* The editorial board of Historical Materialism recognises that the ongoing pandemic has rendered all planning uncertain. It is by no means guaranteed that universities in the UK and elsewhere will be open as usual in the Autumn term, nor can we calculate the personal, financial and material toll of the current public health emergency on comrades’ ability to participate in the conference. We recognise, however, that the conference has become an important point of reference, and a kind of community, for many of us, and hope to be able to hold it in some form. We thus remain flexible in terms of the dates and modality of the conference (for instance, enabling more distanced participation than in the past) and will continuously review the situation and communicate with the HM community.

It is a commonplace in the left’s theoretical imaginary that crises have a revelatory function, as hitherto repressed antagonisms and marginalised contradictions come to the fore. With everyday life across most of the planet in conditions of sequester and the circuits of capital rudely halted by the SARS-CoV2/Covid-19 pandemic, the secular damage to social reproduction and human survival wreaked by predatory austerity regimes is daily manifest in harrowing reports from the clinical frontlines. Society’s reliance on the reproductive and repressive capacities of the state is writ large, yet shadowed by the often malevolent incompetence of capitalist governments, as well as the rich opportunities for the consolidation of authoritarianism offered by a global public health emergency. At the same time, many of the social implications of the pandemic – implicating mobility, access to health and social care – long pre-existed the outbreak, as a long tradition of disability studies and struggles has demonstrated. From the sudden discovery of the social centrality of precarious and proletarianized care and service work to the sudden irruption of prisons into public consciousness, from the recrudescence of xenophobic fantasies to the emergence of multiple forms of social solidarity, the pandemic is foregrounding many of the critical dimensions of our present, and eliciting political transformations that still remain radically under-determined.

This year’s annual Historical Materialism Conference invites papers and panels that seek – speculatively, experimentally, concretely – to explore how critical Marxist theory and radical practice can respond to the potentially profound changes that the pandemic is occasioning. While clichéd theoretical wisdom will argue that Marxism has failed to confront the centrality of the ‘politics of life’ to capitalist modernity, that it suffers a kind of biopolitical deficit, we think it is necessary to recover and foreground the rich seams of ecological, epidemiological and feminist Marxisms that have long attended to the nexus of nature, health and capitalist development and its articulation along axes of gender, sexuality, race, ability and class. But it is also imperative to think through and ‘scale up’ the revolutionary insights that have emerged organically out of anti-capitalist practices of, so to speak, biopolitics from below – the experiments in dual biopower through community health programmes which the Black Panthers once crystallised under the resonant slogan ‘survival pending revolution’.

For more information about the conference or the call for papers, see here.

A Review of Fascism and the Masses: The Revolt against the Last Humans, 1848–1945 by Ishay Landa

Aleksandar Matković

Independent Researcher

salematkovic@gmail.com

Abstract

This article provides an overview of Ishay Landa’s book Fascism and the Masses: The Revolt against the Last Humans, 1848–1945. First, according to Landa, our preconceptions of fascism are still largely framed by the idea that it was a mass movement, and, moreover, a movement of the masses. This is what Landa seeks to deconstruct: for if it turns out that fascism was an anti-mass movement, rather than the other way around, then the ‘standard’ political diagnosis must also be reversed. This article follows the structure of Landa’s book: in it, this ‘standard’ political diagnosis is traced back to what Landa calls left-Nietzscheans (including Alain Badiou and the Frankfurt School, or the ‘Nietzschean economists’, Werner Sombart and Max Weber), but it is extended to today’s far-right Nietzscheans – such as Dugin, Nick Land, Alain de Benoist, and others, as well. Unlike other reviews, this contemporary aim is highlighted in the article as the raison d’être of the book. Towards the end, the article makes its second contribution by highlighting those thinkers which hold conceptions close to Landa’s (the idea of fascism as a preventive counter-revolution and an anti-mass movement, for instance, have their predecessors in the Italian anarchist Luigi Fabbri, and the Hungarian economic historian Karl Polanyi), and calls for a more nuanced reception of the works of the Frankfurt School.

Keywords

capitalism – fascism  – Frankfurt School  – Ishay Landa  –  liberalism  –  masses

Ishay Landa, (2018) Fascism and the Masses: The Revolt against the Last Humans, 1848–1945, New York: Routledge.

‘The time has come, I feel, to make a decision’ – so Landa ends the Epilogue of his new book on fascism and the masses (p. 417). While it takes more than 400 pages to get there, it is in this concluding chapter that the aim of the book is revealed to the reader. For all its treatment of history, the book is undoubtedly aimed at our present time, advancing a broad critique of Nietzscheanism that, although rarely addressed, still underpins the contemporary (self-)understanding of fascism. Examples are not hard to come by: what Landa calls ‘The New Right’, AKA post-World War Two and contemporary alt-right authors such as (to repeat Landa’s list): the German Armin Mohler, the French Alain de Benoist, the Italian Giorgio Locchi, and more recently the US Americans Paul Gottfried and Richard B. Spencer, the English writers Nick Land and Jonathan Bowden, and the Russian Aleksandr Dugin, which the author rightly designates as a ‘neo-Nietzschean movement’ (p. 400), adding, in a footnote: ‘To be noticed is the international spread of the theory.’ (p. 417.) The contemporary contextualisation of the book, found in thisEpilogue, is conspicuously absent from current reviews.[fn]Cf. McKenna 2018; Lancaster 2019[/fn] Yet, this Epilogue is much more than an expected critique of the far-right of today. This chapter also addresses what Landa callsleft-Nietzscheans: including Alain Badiou and the Frankfurt School, or the ‘Nietzschean economists’, Werner Sombart and Max Weber, for their idealisations of earlier stages of capitalist production. This is why Nietzsche is Landa’s main interlocutor: Nietzsche is seen as the nineteenth-century anti-Marx (both as a witness of capitalism’s emergence from up-front, and as the Marxian obverse – the ur-critic of the masses in the wake of the revolutions of 1848). Landa rejects the notion that Nietzsche’s political impact was/is neutral, and that it works ‘somewhat like an energy drink; drink it who may, the effect will be the same’ (p. 411). Rather, Nietzsche appears to have simultaneously incited the right and diluted the left – and to have done all that so as to resist the historical rise of the masses.It is at this juncture that Landa’s critique of Nietzscheanism crosses with the critical study of fascism and its relationship to the masses: for our preconceptions of fascism are still largely framed by the idea that it was a mass movement, and, moreover, a movementof the masses. This is what Landa seeks to deconstruct: for if it turns out that fascism was ananti-mass movement, rather than the other way around, then the standard political diagnosis must also be reversed.

The Liberal Phobia

The book thus starts with Nietzsche’s critique of the masses and expands into ‘the European body of anti-mass literature’ (p. 5), which includes, among many others, the likes of Gustav Le Bon, Emil Lederer, Hannah Arendt, William Kornhauser, Fritz Stern, the Spanish Nietzschean José Ortega y Gasset, and some members of the Frankfurt School. The opening three chapters seek to ground such expansive literature in its proper historical context. Originally departing from Ortega y Gasset and his essays on the ‘revolt of the masses’, Landa devotes the first half of the book to depicting the rise and consolidation of the masses in history or, at least, within the framework of capitalist modernity: their demands for democracy and how they institutionalised themselves, and the general quest to ameliorate the lot of society’s lower strata, via the struggle for obtaining labour-protection, the reduction of labour hours, attainment of healthcare, pensions and insurance, and so on and so forth. In that sense, modernity was an extreme manifestation of popular sovereignty (p. 13). This is depicted in a political sense (for example, the nation and questions of demography), as well as the social (for example, unions and the role of women) and cultural senses (from sports to mass consumption and Americanism), without prioritising any of them. Surely, such a variety of topics can be demanding for the reader. But the point of the book is not simply a critique of ‘anti-mass literature’ as it is, but, more interestingly, a critique of how it is periodised.

          Namely, like the author’s previous book dealing with fascism (The Apprentice’s Sorcerer: Liberal Tradition and Fascism),Fascism and the Masses also takes on the liberal precursor to fascism. Both books can be said to trace how various fascisms developed from tensions already found within liberalism itself. InThe Apprentice’s Sorcerer (to quote the first book), ‘An indispensable historical precondition for fascism was the inherent tension between the political dimension of the liberal order and its economic one.’[fn]Landa 2010, p. 21.[/fn] The history of this ‘liberal split’, as Landa names it, is traced from James Fox and Burke to Schapiro, Hayek and Mises, to as late as Milton Friedman, even, showing a line that is followed all the way up to the twentieth century. Thus, in Landa’s first book on the topic, the question was not whether there is a similarity between fascism and Europe’s political traditions, but rather how to understand it. In Fascism and the Masses, the same question is re-contextualised and re-examined through the reactions of both political strands to the ‘revolt of the masses’ and to the rise of capitalist mass society.

          This whole conundrum can be explained in a sentence: liberalism wasn’t prepared for the masses. From Delacroix’s early, ‘angelic’ depiction of the masses of Paris led by the female figure of ‘Liberty’ in his celebrated painting of 1830, to the ‘demonic’ depiction of London’s populace in Poe’s 1840s ‘The Man of the Crowd’, the rise of masses is observed as its significance is transformed in the eyes of Europe’s bourgeoisie. With a stance akin to detached ‘connoisseurs’ of the masses – that foreign and exotic object – the ‘would-be theorists of the masses’, as Landa likes to call them, were increasingly influenced by the second,condemning, reaction towards the modern mass. Hence, ‘no matter whether we are dealing with Hippolyte Taine, Nietzsche, Gabriel Tarde, Scipio Sighele, Le Bon, Ortega, or any other would-be mass expert, the preconceptions of the writer, mostly negative and judgmental, are projected onto the crowd, without in any way engaging it or any of its perceived members.’ (p. 87.) Describing ‘how he felt when lying awake in bed in his London apartment, one night in 1880, unable to fall asleep on account of the horror of lying so close to “a monster whose body had four million heads and eight million eyes”’ (p. 126), the Victorian novelist Thomas Hardy provides just one, vivid example of the deep-seated fear of the mass by Europe’s upper- and middle classes.

          For Marxists, this is a particularly interesting approach: for it shows how, as the transition from Manchesterian capitalism to the first battles for the welfare of the masses unfolded, this literal mass-anxiety escalated, as well. Corresponding to such a process of mass empowerment, afear of the masses on the part of the upper class undoubtedly spread across the European continent. Analogous with Marx’s critiques of the waning of the revolutionary role of the bourgeoisie, and the assumption of its reactionary role after the disintegration of feudalism, seen also in the transformations of its political economists,[fn]Cf. Grossman 2017, p. 139.[/fn] Landa’s book sheds light on the other side of this Marxian coin, namely the increasing resentment of the liberal bourgeoisie against mass society. This is evident in the concrete social struggles of the period, in a wide array of cultural developments, and – first and foremost – in the failures of Europe’s wars to quell the rise of the masses, of which the most emblematic remains the First World War, a failure which finally led to the emergence of fascism. Liberalism simply was not prepared for mass society – and when it came, it was at pains to come to terms with it.

The Transubstantiation of Fascism

Fascism arose out of a failed redemption – the redemption of the European bourgeoisie through the Great (First World) War, and its failure to escape the threat of the proletarian masses. In the book’s first chapter entirely dedicated to fascism (‘Fascism and mass politics’), Landa reverses the age-old narrative about fascism, whose (unfounded) premises could be summed up in a nutshell: that the masseswanted fascism, that the masseselected it, and that it was themasses whoprofited from it.

According to this narrative, the First World War was the outcome mass euphoria, of essentially the same kind that led to fascism later on: Landa, on the contrary, presents textual evidence by different writers expressing aloathing for peace and a longing for a redemptive war, precisely since peace was perceived as dominated by the masses and favouring their cause. Such luminaries as Ernst Jünger and Max Weber provide some of the examples included, alongside Hitler’s inspiration by the Boer War or the zealous affirmation of war on the part of another self-proclaimed disciple of Nietzsche, who went by the name of Benito Mussolini. These, and other examples, attest, according to Landa, to a ‘bellicose mood [that]predated the war, forming, in reality, one of its indispensablepreconditions’. And he argues further that this enthusiasm for war was grounded, quite centrally, in an effort to dislodge the masses from their perceived position of increasing hegemony, and to re-unite the nation behind the upper- and middle-classes: ‘One of the main purposes of the war was thus to forge internal unity within the different nations, heal the rifts and wounds paradoxically created by the long peace.’ (p. 148.) This, as we shall see, is one the main legacies which fascism, in Landa’s reading, took over from those abhorring the advancing masses of ‘the Last Humans’.

The book’s subsequent chapters could best be described as a valuable deconstruction of a set of several sub-myths, emanating from the same logic that first manifested itself in the claim that the European masses were longing for war and welcomed it with exuberance. The alleged bellicose exultation before the war – according to this argument – continued to fuel mass desires after the war, clamouring for a ‘second round’ of revanchism that fed the proliferation of fascist movements in the interwar period. Yet, argues Landa, if anything the very opposite happened, since the First World War could be seen not as ignited by mass hysteria, but as a failed upper-class project of national regeneration. This project failed because it was unable to check the further expansion of mass society and bring unity to the nation – something which European fascism would equally seek to do in the interwar period, leading up to another colossal conflagration.

With regard to the rise of fascism, the very same argument seemed to repeat itself all over again with the myth of its electoral success amongst the masses: Landa deflates this second myth by offering a detailed analysis of the successes of National Socialists in Germany. Scrutinising the results of the last parliamentary elections in Weimar Germany, he shows that, in reality, the Nazi achievements were ‘primarily the result of a migration of votes taking place within the middle-class, liberal and conservative camp’ (p. 167), and that its inroads into working-class constituencies were comparatively much more limited and affected mostly conservative, agrarian and unorganised workers.

The third, and possibly the most perverse consequence of this narrative is the idea of ‘fascist consumerism’ or a fascist ‘welfare state’, and the collective guilt associated with it, a notion that over the past few decades has been avidly propounded by many historians, from George Mosse to Götz Aly. This prevalent notion is also closely related to the belief that fascism was extraneous to the traditions of high culture, being an offshoot of anti-culture or mass culture. The origins of this conviction can be traced to the interwar period, when liberal and conservative opponents of fascism tried to shift the responsibility for the emergence of their nemesis from their own, elevated social circles, down the social ladder, towards the lower classes and their supposed hatred of culture. As a notable example Landa discusses Klaus Mann’s writings, which evinced a reluctance to confront the failings of high culture and instead tried to depict Nazism as driven by modern ‘Persians’, enraged outsiders, invading and desecrating ‘the supreme citadel of high culture’ (p. 221). Klaus Mann’s apologetic interpretation of the Western tradition, particularly its German branch, is interestingly compared to that of his celebrated father, Thomas Mann. The latter, having begun as a conservative author, knew better than to exonerate German high culture, whose irrationalism and elitism he intimately understood. The difference between the father and son’s positions is highlighted by way of a comparison between their respective renditions of the myth of Faust, so central to German culture. Landa shows how in Klaus’Mephisto (1936), cultured collaborators with the Nazis are depicted as deserting high culture, betraying its cause. By contrast, in Thomas’ post-WarDoctor Faustus (1947) the main protagonist, Andreas Leverkühn, exchanges his soul for a period of artistic creativity in a grand act of Nietzschean defiance of morality. Leverkühn’s choice is diagnosed as deriving from high culture itself, reflecting its intrinsic barbarity, and not some invasion or vulgarisation. In the aftermath of the war both interpretations lived on, but it was increasingly tempting and facile to go along with Klaus, and shift the blame to mass culture, instead of pondering, with Thomas, the culpability of cultural elitism.

After 1945, the blame-the-masses argument also took a somewhat different inflection, where the masses were seen aspassive rather thanactive supporters of fascism: the notion of culture industries. In many of the works produced by representatives of the so-called Frankfurt School, the modern masses in capitalist countries were seen as submissive recipients of indoctrination and quasi-fascist ideology from the ground up; as if behind the arabesques of jazz, to paraphrase Adorno, awaits the military march. A very similar anti-consumerism still haunts the contemporary left despite the fact that we are living in an age of austerity, and such a stance needs to be updated. This is one of the highlights of the present book. To challenge the idea that fascism could seamlessly emerge out of the normal operations of the culture industry, Landa conceptualises commercial culture as an ‘arena in which, under “normal” times when no special political force is applied to administer its procedures, a fierce contention takes place between different ideologies and class-based perspectives.’ (p. 248.) That is why fascists in power consciously and systematically acted totransform and domesticate the culture industries, which in themselves are no more regressive than they are progressive. For Landa, mass culture is, thus, ‘a heterogeneity made of conflicting vantage-points, conservative, utopian, liberal, radical, reactionary or simply trite and insipid’ (p. 249). This is how Landa solves the riddle of the fascists’ investment in cinema and the production ofpopular films: by using mass culture to disseminate inherently elitist ideology, the fascists attempted ‘one might say, toartificially transform them [the actually existing culture industries] into something much more resembling Adorno’s image of the culture industry as a pliant tool for social domination, indoctrination, distraction and pacification.’ (p. 252.) The masses, in that sense, were the object more than the subject of the Nazi cultural effort: in the theatre of war, Landa concludes, the masses ‘were cast, at most, as extras’ (p. 268). Yet what these ‘extras’ actually received, through both war and cinema, is a message quite opposed to the one that we have become habituated to expect: from Nietzsche to Julius Evola and Ernst Jünger, the new fascist gospel, whether philosophical or cinematic, preached disgust with mass-consumption and exhorted against the indulgent and benign spirit of an allegedly emasculated modernity, alien to the ideal of the warring aristocracy. From Jünger’s critique of the bourgeois evasion of pain and suffering and his horror at the masses enjoying the benefits of a long and peaceful life, to the homilies of Mussolini, Hitler and Goebbels against the modern quest for generalised comfort and pleasure, fascism was characterised by a pervasive anti-mass conviction. ‘National Socialism and fascism’, wrote Goebbels in 1939, ‘have in common above all the contempt for a comfortable and therefore pleasant life.’ (p. 292.) To present fascism as mass driven, a cataclysmic acting-out of mass yearnings and fantasies, is therefore ‘a remarkable transubstantiation’ (p. 6) of a movement which, across Europe, understood and presented itself as a militant rejection of mass society. ‘Thus, whatever its liturgy,’ Landa writes, ‘in substantial terms fascism represented a maximal neutralization of mass politics, the negation of the masses’ power and the confiscation of their organizational weapons.’ (p. 183.)

The Counter-revolt

Landa’s argument is structured around the idea of fascism as counter-revolution, originally articulated by Luigi Fabbri (although, curiously, Fabbri is not mentioned in the book). Yet, it should be noted that Landa insists on expanding this argument from the working class to the mass: ‘The emphasis will be on the all-embracing nature of the fascist assault on mass society: while the struggle against working-class organizations, as Marxist historians have rightly emphasized ever since the 1920s, was pivotal in these efforts, fascism cannot be reduced to this single aspect, however vital.’ (p. 20.) The argument is important since it underscores the utopian potential of mass society, pointing beyond the rigid structures of class hierarchy: ‘The fascists, in truth, were the ones adhering to class as a rigid, insurmountable historical reality, and dreading its abolition.’ (p. 24.) The goal of fascism is to maintain class-divides, by defusing not simply the working class, but the masses more broadly speaking. Here we reach the goal of fascism in Landa’s view – not the integration of the masses as much as their elimination, their transformation into manageable and pliantalternativecollectives: ‘Here it should be emphasized that concepts like “the nation,” “the race,” “the people” or “the people’s community” that were so central to the fascist vocabulary, are not to be confused with the masses, since they were in fact opposites. These entities represented everything that the masses shouldbecome.’ (p. 8.) The goal was the diffusion of the masses, and not, as many liberal historians would argue, but also including the theorists of the Frankfurt School, the integration of the masses: in an important way, fascism can be seen as acounter-hegemonic movement, in the sense that its ideologists and militants regarded the masses as the hegemon in modern society and culture (p. 20). Landa is well-aware that the masses are not immanently progressive (as he notes while discussing the idea of theLumpenproletariat on p. 41). But he also refuses the inverse view, that presents them as inherently reactionary (as we have seen, he considers mass culture, for example, as a broad range of disparate ideological dispositions).

