik Party for 15 years and had been educated in a cartridge factory (l. 123). He was very active at this conference and spoke several times on behalf of the Workers’ Opposition.
• 16. TsDAHO F. 1, op. 1, d. 42, l. 123.
• 17. TsDAHO F. 1, op. 1, d. 42, ll. 165-168.
• 18. TsDAHO F. 1, op. 1, d. 42, ll. 196, 198.
• 19. TsDAHO F. 1, op. 1, d. 42, l. 241.
• 20. TsDAHO F. 1, op. 20, d. 453, ll. 7-11. Trotsky group’s theses got two votes, Workers’ Opposition got 21 votes and the Ten got 79 votes. Mitin also spoke. I did not find speeches of Pavlov and Mitin.
• 21. TsDAVO, F. 2595, op.1, d. 20, l. 2 March 14, 1921
• 22. TsDAHO F. 1, op. 6, d. 19. Materialy k protokolam no. 29-41…. 22 March – 19 April 1921.
• 23. TsDAHO F. 1, op. 6, dd. 13, 16, Politburo CC CP(b)U protocols, 2 January – 27 December 1921.
• 24. TsDAVO, F. 2595, opis 1, d. 1, l. 58.
• 25. TsDAVO, F. 2595, op.1, d. 22, l. 7.
• 26. TsDAVO, F. 2595, op.1, d. 22, l. 9.
• 27. TsDAVO, F. 2595, op.1, d. 22, l. 12, October 7, 1921.
• 28. TsDAVO, F. 2595, op. 5, d. 113, l. 1. Amosov’s speech at [Gorodskoi raion of Dnepropetrovsk?] conference of the Metalworkers’ Union in Ukraine on October 13, 1921,
• 29. TsDAVO, F. 2595, op.1, d. 22, l. 28.
• 30. TsDAVO, F. 2595, op.1, d. 115, l. 26.
• 31. TsDAHO F. 1, op. 6, d. 20. Materials for protocols no. 42-48 of Politburo sessions. 21 April – 14 June 1921. l. 68 handwritten letter from Flor Anisimovich Mitin, dated March 29, 1921. To TsK KPU in Kharkov.
• 32. TsDAHO F. 1, op. 6, d. 28. Materialy k protokolam no. 104-110. Politburo sessions CC CP(b)U. 11 November – 27 December 1921. Signed by Members of Bureau of Fraction of CP(b)U of Iuzhburo CC VSRM Ivanov, Skliznev, and [Lobanov?].
• 33. TsDAHO F. 1, op. 6, d. 29, l. 1.
• 34. TsDAVO, F. 2595, op. 1, d. 101, l. 35.
• 35. TsDAHO F. 1, op. 6, d. 34, l. 54. Materials to protokols no. 33-44 of Politburo sessions CC CP(b)U. 31 March – 9 May 1922. Signed by V. Gorlovsky (party ID 882020) and I. Ia. Shpaliansky (party ID 882018).
• 36. TsDAVO, F. 2595, op. 1, d. 101. l. 4; d. 102, ll. 83, 89.
• 37. TsDAVO, F. 2595, op. 1, d. 102, l. 69, 88.
• 38. TsDAVO, F. 2595, op. 1, d. 102, l. 49.
• 39. TsDAVO, F. 2595, op. 1, d. 102, l. 31.
• 40. TsDAVO, F. 2595, op. 1, d. 100 l. 24
• 41. TsDAVO, F. 2595, op. 1, d. 102, ll. 21-22.
• 42. TsDAVO, F. 2595, op. 1, d. 102, ll. 7, 10-11, 17.
• 43. TsDAVO, F. 2595, op. 1, d. 102, l. 2.
• 44. TsDAVO, F. 2595, op. 1, d. 101, ll. 28-29.
• 45. TsDAVO, F. 2595, op. 1, d. 101, l. 21.
• 46. TsDAVO, F. 2595, op. 1, d. 103 ll. 43-44. Protocols of joint sessions of Iuzhburo… w reps of other organizations. 1922.
• 47. TsDAHO F. 1, op. 1, d. 182. l. 22 Stenogramma I Vseukrainskoi Konferentsii KP(b)U. Part 1, uncorrected. 17-21 October 1926.
• 48. TsDAHO F. 1, op. 1, d. 182. ll. 193-206, uncorrected version; f. 1, op. 1, d. 184, ll. 111-125, corrected version. When I read the uncorrected stenographic record, I thought he sounded rattled and unclear. His corrected version made him sound more persuasive. I cannot be sure which version portrays his demeanor most accurately.
• 49. TsDAHO, f. 1, op. 1, d. 182, ll. 207, 226-227, 239-258.
• 50. TsDAHO F. 1, op. 1, d. 183 l. 183. Stenogramma I Vseukrainskoi konferentsii KP(b)U, part 2, uncorrected copy.17-21 October 1926.
• 51. Lobanov’s 1936-7 case file from Kharkov branch of Security Services Archive.
• 52. Bykhatsky’s case file in TsDAHO.
• 53. Sapozhnikov’s case file in the Kiev branch of the Security Services Archive.

A Review of A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology by Robert Brandom

Matt McManus

Department of Politics, Whitman College, Washington

mattmcmanus300@gmail.com

Abstract

Robert Brandom has offered a rich and even profound reading of Hegel that should be of interest to generations of analytic philosophers. However, his approach eschews the radical potential of Hegelianism for both emancipatory and reactionary politics. Consequently, its value to progressives may be limited.

Keywords

Hegel – logic – reconstruction – negative dialectics

Robert Brandom, (2019) A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology, Cambridge MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Introduction[1]Thank you to Borna Radnik for his help in clarifying these points and polishing the piece.

