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.

References

Amin, Samir 2013, Samir Amin: Pioneer of the Rise of the South, Cham: Springer International Publishing.

Appadurai, Arjun (ed.) 1986, The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Austin, John Langshaw 1962, How To Do Things With Words, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Baffes, John 2004a, ‘Cotton: Market Setting, Trade Policies, and Issues’, Policy Research Working Paper Series № 3218, Washington D.C.: The World Bank, available at: <http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/571921468781805093/Cotton-Market-setting-trade-policies-and-issues>.

Baffes, John 2004b, ‘Tanzania’s Cotton Sector: Reforms, Constraints and Challenges’, Development Policy Review, 22, 1: 75–96.

Beckert, Sven 2014, Empire of Cotton: A Global History, New York, NY: Knopf.

Bernstein, Henry 2010, Class Dynamics of Agrarian Change, Halifax, NS: Fernwood Publishing.

Bhaduri, Amit 1986, ‘Forced Commerce and Agrarian Growth’, World Development, 14, 2: 267–72.

Byres, Terry 1996, Capitalism from Above and Capitalism from Below: An Essay in Comparative Political Economy, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Byres, Terry 2003, ‘Agriculture and Development: The Dominant Orthodoxy and an Alternative View’, in Rethinking Development Economics, edited by Ha-Joon Chang, London: Anthem Press.

Çalışkan, Koray and Michel Callon 2009, ‘Economization, Part 1: Shifting Attention from the Economy Towards Processes of Economization’, Economy and Society, 38, 3: 369–98, <https://doi.org/10.1080/03085140903020580>.

Çalışkan, Koray and Michel Callon 2010, ‘Economization, Part 2: A Research Programme for the Study of Markets’, Economy and Society, 39, 1: 1–32, <https://doi.org/10.1080/03085140903424519>.

Chayanov, Aleksandr Vasil’evič 1966, On the Theory of Peasant Economy, Homewood, IL: R.D. Irwin.

Cheal, David J. 1988, The Gift Economy, London: Routledge.

Coase, R.H. 1937, ‘The Nature of the Firm’, Economica, 4, 16: 386–405.

Daviron, Benoit and Peter Gibbon 2002, ‘Global Commodity Chains and African Export Agriculture’, Journal of Agrarian Change, 2, 2: 137–61.

Fine, Ben 2002, The World of Consumption: The Material and the Cultural Revisited, London: Routledge.

Fine, Ben and Ellen Leopold 1993, The World of Consumption, London: Routledge.

Gereffi, Gary, John Humphrey and Timothy Sturgeon 2005, ‘The Governance of Global Value Chains’, Review of International Political Economy, 12, 1: 78–104.

Gilbert, Christopher L. 1996, ‘International Commodity Agreements: An Obituary Notice’, World Development, 24, 1: 591–616.

Harriss-White, Barbara 1999, ‘Power in Peasant Markets’, in Agricultural Markets from Theory to Practice: Field Experience in Developing Countries, edited by Barbara Harriss-White, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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.

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[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]

A Review of Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory by Enzo Traverso

Joseph Fronczak

Department of History, Princeton University

joseph.fronczak@princeton.edu

Abstract

Taking up Walter Benjamin’s idea of ‘left-wing melancholy’, yet investing the concept with redemptive qualities, Enzo Traverso argues that melancholy offers the left a resource for mobilising a return to revolutionary politics. Melancholy, Traverso suggests, was always a hidden dimension of the left’s consciousness, a dimension that surfaced after the political defeats at the twentieth century’s end. With great insight, Traverso interprets how the traumas of 1989 produced a fundamental transformation of the left’s state of consciousness, altering even such basic perceptions as the left’s sense of time – as the left traded future-imaginative hope for past-nostalgic memory. This post-1989 memorial gaze, Traverso suggests, continues to define the left’s sense of the present. This article interrogates Traverso’s central argument regarding melancholy’s possibilities as a revolutionary resource, challenges his conceptualisation of a post-1989 ‘present’, and argues that in Traverso’s analysis melancholy operates more directly as a protective stance after the eclipse of utopias than as a potent resource for revolutionary revival. Nonetheless, Traverso’s attention to the left’s ways of living in time illuminates the emancipatory aspects of its temporal imagination.

Keywords

Traverso – left – twentieth century – neoliberalism – melancholy – memory – history – defeat – Benjamin – Brown – Pontecorvo – time

Enzo Traverso, (2016) Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory, New York: Columbia University Press.

A year into the German depression and a little more than a year away from Hitler’s accession to power and the Weimar Republic’s demise, Walter Benjamin captured the mood of the German intelligentsia with his 1931 essay ‘Left-Wing Melancholy’. Written with fierce class animus, it castigated bourgeois intellectuals who imitated the radical language, tenor, and imagery of the Weimar left. Benjamin accused them of creating commodities posing as political art for self-absorbed, materialistic consumers. In particular, Benjamin took aim at one of Berlin’s most prominent poets, Erich Kästner, who wrote ‘for people in the higher income bracket, those mournful, melancholy dummies who trample anything or anyone in their path’. Kästner’s poetry, Benjamin charged, was banal noise, ‘like a city café after the stock exchange closes’. Benjamin’s political and aesthetic criticism launched into an ethical critique of Kästner’s work: that it fed parasitically on the true ‘political lyricism’ of giants like Bertolt Brecht. Whereas Brecht’s art unsettled its readers, provoking them to new ‘consciousness and deed’, Kästner’s exploitation of Brechtian art produced only ‘complacency and fatalism’ by encouraging crass and well-fed readers to ‘reconcile’ themselves to their political quietism. Benjamin then concluded his essay with a vulgar analogy comparing bourgeois sentiment passing itself off as left-wing radicalism to physiological flatulence, evidence of creative, and political, constipation. And, Benjamin suggested, ‘Constipation and melancholy have always gone together.’[1]

Enzo Traverso, then, would seem to have his work cut out for him in his 2016 book of critical theory, Left-Wing Melancholia, in which he argues, intelligently and elegantly, that melancholy can offer the left quite the contrary: a resource for the politically vanquished to mobilise anew. This Traverso describes as ‘a fruitful melancholia’, capable of capturing what philosopher Judith Butler has called the ‘transformative effect of loss’ (p. 20). It is an intrepid argument that depends on an idiosyncratic reading of Benjamin. It depends in particular on the antinomy that, while Benjamin spat upon the melancholic poses of ‘the middle stratum’ in ‘Left-Wing Melancholy’, he nonetheless elsewhere suggested the ideologically productive power of brooding for the earnestly radical intellectual. As the political theorist Wendy Brown has pointed out, Benjamin’s essays on Baudelaire approached melancholy ‘as something of a creative wellspring’.[2] Traverso, then, has focused his argument on a slightly different facet of political melancholy than that which provoked Benjamin in ‘Left-Wing Melancholy’. What Benjamin called left-wing melancholy was left-wing only in a cynical way; it was the temper appropriated by the fraudulent mimic who has co-opted leftist aesthetics as revolutionary chic. Traverso, rather, is interested in the condition of the committed and faithful leftist intellectual made melancholic by mounting political defeat: Brecht in mourning.

Defeat without Defeatism

Or perhaps more precisely, Bensaïd in mourning. If Left-Wing Melancholia begins with Walter Benjamin, it ends with Daniel Bensaïd, whom Traverso reveres as the unbowed organic intellectual who remained, politically speaking, heroically militant even after communism fell and who remained, intellectually speaking, heroically productive even in personal illness and decline. As such, though Traverso attends to the leather-jacketed Leninist’s glorious ‘street-fighting years’ surrounding May ’68, he emphasises instead the books the ever-engagé philosopher wrote from 1989 onward, beginning with his broadside against that year’s bicentennial commemorations of the French Revolution,Moi, la Révolution. The works that followed were sketches jotted by a master painter in a hurry to put something of his ideas down on paper: shortly after the ideological loss of 1989, Bensaïd received his diagnosis ofaids. The layering of personal and political sorrows made these late works densely melancholy.

Nineteen Eighty-Nine marks Traverso’s great caesura, when communism in its twentieth-century form collapsed and the left was left to find new ground to stand on. Though Traverso suggests that the left has always had ‘a hidden dimension’ of melancholy – consider, he suggests, the annual ritual of secular requiem at the Communards’ Wall (le mur des Fédérés) or the ‘authentic popular emotion’ of mourners at Palmiro Togliatti’s 1964 funeral (p. 48) – his point of emphasis is that ‘it came to the surface only at the end of the twentieth century, with the failure of communism’ (p. 38). To a degree, Traverso’s argument about the increase of melancholy’s importance is relative, regarding what remains when much is lost. As the revolutionary tide ebbed, he seems to suggest, melancholic reefs remained, visible now but there all along, previously submerged beneath the left’s surface-consciousness of utopia, revolution, heroic action, and faith.

There is a difference between faith and fidelity. Traverso recognises considerable dignity in the fidelity of the Marxist intellectuals who, amid the neoliberal onslaught at century’s end, held on to that which was redemptive in the left’s emancipatory causes of the past. For Traverso, Bensaïd epitomised this pained persistence. And for Traverso, it was not simply in spite of defeat that Bensaïd endured. The provocative surprise of his argument is that defeat itself provided a dialectical fuel for those willing to stomach its frustrations. Traverso calls this the ‘metabolism of defeat – melancholic but not demotivating or demobilizing, exhausting but not dark’ (p. 51). He suggests that he takes even this insight from Bensaïd, but that is not quite right. He refers to one of those late mournful writings of Bensaïd, Le pari mélancolique (1997) – ‘the melancholy wager’. But there what Bensaïd bet on actually was revolution. He did so melancholically, yes, because, at the twentieth century’s end, revolution looked like a long bet. He bet nonetheless because the stakes were so high, because the alternative was to fold and accept barbarism. Traverso’s bet is subtly but significantly different. Traverso is betting on melancholy itself, in the hope of winning revolution.

That is, Traverso’s melancholy is not only descriptive, it is prescriptive. He argues that melancholy not only defines the extant left since the collapse of the Soviet Union, it suits the left as well and promises to spark resurrection. This contrasts with Brown’s depiction of melancholy made at roughly the same time that Bensaïd made his wager. In an essay that appeared in 2003, Brown gazed upon on the ruins of twentieth-century socialism and concluded that left-wing melancholy ought to be resisted. ‘It signifies ...’, she argued, ‘a certain narcissism with regard to one’s past political attachments and identity that exceeds any contemporary investment in political mobilization, alliance, or transformation’.[3] More than that, Brown insisted, a dimension of melancholy that weighed particularly heavily on the left since the ascent of neoliberalism was the intellectual alienation from the creative possibilities of the radical present – what Benjamin called Jetzt-Zeit, ‘now-time’ – by clinging, as she put it, to ‘formulations of another epoch’. Conceptual analysis caught in twentieth-century pasts, Brown suggested, ‘not only misreads the present but also installs traditionalism in the very heart of its praxis, in the place where commitment to risk and upheaval belongs’.[4]

          Against Brown, Traverso wants to tell a story with memory of defeat and melancholy on page one, culminating in a future of revolution and utopia. But his own authorial melancholy, his own elegiac mood, keeps pulling him into memorial, historical, and mythical pasts, and the story he does tell begins with revolutions past and ends in melancholies present. This, again, is not the story he wants to tell. Traverso’s argument is that melancholy is a valuable resource for the left to mobilise toward revolution. The example he provides, in his introduction, is Act Up, the militant, radically democratic group organised in New York during the Reagan years to demand access to affordableaids drugs. Act Up was, Traverso concludes, ‘the product of a fruitful, political melancholia’. He offers activist-intellectual Douglas Crimp’s words as capturing ‘the spirit of this book’ when Crimp said, ‘Militancy, of course, but mourning too: mourningand militancy.’ (p. 21.)

          But after its mention in the introduction, Act Up disappears from Left-Wing Melancholia. Douglas Crimp as well. Crimp would fit in well among Traverso’s constellation of brilliant twentieth-century intellectuals who experienced loss and yet endured. Traverso quotes Crimp from a 1989October article, ‘Mourning and Militancy’. Crimp went on to say more on the relationship of mourning and militancy – and indeed cautioned against what he called the ‘spectacle of mourning’ in his 2002 book reflecting onaids resistance and queer politics, titledMelancholia and Moralism.[5] Act Up’s disappearing act has a fascinating effect on Left-Wing Melancholia: though he holds up Crimp’s formula as the essence of his own book, Traverso offers no sustained examples of melancholy-as-mobilisation. It is his central claim, but the introduction’s gesture toward Act Up is the book’s only historical example of effective mass mobilisation rooted in melancholy.

It is an odd evasion, though not ultimately a failing. It creates an intriguing void at the centre of the book, an absence akin, actually, to melancholy, in particular the sort of melancholy that moves Traverso: the sorrow not for things lost but for hopes snuffed out still unfulfilled. Nonetheless, Traverso’s unwillingness to execute his argument appears to be something of a counter-example to his claim: he does seem rather stuck in melancholy, not entirely immobilised perhaps but certainly more caught up in the past than the present. Which was precisely what Brown warned against.

In Traverso’s mind, 1989 marks a break even more profound than the ideological chasm created by communism’s collapse. For Traverso, 1989 marks the temporal divide between past and present. As a result, the present is portrayed in the book as quite flattened out, and it is this flattened present – quite different in its ramifications from ‘now-time’ – that makes Left-Wing Melancholia an unsettling read. The aftermath of the Cold War, where Francis Fukuyama has announced ‘the end of history’ and ‘memory studies’ is sweeping the academy, and François Furet has just writtenThe Passing of an Illusion, is where one still finds much of Traverso’s mind. The present from which Traverso writes, in other words, is a point in time he has stretched out across years and, more to the point, it never quite sticks to the twenty-first century. As if his subconsciousness were trying to expose his reluctance to enter this century that is no longer so new, when he comments that it ‘is born as a time shaped by a general eclipse of utopias’, his wording for it is ‘the twentieth-first century’ (p. 5). When he similarly refers to ‘the early twentieth-first century’, the reader even begins to wonder whether this ‘twentieth-first’ were an intentional play on words, but it becomes evident that it is simply a revealing, poignant, slip of the mind (p. 18). It is, then, unsettling to realise how dramatically Traverso’s mind is caught in the twentieth century, but it does not at all read like the narcissism that Brown describes; indeed, the temporal traumas betrayed inLeft-Wing Melancholia evoke in the reader a deeply felt sympathy with Traverso. Nonetheless, his present always trails behind the reader, still visible on the horizon but seen in the reflection of a rear-view mirror. Traverso proposes an urgent utopian politics of tomorrow rooted in mourning for what was lost by 1989. He spars with those who would consign the twentieth-century history of leftist causes to oblivion; yet he has portrayed a present with nothing to say about the left’s causes and concerns of the twenty-first century present. This, again, was precisely what Brown warned against.

