BY HELA YOUSFI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What does the Arab state stand for?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The challenge of decentralisation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HÉLA YOUSFI

Image: 

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

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

Ahmet Tonak

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

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

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

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

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

LEON

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Barbara C. Allen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Matt McManus

Department of Politics, Whitman College, Washington

mattmcmanus300@gmail.com

Abstract

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

Keywords

Hegel – logic – reconstruction – negative dialectics

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

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

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

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

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

Ian Birchall

Independent Researcher, London

ihbirchall@btinternet.com

Abstract

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

Keywords

French Communist Party – Communist International – Leninism – syndicalism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Note

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

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

Harrison Fluss

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

Department of Philosophy, Manhattan College, Riverdale, New York

hfluss01@manhattan.edu

Abstract

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

Keywords

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

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

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

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

*

Alberto Toscano

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

Georg Lukács, Notes on Dostoevsky (1915)

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Christopher R. Cox, University of Washington

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alf Hornborg, Lund University

What constitutes acceptable Marxist theory is a topic of endless debate. Over the past few decades, much ink has been devoted to how we should go about reconciling Marxism and ecological concerns. As in earlier debates, people disagree about whose version of Marxism is most consistent with Marx’s own concepts, while accommodating pressing issues raised since his time. At stake is a contested and exclusionary Marxist identity, while Marxist discourse, amoeba-like, struggles to absorb the concerns of the day. This testifies to the lasting power of the core position established by Marx and adopted by his myriad of followers, which is arguably the insight that regular market exchange conceals asymmetric material transfers that contribute to the accumulation of capital in the hands of some individuals and groups, at the expense of other market actors. Beyond the diversity and antagonism, what unites Marxists is a distrust of business as usual and a passion for revealing and rectifying its injustices. But the challenge of applying such insights about societal asymmetries and injustices to ecological concerns has generated some divergent and antagonistic approaches.

In a 50-page review article on the Historical Materialism website,1Christopher R. Cox  eulogises Jason W. Moore’s (2015) efforts to “resuscitate the dialectic” by rephrasing “historical capitalism as a continuously unfolding regime of environment-making”. Although he concedes that Capitalism in the Web of Life would be difficult to “get through” for the average American undergraduate student, Cox defends Moore’s verbose deliberations by asserting that “thinking dialectically requires one to be able to accept not knowing”. This indeed seems to be Cox’s primary excuse for ingenuously promoting a treatise so conceptually amorphous that Cox himself admits being unable to digest it, riddled as it is with concepts (“i.e.Oikeios, ‘bundles’, and work/energy”; n. 12) that are, in Cox’s own words, “less th[an] completely fleshed out.” It does not seem to occur to Cox that the difficulties he has experienced in fathoming Moore’s book to a considerable extent reflect the analytical confusion of the author.

A self-professed part of the “world-ecology movement”, Cox explains that his mission is to reconcile Jason Moore and John Bellamy Foster – “two stars in the Marxist galaxy” – by guiding “Foster and his merry band of scholars” across the line that divides “the Oregon and the World-Ecology schools of thought”. Cox thus sets out to educate readers of Historical Materialism on what Moore means by “capitalism as world-ecology, the Law of Cheap Nature, the Oikeios, abstract social labour/nature, the Capitalocene, the ecological surplus, and the concept ofnegative value” (emphasis in original). He clearly believes that Moore’s book is an antidote to what Sartre referred to as the ‘sclerosis’ and ‘Scholasticism’ of “a stagnant and deservedly-maligned” conventional Marxism.

It is obvious that Cox’s understanding of capital is as fuzzy as Moore’s. We are treated to a long list of mysterious features of capital that make it very difficult to define. “Capital is messy. It materialises and dematerialises. It has agency”. “The project of capital is to make nature legible”. “Capital is dialectical”. Capital “is space”. It is “an instance of mobilised place”. It is “also an ‘historical place’, a ‘bundle of human and extra-human natures’”. It is “a place travelling through space-time”. Such dim notions of capital do not serve to increase clarity. A movement confronting capitalism could hardly conceptualise its enemy in foggier terms.2

Rather than attempting to sort out the ways in which societal and natural aspects of socioecological processes are entwined in capitalism, Moore’s “dialectics” intentionally blur the analytical boundaries between society and nature. And Cox rejoices in such holistic amorphousness: “The floating knots of relations of power, accumulation, and (re)production travel vertically and horizontally out across the earth, up into the atmosphere, and down into the fossilised past-lives of the planet”. He cites Moore’s (2015: 7) audacious proclamation that “[h]umans build empires on their own as much as beavers build dams on their own”. Once he managed to “warm to [the] rather strange term” of the Oikeios, Cox realised that it is “continuous with some of Haraway’s great work naming the intersection of the human and the non-human as, among other things, ‘cyborg’ and ‘natureculture’”. He explains this “indispensable spatial-temporal term” by quoting Moore’s own definition:

“The Oikeios is a multi-layered dialectic, comprising flora and fauna, but also our planet’s manifold geological and biospheric configurations, cycles, and movements” (Moore 2015: 36).

It is difficult to see what is not to be included in this all-embracing term – except astronomical phenomena at sufficient distance from the Earth to not exert any influence on it. It is no less difficult to see its analytical usefulness. In what sense is a concept that encompasseseverything that is relevant to life on Earth “indispensable” in explaining capitalism?

Cox explains in a note that “Haraway’s work is central to the evolution of the world-ecology method” (n. 46). Given this concession to posthumanism, and having proposed that capital has “agency”, it is incoherent to deny, as Cox does (n. 65), the affinity between Moore’s and Bruno Latour’s (1993) efforts to abandon the distinction between nature and society. For one thing, Cox’s assertion that “Latour is not mentioned anywhere in the book” (n. 65) is simply incorrect, as anyone who reads page 34 in that book can ascertain. But Latour would not need to be mentioned for it to be evident how his monistic jargon – perhaps mediated by Haraway – saturates Moore’s distortion of Marxist categories. Apparently, Cox is not sufficiently familiar with Latour’s approach to recognise the affinity, but it was recently verified by none other than Latour himself (2018: 119, n. 55), who until then had been consistently averse to Marxism and the very concept of “capitalism”.3  Moore’s diffuse brand of Marxism, it seems, has suddenly made Marx attractive to posthumanists. Contrary to Cox’s sentiment, I do not think that this is an accomplishment to celebrate.

To identify and attempt to rectify the ecological blind spots of traditional Marxism is obviously a worthy undertaking, but posthumanist jargon on bundles of multispecies entanglement is not the remedy. When I suggested, more than twenty years ago (Hornborg 1998), that global processes of capital accumulation involve asymmetric transfers of biophysical resources that tend to escape the Marxist focus on surplus labour value, Moore (2000) responded by criticising me for implying that Marx’s attention to ecology was less than perfect. At that time, he leaned heavily on Foster’s argument on the metabolic rift. Had he continued to do so, his position would have made more sense. The concept of metabolic rift is quite congruent with that of ecologically unequal exchange, as both refer to asymmetric resource transfers and thus nicely complement the classical Marxist emphasis on the appropriation of labour-power. But Moore’s deliberations on the Oikeios, the appropriation of “work/energy”, and the “Law of Cheap Nature” are a disservice to the analytical ambitions of historical materialism.

Although Cox has been charmed by Moore’s efforts to think holistically about “world-ecology”, he does not appear to notice the fundamental philosophical flaw at the core of Capitalism in the Web of Life. This flaw is the failure to distinguish between ontological (“Cartesian”) dualism, on the one hand, and binary analytical distinction, on the other. The former conceives of nature and society as insulated from each other in the real, material world, the latter only as distinct analyticalaspects of material phenomena. To deny that features of nature and society – for instance, entropy and monetary value – should be kept analytically distinct is as untenable as to deny that they are interfused in material reality. But Moore appears to think of the verywords “nature” versus “society” as anathema – except when he slips into using them himself, as when he writes that, in early capitalism, “[f]or the first time, theforces of nature were deployed to advance the productivity of human work” (Moore 2016: 98; emphasis added).4In such moments, he illustrates – contrary to his own argument – that the conceptual distinction between “nature” and “society” is indispensable to any analysis of historical processes.

Cox enthusiastically reiterates Moore’s framework for understanding ecological degradation in terms of a monetary metric, evident in notions such as an “ecological surplus”, the appropriation of “cheap” or “unpaid” raw materials and energy,5and capitalism’s strategy of “not paying the costs of waste, decay, and resource drawdown” (emphasis added). Moore’s tangled jargon boils down to a position that is ultimately no more complex than that of mainstream environmental economists: viz., that environmental degradation is not reflected in commodity prices. Cox attempts to differentiate the two approaches by claiming that Moore does not think in terms of “externalities” and “unpaid costs”, only in terms of “unpaid work”, but this is squarely contradicted by Moore’s (2015: 162) explicit reference to the “externalization of biophysical costs.”6 Moore’s grasp of the grand Oikeios to which he repeatedly refers is thus as flawed as that of mainstream economists: both seem to believe that money can compensate for entropy. Indeed, Moore (2015: 97) ingenuously asserts that “entropy is reversible and cyclical,” and when the atmosphere serves as a sink for entropy in the form of greenhouse gases, he says that it is “put to work as capital’s unpaid garbage man” (Ibid.: 101). Ecological degradation, in other words, indicates that nature’s work is unpaid. Moore’s diagnosis of global ecocide is that capitalist civilisation does not “pay its bills” (Ibid.: 87).

Cox welcomes Moore’s readiness to consider the “work/energy” of the redwood tree alongside the “work/energy of slaves, colonies, and women” (p. 26). In such contexts, Marxists will wonder what relation Moore has to the labour theory of value. At other times, Moore affirms his allegiance to the conviction that “the substance of value is socially necessary labor-time” (Moore 2015: 53; emphasis in original). The central problem with Moore’s preoccupation with “cheapness” is its implicit assumption of objective natural values. What Cox attributes to Moore as “the prism of unpaid, or at least under-valued ... work/energy on the part of humans and therest of nature” (emphasis in original) calls out for a definition: how can something be “under-valued” unless it has an objective (monetary) value in excess of its price? And how could that objective (monetary) value be established? To say that something is “cheap” is to be confined to the capitalists’ own conceptual framework of monetary evaluation. Historical materialism requires a more detached perspective, as in the fundamental Marxian insight that money prices serve as a veil that mystifies objectively asymmetric material transfers by producing an illusion of fictive reciprocity. Our critical focus should be on those asymmetric transfers – and on the ideological means by which they are represented as fair and reciprocal.

Cox also praises Moore’s (2015: 51) claim that industrial capitalism represented a “transition from land productivity to labor productivity as the metric of wealth.” Clearly, however, technological intensification can increase productivity per unit of space (land) as well as per unit of labour time. If Moore’s point that the “Marxian ‘law of value’ ... is transposed into the ‘law of Cheap Nature’” (Ibid., 52-53) is simply that “cheap” resources enable “cheap” technology that enhances labour productivity, we should expect him somewhere to discuss capitalist technology itself as a strategy for converting labour time and natural space appropriated in the periphery into a saving (or compression, in David Harvey’s idiom) of time and space in the core (cf. Hornborg 2001, 2019), but nowhere does he address technology in this way.

Cox’s infatuation with Moore’s ostensibly “holistic” Marxism no doubt reflects a widespread discontent with the extent to which classical historical materialism has failed to address ecological concerns. But in choosing Haraway and Latour as academic allies, Moore has abandoned the pursuit of analytical rigor and political acumen in favour of an amorphous and flamboyant prose that may impress the likes of Cox but that ultimately mystifies the asymmetric material transfers at the heart of capitalism. To blur the analytical boundary between nature and society is finally to suggest that, like earlier empires, capitalism is no less “natural” than a beaver dam (Moore 2015: 7). And to naturalise injustice, of course, is a sure sign of ideology.

References

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

Hornborg, Alf 1998. ’Ecosystems and World Systems: Accumulation as an Ecological Process’, Journal of World-Systems Research, 4(2):169-177.

Hornborg, Alf 2001. The Power of the Machine: Global Inequalities of Economy, Technology, and Environment, Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira.

Hornborg, Alf 2019. Nature, Society, and Justice in the Anthropocene: Unraveling the Money-Energy-Technology Complex, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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

Latour, Bruno 2018. Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime, Cambridge: Polity.

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

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

Moore, Jason W. 2016. ‘The Rise of Cheap Nature’, in Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, edited by Jason W. Moore, 78-115, Oakland: PM Press.

