Panagiotis Sotiris

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[...]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alex de Jong

International Institute for Research and Education, Amsterdam, the Netherlands

alexdejong@iire.org

Abstract

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

Keywords

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

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

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

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

The Birth of the Communist Left

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Breaking with the Bolsheviks

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

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

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

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

Collapse and Transformation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

War and Occupation

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

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

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

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

An Unfinished History

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Giorgio Cesarale

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

                                                                                                (25 June 2020)

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

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

Translated by Loren Balhorn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To what extent does the Marburg School still exist?

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

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

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

Daniel Tutt

George Washington University

tutt@gwu.edu   

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

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

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

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

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

The Importance of Losurdo’s Wide-Context Method

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

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

Nietzsche in His Time:

The Struggle Against Socratism and Socialism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michel Husson

Institut de recherches économiques et sociales, Paris

michel.husson@ires.fr

Abstract

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

Keywords

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

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

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

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

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

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

Christoph Jünke

Independent Researcher, Bochum, Germany

Christoph.Juenke@ruhr-uni-bochum.de

Abstract

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

Keywords

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

--

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.