          Once one gets past the explicit argument into the flow of the book, melancholy actually operates more as a personal virtue of the vanquished than as the resource for collective revival Traverso initially proposed it to be. It serves as a stance by which one can survive the harsh climate of neoliberalism without being co-opted by its forces. This does not necessarily make for an effective revolutionary strategy. In his influential intellectual history, The Last Utopia (2010), Samuel Moyn traces a parallel path away from the revolutionary dreams of utopia that had animated the left for much of the twentieth century toward the human-rights defences adopted late in the century. Moyn recognises in human rights an ideological programme that largely became appealing during the rise of neoliberalismbecause it was ‘a minimalist, hardy utopia that could survive in a harsh climate’, the neoliberal climate that had desiccated ‘more maximal plans for transformation – especially revolutions’.[6]

But Moyn’s deeper point is that ‘the human-rights revolution’, whatever its tactical utility, was a strategic trap: however it might be able to withstand the elements, it nonetheless lacks the elements needed for ‘more maximal plans’ (read: socialism). Moyn warns that, ultimately, the human-rights project did not have the wherewithal for mobilising positively to escape the present. Traverso argues that melancholy offers both stiff armour for surviving assault and an arsenal for a counterattack, but he puts forth little in the way of evidence, far from sufficient to dissuade a reader of Wendy Brown’s warning that melancholy is likely toimmobilise, likely enough that one ought to seek out other, more promising mobilisational resources. Or, in the words attributed to the fine dialectician Joe Hill, ‘Don’t mourn, organise!’ 

Mourning Revolution

In ‘Melancholy Images’, an original chapter apparently written for this book, Traverso reads the twentieth-century left’s films ‘as barometers of left consciousness’ (p. 87). It is the book’s most captivating chapter and also the one that captures the most of Traverso’s complex argument. It is also where Traverso’s narrative trajectory most directly runs counter to his premise of melancholy leading to revolution. The Marxist filmography he presents moves in the other direction and ends trapped in melancholy. It is worth addressing, then, at some length.

Traverso examines, among other films, Luchino Visconti’s The Earth Trembles (1948), Gillo Pontecorvo’s anticolonialist tragediesThe Battle of Algiers (1966) andBurn! (1969), and Ken Loach’sLand and Freedom (1995). The chapter pursues two arguments critical to the broader question of left-wing melancholy. First, Traverso offers a general conceptual claim suggesting that the problem of defeat has consistently served as a central, even defining concern of leftist cinema. Moreover, he insists, leftist filmmakers’ treatment of defeat offers a key to unlocking these filmmakers’, and also the broader twentieth-century left’s, temporal imagination. The other argument offers a claim of historical change suggesting that 1989 marked a schism in leftist cinema that, because it was especially pronounced, lets one see with especial clarity Traverso’s general 1989 line of division. In film as elsewhere, he suggests a shift in the left’s focus from themes of revolution, anticipation, and utopia to those of defeat, resignation, and nostalgia. Moreover, from the particular vantage point of leftist cinema, Traverso sees particularly vividly how this shift produced a fundamental transformation of the left’s very state of consciousness, altering even such basic perceptions as the left’s sense of past, present and future. Traverso writes, ‘From Eisenstein to Pontecorvo, fromBattleship Potemkin toBurn!, left movies described struggles and announced victories’. In contrast, films of the neoliberal 1990s described suffering and recited memories, ‘assuming defeat as the starting point of their retrospective inquiry’ (p. 117).

Part of why the chapter is so illuminating is that it is in art such as cinema that the hopes lying on the horizons of any historical moment can be glimpsed. This is of great importance to Traverso, whose mourning for the twentieth century concentrates on its emancipatory future-visions rather than on its accomplished facts. He notes Slavoj Žižek’s aperçu that melancholy actually emanates from lack rather than from loss: Traverso explains that he mourns for ‘communism as it was dreamed and expected, not as it was realized (state socialism)’ (p. 52).[7] The fall of communism, then, reconfigured the left’s temporal consciousness, away from Ernst Bloch’s notion of dreaming of that which is ‘not yet’ (noch nicht) to remembering ‘a no-longer-existing place, a destroyed utopia that is the object of melancholy art’ (p. 119). This is luminous critical theory; it also accepts melancholy as a coda to the denouement of defeat rather than a mobilisational prelude to a new story of utopian dreaming and revolution, thus causing considerable trouble for Traverso’s primary argument.

          Even so, along the way, Traverso shares compelling interpretations of defeat’s place in the leftist imagination. To begin, he lyrically expresses his belief that the ‘most impressive filmic representation of a left defeat is probably Luchino Visconti’s La terra trema (The Earth Trembles)’ (p. 87). InThe Earth Trembles, not only do historical, memorial, and mythical threads of time interweave, different moments in time converge and cross. Visconti’s neorealist tragedy derives from a beautiful old dialect-laden novel, Giovanni Verga’s 1881 family epicThe House by the Medlar-Tree, about the life of fisherfolk in the Sicilian commune north of Catania, Aci Trezza.[8] Many of the actors in The Earth Trembles were not professionals; they were villagers who spoke (and on screen speak) dialect, ‘the language of poor people’, as the film explains. Traverso situatesThe Earth Trembles within the postwar neorealist impulse to show ‘society and human beings as they were’, but sees as well a neoclassical current cutting across it that elevates the fisherfolk into a time-transcendent mythological realm, giving their plight an allegorical grandeur absent in Verga’s historicist novel. Like the novel, the film offers a decidedly local story, but it concentrates the local so sharply and refracts it through such a mythologising lens that the story takes on a miraculous, fabulous universality: Aci Trezza a Sicilian Macondo.

The film also tells a more emphatically modern tale. In the novel, debt slowly, intractably strangles the family, which reacts philosophically by relying on the folk wisdom of ancestral proverbs. In the film, the merchant class – mercilessly and overtly practising class politics – swiftly strikes the family down after young 'Ntoni attempts to bypass the local wholesalers and sell his catch directly to the market at Catania. (The fish market in Catania remains today a sight to behold, staging real-life dramas of class, labour, capital, and carcass-commodity five days per week.) Unlike the fatalistic novel, the Brechtian film projects an insistence on defying social injustice even though, as Visconti himself once commented, such defiance ‘almost always results in catastrophe’ (p. 90). Such long-odds risk-taking is Bensaïd’s wager.

The tragedy perhaps could speak even more directly to Traverso’s theme of melancholy: class struggle does not fail in The Earth Trembles; rather, it fails even to materialise –lack disguised asloss. This, indeed, is the tragedy: 'Ntoni, like Brecht’s tailor of Ulm, acquires a socialist vision of collective mobilisation – he sees vividly how to defeat the merchant class that daily feeds off the fishermen’s labours – but he is alone, followed by no one. Alone, he is crushed and forced to beg for work from the merchants who have, by the film’s end, become Fascists. 'Ntoni suffers defeat because he was bornahead of his time. Socialism appears only ephemerally at the film’s end, a fugitive ghost-of-the-future haunting a cement wall in the form of graffiti, a hammer and sickle.

Visconti’s promise of future glory, even in defeat, is imperative to Traverso, and the same sort of promise looms even more imposingly over Pontecorvo’s films. For Traverso, Pontecorvo is outright ‘[t]he filmmaker of glorious defeats’ (p. 92). The Battle of Algiers shows not the 1962 triumph of Algerian independence but rather the preliminary mid-1950s near annihilation of the National Liberation Front (fln). Liberation is only briefly, obliquely, foreshadowed in an Eisenstein montage of the masses at the film’s end.

          Traverso usefully allows more screen time for Burn!, by far the lesser known of Pontecorvo’s two masterpieces of Marxist cinema. Set in Queimada, a fictional Caribbean colony of the Portuguese empire, the film not only portrays revolutionary anticolonial insurgency but embeds it within an intrigue-laden world of inter-imperial espionage and provocation. William Walker, the white protagonist of the film, is a British agent seeking to sabotage rival Portugal by sowing discontent among the colonial subjects of Queimada. Engineered by anagent provocateur, the revolution nonetheless becomes real, overtaking even Walker. By reaching past the near-contemporary French Algeria ofBattle of Algiers to the nineteenth-century colonial Caribbean ofBurn!, Traverso expands the time-and-space scope of his own interrogation, pulling in Latin American revolutionary praxis of the past and also alluding to the struggle of Vietnamese revolutionaries against US empire of the film’s present (more explicitly even thanBattle of Algiers,Burn! is a political allegory of Vietnam). While other parts ofLeft-Wing Melancholia can feel cramped by discussion of familiar European intellectuals, here Traverso’s vision of the twentieth-century left opens up to vast geographical and social worlds.

They are worlds of imagination more than of fact. When Edward Said later asked Pontecorvo what books had influenced his rendering of Caribbean history, the question ‘drew a blank from him’.[9] The film is interested in history, but in mobilising it rather than following, or even remembering, it. The name of the British agent provocateur inBurn! – William Walker – Pontecorvo took from the Slave Power filibuster war criminal from the antebellum US South who made himself president of Nicaragua. The hero of the film is José Dolores, whose name is taken from the black colonel, José Dolores Estrada, who led a Nicaraguan army to victory against Walker’s forces in the 1856 Battle of San Jacinto, after the filibuster had legalised slavery. The Dolores ofBurn! was performed with a rare charismatic intensity by Evaristo Márquez, a black Colombian man who had never acted before and spoke only a Spanish-African Creole, not the English his role called for.[10] Márquez’s Dolores heroically does not run from defeat, does not fear death, and before he is executed taunts Walker that white colonial rule only owns the moment, adding, ‘till when’ (p. 95)? ‘Till when’ is the future-pregnant question that both The Battle of Algiers andBurn! mobilise history to pose.

Pontecorvo’s liberty with narrow facts speaks to a methodological argument that Traverso makes later in his book, following Benjamin, critical of historicism. For Traverso, as for Benjamin, historicism ‘accepts as ineluctable the victory of the rulers’ (Traverso’s words) leading to a certain ‘empathy with the victors’ (Benjamin’s) (p. 222). Traverso is interested in countering both the sense of ineluctability and the perspective of victors. Pontecorvo, however, was probably only interested in contesting the latter: his films imply a certain fatalism of conflict, and a certainty of future liberation; the embittered critique is that powerful empires put off the inevitable and make the ordeal of reaching the necessary conclusion bloodier and more brutish than it need be. Such inevitability is not Bensaïd’s wager – it is actually akin to the historicism that Traverso, like Bensaïd and Benjamin, attempts to subvert.

Goodbye, Lenin!

Pontecorvo’s absence after Burn! eats at Traverso, as it has at many of the director’s admirers. However, by withdrawing after his 1960s glories, the director personified Traverso’s theme of leftist retreat with melancholic dignity. Said and Tariq Ali’s 1992 documentaryPontecorvo: The Dictatorship of Truth took the director to task for the unproductivity of his later years, even going so far as to cruelly play a couple of the commercials for Italian television that Pontecorvo directed as an older man to make ends meet. When Ken Loach met Pontecorvo, Loach has said, he ‘chided him for not making more films’.[11] Pontecorvo lived into the twenty-first century without producing another major political film. During the 1980s, he had considered a tale of Óscar Romero’s assassination, which he hoped would star Gene Hackman.

The Romero (as directed by John Duigan) that did emerge, in Traverso’s terrible 1989, exemplified the transformation of leftist consciousness that Traverso charts. Coincident with the left’s turn from ‘not yet’ to ‘no longer’ was a depoliticisation of politics. That is, not only did the left abandon dreams of the future for memories of the past, it also turned to remembering, even memorialising, the past in terms of suffering instead of struggle. With the 1980s–’90s ascent of memory studies, Traverso (who has written extensively on Holocaust memory) observes, ‘A previously discreet and modest figure bursts on [to] the center of the stage: thevictim’ (p. 10).[12] Romero made such an appealing figure in 1989 because he was a martyr, and also because he had shied away from ideological struggle. He was a reasonable man, a moderate man, shot down even though he sought to avoid the extremes of his century. Borrowing a fine line from one of his earlier books, Traverso laments the neoliberal era’s deadening of the ideological past:

The memory of the Gulag erased that of revolutions, the memory of the Holocaust replaced that of antifascism, and the memory of slavery eclipsed that of anticolonialism: the remembrance of the victims seems unable to coexist with the recollection of their hopes, of their struggles, of their conquests and their defeats (p. 10).[13]

More than Pontecorvo’s absence, Traverso implies, it was the films that were made that abandoned the left’s hopeful vision.

Traverso views Theo Angelopoulos’s Ulysses’ Gaze (1995) as a memorialisation of socialism-past that, typical of the 1990s, portrays revolution as reliquary. For Traverso, Angelopoulos presides over a funeral for communism that is poignant but bereft of the sublimatory militancy mobilised at Togliatti’s funeral. Traverso describes the film’s most famous scene, of a ‘melancholic broken statue of Lenin’ floating along the Danube, as a funeral procession (p. 99). Traverso sees in the ceremony ‘an astonishing reverse of Eisenstein’sOctober’, in which it is a statue of Alexander III that is toppled (p. 79). It is the most painful of symbolic reversals: Lenin’s desacralisation mirroring the Tsar’s. Traverso could easily have seen here as well a visual quotation of Roberto Rossellini’sPaisan (1946): the scene that opens the sixth episode, the partisan’s corpse floating down the Po River, murdered by German fascists, observed by riparian crowds of women and children, silent like those on the banks of the Danube inUlysses’ Gaze. The melancholy of Angelopoulos’s funeral scene demobilises – revolution ‘leaving the stage of history’ (p. 79). The melancholy of Rossellini’s scene mobilises: it is clear that the gathered crowds will now sympathise with the resistance; indeed, a nearby partisan and an American intelligence agent promptly risk their lives to rescue the corpse for a proper burial. Young Gillo Pontecorvo, an antifascist active in the wartime Italian Resistance, was in the theatre watchingPaisan in 1946 when he decided he wanted to make movies.

Traverso finds an exception to the neoliberal nineties’ immobilisational memorialisation in Loach’s Land and Freedom, released the same year asUlysses’ Gaze. Traverso finds that ‘Loach’s melancholic gaze is quite the reverse of resignation’ (p. 106). Loach establishes the memorial mood for his Spanish Civil War tragedy with a framing story set in the present-day 1990s after the death of an old Liverpudlian Communist who had volunteered to fight fascism in Catalonia. The film ends with a funeral scene of its own. The antifascist’s granddaughter, Kim, who upon his death has immersed herself in his old leftist memorabilia, stands over his grave, her fist raised in an antifascist salute as she clenches his red neckerchief. The act of mourning has made a militant of her, and her mourning is inextricable from her engagement with the past.