While the book does not mention him, this same anti-mass commitment on the part of fascism was observed and analysed by an author who must not be forgotten. In his The Essence of Fascism, Karl Polanyi saw fascism as countering the very basis of socialisation founded on a shared idea of the intercrossing of individuality and communality in both communism and Christianity – that of the mass individual (which Landa mentions in passing, importantly eluding the mistake of drawing an opposition between the mass and the individual). For Polanyi, this mass individual fulfils the promise of human development and maturity far more than the isolated individual of historic liberalism, precisely the one that became gripped by fear of the masses, manifested in the picturesque anxiety of Thomas Hardy, mentioned above. And, as Polanyi wrote apropos fascism in hisGreat Transformation:

[T]here was a striking lack of relationship between its material and numerical strength and its political effectiveness. The very term ‘movement’ was misleading since it implied some kind of enrolment or personal participation of large numbers. If anything was characteristic of fascism, it was its independence of such popular manifestations. Though usually aiming at a mass following, its potential strength was reckoned not by the numbers of its adherents but by the influence of the persons in high position whose good will the fascist leaders possessed, and whose influence in the community could be counted upon to shelter them from the consequences of an abortive revolt, thus taking the risks out of revolution.[fn]Polanyi 1944, p. 246.[/fn]

A Review of Red Hamlet: The Life and Ideas of Alexander Bogdanov by James D. White

Paul Le Blanc

Department of History, La Roche University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

paul.leblanc@laroche.edu

James D. White, (2019) Red Hamlet: The Life and Ideas of Alexander Bogdanov,Historical Materialism Book Series, Chicago: Haymarket Books.

Abstract

Alexander Bogdanov is a central figure in the history of Russian Marxism, co-equal with Lenin in the early formation of Bolshevism. His life’s work embraced medicine, natural science, mathematics, political economy, sociology, philosophy, education, political theory and more. The Bogdanov/Lenin split involved the crystallisation of a distinctive variant of Marxism that up until now has not been widely available. James D. White’s very substantial biography Red Hamlet: The Life and Ideas of Alexander Bogdanov is part of a collective project retrieving and making available contributions of an extremely important revolutionary thinker. The present critical appreciation of White’s study, and critical overview of Bogdanov’s ideas and life, is meant to advance an expanding explorationof Bogdanov’s insights and approaches that may enhance our understanding of the past, present and future.

Keywords

Bogdanov – Marxism – Communism – Lenin – Bolsheviks

The amazing Alexander A. Malinovsky is better known by his revolutionary last name, which he took from his wife, Natalia Bogdanovna Korsak (herself a revolutionary as well as a nurse and a midwife). Up until now, among those who do not know the Russian language, only fragments of Bogdanov have proved available. Although he was the primary target of Lenin’s philosophical polemic Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, we have not been able to read, except for snatches and excerpts, the Bogdanov texts that provoked, and responded to, what Lenin had to say. The sole complete work of his that has been easily accessible is a remarkable 1908 work of left-wing science fiction,Red Star.[1]

          Born in 1873, he was widely commemorated in the Soviet Union upon his death in 1928 – for example, by Nikolai Bukharin, at that time one of the top leaders of the Russian Communist Party:

In the person of Alexander Alexandrovich we have lost a man who in terms of his encyclopedic knowledge occupied a special place not only in the Soviet Union, but was one of the most significant minds of all countries. This is one of the rarest qualities amongst revolutionaries. Bogdanov felt equally at ease in the refined atmosphere of philosophical abstraction and in concrete formulations of the theory of crises. The natural sciences, mathematics and social sciences: he was an expert in these fields, he could survive battles in all of these areas, and he felt ‘at home’ in all of these spheres of human knowledge. From the theory of fireball lightning to the analysis of blood to the broadest generalizations of ‘Tectology’ – this was the true scope of Bogdanov's theoretical interests. An economist, a sociologist, a biologist, a mathematician, a philosopher, a doctor, a revolutionary and, finally, an author of the beautifulRed Star – in all of these areas he was an absolutely exceptional figure in the history of our social thought. … The exceptional strength of his mind, his nobility of spirit, his loyalty to ideas – all these qualities entitle him to the lowering of our banners at his grave.[2]

A Review of Undervalued Dissent: Informal Workers’ Politics in India by Manjusha Nair

Niloshree Bhattacharya

Presidency University, Kolkata

niloshree.soc@presiuniv.ac.in

Abstract

This review-essay explores informal workers’ politics with respect to state–labour relations in India. Locating informal workers’ movements in the context of neoliberal economic reforms, this essay focuses on how transformations in the nature of the state may close ‘democratic spaces of dissent’ and probes the possibilities of new forms of resistance. This essay explores the agency of informal workers while taking into account their structural locations within the political economy of the state. It compares ‘legitimate’ and claimed spaces of political mobilisation, critically analysing the historical development of state–labour relations in post-colonial India. In the context of the disempowerment of labour and the shrinking of legitimate spaces of dissent, it asks what the future of labour activism might hold, and argues that while some spaces of democratic dissent are shrinking, new avenues, offering the possibility of new forms of resistance, are simultaneously opening up.

Keywords

informal workers’ politics – social movements – industrial relations – India – informal sector – labour

Manjusha Nair, (2016) Undervalued Dissent: Informal Workers’ Politics in India, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

It is surprising that notwithstanding the predominance of the informal sector in India, there have been relatively few studies on informal workers’ politics. Scholars interested in the study of workers’ movements have usually focused on formal employment and trade-union movements.^[1] However, the very nature of the informal sector, located outside of governmental regulations and yet being intricately drawn inside of it, as a huge mass of labour floating in a land with no laws and always being implicated by it, makes it quite a challenging task to grasp informal workers’ politics. Manjusha Nair’s book is a valuable contribution towards understanding the precariousness of informal work, and the possibilities and challenges of informal workers’ politics in the context of transformations of the economy and the state. Nair explores how shifts in the domain of interventions of the state during neoliberal globalisation closed channels of mobilisation for informal workers. In this essay, I investigate whether these very processes of transformation of the state and economy may not only close channels but also have the potential to open up new avenues of mobilisation, making way for new forms of resistance.

Manjusha Nair explores informal workers’ politics in India by studying two different labour movements in Chhattisgarh, a regional state in Central India. One was a mine workers’ movement that emerged in 1977, which succeeded, and the other was an industrial workers’ movement that arose during the 1990s, which failed. She explains the success and failure of the movements by analysing the nature of the state–labour relations in two different time periods. She argues that the second movement failed because of de-democratisation of dissent in state–labour relations in the wake of the 1990s. In other words, the rise of a new kind of state driven by market fundamentalism and right-wing ideologies de-democratised labour politics in India.

The book is a result of eighteen months’ extensive fieldwork in the mining town of Dalli-Rajhara and the city of Bhilai in Chhattisgarh. Dalli-Rajhara mines would supply iron ore to the Bhilai Steel Plant, one of the first public-sector steel plants in India, built in 1960. In spite of the presence of trade unions in the Dalli-Rajhara mines, the workers formed a new union called the Chhattisgarh Mukti Morcha (CMM) under the charismatic leadership of Shankar Guha Niyogi. CMM was a successful movement and it led to the formalisation of employment of the informal mine workers. After thirteen years, workers in the Bhilai industrial area started a strike when they learned that the Associated Cement Company (ACC) was planning to reduce the number of workers. They sought the help of CMM as it was a similar movement, and Shankar Guha Niyogi agreed to mobilise these workers. However, the movement of the industrial workers in Bhilai did not succeed; it was suppressed by the police and paramilitary forces, many lost their jobs, and Shankar Guha Niyogi was assassinated. Manjusha Nair considers these events as ‘two bundles of phenomena that represent the two movements’ (p. 23), which she studies with a comparative and historical methodology. Her book tries to answer a single question: why did the first movement succeed and the second fail, even though they had similar concerns and composition. The only marked difference is the time-period of the two movements. Hence, she concludes that the state–labour relations had transformed to such an extent by the 1990s that the movement of the Bhilai industrial workers was set to fail.

‘Cultures of Democratic Dissent’ and Agency

Overall, the book is well-organised and lucidly written, with a systematic presentation of its analysis. While reading it, one keeps hoping to discover more layers and complexities in the analysis, but finds instead the application of neat categories which are not problematised adequately. This is possibly because of the theoretical framework that she employs. She observes that a ‘culture of democratic dissent was embedded in these otherwise despotic state–labour relations’ (p. 8) and the mine workers succeeded because they used the space and culture of democratic dissent well. ‘Democratic dissent is the ability of workers to organise contention through the channels of trade union activism, political party formation, and social movements’ (p. 6). Using Frances Fox Piven’s concept of ‘interdependent power’,^[2] she argues that the mine workers of CMM had interdependent power which came from simultaneous engagement in militant unionism, social-movement repertoires, electoral politics and community-building. In the case of the first movement, economic nationalism, redistributive development within a framework of political rights for citizens provided a legitimate space for democratic dissent. Whereas, in the case of the second movement, market fundamentalism, the ideology of growth and the rise of the right wing led to withdrawal of the legitimacy of dissent. In this simplistic model of two time periods, one is left with a lot of questions. Can one explain the success or failure of a movement by the presence or absence of certain conditions alone? What else was different (if at all) in the movements themselves? Did workers’ perceptions concerning their lives and engagement in politics in the two different time periods make the movements different? Were those differences not significant enough for the success and failure of the two movements? From the perspective of the author’s theoretical model, it seems that success and failure are always structurally determined. It is as if the informal workershad a ‘space’ which was given to them (by the state) but which was taken away later (again, by the state), and hence the second movement could not succeed.

Social-movement scholarship has several strands, and one strand emphasises the ‘political-opportunity structures’ available for movements that facilitate their emergence and success. The author clearly follows this particular theoretical perspective. But, in social-movement scholarship, a unilateral application of the ‘political opportunity structure’ perspective is considered inadequate. Perceiving movement strategising as a balance between ‘opportunities–threats’ for challengers and ‘facilitation–repression’ for authorities gives insufficient attention to the discursive and dramaturgical practices that shape understandings of movement participants.^[3] However, in subsequent chapters Nair gives an account of how the subjectivities of mine workers were integrated with the ideology of nation-building and electoral politics. Drawing from experiences of the mine workers, the author describes how the Dalli-Rajhara mines were constructed and imagined as a national space, and how ‘the boundaries between workers and citizens, and between formality and informality, reached beyond the workplace and shaped the geographies that the residents inhabited’ (p. 72). She argues that, while the Chhattisgarhiya workers did not physically belong to this ‘national space’, the hegemonic nation-construction process was the dominant political culture which brought within its fold the subjectivities of the mine workers. She demonstrates that the mine workers were successful because of the ‘presence of a democratic space of contention that the workers used to the fullest extent’ (p. 76) by challenging the different arteries of the state simultaneously. One wonders, however, what role did the subjectivities of workers play in theuse of this available space for contention? What was the sense of collective identity, how did they make sense of their lives, how did their discontent get shaped and how did that enable the efficient use of the democratic spaces? It seems as if the movement was one homogenous entity, where the structural potential of the political climate after the Emergency led them to act upon the spaces provided to them by the political-opportunity structures.

In a previously-published article, Manjusha Nair explores some of the above questions, which do not feature in the book. She delineates the narratives of the workers’ contention in the two movements where she argues that ‘unlike the vivid collective memories of the Dalli mine workers, the Bhilai industrial workers’ memories were fragmented and personalised’.^[4] Nair accounts for the weak sense of collectivity and agency in the memories of the industrial workers, which, she perceives, emerged from the different lived experiences of being workers and citizens, from facing different opponents (the state and industrialists) in different times (1977 and 1990) and in different spatial contexts (the mining township and urban town).^[5] She argues that the differences in their narratives and their construction of identities were ‘due to the temporal changes in worker rights and social citizenship in India’ (ibid.). Even though she delves into how workers made sense of their lives in changed contexts, the differences in their sense-making is posited as a result of structural conditions alone, clearly decapitating the agency of actors. The industrial workers exercised a ‘passive agency’ characterised by ‘fraternal signifiers and filial emotions rather than one of action and direct agency’.^[6] Incidentally, the Maoist movement was strong in the Bastar region of Chhattisgarh around the same time. From the accounts of the industrial workers, the author shows that the industrial workers (with their passive agency) were ‘happy’ at the growth of the Maoist movement, as it gave them a sense of another imagined future. But the radicalism of the Maoist movement did not fit well with the industrial workers’ politics of ‘nationalist’ trade unionism. If workers’ agency in the current context is passive, then we are led to the question: can any form of resistance emerge from workers in the current context of neoliberal globalisation and the transformed nature of the state? Does this imply that forms of resistance which may emerge in the current context arenecessarilyoutside of the state, as the state is no longer the protector of the rights of its citizens, the ‘giver’ of legitimate political spaces of contention, and because actors can no longer realise their agency in the changed structural conditions?

Legitimate vs. Claimed ‘Spaces’

The author compares two movements that occurred in distinctly different eras. Earlier, the state established plants in the region of Chhattisgarh as public ventures, ideologically located within the logic of the nation’s growth. The marked shift since the 1990s has been informed by a ‘singular logic of profit and growth from both state and business’ (p. 105). Nair employs David Harvey’s framework of ‘accumulation by dispossession’^[7] to understand the new mode of development in Chhattisgarh. The author highlights the ‘role of the local state in engendering this accumulation through extraction of mineral resources’, and that this had been possible because of the close association of the local state with Indian capital. It is undeniable that there has been a shift from the Nehruvian socialist state to a state which is predominantly pro-capitalist, with a neoliberal ideology since the 1990s. However, the extraction of mineral resources in both periods has not been strikingly different. Whether for the sake of the nation’s growth under the Nehruvian project of modernity, or guided by a neoliberal ideology dominated by the market, mineral resources were extracted in both these periods. The author maps out the number of projects that were sanctioned in the state of Chhattisgarh since 2000, facilitating an extractive economy within the neoliberal developmental regime. Not only from the author’s account but also from the numerous struggles that have erupted against displacement in the recent past in the country, it is evident that in the neoliberal era there has been a marked increase in dispossession. Dispossession from rights over natural resources such as land, water and forests has consequently given rise to struggles on the part of various marginalised populations all over the country. The argument that market fundamentalism during the 1990s, characterised by an extractive economy, contributed towards the failure of the movement is problematic on two grounds. One, extraction of mineral resources has only increased during the 1990s and is not a new process. Two, accumulation through dispossession has intensified since the 1990s, and, consequently, we have seen numerous protests and struggles by marginalised populations, quite regardless of whether there has been any legitimate space of democratic dissent, and some have been surprisingly successful.

To take the case of the protests of Dongriya Kondhs in the Niyamgiri Hills of Odisha against the mining company Vedanta: where does one locate the democratic space of dissent? Through a memorandum of understanding between the government of Odisha and Vedanta Aluminium Limited, and an environmental clearance from the Ministry of Environment and Forests, the state facilitated the extraction of mineral resources in the region in 2003. The Dongriya Kondhs, theadivasis of the region, through sustained mobilisation emerged victorious and Vedanta’s mining project was rejected. This is only one such instance of resistance against dispossession that has erupted in the country on the part of various marginalised populations, who do not have any ‘space’ of democratic dissent but rather haveclaimed such spaces through political mobilisation. Of course, informal workers’ politics and resistances against dispossession have different sets of actors, histories and contexts, but their success and failure probably cannot be explained by reference to the changing nature of the state during neoliberal globalisation. The actual situation is quite possibly the contrary; these very changed contexts have paved the way for new forms of resistance.

Shrinking Spaces and Growing Informal Labour

The distinctiveness of informal workers lies in their complex relationship with formal trade unions on one hand and the state on the other, and consequently their politics is located in the spaces between the two. Manjusha Nair, through her detailed ethnography of the two movements, unravels this particular characteristic of informal workers and their politics. To understand this, four inter-related and overlapping contexts are important: one, the trajectory of trade-union movements in India; two, the relationship of globalisation and labour; three, the changing nature of the state during globalisation; and four, the state–labour relations. Supriya RoyChowdhury comments on the nature of labour in these contexts:

In a period of marketisation, labour is disempowered on several dimensions: the numerical decline of the organised workforce; weakening trade unions; and, frequently, the politically right-ward turn of social democratic parties which shift to neo-liberal, market oriented policies. In such a context, there is a political vacuum in terms of agencies, which would advocate and struggle for labour rights.^[8]

A Review of Revolution and Its Narratives: China’s Socialist Literary and Cultural Imaginaries, 1949–1966 by Cai Xiang

Christopher Connery

Department of Literature, University of California Santa Cruz

cconnery@ucsc.edu

Abstract

This is a review of the English translation of Shanghai-based scholar Cai Xiang’s Revolution and Its Narratives (originally published in Chinese asGeming/Xushu in 2010) in the context of other writing – in China and elsewhere – on socialist literature. It is also an analysis of the contemporary Chinese left and its relation to the socialist past. Cai’s book is valuable not only for the imaginativeness with which he treats the literature of the 1949–66 period, but also for its ability to represent a version of Chinese socialist critical discourse, of which there are few representatives in English. The essay treats the politics of socialist memory, the nature of Chinese political mobilisation, and discourse about class in the socialist period.

Keywords

socialist memory – socialist realism – mobilisation – class – crises of Chinese socialism

Cai Xiang, (2016) Revolution and Its Narratives: China’s Socialist Literary and Cultural Imaginaries, 1949–1966, edited and translated by Rebecca E. Karl and Xueping Zhong, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Labelling China as capitalist puts many self-identified Chinese leftists in high dudgeon: What about the economic dominance of the state-owned enterprises? What about the prohibition – albeit steadily weakening – on private ownership of rural land? What about the name of the governing party? No-one on the left is blind, of course, to China’s actually-existing political economy, yet the recourse to exnomination – elsewhere a tool of the right – is quite pervasive in left circles. Hence, perhaps, the related appeal to the virtual socialist state, to which many on the left are committed. I once had a conversation with a prominent Shanghainese leftist about private cars, whose numbers have led to the ruin of Chinese cities and the degradation of its air. I said that when the Chinese market reforms began in the late seventies, the data on private cars and their environmental and urban effects were widely known. For the future of its cities, China had the advantages of the latecomer: it could choose the Amsterdam/Copenhagen path or the Los Angeles path. As we know, it chose Los Angeles. My friend told me not to worry, that the CCP could abolish private ownership of cars overnight, and if necessary it would do so. Responding to formulations such as the ‘Beijing Consensus’, which argues that contemporary China represents a developmental path superior to and distinct from the ‘Washington Consensus’, Lin Chun proposes a ‘Chinese model’ based on a different China that does not exist: ‘a normative Chinese model would stand by its socialist commitment, opposing any reforms that depart from that commitment rather than concealing or legitimizing the departure’.[1] How will that socialist China appear? Is it the deeper and more-massive force, capable of bursting through the present subduction zone in some historico-tectonic thrust? Is it summonable into existence through demiurgic will? Does it await its proper place in a point on the telos when the forces of production will have matured in their proper sequence – this time without the stage-skipping errors of the twentieth-century peripheral revolutions? The pundits on the Chinese left are, like their comrades elsewhere in the world, relatively silent on questions of transition or emergence.