One of the defining characteristics of analytic philosophy was supposed to be a hostility to Hegel and everything he stood for. Bertrand Russell’s scathing interpretation of British idealism and the subsequent caricature of Hegelianism, and to a lesser extent Marxism, as mystical pseudo-scientific positions are representative. In his short section on Hegel in The History of Western Philosophy, Russell mocks Hegel as a figure of mere ‘historical’ interest and claims that out of a logical mistake concerning the properties of things ‘arose the whole imposing edifice of his system. This illustrates an important truth, namely, that the worse your logic, the more interesting the consequences to which it gives rise.’[2]See Russell 1945, p. 746. Even worse were the conclusions of figures like Karl Popper, arguably the most important analytic philosopher of science in the twentieth century. In The Open Society and Its Enemies, Popper joined the Neo-Kantian Ernst Cassirer[3]See Cassirer 1974. in claiming that the ‘illiterate charlatan’ Hegel was a theoretical precursor to fascistic totalitarianism. His unscientific conception of reason as embodied in the total state rather than the individual paved the way to the effacement of the latter in the course of history, by inspiring generations of Germans and others to surrender themselves to fascism. This nefarious influence went far beyond the philosophical community, as it had an impact on students and intellectuals who might otherwise have little interest in abstract debates about determinate negation or Hegel’s reading of Genesis. As Popper puts it:

In our own time, Hegel’s hysterical historicism is still the fertilizer to which modern totalitarianism owes its rapid growth. Its use has prepared the ground, and has educated the intelligentsia to intellectual dishonesty… We have to learn the lesson that intellectual honesty is fundamental for everything we cherish.[4]Popper 2003, p. 63.

A Review of Un court moment révolutionnaire: La création du Parti communiste en France (1915–1924) by Julien Chuzeville

Ian Birchall

Independent Researcher, London

ihbirchall@btinternet.com

Abstract

Chuzeville’s valuable book gives a new perspective on the history of the origins of the French Communist Party, a history previously often distorted by Stalinist and Cold War prejudices. The Party originated in a split in the mass Social-Democratic party (SFIO), but a key role was played by activists from outside the SFIO, especially revolutionary syndicalists. But the early promise of the Party was crushed by the ‘Bolshevisation’ imposed by the Communist International under Zinoviev, and many of the best militants soon departed.

Keywords

French Communist Party – Communist International – Leninism – syndicalism

Julien Chuzeville, (2017) Un court moment révolutionnaire. La création du Parti communiste en France (1915–1924), Paris: Libertalia.

2019 saw the centenary of the founding of the Communist International. Its ambition – to create mass revolutionary parties capable of carrying through a global transformation of society – remains unfulfilled but continues to haunt a revolutionary left still grappling with the problem of the form of organisation it needs.

As late as 1989 the founding editor of Revolutionary History insisted:

The verdict of history is universal, and conclusive. Except in countries where there was no working class party of any sort already in existence, there has never been a revolutionary party created by recruitment in ones and two to a sect. All the mass parties of the Third International – not excepting the Russian – issued from splits inside previously existing working class parties.Revolutionary History, Volume 2, № 3, p. 49.

Al Richardson was a scrupulously honest historian, and he would undoubtedly have found it necessary to rethink his conclusions in the light of historical research. For many years, the history of the Comintern and its various sections was overshadowed by the fact that its historians had their own problems. Those who claimed that the French Communist Party was the legitimate heir of the party created at Christmas 1920 had to wrestle with the fact that so many of those who had played a major part in its founding had disappeared – expelled or resigned – by the mid-1920s. Critical accounts were generally so blighted by Cold War prejudices that they failed to comprehend what the party’s founders were trying to do. And even critics from the standpoint of the Left Opposition were often preoccupied with defending the orthodoxy of their own tradition and failed to register the different directions which the party’s dissidents took.

So Julien Chuzeville’s new study of the origins and first years of the French Communist Party is to be welcomed. At first sight the SFIC (French Section of the Communist International) looks like a textbook example of a mass revolutionary party formed from a split inside a ‘previously existing working class party’. During the Christmas of 1920 at Tours, the congress of the French Socialist Party (SFIO, French Section of the Workers’ International), the party of Jaurès, Guesde and the Lafargues, decided by majority vote to affiliate to the Comintern; the minority seceded. Yet, as Chuzeville’s account shows, things were not quite so simple.

The book is scrupulously documented, using French Communist Party and Comintern archives and police records, as well as the private correspondence of some of the main protagonists. Chuzeville, who belongs to the generation who came to maturity after the fall of the Berlin Wall, does not seem to have any ideological baggage. He is generally sympathetic to the aspirations of the revolutionaries who built the party, though he is sceptical towards Leninism in its various guises. His claim that the Comintern never functioned democratically and was always dominated by the Russian party undoubtedly has some truth to it, but a careful study of the minutes and other documents of the first four Congresses might have led to a more qualified judgement.

Chuzeville’s careful and detailed account allows us to trace the conditions in which the emergence of a mass revolutionary party was possible. Firstly, the split in the SFIO did not fall from the skies, nor was it the work of ‘entrists’; it was the product of a unique historical conjuncture resulting from the horrific events of the First World War. Chuzeville traces the divisions in the party back to 1914 and shows that for some time a split had been considered ‘inevitable’. The vote at Tours was no more than a final ceremonial recognition; delegates had been mandated well in advance.

The delegates had ‘seized the time’, but only just. The upturn in struggle which had made the party possible was already coming to an end, as Chuzeville demonstrates with strike statistics which show a sharp decline in struggle after 1920. Unfortunately, the party failed to recognise the facts and continued to act as though a potentially revolutionary situation still existed. Chuzeville believes there were elements of Blanquism in the party’s Leninism – though they were partly legitimised by the state repression of the period.

But, secondly, the split and its successful outcome were the products of hard work by a number of key activists, and in particular the Committee of the Third International, which was the International’s French section before the founding of the SFIC. Chuzeville draws attention to individuals who played a central role – Alfred Rosmer, Pierre Monatte, Boris Souvarine and Fernand Loriot (of whom Chuzeville has written a biography). All these figures – and a number of others with whom they were associated – had disappeared from the Communist Party by the mid-twenties, and so tend to be neglected by those, Stalinists or Cold War ideologists, who want to see a continuity between the Party’s origins and its later Stalinist reality. (Monatte did not join the Communist Party till 1923 when ‘the politicians were leaving’.) Chuzeville is not the first historian to point to the importance of the role of the revolutionary syndicalists in the formation of the French Communist Party – the American Robert Wohl, Philippe Robrieux and François FerretteSee my review of his La Véritable histoire du Parti communiste français [The True History of the French Communist Party] in Revolutionary History, Volume 11, № 1. had all done so previously. But it is clear from his account of the role of Monatte, Rosmer (absent in Moscow for the earlier part of the story) and others that the revolutionary syndicalists played an essential role in the founding of the French Communist Party, so that an account of its birth as simply a split in the mass socialist party is seriously misleading. Some syndicalists had been members of the SFIO for tactical reasons, but others had never joined the party, and became SFIC members only after the split.