As compelling as Traverso’s interpretation of leftist cinema’s shift from the future-promises of 1969’s revolutionaries to the past-memorialisations of 1989’s martyrs – José Dolores to Óscar Romero – might be, it is still jarring that Traverso takes 1989’s aftermath to represent the present. Indeed, his selection of films is indicative of how haunted Traverso’s mind remains by that moment of twentieth-century communism’s death. Consider the contrasting moods of Loach’s films on the Spanish Civil War and the Irish Civil War. Loach releasedLand and Freedom in 1995;The Wind that Shakes the Barley came out in the twenty-first century, well into the Iraq War (2006). They are very different films even though they both romanticise the same style of popular revolution, endorse similar social-revolutionary impulses within civil wars, contain stunning parallel scenes of egalitarian assembly and free speech, and portray similarly tragic defeats. They differ, radically, in how they develop Traverso’s key themes of melancholy and militancy and temporality and memory. WhereasLand and Freedom finds common ground with Traverso’s mood,The Wind that Shakes the Barley resurrects Pontecorvo’s revolutionism. WhereasLand and Freedom mourns militants past,The Wind that Shakes the Barley offers unflinching militancy now and forever. InLand and Freedom, Kim, in the 1990s, remembers the Spanish Civil War; inThe Wind that Shakes the Barley, the film’s present-day occupation of Iraqis the British occupation of Ireland. The two occupations become, to borrow Traverso’s phrase, ‘synchronic times’ (pp. 204–34). The bluntness and ferocity of imperial violence as well as the left’s strident anti-imperialism and raw class anger all palpably hit the screen inThe Wind that Shakes the Barley. And the film derives its power from the reality that its impressions belong to the film’s twenty-first century present. UnlikeLand and Freedom, it is not a pedagogical film, instructing its audience to relearn revolution from the past. It is a representation – a barometric reading, as Traverso would have it – of its ‘now-time’, all the more effective because of its analogical surface ostensibly set in the past. InLeft-Wing Melancholia, Traverso interpretsLand of Freedom at length, but does not mentionThe Wind that Shakes the Barley. Traverso’s feel for the present still scratches at the nostalgic midnight of the 1990s.

Paradigm of the Melancholy Man

Time plays tricks in Left-Wing Melancholia and this is nowhere more sublimely revelatory than the moments where it becomes apparent that Traverso remains in some ways psychically trapped in that midnight moment. Deeply learned in the European historiography of time, historicity, and temporality, Traverso movingly depicts time as a live, unpredictable, traumatising, and refractory force.[14] All the more affective, then, that he cannot quite anchor himself amid its currents. Much of what Traverso depicts as the present has slipped away and, indeed, been pushed away by a twenty-first century left he doesn’t much recognise here. A sense of how decidedly Traverso’s present is no longer present can be gained by considering that Left-Wing Melancholia’s preface is dated December 2015, more than a quarter century since his signal moment of defeat. The question is no longer whether – Traverso vs. Brown – the left can mobilise melancholy, it ishow could the left mobilise melancholy over loss that, for so many of us, was before our time?

None of which is to say that Traverso should have written a different, more programmatic book for present concerns. It is to say, rather, that he has given his readers an elusive work of art, and readers ought to take it as their own task to decide what is to be done with such a book. The way Traverso’s unmoored mind floats across the surface of time might make him an unreliable strategist-theoretician of contemporary mobilisation, but it gives the book a rare, quite moving, pathos. Part of this quality is undoubtedly because of the past-involved nature of the subject, melancholy, and part of it is undoubtedly because Traverso has, here and now, clipped together material written in several other moments written for several other argumentative purposes, from as far back as 2002. The result is a palimpsestic multiplicity of texts about a multiplicity of temporal vectors. Indeed, the material reality of Traverso’s text begins to melt into the very form of his theoretical insights – in sync with those of Benjamin and Bensaïd – about non-contiguous, skipping, criss-crossing, looping temporalities. Time-related concepts – pasts, presents, and futures; ‘not yet’, ‘now-time’, and ‘no-longer’; memory-time and historical time; times of politics and times of strategy; messianic time and dialectical time – all dance here in syncopated spins and swings that allow the reader to make sense of their rhythms.

There is much intellectual beauty and much insightful surprise in Traverso’s uncommon book, so, again, my point is not to wish he had written firmly in the present for the present, but rather to observe that the path Traverso has taken has led him and his readers somewhere else in the realm of time, a location where the view has horizons quite different from our own in the here and now. And, to a certain extent, my point is to observe that Brown’s critique of left-wing melancholy – written in the thick of the neoliberal age – does seem to apply to this book, which does seem inhibited by its melancholic attention to past political attachments from investing in any contemporary political question. Traverso’s loyalties to twentieth-century European socialism, and his pain at its demise, do indeed appear to hijack his attempts to arrive in the present, let alone to drive into the future. In spite of Traverso’s imaginative intellectual concoctions, melancholy still seems at the book’s end to go more smoothly with immobilisation than with mobilisation. Benjamin, after all, called indecisive, haunted Hamlet ‘the paradigm of the melancholy man’ (p. 47).

And yet – what to make of it that even a reader unpersuaded by the book’s main thesis finds in Left-Wing Melancholia a rare power? It is not a particularly long book, but it is labyrinthine, filled with coils, turnbacks, track-switches, and retracings. It reads like an old book, and it is alarming to recall that it was published as recently as 2016. If it doesn’t feel particularly attuned to the present, it is a book built to last, and its proper review will always be the next one. It will certainly remain a contentious, defiantly antinomic, demanding, imposing, frustrating, and inspiring text after many reads, each one different from the last.

It is a pastward-looking book nostalgic for future-gazing. It is a melancholy book the argument of which melancholically gets stuck insisting that melancholy can mobilise. Left-wing melancholy is not only Traverso’s subject, it is his method. He writes elegiacally, with an intensity that betrays the depth of his own left-wing melancholy, an emotional pit of suffering and pain and loss and voids. The writing at certain moments has a colt-like quality, not quite tamed, not entirely under even the author’s control. This disturbs the argument of the book, but the reward of such bolts of imagination is for the reader to witness Traverso’s mind happening upon unexpected and startling vistas. Moreover, here, as in all of his work, Traverso gives us a world where there are no inevitabilities. States here do not wither away; classes do not dig their own graves; and history does not march, forward or elsewhere, lockstep or elsewise. Rather he offers an enchanted yet fallen world where time leaps, dodges, and gets away to return another day, and where those who have fallen, vanquished, can return too. It seems a hopeful belief, but Traverso is uncertain.

References

Benjamin, Walter 1999, ‘Left-Wing Melancholy’, in Selected Writings. Volume 2, Part 2: 1931–1934, edited by Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Bensaïd, Daniel 1989, Moi, la Révolution. Remembrances d’une bicentenaire indigne, Paris: Éditions Gallimard.

Bensaïd, Daniel 1997, Le pari mélancolique. Métamorphoses de la politique, politique des métamorphoses, Paris: Éditions Fayard.

Brown, Wendy 2003, ‘Resisting Left Melancholia’, in Loss: The Politics of Mourning, edited by David L. Eng and David Kazanjian, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Crimp, Douglas 2002, Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on aids and Queer Politics, Cambridge, MA: The mit Press.

Davis, Natalie Zemon 2000, Slaves on Screen: Film and Historical Vision, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Evans, Martin 2013, ‘In Short: Ken Loach on The Battle of Algiers’,openDemocracy, 8 January, available at: <https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/in-short-ken-loach-on-battle-of-algiers/>.

Koselleck, Reinhart 2004, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, translated by Keith Tribe, New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

Moyn, Samuel 2010, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Said, Edward 2000, Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural Essays, London: Granta Books.

Traverso, Enzo 1995, The Jews & Germany: From the ‘Judeo-German Symbiosis’ to the Memory of Auschwitz, translated by Daniel Weissbort, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.

Traverso, Enzo 1997, L’histoire déchirée. Essaie sur Auschwitz et les intellectuels, Paris: Éditions du Cerf.

Traverso, Enzo 2010, L’histoire comme champs de bataille. Interpréter les violences du XX^e siècle, Paris: Éditions La Découverte.

Traverso, Enzo 2016, Fire and Blood: The European Civil War, 1914–1945, translated by David Fernbach, London: Verso.

Verga, Giovanni 1995, I malavoglia, Turin: Giulio Einaudi Editore.

Žižek, Slavoj 2000, ‘Melancholy and the Act’, Critical Inquiry, 26, 4: 657–81.

[1] Benjamin 1999, pp. 425–6.

[2] Brown 2003, p. 458.

[3] Brown 2003, p. 459.

[4] Brown 2003, p. 463.

[5] Crimp 2002, p. 198.

[6] Moyn 2010, p. 121.

[7]Žižek 2000.

[8] Extensive footnotes bring to life the Sicilian dialect of Verga’s Risorgimento era in the Einaudi edition: Verga 1995.

[9] Said 2000, p. 285.

[10] Davis 2000, p. 47.

[11] Evans 2013.

[12] See, for example, Traverso 1995; Traverso 1997.

[13] The line is taken from Traverso 2010, p. 265. For Traverso’s stirring reclamation of ‘the age of catastrophe’, 1914–45, as antifascist history, see Traverso 2016.

[14] See, for example, Koselleck 2004.

A Review of Marx’s ‘Capital’, Method and Revolutionary Subjectivity by Guido Starosta

Kaveh Boveiri

Department of Philosophy, Université de Montréal, Montréal

kaveh.boveiri@gmail.com

Abstract

This review essay examines Marx’s ‘Capital’, Method and Revolutionary Subjectivity by Guido Starosta, published as Volume 112 of theHistorical Materialism Book Series. The thesis proposed here is that, notwithstanding the claim proposed in the book, according to which a genuine theory of revolutionary subjectivity has to be practical transformative criticism rather than philosophical, such a theory is doomed to remain at a high level of abstraction (as the author himself admits), thus necessitating further, specifically-philosophical engagement. It will be shown that owing to the insufficiency of such an engagement, principally in the content–form relationship based on a Marxian interpretation, the thesis that Starosta puts forward in this book is not adequate as a response to competing accounts of revolutionary subjectivity.

Keywords

Guido Starosta – method – form – content – revolutionary subjectivity – Capital

Guido Starosta, (2016) Marx’s ‘Capital’, Method and Revolutionary Subjectivity,Historical Materialism Book Series, Leiden: Brill.

A post-Capital Revolutionary Subjectivity

Is the working class alienated? Is it (nonetheless) the revolutionary subject? A positive response to the first question makes a positive response to the second question challenging. This challenge is rigorously taken up by Guido Starosta, professor of the history of economic thought at the National University of Quilmes in Argentina and adjunct investigator at the Council for Scientific and Technical Research, in Marx’s ‘Capital’, Method and Revolutionary Subjectivity (hereafterMCMRS). Although Starosta has written many articles on different topics in Marxian critique and political economy, this is his first book-length work, which is based on his PhD dissertation defended in 2005 in the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick. Earlier versions of Chapters 3, 4, and 8 were also published previously. Notwithstanding a highly technical theme, stylistically the book is well written, with clear and smooth transitions from chapter to chapter and section to section. It is written in a language that steers clear of pedantry, and the author regularly signals the progress of the overall argument, making the book more accessible than it might otherwise be to the reader not well-versed in the rich content that the book addresses. This makes it accessible both to specialists in the field and general readers, though admittedly in different ways.

The topic of the book is announced as ‘emancipatory subjectivity. More precisely, it is a scientific inquiry into social determinations of the revolutionary subjectivity of the working class’ (p. 1). In focusing on the revolutionary subjectivity of the working class, in contrast to the approach that questions the Marxian postulate of the revolutionary character of proletariat,[1] the book represents a major contribution to reviving Marxist theory in current discussions, and is hence heartily recommended. It has also the merit of familiarising us with the works of Juan Iñigo Carrera,[2] a significant but little-known Argentinian Marxist, as they are contextualised and developed by Starosta.

While the young Marx would have told us that genuine criticism transforms its subject matter, Starosta would reformulate this under the slogan of ‘practical criticism’ (p. 4), the science that the working class must be armed with (p. 287), where the subject of practice is the proletariat that becomes scientifically self-conscious in its struggles. This practical criticism does not forget that the impetus of history is not criticism but revolution,[3] and hence only such a criticism can be taken as an inherent, inseparable component of revolutionary change. Through this, Starosta aims at proving his point ‘about the revolutionary nature and contemporary relevance of the Marxian critique of political economy’ (p. 5). The critique of political economy is also introduced as ‘the dialectical critique of the capital form’ (p. 6).

Starosta’s account in the first part of the book shows how the author of the Paris Manuscripts goes from underscoring the materiality of human productive activity to the need to abolish philosophy as uncritical and alienated thought. Thereafter, he draws a distinction between dialectical logic and the dialectical method. Whereas the former applies a formalistic methodology to each particular case and content, including those of political economy, the latter ‘follows in thought thespecific necessity immanent in social forms themselves’ (p. 7). This is also shown to go beyond merely methodological implications and to be intertwined with ‘the determinations of the political action of the working class’ (p. 7). While Feuerbach succeeded in naturalising philosophy, and even in seeing the role of humanity, he could not incorporate the concrete socialisation of man, which in Marx also entailed the transcendence of philosophy. In this way Marx replaces this philosophy with ‘practical criticism’ as the ‘emancipating conscious practice’ (p. 180). Feuerbach’s materialism is superseded by Marxian social materialism and its simultaneously inherent scientific characteristic. The need to elaborate on such a development and connection led Marx to writeCapital; this is where the second part of Starosta’s volume begins.

The first part thus lays the ground for the second part, which is rather a dialogue between Volume I of Capital and theGrundrisse. According to Starosta, this dialogue is needed to fill in the account inCapital, which he considers unsatisfactory, forin the three volumes of Capital‘Marx no longer advances, in any systematic manner, in the unfolding of the material and social determinations of the revolutionary subject’ (pp. 270–1), whereas the Grundrisse ‘unfolds the content of the social necessity for the abolition of the capitalist mode of productionwithout specifying itsform’ (p. 287).

Chapters 4, 5, and 6 discuss different aspects of ‘commodity’, as the starting point of Marx’s exposition in Capital, and its relationship with revolutionary subjectivity. Chapter 4 deals with the commodity-form in Marx’s investigation in the critique of political economy. It is later shown that the comprehension of revolutionary subjectivity is possible only if a mediated and complex unity of the analytic movement of going from the concrete to the abstract is taken along with the returning synthetic movement from the abstract to the concrete. The latter entails the mental reconstruction of the concrete. In other words, it is the movement from the analytical apprehension of all social forms to their synthetic reproduction. This leads to the ‘constitution of the political action of wage labourers as the form taken by the revolutionary transformation of the historical mode of the human life process’ (p. 194).