"Karl Marx" bykraskland is licensed underCC BY-NC-SA 2.0

• 1. http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/book-review/resuscitating-dialectic-moores-capitalism-web-life-ecology-and-accumulation-capital
• 2. Moore’s conceptual fogginess is particularly troubling as Cox affirms that the “world-ecology movement” seeks to make its framework “accessible to the worker and to the academician” alike.
• 3. Latour (2018: 119, n. 55) writes that the title of Moore’s book “restates succinctly the problem that [he is] trying to circumscribe.”
• 4. However, this characterisation of early capitalism is itself quite invalid, as forces of nature such as wind and water have advanced human productivity since the dawn of civilisation. A generous interpretation would be to assume that what Moore really refers to is the mechanical use of fossil energy, but elsewhere he emphatically – and strangely – denies the relation between capitalism and fossil fuels (Moore 2015: 177-180).
• 5. Moore (2015: 93) proclaims that ”[t]he rate of profit is inversely proportional to the value of the raw materials” (emphasis added).
• 6. Cox himself even cites Moore’s (2015: 277) discussion of capital’s final failure to offset “the internalization of waste costs.”

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 by Rohini Hensman                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                

Preface

This paper was first published in the Bulletin of the Communist Platform No.1, October 1977. The context in which it was researched and written was the period between 1974 and 1978, a period of intense debate and discussion within and between some of the socialist groups claiming a Marxist heritage in India. The one with which I was associated was the Revolutionary Bolshevik Circle (RBC) in Bombay, but I had major disagreements with it. One was the perspective of building a vanguard Leninist party, which, in practice, involved extremely sectarian and polemical interactions with other socialist groups. The idea that any of these groups – even the RBC, which undoubtedly took theory, the study of Marx, the legacy of the Russian Revolution and a critique of Stalinism more seriously than any other group – could claim exclusive leadership of a socialist revolutionary movement seemed questionable. This was connected to a second criticism: designation of the industrial proletariat working in large-scale enterprises as the sole motor force of the revolution. One of the groups with whose members we were having discussions was working with agricultural labourers and the rural poor: might not these sections too have to be involved in any revolutionary movement?

However, the criticism that preoccupied me most was that this perspective excluded the vast majority of proletarian women, only a tiny proportion of whom were employed in large-scale industry. I began working on a critique of this marginalisation of working-class women, drawing on two sources. One was a study of Marx’s writings on domestic labour, which seemed to be marked by inconsistencies and contradictions. The other was my own experience taking care of a household and two little pre-school children on a very small income: we had no washing machine or fridge; I cooked on a kerosene stove that often made pots and pans sooty; queued up at the ration shop for kerosene and inferior rice from which stones had to be picked out before cooking; used cloth nappies for my baby until he was toilet-trained; and although we had running water in our flat, the supply was limited to a few hours in the morning and an hour or two in the evening (and occasionally failed to come even at these times), so we had to store water in a drum for washing and bathing etc., and in a matka for drinking and cooking, and there were times when it ran short.

It was hard work, but working-class women living in urban shanty-towns and poor rural women had an incomparably harder time, queueing up to collect water from a common tap or well and carrying the heavy waterpots home; in some cases collecting firewood for cooking; collecting wheat from the ration shop, taking it to the mill to be ground, and making chapatis from the atta; cleaning made so much more difficult because there was not a proper floor; and so on: all extremely heavy, time-consuming tasks.

It appeared that the amount of domestic labour was not independent of the level of wages but inversely related to it, and that when the women were forced to earn – often by homeworking or other forms of informal labour – it resulted in capitalists extracting even more surplus labour from the family. Surely all this labour put into maintaining the current labour force and bringing up a new generation of workers entitled these women to be part of any revolutionary movement even if they were not themselves employed? Their work was not unskilled: indeed, my study of developmental psychology and my own experience suggested that childcare in particular was highly skilled; surely the people who had been doing the bulk of it had a key role to play in reorganising it in a socialist society?

At first, other members of the RBC complained that I was violating ‘democratic centralism’ by discussing my reservations with other groups, but, between 1975 and 1977, during the Emergency, the RBC and groups associated with it in Delhi and Bangalore engaged in intensive discussions in which the politics which had inspired them was subjected to a thorough critique. In 1978, some of us socialist feminists held two workshops in Bombay to discuss the role of women in the class struggle: a smaller, more theoretical Marxist discussion from 3 to 5 July, and a bigger discussion including a larger number of women activists from 6 to 8 July. This paper was a contribution to the smaller discussion. On the last half-day of the small workshop, we invited male comrades to join in the discussion, and it was a sign of the change that had taken place during the transition from the RBC to what we called the Platform Group that we were listened to with respect.

May 2020

***

Marx’s early drafts for his critique of political economy indicate that he intended to write a separate book on ‘Wage-labour’; in the final version, however, this category is taken up in the volumes on capital. Undoubtedly this is a consequence of the restructuring of his work which took place as his conception of it became clearer; yet, in the integration into the main body of his work on capital, the category ‘wage-labour’ suffers considerably. Marx’s treatment of it is marked by ambiguities and inconsistencies which are not characteristic of his work as a whole. This is all the more serious because wage-labour, or labour-power which is sold as a commodity, is the commodity of capitalist production, that on which the whole of capitalist commodity production rests. As Marx himself puts it, ‘When we look at the process of capitalist production as awhole and not merely at the immediate production of commodities, we find that although thesale and purchase of labour-power … is entirely separate from the immediate production process, and indeed precedes it, it yet forms theabsolute foundation of capitalist production and is an integral moment within it’ (Capital Volume I, Pelican Edition, p. 1005). A further development of Marx’s work in this direction thus becomes a vital necessity for Marxists today.

Marx defines labour-power, or labour-capacity, as ‘the aggregate of those mental and physical capabilities existing in the physical form, the living personality, of a human being, capabilities which he sets in motion whenever he produces a use value of any kind’ (Capital I, p. 270). The capitalist mode of production is characterised by the existence of the direct producers as a class dispossessed of all means of production and subsistence, and therefore compelled to sell their labour-power in order to live. Labour-power therefore becomes a commodity which is sold on the market, and, ‘like all other commodities it has a value’ (Capital I, p. 274). Its value is determined, ‘as in the case of every other commodity, by the labour-time necessary for the production, and consequently also the reproduction, of this specific article. In so far as it has value, it represents no more than a definite quantity of the average social labour objectified in it’ (Capital I, p. 274). Here is a clear and unambiguous definition: labour-power is a commodity, it is produced and reproduced as a commodity, and its value is determined, like the value of any other commodity, by the quantity of average social labour objectified on it. Not only labour-power, but ‘the real producer’ in whom this labour-power is embodied, plays the role of ‘mere means of production of material wealth, which is an end in itself’ (Capital I, p. 1037).

For capital, therefore, ‘the maintenance and increase of labour power appear … merely as the reproduction and extension of its own conditions of reproduction and accumulation’ (Capital I, p. 1062). According to this conception, not only means of production which are consumed in the process of production of commodities, but means of subsistence which are consumed in the process of production of labour-power are‘productively consumed’ (Capital I, p. 1045, emphasis added), because their product’s value re-enters the social process of capitalist production. Hence it is possible to condemn the manufacture of luxury goods from the standpoint of ‘capitalist production’ itself if it detracts from the production of ‘means ofsubsistence or production’ in sufficient quantities for the extended reproduction of capital (Capital I, p. 1046, emphasis added).

Running alongside this conception, however, is another which is quite different. In clear contradiction to the notion that the reproduction of labour-power is the production of a commodity which is consumed in capitalist production, Marx writes that ‘in fact, of course, the worker must sustain his capacity for work with the aid of means of subsistence, but this, his private consumption, which is at the same time the reproduction of his labour-power, falls outside the process of producing commodities’ (Capital I, p. 1004). This is in accordance with the idea, more explicit elsewhere, that ‘the product of individual consumption is the consumer himself; the result of productive consumption is a product distinct from the consumer’ (Capital I, p. 290). Such a distinction, which distinctly implies that individual consumption is, by definition, not productive consumption but unproductive consumption, is incapable of characterising the consumption which produces the commodity labour-power, which, on one hand, is embodied in the consumers themselves, so that its reproduction is inseparable from that of the consumers, but is, nonetheless, also a product distinct from the consumers in that it is alienable, it can be sold by the consumers as a commodity without their having to sell themselves.

A more serious defect of this definition is that it distinguishes productive and unproductive consumption purely on the basis of the material form of the product (i.e. living individual on one side, dead product on the other) and not on the basis of its economic function. The fact that in all cases consumption of means of subsistence leads to the reproduction of a living individual leads him here (though not in the passage quoted earlier) to overlook the fact that, in some cases, this living individual is from the standpoint of capital nothing but ameans of production, while, in other cases, this is not so. This is strikingly brought out in the following passage ‘The variable capital is resolved into revenue, firstly wages, secondly profit. If therefore capital is conceived as something contrasted with revenue, the constant capital appears to be capitalin the strict sense: the part of the total product that belongs to production and enters into the costs of production without being individually consumed by anyone (with the exception of draught cattle)’ (Theories of Surplus Value Part I, Moscow edition, p. 219). Here, the non-human form of the draught cattle alerts him to the fact that, although their individual consumption results only in their own reproduction and not in any other dead product, this product nevertheless ‘belongs to production’; while the human form of the labourers conceals the fact that the product oftheir individual consumption, human labour-power, equally ‘belongs to production’: where would production be, after all, without it?

It is not accidental that in equating the individual consumption of the labourer with the unproductive consumption of the non-labouring classes, Marx also equates the income of the labourer with the income of these classes by subsuming both under the category of ‘revenue’. This identification is particularly clear when he writes that ‘the whole amount of the annual product is therefore divided into two parts: one part is consumed as revenue, the other part replaces in kind the constant capital consumed’ (Theories of Surplus Value I, p. 230). This is in marked contrast with his later work, where revenue is strictly a fund for the consumption of the capitalists and their hangers-on, and thus part of the surplus-value appropriated from the workers, while the wages of the workers is part of the value created by themselves; and variable capital, the capital laid out in purchasing labour-power, is capital ‘in the strict sense’ just as much as constant capital. He points out that, if we examine the consumption of the working class on a social scale, the illusion disappears that in engaging in their own consumption workers are merely pleasing themselves, for ‘by converting part of his capital into labour-power, the capitalist valorises the value of his entire capital. He kills two birds with one stone. He profits not only by what he receives from the worker, but also by what he gives him. The capital given in return for labour-power is converted into means of subsistence which have to be consumed to reproduce the muscles, nerves, bones and brains of existing workers, and to bring new workers into existence. Within the limits of what is absolutely necessary, therefore, the individual consumption of the working class is the reconversion of the means of subsistence given by capital in return for labour-power into fresh labour-power which capital is then again able to exploit. It is the production and reproduction of the capitalist’s most indispensable means of production: the worker. The individual consumption of the worker, whether it occurs inside or outside the workshop, inside or outside the labour-process, remains an aspect of the production and reproduction of capital’ (Capital I, p. 717-18).

We must conclude, then, that individual and productive consumption cannot be mutually exclusive, as Marx sometimes implies, but rather that the individual consumption of the working classis, from the standpoint of bourgeois society, productive consumption, ‘since it is the production of a force which produces wealth for other people’ (Capital I, p. 719). In other words, it is productive of labour-power, a commodity which is sold to the capitalist, enters the capitalist labour-process, and is the only source of surplus-value and therefore of capital. This conception of the individual consumption of the working class, which fits in with the entire framework ofCapital, is conceptually clearly separable from the alternative conception of it as the unproductive expenditure of revenue, although, in Marx, the two conceptions are so closely intertwined that he sometimes contradicts himself in the space of a single sentence, as when he says of the means of subsistence consumed by the labourer that ‘this quantity of commodities has been consumed unproductively, except inasmuch as it preserves the efficacy of his labour-power, an instrument indispensable to the capitalist’ (Capital Volume II, Moscow edition, p. 312). Which is to say: it is individual consumption of revenue: therefore, it is unproductive consumption; however, it produces an essential means of production for the capitalist: therefore, it is productive consumption.

The confusion between individual consumption andunproductive consumption is here very clear. Once it is established that the individual consumption of the working class is, in fact, the process of production of the commodity labour-power, that the labour necessary for the production of this commodity is an aliquot part of the total labour of society, and that the value of this commodity is determined by the quantity of average social labour objectified in it, it then becomes possible to examine in greater detail the production process of this commodity, both as a labour-process and as a process of production of value. This we will now do.