And thirdly, the creation of a mass revolutionary party was possible only because the Communist International already existed. As Chuzeville shows, the party was initially known as the SFIC (French Section of the Communist International): the more familiar acronym – PCF – only came into use later.

Chuzeville believes that many of the French activists had illusions or did not clearly understand what was happening in Russia. Perhaps, though it may also be the case that he underestimates the force of the enormous wave of hope aroused by the Russian Revolution in a war-weary population. He notes that some of the French activists, for example Loriot and Rosmer, had known Lenin; in particular he quotes Rosmer’s memoirs of the period – Lenin’s Moscow – but does not follow up the very clear distinction that Rosmer makes between the methods of Lenin and of Zinoviev.

The ‘short revolutionary moment’ of Chuzeville’s title lasted only four years, but it was a rich period, and as well as the interminable internal disputes which he traces in some detail, we get a picture of the party’s activity. The revolutionary wave was already ebbing, and the united front was essential to maintaining and building a party that could take advantage of any future upturn. But there was considerable confusion and dishonesty among sections of the leadership, and Chuzeville considers that only in 1923 was the united-front tactic properly used.

Nonetheless there was much positive in the period. A number of remarkable women leaders like Marthe Bigot emerged in the early period, and there was imaginative activity around women’s suffrage. Women did not have the vote – but it was possible for women to get their names on the ballot paper and to have their voters counted. The anti-militarist traditions of the period before 1914 were revived when French troops invaded the Ruhr in 1923 and there was a courageous intervention which even drew in some of the more right-wing elements in the party. Rosmer could have become secretary of the party – but he declined the job because he thought his work developing the influence of L’Humanité, the party’s daily paper, was more important.

All too soon ‘Bolshevisation’ triumphed, with the leadership of Treint combining the bureaucratic suppression of opposition with adventurist stupidity. Treint was calling the Socialist Party ‘social fascists’ as early as 1924. At one public meeting, armed stewards shot two anarchists dead; it was good fortune that the state authorities did not use the opportunity to seriously damage the party. Russian finance, which had played a relatively small role in the party’s first years, now had a growing influence as membership declined. Money was spent on buying premises where full-time organisers could be installed rather than on propaganda and agitation. A shift to organisation around workplace-based cells was in itself a positive move, but was carried through too hastily and with the aim of suppressing opposition.

Chuzeville ends his story in 1924. Yet if Rosmer and Monatte were gone, others stayed a bit longer. Amédée Dunois left in 1927, Maurice Dommanget, historian and trade-union activist, stayed till 1929. Activity against the Rif War had both positive and negative features. If Zinoviev and his clique had laid the foundations, it would be 1930 before the party became fully Stalinist.

Many of the best activists from the early years regrouped around Monatte’s new journal, La Révolution prolétarienne, which Chuzeville quotes frequently.All the pre-war issues of this important journal, from 1925 to 1939, are now available on-line at <http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb34387382s/date>. This provided valuable and perceptive commentary but was not a focus for action.

There is more, much more, to be said about the early years of the French Communist Party. Even if the manner of its creation belongs to a unique historical period which will not be repeated, there is a lot to be learnt from its activities and activists. For revolutionaries, organisation is a means to an end. But as Chuzeville concludes, for the PCF all too soon means became ends in themselves.

Note

The preceding article was originally written for Revolutionary History but not published there.

A Review of Terrorism and Communism: A Reply to Karl Kautsky by Leon Trotsky, with a Preface by H.N. Brailsford and a Foreword by Slavoj Žižek

Harrison Fluss

Department of Philosophy, St John’s University, Jamaica, New York;

Department of Philosophy, Manhattan College, Riverdale, New York

hfluss01@manhattan.edu

Abstract

This review looks back at Leon Trotsky’s Terrorism and Communism: A Reply to Karl Kautsky, republished by Verso in 2007 with a Foreword by Slavoj Žižek. After providing an overview of Kautsky’s criticisms of the October Revolution and Trotsky’s rebuttal, the historical scholarship of Lars Lih and the philosophical efforts of Žižek are presented to refute the reigning consensus concerning Trotsky’s ‘authoritarianism’ during the civil-war period. Lih and Žižek argue for a new understanding of Trotsky’sTerrorism and Communism that challenges us to rethink the arguments and the historical context of the book. Further, this review considers the theoretical limitations of Žižek’s Lacanian interpretation of Trotsky’s legacy and the historical problem of Stalinism.

Keywords

Žižek – Trotsky – Russian Revolution – War Communism – Lars Lih

Leon Trotsky, (2007) Terrorism and Communism: A Reply to Karl Kautsky, with a Preface by H.N. Brailsford and a Foreword by Slavoj Žižek, London: Verso.

The publication of this book by Verso offers us an opportunity to review Leon Trotsky’s important and controversial work Terrorism and Communism.Trotsky 2007. With the new Foreword written by Slavoj Žižek, and the scholarship of Lars Lih, one can finally re-open the historical and political debate concerning Trotsky’s ‘authoritarianism’ under war communism. Here, historical context is crucial, as Žižek and Lih both emphasise the dire circumstances the Bolsheviks faced during the Russian civil war. And this situation was more than dire according to Lih: it was in ‘the highest degree tragic’:

The world war and then the civil war had drained Russia’s resources and ripped apart the interdependent pre-war economic organism, and yet a large military establishment still had to be supported. The transport system was on the verge of utter collapse. Industry had no goods to give the peasants for their grain… Inflation had destroyed the financial system. Disease, hunger, and cold stalked the land. The lives of the workers had gotten worse, not better.Lih 2007, p. 119.

*

Alberto Toscano

The State as organized tuberculosis; if the germs of the plague were to organize, they would found the world Kingdom.