Chapter 5 highlights the fetishistic characteristic of the commodity. This fetishistic characteristic goes hand in hand with the fact that the commodity is ‘the formal subject of the process of human metabolism, [that] realises its own determinations’ (p. 159). Through the socialisation of these determinations, the commodity fetishism is linked to the fetishism of capital. This is further developed in Chapter 6, where commodity fetishism is shown to be related to the subjective alienation of the producers of the commodity. At stake here is to show the subjectively alienated aspect of the commodity-form. This, according to Starosta, is to be sought by practical criticism, as the dialectical social science that penetrates into the action. Here he finds the well-known passage from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte ‘unfortunate’. We read in that passage:

Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.[4]

A Review of Speaking of Flowers: Student Movements and the Making and Remembering of 1968 in Military Brazil by Victoria Langland

Carlos Eduardo Rebello de Mendonça

Institute of Social Sciences, Rio de Janeiro State University

carloseduardorebellodemendonca@gmail.com

Abstract

An historical account of the founding and subsequent political role of the Brazilian National Students’ Organisation (UNE) prompts a discussion concerning how an organisation intended as an authoritarian corporatist authority for management of university students’ interests came to play an important role in the Brazilian version of the Global 1968, therefore suggesting an analysis of the causes of post-1960s middle-class radicalism and identity politics.    

Keywords

Brazil – university politics – military dictatorship, 1964–85 – 1968 student activism – middle-class radicalism

Victoria Langland, (2013) Speaking of Flowers: Student Movements and the Making and Remembering of 1968 in Military Brazil, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

The bourgeoisie, while utilizing the support of the petty bourgeoisie, distrusts the latter, for it very correctly fears its tendency to break down the barriers set up for it from above.

—— Trotsky[1]

 ‘Speaking of flowers’: We enter the work threading upon an all-too familiar trope of history-writing in a postmodern setting – the divide between the historical fact and its remembrance, the manner in which the subject of memoryremembers a particular past event (whose paramount relevancy is assumed) in order to ascertain its meaning, said meaning being then consigned to public consciousness; in the metaphor used by Jan Stern in a book about Pinochet’s 1973 coup in Chile, this remembrance of the event acts as a ‘nervous knot’ interrupting day-to-day workings and surfacing as ascream of the social body.[2] Remembrance therefore is produced by the event’s concrete happening; nevertheless, remembrance is at the same time a distorting mirror, which transmits and at the same time transforms the consciousness of the event into something that does not necessarily exist ‘by itself’.

The book starts by telling us how, already well past mid-1968 in Brazil, a protest song by the singer and songwriter Geraldo Vandré became enormously popular as the unofficial hymn of the ongoing mass-manifestations against the military dictatorship – ‘our Marseillaise, born amid the struggle, sung, spontaneously and emotionally, by an ever greater number’, according to the belated comment of satirist Millôr Fernandes.[3]

Something, then, which poses the issue of the relationship between the Marseillaise in itself (one of the many patriotic songs from the French Revolution) and theMarseillaise as aparticular set of memoriesabout the French Revolution, not onlyof it. Just as theMarseillaise had to face competition, was banned, accepted grudgingly – until it eventually became the hallmark of a patriotic and conservative bourgeois consensus – and was eventually superseded byThe Internationale as a revolutionary song –, in the same way, Vandré’s song eventually (and in untimely fashion) became the quintessentialmemory of the Brazilian 1968 mass protest, standing, however, in a problematic relationship with the 1968 events taken in themselves. Just as Eric Hobsbawm titled his work on the historiography of the French Revolution ‘Echoes of the Marseillaise’,[4] so could Professor Langland have titled hers ‘Echoes of Speaking of Flowers’.

Professor Langland’s task, however, was far more difficult than Hobsbawm’s, who wrote a work on the eve of the Great Revolution’s bicentennial and in the shadow of its world-accepted relevance. Professor Langland had to write, at the same time – writing in English and for an anglophone public – a history of the Brazilian students’ movement and its role in the opposition to the 1964 coup and the ensuing military dictatorship, as well as a history of thememories that developed out of and around the same movement.

Any of these single tasks would be difficult to tackle in the space of a single book; as it is, she had to achieve both. If Professor Langland were writing in Portuguese and for a Brazilian audience, she could have been much more direct in dealing with what is her book’s most interesting subject, the interplay between actual happenings, their remembrance, telling and writing; as it is, she has to deal, Ranke-like, with the eigentlich gewesen – the ‘making’, as her title goes– before she proceeds to the ‘remembering’ – the latter being far more original and intriguing than the former, and sometimes crowded out by details of the bare facts. 

As Professor Langland begins in her Introduction, Speaking of Flowers is as important, in both music and lyrics, for what it tells about the protests in 1968 Brazil as for what it choosesnot to tell. It rejects militarism and the military, who ‘live without reason’, but at the same time conveys an alternative vision of ‘conqueringmasculinity’ (p. 4) of its putative singers – with ‘flowers on the ground and history in [our] hands’– that turns one back towards the gender-charged nature of much of contemporary protesting: the challenging of traditional conceptions of appropriate gender behaviour by the increasing participation of female students in political organisation, acts of violence– and premarital sex – as if general militancy still ‘rested on masculinist and heteronormative assumptions’ (p. 4), something underscored by the ‘steady marching rhythm’ of the song itself (p. 2). 

This is something that is more implied than stated in Langland’s text: that Vandré’s song, as much as it intends tocelebrate the ongoing event, at the same time standsin contradiction to it: by speaking in its lyrics of the revolutionary scenery as ‘schools, streets, fields and building-sites’ (a progression ending in the all-too-familiar peasant–worker pair) it depicts an image of the mass upsurge according to the at-the-time all too familiar line of a 1950s Soviet poster: the standard militant as a male representative of a particular class collective. However, as Langland elaborates in the following first chapter, one of the hallmarks of the development of the Brazilian students’ movement that attained self-sustaining momentum during the 1960s was precisely the transition from the ‘student’ as simply the junior member and younger replacement of the (ruling and/or middle) class, towards the student as a subject unto herself – the transition from conventional class politics to identity politics, with all the consequent changes in political discourse. 

As Langland explains at the start of Chapter 1, even if university-level education had existed in Brazil since the early 1800s, following the flight of the Portuguese Court from the Napoleonic army and the temporary (1808–21) transfer of its seat to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil failed to develop a proper university as an institution; what was created instead were professional programmes – cátedras – attached to lifelong, tenured professors,catedráticos, teaching a particular discipline. What developed in Brazil from the early-nineteenth to the early twentieth century– in sharp contrast to Spanish-speaking Latin America– was not the university ascorporate institution, but as a network of isolated faculties, with the students in the role of individual pupils to a prominent figure teaching a particular profession. In this mechanism of co-optation, agency remained firmly in the hands of the senior party, with the juniors as dependent subordinates. Hence the fact that students were not supposed, well into the Vargas era, even when politically active – as many undoubtedly were – to represent views and stances other than those representative of the ruling class as a whole: ‘student politics’, as distinguished from a sample of the ruling class’ politics, did not exist. Hence the fact that the pioneering early-twentieth-century students’ organisationCasa do Estudante do Brasil, founded in 1929 by feminist poet (and high-society lady) Ana Amélia Carneiro de Mendonça, functioned merely as a charitable and cultural venue concerned with cheap lodgings and meals, amateur theatrics, and other similar activities. Casa do Estudante, however, attained membership of the international, Brussels-based organisation, the CIE (Confédération Internationale des Étudiants), and as such was acknowledged asthe national organisation of Brazilian students as a whole, something that enabled it to act as parent organisation to the later, Vargas-era corporate organisation the UNE (União Nacional dos Estudantes).

The creation of UNE followed the late-1937 coup that created Vargas’s personal dictatorship, which abolished electoral politics, thus rendering ‘corporatist and other forms of political pressure ever more critical’ (p. 36). As Vargas’s interest from 1937 on was in creating something approaching what might be called, in Dahl’s terminology, an Inclusive Hegemony, i.e., a network of corporatist organisations providing the dictatorship with a grassroots support-base, he felt it necessary to institute, in December 1938, a national political students’ organisation superseding all previously existing organisations, and thereby enjoying a legal monopoly in the representation of students’ interests. Since Vargas wanted to wrestle the students’ body away from the influence of the fascistoid Integralist Movement, his granting of the monopoly of representation to the UNE dovetailed with the interest of the organised Left in forming a grassroots base of support for popular-front, antifascist politics – as much as Vargas also opposed fascism for the sake of his Bonapartist, populist political project. In this way the UNE quickly became the commonly-acknowledged representative body of Brazilian university students.

As Langland writes, this acknowledgement came at a price: as much as the UNE granted students a separate political identity from their mentors, that identity was, according to Langland, a purely ‘gendered culture of male camaraderie and homosocial [i.e., male-centred] political networks’ (p. 39). As the UNE quickly came to outshine Casa do Estudante and Ms Mendonça’s leadership, women students lost their sole space for discussion of their needs, as they were excluded from the new organisation’s agenda. However, it could be remarked that, as Casa do Estudante was mostly a charitable venue, Ms Mendonça’s position within it was mainly that of someone exerting a role somewhere between a chaperone and a duenna, thus partaking of the entirely subordinate role assigned to students, irrespective of their gender. As much as the Vargas-era UNE leadership worked within a framework of ‘intra-elite male networks of […] friends and family’ (p. 42) – as was wont to happen in the context of a personal dictatorship where political participation was closely managed and under the dictator’s thumb – the UNE quickly developed into something different during the post-dictatorship period. 

One of the issues with Langland’s book is that although she – like most American Brazil scholars – has complete mastery over the sources and archival evidence, that is,history itself, she dialogues little with Brazilianhistoriography in terms of its particular concerns: when Vargas, in 1942, turned the confiscated stately Rio mansion that housed a German club into the UNE headquarters – at the same time rewarding the organisation for backing Vargas’s diplomatic turn against the Axis and offering it formal recognition as the representative of the entire body of university students nation-wide – he fostered with his endowment a gentlemanly, thoroughly homosocial ethos that imbued much of the UNE’s activities. However, Vargas’s acknowledgment of the UNE also did much to make the organisation thoroughlypolitical.

In late 1948, when the leadership of the American USNSA wrote to the UNE urging it to break its ties with the successor organisation to the CIE, the IUS (which was Prague-based, and therefore deemed unreliable in the context of the burgeoning Cold War), the Americans presented the Brazilians with the argument that the IUS was a partisan organisation, ‘more concerned with political considerations than with constructive student activities, such as travel and exchange’ (p. 51). As Langland puts it, this all had to do with the fact that the UNE leadership was from the start far more politicised than the Americans were willing to concede, ‘that it never considered student interests to be limited to travel and exchange’ (p. 51); that the Union, therefore, was acting as part of what Brazilian Marxist historian Nelson Werneck Sodré called ‘The Brazilian Revolution’,[5] i.e., a belatedly bourgeois-democratic revolutionary process, one of whose traits was the emergence of a politically active middle class acting politically in its own right, instead of entering the political game in a capacity ancillary to the elite power-brokers – mostly thorough the state apparatuses (Sodré, a member of an older generation, came to play a part in contemporary political struggles solely in his capacity as a senior military officer). What the UNE offered to the younger, politically active members of Brazil’s contemporary emerging middle-class was an opportunity for independent political agency, thus facilitating the switch from a game of pure class politics into identity politics – something that would eventually include gender issues – in a far more inclusive manner than could have been expected from leaving the management of a national student organisation to a female philanthropist.

It is undeniable that Werneck Sodré’s notion of ‘Brazilian Revolution’ was altogether questionable, smacking of a stage-ist conception of Marxism that set an agenda for backward capitalist societies in which a largely mythical bourgeois revolution mandatorily precedes a socialist revolution set in the unforeseeable future. That notwithstanding, the emergence of the UNE did much to trigger a process of middle-class political radicalisation that would reach its zenith during the 1960s; such a process having to do with the fact that the emergence of a national student organisation like the UNE as an independent, open-ended organisation, not tied to a particular concrete purpose – be it a functionary of the national state-bureaucratic apparatus, or a private charitable pursuit – turned the organisation into a loose cannon.

One cannot assign a function to a student organisation in the same way one might a trade union: the UNE’s functions were so general and ill-defined that, even if its original aim was to allow students to participate in intra-elite political networks, the organisation eventually developed a moral authority of its own that allowed it to become a hotbed of partisan activity, something that prompted its critics to dispute the ‘students’ authority to participate politically at all’ (p. 59). Already during the 1950s, the UNE had become a vector of that Brazilian conservatives’ nemesis, political radicalism with no strings attached, a notion that could be conveyed by the choicest word of abuse hurled by the 1960s military dictatorship at the students’ movement and other opponents: baderna, for ‘mayhem’,stasis – a Brazilian idiom rolling together the notion of uncompromising political radicalism with gender and race politics, as ‘baderna’ was originally the family name of a nineteenth-century Italian female dancer reviled both for her ‘dissolute’ ways and for incorporating African refrains into music-hall performances.[6]  

I agree with Professor Langland that the UNE all-too-often played the respectability card by struggling to appear – in memory if not in actual fact – as respectable by conforming to the accepted norms of social behaviour, excluding all that did not conform to an aura of gentlemanly camaraderie and feats of arms. However, from its very inception the organisation favoured political voluntarism on the part of the younger members of the petite bourgeoisie – and with, it the re-emergence of all kinds of political activism, even those that the UNE itself wanted to downplay, such as gender politics. By fostering voluntarism, the UNE potentiated a subjective activist mood that favoured repressed groups, the assertion of whose interests – even when based on actual issues and plights – otherwise proved difficult in the context of the elitism and corporatism of existing institutions. The UNE, at least, exhibited the hallmark of a new kind of subjective socio-political mood in 1960s Brazil, when, in the words of a female historian (taken from Freirean pedagogy), ‘the entire country was creating its consciousness [se conscientizava]’ (p. 72).

At this point we are already well into the second chapter of the work, which deals with the period leading up to the 1964 military coup and its immediate aftermath up to late 1967. The chapter begins by describing one of the innumerable minor scuffles of the time, namely the 1961 confrontation between a reactionary dean and the student body of the University of Pernambuco over granting a venue for Che Guevara’s mother Celia to perform a speaking engagement (together with peasant leader Francisco Julião) which had to be delivered by candlelight (the dean ordered power lines to the conference room to be cut) and the ensuing students’ strike, that was repressed by force by the military. The ruckus attracted not only the attention of Brazilian media, but also of Time magazine, whose writer fulminated against a ‘Marxist Typhoid Mary, spreading violence wherever she goes’. In Professor Langland’s apt summing-up, the powers that be in both Brazil and the US found this ‘combination of peasants, university students and Communists potentially catastrophic’ (p. 63, emphasis mine). The fact that state-owned Brazilian universities suffered at the time from a glut of middle-class candidates with passing grades as against the limited positions available, who had to wait in line as ‘surplus [excedentes]’, that curricula were mostly outdated, devised as they were by a small number of lifetime chair-holding professors – all these factors, combined, made much for ‘spearheading a large rush of student political involvement’ (p. 73), such involvement having to do mostly with university issues, but then also with the surrounding radicalised political environment.