Given the existence of the individual, the production of labour-power consists in his reproduction of himself or his maintenance… But in the course of this activity, i.e. labour, a definite quantity of human muscle, nerve, brain, etc. is expended, and these things have to be replaced… His means of subsistence must therefore be sufficient to maintain him in his normal state as a working individual. His natural needs, such as food, clothing, fuel and housing vary according to the climatic and other physical peculiarities of his country. On the other hand, the number and extent of his so-called necessary requirements, as also the manner in which they are satisfied, are themselves the products of history, and depend therefore to a great extent on the level of civilization attained by a country; in particular they depend on the conditions in which, and consequently on the habits and expectations with which, the class of free workers has been formed… The labour-power withdrawn from the market by wear and tear, and by death, must be continually replaced by, at the very least, an equal amount of fresh labour-power. Hence the sum of means of subsistence necessary for the production of labour-power must include the means necessary for the worker's replacements, i.e. his children… In order to modify the general nature of the human organism in such a way that it acquires skill and dexterity in a given branch of industry, and becomes labour-power of a developed and specific kind, a special education or training is needed… The expenses of this education (exceedingly small in the case of ordinary labour-power), form a part of the total value spent in producing it. (Capital I, pp.275-6.)

This is the most complete definition of the elements entering into the determination of the value of labour-power in Marx’s work. We see from this that the average social labour objectified in it includes labour expended on: (1) keeping the labourers alive; (2) replacing any energy or tissues used up in the course of their work and supplying the needs which have historically come to be regarded as essential even if they surpass the bare physical necessities; (3) reproducing the labourers through the upbringing of a new generation of labourers; and (4) educating and training the labourers. Thus, if the price of labour-power or the wage is to be equal to its value, then two conditions must be satisfied. Firstly, the labourers must expend in labour no more energy or tissues than can be replaced in the time at their disposal for rest and recreation. This implies a normal working day of reasonable length, for, as the labourer might say to the capitalist,

‘by an unlimited extension of the working day, you may in one day use up a quantity of labour-power greater than I can restore in three… You pay me for one day’s labour-power, while you use three days of it. That is against our contract and the laws of commodity exchange. I therefore demand a working day of normal length, and I demand it without any appeal to your heart, for in money matters sentiment is out of place… I demand a normal working day because, like every other seller, I demand the value of my commodity.’ (Capital I, p. 343.)

Overwork, the using up of more labour-power in a day than can be replaced in a day, will inevitably result in the reproduction of labour-power in a crippled state and ultimately premature death, and is thus one form of the payment of labour-power below its value. Secondly, the amount of the wage must at least be sufficient to purchase all the commodities, material goods as well as services, necessary to reproduce labour-power in a healthy and unimpaired condition. If the historically developed situation is such that more than this biological minimum is regarded as being essential for a normal life, and moreover education and certain skills are necessary, then the wage must be sufficient to purchase these also.

Of all these elements of the value of labour-power, the most obvious is the value of the commodities which are necessary for the subsistence of the individual worker. In fact, this element is so obvious that, at times, Marx even considers it possible to reduce the whole of the value of labour-power to this, as when he says that ‘the ultimate or minimum limit of the value of labour-power is formed by the value of the commodities which have to be supplied every day to the bearer of labour-power, the man, so that he can renew his life-process’ (Capital I, p. 276). But a little thought shows that should the value of labour-power ever fall to this level, it will not be reproduced ‘in a crippled state’ (p. 277), but rather will not be reproduced at all beyond a certain point in time. For if thevalue of labour-power (and not merely its price in individual cases) falls to a level such that only the subsistence of those who are actually working is provided for, then the workers will not be able to have children, and, once they die, there will be no one to replace them. It is evident that the value of labour-power can never fall to this level; the rock-bottom minimum is that level at which the worker’s family, the unit of production of labour-power, can subsist. Marx recognises this elsewhere when he says that ‘theexchange-value of labour-power is paid for when the price paid is that of the means of subsistence that is customarily held to be essential in a given state of society to enable the worker to exert his labour-power with the necessary degree of strength, health, vitality, etc. and to perpetuate himself by producing replacements for himself’ (Capital I, p. 1067). In other words, what is sold by the worker is not his labour-power as an individual, but the labour-power of the household, the unit of reproduction of labour-power; and what is sold by the aggregate of wage-labourers is not simply their own labour-power but that of the wage-labouring class as a whole, including that of children as yet too young to work. At any given time, the value of labour-power must include the value of means of subsistence for those who are not actually wage-labourers as yet; this is a necessary consequence of the fact that this particular commodity requires the expenditure of many years of labour-time on its production before it is brought to market.

Firstly, then, the value of the necessary means of subsistence for the working-class family enters into the total value of labour-power, or in other words the social labour-time embodied in these is part of the social labour-time embodied in the commodity labour-power. But, at no time in the history of capitalism, has this amount of labour-time alone been sufficient for the reappearance day after day and generation after generation of labour-power on the market. Food which is bought has to be cooked before it can be consumed, dwellings have to be cleaned in order to be habitable, clothes have to be washed and mended (and sometimes made), children have to be cared for and taught, etc. etc. That is to say, the reproduction of labour-power requires the expenditure of a considerable amount of additional necessary labour-time over and above the labour-time embodied in material means of subsistence. This additional necessary labour-time has to be supplied in the form of services, and very rarely is it the case that these services are available as commodities. Does it constitute part of the social labour objectified in the commodity labour-power? Marx's attitude to this question is ambiguous, to say the least. Where these services take the form of commodities, he is prepared to accept that they add to the value of labour-power. ‘As to the purchase of such services as those which train labour-power, maintain or modify it, etc., in a word, give it a specialized form or even only maintain it,’ he writes, ‘thus for example the schoolmaster’s service, in so far as it is “industrially necessary” or useful; the doctor’s service in so far as he maintains health and so conserves the source of all values, labour-power itself – these are services which yield in return “a vendible commodity, etc.”, namely labour-power itself, into whose costs of production or reproduction these services enter’ (Theories of Surplus Value I, p. 167). Again, ‘what the labourer … pays out for education is devilishly little, but when he does, his payments are productive, for education produces labour-power’ (p. 210). Here ‘productive’ is clearly being used in the sense of being productive of value which is embodied in a commodity, and we will for convenience accept this usage.

However, as Marx points out himself, most of these services which are necessary for the reproduction of labour-power are not bought as commodities but are supplied directly by the working class itself. Does the labour-time spent on these services contribute to the value of labour-power? Marx distinctly implies that they do not. He says, for example, that ‘there are very few unproductive labours or services left on which the labourer’s wages are spent, especially as he himself provides his costs of consumption (cooking, keeping his house clean, generally even repairs)’ (T.S.V. I, p. 210). The term ‘costs of consumption’ which he coins here would be unnecessary unless he considered these costs to be something different from the ‘costs of production or reproduction’ constituted by the doctor’s and school-teacher’s services. The same conception of these costs is present in the following passage;

‘The largest part of society, that is to say the working class, must incidentally perform this kind of labour for itself; but it is only able to perform it when it has laboured “productively”. It can only cook meat for itself when it has produced a wage with which to pay for the meat; and it can only keep its furniture and dwellings clean, it can only polish its boots, when it has produced the value of furniture, house-rent and boots. To this class of productive labourers itself, therefore, the labour which they perform themselves appears as “unproductive labour”. This unproductive labour never enables them to repeat the same unproductive labour a second time unless they have previously laboured productively’. (T.S.V. I, p. 166.)

The argument is similar to that in the earlier passage. In contrast to the payments for education and medical attention, which are productive of value and enter into the costs of production of labour-power, the expenditure of labour on cooking, cleaning, sewing and repairs is unproductive of value and presumably does not enter into the costs of production of labour-power. From the argument here it is not clear whether this is because (1) these services by their nature cannot be productive of value: this is implied by the use of the term ‘costs of consumption’; or because (2) they are suppliedby the working class itself, whereas if they werebought with their wages they would be productive of value. Let us examine these one by one.

(1) In criticising Smith for identifying productive labour with labour which produces a material product, Marx makes it clear that the form of the commodity, whether it is a service or a material use-value, does not determine the character of the labour which produces it. He remarks that

‘even though capital has conquered material production, and so by and large home industry has disappeared, and the industry of the small craftsman who makes use-values directly for the consumer at his home – even then, Adam Smith knows quite well, a seamstress whom I get to come to my house to sew shirts, or workmen who repair furniture, or the servant who scrubs and cleans the house, etc., or the cook who gives meat and other things their palatable form, fix their labour in a thing and in fact increase the value of these things in exactly the same way as the seamstress who sews in a factory, the engineer who repairs a machine, the labourers who clean the machine, or the cook who cooks in a hotel as the wage-labourer of a capitalist.’ (T.S.V. I, p. 1649, emphasis added.)

Evidently, then, sewing, repairing, cleaning, cooking, cannot by their nature be unproductive of value, whether they take place in the factory or in the house of the consumer of these services. Therefore, the term ‘costs of consumption’, which implies that they belong within the process of individual consumption, is totally misleading; they are ‘costs of consumption’ only in the banal sense thatevery process of production of an article of consumption in some way prepares it for consumption. I.e. the reaping, threshing, milling and baking of grain are in this sense ‘costs of consumption’, likewise the picking, cleaning, spinning and weaving of cotton, and so on. Clearly, this is a strange way in which to conceive of these processes, which should rather be seen, and are seen by Marx, as processes of production of articles of consumption. Sewing, repairing, cooking and cleaning are likewise processes of production which result in a use-value, and, in a commodity-producing society, a value. In fact, when we examine the production of the commodity labour-power as a labour-process, it is clear that means of production (raw food, fuel, brooms and mops, needle and thread, etc.) are converted into the form of the product (labour-power) precisely through the labour-process which takes place in the home of the working-class family and whose components are cooking, cleaning, washing, sewing, knitting, mending, child-care and so on. If we examine it as a process of production of value, then the living labour performed in the final process of production is no less part of the total social labour objectified in the labour-power than the labour which has previously been objectified in means of production of labour-power.

(2) Thus we have already disposed of the argument that these processes of production do not add to the value of the product simply because they are performed by the working class itself. This would be like saying that the products of any petty commodity-producing households – handloom weavers, for example – incorporates only the value of the means of production such as yarn and loom, while the actual labour of weaving adds no value to the product because it is performed by the weavers themselves – a proposition which obviously contradicts Marx’s whole theory of value.

If we now look more carefully at the passage where Marx says that the working class can cook, etc. only after it has obtained a wage, we can detect an inversion. If we generalise this proposition to all commodities, it would state that until a commodity has been sold, it cannot be produced. Now, it perfectly true that, having once been produced, a commodity must be sold in order that the elements of production be replaced and the process of production occuragain. But it should be obvious that it cannot in the first place be sold unless it has already been produced. This is especially true of labour-power, which cannot be sold unless many hundreds of hours of labour-time have already been spent on its production. As Marx himself remarks in another context, ‘its value, like that of every other commodity, is already determined before it enters into circulation, for a definite quantity of social labour has been spent on the production of the labour-power’ (Capital I, p. 277). And, again, ‘Its exchange-value, like that of every other commodity, is determined before it goes into circulation, since it is sold as a capacity, a power, and a specific amount of labour-time was required to produce this capacity, this power’ (Capital I, p. 1066).

We can ask, then, why it is that this domestic labour, which, it is true, is not directly productive of surplus value, should be treated by Marx as though it is not productive ofvalue at all; and why he should, at times, treat the process of production of labour-power, which, it is true, is not the production of commodity capital, as though it were not the production of a commodity at all. It is possible that the answer lies in some lingering fetishism of the wage-form. If it were hislabour that was being sold, there would be no anomaly in saying that obtaining a wage is aprecondition of preparing means of subsistence for consumption, since labour, unlike labour-power, is not ‘a capacity, a power’, and no labour-time is required for its production. This lingering fetishism would also account for the idea sometimes expressed by Marx that the labourer sellshis labour-power only. The visible transaction is certainly the sale of something that ishis, and the sale of the labour-power of the entire family lies concealed beneath this appearance-form.