Georg Lukács, Notes on Dostoevsky (1915)

 

It is commonplace when commenting on crises of various stripes to note their capacity suddenly to reveal what the seemingly smooth reproduction of the status quo leaves unremarked, to frontstage the backstage, rip the scales from our eyes, and so on. The character, duration and sheer scale of the SARS-CoV-2/Covid-19 pandemic is a particularly comprehensive illustration of this old, ‘apocalyptic’ truth. From the differential exposure to death engineered by racial capitalism to the foregrounding of care work, from attention to the lethal conditions of incarceration to a drop in pollution visible to the naked eye, the ‘revelations’ catalysed by the pandemic seem as limitless as its ongoing impact on our social relations of production and reproduction.

But the widespread, incessant, mediatised acknowledgment that we are living through an unprecedented crisis can also fool us into thinking that our political and ethical imaginaries are already capable of distinguishing the old from the new,  that our recognition is not a misrecognition, our sight an oversight, our connaissance, to put in French, améconnaissance. The pressure that an epidemic, as both reality and allegory, can put on our cognitive and moral mappings is something that Albert Camus had incisively captured in hisNotebooks, in preparatory remarks towards the writing ofThe Plague:

Develop social criticism and revolt. That they are lacking in imagination. They settle down to an epic as they would to a picnic. They don't think on the right scale for plagues. And the remedies they think up are barely suitable for a head cold.1

The imaginative blockage is arguably intensified today, as pandemic conditions intersect with and are exacerbated by other social and material processes whose visibility and intelligibility are in no way transparent, not least the economic dynamics of capitalist globalisation and the vicissitudes of political power. What I’m going to try to sketch out today is just an element in a broader effort to interrogate what we could call the relation between the virus, value and violence, or epidemiology, political economy and political theory.

The political dimension of our collective life under global pandemic conditions certainly seems to abide by a crisis logic of intensification and revelation, at the same time as its haunted by its own opacities, and failures of imagination. States of alarm and emergency proliferate, veritable sanitary dictatorships are spawned (most egregiously in Hungary), a public health emergency is militarised, and what The Economist dubs a ‘coronopticon’ is varyingly beta-tested on panicked populations.2 And yet it would be far too simple merely to castigate the various forms of medical authoritarianism that have appeared on the contemporary political stage. Especially for those invested in preserving emancipatory futures in the aftermath of the pandemic, it is crucial to reflect on the profound ambivalence towards the state that this crisis brings to the fore. We witness a widespreaddesire for the state – a demand that public authorities act swiftly and effectively, that they properly resource the epidemiological ‘frontline’, that jobs, livelihoods and health be secured in the face of an unprecedented interruption of ‘normality’. And, correcting a hopeful progressive conceit, whereby all repression is top-down in origin, there is also an ambient demand that public authorities swiftly repress those engaging in imprudent or dangerous behaviour. In the unsettling words of one of the characters from Maurice Blanchot’s ‘plague novel’,The Most High: ‘The sickness contaminates the law when the law cares for the sick’.3

Given our cramped political imaginaries and rhetoric – but also, I will argue, the very nature of the state – this desire is overwhelmingly articulated in martial terms. Our ears grow dull with declarations of war on the coronavirus: the ‘vector-in-chief’, as Fintan O’Toole has nicely termed him,4 tweets that ‘The Invisible Enemy will soon be in full retreat’, while a convalescent UK Prime Minister talks of ‘a fight we never picked against an enemy we still don’t entirely understand’; wayward nationalist analogies to the ‘Spirit of the Blitz’ are trotted out, while wartime legislative powers are enacted temporarily to nationalise industries in order to produce ventilators and personal protective equipment. Of course, waging war on a ‘virus’ is ultimately no more cogent than waging war on a noun (i.e. terror), but it is a metaphor deeply embedded both in our thinking about immunity and infection, and in our political vocabulary. As the history of the state and of our perceptions of it testifies, it is often exceedingly difficult to tease apart the medical and the military, whether at the level of ideology or of practice. Yet just as detecting the capitalist ‘hotspots’ behind this crisis does not exempt us from facing up to our own complicities,5 so castigating the political incompetence and malevolence that is rife in responses to Covid-19 doesn’t grant us any immunity from confronting our own contradictory desire for the state.

The history of political philosophy can perhaps shed some partial light on our predicament. After all, the nexus between the alienation of our political will to a sovereign and the latter’s capacity to preserve the life and health of its subjects, especially in the face of epidemics and plagues, is at the very origins of modern Western political thought – which, for better and very much for worse continues to shape our common sense. This is perhaps best exemplified by a dictum coined by the Ancient Roman statesman and philosopher Cicero and then adopted in the early modern period – that is, the era of the gestation of the modern capitalist state – by Thomas Hobbes, Baruch Spinoza, John Locke and the Leveller insurgent William Rainsborowe: Salus populi suprema lex (the health of the people should be the supreme law). In this deceptively simple slogan can be identified much of the ambivalence carried by our desire for the state – it can be interpreted as the need to subordinate the exercise of politics to collective welfare, but it can also legitimate the absolute concentration of power in a sovereign that monopolises the ability to define both what constitutes health, and who the people are (with the latter easily mutating into anethnos or race).

Revisiting our political history and our political imaginaries through Cicero’s slogan rather than, say, through a single-minded focus on war as the ‘midwife’ of the modern state, is particularly instructive in our pandemic age. Pick up a copy of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651) and look at the famous image which likely graces its cover (in the original it was the frontispiece, which faced the title page). You will probably be transfixed by how Hobbes instructed his engraver to depict the sovereign as a head gazing out atop a ‘body politic’ composed of his subjects (all gazing inward or upward at the king). Or you might scan the landscape to observe the absence of labour in the fields and distant signs of war (roadblocks, war ships on the horizon, plumes of cannon-smoke). Or you might wander about the icons of secular and religious power arranged on the left and right sides of the image. What you’re likely to miss is that the city over which Hobbes’s ‘Artificial Man’ looms is almost entirelyempty, save for some patrolling soldiers and a couple of ominous figures donning birdlike masks, difficult to make out without magnification. These are plague doctors. War and epidemics are the context for the incorporation of now-powerless subjects into the sovereign, as well as for their seclusion in their homes in times of strife and contagion.Salus populi suprema lex. Viewed through this prism the state can be seen to lie between but also combine the metaphysics of the plague and its epidemiology, the people as a symbolic and iconic entity, on the one hand, and the population as a viral reservoir or vector.