What divides the left from the liberals in China is not, for the most part, the orientation toward the future. There is general consensus across the political spectrum about the desirability of the ‘moderately prosperous society’ and ‘national rejuvenation’, the former a Confucian-era social ideal and the latter the restoration of the dignity and prosperity that ‘China’ – this is in quotation-marks because the formation of the current entity ‘China’ took place within the history of global conflict[2] – was deemed to have lost since the Opium Wars. Although most on the left call for significant increase in social-democratic protection for the rural and urban poor, any discourse smacking of class war is still generally anathema on all sides, and there is remarkably little call on the left for significant redistribution of wealth. Even a central pillar of China’s current global economic strategy – the ‘one belt, one road’ infrastructural development of Eurasia – is hailed equally by capitalists who see business opportunities and by socialists who see a renewed efflorescence of Bandung-era Third Worldism.

The Politics of Periodisation

But consensus breaks down in relation to the pre-reform era, to non-capitalist China, to what some call ‘the socialist era’. As the opening sentences of Cai Xiang’s Revolution and Its Narratives declare:

In my opinion, the deep division within contemporary Chinese thought or theory does not mainly reside in how to understand and criticize existing social problems. Rather, major divisions exist more in the field of history. (p. 1.)

A Review of Na Contracorrente da História: documentos do trotskismo brasileiro 1930–1940 [Against the Current of History: Documents of Brazilian Trotskyism, 1930–1940], edited by Fúlvio Abramo and Dainis Karepovs

Carlos Eduardo Rebello de Mendonça

Institute of Social Sciences, Rio de Janeiro State University

carloseduardorebellodemendonca@gmail.com

Abstract

This is a review of a recently updated collection of documents by members of the Brazilian section of the International Left Opposition that shows the concept of Permanent Revolution being developed independently of Trotsky.

Keywords

Trotsky – Permanent Revolution – Brazil

Fúlvio Abramo and Dainis Karepovs (eds.), (2015) Na Contracorrente da História: documentos do trotskismo brasileiro 1930–1940, São Paulo: Sundermann.

The Particular Relevance of the Work

This book is a revised and enlarged edition of the original collection of documents from the Brazilian section of the International Left Opposition, the Internationalist Communist League (Liga Comunista Internacionalista; hereafter LCI), the original 1987 edition comprising documents from the period up to 1933, to which were added documents from the period up to the late-1939 split from the LCI (at the time renamed the Leninist Workers’ Party – POL – as a national section of the Fourth International) of its most important cadre Mário Pedrosa over the controversy with Trotsky on the class nature of the Soviet state (Pedrosa, in exile in New York City during the late 1930s, sided with James Burnham in questioning the ‘Degenerate Workers’ State’ position held by Trotsky). Pedrosa’s split with the Fourth International is considered the close of the early period of Brazilian Trotskyism. Pedrosa’s break, occurring against the backdrop of the increasing general repression of the Vargas dictatorship in Brazil, followed by Trotsky’s murder, meant that when the Brazilian Trotskyist movement resurfaced after WW2 and Vargas’s fall in 1945, it was to do so under different leadership and over different issues. Pedrosa himself, since the 1950s and up to his death in 1981, remained a man of the Left, but his political life since then was mostly an offshoot of his activities as an art critic and international museum curator.

This is, therefore, a collection of documents that can be tackled as a self-contained whole, as they bear witness to the local development of an historical process all too well-known to historians of the Communist movement: the 1920s internal struggles among the Bolsheviks, Trotsky’s exile, the transition of his oppositional movement from a mostly Soviet perspective to an international one, the movement’s brief spells of influence in the late 1920s and early 1930s, followed by a rapid nadir prompted by Stalin’s purges and the rise of fascism, culminating in Trotsky’s murder in 1940 in Mexico.

Histories of the early development of the international Trotskyist movement are generally tied to Trotsky himself, to the development of his views on the issues of the period and – last but not least – to the unchallengeable ascendancy exerted by the Old Man over his followers, such that a history of the early ‘Trotskyist movement’ tends to be merely the political history of Trotsky and his circle. The early history of the national sections of the movement, conversely, is mostly the history of what Trotsky said and wrote on the issues this movement had to face nationally (‘Trotsky on…’). This, however, is not the case with the Brazilian section, which, according to the collection’s general foreword by Pierre Broué, developed its activities in ‘almost total absence of written interchange with the International Secretariat of the Opposition, with Trotsky and [Leon] Sedov’ – even when compared with other Latin American sections, such as the Mexican and Argentinean ones (p. 25). This unique trait of the Brazilian section means that, firstly, the section developed independently of Trotsky’s immediate guidance, and that its leaders had to formulate theoretical work in the absence of a blueprint devised by the Old Man: there is no collection of Trotsky’s writings titled ‘Trotsky on Brazil’. This allowed for the emergence of a specifically Brazilian movement and a specifically Brazilian praxis. Secondly, this relative independence was produced, among other things, by the relative political insulation of Brazil herself from world- and Latin American political developments – something that adds to the work’s general relevance.

Fortunately, the collection of writings contained in the book was begun, in the late 1980s, in the Workers’ Movement Documentation Centre of the University of Campinas (CEMAP) by the then still-living member of the original LCI cadre, the journalist and activist Fúlvio Abramo (1909–93). As Abramo writes in the second foreword to the book, the Brazilian section of the LO did not emerge from a factional clash among the rank-and-file of an already-developed Communist Party; it developed out of what was felt as theinsufficient development of a newly constituted CP: ‘the Party was new and lacked members with a modicum of ideological capabilities: Marxists could be counted on the fingers of a single hand’ (p. 31). The Brazilian CP had developed out of a previously existing petit-bourgeois radicalism (with a mostly Comtean Positivist tinge) that had itself developed over the political clashes associated with the 1889 transition from an outwardly constitutional monarchy to a presidential republic. The CP’s original leadership was mostlyenragé petit-bourgeois, and kept at the helm by the subsequent organisation of the party within the authoritarian framework devised by the 1920s Comintern (Zinoviev’s ‘Bolshevisation’). The Brazilian LO, therefore, developed over theideological critique of the CP’s leadership. The LCI leadership was also composed of ‘middle-class’ intellectuals (Pedrosa, Lívio Xavier, Costa Pimenta) – albeit more conversant with Marxist theory and in touch with a group of Hungarian expatriates, former Red Army servicemen with a surer grasp of Soviet questions (pp. 32, 34).

          What was the nature of this ideological logjam? In Abramo’s view, the divide out of which the Brazilian section of the LO developed had mostly to do with the Marxist characterisation of the nature of Brazilian society, since ‘out of the characterisation of the type of society where one lives, comes the character of the change (revolution) one intends to materialise’ (p. 31). The ‘middle-class’ character of the existing Party leadership imposed a mode of political activism that was to remain within the bounds of bourgeois democracy. It was not simply an issue of copying strictures that came from the ICCI: very early on, Brazilian communism had already enjoyed an autochthonous ideological foundation, expressed in the 1926 handbook by the pharmacist and activist Octávio Brandão, Agrarismo e Industrialismo [Agrarianism and Industrialism]. As the title itself indicates, this handbook proposed a sociological interpretation of Brazilian society in terms of a (mechanical) dialectics between two opposing principles: ‘Agrarianism’ (not only agriculture as an economic basis, but the mores, the politics and the ways of living of a mostly-rural society) versus ‘industrialism’ (i.e. bourgeois modernity). Since ‘industrialism’ was the ‘superior’ principle, the incoming Brazilian revolution was of necessity liberal-bourgeois…

As Abramo remarks, this conception (a mash-up of Hegel with Comtean Sociology) was also profoundly faulty in terms of practical politics, in that it confined the activity of the CP to the liberal-bourgeois state apparatus. As Abramo, again, outlines, the early formation of a section of a Left Opposition alongside the Brazilian CP had to do not with a class change in the rank-and-file, but simply with the existence of more theoretically-aware activists, above all the lawyer and teacher Mário Pedrosa, a would-be student of the Lenin School of cadres who had refused to go to Moscow after Trotsky’s exclusion from the Central Committee and returned to Brazil after a season of Marxist studies in Germany and France (p. 33). Abramo stresses that, since the LCI developed mostly as an intellectual opposition, this opposition concerned itself chiefly with the actual understanding of the dynamics of the class struggle as it developed in 1930s Brazil on the social and political levels.

The oppositionists’ principal charge against the incumbent CP leadership had to do, firstly, with what practical political activity a communist party should busy itself with in the conditions of late-1920s Brazil – a supposedly bourgeois republic on the American model ruled in practice by a caucus of commodity-exporting agrarian oligarchies that managed to get ‘elected’ in (mostly fictive) ballot-casting events – given that this particular facade was breaking down: in October 1930, a military coup, aided by dissident oligarchies, put the governor of the Southern Rio Grande State Getúlio Vargas in power as provisional President, in accordance with an anti-oligarchical blueprint. At such a juncture, the LCI’s first complaint was that the Communist Party’s politics mostly involved striking an alliance of sorts with various petit-bourgeois demagogues and the dissatisfied Young Turk junior army officers [tenentes] leading most of the contemporary military uprisings. In the words of LCI activist Aristides Lobo, in the tract that opens the collection, such a policy made the Party limit itself to a struggle for the political leftovers of current petit-bourgeois politics, and accept being led by ‘peddlers of sacred images and other instalment-sold trinkets, unreformed exploiters of the proletariat’ (p. 49).

But in 1930 backward Brazil, should the political task of a fledgling Communist Party not rather have been, of necessity, that of working alongside middle-class bourgeois radicals in order to deepen and radicalise such necessary bourgeois reforms as extending the franchise, empowering the destitute, achieving land reform, putting controls on international finance capital, and so on? We seem to find ourselves fully in the middle of the discussion of Trotsky’s theory of the Permanent Revolution and its cause, Combined and Uneven Development. But then, at the time, in Trotsky’s own words to his American followers during 1934, the ‘theory’ wasn’t yet a theory, a ‘law’, a definite and necessary causal link, but only a case-history – or a couple of such cases – or namely, ‘as a law [uneven and combined development] is rather vague. It is more of a historical reality.’[1] And there lies the particular relevance of the 1930s Brazilian literature.

How far Permanent Revolution Goes

At its inception, Trotsky’s notion of ‘Permanent Revolution’, torn asunder from its original context in the text of Marx and Engels where the Russian revolutionary had found it, was simply an extraordinary statement intended to explain an extraordinary case: namely, the Russian one. Trotsky seems to have started with the idea that the development of capitalism in Russia was a case of what Gramsci would – independently, and basing his account on the Italian case – call a ‘Passive Revolution’, i.e., that the capitalist development of Russia was sponsored by the tsarist state apparatus in the face of the military pressure exerted by the Western European powers, and that this political development melded together the economic interests of the Russian bourgeoisie with the maintenance of a feudal-absolutist political apparatus and of backward social-relations, in such a way that the accomplishment of bourgeois modernity would depend upon putting the bourgeoisie aside, depriving it of social and political power. The Russian Revolution, as Trotsky describes it – bothex ante andex post – was bourgeois in character, proletarian in agency – a ‘passive revolution’ turned upside down.[2]

In the case of China, however, Trotsky seemed to believe in the early 1920s that semi-colonial China, in the absence of a feudal state, could achieve something like a standard bourgeois revolution in which the native bourgeoisie would lead the process of self-determination against the occupying colonial powers. It was only sometime before 1926 that he began to argue that the clear hostility of the Chinese bourgeoisie and its Kuomintang political leadership towards the native workers’ movement expressed the sheer impossibility of such a bourgeoisie building a fully-fledged bourgeois modernity – either politically (a functioning liberal-bourgeois democracy, even one expressing unmistakably bourgeois class rule), socially (land reform, the end of openly-hierarchical social relationships and unfree labour) or even economically (a minimally autonomous process of capitalist reproduction, what the economists of the ECLA/CEPAL would call in the 1950s ‘development from the inside [desarollo hacia adentro]’). Even then, Trotsky hesitated in turning uneven and combined development into a general law of capitalist development: the Chinese case was another extraordinary occurrence, requiring a purely historical, contingent, explanation.[3]

Hence the importance of the early twentieth-century Brazilian case, in which one has, firstly, since 1889, a formally independent bourgeois republic – itself the successor to a post-Napoleonic constitutional and formally-parliamentary monarchy on the British model; secondly, a culturally – if not ethnically – unified country, putatively ‘Western’, speaking a single European language (and with, therefore, no question of a linguistically and culturally distinct Amerindian peasantry, as was the case in most Latin American countries); thirdly, a legal set of acknowledged social relations, since the 1888 abolition of slavery and the 1916 adoption of a general Civil Code on the lines of Code Napoléon, based on wage labour and private bourgeois property; and, finally, a commodity-exporting economy tied to the capitalist world-market. Nevertheless, one of the common tropes of early twentieth-century Brazilian political discourse was precisely that of the general self-awareness of the sharp divide between the ‘formal’ country on one hand and the actual one on the other – with the ‘actual’ country being seem as politically oligarchic, socially unequal and economically backward. Therefore, the chief issue at stake was: could it be that ‘combined and uneven development’ is not an historical particularity – or a collection of such peculiarities – but instead a general law, expressing the general contradictions of bourgeois modernity? Could it be that such modernity was necessarily and generally incomplete, always a combination of advancement and backwardness? Could it be that bourgeois modernity is fully achievable only through socialist-revolutionary means – anytime, anywhere?

Combined and Uneven Development in Brazil

Shortly before Vargas’ taking power in October 1930, Mário Pedrosa, jointly with his close collaborator Lívio Xavier, wrote a tract that was to stand as an alternative to Agrarismo e Industrialismo: his and Xavier’sDraft for an Analysis of Brazil’s Economic and Social Situation. This tract practically resurfaced during the 1980s, as it was originally published in the LCI’s underground paper,A Luta de Classe [Class Struggle], the issue in which it was published being shortly afterwards seized by the police, with the copies destroyed, so that the work left no impression and played no role in contemporary Brazilian political debate. What Abramo and Karepovs have published in the present collection is a retranslation into Portuguese of a prior French version.

The resurrected tract, however, still manages to be intriguing, as it begins with the phrase: The capitalist mode of production and accumulation – and therefore bourgeois private property – were imported directly from the metropolis to the New World (pp. 62, 63 – my italics). As to the question concerning what type of class society existed in colonial Brazil, while Octávio Brandão chose to answer it according to theforces of production and their material outlook – therefore stressing the agrarian, supposedly non-capitalist character of the regnant mode of production – Pedrosa and Xavier chose, on the contrary (in an application of what Lukács considered the hallmark of ‘orthodox Marxism’, theviewpoint of the totality) to respond according to production relations, stressing the continuous existence of amonetary economy and its implicitly bourgeois character. For ‘the wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an immense collection of commodities’[4] – hence the superiority of Pedrosa’s and Xavier’s analysis, grounded on a very sound (and, for the time and place, very unusual) understanding of the Marxist method.

The existence of chattel slavery and its role as the basis for colonial plantation production, as well as its association with other forms of unfree labour (debt bondage, sharecropping etc.) inclined most Brazilian Marxists since the 1930s to think of the country’s ruling mode of production as pre-capitalist. That analysis, grounded simply on the observation of existing material forms of production, failed to step behind the phenomenological traits of the process to seek out its structural traits. What Pedrosa and Xavier remarked was that in the plantation colonial system, chattel slavery was introduced in order to prevent the emergence of a class of small independent producers, and therefore to grant a labour-power supply necessary to commodity production: ‘the dependence of the worker towards the capitalist as owner of the means of production had to be created through artificial means, namely: land appropriation by the state, its subsequent conversion into private property, and the introduction of African and Amerindian slavery’ (p. 63).

In view of the subsequent voluminous Marxist historiography on the relationship between the colonial system, its mercantile character, and the subsequent development of capitalism, Pedrosa’s and Xavier’s dictum – to simply declare the colonial plantation system as capitalist – was undoubtedly timely. The fact is, however, that they were not scholars engaged in a drawn-out process of comparative historiography, but political activists intent on devising a blueprint for political action.

What justified the ancillary role of the Communist Party in contemporary political developments in Brazil, its playing second fiddle to middle-class ‘radical’ movements, was the idea that, the existing relations of production being non-capitalist, in order to overcome the existing socio-economic backwardness some kind of classical, standard bourgeois revolution was still necessary (a belief held also in non-Marxist circles, as with the political caucus behind Vargas, the ‘Liberal Alliance’). What Pedrosa and Xavier proposed was that Brazilian backwardness was not a ‘vestige’, a ‘relic’, a collection of remnants of past ages, but that such backwardness was the functioning, actually-existing superstructure necessary to the reproduction of the regnant capitalist economy: ‘in the new [i.e. postcolonial] states, directly tied to Imperialism, the national bourgeoisie enters the arena of world politics already wizened and reactionary, its democratic ideals corrupted from the very start’ (p. 68). The centrality of commodity-export to the reproduction of the economy as a whole implied a high degree of economic instability, as the economy depended chiefly on foreign demand – ‘imperialist penetration playing the role of an emetic, accelerating and deepening economic and class contradictions’ (p. 68). Hence the necessity (Brazil’s export economy had been hit hard by the 1929 Crash) of compensating for such instability by means of a state-led blueprint for internal investment, something that rallied peripheral regional oligarchies to the support base of the movement that had toppled the hitherto ruling coffee-exporting São Paulo oligarchy. Note, however, that such a project of authoritarian bourgeois modernisation has nothing ‘democratic’ about it, as it implies an authoritarian mobilisation of economic resources and the regularisation of capitalist exploitation. Therefore, in the words of Xavier and Pedrosa, the notion of a ‘liberal’ bourgeois revolution, as a political cause in Brazil, was stillborn: ‘In Brazil all classes are dependent on the Executive Branch and the most hackneyed liberal catchphrases seem subversive to the Government [….] So-called liberals support police repression when directed against workers’ organisations’ (p. 70). Just as the colonial enterprise had earlier (re)created chattel slaveryex nihilo, as a necessary prerequisite to capitalist accumulation, the ever-recurring authoritarian political developments in Brazil were not an absence or pathology of liberal-bourgeois rule, but its very mode of operation.

In a rejoinder to Pedrosa’s and Xavier’s tract, their comrade Aristides Lobo elaborated on the contrast between formal andactual relations of production: Brandão had previously mused on the imminence of the coming bourgeois revolution by speaking of a class of small farmers, pointing to the fact that at the time, in the State of São Paulo, some 78% out of the total of rural workers were tenants [colonos] themselves, or members of a tenant’s household. As Lobo elaborates, by the standard terms of lease of the time, the tenant was allowed to farm a patch in exchange for services rendered to the landowner – such services being usually to tenda thousand coffee-treesyear-round, in exchange for said right to farm, plus a meagre yearly fee (the fee mentioned by Lobo is 100$000,cem mil-réis – two times the asking-price for a posh meal at a fashionable São Paulo hotel of the time).[5] As Lobo concludes, such tenants, ‘if we want to define exactly their place on the social ladder, are on a rung below the seasonal wage-earner [camarada], or, to be precise, midway between the temporary worker and a slave’ (p. 80). In a nutshell, thecolono was a disguised rural proletarian producing a surplus-value in exchange for his self-maintenance and a yearly pittance. Therefore, ‘this erroneous notion held by the Party amounts to an implicit approval of a hypocritical bourgeois conception [i.e. an ideological fiction of a ‘fair deal’]. Being equally reactionary, they [i.e. both conceptions] meld into one.’ (p. 80.) Both were equally reactionary in that both disguised, under the notion of fair exchange between formally equal parties, the reality of the most ‘abnormal’, extreme class exploitation supported not by backwardness, but by the normal functioning of the bourgeois economy.