To establish that the value of labour-power incorporates the labour performed in the home may not appear to be very important. Yet it considerably alters the way in which the value of labour-power is calculated. Marx divides the factory working day into a period of necessary labour in which value equivalent to the wage is produced by the workers, and a period of surplus labour in which surplus-value is produced. In accordance with the assumption that the commodity labour-power exchanges at approximately its value, he assumes also that in the necessary labour-time value equivalent to the value of labour-power is produced. If this is the case, the labourer must in the necessary labour-time produce not only value equivalent to subsistence costs incurred in money, but also, in addition, value equivalent to the labour expended in the home, and this must be calculated on a household and not an individual basis. In other words, household labour must be seen as part of the total social labour-time engaged in the reproduction of society through its contribution to the production of labour-power. This is not immediately apparent because, here again, we come up against the fetishism of money and especially of the wage-form which hides the intrinsic unity of necessary labour performed in the factory and necessary labour performed in the home. In the case of a natural household economy, it is obvious that work done in the field, the workshop and the home are part of a single process of reproducing the household. Where simple commodity production is concerned, the unity is less apparent, because the labour-time spent in producing commodities for sale is divided from the time spent in producing use-values for household consumption. But it still not difficult to penetrate the secret that the labour spent in producing commodities is, when seen on a social scale, only part of the social labour performed to provide for the reproduction of the sum total of commodity-producing households. Capitalism, however, erects a Chinese wall between work performed in the workshop or factory, which becomes part of the life-process of an alien being, capital, and work performed in the home; thereby obscuring both the social character of domestic labour as merely ‘an aspect of the production and reproduction of capital’, labour-time spent in producing a product for consumption by capital,and the fact that however contingent the use-values in which the labour performed in any given workplace is embodied, the total labour of the working class must produce means of production and consumption necessary for the reproduction of society.

From this point of view, then, the full value of labour-power is realised only when the working-class family obtains a collective wage with which it can purchase means of subsistence necessary for a normal standard of living without collectively having to work a greater number of hours a day than normal. The former, it has already been pointed out, contains a historical and moral element; likewise the latter:

‘The working day does have a maximum limit. It cannot be prolonged beyond a certain point. This maximum limit is conditioned by two things. First by the physical limits to labour-power. Within the 24 hours of the natural day a man can expend only a certain quantity of his vital force. During part of the day the vital force must rest, sleep; during another part the man has to satisfy other physical needs, to feed, wash and clothe himself. Besides these purely physical limitations, the extension of the working day encounters moral obstacles. The worker needs time in which to satisfy his intellectual and social requirements, and the extent and number of these requirements is conditioned by the general level of civilization. The length of the working day therefore fluctuates within boundaries both physical and social.’ (Capital I, p. 341.)

All this is equally true of women and applies with even greater force to children, whose normal development requires more time for rest and the free exercise of physical and mental capacities than that of adults.

Thus, realisation of the full value of labour-power implies much more than that the labourers should be able to maintain themselves and produce children who will constitute the future labour-force. It implies also that the collective wage of the working-class family should be sufficient to maintain it at a standard of life which is socially considered to be normal, which may be much higher than the biological minimum. Moreover, it implies that the total number of hours of work per day for the family should not exceed the amount socially accepted as normal. This total number of hours per day, however it is distributed as between different members of the family, includes both domestic labour and wage-labour performed in the factory. In modern times, the normal working day is considered to be such that children should not have to work at all, while older adolescents and adults should not work more than eight hours a day. Since domestic labour contributes to the value of labour-power, only if it is included in the calculation of hours of work can labour-power be considered to be sold at its value. If wage-labour alone fills up eight hours of each adult’s day, labour-power is being sold below its value; and if wage-labour and domestic labour together constitute more than an eight-hour working day for any adult, then labour-power is still being sold below its value.

At any given level of the social productivity of labour, the mass of surplus-value can be expanded either (1) by reducing the necessary labour performed in the factory while keeping the factory working day constant; (2) by extending the factory working day; or (3) by intensifying the work performed in the factory, a case which need not here be considered. (1) When the necessary labour-time is reduced below the time in which value equivalent to the value of labour-power is produced, the immediate result is a reduction in the use-values which can be purchased and hence a fall in the standard of living. However, the necessary labour-time can be considerably reduced without producing a drastic fall in the standard of living simply by increasing the domestic labour-time engaged in the production of labour-power. If the wage is not sufficient to buy cooked or processed food, it will be bought raw and cooked at home; if it is not sufficient to buy laundering services, clothes will be washed at home; if tailoring services or ready-made clothes cannot be afforded, clothes will be stitched at home; if flour or bread is too expensive, grain may be bought, cleaned and sometimes even ground at home, at the cost of a tremendous amount of time and effort. In this way, it is possible to push the price of labour-power far below its value; where part of the food for domestic consumption is produced by the household on a small plot, it is possible to push it down still further. This is, however, compensated by a greater amount of time expended on domestic labour. In terms of social averages, the extra time expended at home may be equivalent to the reduction achieved in the necessary labour-time in the factory, but, in absolute terms, the extra time in the home is much greater because of the primitiveness of the domestic labour-process. Thus, the real mechanism by which this reduction of the price of labour-power below its value is achieved is by an extension of the household working day far beyond the normal length. However, since the extra working time occurs in the home and not in the factory under the direct supervision of the capitalist, it is seldom perceived as an extension of the working day. (2) On the other side, extension of the surplus-labour performed under the direct control of the capitalist is best considered from the standpoint of the entire working-class family. The total amount of surplus labour-time appropriated from them can be increased not only by increasing the working time of an individual member, but by increasing the number of family members engaged in wage-labour to include, e.g., women and children. Here, again, the price of labour-power is reduced below its value, not through a reduction of the use-values consumed by the family, but by an extension of the number of hours of wage-labour it is compelled to perform per day.

Thus, at a given level of labour productivity, surplus-value can be increased by (1) reduction of the quantity of use-values consumed by the working class; (2) extension of the domestic labour-time it must employ in order to reproduce its labour-power; and (3) extension of the surplus labour-time appropriated from it in the factory. The individual capital, on which the laws of capitalist accumulation act as external compulsion, strives to achieve all three, thus pushing down wages to the equivalent of the price of the minimum quantum of use-values that have to be purchased. The labourers, on the other side, have no means of resisting this pressure so long as there is free competition amongst them for the sale of their labour-power on the market. Thus, as a result of the operation of the laws of capitalist production, wages would tend to fluctuate around the average aggregate price of the minimum means of subsistence that have to be purchased on the market, and not, as Marx assumed, around the value of labour-power. Fluctuations of supply and demand would lead wages to deviate above or below this average aggregate price, but these deviations would mutually balance one another.

Why does this persistent, and not merely accidental, deviation of the price of labour-power from its value occur? The same problem in fact confronts us if we examine the prices of all other commodities produced in a capitalist society. If we begin with the assumption that prices gravitate towards values, we have to conclude that commodities produced by capitals of varying organic compositions must achieve correspondingly different rates of profit. This, however, is contradicted by the existence of a general rate of profit. It is the initial assumption which has to be dropped when we come to a more concrete examination of capitalist society where products exchange not at their value but approximately at their prices of production. As Marx points outs

‘For prices at which commodities are exchanged to approximately correspond to their values, nothing more is necessary than (1) for the exchange of the various commodities to cease being purely accidental or only occasional; (2) so far as direct exchange of commodities is concerned, for these commodities to be produced on both sides in approximately sufficient quantities to meet mutual requirements … and (3) so far as selling is concerned, for no natural or artificial monopoly to enable either of the contracting sides to sell commodities above their value or to compel them to undersell… The exchange of commodities at their values, or approximately at their values, thus requires a much lower stage than their exchange at their prices of production, which requires a definite level of capitalist development.’ (Capital Volume III, Moscow edition, pp. 174-5, 174.)

Thus, as the capitalist production of commodities comes to displace simple commodity production, products come to be sold at around their prices of production rather than around their values. But labour-power defies all the rules. On the one hand, it is only when the capitalist production of commodities has reached a definite level of development that it is widely produced as a commodity at all; on the other, even at this stage, it is produced as a simple commodity and not as a capitalist commodity. In other words, it is a simple commodity produced in a world of capitalist commodities: what, then, constitutes the centre towards which its market-price gravitates? Not its value, since commodities no longer exchange at their values. Nor its price of production, since it is not produced capitalistically and its producers do not demand profit at the average rate. Rather, its price gravitates spontaneously towards the average aggregate price of the commodities that enter into its production.

It is important to emphasise that, in a society where commodities in general do not exchange at approximately their values, there would be no possible mechanism whereby the price of one isolated commodity, namely labour-power, could fluctuate around its value. Marx does not point this out because he commits a forced abstraction in making a transition straight from the value of labour-power to its price in Volume I itself, throughout which he maintains the assumption thatall commodities sell at their value. Having done this, he forgets that this mode of determination of price is possible only on the assumption that all commodities sell at their value, and thinks that he has established the centre of gravity of the market-price of labour-power for a capitalist society as such. Hence, when he begins to approach the surface of bourgeois society inVolume III, and shows that capitalistically produced commodities have market-prices which fluctuate around prices of production and not values, he fails to carry out a similar transformation on the price of labour-power and assumes that it still continues to gravitate towards value. Thus:

‘If supply and demand coincide, the market-price of commodities corresponds to their price of production, i.e. their price then appears to be regulated by the immanent laws of capitalist production, independently of competition, since the fluctuations of supply and demand explain nothing but deviations of market-prices from prices of production. The same applies to wages. If supply and demand coincide, they neutralize each other’s effect, and wages equal the value of labour-power.’ (Capital III, p. 349.)

As a result of this mistaken assumption, he is unable adequately to explain the real historical necessity of trade unions. If it were merely a matter of fluctuations of supply and demand causing temporary deviations of wages above and below the value of labour-power, the immanent laws of capitalist production would, by themselves, ensure that labour-power, in the long run, would be sold at its value. It is, on the contrary, the immanent tendency of capitalist production to push wages below the value of labour-power that compels the working class tostruggle andcombine merely in order to realise the value of its labour-power, and the organisations historically thrown up in the course of this struggle are the trade unions. In fact, it is the struggle of the working class through the trade unions to increase the use-values obtainable with the wage and to reduce the length of the working day that tends to push wages up towards the value of labour-power. The failure or success of this struggle, however, depends on historical circumstances outside its control.

Finally, the state. As embodiment of the general interest of bourgeois society, it attempts to ensure optimum conditions for the accumulation of capital. Unlike, however, the individual capitalist, whose watchword is ‘Après moi le déluge!’ and who takes no account of the cost to society so long as his own profit is increased, the state must, in the interest of the whole capitalist class, limit the extent of exploitation of labour-power within boundaries which allow of its unimpaired reproduction. It is this function of the state which accounts, for example, for the passing of the English Factory Acts of the mid-nineteenth century.

‘These laws curb capital’s drive towards a limitless draining away of labour-power by forcibly limiting the working day on the authority of the state, but a state ruled by capitalist and landlord. Apart from the daily more threatening advance of the working-class movement, the limiting of factory labour was dictated by the same necessity as forced the manuring of English fields with guano. The same blind desire for profit that in the one case exhausted the soil had in the other case seized hold of the vital force of the nation at its roots.’ (Capital I, p. 348.)

In this instance, the blind desire for profits of the individual capitalists threatens to annihilate the very source of its profits by over-working the proletariat to such an extent that it is unable to reproduce itself. The workers, struggling for their own existence, ‘put their heads together and, as a class, compel the passing of a law, an all-powerful social barrier by which they can be prevented from selling themselves and their families into slavery and death by voluntary contract with capital’ (Capital I, p. 416). And this law, paradoxically, is enacted in the wider interests of the capitalists themselves, who individually fight against it tooth and nail.

The purpose of this example is merely to indicate the complexity of the interaction between capitalists, wage-labourers and bourgeois state which occurs during the process of the historical development of the class of wage-labourers. This historical development results, on the one hand, in an alteration of the conditions in which labour-power is produced, sold and consumed, on the other, in the expansion of the proletariat into a truly world-historical force, and these two aspects are inter-related. A more detailed investigation into the various aspects of this development and their inter-relations is a necessity if the various forms of organisation and struggle historically thrown up by the working class are sought to be understood, and if a deeper understanding of the present stage of the class struggle is to be obtained.

Image modify from "work" byJudy ** is licensed underCC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Xavier Lafrance teaches political science at the Université du Québec à Montréal. With Charles Post, he co-edited the book Case Studies in the Origins of Capitalism (Palgrave 2018) and he is the author of The Making of Capitalism in France. Class Structures, Economic Development, the State and the Formation of the French Working Class, 1750-1914 (Brill, « Historical Materialism Book Series, 2019) – now out in paperback https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1462-the-making-of-capitalism-in-france

This interview first appeared at https://www.contretemps.eu/construction-capitalisme-france-entretien/

Could you tell us about your political and intellectual background ? In the introduction to The Making of Capitalism in France, you write that the theoretical framework you are inclined towards is the one you call “political Marxism” (which you prefer to call Capital-centric Marxism): could you say more about your relationship to this theoretical tradition?

In the book, I’m using the “Political Marxist” framework developed by Robert Brenner and Ellen Meiksins Wood from the late 1970s and early 1980s, building on Marx’s mature critique of political economy. In his early works – especially in The German Ideology andThe Communist Manifesto – Marx was still under the influence of Adam Smith’s classical presentation of the “commercial model”, in which the expansion of market exchanges drove an ongoing division of labour and development of productive forces that culminated with the rise of capitalism (or what Smith called “commercial society”).