At this particular point, Professor Langland’s American perspective is very helpful, as she quotes the remarks of one American USNSA representative – who attended a 1961 UNE congress as part of an attempt, again, at wooing the Brazilian organisation away from the IUS – about ‘the fashionable dress of the [women] delegates […] and the drab attire of most women at the NSA Congress’ (p. 78). One could say that the quote hits the nail on the head in capturing one of the chief traits of radical politics in 1960s Brazil: the festive, partying, even sexually-charged atmosphere – something conveyed by a contemporary idiom hurled at middle-class activists:esquerda festiva, ‘festive Left’ – something that might be anglicised as Tom Wolfe’s ‘radical chic’, were it not that Wolfe’s expression deals with radicalism as agrand bourgeois fad, as the ultimate means of high-class snobbery, whilefestiva speaks of radicalisation as a means for, above all, middle-class self-expression and political agency in disregard of the existing hierarchies.

As culture scholar Roberto Schwarz noted in one of his essays on the period, it was this educated middle-class radicalisation that made 1960s Brazil seemingly so progressive on the cultural and political levels; in an ironic aside, Schwarz describes the mood of the time by saying that ‘’twas a time when even some congressmen made speeches that were actually intriguing’.[7] That notwithstanding, behind this progressive façade, what eventually prevailed was the unnerving reactionary mediocrity of ruling-class discourse and of its middle-class adherents. Hence the fact that the grand opening of the 1 April 1964 coup – ‘the smouldering aftermath of the Day of Lies’, as Langland aptly puts it (p. 87) – would be marked by the torching of the UNE Rio building by a crowd of coup supporters. That Langland chose to make the ‘lynching’ of the UNE building the focal point for her subsequent account of the early dictatorship points to what would become a defining trait of the period up until today: the struggles around thememories of present and past events.

Instead of simply banning the UNE outright, the new regime instituted in its place a shadowy Students’ National Directorate (DNE) whose functions remained indistinct and which was rejected outright even by the USNSA (p. 94). For as long as university students were recognised as political actors in their own right, they might stage a discursive backlash, and the view that was to ultimately prevail among the dictatorship’s top brass was expressed at the time by financial czar Roberto Campos: that to allow students any kind of political activity was to defer ‘to the pretension of setting directions without previous experience’ (p. 96). By 1967, the dictatorship had already instituted new rulings that simply precluded the existence of students’ organisations on the national and state level, with remaining organisations being supposed to deal only with specific student concerns. Hence the fact that the student movement assumed a clandestine quality – quite apart from its individual members’ participation in the clandestine Left organisations that began to form at the time. Hence also the fact that, when mass action burst forth in early 1968, it would from the very start assume a performance-like quality, that of an ‘acting out’, in the Lacanian sense, i.e. a demand forrecognition.

Chapter 3 of Langland’s work deals with the 1968 chain of events as she describes how, in late March 1968 (i.e., at the beginning of the working school-year after the Southern summer vacation), during a banal police-brutality episode, the student Edson Luis was shot dead outside the downtown Rio Calabouço student restaurant. She then proceeds to stress the fact that the killing spurred an immediate – and, in hindsight, seemingly disproportional – response in a surge of massive street demonstrations, beginning with the public wake, funeral procession and a seventh-day mass. The conclusion drawn by Langland underlines that what was at stake from the start was the massive quality of the demonstrations as an end in itself, as the actual fact of their multitudinous quality broke down the façade erected by the dictatorship of a – to use a contemporary expression – supportive ‘silent majority’ among the students’ body politic. The fact that Edson’s death was haphazard, an ‘unfortunate incident’, also helped to bring home the discursive truth – repeated as the motto, ‘podia ser seu filho [It could have been your son!]’ – that the killed student could have been, in fact,anyone. The manifestations were planned and organised ‘for the record’, as acts of memory and as a claim for independent political agency. Notwithstanding the fact underlined by Langland that these memories tended to conform to a sexist, male-only discursive pattern, the truth was that the 1968 mass demonstrations’ ambience allowed considerable space for political agency irrespective of gender. Of course, much of what passed for progressive at the time had a faked, staged quality. However, the fact remains that, in the ensuing memory-wars surrounding the actual happenings of that year, ‘1968’ quickly became 666: to Brazilian reactionaries, a signifier for anything ‘destined to destroy society and subvert customs’ (p. 141), from mass mobilisation to venereal disease and illegitimate birth– in the words of one of the most unnerving military mediocrities of the time (p. 177).

It is therefore only natural that, even after the late-1968 military backlash that established an overtly military dictatorship and inaugurated Brazil’s bleierne Zeit, when the organised students’ movement was repressed out of existence – even then underground Left activists looked back to 1968 as thefons et origo for the legitimacy of their politics.

If I have chosen here Hölderlin’s original German for what became commonly known in Brazil as the Years of Lead, os anos de chumbo, what I mean by this is to stress the fact that 1968 was less a concrete programme than a mood– in fact, it stood for the notion of unconditional, independent political agency – something like Hölderlin’s uncompromising political romanticism. For the military and their ruling-class allies, who intended a society without room for any kind of ‘unauthorised’ action, anytime, anywhere, anyhow– no matter how trite the action actually was – ‘1968’ came to stand as the supreme abomination.

In Chapter 4 of her work, which deals with the realities of the Years of Lead (1968–78), Langland describes an episode taken from archival evidence from the repressive organs’ own files: during late 1973, a group of high-school teenage students paraded briefly through downtown Rio indulging in a parody of a political march, under a banner asking ‘for a love song’ and to the tune of a mildly obscene ditty (pp. 192, 193) – an antic that threw the reporting officer for the police into abject panic, classifying the incident as preparation for fully-fledged guerrilla activity…. Actually (and given the fact that I myself remember having participated in similar activities at the same time) one can be fairly certain that the students in question risked imprisonment and torture – even death, provided the report reached the ‘right’ quarters. Given the vicious fear of the officer, Langland wonders if this strange incident was not a façade for something ‘bigger’ – i.e., some kind of actual political manifestation, as she ponders whether the ‘long song’ banner was or wasn’t a mock-erudite reference to an antifascist 1940s poem by Drummond de Andrade (p. 201). Speaking out of my personal – and avowedly anecdotic – experience, I beg to differ: it was probably nothing other than teenagers, out of bravado, mimicking some forbidden grown-up thing; something that renders the episode even more creepy and scary, when one considers that these boys and girls unwittingly jeopardised their lives by so doing.

But then Langland begins Chapter 5 – with discussion concerning the memory ties between ‘1968’ and a rebuilt, post-dictatorship students’ movement – by speaking of Honestino Guimarães, whose 1973 arrest and ‘disappearance’ was mostly due to his previous UNE activism and to the fact that he was one of the clandestine vice-presidents to the then-illegal organisation. The UNE memory of mass mobilisation remained central to the late dictatorship and post-dictatorship period, even when the students’ movement had to rebuild itself almost from scratch: hence the fact that most of this final chapter tells of the 1980 confrontation that opposed the waning military dictatorship, as against the fledgling students’ movement over the fate of the old UNE HQ Rio building, which was torn down by the federal government and turned into a parking lot – but even then only after a long, protracted process of court measures and counter-measures, that even included a gunpoint confrontation between the police and a federal judge, something that preserved UNE memory for the younger generations.

In the Epilogue that closes the work, Professor Langland takes us only as far as 2011 – that is, to the close of Lula’s second term – in order to inform us, by way of a conclusion, that ‘1968 lives on in Brazilian national memory’ and that subsequent political and cultural events are ‘read through the lens of this earlier period’ (p. 248). This, however, in the near-decade between the completion of the work and today, has acquired an entirely new layer of meaning – as Langland herself expected. If her concluding 2011 remark meant that memory of 1968 mass-mobilisations and student radicalism is the bottom line over which a common acceptance of mass politics and a democratic consensus was built during the post-dictatorship years, one cannot but accept her conclusion, but also to add that the centrality of the ‘1968’ signifier is proved not only by its acceptance but also by its refusal, as the rightist backlash that developed during Dilma Roussef’s administration, and eventually led to her deposal through a parliamentary coup, has taken every available opportunity to contest and vilify those same 1968 memories – something expressed by the sexist and misogynist smears directed against Dilma. Nevertheless, episodes such as the 2013 wave of street manifestations and the 2015 São Paulo public high-schools occupations prove that memories of 1968 with a positive slant are also still very much with us.

Now, to something by way of a final conclusion: as far as can be gathered by the reviewer, Langland’s work is conceived as history, not sociology or political science – hence the fact that theoretical remarks are kept to a minimum. That notwithstanding, the work tells a lot to the theoretically-minded scholar. As the author herself admits, the Brazilian 1960s history of mass mobilisation is part of a history of the global 1960s – something that was admitted even at the time, when the Brazilian student movement’s activity took note of the ongoing French May and similar contemporary developments, while the military dictatorship and its supporters feared foreign contagion. This global wave of contestation, as much as it developed in the context of a global Cold War ambience and nourished itself on a previously existing Left political culture, at the same time broke with it, in that it conformed, not to the ‘class vs. class’ framework that prevailed until the late 1950s, but contrariwise fed itself mostly on a middle-class radicalism that inaugurated the era of identity politics.

This turn from class and towards identity politics is something that became one of the chief themes of the Marxist historiography of the period, viz. Hobsbawm’s Age of Extremes.[8] That developed into the post-Marxist notion of, say, a Žižek, according to whose nostrum radical politics has to move away from objective sociology towards emancipatory subjectivity, from the concrete working class towards the proletariat as the (symbolic) embodiment of ‘social negativity’.[9]

To a Marxist who wants to maintain coherence with his theoretical notions, such ‘negativity’ is in itself a slippery commodity, large-scale social change being of necessity based on the objective interests of class – which, in the case of the global capitalist economy, means the working class. The working class, however, no matter how blurred in terms of its limits, is never an absolute majority. Therefore, no revolutionary change is possible without a political basis of support in the petite bourgeoisie – or the middle class, the class that ‘doesn’t exist’ in Lacanian terms, as its identity is defined by what it is not, by its being ‘in the middle’. The political agency of the middle class resides, objectively, in its possibility of choosing sides – a decision, to a certain extent, taken subjectively.In this sense, the Brazilian ‘1968’ – and a whole host of similar 1968s – is still very much with us, in memory and in actual fact. And it is in drawing our attention to this that resides the chief merit of Professor Langland’s work.

References

Hobsbawm, Eric 1990, Echoes of the Marseillaise: Two Centuries Look Back on the French Revolution, London: Verso.

Hobsbawm, Eric 2000, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991, Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith Publisher, Inc.

Langland, Victoria 2013, Speaking of Flowers: Student Movements and the Making and Remembering of 1968 in Military Brazil, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Ridenti, Marcelo 1993, O fantasma da revolução brasileira, São Paulo: UNESP.

Schwarz, Roberto 1978, O pai de família e outros ensaios, Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra.

Sodré, Nelson Werneck 1973, Introdução à revolução brasileira, São Paulo: Ciências Humanas.

Teles, Maria Amélia de Almeida 1993, Breve história do feminismo no Brasil, São Paulo: Brasiliense.

Trotsky, Leon 1977, The Struggle against Fascism in Germany, New York: Pathfinder.

Žižek, Slavoj 2002, Revolution at the Gates: Selected Writings of Lenin from 1917, London: Verso.

[1] Trotsky 1977.

[2]Apud Langland 2013, p. 212.

[3] Quoted in Ridenti 1993.

[4] Hobsbawm 1990.

[5] Sodré 1973.

[6] Teles 1993.

[7] Schwarz 1978.

[8] Hobsbawm 2000.

[9] Žižek 2002.

A Review of Lu Xun and Trotsky: ‘Literature and Revolution’ in China by Nagahori Yūzō

Gregor Benton

School of History, Archaeology and Religion, Cardiff University

Benton@cardiff.ac.uk

Abstract

Lu Xun was a giant of modern Chinese literature and a fellow-traveller of the Chinese Communists, to whom he saw no alternative at a time of rampant fascism and the threat of war. However, he was also an admirer of Trotsky, although this fact has been expertly hidden from sight for decades by the Chinese state. Nagahori Yūzō tells the story of Lu Xun’s thoughts about Trotsky, in a book translated into Chinese and published in Taiwan. This article is a review of Nagahori’s book.

Keywords

Lu Xun – Trotsky – Mao Zedong – Literature and Revolution – Chinese Trotskyism

Nagahori Yūzō {長堀祐造}, (2011) Ro Jin to Torotsukī: Chūgoku ni okeru ‘Bungaku to kakumei’ {魯迅とトロツキー: 中国における‘文学と革命’} [Lu Xun and Trotsky: Literature and Revolution in China], Tokyo: Heibon sha,

Nagahori Yūzō {長堀祐造}, (2015) Lu Xun yu Tuoluociji: ‘Wenxue yu geming’ zai Zhongguo {鲁迅與托洛茨基：‘文學與革命’在中國} [Lu Xun and Trotsky: Literature and Revolution in China], translated by Wang Junwen {王俊文}, Taibei: Renjian chuban she.

Lu Xun (1881–1936) was the pen name of Zhou Shuren {周树人}, a giant of early twentieth-century Chinese literature and popular culture, and, in the 1920s and the 1930s, a leader of China’s radical intellectuals.^[1] He was a novelist, translator, literary critic, essayist, poet, and editor, and in 1930 he became titular head of the League of Left-Wing Writers. Ōe Kenzaburō {大江健三郎}, the Japanese Nobel Laureate in literature, called him ‘the greatest writer Asia produced in the twentieth century’, but his work is barely known outside East Asia.

          Lu Xun was a political and intellectual maverick who came to see himself as a fellow-traveller of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), though he had little time for its hacks and dogmatists. Mao Zedong issued him a Party card after his death, supposedly in posthumous recognition of his contribution to the May Fourth Movement of 1919 and the radical New Culture Movement of 1915–21. But that he would have accepted it, given the choice, is doubtful.

Nagahori Yūzō, one of many Japanese experts on Lu Xun, but the only one among them to have sympathised with China’s defeated Trotskyists, has written an excellent study (now available in Taiwan in Chinese translation) on Lu Xun and Leon Trotsky, looking in particular at the reception in China of Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution. Japan was, for many years, the main centre outside China of Lu Xun studies, and the site, in 1937, of the first publication of Lu Xun’s collected works in Japanese translation,[2] a year before their first appearance in Chinese (larger editions followed).[3] Lu Xun’s popularity in Japan ensured him a large readership in Taiwan and Korea, under Japanese rule until 1945, where his books, read in Japanese or Chinese, spread a spirit of resistance and internationalism.