From the Particular to the General

In this point resides the present importance of the collection, besides its value as a piece of purely historical scholarship: what Pedrosa, Xavier, Lobo and others are advancing is the notion of ‘combined and uneven development’ as not only an extraordinary combination of factors in a particular historical juncture, but a general mechanism, a ‘law’ – the step forward that Trotsky himself was at the time loath to take. Instead of thinking of bourgeois society as moving necessarily towards the kingdom of formal equality and representative democracy, what the labyrinthine historical intrigue around the rise of the bourgeoisie in tsarist Russia, KMT China and Vargas’s Brazil tell us is that the bourgeois order is the kingdom ofcapital as a general social relation, to which democratic ideologies are immaterial; as in the LCI tract dealing with the upcoming 1933 elections for a Constituent Assembly (that would write the short-lived 1934 Constitution, superseded in 1937 by Vargas’s coup, instituting ade jure personal dictatorship), ‘every conscious worker knows that the bourgeois state, as a tool for the rule of the bourgeoisie, does not stand solely on the Parliament, whose functions are relatively secondary and whose existence is conditional, possibly ceasing from one moment to the next, whenever bourgeois interest so demands’ (p. 90). It is an extreme – and usually rejected – Marxist notion of bourgeois rule, bypassing its elements of ideological consensus-building (Althusser’s Ideological State Apparatuses) and stressing instead its ‘core’ of naked coercion; it is the rule of the bourgeoisie as it appears in Trotsky’sTerrorism and Communism.

Note, however, that the LCI opposed the Stalinist liquidationist, ‘Third Period’ line held by the CP, advocating instead for workers’ candidacies and for work inside the Constituent Assembly. In the conditions of the time, this was mostly a moot point; but then the LCI also argued, as against the Stalinists, for work inside the new corporatist quasi-state trade unions (these ‘unitary’ unions – only one for each particular trade and geographical area – since comprising the basis for the Brazilian system of industrial relations) organised by Vargas’s regime. Instead of agitation for a fictitious ‘Red Union’ (according to ‘Third Period’ strictures) what communists should do, according to the LCI, is ‘to unite with the EXISTING workers’ organisations to fight for common, well-defined, accepted-in-advance goals [….] If […] the majority of the proletariat were communist […] a United Front wouldn’t be necessary, as the chief condition for a proletarian revolution would have been achieved.’ (p. 109.)

What the LCI opposed was the idea that the abstract interests of the working classes could somehow exist outside the masses themselves, kept unsullied and pristine in an Olympian abode such as the (Stalinist) Party Apparatus. There is no revolutionary practice without revolutionary theory, but no revolutionary theory can become a material force without being tried in the task of guiding concrete working classes’ political activities. At the same time, in a 1933 draft thesis on the Brazilian situation, the LCI caucus stated that Stalinism, in undeveloped countries like Brazil, defined the prospective activities of the Communist parties in terms of instalments: to move away from colonial backwardness towards a developed, ‘mature’ bourgeois democracy. The fact was that such an abstract bourgeois democracy, in Brazilian conditions, could be conceived only as a metaphysical entity, since thepractical reality of police and boss repression continued unabated before and after the fall of the oligarchic republic and the relative constitutionality of the early Vargas regime up until 1937. Therefore, what the LCI advocated was for the acknowledgement that

the distinction made by the Communist International programme [in the IC’s Sixth 1929 Congress], between countries ‘immature’ and ‘mature’ for socialism, has nothing Marxist about it [….] The Russian Revolution […] confirmed flatly the perspective of the Permanent Revolution in the sense given to it by Marx, that each revolutionary stage is present in the bud of the preceding stage, hence the uninterrupted development of the revolution, leading directly towards the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. The working class, as Trotsky said in 1905 […]could not assure the democratic character of its dictatorship without breaking from its democratic framework. (pp. 125, 126 – italics mine.)

A Review of Market Threads: How Cotton Farmers and Traders Create a Global Commodity by Koray Çalışkan

Lorena Lombardozzi

Department of Economics, The Open University

lorena.lombardozzi@open.ac.uk

Abstract

This review-article discusses, through the lens of Çalışkan’s Market Threads: How Cotton Farmers and Traders Create a Global Commodity, how the mainstream economic conceptualisation of markets and prices conceals the power dynamics that underpin capitalism and explain social outcomes. Focusing on detailed empirical evidence of how vertical structures and agents – namely markets, farmers and traders  – interact through cotton,the book analyses how the global, regional and local dialectically create a world market. I argue that although Çalışkan’s book does not grasp entirely such complexity, by demystifying the economic constructions built around methodological individualism, rationality and equilibrium, it does put forward an acute and innovative analysis of social relations of production and exchange of global commodities which suggests a way to overcome inadequate epistemological and ontological paradigms in the social sciences.

Keywords

cotton – commodity market – trade – value – price – farmer

Koray Çalışkan, (2011) Market Threads: How Cotton Farmers and Traders Create a Global Commodity, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

1       Looking at the Same Things, Explaining them in a Different Language

Market Threads is an insightful book. It was written by a political scientist who has used an ethnographic approach to investigate a topic that has inspired countless academics across various disciplines. Dr Çalışkan currently works as an Associate Professor of Strategic Design and Management at The New School–Parsons, and has published widely in the field of political economy and on the anthropology of capitalism. The book, based upon his doctoral thesis, develops in two-hundred and eight pages an empirically-grounded investigation into how cotton, one the most widely-used commodities, circulates in the world economy. More precisely, this book investigates how structures and agents, namely markets, farmers and traders, interact through cotton. Indeed, cotton is claimed to be the protagonist of the book. That notwithstanding, it is used as a lens with which to investigate social relations of production and exchange in Egypt, Turkey, and globally.

Due to its ground-breaking potential, cotton has filled the pages of a multitude of classic and contemporary academic works. Historically, cotton has triggered capitalistic development, as an input of production in the first industrial revolution,[1] and as a means of worker-exploitation in the global division of labour. Being a core ingredient of Western consumerism, many have investigated its ‘enforced commodification’ across the Global Souths. This literature has explored post-colonial relations, in the sphere of critical Marxist political economy and/or dependency theory.[2] More recently, studies on cotton have focused on global value-chains and financial markets. In the latter sphere, by emphasising the role of capital liberalisation and deregulation following the post-2008 economic crisis, many macroeconomists have been feeding academic journals with a seemingly endless number of papers on ‘financialisation’, ‘price transmission’ and ‘speculation’. It should be noted that neither the table of contents nor the book itself contains those three terms. Indeed, while useful for describing global patterns of profits arising from commodities in neoliberal capitalism, sometimes such analysis wants for empirical significance, methodological efficacy, or, indeed, anything original to contribute. Indeed, theoretical categories can sometime become empty labels expressing contradictory ideas, which nonetheless represent the passe-partout to gaining voice within the academic arena. Perhaps these categories are missing because in 2010, the year of the book’s release, they were not popular. Yet, this book does not hide behind pre-conceived definitions and circumvented narrow concepts by compensating for their absence with detailed and dense empirical material and an original theoretical framework. The book goes beyond the dichotomy of formalists and substantivists. Drawing from actor-network theory, it vividly engages with the concept of ‘economisation’, which refers to ‘the assembly and qualification of actions, devices and analytical/practical descriptions as “economic” by social scientists and market actors’.[3] Markets, agencies, encounters, prices and market maintenance are shown in regard to their socio-material nature. Through (1) theories of the economy; (2) institutional and technical arrangements and (3) methods of valuation, the book’s aim is to investigate the process of marketisation within societies.[4]

That said, the principal contribution of this book is methodological. The book interconnects primary data, participant observations, interviews, professional experience and a veritable cornucopia of secondary data collected over, as it correctly and proudly emphasises, two years of multi-site fieldwork. Those elements are presented in a realistic writing-style, and they reveal the ‘open-endedness’ of ‘theeconomic’, which cannot be found in any international economics textbook. Rural and urban, local and global, formal and informal, past and future, capitalism from below and from above: those are just a few of the dichotomies that this research has implicitly acknowledged, and embraced in its analysis. By bypassing the normative foundations of methodological individualism,[5] the author has used an inductive approach which allows the book to unveil real-life phenomena.

2       An Ontological Critique of the Market and Price

Another major contribution of this book is its deep and acute understanding of markets. The author untangles not only the market as a concept per se, but also its modalities of representation and operationalisation through the study of the cycle of cotton. Referring to Foucault, he claims that the predominant neoclassical theory not only describes, but also plays an active role in shaping, the understanding of markets, ‘modern economics and modern economic markets [being] mutually constructive’ (p. 7). The epistemological implication is pervasive and relevant: neoclassical economics not only gives us the language to talk about ‘economic issues’, but also provides the presuppositions to make its concepts sound real and legitimate. Therefore, power relations regulate epistemology and knowledge too. In this way, Çalışkan’s book represents an act of resistance, a response to such intellectual hegemony, and possibly a platform for new radical contributions. For instance, Çalışkan attempts to contextualise financial markets for their specific materiality, identified as a neoclassical necessity due to their confined and enfranchised forms of transactions. Furthermore, the book refrains from the restrictive understanding of the market as the physical locus of social-productive interaction, and it retrieves its historical, social and institutional specificities organically integrated with non-marketthings and agencies.

The second chapter of the book maps the circulation of two thousand bales of cotton travelling from the US to Turkey. The transactions of cotton are not only analysed through the core transaction of buying and selling, but expanded towards what most mainstream economists might define as ‘informalities’ or ‘distortions’. These are manifested via networking, the exchange of gifts, dinners etc., defined in this book as the ‘technology of power’ (p. 60). The author argues that such maintenance activities make the commodity-markets work.

In particular, three factors are listed as active components of the market: capital,knowledge andnetworks. These concepts have already been investigated in the literature along the lines of inclusiveness, social capital and moral economy by many anthropologists and social scientists. For instance, the idea of gift as a source of reciprocity and obligation is not new; it draws upon the work of Mauss and others. Nevertheless, the mainstream literature has defined these phenomena either as clientelism or corruption, linking them to the institutionalists’ ideas of rent-seeking, transaction costs and ‘bad governance’. Another strand of the literature has looked at these factors as part of ‘social capital’, which is embedded in the market and, by solidifying networks, is instrumental for economic growth. However, social capital remains obscure, and power relations are not explained. Hence, knowledge and networks have never been analysed as intrinsic parts of the social relations of production and for their role in commodity-exchange. The originality ofÇalışkan’s work resides in the idea of considering socio-technicalarrangements of market maintenance as part of the commercial transaction of cotton itself. The use of these ‘technologies of power’ proves that price does not reside in the correspondence between supply and demand driven by homogenous agents, but rather inheres in a combination of different premeditated actions and transactional forces. The author demystifies with stark lucidity the real meaning of transactions beyond the sterile concept of price, and he recognises that those norms are part of economic relations that shape patterns of domination.

By surmounting the mainstream analysis of ‘price’, the book introduces the concept of ‘prosthetic price’. This is the outcome of actions made by artificial, technical and human devices. Çalışkan explains how the prosthetic price, while the sine qua non condition for traders to enter the market, is not employed in the actual exchange of the commodity but precedes the price accepted for the transactions by providing a directional signal. The argument here is that the price is produced mostly as a result of agents’ bargaining power, underpinned by local social factors and power–knowledge relations (p. 55). The micro-mechanisms of cotton-trading in the futures market have revealed important implications dismissed by neoclassical theory. First, suppliers and buyers are interchangeable, and second, they do not follow the objective of rational utility maximisation but, instead, adopt different methods of valuation. This thesis is proven in the book through powerful examples of prosthetic prices.

A further aspect tackled in the book is the role of product differentiation and ‘sub-marketisation’ in shaping prices. That is, when a trader demands or offers cotton on the market, the specificities of the product affect the price negotiation. This apparently descriptive passage in the book reveals that the quality of the commodity is a crucial variable not sufficiently addressed in mainstream economic analysis. Indeed, the poor specificities of the commodity can act as an entry-barrier to the market. The author acknowledges also that a central concern of the traders is not the price per se but its unforeseeable or unexpected evolution. Those concerns cannot be addressed by reading textbooks but rather only through consultation with reports that inform on stocks, production and mill-use. However, those contain only partial pieces of information. Those who govern the market are precisely those who manage the entire body of information, through informal trust and networking. Thus, it has been rightly emphasised by the author that, rather than a peaceful meeting-point born of free will, the market is a place of conflict, tension and exclusion, and the result depends on the interests of the strongest players. Such outcomes have been meticulously elucidated through considerable empirical evidence.

In conclusion, by underlining the social and cultural nature of the markets, and by acknowledging the institutions that define the power relations embedded in those markets, this section provides several perspectives from which to confute the mainstream approach to the economy. The author not only suggests that value and price are decoupled at multiple stages, but also that they define neither the quantity nor the quality of the labour necessary to the production of the commodity. In turn, the circuits of finance maintain the minimum necessary contact with the real system of production, just so as to extract the value of living labour at its source. Those markets are not neutral, and are instrumental for the interests of the merchant class.

3       The Empirical Case Studies

As mentioned, the book relies on a rigorous qualitative-inductive approach. Four chapters contribute to the empirical multi-level analysis of the markets through the two case studies of Turkey and Egypt. Parallel dynamics of cotton are sometimes compared between the Turkish and the Egyptian context.

The analysis of Turkey is developed through a clear division of the analytical subjects: Chapter 3, ‘Markets’ Multiple Boundaries in Izmir’, narrows down the investigation into price-production among local traders in Turkey. It is a highly-detailed ethnographic description of how local actors, merchants, and pit employers are strictly embedded into cultural and historical institutions, so as to create the price. Another form of prosthetic price for the purpose of exchanging cotton is introduced. The rehearsal prices are used to make bids or offers in the pit. So again, the author provides examples of how a market features various sites and various prices exist even within the same geographical unit. Chapter 5, ‘Growing Cotton and its Global Market in a Turkish Village’, looks at the asymmetric relations between cotton farmers and traders. Tackling issues of labour-time, ethnicity, age, gender, and intra-household dynamics, the author reveals the complex bio-economic cycle that regulates production and exchange-relations in the small community of Pamukkoy. This, in my opinion, is one of the most valuable and thought-inspiring sections of the book. Different and complex power relations linked to land-access and credit-traps are described through the bonds between traders and farmers, created by the exchange of cotton. In addition, he emphasises that such diminished power is also the result of intersubjective self-perception. For example, because cotton farmers’ skills are underestimated by traders and by farmers themselves, being a farmer in the Turkish market negatively affects their power relations. As a result, conventional markets are not perceived as the places where the price is set up, whereas ginning factories are, because that is where traders’ power is manifested. It is shown that the asymmetries and inter-temporalities of prices and markets are constructed through forms of resistance and bargaining-power, and reinforce dynamics of path-dependency. In conclusion, while cotton-exchange is identified by the author as the cause of the relentless disappearance of the subsistence mode of production, nevertheless, the causal factors related to the exploitation of labour or to the ownership of the means of production are not explored in detail. Yet, the political topography obtained through this ethnographic research could have immense potential if connected to implications for the macroeconomic national policies.

What has been omitted in the Turkish case, in the Egyptian case-study occupies a considerable part of Chapter 4, ‘A Market without Exchange: Cotton Trade in Egypt’. This chapter focuses implicitly on the role of the state and the peasantries to understand the dynamics of economic liberalisation. This chapter looks at the causes that overturned the competitiveness of Egyptian cotton, in particular following the privatisation of the Alexandria Cotton Exporters’ Association: ‘a case study of how a trading regime without organized exchange can be fully integrated into the global market’ (p. 105). Avoiding technical irrelevancies, the author describes how privatisation enabled the conditions for foreign and private capitals to take control of the Association, and to trade cotton through more flexible circumstances than the public one. Market-oriented reforms, by allowing private business to adopt looser regulations on labour and prices, made public companies look uncompetitive. In reality, this had been made possible by creating unfair competition in respect of labour-costs and rights, price flexibility, bureaucratic exemption, etc. Trade liberalisation and privatisation have impoverished local farmers by individualising commercial and production tasks and risks, in the absence of institutional support that might allow them to survive in the market. As a result, Egyptian cotton production went from constituting over 65% of world-output in the 1980s to less than 20% after ten years, with a sharp decline in the output of the finest cotton. Coincidentally, this decline has corresponded to the commercial success of highly-subsidised US cotton. In conclusion, this chapter provides a concise but neat example of the historical and geo-political hegemonic processes directed by the USA, which have shaped the world of cotton across continents in the last century. It reveals how changes in key political and economic institutions have brought disastrous consequences upon local sectors in low-income countries. Nonetheless, such an insightful overview does not engage with the problems of global governance and false ‘multilateralism’, which have contributed to the crisis and poverty in the Global South.

Although for security reasons the author did not conduct fieldwork research in Egypt with the same degree of depth as in Turkey, nevertheless Chapter 6, ‘Cotton Fields of Power in Rural Egypt’, reveals the power-relationships and struggles of the local agrarian actors through micro-ethnographic accounts. The neoliberal policies previously described negatively affected networks and power across three dimensions. The first dimension that the author emphasises is the escalation of violence and insecurity in the countryside, with many farmers killed or injured in rural areas. The second dimension is poverty: because of withdrawal of investment in agriculture, child labour was highly involved in the process of hoeing and sowing. However, such is the author’s delicate and thoughtful contextualisation of what children’s expectations were, their accounts have not been filtered through euro-centric values. Indeed, he describes a situation in which children perceive work as a normal practice. The third dimension is informality: the acknowledgement that spontaneous mechanisms of survival have created new informal arrangements of commodity production which guarantee the conditions for the perpetuation of the capitalistic mode of production. He argues that the system ‘locate[s] farmers in a simultaneous engagement in relation to production and exchange in which all the actors of cotton growth and circulation deploy heterogeneous strategies of money making or surviving by constantly transgressing the invisible border between formality and informality’ (p. 66). This statement deserves some attention, firstly because it implies the overcoming of production, exchange and ‘valuation’ as separate spheres. Secondly, because it proves that cotton farmers have been the most disenfranchised class in the politics of Egypt.

4       Conclusion

The book analyses how the global, regional and local together create a world market. This is an objective that most researchers using ethnographic materials struggle with, namely, to make their research externally valid without overgeneralising concepts. In Çalışkan’s book, ample evidence is provided at various scales of analysis. At the macro level, the author underlines how the international Western players have dominated the cotton sector thanks to the different trade-policy standards exercised domestically, and imposed internationally by international financial institutions. Particularly interesting is the detailed explanation of how structural adjustment programmes have undermined the Egyptian cotton sector. When in the book’s Conclusion he argues that ‘global processes as derived encounters are made and informed by regional relations of marketing’ (p. 194), such relational dynamics between local and global agents could be disentangled even further. Indeed, in this book the reader jumps from an ontological critique of the theory of markets and price to an ethnographic immersion in Turkey and Egypt. For such reasons, sometimes the connections between layers of analysis are not very explicit. However, by the end, the fil rouge of the book is clearly revealed to be its empirical evisceration of ‘price’ and ‘marketisation’.

One of the most interesting theoretical contributions of the book is the empirically informed demystification of the financial utopia we commonly call price. Price equilibrium as conceived in the neoclassical textbooks does not exist; it is a narrow and myopic way of understanding market exchanges. Price is instead a fluid tool used by competitors to beat each other in the market. The concept of prosthetic price, meant as a moment of the process of price realisation, the peak of a veritable iceberg of procedures, people, law, institutions and ultimately power, is an example of this attempt.