Marx broke with these Smithian assumptions in the Grundrisse and in his masterpiece,Capital (hence the phrase “Capital-centric Marxism). In these works, Marx rejected the classical political economists’ notion of a “so called primitive accumulation” initiating the emergence of capitalism. He stressed that no amount of commercial expansion or accumulation of monetary wealth could ever by themselves explain the transition to capitalism. Capital is not a thing but a “social relation” and the emergence of capitalism required a radical transformation of class relations – a qualitative reconfiguration of social power, not a mere quantitative accumulation of wealth. To explain this transformation of class relations, Marx devoted most of the last section of the first volume ofCapital to an analysis of the mass and violent expropriation of peasants from their land that took place in the English countryside during the early modern period.

Building upon and developing Marx’s argument, Brenner published landmark articles[fn]Brenner, Robert (1976) ”Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe”, Past & Present, no. 79 pp. 30-75;  Brenner, Robert 1977, ‘The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism’,New Left Review, I, no. 104: 25–92. [/fn] in the late 1970s on the agrarian and English origins of capitalism. In these articles, he breaks with analyses of the emergence of capitalism that assume the very thing that need to be explained. Most historical explanations of the origins of capitalism have been circular, suggesting that capitalism emerged out of pre-existing, if embryonic, capitalist dynamics. Ancient profit-taking commercial practices, typically involving buying cheap in one region and selling dear in another, thus tend to be equated with capitalism. We are left with historical explanations that revolve around the removal of obstacles to timeless (proto) capitalist processes, an endeavour often attributed to urban merchants, sometimes involving violent revolutions. Historical lines of demarcation are blurred, and the unique imperatives of capitalism are naturalised. This is precisely the kind of framework that was rejected by Brenner.

An earlier Marxist “transition debate” had taken place in the 1950s, around the exchange between Maurice Dobb and Paul Sweezy.[fn]Hilton, Rodney (ed.) (1985), The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism, Verso. [/fn] Whereas Sweezy related the rise of capitalism to the growth of trade and urbanisation, Dobb maintained that the latter were not a threat but in fact fully compatible with feudalism. For Dobb, the critical factor behind the transition was class struggle between lords and peasants, which freed the later from feudal impediments and allowed them to engage in petty commodity production and to eventually become full-fledged capitalists. Brenner retained Dobb’s focus on class struggles in the countryside while getting rid of his Smithian assumptions.

Launching a new transition debate that came to bear his name, Brenner engaged the dominant non-Marxist explanations of the emergence of capitalism, explaining that both the “commercialisation model” and the “demographic model” assumed that the early modern agrarian economy responded to changes in supply and demand of land on the market. Doing this, these models presumed that specifically capitalist dynamics propelling producers to specialise, innovate and accumulate existed transhistorically, and they were consequently unable to account for the divergent paths of development that emerged across Europe in the wake of the spread of trade from the eleventh century and the demographic collapse of the fourteenth.

Brenner explained how, under feudalism, the possession of land by peasants outside of market competition, and the consequent use of extra-economic coercion to extract rents in labour, while fuelling the accumulation of military means and trade of luxury goods as part of state building projects led by feudal ruling class, ruled out the systematic development of productivity through improved methods of labour-saving techniques. As population rose, the tendency toward the parcellisation of landholdings through partible inheritance lead to declining yields per acre and labour input and, eventually, to demographic collapse. While they were universal across European feudal societies, Brenner showed how the impact of commercial and demographic trends diverged following the balance of power within and between classes in a given region.

In Eastern Europe, where peasant had not developed strong communal village organisation, landlords where able to impose a “second serfdom”. In Western Europe, stronger solidarity allowed peasant to freed themselves from serfdom while preserving effective possession of their plots through stable, customary rents. Lordly attempts to consolidate leaseholds and to raise rents were checked by peasant resistance and short circuited by the consolidation of Absolutist monarchies – in France and elsewhere – whose main source of revenue was taxes. Extra-economic surplus appropriation was thus preserved partially via a new form of state-mediated exploitation (though rent remained a major source of revenue).

In England, however, an epoch-making transformation of class relations took place allowing for the rise of a historically new form of economic exploitation. There, the unintended consequence of the ruling class strategy of reproduction in face of the feudal crisis was a transition to agrarian capitalism as lords reacted to the peasants’ ability to gain their legal freedom by imposing commercial, capitalist leases on tenant farmers. This process was backed by a relatively more centralised English state and led to specifically capitalist social property relations in which the tenant farmers’ access to their land became market dependent. This market dependence compelled producers to specialise, innovate and accumulate in order to pay rising rents set by market competition. The upshot was unprecedented sustained economic growth and a breakaway from Malthusian demographic cycles. 

In short, while most historians and social scientists assume, in Smithian fashion, that growing market opportunities will automatically lead producers to adopt capitalist behaviours, Brenner showed how the latter only ensued from specific social property relations that were at first confined to England and that compelled economic actors to reproduce through market competition and profit maximisation. As Wood puts it, capitalism emerges precisely when markets are no longer sets of market opportunities but become coercive forces. This, of course, has important implications for our theorisation of historical materialism.

 Your problematisation of capitalism plays a key role in your approach to the development of capitalism in France: in what sense is analysing capitalism as a social system rather than a “purely” economic phenomenon crucial to you as a Marxist scholar?

The historical analysis discussed above reveals that capitalism is not simply “more of the same”; it is not a mere expansion of “economic” phenomena, be it trade, as Smithian believes, or productive forces, as many Marxists suggest. Its advent requires a reconfiguration of social power and is the result of class struggles.

As part of the “Brenner Debate”, launched by the work discussed above, the French historian Guy Bois accused Brenner of “political Marxism” – thus coining the name by which this approach came to be known –  for giving to much weight to political factors, namely class struggles, at the expense of economic factors, especially the contradictions between forces and relations of production. Bois’s critique, however, was well beside the point, since it took for granted a separation of the “political” and the “economic” that is specific to capitalism. Under feudalism and other non-capitalist social forms, surplus was extracted through “extra-economic” means, namely political, juridical and military power. Feudal lords used their personal political power directly in the process of surplus appropriation, which led Brenner to speak of “politically-constituted property” in reference to non-capitalist modes of production. Consequently, in these non-capitalist societies, class struggles tended to be overtly and directly political in nature, and the balance of power between classes as well as the level of solidarity within classes played a greater role in shaping the evolution of feudal societies and economies.

While class relations and struggles remain central under capitalism, this system is radically distinct in the way it makes both producers and exploiters dependent upon successful market competition for their reproduction. This system’s unique laws of motions, or rules of reproduction – the law of value which compels producers to economise labour-time through specialisation, the use of labour-saving innovations and the ongoing accumulation of surplus-value – operate via the mechanism of price competition. In other words, though it always preserves forms of unfree labour, capitalism is uniquely reproduced through the “dull compulsion of the market place” rather than prominently through forms of extra-economic coercion. Capitalism allows for a separation of the “political” and the “economic” as the state can become – though this has always been the result of struggles from below – a public sphere of impersonal power. This public character of the state does not fundamentally threaten the reproduction of class divisions and exploitation since the latter is now privatised in individual units of production.

The separation of “economic” and “political” spheres is thus in fact a reconfiguration of social power through which some political functions and powers (over production and distribution) are apparently depoliticised and confined to an “economic” sphere where they fall under the logic of “self-regulated” markets. Moreover, the unique dynamism of capitalism, the constant drive to develop productive forces, operates much more independently of the desires and goals of either individual capitalists or the state. This systematic development of productive forces – and their determinant impact on broader social, political and cultural processes – is actually something that is specific to capitalism, and, contrary to Bois’s (and many Marxists’) belief, is not a transhistorical motor of development.

To get a better grasp of these issues, consider the fact that Brenner speaks of “social property relations” and not simply of social relations of production. He does this to avoid the notion that technical change in the immediate process of production would mechanically lead to a new social division of labour, new class configurations, and, ultimately, a new form of state and ideological “superstructure”. Doing this, Brenner, and Wood, remain in the track of Marx’s mature critique of political economy and his crucial insight that each historical mode of production functions according to its own distinctive internal logic. This logic, according to Marx, is determined by the way in which “unpaid labour is pumped out of direct producers” by an exploiting class. In other words, in class societies, modes of production are always simultaneously modes of exploitation – i.e. sets of social property relations.

Hence, as I put it in the book, analyses informed by a historical materialist framework must “begin with the multi-layered and complex configuration of social power that shapes how societies reproduce themselves[fn]It should be mentioned that this social reproduction involves not only class, but also gender relations. For a sympathetic, yet critical, discussion of « political Marxism » from a social reproduction theory standpoint, see Nicole Leach (2016) « Rethinking the Rules of Reproduction and the Transition to Capitalism : Reading Federici and Brenner Together », in Xavier Lafrance and Charlie Post (eds.),Case Studies in the Origins of Capitalism, Palgrave, pp. 317-342. [/fn] while allowing one class to appropriate a surplus at the expense of another (or several others). Put another way, we begin with an assessment of social property relations – which always involve horizontal relationships of competition and collaborationwithin classes as well as vertical conflictsbetween classes – that impose ‘rules of reproduction’ on social agents and consequently orient macro-level social and economic phenomena.”

Historical materialism looks at the ways in which humans establish social relations of reproduction with nature and how these fundamental social relations structure other sets of social, political, and cultural experiences. As Wood explains, “the forms of [social] interaction [with nature] produced by human beings, themselves become material forces, no less than are natural forces”. Now, in class societies, the focus moves to the ways in which classes reproduce themselves – in relation with each other and with nature – and how this affects social and political reality. The nexus of class exploitation patterns other forms of social relations and is consequently not an epiphenomenon responding to the development of forces of production. On the contrary, the configuration of class relations of exploitation orients the development (or non-development) of productive forces within a given mode of production. That is, social property relations shape the behaviour that individuals and class must adopt to reproduce themselves, and thus establish patterns of economic development and social conflict at a macro level. Whereas, in feudal society, surplus appropriation by a class at the expense of another took an extra-economic form that tended to stall economic development and made class conflicts overtly political, in capitalist societies exploitation is mediated by market relations that compel economic actors to adopt profit-maximising behaviours and that tend to depoliticise class conflicts.

All of this is useful to conduct research, because it provides a clear understanding of what capitalism is and allows us to observe the emergence of capitalism and the ways it re-orients social relations and unfolds in actual historical processes. Without this clear understanding of distinctive capitalist dynamics, it would not make much sense to attempt to explain and describe the transition to capitalism in France or any other country/region. Beyond these academic endeavours, the historical materialist framework and the conception of capitalism presented here have important political consequences. In order to think and act strategically as anti-capitalists and socialists, we need to have some sort of understanding of the capitalist terrain on which we are fighting; we need to have some grasp of the forms of power that we are confronting and of their specific dynamics. Moreover, Marx’s point that capitalism is a historical – as opposed to a natural or transhistorical – phenomenon is a fundamental precondition for all socialist politics because it signals that this system had a beginning and will have an end – just how it will end (leading to “barbarism or socialism”) depends on our collective struggles.

Contrary to other Marxists, such as  Perry Anderson for example – who, in Lineages of the Absolutist State (1974), argues that French absolutism facilitated the capitalist transformation of the economic structures – you write that the formation of the absolutist state was rather an alternative path out of the crisis of feudalism. Could you expand on this? In what sense is a comparison with England in the same epoch relevant?

Anderson suggests that the absolutist state was a “redeployed and recharged apparatus of feudal domination” – the way through which a challenged old noble class established a new form of state-constituted surplus appropriation.[fn]Anderson, Perry, 1974, Lineages of the Absolutist State, Verso. [/fn]Yet, he also maintains that the dissolution of feudalism severed the unity of politics and economics at the level of villages, while the emerging state reactivated Roman law, thus enacting new forms of exclusive property conducive to a progressive establishment of capitalist agriculture and supporting the interests of a nascent manufacturing class.