For decades, many Japanese and other non-Chinese Lu Xun scholars went along with the Chinese view of him, with minimal reservations. In China, he was portrayed as an ‘incarnation of history’ and a figure ‘between Sun Wen [the Republic’s founding president Sun Yat-sen] and Mao Zedong’. Subservience to the Chinese approach to Lu Xun lasted in Japan until the start of the post-Mao reforms in China and the gradual emergence in the 1980s of a more nuanced interpretation of the writer’s work – even today, some members of the old school of Lu Xun studies outside China have yet to break completely from the Beijing line. So Nagahori, in seeking to draw a different picture of Lu Xun, principally by highlighting the role played in his literary thought by Trotsky, has ploughed a rather lonely furrow.

          Nagahori’s book has come out in Chinese at a time of surging academic interest in Lu Xun in China and abroad. Wang Hui {汪暉}and other thinkers associated with the Chinese ‘New Left’ (a label they themselves reject) have been engaged since the 1990s in a passionate debate about the future of Chinese modernity in which they draw inspiration from Lu Xun, championed as an emblem of ‘perpetual revolution’ and of the possibility of breaking the seemingly endless chain of Chinese history. Wang Hui’s attachment to Lu Xun’s critical spirit has led him to resurrect the work of one of Japan’s earliest Lu Xun experts, the cultural critic and Sinologist Takeuchi Yoshimi {竹内好} (1910–77). Wang Hui was especially attracted by Takeuchi’s criticism of Western concepts of modernity, his idealisation of China, and his promotion of China as a model of Asian resistance to the West, incarnated primarily in Lu Xun. Some Japanesefind this Chinese rediscovery of Takeuchi’s work on Lu Xun nearly seventy years after its first appearance (in Takeuchi’s wartime work) surprising, for in Japan Takeuchi’s Lu Xun study has long been seen as out-of-date and severely limited by the materials available to him at the time of its writing. Nagahori argues (in a letter to me) that the interest in Takeuchi in China, South Korea, and the US is due more to his contribution to modern Japanese thought and his work on Japanese and Chinese nationalism than to his Lu Xun scholarship. The desire to rethink Chinese modernity along Chinese lines and to reimagine the Chinese past in patriotic terms can also be said to drive Wang Hui’s interest in Lu Xun and Takeuchi. Nagahori’s study is of a quite different sort: a rigorous and closely-focused empirical exploration, based on textual and biographical evidence, of an important source of Lu Xun’s literary inspiration, free of the ideological intent that animates much of the new Lu Xun scholarship in China.

Nagahori’s main sources in writing his book included memoirs, in particular by the scholar Masuda Wataru {增田涉} (1903–77), one of Lu Xun’s many Japanese students, friends, and collaborators; and writings on the literary politics of the 1920s and the 1930s by Lu Xun’s Chinese contemporaries, including the Trotskyist Wang Fanxi {王凡西}. Nagahori explains how in August 1925 Lu Xun, having already established himself as a leading literary figure in China, bought a Japanese translation, by Shigemori Tadashi {茂森唯士}, of Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution.[4] From it, Lu Xun borrowed ideas that he cherished for the rest of his life. These included Trotsky’s concept of the ‘revolutionary person’, his belief in the impossibility of proletarian literature (‘new culture will be culture all the more to the extent that the proletariat has ceased to be a proletariat’), his insistence on the necessary autonomy of literary production even under the Communists, and his notion of the literary ‘fellow-traveller [попутчик]’ of the revolution, author of a transitional art that is neither bourgeois nor ‘of the Revolution’ but nevertheless ‘organically connected with the Revolution’. In his book, compiled from articles written by him between 1987 and 2009, Nagahori knits these and other topics into a tightly-edited narrative account of Lu Xun’s self-identification as a fellow-traveller, his rejection of Stalinist literary policy, his attitude towards the Communists, and the fate in China of those who sympathised with Trotsky’s idea of ‘permanent revolution’.

Literature and Revolution had a big impact not just on Lu Xun but on many other writers and scholars in China interested in literary theory. The first full Chinese translation, by Wei Suyuan {韦素园}and Li Jiye {李霽野}, appeared in Beijing in February 1928 under the auspices of Weiming she, a publishing house set up by young Beijing writers with Lu Xun’s help, and it was frequently republished. Quite a few partial translations also appeared, starting in 1926. Among Trotsky’s Chinese admirers were the anarchist writer Ba Jin {巴金}, who translated his essay on Tolstoy; the writer and poet Yu Dafu {郁達夫}, who wrote essays brimming with his influence; and, of course, Lu Xun’s followers Feng Xuefeng {冯雪峰}and Hu Feng {胡风}.

Even before reading Literature and Revolution, Lu Xun was able to acquaint himself with developments on the Soviet literary scene through other channels, including the lectures and writings of Vasily Eroshenko, the blind Soviet poet and Esperantist who turned up at Peking University in the 1920s.[5] (Eroshenko’s role is noted by Shi Shu {施淑}, in her Preface to the Chinese translation of Nagahori’s book) [pp. v–xvi]. Lu Xun spent much of his time in the mid-to-late 1920s translating Soviet and Japanese writings on literary theory. However, he refused to settle on a single political authority and embraced revolution ‘in his own way’, in the manner of Trotsky’s Soviet ‘fellow travellers’. In 1930, when he joined others in founding the League of Left-Wing Writers, controlled by the CCP and thus, ultimately, by the Comintern in Moscow, he did so not out of commitment to ‘proletarian revolutionary culture’ and Communism but because in ‘dark China’ under Chiang Kai-shek he saw the literary movement of the proletarian revolution as the sole ‘bud in the wilderness’.

In 1932, the reins on literature tightened in the Soviet Union, with the disbanding of the wide range of writers’ and artists’ organisations that had flourished in the days of Proletkultand their replacement by the monopolistic Union of Soviet Writers. In 1934, the newly promulgated theory of Socialist Realism required art to serve the proletariat, denounced experimentalism as degenerate, and consigned literary ‘fellow travellers’ to history’s dustbin. Inevitably, the CCP took the same view. In those years, Lu Xun generally went along with the Stalinist line on proletarian literature and the CCP’s idea of ‘mass culture’, associated above all with Qu Qiubai. He praised the ‘revival’ of Soviet literature in the wake of Stalin’s First Five-Year Plan (1928–32), and seemed resigned to the idea of Party guidance over creative writing. It was not until 1935, shortly before his death, that he began to take an openly-independent political line.

Mao Zedong and Lu Xun

Mao never met Lu Xun, although both men were in Beijing at the same time in the May Fourth days. Mao first read Lu Xun’s writings in 1935, in Yan’an, at the end of the Long March. After that, he kept Lu Xun’s works constantly by his side, even on his death bed. He seems to have read Lu Xun at every critical juncture, including in his Moscow hotel in 1949, while waiting to see Stalin. He praised Lu Xun for his clarity, candour, modesty, and courage – and, in a world where some of Mao’s rivals in the Party leadership had, unlike him, been to university, he noted with satisfaction that Lu Xun had never graduated.

          The glorification of Lu Xun began in 1933, when the Communist Qu Qiubai {瞿秋白} described him as ‘a true friend, and even a warrior, of the proletariat and the toiling masses’. Lu Xun’s apotheosis came in 1937, when Mao appointed him as ‘new China’s saint’ (just as Confucius had been the ‘saint of feudal China’) and ‘commander-in-chief of China’s cultural revolution [in the 1910s]’. It climaxed in Mao’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of 1966–76, when the dead Lu Xun was raised to his greatest height.

          So close did the association between Lu Xun and the Communist establishment become that, at one stage, Chinese angry with the Party took to venting their feelings on Lu Xun, as its supposed surrogate. What they forgot is that Mao’s acceptance of Lu Xun was laughably selective: he could beatify Lu Xun only by ignoring the greater part of his output, which opposed despotism and championed humanism and freedom of expression. Moreover, Lu Xun’s satirical and ironic style of writing and his caustic social commentary flew in the very face of Mao’s idea of literature. More recently, pro-liberal Chinese netizens have returned the focus to Lu Xun’s attacks on past social maladies, which they borrow to criticise unpopular practices of the present regime. There have been massive online protests against the removal, from the latest editions of school literature textbooks,of essays by Lu Xun criticised by Party apologists as ‘too deep’ and requiring excessive ‘reflection and critical thinking’.[6]

          Mao’s placing of the dead Lu Xun on a literary pedestal started as a Chinese copy of Stalin’s Maxim Gorki cult. The canonisation was designed to wrap Stalin, and then Mao, in the respective writer’s reputation for independence and integrity, and to imply good writers’ inevitable progression towards supporting Communism. Mao’s second goal in raising up Lu Xun, first noted by the Chinese Trotskyists, was to use him to hide the embarrassing fact that the New Culture Movement of the 1910s was led by undesirables: Chen Duxiu {陈独秀}(founder of the CCP in 1921 and of its Left Opposition in 1931) and the liberal philosopher Hu Shi {胡适}. Chen Duxiu was, for a long time, universally acknowledged on the left as the leading light in the May Fourth Movement, which called for democracy and science. However, Chen Duxiu’s expulsion from the CCP as a Trotskyist made it difficult for the Party to say anything good about him, so in the late 1930s they began to claim leadership of the May Fourth Movement for Lu Xun, who had in fact played only a minor part in it. In an interview with the American journalist and ‘friend of China’ Edgar Snow, published in Red Star over China in 1936, Mao conceded that Chen Duxiu ‘had influenced me more than anyone else’ in the May Fourth years, but this statement was omitted from the Chinese translation of the interview.[7]

But while the Communists suppressed much of Lu Xun’s legacy and purged his followers, it is also true that Mao and his comrades admired and revered him as modern China’s greatest writer and a ‘champion of common humanity’. He worked in many different genres and idioms, including the classic, the archaic, and the colloquial. His style was typically dense, complex, experimental, and intense. However, he fiercely defended vernacular writing against writing of the elite, and strove to create a literature and art of the people that could be used to criticise the ruling class and tackle social ills. His value as a resource for critical thought and his fearlessness and backbone were the main positive reasons Mao proposed him as a literary model.

Although Mao initiated a cult of Lu Xun during the Sino-Japanese War, he took pains to ensure that Lu Xun’s critical spirit was not imported to Yan’an, his wartime capital. The urban intellectuals who slipped away into the countryside to serve in the anti-Japanese resistance under Mao included many of Lu Xun’s loyal followers, who abandoned their families and careers to join the Communists. In the cities, before migrating to Yan’an, they had aimed Lu Xun-style zawen (brief topical and polemical reflections on social and political injustice) at Chiang Kai-shek and his regime. In 1942, Wang Shiwei {王实味}and other Lu Xun-ites began, bravely but unwisely, to employ the same zawen as daggers to stab at the heart of bureaucracy and iniquity under the Communists. They were denounced at rallies, and Wang Shiwei, the least ready among them to eat humble pie, was gaoled and later murdered. Mao made the writers a target of his famous Yan’an Talks on Art and Literature, discussed below.

Lu Xun and Literature and Revolution [pp. 14–129, pp. 3–125]

Lu Xun’s acquaintance with Trotsky’s literary theories began in the summer of 1925, when he translated the chapter in Literature and Revolution on the Russian lyrical poet Alexander Blok. Lu Xun’s translation, and his postscript to it, had a big impact on Chinese writers at the time. Decades later, after his release from gaol under Mao, the dissident writer Hu Feng said that it had ‘further freed him from a vulgar sociological [understanding] of the creative process’, and had taught him that frustration at the suppression of human vitality is the foundation of literature and art.[8]

          After Trotsky’s expulsion from the Soviet Communist Party in 1927, praise for Literature and Revolution in the Soviet Union turned to bitter denunciation. In China, following years of silence, the book was eventually criticised by Mao, in his Yan’an Talks, where he summarised it as ‘politics, Marxist; art, bourgeois’. Lu Xun’s attachment to Trotsky was troubling for the CCP’s literary establishment, led by Zhou Yang {周扬}, which tried for decades to conceal it. Although Lu Xun’s admiration for Literature and Revolution was open and transparent between 1925 and late 1932, his references to it were minimalised or deleted by Chinese editors of his work after his declaration as a Party saint, and they were omitted from the 10-volumeCollected Works published in 1956–8.

          In Japan, too, Trotsky’s influence on Lu Xun was marginalised and discounted, but to a less extreme degree, for the same taboos could not be observed by China scholars on the Japanese left as by Lu Xun scholars in China, where they were de rigueur. All the same, Lu Xun experts in Japan consciously or unconsciously played down his Trotsky connection, until Nagahori started to confront the issue, in 1987, in his article on the concept of the ‘revolutionary person’ inLiterature and Revolution.

Following Trotsky, Lu Xun argued in his work on literary theory that only a revolutionary person can write revolutionary literature, and that ‘whatever a revolutionary person writes is revolutionary literature’. But revolutionary literature of this sort could only appear after the passing of the revolutionary storm and the emergence of the ‘new revolutionary human being’.

Trotsky wrote Literature and Revolution in 1922–3 and published it in 1923–4. Its first part, which is what most people (including Lu Xun) mean when they refer to it, looked mainly at literary trends and movements in the years between 1905 and 1917 and the revolutionary period between 1917 and 1923. Trotsky thought there could only be a real revolutionary literature after the revolution. In times of revolution, most of the talent capable of producing revolutionary literature would be at the front, making actual revolution. As for Lu Xun, he thought (unlike the Russian and Chinese Stalinists) that there was no revolutionary situation in China in the late 1920s and that China, too, lacked the conditions for a revolutionary literature. He thought, like Trotsky, that real revolutionary art and literature would appear only after the revolution. Young Chinese leftist writers claimed in 1927–8 that China had to have a revolutionary literature and attacked Lu Xun, whom they saw as hostile to proletarian literature. This was in line with official policy in the USSR (promoted by Stalin and others).

Trotsky’s distinction between revolutionary and non-revolutionary literature is illustrated by his treatment of Alexander Blok. Trotsky noted that ‘Blok belonged to pre-October literature, but he overcame his past and entered into the sphere of October when he wrote his poem The Twelve’, which Trotsky called ‘the swan song of the individualistic art that went over to the Revolution’. ‘To be sure,’ he concluded, ‘Blok is not one of ours, but he reached towards us.’ Lu Xun not only translated the chapter on Blok fromLiterature and Revolution but embraced its tenets. Nagahori reminds us that the biographies of Blok and Lu Xun have much in common. They were born within months of one another, into literary families; both were ‘people of the old era’ (Lu Xun’s self-description) who reached out towards the revolution; and both knew the value, but also the limits, of the intelligentsia as a ‘class’.

Lu Xun’s relationship with Trotsky was at the heart of his thinking on literature, but it has rarely been subjected to frontal scrutiny, except in little-known publications of the Chinese Trotskyists.[9] It was almost wholly ignored in mainstream studies on Lu Xun in Japan before Nagahori began publishing on the subject. The resemblances between Lu Xun’s and Trotsky’s ideas were viewed as at most a coincidence.