Another important point to reflect upon is the book’s original interpretation of the so-called gift economy, defined by Cheal as a ‘system of redundant transactions within a moral economy, which makes possible the extended reproduction of social relations’.[6] Considering that knowledge in trade leads to power, and that networking is fundamental to obtaining information, gifts are here perceived as a vehicle to strengthen human ties by acting as the lubricant for market maintenance. The market is not neutral, and in order to survive it has to be continuously maintained through non-market forms. From this perspective, the concept of ‘economisation’ is a theoretical framework valid for not only identifying what has been ‘marketised’ (and what has not), but also for acknowledging that economic market constructions require suitable institutions to survive.[7]To put it metaphorically, we can think about the market as a volleyball match: thus the ball is the commodity, the game is the market space, and the strategy is the multiple forms of productive, unproductive and socio-institutional activities the author describes. The match’s result depends not only on the players’ actions during the factual exchange of the ball, but also on the defence and attack-positions deployed throughout the game, and even earlier while preparing the match strategy. The book warns about the risk of misunderstandings that arise by merely watching the ball in motion. The empirical insights provided through ‘technologies of power’ could be expanded in relation to the major debate surrounding the mainstream ideas of market equilibrium and individual rationality. In particular, Çalışkan’s book could inspire further exercises on the demystification of such often-simplistically-explained ontological paradigms.

Finally, through cotton, light is shed on various dark corners of many disciplines and strands of thought. He acknowledges the limitations of neoclassical and institutional economics, which do not explain how society shapes price-making and reproduces context-specific and complex non-market and market practices. By cross-referring to economics, sociology and anthropology, the book engages with Hayek’s epistemological analysis of subjective information and with Polanyi’s concept of ‘social embeddedness ... [to take into account] that economic processes take place within a social network’ (p. 6).

Nevertheless, by also looking at heterodox alternatives, he rejects anything that might constrain the analysis within sectors, and binary static structures, such as the global value-chain literature or the system of provision approach. He also rejects the Appadurai’s social life of things framework, as it fails to account empirically for ‘things-in-motion’ (p. 11).

In developing very sophisticated reflections, he nevertheless does not engage with potentially relevant debates within agrarian political-economy, institutional economics and heterodox theory on methodology that would create an exciting dialectic between these and Çalışkan’s own contribution. This can be interpreted as a mere stylistic choice, but, more likely, it is the outcome of the methodological and epistemological challenges that the book has undertaken. When arguing that an analysis of the market requires a ‘radical break’ in both political economy and economic sociology (p. 207) this raises the question of what the common ground might be where heterodox social sciences meet. Nevertheless, an important point can be drawn: there is still a huge gap in the language used by different ‘sectors of knowledge’, which discourages interdisciplinary work.

In his review of the literature he dismisses the idea of a hierarchical order of production and exchange, and refuses to analyse them as separable entities (p. 11). Based on these perspectives, the author avoids the theoretical debate on whether value is created in the cycle of production or in the sphere of exchange; similarly, in regard to how the epistemological theorisation of a multitude of values clashes with the relationship between price and value and with the labour theory of value itself. Yet, how such dialectical and fluid systems of exchange and marketisation might serve to reproduce, alter or stop the capitalist regimes of accumulation, exploitation and class inequality is not deeply explored. Nonetheless, this is a choice amenable to a neat and alternative understanding of the modality of circulation and valuation of things and societies as a whole, proper to the ‘economisation’ framework.

          This book, in overcoming the existing approaches, launches a new trajectory of analysis where markets are ‘neither asocial mechanisms of price setting, nor are they embedded in society’ (p. 188). In addition, Çalışkan’s book debunks the dangerously romantic view of society seen as intrinsically benevolent, and which ‘cools down’ the fury of the commodity exchange by making it less violent. It is instead reasonable to assert that his analysis suggests that an intrinsic and complex blend of forces coming from the market, the family, gender and age, resist and fight for their social and economic survival within the capitalistic system. With regard to future research, he calls for additional work to ‘study relations of economization as fields of power made and maintained by various human and non-human agents that confront each other on asymmetrical platforms’ (p. 188). In particular, he outlines three aspects which need to be investigated: a) the organisational aspects of production and exchange, b) what he calls socio-technical ‘agencements’, that revolve around market devices and rules, and c) the overcoming of the binary relational analysis between the human and non-human in favour of a more organic and active materiality. Those seem relevant and promising trajectories, able to connect theory and practice in the study of marketisation. Yet, further research is desirable in order to connect this precious body of literature to the broader understanding of class struggle and power and wealth’s asymmetrical distribution, which are the results of the contemporary predatory dynamics of financial marketisation. I hope that his forthcoming bookData Money: A Taxonomy of Cryptocurrencies and Blockchains (New York: Columbia University Press) will fulfil these expectations and advance the debate further.

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Harriss-White and Judith Heyer (eds.) 2009, The Comparative Political Economy of Development: Africa and South Asia, pp. 66–87, London: Routledge.

Hayek, Friedrich August von 1986, ‘The Moral Imperative of the Market’, in The Unfinished Agenda: Essays on the Political Economy of Government Policy in Honour of Arthur Seldon, edited by Ralph Harris, Martin J. Anderson and Arthur Seldon, pp. 143–9, London: The Institute of Economic Affairs.

Khan, Mushtaq 2012, ‘Governance and Growth Challenges for Africa’, in Good Growth and Governance in Africa: Rethinking Development Strategies, edited by Akbar Noman, Kwesi Botchwey, Howard Stein and Joseph E. Stiglitz, pp. 114–39, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lapavitsas, Costas 2004, ‘Commodities and Gifts: Why Commodities Represent More Than Market Relations’, Science and Society, 68, 1: 33–5.

Latour, Bruno 1994, ‘On Technical Mediation: Philosophy, Sociology, Genealogy’, Common Knowledge, 3, 2: 29–64.

MacKenzie, Donald 2004, ‘The Big, Bad Wolf and the Rational Market: Portfolio Insurance, the 1987 Crash and the Performativity of Economics’,Economy and Society, 33, 3: 303–34.

Marcus, George E.1998, Ethnography through Thick and Thin, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Marx, Karl 1887, Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production, Volume 1, translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, London: Swan Sonnenschein, Lowrey, & Co.

Mauss, Marcel 1990 [1922], The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, translated by W.D. Halls, London: Routledge.

Nissanke, Machiko and Erik Thorbecke 2006a, ‘The Impact of Globalization on the World’s Poor’, World Development, 34, 8: 1333–1458.

O’Laughlin, Bridget 1977, ‘Production and Reproduction: Meillassoux’s Femmes, Greniers et Capitaux’,Critique of Anthropology, 2, 8: 3–32.

Polanyi, Karl 1944, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, New York: Farrar & Rinehart.

Schumpeter, Joseph 1908, ‘On the Concept of Social Value’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 23: 213–32.

Smith, Adam 1789, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Book 1 (Fifth Edition), London: Andrew Strahan and Thomas Cadell.

Wade, Robert 1988, Village Republics: Economic Conditions for Collective Action in South India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wallerstein, Immanuel and Terence K. Hopkins 2000, ‘Commodity Chains in the World-Economy Prior to 1800’, in The Essential Wallerstein, pp. 221–33, New York, NY: The New Press.

[1] Marx 1887, pp. 148–65; Smith 1789, Chapter I, p. 7.

[2] See, for instance, Amin 2013; Beckert 2014.

[3] Çalışkan and Callon 2010, p. 1.

[4] Çalışkan and Callon 2010.

[5] Schumpeter 1908, p. 91.

[6]Cheal 1988, p. 19.

[7] Çalışkan and Callon 2009.

Marcelo Starcenbaum

Today, more than 90 years after the first publication of Mariátegui’s Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality, it is no simple task to offer a meaningful intervention around his figure. Doing so inevitably means measuring oneself against a mountain of research that has already dealt capably with the innumerable problems connected to the work of the Peruvian Marxist. Often, these approaches prefer to locate Mariátegui along a specific spatial-temporal axis. This line of inquiry has sought to grasp how the surrounding Peruvian context would shape the elaboration of such a singular and influential body of work. Or, differently, his work is just as frequently placed in relation to contemporary intellectual currents, where scholarship then attempts to delimit the complex reading processes conceived by Mariátegui to interpret European Marxism and traditional Latin American cultures. In sum, Mariátegui’s writing has spawned its own field of research, Mariateguian studies, which has, in turn, become the object of debates and critical inquiry in recent years.[1]

Bearing all this in mind, and remembering that we are also coming upon the 40^thanniversary of the last great theoretical and political “Mariátegui debates”,[2] my purpose here is to reflect on Mariátegui’s contemporaneity. By this, I am proposing an exercise in which the foundational problems present in his work might also be relocated within broader Marxist debates taking place over the last two decades. This type of reading, I feel, can be productive for two reasons. Firstly, and without jettisoning the contributions of Mariateguian studies, the direct interpellation of his work by contemporary theoretical and political discussions invites us to consider both the potential and limitations of one of the foundational figures of Latin American Marxism.[3]Secondly, by analysing contemporary theoretical debates in light of Mariátegui’s work, we are able to re-examine more closely and without concessions the specific challenges with which Marxism has been met in recent years. This approach allows us to consider the limitations proper to the Marxist tradition while also questioning several recent postulates that have been offered as an attempt to overcome Marxism itself.

As my point of departure, I would like to examine a text by Mabel Moraña that discusses the actuality of the Seven Essays in terms of that work’s understanding of the colonial phenomenon. There, Moraña insists on the productivity of an apparently contradictory position taken up by Mariátegui vis-à-vis the nation.[4] On her account, Mariátegui combines an understanding of the strategic importance of national organisation and state institutions as a reference point for social struggles, while simultaneously being cognisant, where popular struggles are concerned, of the forms of domination and exclusion proper to the bourgeois nation. While the first variable leads to a conception of the nation as “the emancipated underside of the colony” and the “doorway to an open history leading towards future liberation”, the second consideration seeks to “dismantle the mechanisms of control and subalternisation of popular sectors at the heart of the criollo nation”. This apparent contradiction provides a useful inroad insofar as it allows us to situate the concerns of theSeven Essays within contemporary Marxist debates. Taking this apparent contradiction as our point of departure is especially useful insofar as a large part of debates in recent years have centred on this two-sided interpretation of the nation: on the one hand, centred around Marxist narratives related to the capitalist periphery and the variety of ways in which the politicity of subaltern sectors may be represented; on the other hand, in nations born from their rupture with the colonial form, the need to attend to enduring mechanisms of domination and exclusion even after the colonial break.

II.

On the specificity of the national question in the capitalist periphery, much has been written on the foundational role Mariátegui has played in shaping subsequent discussions. Put succinctly, we might say that, taking up a position equidistant from teleological Marxism and democratic nationalism, Mariátegui develops an understanding of the nation in which different productive regimes can coexist and where the unfinished character of the local bourgeoisie is a defining feature. That is, the contours of the nation are delineated by a political and economic development at variance with the experience of European modernity. Following in the footsteps of a less teleological Marx, and anticipating the “motley thesis” of René Zavaleta Mercado, Mariátegui offers a vision of economic evolution capped with the observation that “there are elements of three different, coexisting economies in present-day Peru”.[5] In a schema at once classificatory and symptomatic, Mariátegui retraces the feudal inheritance set down from the colonial period and highlights the enduring presence of indigenous communism, while also identifying the slow development of capitalist relations in Peru’s coastal region. In addition to the deferred development of a modern national institutionality, feudal social relations in Peru, Mariátegui argues, have retarded the development of a truly bourgeois class and its corresponding impetus for national development. In that precise sense, Peru’s economic evolution would be defined by “a landowning class [that] failed to transform itself into a capitalist bourgeoisie, steward of the national economy”.[6]

By grasping Peru in terms of a specific socio-economic formation, Mariátegui embarked on a path that diverged sharply and in equal parts from a necessity-driven variant of Marxism, as well as the variety of nationalisms then on offer. This singularity was expressed paradigmatically in the statements made by the Peruvian delegation to the First Latin American Communist Conference, held in 1929 in Buenos Aires. There, these national particularities acted as the grounds for the Peruvian delegates’ defence of a full-fledged socialist revolutionary programme, plainly at odds with the communist leadership’s insistence that Latin American countries should follow a bourgeois-democratic course. This was certainly one of the most productive elements in Mariátegui’s Marxist analysis: his conception of the nation skirted the essentialisation of the Peruvian case just as much as it rejected the idea that the nation would be a mere expression of external tendencies. As Antonio Melis suggests, “the more mature Mariátegui intuit[ed] that in order to understand Marx one must be prepared to grasp the full ‘structural’ breadth of his analysis, that is, his pursuit to situate features specific to a given social-economic formation within a general model of historical development”.[7]

We should underscore here that taking up such a position involved a series of contortions in relation to the requirements imposed by political practice. There was, on the one hand, the familiar opposition between Mariátegui and Victorio Codovilla, head of the Communist Party of Argentina and responsible member for enforcing the policies of the Comintern. But there was an additional predicament, centring on the conflict between Chile and Peru over the Tacna and Arica regions, that proved especially illuminating. Whereas the International called for a plebiscite under worker control, taking for granted widespread unrest among diverse sectors of Peruvian society, Hugo Pesce intervened on behalf of the Peruvian delegation to argue that a communist politics should be based on precise knowledge of the context in which it is unfolding: “we communists, we must study an extremely important point: what has been the position of different social layers before a determinate conflict”.[8] As Flores Galindo has pointed out, these differences were not so much due to a lack of information as they were that the Peruvians were asserting “a line of reasoning that subordinated political action to the class situation, refusing to ignore objective conditions and social consciousness, considerations without which it was impossible to draw up any tactics”.[9]

In the last several decades, Marxist discourse on the peripheral nations of the capitalist world-system has been branded as teleological and Eurocentric in nature. With support from British Marxism’s theoretical and methodological innovations, and employing the historiography of colonial India as their object of analysis, these authors associated with subaltern studies have sought to identify how colonial, nationalist and Marxist discourses share a common set of analytical variables. By centring its historical narrative on insurgent movements where a written agenda and a theoretical programme were predominant, Marxism would on this account have contributed to reinforcing elitist accounts that were guilty of omitting the politicity of subaltern sectors.[10] This tendency present in Marxist discourse would suppose European history as the silent reference point in its historical narratives of peripheral regions. By locating in European civilisation the parameters that oversee the national history of non-European societies, Marxism would have proffered a developmental and modernising account in which local experience would only appear as weak, lacking and insufficient.[11] The reception of these types of readings in Latin America would eventually galvanise attempts to restore the historicity of popular political experiences outside the framework of the nation-state, and to conduct a critical revision of the vanguardist and enlightened methods with which the subcontinent’s left-wing intellectuals had attempted to represent the experience of subalterns.[12]

A superficial reading of the subaltern tradition could lead one to see Mariátegui as reproducing a number of the master narratives of European mint. The schema of economic evolution rehearsed in the Seven Essays and its conceptualisation of Peru’s political development are certainly loaded with figures of failure and lack. A landowning class thathas failed to become a capitalist bourgeoisie. Latifundio and forms of bondage as feudalholdovers. An independence that was not guided by the existence of a conscious bourgeois class and that could not count on the collaboration of a revolutionary peasantry. The property system acting as an obstacle to the development of national capitalism. The Peruvian criollo’s incapacity to represent nationality. And yet, unlike other Marxist discourses of Latin America, Mariátegui foregrounds in his analysis the national particularities within the global development of capitalism, thus proffering elements that would counteract the aforementioned tendencies.

Moreover, the radicalisation of certain subaltern hypotheses could just as easily push some of the founding research of that tradition into the camp it purports to oppose. Guha’s “domination without hegemony”, in reference to the local bourgeoisie’s failure to represent the nation under contemporary India, could just as easily be understood as a narrative structured with Europe as its silent reference point. Thus, rather than insisting on this dimension, it seems more productive to consider those aspects of Mariátegui’s analysis that distance themselves from accounts anchored in necessity and lack. In that respect, Chakrabarty’s terminology is useful insofar as it revisits the disputes over teleological and Eurocentric narratives employed in the Third World. Opposed to the idea that determinate social sectors were still not ready to assume political responsibilities, the discourses and anticolonial politics of the 20^th century insisted on “the now” as the temporal horizon of action. In that sense, theSeven Essays can be situated within an impetus to politically register the experience of subaltern subjects and counteract interpretations that, even within Marxism, would perpetuate their subaltern status in the name of development and historical necessity.

III.

With respect to the other side of this two-sided position regarding the national question, Mariátegui has likewise offered a foundational precedent for subsequent research and ample material with which to discuss contemporary theoretical developments. The general terms in which he interprets the forms of the bourgeois nation are relatively familiar. Analysing the diverse issues pertaining to the Indian, Mariátegui asserts that liberal politics are incapable of advancing the liberation of the indigenous and reverting the colonial condition to which they have been subjected. In that sense, the revolution for independence amounted to a process whose liberal program was favourable to the Indians but lacked a bourgeois class capable of bringing that process to a head. Despite independence, the latifundist colonial aristocracy preserved its rights over the land and over the Indians. Here as before, Mariátegui’s analysis insists on the evidence of failure. Republican rule ends up reproducing a logic that should have been defeated. Thus the power and precision of his assertion: “the Viceroyalty emerges as being less guilty than the Republic”.[13] One could hardly expect more from the colonial order: as a medieval and foreign regime, it was in its nature to exploit the Indian. The Republic is a different case, and insofar as it was a Peruvian and liberal regime it bore the mission of raising up the Indian.

Mariátegui’s analysis of the process of subalternisation in the Seven Essays is essentially multidimensional. A careful reading of the terms on which Mariátegui constructs an opposition between colonial and republican regimes reveals a series of interpretive levels. On the one hand, there is the strictly economic. Contrary to its rightful mission, the Republic “has pauperized the Indian, compounded his depression and exacerbated his misery”.[14] For the Indian, the shift from Viceroyalty to Republic represented a transition from a colonial system of exploitation to a system of dispossession led by a new dominant class. Along with this aspect, the Seven Essays gives ample space to the political and cultural dimensions of subalternisation. According to Mariátegui, “the Republic is additionally responsible for having made the race lethargic and weak”.[15] Republican rule not only worsened the economic situation of the Indian, it also meant the appropriation of the Indian’s own grievances by the criollo elite. National parties would include indigenous demands in their political programmes, pressing the issue into the services of demagogic speculations while diminishing the Indians’ capacity to fight on their own behalf. Finally, Mariátegui notes that the Indian problem is a logical component in any analysis of public instruction in Peru. At the level of what might be called a national ideology, Mariátegui observes that Republican rule has preserved a representation of the Indian corresponding properly to the colonial regime. The fact that national education is itself the preserve of a colonial framework means that the Peruvian state reproduces the same notion of the inferior Indian race that typified the Viceroyalty.