While Anderson’s account offers important insights, it does not allow to grasp how absolutism actually took France away from the capitalist path taken by England in the wake of the fourteenth-century feudal crisis.[fn]One of best critiques of Perry Anderson’s important book is offered by Benno Teschke, 2003, The Myth of 1648. Class, Geopolitics and the Making of Modern International Relations, New York: Verso. [/fn] In France, peasants gained their freedom and secured possession of the land and fixed rents during the late medieval period. These gains were allowed by relatively strong solidarities embedded in village communities, but also by intense competition for land and peasants among landlords, which was inefficiently mitigated by unstable bonds of vassalage. Resistance from below, lack of intra-class cohesion, and competition from a monarchical state seeking to both safeguard and tax small peasant property severely threatened the nobles’ interests. While political, and often military, conflicts with the crown remained endemic, many nobles were compelled to turn to the concentrated monarchical state apparatus, supplementing rent with tax revenues. The incorporation of sectors of the old nobility and, increasingly, of the high bourgeoisie to the state, was realised through the granting or sale of venal offices. Accumulating wealth through tax/office structures, interests on loans to the Crown, commercial monopolies, and, still to a large extent, rent, a parasitic class of financiers and tax-farmer aristocrats formed the social basis of the new state.

The formation of this new mode of exploitive production had consequences of critical importance for the country’s political and economic development. The selling of venal offices amounted to a privatisation of state power, which was pulverised by the very process that was meant to consolidate it. Together with the reproduction of a myriad of competing feudal local and regional jurisdictions within the state, this made the development of a modern administrative apparatus impossible, as state officials used their offices as patrimonial means of enrichment.

This renewed mode of extra-economic class exploitation was also not conducive to sustained economic growth. France did experience substantial agricultural and manufacturing growth from the end of the late seventeenth century slowdown to the Revolution, as growing urban demand and colonial trade fuelled commercial production. Commercial agriculture, however, was nothing new and neither landlords nor peasants faced incentives nor imperatives to specialise, adopt new farming techniques or consolidate plots and estates. Landlords had no thought of expropriating peasant and, on the contrary, pursued the practice of pinning down ever more of the peasants’ labour to the soil. Even in the Paris basin, where commercialisation was most widespread, systematic calculation of labour costs was unheard of, the number of small peasant farms remained important and continuously grew, while traditional, quasi-feudal leases remained the rule. Outputs grew because more plots were put under cultivation and large reserves of rural labour were exploited by landlords on the land and merchants in proto-industrial production. Light years away from a process of capitalist transition, as Steve Miller explains, this increase of output took place “through the intensification of labour and stagnating or declining returns to each additional hour of work”.[fn]Miller, Stephen, 2009, ‘The Economy of France in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: Market Opportunity and Labor Productivity in Languedoc’, Rural History, 20 (1), p. 6. [/fn]

Things took a radically different turn in England. Put simply, agrarian capitalism emerged as an alternative to absolutism. Centralised state power and greater class cooperation allowed landlords to enforce “economic” leases. Landed property and economic rent rather than politically constituted property became the cornerstone of English ruling class reproduction and absolutist temptations were definitely put to bed with the so-called “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, which allowed landlords to assert their parliamentary power over the crown. Economic leases established rents through market competition, thus compelling tenants to specialise, increase labour productivity, innovate, and to reinvest surpluses to preserve access to their land. The upshot was sustained economic growth in the countryside that caused ongoing dispossession of customary tenants, and fuelled rapid demographic growth and urbanisation leading to the rise of competitive, mass labour and consumer markets – all of which lifted the Malthusian cap on industrial development in England.

Moreover, the reliance on economic rent as opposed to politically constituted property made possible the development of a modern state apparatus.[fn]Brewer, John 1989, The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688–1783, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. [/fn] Because its economy was much more productive and its administrative apparatus more efficient, the English state was also able to borrow at advantageous rates to finance its military efforts. All of this provided a decisive geopolitical advantage to England.

In France, in the absence of agrarian capitalism, the expansion of state revenues was dependent on ongoing “geopolitical accumulation”, so as to acquire a larger tax-base. Sectors of French state elite sought to reform and liberalise the country’s agrarian and manufacturing sectors, but these attempts tended to threaten the extra-economic strategy of reproduction of the ruling class and were consequently often rolled back, and overall unsuccessful.

Unable to emulate English intensive economic development, the French state had to continue to rely on an extensive strategy. Yet, territorial conquest on the Continent was difficult and costly, while colonial expansion was increasingly checked by growing English power. Entrapped in successive military conflicts with its neighbour, the French state had to impose punitive taxes on its peasantry, to resort to the sale of offices that intensified the Byzantine character of its administrative apparatus, and to contract mounting debts. This created a catastrophic fiscal situation and widespread discontent among elite and popular classes – the background of the revolutionary explosion of 1789.   

According to you, the French Revolution was a bourgeois but non-capitalist revolution. In what way did the French Revolution not herald the rise of a capitalist economy?

The classical “social interpretation”, outlined by Georges Lefebvre, Albert Mathiez or Albert Soboul, remained dominant until the 1960s and depicted the Revolution as the act of a capitalist bourgeoisie liberating itself from the shackle of feudalism, thus allowing capitalism to fully blossom in France. They took their cue from the early work of Marx, who was himself following liberal thinkers such as Turgot. This interpretation faced a severe challenge from “revisionist” historians such as Alfred Cobban in the 1950s and François Furet from the early 1970s. Revisionists unmistakably showed how the bourgeois that led the Revolution were not capitalists but rather landowners, state officials or lawyers. Some Marxists reacted to this devastating challenge with a “consequentialist” interpretation that maintained that, notwithstanding the motives of its agents, the Revolution had established a new political and legal context – with measures such as the abolition of privileges, intermediary bodies and guilds, or the suppression of internal custom barriers and the standardisation of weights and measure – that were conducive to an eventual emergence of capitalism.

“Consequentialism” is an attempt to rescue the notion of capitalist bourgeois revolution by emptying it of much of its content. It leaves us without a satisfactory causal explanation of Revolution and its empirical assessment of the impact of revolutionary transformations are flawed. Political Marxists[fn]Brenner, Robert, 1989, ‘Bourgeois Revolution and Transition to Capitalism’, in The First Modern Society: Essays in English History in Honour of Lawrence Stone, edited by A. L. Beier, David Cannadine, and James M. Rosenheim, 271–304, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Comninel, George C. 1987,Rethinking the French Revolution: Marxism and the Revisionist Challenge, London: Verso; Teschke, Benno, 2005, ‘Bourgeois Revolution, State Formation and the Absence of the  International’,Historical Materialism, 13 (2): 3–26. [/fn] have put forth a new interpretation that disentangle the notions of “bourgeoisie” and “capitalist class” while retaining a class analysis of the Revolution.

Simply put, while the bourgeoisie and aristocracy both reproduced themselves on the basis of non-capitalist land-tenure and politically constituted property, they had differentiated access to state offices and privileges. Bourgeois and many lesser nobles remained excluded from special privileges of noble status, and the aristocracy, as the highest and exclusive inner circle of the nobility, monopolised the most prestigious and lucrative positions in the state apparatus. Calling for state positions to be “open to talent” and for liberal reforms of the state administration, the bourgeoisie did not attempt overthrow the existing mode of exploitation but actually to improve its position in its midst. The Revolution was an intra-ruling class conflict opposing bourgeois and aristocrats over the access to politically-constituted property, flanked by a popular movement of exploited artisans and peasants, in a context of intensifying geopolitical pressures experienced by the French state that contributed to an intense politicisation of fiscal issues.

The partial rationalisation of the state – the continuation of a longstanding project pursued by old regime reformers now taken over by an enlightened bourgeoisie – that took place during the Revolution and under the First Empire was limited by the reproduction of politically-constituted forms of appropriation across the revolutionary divide. Nepotism and quasi-patrimonialist practices remained ubiquitous within the administration. As is also universally recognised, the Revolution consolidated and contributed to the spreading of petty peasant property for decades to come. This ruled out the apparition of agrarian capitalism in France.

What was less well known, but has now been demonstrated by important historical works since around the late 1980s, is that revolutionary struggles waged by artisan and industrial workers led to major gains that gave a definitely non-capitalist character to their economic sector. Guilds had been abolished in practice by workers already in 1789, after decades of resistance against their subordination to their masters. The legislators that formally abolished guilds in 1791 acted largely after the fact, were informed by political rather than economic liberalism, and had plans to implement local regulations of trades. These legislative plans were not enacted for contingent historical reasons but local customary regulations were kept alive and thrived in following decades as workers applied the emancipatory spirit of the Revolution to their trades. Labour contracts ruling out subordination to employers became the rule, while a bon droit – a kind of “moral economy” in the sense given to this phrase by E.P. Thompson – came to regulate artisanal and industrial work and was enforced by new judicial institutions such as justices of the peace andprud’hommes councils. The latter overturned all attempt by employers to impose unilateral rules within workshops and factory, thus making impossible the subsumption of labour by capital.

In brief, the French Revolution amounted to a partial emancipation of labour – right a time when English workers experienced enhanced subordination to employers that were benefiting from the active legal support of the state in the context an of industrial revolution. The point, however, is not that this partial emancipation of French labour amounted to an obstacle to a latent capitalist industrialisation.  This emancipation was in fact tolerated for decades by French industrial employers who were not subjected to competitive market imperatives.

You write that, whilst industrialisation arrived quite early in France, capitalism by contrast arrived late. A key argument in your book is that the birth of capitalism in France did not happens endogenously. Could you explain why, on the one hand, capitalism developed late in France and, on the other, what external factors can explain the development of capitalism in France?

Industrial production took place under the old regime, but investment and mechanisation remained very limited, in spite of efforts by the state to stimulate industrialisation. On the eve of the Revolution, in its cotton trade, England had 260 spindles per 1000 inhabitants, against 2 in France, while there were 900 spinning-jennies in France against 20,000 in Britain, and no more than a dozen mule-jennies in the former country against 9000 in the latter. English superiority was overwhelming, and much of France’s industrial sector collapsed in the wake of the signature of a trade treaty by the two states in 1786. Instead of investing so as to make manufacturing facilities more productive French textile merchants simply bought English yarn to sell it in France.

Industrial investments accelerated in an unprecedented way over the decades that followed the Revolution, in the context of a protected national market, but industrial labour productivity remained much lower in France compared to Britain. This was because a much slower pace of mechanisation of production could be witnessed in France at the time. To illustrate this, consider that, in 1830, 3000 steam engines could be found in France, producing 15,000 horsepower, while Britain numbered 15,000, with an overall capacity of 250,000 horsepower. In 1840, France, with a population of 35 million, possessed steam engines producing 34,000 horsepower, while Britain, with a population of 19 million, had steam engines producing 350,000 horsepower. By 1850, these figures had respectively increased to 67,000 horsepower against 544,000 in Britain, and France had by then fallen behind Prussia.

A comparative analysis of processes of industrialisation in France and England raises pressing questions. For instance: how do explain that France had only 10 percent of England’s horsepower in 1840, even with a much larger population and plenty of financial resources? To begin to answer this question, we must accept that the transition to capitalism was not a Western European phenomenon – it began in England and was later imported on the European continent. Simply suggesting that France and Britain have followed distinct paths of industrialisation, as many historians have done, is insufficient at best. We must be very clear that different paths were taken because one country was capitalist while the other was not.

With this general framework in mind, an important first factor to consider is that, because agrarian capitalism was absent in France, the country’s internal consumer market remained limited and this necessarily slowed down industrial growth. But, beyond the extent and depth of the market, we must also consider its nature. Until the last third of the nineteenth century, there was no integrated and competitive market in France. In spite of the abolition of internal tariffs during the Revolution, the absence of adequate transport infrastructures implied that the French national economic space remained intensely fragmented and constituted of a series of local and regional markets. These local and regional spaces were not organised through the mechanism of price competition and remained regulated by customary trades usages enforced by institutions such as prud’hommes, commercial tribunals, and local governments. French merchant-industrialists made much of their profits as mediators between these disconnected economic spaces. As Jean-Pierre Hirsch explains, “the logic of an ongoing decompartimentalisation of circulation, of a levelling of costs and prices did not exist in the attitudes of the vast majority of merchants, or even in the declarations of their representatives. Above all, as years passed, nothing indicated an evolution toward a less ‘imperfect’ market, nor a will to reduce the number of filters through which supply and demand were at play.”[fn]Hirsch, Jean-Pierre, 1991, Les deux rêves du commerce. Entreprise et institution dans la région lilloise (1780–1860), Paris: Éditions de l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales, p. 392. [/fn]

The other important factor that explained the absence of competitive imperatives in France was the strongly protectionist policies – including prohibitive tariffs on different items and outright prohibition of cotton good imports – adopted by the Restauration in 1816 and 1817, at the end of the Napoleonic Wars and of the Continental Blockade. This protectionism insulated French manufacturers from English competition.