In a recent commentary on Hobbes, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben (whose own editorialising about Covid-19 as merely an opportunity for the intensification of the state of exception has been widely censured), nicely noted that the frontispiece of the Leviathan is a powerful clue to a defining aspect of that modern state which Hobbes’s thinking did so much to shape and legitimise: the absence of the people, or, in Greek,ademia. Hobbes’s plague doctors thus suggest a kind of secret link between, on the one hand, the absence of the people, thedemos (as anything other than a multitude to be contained by and alienated into the state’s sovereign), and, on the other, the periodic crises elicited by epidemics (literally, ‘on the people’,epi +demos) and pandemics (literally, ‘all the people’,pan +demos). The modern state, with its monopoly of power, is a plague state. We could also note that it is a state ofseparation – Camus’s notes onThe Plague are again suggestive, where he writes: ‘What seems best to characterise this epoch, isseparation. Everyone was separated from everyone else, from those they love or from their habits. … At the end of the plague, all the inhabitants [of the city] had the look of migrants.’

But this separation is not simple, its political arithmetic of individualisation is more insidious and productive than it might at first appear. In his lectures on the modern emergence of the social figure of the ‘abnormal’, Foucault asked himself under what conditions Europe witnessed a shift from forms of rule that excluded, prohibited and banished, to techniques of power that sought to observe, analyse and control human beings, to individualise andnormalise them. His suggestion was that we turn to the transition between two ways of dealing with infectious disease, from the politics of leprosy to the politics of the plague. According to Foucault, the move away from a separation between two groups, the sick and the well, as materialised in the leper colonies orlazzaretti, to the meticulous governance of the plague town, household by household, signalled a momentous shift in the governance of our behaviour, ultimately serving as the precondition for our understandings of political power and representation, citizenship and the state. Foucault’s description of the deployment of power in a plague town bears uncanny testimony to the idea that we still largely live in the political space that emerged in eighteenth-century Europe, in what he called the ‘political dream’ of the plague (the ‘literary dream’ of the plague was that of lawlessness and the dissolution of social and individual boundaries):

The sentries had to be constantly on watch at the end of the streets, and twice a day the inspectors of the quarters and districts had to make their inspection in such a way that nothing that happened in the town could escape their gaze. And everything thus observed had to be permanently recorded by means of this kind of visual examination and by entering all information in big registers. … It is not exclusion but quarantine. It is not a question of driving out individuals but rather of establishing and fixing them, of giving them their own place, of assigning places and of defining presences and subdivided presences. Not rejection but inclusion. You can see that there is no longer a kind of global division between two types or groups of population, one that is pure and the other impure, one that has leprosy and the other that does not. Rather, there is a series of fine and constantly observed differences between individuals who are ill and those who are not. It is a question of individualization; the division and subdivision of power extending to the fine grain of individuality.6

Where the enclosure of lepers operated on the stark group division between the sick, that is the contagious, and the healthy, the policing of the plague works on gradations of risk, mapping individual behaviour and susceptibility onto cities, territories and mobilities. It is not a moral or medical norm which is at stake here, but a continuous effort to normalise the behaviour of individuals, each and every one becoming the bearer of a potential threat that can only be managed through data collection (the big registers carried by the watchmen). The government of the plague is thus a precursor of the political obsession with the ‘dangerous individual’, which brings together (and confuses) phenomena of contagion, crime or conflict.   In the age of surveillance capitalism and algorithmic power, normalizing practices targeted at the dangerous individual accrue enormous computational force, finer and finer grain. But they are also, like Daniel Defoe’s narratives of self-isolation in A Journal of the Plague Year, an increasingly voluntary affair, while the prolongation of the pandemic and its threat to individual and collective health can serve as a compelling argument not just for the intensification in the powers of the state, but for that examination and registering, that relativization of ‘privacy’, of which Foucault’s plague town was the dramatic precursor.

In view of this long and deeply-entrenched history of the plague state, of plague power, is it possible to imagine forms of public health that wouldn’t simply be synonymous with the health of the state, responses to pandemics that wouldn’t further entrench our desire for and collusion with sovereign monopolies of power? Can we avoid the seemingly intractable tendency to treat crises as opportunities for a further widening and deepening of state powers, in the absence and isolation of the people? The recent history of epidemics in West Africa has suggested the vital significance of epidemiologists thinking like communities, and communities thinking like epidemiologists,7 while critical thinking on the profound limits of the lockdown strategy without the institution of ‘community shields’ move in a similar direction.8

Pandemics need not be thought, by analogy with war, as biological arguments for the centralisation of power. If the post-war period which persists as the lost object of much Left melancholy was characterised by the welfare-warfare state, the ‘exit’ out of our predicament need not accept welfare-as-warfare as its only horizon. This is especially the case once we reflect on the profound contradictions now tearing at the seams of government between epidemiological and public health priorities, on the one hand, and capitalist imperatives, on the other. In other words, when the health of the people and their social reproduction has been profoundly entangled with the imperatives of accumulation – the very ones determining the contribution of agribusiness to the present crisis and the dereliction of Big Pharma in alleviating it – the state may be intrinsically incapable of thinking like an epidemiologist.

One speculative avenue for how to begin to separate our desire for the state from our need for collective health involves turning our attention to the traditions of what we could call ‘dual biopower’, namely the collective attempt politically to appropriate aspects of social reproduction, from housing to medicine, that state and capital have abandoned or rendered unbearably exclusionary, in an engineered ‘epidemic of insecurity’.9 Public (or popular or communal) health has not just been the vector for the state’s recurrent power-grab, it has also served as the fulcrum from which to think the dismantling of capitalist social forms and relations without relying on the premise of a political break in the operations of power, without waiting for the revolutionary day after. The brutally repressed experiments of the Black Panthers with breakfast programs, sickle-cell anaemia screening, and an alternative health service are just one of many anti-systemic instances of this kind of grassroots initiative. The great challenge for the present is to think not just how such political experiments can be replicated in a variety of social and epidemiological conditions, but how they can be scaled up and coordinated – while not giving up the state itself as an arena of struggle and demands. The slogan that the Panthers adopted for their programs is perhaps a fitting counter and replacement for the Hobbesian link between health, law and the state: Survival Pending Revolution.