To overthrow this view, Nagahori set out to trace the provenance of Lu Xun’s thinking about the ‘literature of a revolutionary period’, starting with his speech given under that title at the Huangpu Military Academy in Guangzhou on 8 April 1927, on the eve of Chiang Kai-shek’s bloody coup against his Communist allies. Nagahori establishes the relationship between Lu Xun’s and Trotsky’s views on literature mainly by means of a comparative textual study of Lu Xun’s writing in Chinese and Trotsky’s in Japanese translation.

The first tenet of Lu Xun’s 1927 speech was that literature is of no use, for ‘only the weakest, most useless people talked about [it, while those] who are strong do not talk, they kill’. His experience in Beijing (a reference to a massacre on 18 March 1926) had taught him that ‘[a] poem could not have frightened away [the warlord] Sun Chuanfang, but a cannon-shell scared him off.’ Nagahori derives this idea from Trotsky’s Introduction to Literature and Revolution, where he explains that art cannot match the role of warfare: ‘The place of art can be determined by the following general argument. If the victorious Russian proletariat had not created its own army, the Workers’ State would have been dead long ago, and we would not be thinking now about economic problems, and much less about intellectual and cultural ones.’

Lu Xun’s second tenet was that revolutionary literature ‘lacks vigour’. Although writers liked to claim that ‘literature plays a big part in revolution and can be used, for instance, to propagandise, encourage, spur on, speed up and accomplish revolution’, in Lu Xun’s view

writing of this kind lacks vigour, for few good works of literature have been written to order; instead, they flow naturally from the heart with no regard for the possible consequences. To write on some set subject is like writing a [stilted and stereotyped] bagu essay, which is worthless as literature and quite incapable of moving the reader.

A Review of Secret Reports on Nazi Germany: The Frankfurt School Contribution to the War Effort, edited by Raffaele Laudani

Mike Makin-Waite

Independent Researcher

mike@processnorth.co.uk

Abstract

The following is a review of a book which surveys the work of Herbert Marcuse and other members of the Frankfurt School when they were employed by the United States government during and immediately after the Second World War. It locates their reports for the Office of Strategic Services within broader trajectories of Frankfurt School thinking, and notes how Marcuse’s work in the 1940s anticipated themes that would be central to his 1960s writings, when he became a radical icon. The book under review shows how Frankfurt School methodologies and theories combined with immediate analysis of concrete developments to generate valuable insights into the complex interactions between capital, technology, militarism, politics, culture, and anti-Semitism in Hitler’s ‘Third Reich’. On this basis, Marcuse and his colleagues set out proposals for effective struggle against German fascism.

Keywords

Frankfurt School – Herbert Marcuse – Max Horkheimer – Franz Neumann - Second World War – Office of Strategic Services – Cold War

Franz Neumann, Herbert Marcuse and Otto Kirchheimer, (2013) Secret Reports on Nazi Germany: The Frankfurt School Contribution to the War Effort, edited by Raffaele Laudani, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

‘New Left Guru’ with a ‘Scandalous’ Past?

In the late 1960s, Herbert Marcuse was widely seen as a ‘guru’ of the New Left and counterculture, and as the ‘father of the student movement’. Unlike other key thinkers in the Frankfurt School tradition, he explicitly endorsed and encouraged spontaneous and anti-authoritarian struggles. Here was a well-known left-wing theoretician whose books Eros and Civilisation (1955, reissued with a ‘political preface’ in 1966) andOne Dimensional Man (1964) had anticipated many of the causes and hopes which were now animating young radicals: sexual freedom; emancipatory culture; the need to link personal, social and political liberation; broad demands for ‘total change’; and the need for a ‘great refusal’ of all systems of repression and domination.

But, ‘although he was revered by many, for others he was a “revisionist”, “idealist philosopher” [and an] “elitist”’. And, in the fast-moving ferment of 1960s radicalism, a few critics even identified Marcuse as ‘a CIA agent’.[1]

Claims about Marcuse working for the Central Intelligence Agency were first promoted in the US by the Maoist organisation, the Progressive Labor Party, and then picked up in Europe. Rumours spread that Marcuse had worked for the US secret services until the 1950s, and possibly into the 1960s. When Marcuse tried to give a lecture in Rome in June 1969, he was repeatedly interrupted and goaded by Daniel Cohn-Bendit, famous since May the previous year as a figurehead of the Paris ‘events’. Cohn-Bendit demanded that Marcuse admit his role as an agent of the American state: ‘Marcuse, why have you come to the theatre of the bourgeoisie? Herbert, tell us why the CIA pays you?’[2]

Marcuse was angry about the false accusation of having been employed by the CIA. He was in fact a constant critic of the CIA, and the foreign-policy objectives which it served. His radical politics meant that he had been under covert FBI surveillance from the early 1950s, and this had become more intense and intrusive since the mid-1960s.

At the same time, the truth of his having been employed by the United States government during the Second World War was not something he wished to hide. On the contrary, Marcuse was proud of his record as a political analyst in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Amongst other tasks he carried out there, Marcuse had in summer 1944 written an early draft of the proclamation of the dissolution of the Nazi party which formed the basis of the actual proclamation issued in May 1945 (pp. 262–3). The fact that such service was being conflated with being ‘a CIA agent’ betrayed sloppiness in polemic, and a lack of interest in key shifts and changes which took place in American state structures during the 1940s.

In Marcuse’s eyes, as for the vast majority of people on the left at the time, the US involvement in the war against Hitler had meant that working for the state was a means of fighting fascism. But the end of the war saw the marginalisation and then, in October 1945, the closure of the OSS. Nearly two years later, in late 1947, the CIA was established as part of the promotion and pursuit of the Cold War: Marcuse had never worked for the Agency. But in June 1969, such subtleties and distinctions were lost on the red-haired heckler in the packed Eliseo Theatre, shouting out his demand that Marcuse own up to his scandalous past.

A Place to Fight Fascism

To understand Marcuse’s actual war record, context is important. This review therefore details the formation and character of the anti-fascist intelligence agencies created by the United States from 1942. It then considers some of the work carried out as part of the American war effort by Marcuse and his fellow ‘Frankfurters’. This was shaped by and positioned within significant debates within the Frankfurt School, which are sketched here: these have been described as producing ‘a strange assortment of views on the correct interpretation of Nazism, and a peculiar dispute about … “state capitalism”’.[3] The review then tracks the shift into the Cold War period, when the types of contribution to official policy which the Frankfurt School members had made were no longer ‘needed’ – or welcome.

Marcuse had not been the first German-Jewish exile associated with the Frankfurt School to take up a job with the OSS. Franz Neumann had been the legal advisor to a range of trade unions, a party activist, and the most prominent lawyer acting on behalf of the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD) before Hitler’s seizure of power. He had then fled to London and studied at the LSE, beginning his association with the Institute for Social Research on Harold Laski’s recommendation. He moved to New York in 1936, and had been recruited to the OSS as it was being set up in spring 1942.

Early in 1943, the new intelligence agency’s Research and Analysis Branch (R&A) was established. It grew quickly, employing over 1,200 people, around two-thirds of whom worked in the USA, and the rest overseas, including in battlefield situations. These officers were chosen on the basis of their evident skills and abilities, and issues of political commitment do not appear to have blocked recruitment – though prospects for significant promotion were affected by judgements about ideological orthodoxy, and by ‘ethnic’ prejudice, i.e. anti-Semitism. Among the leftists who worked in R&A were Paul Sweezy, already recognised as a Marxist, and later to become a founding editor ofMonthly Review; his collaborator in Marxist economics, Paul A. Baran; and Arno J. Mayer, later a ‘left dissident Marxist’ and major historian, whose works include the important 1988 account of the Judeocide,Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? The ‘Final Solution’ in History.

In this context, Neumann soon became Deputy Chief of the R&A’s Central European Section, which employed over forty people. Marcuse joined this team in March 1943, and he quickly became ‘the leading analyst on Germany’.

The fact that Frankfurt School figures were taking up full-time government jobs was helpful in managing financial challenges facing the school’s organisational basis, the Institute for Social Research. Since 1937, this had been hosted by Columbia University on Morningside Heights, New York. Its director Max Horkheimer had pushed Neumann to take up the OSS role on the basis that the Institute could no longer afford him; and the same ‘push’ would be given to the Institute’s part-time associate Otto Kirchheimer in 1943.

          Marcuse left the Institute much more reluctantly, and with some emotion: alongside Theodor Adorno and Horkheimer himself, Marcuse had been one of its central members, and even with government job-offers in his hand, and with his wife urging him to finally move on from his dependency on the Institute, he had begged Horkheimer to keep him on. The power dynamic in this interaction reflected ‘the patriarchal and confidential’ – and self-interested – way that Horkheimer managed Institute resources. Since the late 1930s, when the endowment capital on which the Institute depended began to shrink, ‘Horkheimer’s main concern became to reserve a large enough share of the assets … to secure his own scholarly work on a long-term basis’.[4]

Whilst Horkheimer and Adorno applied themselves to the ‘philosophical fragments’ which would later be published as Dialectic of Enlightenment, working in R&A provided the opportunity for Neumann, Marcuse and Kirchheimer to apply the critical theory they had developed through the Institute for Social Research in the urgent struggle against the Nazis. The book under review collects and annotates nearly thirty reports and policy papers which they wrote for their governmental and military colleagues between 1943 and 1945, and which were declassified in the mid-1970s. R&A material was circulated without attribution, but using internal evidence, other archival material, and the reported recollections of the authors themselves, the volume’s diligent editor Raffaele Laudani has identified each item here as written wholly or mainly by one of ‘the Frankfurters’.

The resulting collection is an important addition to literature about the Frankfurt School. It adds depth and nuance to those parts of Stuart Jeffries’s accessible overview of the tradition which deal with the Second World War;[5] complements Thomas Wheatland’s work on the Frankfurt School’s influence on American academic and political life, which particularly focuses on the postwar period, and the ways Marcuse inspired the New Left;[6] and provides evidence to support Tim B. Müller’s assertion of the considerable continuity between the work carried out by the Frankfurters for the OSS, and their subsequent interpretations of the postwar political landscape.[7] Müller also traces how the wartime research, particularly that of Marcuse, fed directly into the radical critique of Western modernity which was so influential in the 1960s, and which many consider to have relevance for contemporary social movements, ecological politics, and other radical initiatives.[8]

Who Makes the Nazis?

In order to produce their briefings and policy papers for OSS directors and operatives, R&A analysts had access to a wide range of material: well-stocked libraries, including newspapers and other publications quickly sourced from within ‘the Third Reich’; tapes of Nazi radio broadcasts; classified intelligence documents; reports from front-line military units; transcripts of intercepted telephone calls; and notes from Prisoner of War interrogations.

The resulting reports cover many issues. There are assessments of periodic changes in Reich government composition, and the elevation of particular figures such as the technocrat Albert Speer and the SS leader Heinrich Himmler; analyses of ‘social stratification’; surveys of civilian morale at such moments as the Nazi army’s defeat in Tunisia; insights into the psychological effects of air raids on German cities; and a prompt explanation of the factors behind the attempted assassination of Hitler by Claus von Stauffenberg and others in July 1944. There are also substantial accounts of the parties, organisations and networks which maintained some clandestine opposition to the Nazis inside Germany, as well as from their bases in exile – in particular, the SPD and the Communist Party.

The Frankfurt School members toned down their established practice of foregrounding ‘philosophical and theoretical categories for an analysis that was apparently more descriptive’ (pp. 7–8). The varied pieces in Secret Reports on Nazi Germany do, of course, include a great many factual details that will interest those studying the period.[9] Nevertheless, Neumann, Marcuse and Kirchheimer always shaped and organised their ‘empirical’ material on the basis of critical understandings. Their analytical skills, coherence and preparedness to follow and adapt to the OSS’s procedural requirements meant that they were able to shape the work programme of the entire Central European Section in line with their broad approach. Whilst incorporating theoretical perspectives drawn from the Hegelian-inflected critical Marxism of the Institute, their reports met managers’ expectations by displaying immediate practical intent, and almost always pointed to particular steps for the military and US agencies to take. Some of these fitted with the overall established policies of the US government. Others did not, and these proposals sometimes provoked ‘veritable “political” battles inside the administration’ – battles which Marcuse and his colleagues almost always lost (pp. 7–8).

One of these ‘battles’ concerned the extent to which prominent businessmen (sic) within Reich systems of governance should be considered as key members of the regime, and therefore as ‘economic war criminals’ to be brought to justice once the Nazis were defeated. As it became clear that there would be an Allied victory, the Frankfurt group urged

a radical policy of denazification that [should extend] beyond merely purging the Nazi political and military leadership [but] should also undermine Nazism’s ‘economic base’, which had been promoted and sustained by elements external to the party. (p. 14.)

On this basis, Marcuse drew together a list naming 1,800 businessmen, industrialists and bankers who belonged to apparently ‘independent’ organisations and companies, but who in fact played a crucial role in the rise and maintenance of Nazism. Since they were exerting considerable direct control over the Reich economy, the analysts of the Central European Section argued that these figures needed to be added to the approximately 220,000 ‘active Nazis’ whom the American military was already planning to capture and put into custody, if found alive at the time of Nazism’s defeat. Marcuse and his colleagues urged that dealing with these chiefs of industry and finance was far more important than finding those old men responsible for the culture of ‘Prussian militarism’ which Roosevelt and Churchill had declared they aimed to annihilate.[10]

Their focus on the importance of modernising economic agents expressed the Frankfurt group’s understanding of the Nazi system – and the ways that their understanding differed from that of their old colleagues back on Morningside Heights. All Frankfurt School members held that Nazism was but one expression of an emerging ‘single paradigm of domination’ in the world, which also included Soviet Communism and liberal democracy. They did not believe that there was an absolutely distinct and unique German path to modernity: such a perspective would have been a mirror-image of the exceptionalist claims promoted by Nazi ideologists. But Horkheimer, Adorno and Friedrich Pollock saw Nazism’s driving forces in the increasingly autonomous dynamics of politics and technological developments, to which the economy was subordinated.

Though a range of nuances and differing emphases distinguished their individual positions, these three thinkers all saw Hitler’s regime as a form of ‘state capitalism’, characterised by a tendency to eliminate market autonomy, with the profit motive increasingly replaced as the economy’s motor by the ‘motivation of power’. In this way, ‘state capitalism’ was a new phase, succeeding monopoly capitalism. It could take a liberal, democratic form, as in the emerging ‘managerial capitalism’ in the USA: one of the areas of debate between these Frankfurt School members was about the extent to which the liberal or fascist form would prove the more effective in atomising and integrating the working class. Horkheimer and Adorno’s analyses also drew from the work of Ernst Bloch, Erich Fromm and Wilhelm Reich, who had in various ways highlighted the complex psychological dynamics informing the appeal and effectiveness of fascism. This cultural level of analysis drew upon the Frankfurt School’s prewar Studies on Authority and the Family, and would inform the major postwar project carried out in the USA,Studies in Prejudice, which generated the volumeThe Authoritarian Personality.