Acknowledging that mechanisms for colonial exclusion and dominance have been preserved within the national order, as well as recognising the contemporary transformations to the capitalist economy, the last several decades have seen the emergence of a discourse that question the centrality of the nation-state as the fundamental political and organisational unit, while equally questioning the general understanding of the modern social order through binary relations (coloniser/colonised, First/Third world). Disavowing master narratives, orientalism, foundational categories and fixed subjects, postcolonial theory has encouraged replacing national origins with subject positions, prioritised local interactions over global structures, and the faculty of being in the midst of the postcolonial subject.[16]Just as with subaltern studies, contrasting the Seven Essays with this discursive postcolonial constellation results in an ambivalent picture. On the one hand, Mariátegui is indeed clearly staking a more subtle position on the idea of the nation-state as the foundational organiser of contemporary political experience. His understanding of the liberal regime as a continuation of the colonial order suggests a thinker acutely concerned with delimiting the particularities of Peru as apostcolonial society. On this point, while the arguments developed in theSeven Essays could be made to engage with some important aspects of the postcolonial condition – the description of conditions in once-colonial societies –, it is harder to see how it can relate to other concerns of the postcolonial tradition: the assertion of a global condition in the aftermath of the colonial period, or a discourse epistemologically oriented by a postcolonial condition.[17]

In a text from the 1990s exploring the possibility of a “postcolonial Mariátegui”, Neil Larsen poses the following question: “If Mariátegui had been able to benefit from the ‘conceptual revolutions’ of Freud, Saussure and Derrida, would he then be telling us that the ethico-social goal of Peruvian literature should not be to transcend the cultural dualism of Peru and create an autochthonous ‘Peruvianness’, but instead to foster a ‘différance’ that resists an type of reductive identification?”.[18] No doubt counterfactual and deeply debatable, Larsen’s suggestion to a great extent anticipated subsequent developments in subaltern and postcolonial thought on the national question in Latin America. While also engaging with Lacanian and post-structuralist perspectives, these currents have advanced the hypothesis that the nation is represented theoretically as an oppressive identity built on the a priori exclusion of a stigmatised other. Thus, studies of national literature, to take one example, began to take shape according to an ethics of literature whereby the subject should be thwarted in its attempt to take shape through the logic of an “other”.  Again, the Marxist framework in which theSeven Essays is framed clearly acts as a counterweight to the postcolonial appropriation of Mariátegui. In an attempt to answer the above-cited question, Larsen asserts that, contrary to the contemporary tendency to think of the nation as one among several possible subject positions, “Mariátegui never ceases to insist on the social and historic place of the nation as an integral factor in the process of post-national emancipation”.[19]

Finally, this conception of the relation between the nation and emancipatory politics offers a series of elements that make possible a general evaluation of the relations between Marxism and post-colonialism. As previously stated, the subaltern perspective and postcolonial studies alike erupted within the field of critical thought, introducing a set of concepts and postulates that seemed to rescue Marxism from its entanglements with the teleological, Eurocentric narratives of colonialism and nationalism. Two decades on from this emergence, Vivek Chibber’s recent book has again placed Marxism in a position to criticise the influence of subaltern and colonial studies in contemporary analyses.[20] Following Chibber’s diagnostic, the link between the New Left and Marxism in the 1960s and 70s gave way to an interest in culture and ideology, no longer as objects of study but as explanatory principles previously reserved for class and the relations of production. The implications here are clear enough. Subaltern and postcolonial studies, in detriment to a materialist perspective, have produced influential research on modernity, hegemony and resistance while largely ignoring the capitalist substrate of such phenomena. Introducing Mariátegui into this discussion merits at least two considerations. First, Mariátegui’s analysis of the Peruvian situation in the Seven Essays is as different from a teleological Marxism – a difference subaltern and postcolonial studies would later vindicate – as it is from anything like a radical culturalism, being that is clearly comes down in support of a Marxist and materialist position. One could better speak, in Mariátegui, of the productivity of a Marxist conception of the postcolonial condition. The second consideration concerns what utility Mariátegui’s writing might offer towards an understanding of the relation between Marxism and postcolonial studies, beyond their apparent incompatibility. As Chibber has suggested, Marxism and the postcolonial condition can be understood less as fixed categories and more as dynamic positions responding to social transformations that make the understanding of events and historical processes an increasingly complex undertaking.  A productive dialogue between both perspectives can contribute to a renewed analysis of, among other issues, uneven capitalist development, the process of capitalist accumulation, or the relationship between modernity and capitalism.[21]

IV.

By way of concluding, I would like to offer up for consideration how Mariátegui’s writing might interact with another challenge recently posed to Marxism. I am referring here to the so-called decolonial perspective in its explicitly Marxist-hostile iterations.[22] Just as with the counterpoint to subaltern and postcolonial studies, the potential encounter between the Marxist Peruvian and the decolonial school takes place on a common ground. The decolonial discourse addresses a set of fundamental issues that partially align with the Marxist inquiry of Latin American reality. Among them, the relation between local historical experience and global civilisational development, the correlation between Latin American modernity and the economic structuration of the subcontinent, or the link between scientific knowledge and popular cultures. However, unlike the other currents, the results of the decolonial-Mariátegui encounter offer a much less positive yield. Whereas in the former case, Mariátegui’s interpellation by contemporary discussions serves to revisit the productive aspects of his work while relativising some of the accusations levelled by postcolonial and subaltern studies against Marxism, the decolonial perspective tends to foreclose any such dialogue with the Marxist tradition and thus the possibility of the aforementioned productive recognitions. The unwavering assertion that Marxism is just another Eurocentrism, located along a sequence of colonial thought running from the Crónicas de Indias to contemporary social sciences, requires an enormous distortion of a Marxist theoretical accomplishment such as that of Mariátegui. His work would, on the one hand, lie outside the repertory of possible readings on account of its being contaminated by colonial knowledge. On the other hand, even if it were read, revisiting the work of Mariátegui would be conditioned by the absolutisation of elements (the local, the margins, the ancestral, etc.) that can only be apprehended in a more complex mode.

Translated by Nicolas Allen

[1] For an example of one such inquiry, see Beigel, Fernanda, El itinerario y la brújula. El vanguardismo estético-político de José Carlos Mariátegui, Buenos Aires, Biblos, 2003.

[2] This is in reference to the so-called “Sinaloa generation”, a shared reading framework that converged at the International Colloquia “Mariátegui y la revolución latinoamericana”, held in the Mexican state of Sinaloa in 1980. For further reading, see, Cortés, Martín, “José Aricó y el coloquio mariateguiano (1980) de la Universidad Autónoma de Sinaloa”, Cuadernos Americanos. No. 165, 2018, pp. 65-82 and Giller, Diego,7 ensayos sobre socialismo y nación(incursiones mariateguianas), Buenos, Aires, Caterva, 2018.

[3] The author is well aware that the assertion of Mariátegui’s foundational role in Latin American Marxism is not without its problems. This discussion, however, is beyond the purview of this article. For a systematisation of the problem see Acha, Omar y D’Antonio, Débora, “Cartografía y perspectivas del ‘marxismo latinoamericano’”, A Contracorriente. Vol. 7, No. 2, 2010, pp. 210-256.

[4]Moraña, Mabel, “José Carlos Mariátegui en los nuevos debates. Emancipación, (in)dependencia y ‘colonialismo supérstite’ en América Latina”, in: Mabel Moraña and Guido Podestá (eds.), José Carlos Mariátegui y los estudios latinoamericanos,Pittsburgh, Instituto Internacional de Literatura Latinoamericana, 2009, p. 67.

[5]Mariátegui, José Carlos, 7 ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana, Caracas, Biblioteca Ayacucho, 2007, p. 20.

[6] Ibid., p. 21.

[7]Melis, Antonio, Mariátegui, primer marxista de América, Mexico D.F., Universidad Autónoma de México, 1979, p. 19.

[8] Cited in Flores Galindo, Alberto, La agonía de Mariátegui. La polémica con la Komintern, Lima, Centro de Estudios y Promoción del Desarrollo, 1980, p. 26.

[9]Id.

[10] Guha, Ranahit, “Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India”, in: Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society. Vol. 1, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1982, pp. 1-8 and “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency”, in:Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society. Vol. 2, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1983, pp. 1-42.

[11] Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Provincializing Europe. Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2000, pp. 3-16.

[12] Latin American Subaltern Group, “Manifiesto inaugural”, in: Santiago Castro-Gómez and Eduardo Mendieta (eds.), Teorías sin disciplina (latinoamericanismo, poscolonialidad y globalización en debate), México D.F., Porrúa, 1998, pp. 85-100.

[13] Mariátegui, José Carlos, 7 ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana, op. cit., p. 36.

[14] Id.

[15] Id.

[16] Prakash, Gyan, “Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World: Perspectives from Indian Historiography”, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 32, No. 2, 1990, pp. 383-408.

[17] Dirlik, Arif, “Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism”, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 20, No. 2, 1994, pp. 328-365.

[18] Larsen, Neil, “Indigenismo y lo ‘postcolonial’. Mariátegui frente a la actual coyuntura teórica”, Revista Iberoamericana, Vol. LXII, No. 176-177, 1996, pp. 871-872.

[19] Ibid., p. 872.

[20] Chibber, Vivek, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, London, Verso, 2013.

[21]Sinha, Subir and Varma, Rashmi, “Marxism and Postcolonial Theory: What’s Left on the Debate?”, Critical Sociology. Vol. 43, No. 4-5, 2015, pp. 1-14.

[22] See, for example, Lander, Edgardo, “Marxismo, eurocentrismo y colonialismo”, in: Atilio Borón, Javier Amadeo and Sabrina González (eds.), La teoría marxista hoy. Problemas y perspectivas, Buenos Aires, CLACSO, 2006, pp. 209-243.

Roger Martelli

The philosopher Lucien Sève has died of coronavirus on 23 March, at the age of 93. It took the plague that is paralysing our societies to bring down a man whom no one had been able to subdue. He was a great figure of both Communism and critical thinking, yet far from sufficiently recognized.

Few men have counted so much in my life as an intellectual and militant. Like Albert Soboul, the great historian of the French Revolution, Lucien Sève was someone who intellectually legitimised my political choice of the Communist Party at the time of the great shock of 1968. He was admired by a large number of people. His rigour, his erudition in Marxism and his biting criticism fascinated several generations of students, teachers, researchers and militants.

Lucien Sève could have had an undisturbed brilliant career, but he did not. A graduate of the École Normale Supérieure, and a qualified teacher by autumn 1949, he was dismissed in May 1950 from a prestigious post at the Lycée Français in Brussels. Like all young Frenchmen he did his military service, in his case in Algeria, in the highly disciplined ‘Bataillon d’Afrique’. As a Communist and trade-unionist militant, he was subjected to a number of administratively decided transfers before landing up at the Lycée Saint-Charles in Marseille, where he remained to the end of his teaching career in 1970.

Science and struggle: the two sides of the quest for human emancipation

Marked by memories of the war, and immersed in the ideological battles of the Cold War, Lucien Sève believed that science and struggle were two inseparable facets of the great quest for human emancipation. Like his friend Louis Althusser, and so many others, he was without hesitation a Stalinist intellectual ‘in his niche’, very early on a scholarly connoisseur of Marx in the original version, as he was also of Lenin, thanks to his wife Françoise who had a perfect command of Russian.[2]

It was not easy for this generation to get rid of the stains of Stalinism. In 1956, Lucien was one of those who, despite seeing the tragedy of this era, considered above all, like Maurice Thorez and Mao Zedong, that criticism should not be confused with recanting. Like the vast majority of his PCF comrades, he therefore felt that opportunism was the main danger.

The first great public battle of his life was against the reading of Marx undertaken by Roger Garaudy, then considered the PCF’s official philosopher. Like Althusser, he saw Garaudy’s approach as an adulteration of Marxism, ultimately a source of capitulation. But, in contrast to Althusser, he chose to combine this spirit of rigour, sometimes bordering on stiffness, with the desire for openness that the PCF pursued after 1962, propelling him to the shores of Eurocommunism between 1975 and 1978.

The choice of the Communist Party

In 1970, Lucien Sève chose to become a paid official of the Communist Party. The choice was fraught with consequences: in the eyes of most people, intellectuals above all, someone choosing to be a professional revolutionary takes the side of ‘party interest’ rather than ‘truth’ or ‘objectivity’. In the end, this meant that he was not recognized as the great intellectual that the sum and quality of his works indicated. It is true that the choice of total commitment, in a party that was at one and the same time the object of conscious choice, a passion and an apparatus, became a constraint that shaped his way of being, speaking and writing. But this respect for collective militancy did not mean for Lucien Sève the absolute obedience of faith. He was a full-time member of the Central Committee from 1961 (when he was 35 years old). In practice, he was considered an official philosopher, though he fiercely rejected this. But he never reached the sacrosanct Political Bureau. Appointed director of the PCF publishing house in 1970, he left this post in 1982, feeling that he no longer had the autonomy of decision-making that he considered indispensable. Finally, in June 1984, when his stature in the party was at its height, he began the process of distancing that made him a ‘re-founder’ in 1989 and even saw him viewed for a while as the inspirer of a ‘plot’ against the party. He knew what it cost to deviate from the line, and he accepted the price to be paid.

Lucien Sève was an unshakeable militant who left an incredibly rich body of work. I have been a passionate reader of this, but I am not qualified to judge the significance of work that it is primarily philosophical. I will only say that it left me with admiration for the intellectual asceticism of his scholarship, the conviction that there is no science without argument, and fascination at some of his brilliant insights. If I had to pick out a few of these, they would particularly include: that the abolition of capitalism is nothing without the idea oftranscending it, i.e. of the process that leads to its disappearance; that history is not a science of general laws, rather a science of the individual; that Marx said that the emancipation of each was the condition for the emancipation of all, and not the contrary; that it is useless to oppose form and content, or form and structure, but necessary instead to considerformation, that is to say, the constructive process of form, content and structure. Without Lucien Sève, I would never have been able to perceive all this and much more.

A guardian figure of Marxist thought

In the Communist Party and in its leadership, I have had the good fortune, indeed the honour, to encounter some of the great names in the Communist legend, such as Henri Rol-Tanguy and Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier, to name but two. I am also proud of having been close to Lucien Sève and benefiting from his friendship. We were not of the same generation, did not have the same intellectual training and did not agree on some points. But if I never ventured to make him into a model, he has been a guardian figure for me ever since 1969. A figure that I loved deeply, whose loss saddens me and creates a void that nothing can fill.

In 2020, the PCF celebrates a hundred years of existence. It will do so without Lucien Sève. History has closed many doors, and death adds one more. But Lucien convincingly showed us that, just as Communism was not born with the twentieth century, there was no reason for it to disappear with this.

*           *           *

Roger Martelli is a historian and the editor of Regards. His books include Louis Althusser and Lucien Sève,Correspondance 1949-1987 (Éditions sociales, 2018) andUne dispute communiste: le Comité central d’Argenteuil sur la culture (Éditions sociales, 2017). Lucien Sève was, with Louis Althusser and Roger Garaudy, one of the key figures in the debates surrounding this historic session of the PCF Central Committee in 1966.

Translated by David Fernbach

[1] First published as http://www.regards.fr/idees-culture/article/lucien-seve-mort-d-un-grand…

[2] She particularly enabled him to read the work of the Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky, whose major works she translated: Thinking and Speech andThe Development of the Higher Mental Functions.

Panagiotis Sotiris

The coronavirus pandemic has forced us to rethink the politics of health in the broadest sense. In particular, we have had to confront again that vexed relationship between the state, the dominant social relations and public health. Concepts that may have seemed obscure and or to have fallen out of one academic fashion, such as biopolitics or “naked life”, have leapt from the page and become suddenly irrepressibly pertinent to our everyday experiences. The same could be said about 'the state of exception', whose recent popularity recalls the onset of the War on Terror, and now refers to the extreme, authoritarian measures taken to confront the pandemic. At the same time they pose the challenge of how to think about the politics of health from the perspective of the subaltern classes. In view of this challenge I believe that these concepts need to be both problematized and re-elaborated.

A recent intervention from the philosopher Giorgio Agamben offers, in my opinion, an example of a failure to answer this challenge so grave, that it may lead many into rejecting the problem and concept of biopolitics itself - specifically because the mentioned concepts are so closely associated with Agamben’s work. In an article written at the very first stages of the Covid-19 epidemic in Italy, Agamben characterized the measures implemented in response to the Covid-19 pandemic as an exercise in the biopolitics of the ‘state of exception’. This text has sparked an important debate on how to think of biopolitics in relation to events such as pandemics and the measures associated with them. In it, Agamben,  suggested that the measures taken were imposing an ‘authentic state of exception’ and that the ‘invention of an epidemic offered the ideal pretext’ for further limitations to basic freedoms. The article provokeda series of responses. Jean-Luc Nancy insisted that the danger from the epidemic is indeed real and that the very notion of the exception is becoming the rule as a result of the increased ‘technical interconnections’ of all kinds in contemporary life. Roberto Esposito in his response to both Agamben and Nancy defended the relevance of biopolitics as a way to think important contemporary developments but also suggested that the situation in Italy ‘has more the character of a breakdown of public authorities than that of a dramatic totalitarian grip’. Others stressed the reality of the danger of the pandemic, the need to avoid easy dismissals of warnings by experts and the need to rethink the very notion of responsibility we have toward others.^[1] I think that this debate offers a way to rethink the very notion of biopolitics, and I would like to offer some preliminary thoughts on the possibility of an alternative thinking of biopolitics.

The notion of biopolitics, as it was formulated by Michel Foucault, has been a very important contribution to our understanding of the changes associated with the passage to capitalist modernity, especially in regards to the ways that power and coercion are exercised. From power as a right of life and death that the sovereign holds, we pass to power as an attempt to guarantee the health (and productivity) of populations.^[2] This led to an expansion without precedent of all forms of state intervention and coercion. From compulsory vaccinations to bans on smoking in public spaces, the notion of biopolitics has been used in many instances as the key to understanding the political and ideological dimensions of health policies.

At the same time, it has allowed us to analyse various phenomena that are often repressed in the public sphere, from the ways that racism attempted to find a 'scientific' grounding to the dangers of trends such as eugenics. And indeed Agamben has used it in a constructive way, in his attempt to theorise the modern forms of a ‘state of exception’, namely spaces where extreme forms of coercion are put in practice, with the concentration camp the main example.^[3]

The questions regarding the handling of the Covid-19 pandemic obviously raise issues associated with biopolitics. Many commentators have suggested that China made steps towards containing or slowing the pandemic because it could implement an authoritarian version of biopolitics, which included the use of extended quarantines and bans on social activities, which was helped by the vast arsenal of coercion, surveillance and monitoring measures and technologies that the Chinese state has at its disposal.

Some commentators even claimed that because liberal democracies lack the same capacity for coercion or invest more on voluntary individual behaviour change, they cannot take the same measures and this could inhibit the attempt to deal with the pandemic.

However, I think that it would be a simplification to pose the dilemma as one between authoritarian biopolitics and a liberal reliance on persons making rational individual choices.

Moreover, it is obvious that simply treating measures of public health, such as quarantines or ‘social distancing’, as biopolitics somehow misses their potential usefulness. In the absence of a vaccine or successful anti-viral treatments, these measures, coming from the repertoire of 19^th century public health manuals, can reduce the burden, especially for vulnerable groups.

This is especially urgent if we recognizethat even in advanced capitalist economies public health infrastructure has deteriorated and cannot actually stand the peak of the pandemic, unless measures to reduce the rate of its expansion are taken. 

One might say that contra Agamben, the concept of ‘naked life’ can better describe the pensioner on a waiting list for a respirator or an ICU bed, because of a collapsed publichealth system, than the attempt to adjust to the practical exigencies of social distancing or quarantine measures. In light of the above I would like to suggest a different return to Foucault. I think that sometimes we forget that Foucault had a highly relational conception of power practices.^[4] In this sense, it is legitimate to pose a question whether a democratic or even communist biopolitics is possible.

To put this question in a different way: Is it possible to have collective practices that actually help the health of populations, including large-scale behaviour modifications, without a parallel expansion of forms of coercion and surveillance?

Foucault himself, in his late work, points towards such a direction, around the notions of truth, parrhesia and care of the self.^[5] In this highly original dialogue with ancient philosophy, in particular Hellenistic and Roman, he suggested an alternative politics of bios that combines individual and collective care, based on a certain obligation and courage to tell the truth, in non-coercive ways.

In such a perspective, the decisions for the reduction of movement and for social distancing in times of epidemics, or for not smoking in closed public spaces, or for avoiding individual and collective practices that harm the environment, would be the result of democratically discussed collective decisions based on the knowledge available and as part of a collective effort to care for others and ourselves. This means that from simple discipline we move to responsibility, in regards to others and then ourselves, and from suspending sociality to consciously transforming it. In such a condition, instead of a permanent individualized fear, which can break down any sense of social cohesion, we move towards the idea of collective effort, coordination and solidarity within a common struggle, elements that in such health emergencies can be equally important to medical interventions.

This offers the possibility of a democratic biopolitics. This can also be based on the democratization of knowledge. The increased access to knowledge, along with the need for popularization campaigns makes possible collective decision processes that are based on knowledge and understanding and not just the authority of experts.

Biopolitics form below

The battle against HIV, the fight of stigma, the attempt to make people understand that it is not the disease of ‘high risk groups’, the demand for education on safe sex practices, the funding of the development of therapeutic measures and the access to public health services, would not have been possible without the struggle of movements such as ACT UP. One might say that this was indeed an example of a biopolitics from below.