Image: "COVID 19 - Buenos aires" bySantiago Sito is licensed underCC BY-NC-ND 2.0

• *. This is a slightly expanded version of an essay originally published in Sick of the System: Why the COVID-19 Recovery must be Revolutionary (Toronto: BTL, 2020).
• 1. Albert Camus, ‘Pages de Carnets’, Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures, 12:1-2 (1958), p. 3.
• 2. ‘Creating the coronopticon’, The Economist, 28 March 2020, available at: https://www.economist.com/printedition/2020-03-28
• 3. Maurice Blanchot, The Most High, trans. and introd. Allan Stoekl (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1996), p. 169.
• 4. Fintan O’Toole, ‘Vector in Chief’, The New York Review of Books, 14 May 2020, available at: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/05/14/vector-in-chief/
• 5. Rob Wallace, ‘Capitalism is a disease hotspot’ (interview), Monthly Review Online, 12 March 2020, available at https://mronline.org/2020/03/12/capitalism-is-a-disease-hotspot/
• 6. Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France 1974-1975, trans Graham Burchell (London: Verso, 2003), pp. 45-6.
• 7. Alex de Waal, ‘New Pathogen, Old Politics’, Boston Review, 3 April 2020, available at: https://bostonreview.net/science-nature/alex-de-waal-new-pathogen-old-politics, with reference to Paul Richards’s book, based on his research in Sierra Leone, Ebola: How a People’s Science Helped End an Epidemic (London: Zed Books, 2016).
• 8. Anthony Costello, ‘Despite what Matt Hancock says, the government's policy is still herd immunity’, The Guardian, 3 April 2020, available at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/03/matt-hancock-government-policy-herd-immunity-community-surveillance-covid-19
• 9. ‘Interview: Dr. Abdul El-Sayed on the Politics of COVID-19’, Current Affairs, 7 April 2020, available at: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/04/interview-dr-abdul-el-sayed-on-covid-19

Christopher R. Cox, University of Washington

Jason W. Moore has been written off by an influential group of peers, unjustly in my opinion. Therefore, instead of writing another ruthless critique of Capitalism in the Web of Life, I attempted to show how the book is an important contribution to the ever-expanding world of Marxism. In this light, my review essay was indeed based on a positive reading of the book.1 There are some who believe that the Marxist framework should be reined in, clarified and codified, as opposed to being opened up to a leap into postmodernism, or post-anything. I disagree vehemently with that viewpoint, which is a source of righteous indignation for Alf Hornborg.

His reluctance to allow Marxism to take on new vistas that even Marx himself may or may not have dug into, highlights the sclerosis of Marxism within the walls of academe, and Hornborg’s role as hall monitor. Perhaps it is worth reminding ourselves that Engels argued that readers of Marx’s writing ought not expect “fixed, cut-to-measure, once and for all applicable definitions” (Marx 1991: 103), for that is where the dialectic lives. There is a chasm of difference between the status-bound scholasticism of Hornborg’s Marxism and the politics of democratic knowledge production that Moore – and a global network of connected world-ecology scholars – advocates, even though Marxism is what connects them all. In his practice, Moore advocates, as does Haraway in her theoretical work, a move from the posthuman to the post-Human.2 Haraway situates that as a move away from the supposedly ‘objective’ – and usually white male – gaze from nowhere and everywhere, what she famously called the “God-trick” (Haraway 1988). This viewpoint opens modes of exploration for mutual connection and aid that are often deeply veiled or even shut down by the would-be holders of the knowledge of “acceptable Marxist theory”.

Hornborg made a point of noting that I was incorrect in stating that Bruno Latour is not mentioned in the book. He is correct. Latour is indeed mentioned, once, in a footnote simply to provide a citation for the idea that cultural studies scholars write of “hybrids, assemblages, and networks,” as a way of addressing the “arithmetic of Nature plus Society” (Moore, p. 33-34).3 Hornborg’s unfortunate pettiness is on display here, especially as he suggests that I am not “sufficiently familiar with Latour’s approach to recognise the affinity”. My point was very clear. Moore actually suggests, rightfully so in my view, that Latour and others in his lineage, do not actually go far enough in their attempt to “abandon the distinction between nature and society”, because that distinction is still quite strong in their work. Read a few pages of Latour’s famed ‘actor-network theory’ (Latour 2005) and you will see for yourself. He then cites Latour’s equally petty statement that the title of Moore’s book “restates succinctly the problem that [he is] trying to circumscribe.” Perhaps it would have pleased Hornborg more if Latour were written off by Moore, as opposed to given credit for being an important thinker in his own right. Crucially, I think Moore harmonises quite well with Latour’s notion that “we” were never modern (Latour 1993). It is possible to respect a fellow scholar and disagree with them at the same time.

In a turn toward the absurd, Hornborg states that my “mission is to reconcile Jason Moore4 and John Bellamy Foster”, which is patently false. In fact, I argue that it is not a reconcilable debate because it is not an actual point-counterpoint discussion. I state that it is a “non-debate” because Foster has “refused to engage in any meaningful way with Moore’s critiques”. Hornborg does not respond to my outlining of the analytical differentiations between the metabolic rift school of thought and that ofworld-ecology, nor to the well-documented dislike Foster seems to have for anyone who suggests Moore’s work is useful.

Hornborg posits that I “rejoice” in the “holistic amorphousness” that Moore represents to him. Perhaps he is really onto something here! On the one hand, Moore is simplifying much of the complexity of capital in nature by always focusing so doggedly on the environment-making aspects of capital accumulation throughout the history of the post-feudal world, while, on the other hand, he is complicating the simplified language that the stagnant Marxism of academe has developed over the past forty years. An example of this complicating, in my view, is Moore’s term the Oikeios, which I did in fact point out as one of the terms I had a hard time coming to accept. It still makes me a little uneasy, but unlike Hornborg, I am giving Moore the benefit of the doubt here, because I do believe there is something useful in it. Not unlike the dark matter that holds the universe together - something we cannot actually see, but to which we have plenty of evidence of existence - there is a kind of amorphous socioecological substance that these “biosphereic configurations, cycles, and movements” (Moore 2015: 36) travel through. This dark matter of capital is what Hornborg is either very uninterested in considering or is just put off by the language that Moore uses in his attempt to describe. Which is it? 