For Marcuse, Neumann and Kirchheimer, however, the driving force and key explanatory factors of Nazism were primarily economic – and wholly capitalist. As Alberto Toscano has stated, this was at one with wider Marxist theory, which focused on

the interface of the political and the economic, seeking to adjudicate the functionality of the fascist abrogation of liberal parliamentary democracy to the intensified reproduction of the conditions for capitalist accumulation. This entailed identifying fascism as a ruling-class solution to the organic crisis of a regime of accumulation confronted by the threat of organised class struggle amid the vacillations of an imperialist order.[11]

Frankfurt School theorists like Pollock and Neumann also recognised and emphasised ‘the contradictions between the autonomy or primacy of the political brutally asserted by fascist movements and the possibility of a reproduction of the capitalist mode of production’.[12]

Neumann had developed his analysis along these lines before joining the OSS. His 1942 book Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism had emphasised the ways that ruling groups in Nazi Germany controlled the population through bureaucratic systems and the promotion of racist ideology, but also showed how Hitler’s regime maintained and developed capitalist social relations, through encouraging ‘monopolistic concentration, reinforcing the power of industrial potentates and weakening the position of the middle and working classes’ (p. 5).

The Nazi economic system was a particular instance of monopoly capitalism, which benefited large companies and cartels. It sought to integrate workers, having smashed their collectivist class organisations, by providing ‘full employment’, and promoting a racist, ambitious mass culture through which individual ‘Germans’ could identify with each other through their shared relationship to the state. Nazi rule was a means to adapt society to the requirements of large-scale industry, through which monopolies and state-orchestrated cartels continued to accrue great profits: German people were organised to serve these ends through becoming subject to an all-embracing apparatus of domination.

On some other important issues which were key to understanding Nazism, disagreements and differences of emphasis between Frankfurt School figures took a different pattern. In 1943, Neumann had succeeded in getting the OSS to accept his views on the function and workings of the Nazis’ anti-Semitism. He defined it as the ‘spearhead’ of the terroristic approach that Nazis were planning to apply to ever larger circles of intended enemies:

The persecution of the Jews ... is only the prologue of more horrible things to come. The expropriation of the Jews … is followed by that of the Poles, Czechs, Dutchmen, Frenchmen, anti-Nazi Germans, and middle classes. Not only Jews are put in concentration camps, but pacifists, conservatives, socialists, Catholics, Protestants, Free Thinkers and members of the occupied peoples. Not only Jews fall under the executioner’s axe, but countless others of many races, nationalities, beliefs and religions … the extermination of the Jews is only the means to the attainment of the ultimate objective, namely, the destruction of free institutions, beliefs and groups. (pp. 27–8.)

Neumann’s analysis touched directly on issues which were already beginning to be controversial by the last years of the fight against the Nazis, and which have not become less so: the importance of positioning the murderous horrors suffered specifically by Jewish people in the Judeocide; the extent to which these are to be highlighted as exemplifying Nazi barbarism; and the political problems and divisions that can result from emphasising these in contradistinction to the millions of deaths of other people during the Second World War.

As Neumann was establishing his perspectives as government policy, Leo Lowenthal was working back at the Institute with Horkheimer and Adorno on the ‘Elements of Anti-Semitism’ chapter for Dialectic of Enlightenment. He wrote to Marcuse, and persuaded him that there were major problems with Neumann’s ‘spearhead’ theory. Lowenthal instead favoured the ‘scapegoat’ theory, which positioned Nazi anti-Semitism as a diversionary strategy, enabling the regime to blame all manner of problems on Jews, and to channel popular hatreds, anxieties and fears.

Victory – and Marginalisation

Marcuse, Neumann and their colleagues maintained an ‘internal debate’ on the nature and roles of Nazi anti-Semitism until the end of the war. But they converged around the understanding that, as the war developed, anti-Semitism increasingly ‘served the purpose of forcing all Germans either to identify themselves with Nazism or pay the price of dissent’ (p. 97). Their continuing differences of emphasis did not get in the way of the important work of assembling material which evidenced specific crimes against Jewish people, and the overall scale of the Judeocide. Their files and reports informed and underpinned the prosecution of war criminals at the Nuremburg Trials.

More generally, the ‘Frankfurt’ R&A analysts helped inform the US government’s thinking about what to do once Hitler had fallen. They prepared several reports anticipating ‘possible patterns of German collapse’, and directly intervened in policy debates over whether and how to promote postwar reconstruction. Marcuse argued that the Allied approach should not involve the economic destruction of Germany, or any repeat of the steps taken by the US, Britain and France after Germany’s defeat in the First World War: plans to agrarianise the vanquished ‘Fatherland’, which Churchill sometimes appeared to favour, would be entirely counter-productive.

In promoting his perspectives, Marcuse could be bluntly explicit in his criticisms of US policy and practice. In a 1943 piece he pinpointed

the gravest mistake of our [psychological warfare] against Germany, namely the failure to show the German people a way of terminating the war and overthrowing the Nazi regime without surrendering its national independence to a foreign conqueror. (p. 150.)

Confirming that the Frankfurt tradition was by no means pro-Soviet, such arguments were sometimes linked to warnings that the Soviets might succeed in engaging effective opponents of the Nazis, where the US might fail. Marcuse counselled that not acting on the perspectives of R&A’s Central European Section could lead to the unintended result of Stalin controlling and influencing postwar Germany, rather than the US.[13]

If some of their arguments were accepted, to some degree, many of their more important points were not. As already stated, the Frankfurt group had argued that denazification procedures – and war crimes trials – should not focus too exclusively on high-profile members of the Nazi party and the military, while allowing equally, if less directly, responsible businessmen and other economic agents to escape justice. But their arguments on this matter did not shape policy. Nor was the legal system cleared out of those who had promoted and enforced Nazi laws – partly because of the effective cultures of solidarity between top lawyers and legal professionals during the years after the war, but largely because denazification of judges was not a priority for the US and Britain.

There was no attempt to hide the political choices being made on such matters. On several occasions, Justice Robert H. Jackson, the American Chief Prosecutor on the International Military Tribunal, simply ignored the well-evidenced recommendations of the top R&A analysts over such matters as selecting defendants to bring to trial. In reaction to such decisions, for which no explanation was ever given, Neumann resigned as the head of the research team on war crimes a few days into the main Nuremburg trial. He headed for academic jobs in New York and Berlin, whilst many of the people he had helped identify as ‘economic war criminals’ resumed positions of significant responsibility in the postwar German economy.

Meanwhile, the OSS was being marginalised, and would be closed down by October 1945. Marcuse and Kirchheimer were transferred to the State Department’s Research and Intelligence Division which, by spring 1946, was itself the focus of ongoing suspicion and frequent attack for alleged ‘Communist tendencies’. As the Cold War developed, however, they held onto their jobs for some years: Marcuse’s personal situation, and in particular the terminal cancer of his wife Sophie, meant that he did not feel he had the option to leave Washington. But his government work seemed less and less useful, both to him and to his employers, and it certainly did not influence policy. In the summer of 1949 he collated a long report on ‘The Potentials of World Communism’. The Introduction to this report, which closes this volume, argued that there was no ‘Communist threat’ of the kind that the US Cold Warriors were inventing and inflating to justify their foreign-policy objectives and military ambitions.

In 1951, Sophie died. Horkheimer, Adorno and Pollock returned to West Germany to re-establish the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Horkheimer having more-or-less made clear that Marcuse would not be a paid member of the school ‘back home’. In these circumstances, Marcuse was pleased to secure a scholarship which enabled him to take up the first of a series of posts in American universities.

Frankfurt Questions

Beyond the intrinsic value of the ‘secret reports’, how does the work gathered in this volume illuminate wider issues about the Frankfurt School: its concerns, debates, illuminations and evasions? Neumann, Marcuse and Kirchheimer distinguished the ‘ideological’ levels and performances of Nazism from the regime’s real social and economic logic. Many passages in this book demonstrate that beneath its ‘Wagnerian’ posturing, and its indulgence of obscurantist medievalism, Nazism was a thoroughly modern movement, attacking and dispensing with tradition in a relentless drive to achieve technical efficiency, realise infrastructural projects, build its war machine, and promote highly integrated economic structures in order to serve the regime’s objectives.

The reports are more specifically marked by their authors’ connections to the Institute for Social Research through repeated and more-or-less explicit returns to typically Frankfurt School considerations: what forms is modern society taking? How should radicals understand and engage with these social forms and dynamics? What are the cultural and psychological impulses which are interacting with social, economic and political trends to shape the specific conjuncture being considered?

Secret Reports on Nazi Germany provides a rich case study in how to analyse the shifting relationships between different sites of social power, and the modalities of decision-making across networks of technocrats, industrialists, factory managers, business owners, and those holding state power. The book details a particular instance of connections between capitalism, technology, forms of cultural domination, oppressive politics and the trends which the primary authors saw across the modern world towards ‘total socialisation’.

There is an important piece by Marcuse on these themes which is not collected here, as it pre-dates his government employment, but is worth consulting as a complement to this book.[14] As Douglas Kellner has stated, ‘“Some Social Implications of Modern Technology” … contains Marcuse’s first sketch of the role of technology in modern industrial societies and anticipates his later analysis in One Dimensional Man’: it even points towards his pioneering advocacy of ecological politics in the 1970s. The article, which was published in the Institute journal, sets out theoretical assumptions that shape most of the arguments in the ‘secret reports’. Marcuse’s 1941 argument was that the development of modern industry and technological rationality led to individuals becoming subject to increasing domination by the ‘technical-social apparatus’.[15] The result was the closing-down of space for ‘critical rationality’. On the basis of this understanding, Marcuse ‘presents National Socialism as an example in which technology and a rationalised society and economy can serve as instruments of totalitarian domination, describing the Third Reich as a form of “technocracy”’.[16]

At a time when such labels as ‘fascism’ and ‘extremism’ are being used to try and characterise phenomena from the Trump presidency to ethno-nationalist and racist movements and parties in various European countries, it is useful to be reminded of the need to combine urgency with thoughtfulness in applying critical concepts to achieve materialist analysis which has real explanatory power, and the potential to inform progressive and effective political action. Secret Reports on Nazi Germany, and the tradition of work it forms part of, stands as such a reminder.

About the Reviewer

Mike Makin-Waite is the author of Communism and Democracy: History, Debates and Potentials (Lawrence and Wishart, 2017). He is a member of the editorial board of Socialist History and has written for Soundings, Radical Philosophy, New Humanist and Twentieth Century Communism.

References

Abromeit, John 2013, Max Horkheimer and the Foundations of the Frankfurt School, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Biro, Andrew (ed.) 2011, Critical Ecologies: The Frankfurt School and Contemporary Environmental Crises, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Jeffries, Stuart 2016, Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School, London: Verso.

Kellner, Douglas 1998, ‘Introduction’, in Kellner (ed.) 1998.

Kellner, Douglas 2004, ‘Introduction’, in Kellner (ed.) 2004.

Kellner, Douglas (ed.) 1998, Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, Volume I:Technology, War and Fascism, London: Routledge.

Kellner, Douglas (ed.) 2004, Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, Volume III:The New Left and the 1960s, London: Routledge.

Lamas, Andrew T., Todd Wolfson and Peter N. Funke (eds.) 2017, The Great Refusal: Herbert Marcuse and Contemporary Social Movements, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

Leslie, Esther 1999, ‘Introduction to Adorno/Marcuse Correspondence on the German Student Movement’, New Left Review, I, 233: 123–36.

Marcuse, Herbert 1998 [1941], ‘Some Social Implications of Modern Technology’, in Kellner (ed.) 1998.

Müller, Tim B. 2010, Krieger und Gelehrte: Herbert Marcuse und die Denksysteme im Kalten Krieg [Warriors and Scholars: Herbert Marcuse and Cold War Culture], Hamburg: Hamburg Institute for Social Research.

Neumann, Franz, Herbert Marcuse and Otto Kirchheimer 2013, Secret Reports on Nazi Germany: The Frankfurt School Contribution to the War Effort, edited by Raffaele Laudani, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Toscano, Alberto 2017, ‘Notes on Late Fascism’, HistoricalMaterialism.org, 2 April, available at: <http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/blog/notes-late-fascism>.

Wheatland, Thomas 2009, The Frankfurt School in Exile, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Wiggershaus, Rolf 1995, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories and Political Significance, translated by Michael Robertson, Cambridge: Polity Press.

[1] Kellner 2004, p. 22.

[2]In later years, Cohn-Bendit denied he had raised the question of the CIA, and sought to make peace with Marcuse. See Leslie 1999.

[3] Wiggershaus 1995, p. 280.

[4]Wiggershaus 1995, p. 261. For a major contribution to Horkheimer’s intellectual biography, see Abromeit 2013.

[5] Jeffries 2016.

[6] Wheatland 2009.

[7] Müller 2010.

[8] Biro (ed.) 2011, and Lamas, Wolfson and Funke (eds.) 2017.

[9] Alongside information on the Nazis and the war, there is much useful material on aspects of German left history. For example, a report by Neumann includes a concise summary of successive ‘National Bolshevist’ initiatives between 1923 and 1932, in which communists attempted to directly connect with and re-articulate the agendas and hopes of Nazi supporters (Neumann, Marcuse and Kirchheimer 2013, pp. 153–9). Such episodes are often quickly and simplistically condemned as the result of self-defeating opportunism by German communists, or as a baleful consequence of the Comintern seeking ‘national roads to socialism’. Neumann’s account has the merit of explaining the contexts in which this tendency developed.

[10]A short report by Marcuse and the non-Frankfurter Felix Gilbert (Neumann, Marcuse and Kirchheimer 2013, pp. 61–70) convincingly explains how the ‘problem’ of Prussian culture was not in fact a real issue, and that the Nazis had actually dismantled the Junkers’ power bases and marginalised their traditions. The sources of Nazi aggression were to be found in the policies of the resurgent ‘industrial bourgeoisie’ – not amongst the hierarchical trappings of nineteenth-century Prussian culture.

[11] Toscano 2017.

[12] Ibid.

[13] This point about Frankfurt School politics is not contradicted by the fact that Franz Neumann was – for a short while and during his OSS service – a KGB informant, providing his contacts with highly classified US material which he accessed through his R&A job. Even more remarkably, it is possible and even likely that the American secret services knew of Neumann’s activities, ‘without any accusations of treason or conspiracy against him having arisen’ (Neumann, Marcuse and Kirchheimer 2013, p. 7).

[14] Marcuse 1998, pp. 41–65.

[15] Kellner 1998, p. 4.

[16] Kellner 1998, p. 6.