As I explain in the book, because of all this, capitalist social property relations remained absent in France, where industrial firms where not compelled by price competition to systematically mechanise production, innovate, improve, and discipline labour processes so as to maximise profits and beat competitors. Consequently, until the Second Empire, the mechanisation of French industrial production was fuelled by market opportunities rather than by market compulsion. Assessing French industrialisation over this period, William Reddy stresses “just how weak the force of competition” remained, and explains that firms were not evolving on “price-forming markets” and were consequently not compelled to engage in “cost-conscious management”. At the same time, the “twenty-fold advantage in productivity, and the attendant profit boosting potential that English machines provided to their owners did not escape French merchant-industrialists.[fn]Reddy, William, 1984, The Rise of Market Culture: The Textile Trade and French Society, 1750–1900, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 74, 100. [/fn]

French industrialists were strongly attached to protectionist policies and fought intensely to preserve them – they were not interested in being exposed to English competition, knowing that this would threaten their easy profits. The importation of capitalist social property relations – the building of an integrated and competitive market – was left to the French state, which finally decided to act resolutely so as to activate a capitalist transition in the face of intensifying international geopolitical competition stemming out of ongoing state restructuring processes and capitalist industrialisation emerging in different countries around the mid-nineteenth century.  

Could you say something about the development of the French working class? In the fourth chapter of your book, you cite the paradox highlighted by Ernest Labrousse in the 1950s that, whilst industrial development was quite slow in France, the working class was extremely combative throughout the nineteenth century. How do you explain this apparent paradox?

This paradox has been puzzling historians for a long time and two main types of explanations of the making of the French working class have been dominant over the last few decades. A first explanatory strategy, whose most influential exponent is William Sewell,[fn]Sewell, William H. 1980, Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [/fn] has been to assert that, even though largescale factory production remained sparse in France, the country’s artisanal sector experienced a capitalist transition in the wake of the 1791 abolition of guilds. For reasons already discussed, I reject this thesis. The other important type of explanation, systematised among others by Tony Judt,[fn]Judt, Tony 2011 [1986], Marxism and the French Left: Studies in labour and politics in France, 1830–1981, New York: New York University Press. [/fn] stresses the irrelevance of economic transformations while focusing on the effect of a new political culture emerging in the wake of the Revolution. While recognising the importance of the “political culture” and institutions developed by French workers before, during, and after the revolutionary period, I offer an alternative materialist analysis in order to answer the paradox identified by Labrousse and others.

Simply put, I argue that French workers made themselves into a self-conscious class in a non-capitalist context, in the wake of the 1830 Revolution, and during the intense period of resistance that culminated with the 1848 Revolution. The working class was formed in opposition to a ruling class of notables that monopolised state power as a mean of exploitation, and through struggles seeking to consolidate gains made in the wake of 1789. French workers developed a republican-socialist agenda fighting for a democratic and social republic.

As I mentioned earlier, under the Restoration and the Orleanist monarchy, non-capitalist channels of surplus appropriation remained in place. The notability, mingling together nobles and great bourgeois, largely favoured “proprietary” or rentier forms of wealth – they prioritised the acquisition of land and buildings, secured lucrative interests on state and private loans, while investing only around 3.7 percent of its overall wealth in private firms during this period. As a rule, successful merchants and industrialists sought to join the notability by acquiring a mansion in the country side or private hotel in the city, and attempting to secure prestigious administrative or political careers for their sons. Notables remained attached to state offices as means of enrichment and markers of social standing.

It was against this ruling class that monopolised state power and revenues that French workers developed their class consciousness, constantly denouncing and collectively mobilising against state parasitism, the use of lucrative offices to serve private interests and the indirect taxes that burdened them. Workers fought against the parasitic monarchy and for a republic that would implement universal male suffrage as a way to take the state away from the ruling class.

But workers were also demanding a social republic that could consolidate and expandbon droit – the customary regulations of their trades. Conflicts that opposed workers to merchant-industrialists or workshop owners were not infrequent and revolved around attempts to circumvent customary regulations or to charge high interests on loans taken out by workers to pay for tools, for instance. These encroachments by “dishonest” employers were nothing new and had been taken place for centuries. They were repressed and contained byprud’hommes councils and justices of the peace – proximity judicial institutions that played a key role in preserving and extendingbon droit in trade communities – with considerable success, but loopholes remained and workers had to stay on guard and to mobilise to close them. Whatwas new, however, and explains much of the rising working-class resistance of the time – was the absence guilds since 1791; that is, of state-backed regulatory institutions and of formal injunctions compelling artisans to associate and to regulate trades. In the absence of regulatory institutions officially and actively backed by the central state, French workers mobilised to close regulatory loopholes in their trades by consolidating their rights and customary regulations, and this represented an inextricably political struggle.

At the time, French socialists decried the dangers of “competition” and “individualism”, but constantly did so by pointing to English developments. Many socialists developed their doctrines in an ongoing debate with British political economists and with liberal intellectuals that relayed their ideas in France. They were concerned that France might adopt the English economic system and wanted to avoid such a scenario.

At a more fundamental level, socialists were attempting to develop new principles that would hold French society together, after the evaporation of the corporatist paradigm in the wake of 1789 (the broader context in which the abolition of guilds took place and was justified in 1791). This is the reason why Jonathan Beecher presents them as “romantic socialists” who “were writing out of a broader sense of social and moral disintegration”. Their fundamental concerns were social and political, rather the economic: “their ideas were presented as a remedy for the collapse of community rather than for any specifically economic problem”.[fn]Beecher, Jonathan 2001, Victor Considerant and the Rise and Fall of French Romantic Socialism, Berkeley: University of California Press, p. 2. [/fn] In this respect, their thought was rooted in a long-standing debate in French political thought. As Ellen Wood explains, this debate had evolved for centuries under the old regime, and revolved around the challenge of integrating “a fragmented social order … a network of corporate entities”, and was informed by “a conception of society in which the totality of social relations, including economic transactions, was subsumed in the political community”.[fn]Wood, Ellen Meiksins, 2012, Liberty and Property: A Social History of Western Political Thought from Renaissance to Enlightenment, New York: Verso, p. 170. [/fn]

Socialists were deeply concerned by the fact that, in the new post-revolutionary French society, “individuals were becoming increasingly detached from any kind of corporate structure, and that society as a whole was becoming increasingly fragmented and individualistic”.[fn]Beecher, 2001, p. 2. [/fn] Simply put, as corporatism was fading as the formal, state-backed way of integrating society, they put forth socialism as an alternative to a capitalist form of social integration and regulation.

Struggling to serve their material interests and improve their living and working conditions by closing regulatory loopholes and to continue to consolidate and develop their customary rights and trade regulations, and taking their cue in part from socialist intellectuals, French workers also came to frame a new model of political governance and socio-economic organisation: a revolutionary democratic and socialist republic as a federation of organised trades. The rise of socialist republicanism became increasingly clear, for instance, with the canuts insurrection of the 1830s in Lyon, the great Parisian strikes of 1840, and, of course, during the 1848 Revolution.

In 1848, the government was compelled by popular mobilisations to create the Luxembourg Commission, which gathered representatives from all Parisian trades. As contemporary commentators claimed at the time the Commission rapidly became something like a “high court of prud'hommes” acting as sort of moral government of trades reflecting the free wish and express appeal of workers and heads workshops.  The Commission itself declared that it was “transformed incontinently, by the logic of things, into a high court of arbitration and exercises a sort of moral government by the free will and the express call of labourers and heads of establishments”.  Delegates determined the wages and usages that they considered most equitable, and new ones were elaborated, thus consolidating and expanding gains made by workers over previous decades.

Through the activities of the Luxembourg Commission, republican principles penetrated trades more concretely and more deeply than ever before. In the spring of 1848, work was becoming a “public activity”. Workers approached their trade organisations as public institutions and referred to their delegates, whose mandate they democratically controlled, as functionaries.  These developments had the potential to powerfully extend the democratisation of social relations of production initiated in 1789-1791, with the abolition of authoritarian guilds and their replacement by new and more democratic regulatory institutions. While republicanism permeated trades, the federation of trades –where, socialists hoped, cooperative workshops would become the rule – was also foreshadowing a potentially radical reshaping of the republic.

The Second Republic, and its socialist currents, of course, were violently repressed and overthrown. The Second Empire and Third Republic initiated a capitalist transition that led to a re-formation of the French working-class. This re-formation process was accomplished through an intense and unprecedented wave of strikes aimed at preserving and restoring customary regulations of trades and entailed the rise of an increasingly (though never completely) autonomous socialist movement vis-a-vis mainstream republican government parties. The re-formation of the working-class also took place at a time when nationalism and xenophobia were thriving and when the rise of industrial capitalism had a profound impact of social reproduction and gender relations. The latter issues deserve further investigation that should take its cue from the important work of Johanna Brenner and Maria Ramas on capitalism and the oppression of women.[fn]Brenner Johanna and Maria Ramas, 1984, « Rethinking Women’s Oppression », New Left Review, I/144. [/fn]

In your book, you argue that capitalism was imported into France by the state. What role did the consolidation of British industrial capitalism in this importation? How did this importation play itself out?

While liberal state officials had been attempting to implement liberal economic reforms in France – often against the will of merchant-industrialists – since at least the second half of the eighteenth century (efforts had intensified in the wake of the Seven Years’ War defeat to England), a successful capitalist transition finally began under the Second Empire and continued under the Third Republic. The combination of the instituting of a new regime in France, on the one hand, and of the emergence of a new international context, on the other hand, allowed and compelled the French state to initiate this capitalist transition. State actors and French elite remained deeply divided on the need and desirability to support the transition, but pro-capitalist forces finally held sway.

The consolidation of industrial capitalism during the second third of the nineteenth century had allowed the British state to raise unmatched revenues to fund its military without undermining its economic base, while technical innovations also allowed for the mechanisation of warfare. This transformed the international context, precipitating state unification and restructuring processes while ruling classes were compelled to modernise their economies by emulating the English model. Germany, the United States and Japan’s power grew rapidly, and France also had to adapt to this new context in order to maintain its geopolitical standing.

The rise of the Second Empire after the 1851 coup, imposed a personalised quasi-dictatorship that was freer of parliamentary control compared to previous regimes. Under the influence of liberal Saint-Simonian high-ranking public servants, Napoleon III rapidly asserted that an industrial revolution was necessary to consolidate the new regime. Rapid industrial growth would provide means to preserve the nation’s greatness – by successfully keeping at bay the growing military power of foreign ruling classes and their states – and to co-opt the working class – by reducing unemployment and increasing popular consumption.

The Emperor’s government rapidly liberalised the financial sector and actively supported to development investment banking. Yet, even as capital supply improved, capital demand remained limited in the absence of market imperatives that would make profit-maximisation a matter of economic survival and would compel French firms to systematically invest in labour-productivity enhancing technologies. The state consequently committed to building a competitive market by actively directing capital investments toward railroad building. The rapid development of railways, the construction of a national telegraph network, and the concomitant emergence of new commercial and marketing practices, led to the formation of an integrated and competitive economic space over the 1860s and 1870s, which wiped out whole regional industries as guaranteed profits derived from monopolies evaporated.

In parallel, the Emperor’s government used its unrestricted power regarding international trade policies to stimulate the modernisation of the economy by signing a commercial treaty with Britain in 1860 – against strident opposition from French industrialists who denounced a “coup d’État douanier”. This and subsequent commercial treaties with numerous European states exposed French industrial firms to foreign competition. A unified national market was now integrated to, and exposed to the competitive imperatives of, an emerging global capitalist market.

Within this new competitive context, French firms were compelled to seize control over labour processes so as to improve productivity. From the late 1860s, the Cour de cassation – France’s highest court of justice – began, with the Senate’s backing and against occasional opposition from theChambre des députés, to invalidate rulings byprud’hommes council, with the consequence of rapidly eroding customary regulation of artisan and industrial trades. The upshot was the gradual imposition of a new industrial and time discipline across the country.

Using Marx’s concepts, we can say that the subsumption of labour by capital was taking not only a formal but also increasingly a real form in core industrial sectors, as investments and mechanisation increased at an unprecedented pace. This happened because of tighter price competition in the context of the (so-called) long depression of the last third of the nineteenth century, as international integration was growing apace. The average annual growth of horsepower in use in French industry went from 9500 from 1839 to 1869, up to 32,800 from 1871 to 1894, before reaching 73,350 from 1883 to 1903 and 141,800 from 1903 to 1913. Accordingly, the share of industrial investments in total investments reached 38 percent from 1905 to 1913, up from 13 percent from the mid-1840s to the mid-1850s.

This unprecedented acceleration of industrial investments took place at a time when internal consumer demand stagnated. Consequently, these new “capitalistic” (to use François Caron’s phrase) patterns of investments cannot be explained by the pull of market demand. They were in fact fuelled by a qualitative transformation of social property relations.