Hornborg seeks to “sort” the interconnections between “nature and socioecological processes”. He admits that Marxist discourse is “amoeba-like” in its struggle to “absorb the concerns of the day”, yet he vilifies Moore’s attempt to build a vocabulary that is appropriately amoeba-like as “fuzzy,” “dim,” and “post-humanist jargon.” Those who pass off a certain style of analytical writing as “jargon” rarely, in my experience, spend much time reading what is on offer. Post-humanist analysis suggests the generally not radical idea of thinking about socieoecological questions from a more-than-human perspective. It dares to argue that humans are not in fact the centre of the universe, and that humans are far more diverse creatures than we typically acknowledge. After all, what does “humanity” even mean? Post-human is thus a better term, because it also does away with the noxious idea of a unified identity called Humanity. Does Humanity include indigenous people, urban and rural impoverished minorities, non-Western women, Black and brown people living in a White supremacist police state? When ecological Marxists are lamenting the doings of “humans” to the planet, who exactly are they thinking about? This is where, in my opinion, most Marxists fail. Neither Moore nor Hornborg spend nearly enough time picking out exactly the people that have placed “Humanity” in the position it finds itself.

Post-humanism does not suggest that we leave humans in the lurch and relegate ourselves to the wild musings of, say, new materialism, even though I may personally welcome that turn! To the contrary, the notion that the Anthropocene – or the Age of Humanity – is marked not by the ruinous doings of the capitalist system, or any of the many ‘isms’ it puts to work for it, but “Humanity” as an inherently destructive species. This is most assuredly anti-human. Yes, Moore’s work is, in this sense, quite necessarily post-human, but not in the archaic interpretation that Hornborg seems to think it implies. Through his own overly simplistic rendering of Moore’s thinking, and post-humanism, he marks himself as a member of the Anthropocene gang that is against the human species. I am not sure that is intentional, but that is how it reads. This is perplexing, because in his own words: “Both Marxian and mainstream thought represent technological objects as empowered by their intrinsic properties, which derive from human ingenuity and tend to progress over time. 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” (Hornborg 2014). It could very well be that my understanding of Hornborg’s thinking is unclear, but from what I read of him in the past, I do not see him so diametrically opposed to Moore, but here we are.

Hornborg then goes on to bemoan my connecting of Moore’s work to that of Donna Haraway, as something I should be ashamed of. I acknowledge the lines of connection between their work as something I think is a great step in the right direction. After all, if the post-humanists are unable to interact with Marxists, we Marxists are going to continue to live on an isolated island of our own, constantly deemed irrelevant to the real crisis of the moment. Hornborg’s response to the notion that Moore’s work had made Marxism a bit more legible to the post-humanist scholar is to simply throw away the work of Haraway and others and cavalierly claim: “I do not think that this is an accomplishment to celebrate”. Hornborg offers no clear explanation for this, so the reader is left assuming it just his opinion that the work of Haraway, one of the most respected radical scholars of the past forty years, is somehow misguided.

Responding to Moore’s Oikeios, he writes: “It is difficult to see what is not to be included in this all-embracing term – except astronomical phenomena at sufficient distance from the Earth to not exert any influence on it”. Since when do astronomical phenomena have no influence upon the Earth? With facetiousness I am making a point. Hornborg’s reluctance to think holistically leads directly to his inability to think beyond scientific rationality, precisely the boundary that Haraway and others urge us to transcend. Whereas Marx was willing and able to think about capital as a relation, for example, Hornborg seems unable to think about nature as such. The general antagonism of anything not neatly categorisable is extraordinarily non-dialectical. It is true, however, that Moore could be more careful in his boundary-making practices, as could I. For example, the ‘capital-in-nature’ relation that runs throughout Moore’s work, is hard to clearly visualise and explain, but that does not mean it is not an important and useful imaginary. Crucially, Moore has remained wide open to collaboration and exploration of the framework he has proposed, to the point at which many critical interpretations of his work have been published and then subsequently promoted by him. Where Hornborg seeks more categories, it would seem a great collaborative move to actually engage Moore directly and see how they might work together to clarify the modalities through which ‘capital-in-nature’ versus ‘capital-and-nature’ can be more usefully visualised.

Maybe the goal of trying to “sort out” the relation between nature and socioecological processes - a reductionist statement if there ever was one - is useless. Seeking clear lines of measurable connection between society and nature appears to me as a fruitless venture. It has, after all, gotten us nowhere. The capitalist world-system has only gotten stronger and more intertwined as we have studiously tried to show the separations between it and nature through all sorts of invented metrics. An ecological footprint is but a shadow in the fog when not placed in direct relation to the socioecological history that produced it.

Nature is either inclusive of everything, or exclusive of humans. We cannot have it both ways. What Moore and for that matter the post-humanists have accepted is that we humans do not do anything on our own. Hornborg terribly misinterprets Moore’s thinking here. Moore writes “Humans build empires on their own as much as beavers build damns on their own … neither exists in a vacuum” (Moore 2015, p. 7). He calls this an “audacious proclamation” that inadvertently seeks to “naturalize injustice”. To the contrary, by internalising capital to nature, we are dealing with the system itself, as a totality. When you tell a worker that capitalism is in the business of making nature (including humans) work for it, they get it. Even my eighth-grade geography students get what Moore means by this, while many scholars do not. This points to the chasm between not just the Hornborgs and Moores of the world, but the workers and the intellectuals. Moore’s language and writing style can be hard for many to get through easily, but within it there are brilliant, often very simple, imaginaries for unimaginably complex problems.

Hornborg goes on to make the bold assertion that “the fundamental philosophical flaw at the core of Capitalism in the Web of Life” is Moore’s failure to distinguish between ontological dualism and “binary analytical distinction,” a difference that he asserts I am missing in my reading of Moore. I am not. I am very cognisant of the difference. I just believe that those who do not come back to the dialectical whole are failing in their analysis, and thus falling into the trap of the Cartesian dualism I am told I don’t understand. On this, I am fully on board with Moore’s reading of the problem. Hornborg is not, and to him that means we are wrong. Furthermore, what Hornborg fails to understand about the world-ecology framing that Moore uses, is that nature is always “analytically distinct,” because he is constantly asking the question, how does capital make nature work for it? We can all acknowledge that capital demands the resources and ecological work of nature (inclusive of humans) to make rich white oligarchs increasingly powerful. What seems to be amiss is the ability to talk about how a system like capitalism is put to work entraining other systems within nature to behave in certain ways. Ecosystems do not exist in vacuums, and so our frameworks of analysis must not either.