And in the current conjuncture, social movements have a lot of room to act. They can ask of immediate measures to help public health systems withstand the extra burden caused by the pandemic. They can point to the need for solidarity and collective self-organization during such a crisis, in contrast to individualized “survivalist” panics. They can insist on state power (and coercion) being used to channel resources from the private sector to socially necessary directions. They can organize struggles for paid sick leave and for an end to measures such as eviction. They can put their collective ingenuity in practice to create forms of support for the elderly and those without any assistance. They can project, in all possible ways, the fact that today the struggle against the pandemic is a struggle waged by labour, not capital, by doctors and nurses in understaffed public health systems, by precarious workers in the vital supply chains, by those that keep basic infrastructure running during the lock-down. And they can demand social change as a life-saving exigency.

(This text is the slightly revised version of text that first appeared here: https://lastingfuture.blogspot.com/2020/03/against-agamben-is-democratic.html This revised form first appeared here https://www.viewpointmag.com/2020/03/20/against-agamben-democratic-biopolitics/)

^[1] The European Journal of Psychoanalysis has put together a special section on ‘Coronivirus and philosophers’ with a translation of Agamben’s intervention and the responses to it referred in this paragraph: https://www.journal-psychoanalysis.eu/articles/coronavirus-and-philosophers/. Agamben wrote a response to the criticisms addressed to his original intervention and a translation of this response can be found here:https://itself.blog/2020/03/17/giorgio-agamben-clarifications/

^[2] See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1, New York, Panteon Books, 1978, pp. 139–140. See also Michel Foucault,Society Must Be Defended. Lectures at the Collège  de France 1975–1976, Picador, New York, 2003, pp. 243-250.

^[3] Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1998.

^[4] ‘Power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere.

And "Power," insofar as it is permanent, repetitious, inert, and self-reproducing, is simply the over-all effect that emerges from all these mobilities, the concatenation that rests on each of them and seeks in turn to arrest their movement. One needs to be nominalistic, no doubt: power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategic situation in a particular society’ (Foucault, History of Sexuality.Vol 1, p, 93).

^[5] Michel Foucault, The Care of the Self. Volume 3 of the History of Sexuality, Pantheon Books, New York 1986; Michel Foucault, Le gouvernement de soi et des autres. Cours au Collège de France. 1982–1983, Paris, Gallimard / Seuil, 2008 ; Michel Foucault,Le courage de la vérité. Le gouvernement de soi et des autres II, Paris EHESS / Gallimard / Seuil, 2009.

A Review of The Implosion of Contemporary Capitalism by Samir Amin

David W. Pritchard

Department of English, University of Massachusetts Amherst

dpritcha@english.umass.edu

Abstract

This essay takes The Implosion of Contemporary Capitalism as an opportunity to ask the question of how the specific discursive mode of polemic fits into the overall project of the critique of political economy. Focusing on the figure of the ‘gap’ between structure and agency that Amin uses to characterise our conjuncture, I readImplosion both backward and forward, situating it against the backdrop of Amin’s foundational work in dependency theory inAccumulation on a World Scale and asking how the proposals he makes here contribute to the larger project of fostering a politics of transition. Ultimately I argue that Amin’s polemic falls short of its self-proclaimed ‘audacity’ insofar as it fails to grasp structure and agency dialectically; and I conclude by suggesting a way beyond this impasse by bringing forward the ‘Maoist terrain’ out of which Amin’s work emerges.

Keywords

Samir Amin – Maoism – dependency theory – transition – polemic

Samir Amin, (2013) The Implosion of Contemporary Capitalism, New York, NY: Monthly Review Press.

Criticism is no longer an end in itself, but simply a means; indignation is its essential mode of feeling, and denunciation its principal task.

— Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right

A polemic is a useful agent of estrangement. It effects a series of calculated reductions and exaggerations of the terms of a given debate, in order to lay bare the contours of the terrain of ideological struggle. It is less about taking a side than clarifying what the sides are by rearticulating them, at least from the outset. This means that polemics do not take the place of theoretical and historical analyses, but are attempts to situate those undertakings, often in the service of marking out the place where urgent political questions of agency and intention – that is to say, of consciousness – make themselves felt in and through analysis and critique. Whence, for example, Marx’s use of satire in his work as the figurative complement to his conceptual demonstrations of the torsions of the dialectic; the capitalist, to use only a very famous example fromCapital, is reduced to ‘Mr Moneybags’ in what amounts to a formal example of the process by which one comes to serve as the bearer of one’s class position within the capitalist mode of production.^[1] Thus we might also say of polemic that it mediates the contradictory relationship between form and content, and as such that it is of particular importance in a Marxist tradition that is concerned to move beyond Kantian antinomies and transcendental categories. But what happens when a work is comprised of a polemic distilled from a larger intellectual project? How does this reduction of a mode primarily characterised by reduction change how we encounter a work?

These are a few of the questions that animate Samir Amin’s The Implosion of Contemporary Capitalism. Amin is one of the central figures within Marxist dependency theory, a school of economics that sought to theorise the asymmetries between development in the capitalist core and the ‘underdeveloped’ nations of the periphery. Along with Andre Gunder Frank, Amin drew on the work of Rosa Luxemburg and Vladimir Lenin on imperialism to theorise the ‘development of underdevelopment’: that is, the notion that the unevenness between core and periphery was not a matter of natural fact or historical accident, but a deliberate consequence of, as well as an existential requirement for, the production and reproduction of capitalism. In this context, works likeAccumulation on a World Scale andUnequal Development served to lay the foundation for future work on the capitalist world-system and its uneven geographies; their insights, even if not explicitly acknowledged, continue to inform work done under the aegis of world-systems theory and critical geography. Amin is also responsible for coining the term ‘eurocentrism’, and has assayed it in multiple contexts – the most robust and concise of which is 1988’sEurocentrism – to elaborate a Marxist account of the transition from feudalism to capitalism that attends to the role played by the Arab world in this historical process.

This is not to say that Amin is a stranger to polemic. Implosion joins an array of slender volumes from the last decade that forcefully restate the basic premises and insights of dependency theory, using these to limn the political present and draw conclusions about what prospects there are for a robust anti-capitalist project on this combined and uneven territory. Amin beginsImplosion with something like a rationale for polemic in this context; he tells us that the purpose of this book is to traverse what he calls the ‘gap’ that exists between ‘the autumn of capitalism [and] the possible springtime of peoples’ (p. 7). This temporal gap is undergirded, he tells us, by a spatial one; for ‘capitalism is not merely a system based on the exploitation of labor by capital; it is just as much a system based on the polarized way in which it has been extended over the planet’ (pp. 7–8). The major themes of dependency theory are sounded here in condensed form: the centrality of imperialism to capitalist accumulation; the combined and uneven geographical development of capitalism; and the persistence of the development of underdevelopment as a primary lever for the reproduction of capitalism. This ensemble of concerns grounds the major political motivation forImplosion, which is the revitalisation of a strategic imaginary oftransition on the revolutionary left, to which end Amin concludes his book with a series of what he calls ‘audacious’ proposals. I will discuss these later on. For now, it is important merely to note that they all revolve in some way around the question of thenation, which is the category at the centre of Amin’s strategic thinking, in keeping with his longstanding commitment to Maoism, and from which all the strengths and weaknesses ofImplosion’s polemic emanate.

In what follows, these strengths and weaknesses will guide my consideration of polemic as a genre in light of The Implosion of Contemporary Capitalism. This does not mean I will focus on form at the expense of content; if anything, content is even more important than form in those moments when polemic runs aground on the complexities of the reality it seeks to intervene in and change. But this only emphasises the extent to which polemic is the form adequate to the unevenness that underwrites the ‘gaps’ we saw Amin identifying in our conjuncture. And thus thinking about polemic means thinking also about how it fits into the critique of political economy writ large. How does a reading ofImplosion as a polemic contribute to our understanding of larger and more systematic works in which polemic functions as one moment among many? What happens if we treat polemic as a mode of inquiry in its own right? What kinds of questions can we ask in and through polemic, that are perhaps less suitably posed in other modes or forms? In short, what can polemic do that other kinds of theoretical analysis cannot?

To get at the polemic in Implosion, it helps to start elsewhere in Amin’s body of work, with 1971’sAccumulation on a World Scale. Here we find a complete and thorough statement of dependency theory’s account of the combined and uneven development of capitalist production, in the name of what the book’s subtitle calls its ‘critique of the theory of underdevelopment’. In place of this theory – which holds that so many historical, geographical, even geological or natural accidents shape the trajectory of the ‘development’ of different nations – Amin proposes a theory of the development of underdevelopment, identifying the contradiction between the core and the periphery as the central one within the capitalist mode of production.^[2] Against a certain ideology of economism, Amin proposes a theory of unevenness. In the course of doing so, he hits upon two waypoints that a later, more condensed book like Implosion will build upon in the course of its polemic. The first waypoint emerges out of the distinction Amin makes between modes of production and social formations. He does so in order to make it possible to ‘[ask] why, at the center, the capitalist mode of production tends to become the only one (the formation tending to merge ideally with the mode of production), whereas in the periphery this does not occur.’^[3] This does not mean that there are nodes of the periphery that are outside of capitalism; Amin demonstrates that capitalism is not a tide that lifts all boats, but a profoundly uneven mode of production that attains dominance on a world scale precisely through its capacity to subsume or repurpose for value-production those forms and institutions proper to older modes of production that it encounters as it expands geographically. The upshot of this is that we cannot assume that identifying the core/periphery distinction as the fundamental contradiction of capitalism solves all of our theoretical problems. We have to attend to the particular instantiations of this contradiction as they articulate themselves within and around the residual and emergent formations that variously buttress – and possibly point up the possibilities for resistance to – capitalist accumulation. Class war is not waged on even terrain.^[4]

The second waypoint builds upon the first. Amin maintains that what Marx calls primitive accumulation is not only an historical but a permanent feature of the development of capitalism. If this strikes the reader as not being particularly contentious, this is perhaps due to the fact that world-systems theorists and critical geographers have succeeded in defending this thesis against those who begin their analyses of the present by positing some kind of radical break with the past.^[5] Even so, in 1971 it takes on polemical form: Amin argues that an ‘analysis of the contemporary mechanisms of primitive accumulation is essential for understanding the basis of the internal solidarities of “central” capitalist society (in particular, of the solidarity between proletariat and bourgeoisie which is at the origin of social democracy), and for understanding the nature of the internal contradictions of the peripheral formations.’^[6] Marx’s account of the transition from feudalism to capitalism, in other words, is at one and the same time historical and theoretical. It describes the emergence of capitalism on the world stage, and also gestures toward what Volume II of Capital will deal with: the reproduction of the capitalist mode of production.

The emphasis of Amin’s intellectual project, as these waypoints in combination suggest, falls on the political dimension of the critique of political economy. The preoccupation with the problem of transition is therefore at once objective and subjective: objective, insofar as it entails thinking about how social forms change in and through the real movement of history; and subjective, insofar as it holds that these changes are not visited upon societies from without, but bound up in the activity undertaken by those societies in the course of producing and reproducing themselves. This is not to say that understanding the contradictions of capitalism immediately and automatically tells one how to overcome them. Indeed, to paraphrase Adorno in terms Amin would no doubt embrace, the theory of surplus-value is not a theory of revolution. The point is to theorise the totality of transition as a dialectical relationship between structure and agency. And inAccumulation on a World Scale as much as inImplosion, it is to the latter term that Amin wishes to direct our attention.

This puts us in a position to understand why Amin chose ‘implosion’ as the figure for capitalist crisis and collapse. If capitalism is constantly compelled by its inner laws to use force to create ‘free’ labour where once there was none; if capitalism must navigate the uneven geography that accumulation on ever-greater scales produces and requires; if capitalism must do all this in the context of its own ‘globalisation’, that is, without the luxury of non-capitalist spaces into which it can expand – if all this is the case, then the reproduction of capitalism, however desperate and violent an affair it may be, remains the reproduction of capitalism. Systemic collapse does not automatically engender some new, let alone ‘better’, mode of production. The totality of social relations is still total; there is still no outside from which to launch an offensive or to begin building some new world. ‘Implosion’ highlights this point, at the same time as it clarifies that something other than the general laws of capitalism will have to be the agent of its supersession. We bring about the new world from the ashes of the old.

And the old world has been smouldering, according to Amin, since the 1970s at least, when capitalism attained the form of what he calls ‘generalized-monopoly capitalism’ (p. 14). This is nothing less than a ‘new stage of imperialism’ predicated on the agglomeration of monopolies into an ‘integrated system’ of ‘relatively autonomous companies’ which levy a ‘monopoly rent [...] on the mass of surplus-value (transformed into profits) that capital extracts from the exploitation of labor’ (p. 14). Capital accumulation is therefore ‘driven by the maximization of monopoly/imperialist rent-seeking’ (p. 15). In this configuration, the proletariat is also generalised. ‘Today,’ writes Amin, ‘the fragmentation of production resulting from capital’s strategy of using all the possibilities of modern technology while keeping control over subcontracted or outsourced production has, of course, weakened working-class solidarity and accentuated the class’s perception of a diversity of interests within itself [....] The proletariat thus seems to disappear at the very moment when the proletarian condition becomes generalized’ (pp. 31–2). Imperialism, in other words, does not change the agent of revolution so much as it expands it by expanding the boundaries of the capitalist mode of production. The primary contradiction is still that between labour and capital, but thescale of that contradiction is different.

At this point Amin sounds a Maoist note, one that will be familiar to readers of his work and which will blossom into a polemical melody in its own right over the course of Implosion.^[7] He suggests that the asymmetries between the working classes in the core and those in the periphery – the unevenness between different social formations – be construed not as an untranscendable horizon of differences in kind, but as ‘contradictions within the people’ whose resolution demands the formation of a ‘united front against the compradors’ (pp. 32–3). In other words, to traverse our conjuncture’s gap we require an organisational form capable of coordinating the diversity of struggles waged by a generalised proletariat, something in the vein of a revolutionary International. This proposition reveals the motivation of Amin’s polemical device: it points up both his fidelity to a classical model of revolutionary subjectivity constructed around the form of the party, and to an orthodox Marxist understanding of the proletariat as the subject and object of history, and as such the agent of revolution. It also appears to clarify his reductive rejection of the political significance of ‘social movements’ based on ‘“social categories” that express their ambitions in ways as diverse as the categories themselves’ (p. 11) with which Amin begins Implosion.

          It is not felicitous to conclude that Amin takes a hard-line, anti-identitarian stance with regard to social movements (although neither is it felicitous to defend his relatively simplistic account of these things). Rather, it seems that he wants to point up the hard and fast limits to this model of political struggle in terms of what it has and possibly could achieve. Whence his question about ‘the real distance between the things that can be transformed through the progress of social movements and the things that cannot be transformed without the transformation of state power itself’ (p. 11), which suggests that what’s at stake is not deriding movements like Occupy or the Arab Spring (in the present we might add Black Lives Matter and BDS to the list, among many other organisations that have sprung up in response to the rise of the far right around the world). Amin is interested in a sympathetic critique, an appraisal of the limits of social movements as political subjects or agents. Implosion deals with these limits implicitly, posing questions that, at least as far as Amin is concerned, the left can only answer outside of the framework provided by this or that social movement.

Hence the importance of the category of nation inImplosion that I noted above; and hence also the relevance of the distinction between modes of production and social formations that I brought forward fromAccumulation on a World Scale. If the nation is the basic building-block of the analysis of uneven development, which for Amin as for many others refers to both intra- and inter-national constellations of accumulation, then it is also the basis for thinking about political struggle against capital. The nation is therefore the basic unit for any politics oftransition – anyway, this is Amin’s contention. And it is a useful and provocative contention to make, especially since it throws into relief what falls generally outside of social movements’ purview: namely, the international contours of class struggle. Following Amin, we might say that social movements are hemmed in by the social formations they inhabit, whose outer limit is the nation; if we think at a higher level of abstraction, it becomes possible to triangulate different social movements, and to give organisational and institutional form to some of the stirrings of tendentially internationalist imaginaries one finds in those movements.[8]

I will return to this movement/party dialectic below. For now I want to stay with the national question in Amin, which is the basis for what is most compelling and remarkable in Implosion, as well as the place where the gap between form and content in Amin’s argument is most readily apparent. In keeping with our reading of this book as a polemic, it is simple enough to note that Amin essays to grasp and present complex constellations of social forces in fairly straightforward ways, reducing to a matter of a few sentences what elsewhere has been taken up in detailed and thorough ways. Often we are confronted with arguments based on conclusions Amin has drawn elsewhere in his more theoretically and analytically rigorous work. The problem is that some of his simplifications are, well, too simple. They are not amenable to a generous reading like the one I have done of his critique of social movements, which at the very least allows us to understand something about the limits of an approach (even if we do not share Amin’s cynicism regarding it). This is the outer limit of polemic as a mode, the point at which provocation lapses into opinion, where enthusiasm shades over into embarrassing intransigence. For instance, Amin’s account of the situation of China, in which we learn that China, which is not a ‘capitalist’ nation because land in China is not a commodity (p. 68), is uniquely poised to lead the world revolution. Any deviation from this position is a result of the pernicious ideological programme of ‘China bashing’ (p. 82) that has inhibited clear-eyed appraisals of China’s revolutionary achievements. It is not so much that Amin iswrong, although there is that (one wonders what the striking labourers across China would have to say about the idea that they are pawns of ‘China bashing’); the problem is that the contradictions that inform Amin’s argument go unilaterally slack, ossifying into binary oppositions with none of the dynamism that makes the core/periphery heuristic, to say nothing of a distinction like that between social formations and modes of production, such a powerful explanatory rubric in the first place.[9]

The severity of Amin’s missteps should not lead us to ignore what he gets right in the course of his polemic. The thumbnail sketches of ‘failed emergence’ in Turkey, Iran, and Egypt that precede the chapter on China are noteworthy; they sketch the revolutionary strides these nations made only to run aground when it came to economic ‘development’ or ‘modernization’ (p. 48). This was due, not to the hubris or arrogance of revolutionary nationalist movements, nor to the happenstances of geography and nature, but to the concerted interventions by the capitalist core that aimed to foster the conditions for the development of underdevelopment in perpetuity. So even if we cannot follow Amin all the way in his nation-based arguments, we can appreciate the attempt to think about transition in a global way, and to demonstrate the persistence of certain classical political problems into the current crisis. Chief among these is the struggle for national self-determination, which we cannot grasp without seizing upon the constitutive unevenness of its contours, a task which The Implosion of Contemporary Capitalism undertakes with audacity.

‘Audacious’ is Amin’s word, the adjective he uses to describe the vocation of left politics in his concluding chapter, ‘The Socialist Alternative: Challenge for the Radical Left’. This chapter features a number of striking proposals, although when it comes to the matter of their audacity the results are, well, uneven. On the one hand, nothing is particularly new about the tasks considered – the nationalisation of monopoly corporations, the de-financialisation and restructuring of global banking, and the de-linking of nations from the global market (p. 136). All of these initiatives would unfold, if at all, in and through the institution of the state, which makes sense given Amin’s involvement in the economic-policy oriented Third World Forum, but which hardly seem ‘audacious’ from the standpoint of revolution. Does not ‘policy’ ratify the legitimacy and power of the state, endorsing ideological narratives of the slow and rational movement toward progress? Isn’t it reformist? While there is truth in these objections, I am inclined to view the role of ‘policy’ in the context of theoretical speculation as a kind of utopian wager, an attempt to imagine the rational and planned organisation of a society which, as Amin repeatedly has recourse to remind us, is rent ever more anarchically asunder by the capitalist mode of production which simultaneously declines and persists on a world scale.