While growing international demand contributed to the acceleration of French industrialisation from the second half of the 1890s and until World War I, the absence of agrarian capitalism in France implied that the country’s consumer market remained limited, and this considerably slowed down its process of capitalist industrialisation. Exposure to international price competition (and national competition in a newly integrated French market) did have the effect of rapidly eliminating cottage textile production and other forms of ancillary sources of income over the period. This forced growing numbers of poorer peasants that were unable to buy land and that had relied on proto-industrial activities to move to urban centres and to engage exclusively in industrial labour. The process of urbanisation, however, remained slow and limited. This was because, international competition also had the effect of devaluating land and this led many large landlords to shed part of their domains (as they began to increasingly invest in industrial firms), which allowed peasants that could afford it to buy new land and to secure plots that allowed them to be self-sufficient. The upshot was a seclusion of the French peasantry from ongoing economic changes for the rest of the century and well into the twentieth.

The French state and ruling class did not challenge this entrenchment of a large peasantry. The latter class had formed the basis of successive regimes and had often (though not always!) acted as a buffer against a radicalising urban working class. Political leaders, many still attached to a traditional rural France, delayed the transition to agrarian capitalism. Accordingly, they made sure to re-establish relatively higher tariffs on foreign agricultural products from the 1880s and 1890s. A massive French peasantry remained in place well into the twentieth century, and a capitalist transformation of the country’s agriculture induced by purposeful state policies was necessary before France could experience the economic boom of the so-called Trente Glorieuses.[fn]Isett, Christopher, and Stephen Miller 2017, The Social History of Agriculture: From the Origins to the Current Crisis, London/New York: Rowman & Littlefield. [/fn]

Your book concentrates particularly on the period 1750-1914 but slavery and colonialism don’t seem to play a major role in the changes you discuss. In How The West Came to Rule, Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nisancioglu criticise “Political Marxism” for its Eurocentrism – notably by minimising the importance of extra-European sources of wealth in the formation of European capitalism. Does this criticism seem valid to you?

Political Marxism has been accused of Eurocentrism by some but, following Ellen Wood,[fn]This has been brilliantly explained by Ellen Wood : https://solidarity-us.org/atc/92/p993/[/fn] I would argue that it actually offers a deeply powerful response to Western chauvinism while, paradoxically, most anti-Eurocentric theories are based on Eurocentric assumptions. Eurocentrists explains the transition to capitalism in Western Europe by its capacity to remove obstacles to the maturation of commercial activities into modern industrial capitalism; obstacles that remain in place and consequently stall the development of non-Western civilisations. Most anti-Eurocentric responses reverse the argument while sticking to a similar conception of capitalism, claiming that the failure of non-European societies that had reached high level of commercial development – in many cases superior to European societies – to transit toward mature industrial capitalism derives from impediments stemming from Western imperialism. This line of argument assumes that non-Western societies ought to be judged according to their capacity to follow the capitalist path of development trailed before them by Westerners, as if capitalism was the natural order of things. As Wood puts it, there is “no more effective way to puncture the Western sense of superiority than to challenge the triumphalist conviction that the Western path of historical development is the natural and inevitable way of things”, and doing this implies stressing the historical specificity of capitalism.

Anievas and Nisancioglu refuse to work from a clearly defined conception of capitalism as a historically specifically social form and prefer to approach it as “assemblages” or “bundles” of social relations and processes. While their book is stimulating in many ways, this indeterminacy leads to serious theoretical and empirical flaws.[fn]See the excellent review of How the West Came to Rule by Spencer Dimmock for a discussion of these flaws :http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/book-review/eastern-origins-capitalism[/fn] These authors fault political Marxism for its “internalist” perspective, which, they claim, does not allow to factor-in “inter-societal” relations and the contribution of colonial plunder to the emergence of European capitalism. Anevias and Nisancioglu put forth an alternative explanation of the origins of capitalism using the notion of uneven and combined development as their central explanatory concept.

As first major problem with this perspective is that it is anachronistic.[fn]Post, Charles, 2018, « The Use and Misuse of Uneven and Combined Development : A Critique of Anevias and Nişancıoğlu », Historical Materialism, Vol. 26 (3); Rioux, Sébastien, 2015, « Mind the (Theoretical) Gap: On the Poverty of International Relations Theorising of Uneven and Combined Development »,Global Society, Vol. 29 (4), p. 481-509. [/fn] While states did try to emulate the best military and administrative practices of other states, geopolitical interaction before capitalism reproduced and deepened uneven development – there was no combined development of sustained economic growth because such economic dynamics where nowhere to be found. It was the consolidation of industrial capitalism in England that initiated uneven and combined patterns of global development, as non-capitalist ruling classes were forced to adopt capitalist social relations and patterns of industrialisation, and did so with uneven success.

Moreover, the accusation of “internalism” placed against political Marxists is unwarranted. Recall that our conception of historical materialism revolves around the concept of social property relation (or mode of exploitive production) that always encompasses vertical relations of class exploitation between exploiters and direct producers and horizontal relations (of competition or cooperation) between members of social classes. Both dimensions of class relations are given equal explanatory weight, and horizontal relations always involve a given logic of inter-societal interaction and competition between ruling classes and their states, including war, trade, and colonial efforts.

This means that dynamics deriving from the rules of reproduction of a set of social property relations (or, to put it differently, the “laws of motion” of a mode of exploitative production) within a given state (or several states) can transform the logic of international relations – and the logic of colonisation/imperialism – in a given historical period.  Conversely, it also means that the effects on international relations are always “filtered” by the social property relations and balances of power between and within classes in a given society.

Whether or not slave labour exploited in colonies contributed to the development of capitalism in different European states depends on the dialectics between international dynamics and the social property relations in place within given countries. European colonial ventures followed distinct logics. The English colonial Empire was the product of the dynamics of agrarian capitalism, which fuelled rapid population growth and thus settler colonialism aimed at reproducing capitalist property tenure abroad, while also creating a mass domestic market serving as an outlet for exotic goods like coffee, tobacco and sugar. Rapid industrialisation subsequently fuelled cotton production in the colonies. While the exploitation of these resources did not cause the emergence of capitalism in England, it did greatly contribute to its development, just like the industrial revolution of the metropolitan economy also stimulated the rise of cotton production in the American South. Colonial planters benefited from metropolitan demand, and profits derived from slave labour were reinvested “productively” in England were capitalist social property relations compelled firms to maximise profits, increase productivity, and develop productive forces to stay afloat.[fn]Blackburn, Robin, 2010 [1997], The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, Verso, 1997 ; Post, Charles, 2017, « Slavery and the New History of Capitalism », Vol. 1 (1). [/fn]

The colonial empires of Spain, Portugal, Holland and France, however, were variations of a continuity of a feudal-absolutist logic of expansion.[fn]Wood, Ellen Meiksins, 2003, The Empire of Capital, Verso. [/fn] Monarchs sponsored colonial ventures to secure economic resources they could not amass at home thus projecting on the Atlantic world (and beyond) the international political-military competition that persisted among the non-capitalist ruling classes of the European continent.[fn]Post 2017, p. 181. [/fn] Much of the trade and colonisation was undertaken by state-sanctioned merchant companies that enjoyed monopolies over slave trade and other imports and exports. As a rule, the wealth violently extracted from colonies was spent on feudal-absolutist pursuits, mostly on war, empire building and the conspicuous consumption of ruling classes, not as capitalist investments.

The colonisation of the English Caribbean and North America was undertaken by “new merchants”, as opposed “company merchants”.[fn]Brenner, Robert, 2003, Merchants and Revolution, Verso. [/fn] Because merchants could seize land from planters, the latter were market dependent and subjected to competitive imperatives. The French colonisation of Caribbean islands was actually also largely assumed by independent entrepreneur that partially escaped royal monopolies. Yet, laws forbade the seizure of the planters’ land and slaves to cover debts and competitive constraints remained absent in this case.[fn]Blackburn 2010, p. 444-445. [/fn] Consequently, while French planters violently extracted great wealth exploiting slave labour in Saint-Domingue, Martinique and Guadeloupe their enterprises do not appear to have been capitalist.

In any case, it is clear that the great wealth extracted by French planters committing atrocities in Caribbean colonies did not contribute to capitalist industrialisation in France. France did not have a mass consumer market, and French Caribbean sugar plantations and mills produced the finest white sugar, which was for the most part re-exported by French merchants as luxury products on European markets, where it was consumed by members of upper classes. There was no price competition, and profits were largely canalised toward the conspicuous consumption of notables.

A substantial portion of French economic growth over the eighteenth century was due to rising foreign trade, which quadrupled from 1716 to 1788, in good part due to the development Atlantic commerce, especially with Saint-Domingue. This trade, however, scarcely contributed to industrial modernisation, and involved mainly foodstuffs. France mostly traded wheat and wine with its Antillean colonies in exchange for sugar and coffee, 60 to 80 percent of which was re-exported.

Colonial trade did propel the swift development of proto-industrial enclaves around port cities such as Bordeaux and Nantes, but France’s external and domestic economies remained very poorly integrated and only a very limited portion of commercial capital engaged in colonial ventures was rechannelled as investments into the metropolitan economy.[fn]Tarrade, Jean 1972, Le commerce colonial de la France à la fin de l’Ancien Régime: l’évolution du régime de l’exclusif de 1763 à 1789, Paris: Presses universitaires de France. [/fn] The percentage of manufactured goods in total French exports scarcely altered across the eighteenth century whereas the percentage of manufacturing import rose significantly. Meanwhile, Britain mainly imported raw materials and the rising productivity of its industrial sector allowed for rising manufacturing exports.[fn]Jones, P. M. 1995, Reform and Revolution in France. The Politics of Transition, 1774–1791, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 99-100. [/fn] Silvia Marzagalli explains that “colonial imports only gave modest stimulus to the French economy as a whole, in contrast to the British economy characterized by the importance of exporting manufactures. The growth of French overseas trade, with its strong colonial component, did not on the whole benefit the rest of the French economy, and was a sort of “bubble” depending on special conditions laid down for a time by the French state”.[fn]Marzagalli, Silvia 2012, ‘Commerce’, in The Oxford Handbook of the Ancien Régime, edited by William Doyle, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 262. [/fn] The loss of Saint-Domingue and British hegemony over the Atlantic from the early 1790s led to the collapse of France’s trade with its colonies and of much of the industrial activities that depended on it, and the overwhelming superiority of British trade with the Americas continued during the nineteenth century.

As summarised by Crouzet, the expansion of the French economy over the eighteenth century – during which the development of its slave colonies reached its apex – “took place in a framework that, in its organisational aspects and in terms of methods, remained very much traditional […] On the eve of the Revolution, the French economy was not fundamentally different than what it had been under Louis XIV: it only produced more.”[fn]Crouzet, François 1966, ‘Angleterre et France au XVIIIe siècle : essai d’analyse comparée de deux croissances économiques’, Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations, 21 (2): 254–91, p. 271-272 (my translation). [/fn]

During the Second Empire, as I explained earlier, the French industrial sector began a capitalist transformation. This transition began just before the rapid growth and consolidation of much of the French colonial empire in Africa and Indochina. Protected colonial markets like the Algerian market, where colonisation began in 1830 and was completed by the end of the 1850s, actually served for a while as a rampart against international competition – and thus against the constraints of capitalist restructuring – for French industrial firms, even after the signature of commercial treaties from 1860.

Having said this, it is also crucial to underline that, during the last third of the nineteenth century, the emergence of capitalism in France transformed the nature of its colonial endeavours, as has been shown by works such as Martin J. Murray’s on capitalist development in French Indochina from the 1870s.[fn]Murray, Martin J. 1980, The Development of Capitalism in Colonial Indochina (1870-1940), University of California Press. [/fn] Murray exposes the way in which French capitalist firms, supported by the colonial administration, engaged in efforts of “outward expansion of the capitalist production and circulation processes”.[fn]Murray 1980, p. 5. [/fn] These efforts led to differentiated patterns of development in different regions of French Indochina, and lead to processes of “primitive accumulation” at the initiative of French capital, which put in place rubber plantations exploiting dispossessed wage-labour in Cochinchina and South Annam. The aim of metropolitan capitalist enterprises was to extract natural resources out of the colonies while “organizing the capitalist labor process in such a manner that unit costs remained sufficiently lower than the prices which could be obtained on the world market, thereby guaranteeing at least normal rates of proft”.[fn]Murray 1980, p. 256. [/fn] The dynamics of market competition and of labour subsumption that had taken root in the metropolitan France were now operating within colonies.

We need to rethink the history of the French colonial Empire that was consolidated around the turn of the twentieth century in a way that will allow us to assess the impact of the transition to industrial capitalism on colonising processes and to reconsider the impact of these processes on French capitalist development into the twentieth century.