It is clear from Hornborg’s assertion that I am “charmed” by Moore’s attempts to “think holistically about “world-ecology,” that he lacks even the most basic understanding of what “world-ecology” is. He also lacks the capacity to understand what I was doing in my essay. I’ll take the blame for that. World-ecology is an environmental historical argument and methodological approach to analysing capitalism as an environment-making regime – capitalism as ecology, not the ecology of capitalism. This is a crucial aspect of the world-ecology approach that Hornborg and many others seem wilfully blind to. In Moore’s own words, “capitalism is, rather, best understood as aworld-ecology of capital, power, and re/production in the web of life” (Moore, p. 14). Perhaps I am missing something, but I do not see how that can be construed as thinking holistically about anything other than capital, power, and re/production. Nature, as a distinct analytical frame, in fact does regularly surface in Moore’s work, but it does so in ways that do not allow it to stay distinct, hence being anti-Cartesian. In this sense, words matter. Capital in nature is not the same thing as capitaland nature. This simple ‘analytical distinction’ is rarely addressed by Moore’s detractors, including Hornborg.

Hornborg shows his underlying motive by stating that if Moore had simply stayed perfectly aligned with Foster’s metabolic rift thinking, “his position would have made more sense”. This, of course, comes right after reminding readers that Moore criticised him for “implying that Marx’s attention to ecology was less than perfect”. This is a highly uncharitable reading of an essay, now twenty years old, that praises Hornborg profusely. Moore (2000) simply argues that Hornborg does not go far enough in his outlining of Marx’s ecological thinking. He then goes on at great length to show what, in his view, is the deeply ecological thought process of Marx.5 A glaringly omitted point in this line of critique is the failure to notice or mention that Moore used the work of John Bellamy Foster to make his point. Not only is Hornborg reading into Moore’s critique something that is not there, but he is doing so in defence of someone who needs no defence. Foster has legions of people willing to go to war over his ideas.

Where my review essay of Moore’s book is based on a broadly positive reading, Hornborg’s response to that essay is one that reads like a wronged man seeking justice before a court of his intellectual peers. He is a tenured professor with a very good quality of life, yet his petulance glares off the page. What is it about Moore and his many compatriot thinkers that puts him off so much as to allow himself to treat Moore as a second-rate hack? Treating me like that – a not yet done PhD student – is nothing out of the ordinary in today’s academic universe, but to treat a highly successful and deeply published colleague in this way is deeply unprofessional. Perhaps instead of woefully bashing disagreeable Marxists and junior members of the now crumbling edifice of the academy, I endure to imagine a more collaborative approach to widening the field of play for differing Marxisms.

With all due respect to the good professor, it is downright off-putting to be told that I am “infatuated” with Moore’s holistic approach to Marxism.6 I am not infatuated with any analytical traditions, including historical materialism. I am simply open-minded to the usefulness any of them might have. This leaves very little room to see Hornborg as less than infatuated with challenging Moore, which surfaces as the fragility of ego, to which none of us is immune. Not unlike the hurt posture that Foster attacks Moore from, there is no recognition of Moore’s very prominent praising of both of their works over the years. Instead, there is the odious smell of indignation that Moore dare suggest there is something to criticise in their work. For Hornborg, anyone who dares to utilise Marxist analysis in a way that does not objectively place humanity and capital as working over and against nature, as opposed to within it as a totality, is doing a disservice to the veracity of Marx’s criticism of capital, and somehow to the dialectic. I find this logic fuzzy.

To conclude, let us re-consider what Hornborg has suggested. He has said that Moore’s approach (and mine by association) to the dialectic is confused, and this is evidenced by the fact that Moore’s work has opened the door to Marxism for post-humanist scholars. Karen Barad, an eminent scholar in this field, writes that “what often appears as separate entities (and separate sets of concerns) with sharp edges does not actually entail a relation of absolute exteriority at all” (Barad 2007: 135). The capitalists rely on humans continuing to think and act as though we can neatly separate, or “sort,” the problems of nature and society. We cannot separate the deeply interdependent processes of production and nature any more than we can separate white supremacist policing and the capitalist establishment in America. Watch, as it all burns while the intellectual gatekeepers of anti-humanist Marxism do the work of the capitalists for them.

References

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

Cox, Christopher R. 2020. ‘Resuscitating the Dialectic: Moore’s Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital in the Supposed “Age of Man”’,Historical Materialism, published online Feb. 4, 2020.

Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (Fall 1988).

Hornborg, Alf. "Technology as Fetish: Marx, Latour, and the Cultural Foundations of Capitalism." Theory, Culture & Society 31, no. 4 (2014): 119-40.

Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.

Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Clarendon Lectures in Management Studies. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Marx, K., Engels, Friedrich, Mandel, Ernest, & Fernbach, David. Capital : A Critique of Political Economy. Volume Three, [The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole]. London: Penguin Classics, 1991.

Moore, Jason W. 2000. ‘Marx and the Historical Ecology of Capital Accumulation on a World Scale: A Comment on Alf Hornborg’s “Ecosystems and World Systems: Accumulation as an Ecological Process”’, Journal of World-Systems Research, 6(1):133-138.

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

• 1. http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/book-review/resuscitating-dialectic-moores-capitalism-web-life-ecology-and-accumulation-capital
• 2. I would like to thank Alan P. Rudy for helping me thing through this notion, as well as other issues that have come up in this set of essays.
• 3. This was part of larger literature review of how various strands of thought dualism and dilaectics.
• 4. I must also point out that his use of the great John Bellamy Foster’s middle name, while omitting Jason W. Moore’s middle initial (which he emphatically asks people to use, because there are so many “Jason Moores” in the world) is emblematic of the turf war that Hornborg seems to have been drafted into. We are scholars, and thus words matter. How we refer to each other matters as well.
• 5. Further, was this not the goal of Foster’s great work in Marx’s Ecology?
• 6. This also takes no accounting of the fact that I have utilised a wide swathe of frameworks in my own scholarship, including feminist new materialism, post-humanism, post-colonialism, indigenous knowledge, discourse analysis, environmental political theory, and anarchist geography. I have described my own approach to scholarship as “open at the top,” meaning I could not care less about what something is called, if I think it is useful analytically.