In the same utopian spirit, I wonder if there is not something audacious about eschewing a certain poetry of revolution. Amin does not tarry with the phenomenology of revolution and revolt; unlike theorists such as Frantz Fanon and Guy Hocquenghem, he writes about the tedious and pragmatic problems of what a revolutionary agenda – to be taken up by the revolutionary subject these other authors assay – might include. In this prose of the revolution, the gap between structure and agency is addressed almost exclusively from the standpoint of structure, both as the locus of crisis and the major problem in need of description or analysis. This makes consciousness an instrumental affair, which might go some way toward explaining why the particularities of China in the present fall by the wayside. Put bluntly, Amin sees structure or system as a form, and consciousness as itscontent. He has made, that is, a false choice between the poles of the objective mode of production and its social structures, and the subjective problems of agency, intention, and consciousness. And he has done so in a situation where the only way forward is to think these two terms together as two halves of a whole (and uneven) contradiction.

All of which is to say that there is no overarching concern with ideology as a concept inThe Implosion of Contemporary Capitalism. This is by design: Amin’s overall polemical contention seems to be that ideology alone is not the only battlefield where the struggle for transition will take place; it isn’t even the most important one. We can explain the crises and contradictions of capital, but doing so does not dispel them or make it possible easily to opt out of them. There still remains the question of what the rudiments of our transitional project will be, what organisations, institutions, and demands we can use to begin the difficult task of remaking the world. On the other hand, the absence of a concept of ideology more complex than straightforward domination and manipulation (by, for example, the news media (pp. 34–6)) resulting in ‘false consciousness’ leads to the unintended and non-polemical reduction of politics to precisely the economism that Amin has devoted his career to critiquing. Equating ideology with wrong or bad ideas undermines the theory of the development of underdevelopment; it posits a non-contradictory, uni-directional social world in which systemic change is progressive and linear after all – that is to say,even – insofar as the relation between core and periphery ends up being more like an antinomy than a genuine and moving contradiction. This has in part to do with Amin’s avowed stagism (p. 77; p. 109), but more to the point it is an object lesson in what happens when one bends the stick too far in the name of polemical intervention.

I want to stay with this metaphor of bending the stick – which originates in certain translations of What Is to Be Done? and has since become a watchword for polemic, especially in the tradition of Marxism-Leninism – because it usefully indicates how we could situate a reading of Amin in the context of a larger conversation about revolutionary politics and the transition out of capitalism. As I understand it, ‘bending the stick’ connotes a practice of useful distortion through which one emphasises certain aspects of a shared object of study and concern. It does not sweep away everything under consideration and replace it with a new, better problematic. It attempts to hone our attention to the situation at hand. So if Amin fails to grasp the granularities of ideology as both a category and a component of the material world, he nevertheless helpfully reminds us that consciousness is not reducible to reasoned argument and impassioned sensation. It is also made, manipulated, shaped by exploitation and the division of labour. What is ultimately at stake in the concept of revolutionary consciousness – a concept that revolutionary theory and politics cannot do without – is giving an account of precisely the extent to which agency is immanent to structure, produced by the constraints of a given historical situation and yet not reducible to so many emanations or reflections of the movement of value. Faced with a choice between voluntarism and fatalism, between spontaneity and organisation, the only possible answer isyes.

Amin’s misconceptions about ideology, then, have the capacity to bring us back to the great texts that have taken up the phenomenology of revolutionary struggle in greater detail. They invite us to reread these texts against the backdrop of what his polemical reduction brings forward about the workings of ideology. These texts – from The Wretched of the Earth toThe Screwball Asses, fromHistory and Class Consciousness to theLotta Femminista polemics surrounding the Wages For Housework campaign – all attempt to theorise the activity of mediation in ways that do not contrast with so much as complete the arc of Amin’s polemic. They are about spontaneity only insofar as spontaneity is the dialectical opposite number of organisation. Indeed,The Wretched of the Earth (to take one example) deals with spontaneity as something withboth grandeurand weakness; it is a moment in a total revolutionary process, whose end result is the construction of a liberated nation which then is tasked with participating in a genuine revolutionary internationalism.^[10] Amin is no Fanon, but he helps us mark the place of Fanon’s utopian desire for a new humanity within the unfolding of revolutionary struggle. People may make history, but they do not make it as they please; the revolutionary subject will be uneven, contoured by the geography of accumulation and immiseration and shot through with different temporalities; it may well even begin its life as a reaction against further encroachments by capitalism into the lifeworld of the generalised proletariat.^[11] Nevertheless, it will emerge, and at that point we will be able to consider in more detail the proposals Amin has laid out as blueprints for a utopian future.

If Amin’s stick-bending underestimates the role of consciousness in a revolutionary process, it nevertheless marks out the place where consciousness would appear in the course of that process. This is what the figure of the gap does: it limns the place of some future agency. Yet it seems to imply we require some prior agency in order to traverse it (as if by sheer force of will). Amin’s shortcomings in the domain of ideology allow us to specify a third term in the gap, namely, that it may well have been engineered by some other agent – in which case it is strikingly homologous to the processes that Marxist theory ranges under the heading of primitive accumulation, the political concomitants to capitalist reproduction. This brings us back to the importance of primitive accumulation for Amin’s work writ large: as a theory of the contingency of capitalism, primitive accumulation lays the groundwork for a fully-fledged and systemically-oriented political opposition to that system. I would go so far as to say that Amin scandalously implies that the revolutionary subject, like primitive accumulation, emerges in the nexus mediating capitalist production and reproduction. This is where the significance of social movements might come into play. To read Amin somewhat against himself, we may say that to the extent that social movements – the example I used above was MBL – direct their energies at the processes of primitive accumulation, so do they tendentially begin to articulate the contradiction between movement and party. This is a key point, especially if we situate it against the backdrop of what J. Moufawad-Paul has recently dubbed ‘the Maoist terrain’ of revolutionary struggle, where what is at stake is the ‘revolutionary tradition that occupies a political sequence between the twin orthodoxies of party monolithism and movementist utopianism’.^[12]

On the face of it, this contradicts the Amin-ian antinomy between social movements and parties. Recall, however, that for Amin the problem is that social movements are limited, which we might well say about parties, too – this is what I understand Moufawad-Paul to be saying in the formulation just quoted, too. Both writers are concerned not to reduce political struggle to one of its two possible ‘orthodoxies’ on the left. Doing so would beggar the whole dialectic of reform and revolution, entirely foreclosing on the matter of transition. As for the question of where revolutionary agency resides – with movements or with parties – we might answer neither, following Maoism in holding that the agent of revolution is the people. This brings us back to Amin’s elliptical allusion to Mao Zedong’s essay ‘On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People’, where Mao states very explicitly that ‘the concept of “the people” varies in content in different countries and in different periods of history in the same country’, and where also he argues that ‘contradictions among the working people are non-antagonistic’ as opposed to those between capital and the people.^[13] Notice how Mao invites us to think of the people as a national figure, which resonates with Amin’s nation-centric mode of presentation in Implosion and elsewhere. Notice, too, that the people is not a homogeneous grouping but a collective with internal contradictions all its own, which suggests that the basis for revolutionary organisation is not dogmatism but solidarity.

In closing I want to think a little bit about solidarity, which informs the very gesture of polemic. If, as I began by saying, polemics are attempts to lay bare the stakes of a given debate through exaggeration and reduction, then The Implosion of Contemporary Capitalism succeeds even in its failures. It forces us to rearticulate the field on which ideological struggle takes place, which is a useful exercise for anyone to do. On the other hand,Implosion fails insofar as it does not address any contradictions other than antagonistic ones, leaving to one side the debates about agency, intention, and tactics as it repeatedly hammers home what one can only assume Amin’s (at least Marxist, if not Maoist) audience already knew going into the book: that capitalism has reached some kind of breaking point, that it will not magically turn over into communism, that something is to be done and we have to ask what. To this we can only say that it is more fuel for the anti-organisational fire of certain left-liberal critiques of the party-form, which masquerade as concerns about the ability of Marxist organising to address the miseries of gender, race, sexuality; a list which we do well to note does not include class because class as a category for Marx is analytically distinct from any kind of ‘identity’ with any determinate content. Amin’s vision of revolutionary transition amounts to a constellation of bad abstractions to the extent that it posits an almost absolute break between the politics of solidaristic alignment and the determinations of world-historical consignment to a standpoint from which one must set out to see, think, and (hopefully) transform the whole.

This is to say that Amin’s polemic winds up right where we started: with the need, not for moderation, but for ever more audacity. By a dialectical twist, Amin has bent the stick too far and therefore failed to bend it far enough. His proposals call attention to the limits of social movements with reformist demands and invite us to think instead in terms of transition; but these same proposals fall short of giving an adequate account of transition that grasps structure and agency as part of a dynamic movement in which, to paraphrase Marx again, we make our history, although not as we please or in circumstances of our own choosing. In this context, ‘solidarity’ is not ‘correct thought’ as a matter of content, but a way of knowing that cuts enthusiastically across the imagined distinctions between party and social movement, mediating between these two poles, elaborating the principal and non-principal contradictions in and among them (and the principal and non-principal elements of those contradictions). It is the principle for collective activity and the basis for revolutionary struggle. Revolutionary theory unfolds from the standpoint of solidarity; in a few moments in The Implosion of Contemporary Capitalism we glimpse this. These are the strongest, most clear-eyed moments, the moments when Amin affirms that the politics of transition may not be fun, but they will no doubt be, to paraphrase Lenin fromThe State and Revolution, joyous.The Implosion of Contemporary Capitalism is a deeply imperfect book, but it asks important questions and, however unevenly, directs our attention to the uneven and combined revolution that we will make, even if we cannot choose its circumstances.

References

Amin, Samir 1971, Accumulation on a World Scale: A Critique of the Theory of Underdevelopment, New York, NY: Monthly Review Press.

Amin, Samir 2006, ‘What Maoism Has Contributed’, Monthly Review Online, 21 September, available at: <https://monthlyreview.org/commentary/what-maoism-has-contributed/>, accessed 11 March 2017.

Amin, Samir 2013a, The Implosion of Contemporary Capitalism, New York, NY: Monthly Review Press.

Amin, Samir 2013b, Three Essays on Marx’s Value Theory, New York, NY: Monthly Review Press.

Ching Kwan Lee 2007, Against the Law: Labor Protests in China’s Rustbelt and Sunbelt, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Fanon, Frantz 2004, The Wretched of the Earth, translated by Richard Philcox, New York, NY: Grove Press.

Federici, Silvia 2004, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation, New York, NY: Autonomedia.

Federici, Silvia 2012, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle, New York, NY: Autonomedia.

Hao Ren (ed.) 2016, China on Strike: Narratives of Workers’ Resistance, edited byZhongjin Li and Eli Friedman, Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books.

Harvey, David 2003, The New Imperialism, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hocquenghem, Guy 2009, The Screwball Asses, translated by Noura Wedell, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Jameson, Fredric 1981, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich 1987, What Is to Be Done? and Other Writings, edited by Harry M. Christman, New York, NY: Dover.

Luxemburg, Rosa 2003, The Accumulation of Capital,translated by Agnes Schwarzschild, London: Routledge.

Mao Zedong 1971, Selected Readings from the Works of Mao Tse-Tung, Peking: Foreign Language Press.

Marx, Karl 1976, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Volume One, translated by Ben Fowkes, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Moufawad-Paul, Joshua 2016, Continuity and Rupture: Philosophy on the Maoist Terrain, Winchester: Zero Books.

Ngai, Sianne 2015, ‘Visceral Abstractions’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 21, 1: 33–63.

Paulson, Justin 2002, ‘Uneven Reification’, The Minnesota Review, 58–60: 251–64.

Rosenberg, Jord/ana 2014, ‘The Molecularization of Sexuality: On Some Primitivisms of the Present’, Theory & Event, 17, 2, <https://muse.jhu.edu/article/546470>.

The Movement for Black Lives 2016, ‘Platform’, available at: <https://policy.m4bl.org/platform/>, accessed 1 February 2018.

^[1] See Ngai 2015 for an overview of examinations of Marx’s prose style in this connection.

^[2] Amin 1971.

^[3] Amin 1971, p. 21.

^[4] I am sensitive to critiques of the social formation/mode of production distinction, which, as Fredric Jameson notes, runs the risk of reproducing ‘the very empirical thinking which it was concerned to denounce, in other words, subsuming a particular or an empirical “fact” [the social formation] under this or that corresponding “abstraction” [the mode of production]’ (Jameson 1981, p. 80). At the same time, the kernel of truth at the heart of this binary is that ‘every social formation or historically existing society has in fact consisted in the overlay and structural coexistence of several modes of production all at once, including vestiges and survivals of older modes of production, now relegated to structurally dependent positions within the new, as well as anticipatory tendencies which are potentially inconsistent with the existing system but have not yet generated an autonomous space of their own’ (p. 80).

^[5] There are a number of debates surrounding the category of primitive accumulation, both in terms of how Marx uses it and its relevance to our current conjuncture. David Harvey, for instance, argues that primitive accumulation now outstrips the extraction of surplus value at the point of production as the primary means of valorisation (Harvey 2003, especially pp. 137–82). Silvia Federici offers an account of the transition from feudalism to capitalism that insists, among other things, on the centrality of primitive accumulation to contemporary capitalism (Federici 2004). More recently, Jord/ana Rosenberg has argued that the theory of primitive accumulation is at once a critique of, and points the way beyond, the current fascination with thing theories and molecular ontologies of revolt: see Rosenberg 2014. This essay is a useful starting point for fleshing out some of the intricacies of the debate about primitive accumulation that, regrettably, this note and this review more broadly do not have room to consider more fully.

^[6] Amin 1971, p. 135.

^[7] For more on Amin’s Maoism, see Amin 2006.

[8] For example, we might read the platform of the Movement for Black Lives (MBL) as a document written within a national framework. And yet the demands that make up this platform point self-consciously toward other, homologous dynamics in the peripheries of capitalism: whence the avowed solidarity of MBL with occupied Palestine. Even from within the particularities that render social movements insufficient for Amin, then, we find gestures toward possible supersessions of that particularity in the name of unapologetic anti-capitalist universalism.

[9] For a detailed account of the clash between labour and capital in China since the late 1980s, see Ching Kwan Lee 2007 and Hao Ren (ed.) 2016.

^[10] Fanon 2004.

^[11] On this dynamic vis-à-vis revolutionary consciousness, see Paulson 2002.

^[12] Moufawad-Paul 2016, p. xiii.

^[13] Mao Zedong 1971, p. 433.

A Review of The Political Force of Musical Beauty by Barry Shank, andMusic and Capitalism: A History of the Present by Timothy D. Taylor

Mark Abel

School of Humanities, University of Brighton

M.Abel@brighton.ac.uk

Abstract

This is a review of books which address two related issues of interest to musical Marxists: the political nature of music and the relationship between music and capitalism. The review comprises a critique of the Rancièrian framework underpinning Shank’s theorisation of musical beauty and politics, and an assessment of Taylor’s account of the music business in the era of neoliberal globalisation.

Keywords

music – aesthetics – politics – Rancière – capitalism – world music

Barry Shank, (2014) The Political Force of Musical Beauty, Durham, NC: Duke University Press,

Timothy D. Taylor, (2016) Music and Capitalism: A History of the Present, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

I have long been perturbed by the fact that my musical tastes overlap considerably with those of Kenneth Clarke. Clarke was, until the recent general election, the longest serving MP in the British parliament, having occupied all the major ministerial offices of British government, including those of health and education under Thatcher’s premiership. He has also served as Deputy Chairman of the multinational corporation British American Tobacco. And yet, despite these impeccable establishment credentials, in a series of programmes for BBC radio, he revealed himself to be a perceptive and knowledgeable student of jazz, appreciative of even its more radical and politically conscious practitioners such as Charles Mingus and Max Roach.

          How can this be? How can someone who, when Chancellor of the Exchequer, was responsible for policies designed to protect the interests of corporations and the rich against those of working people, a man who lobbied against stronger health warnings on cigarette packets in order to maintain the profits of the tobacco industry, simultaneously appreciate music born of an oppressed section of society which revolutionised the process of music-making and challenged the established cultural values cherished by society’s elites? The most obvious way of squaring that circle is to deny any connection between music and society, especially politics, either by regarding music as pure entertainment or by isolating it to a hermetically-sealed aesthetic realm. The fact that Clarke and I both appreciate jazz thus becomes no more of a conundrum than, say, our both liking Thai food.

          Barry Shank offers an alternative explanation which does not deny music’s political component. On the contrary, Shank insists on an immanent connection between aesthetics and the world of people and events, between artistic beauty and politics, arguing that the pleasures that derive from musical listening are both aesthetic and political.[1] This is a refreshing view in the context of contemporary writing on music; but how, exactly, is music political? Marxist and Marxism-influenced writers on music, including Adorno, Bloch and Attali, argue that in its sounds and its language music expresses meanings and values which are political by virtue of their social and historical derivation. Shank, by contrast, argues that political meaning is not so much embodied in the music as generated in the moment of listening.[2] Drawing on the postmodernist Lawrence Kramer, he argues that it is precisely music’s non-referentiality, its inability to speak directly about the world, that makes it the object of subjective desire and the repository of extra-musical meaning imparted by those who experience it.[3] Once he moves on to discuss specific music, however, he finds himself unable to stick to that position.

          Shank’s starting-point has the virtue of understanding music, like politics, as a collective and social experience. Though primarily a cultural theorist, he is clearly influenced by the perspective of ethnomusicology in viewing music’s social function as ‘creating shared senses of the world’, the belief that the collective experience of music confirms ‘a commonality that feels right, that announces that this we that we are at this moment is the rightwe, thewe that we are meant to be’.[4] This, not consonance or harmony or symmetry, is, for Shank, what musical beauty consists in.

          But he also identifies a repressive aspect of ethnomusicology’s tendency to ‘reduce music’s political force to an expression of a group’s already existing and stable identity’.[5] On this understanding, music does not change anything, but merely reinforces sets of values which pre-exist it. The group or society in question is understood as a community which is united around shared values, in which no serious divisions or disagreements exist, while the connection between the music and those who make and experience it is not explained, but simply assumed.[6]

          Shank seeks to avoid the implicit conservatism that characterises analyses which essentialise and homogenise the relationship between peoples and cultures. What is required, according to Shank, is a different conception of politics and the relationship of music to it. ‘Political community is not characterised by sameness … [it] does not consist of those who agree on the matters at hand, but instead is made up of those who recognise each other as speaking with legitimate political voices’ – a polis.[7] Politics is a field which is inherently agonistic rather than unified. And because of this, music is uniquely fitted to express it aesthetically because its ‘sonic interweaving of tones and beats, upper harmonics and contrasting timbres … model[s] the experience of belonging to a community not of unity but of difference’.[8]

          This explains my Kenneth Clarke conundrum. ‘Why are we disappointed and frustrated when we discover that we don’t agree … on important things’ with those with whom we have shared a musical experience? Because what we have shared is not agreement on any political position but our collective belonging to a pluralistic political community. Through the beauty of the music, we have jointly experienced a conception of a better future even though we may have very different ideas of what that future might be and how it might be achieved.

          What Shank has done here, under the influence of Laclau and Mouffe, is to push back the status of ‘politics’ from the concreteness of definite struggles around specific demands against identifiable opponents to that of an enabling condition, the terrain which is presupposed by all political claims and goals.

The experience of musical beauty never enforces a particular social attitude or belief. The musically produced common instead establishes the sensibility within which social associations or political positions can be perceptible and, therefore, become a matter for debate.[9]

This formulation of Shank’s might be viewed as going no further than saying that music is social, and at times it appears that he is simply offering a definition of music. For instance, the word ‘political’ in the following sentence is surely superfluous:

The political force of music derives from its capacity to entrain subjects to feel pleasure in particular combinations of auditory difference and to reject other combinations as noise.[10]