As the Lebanese revolutionary uprising enters its third month, the ancien regime has already unleashed counterrevolutionary practices in all its forms. Fear-mongering of pre-October 17 sectarian tensions alongside blaming the impending economic collapse on the continuous protests and reviving the specter of the civil war is rife on Lebanese TV channels as members of the Lebanese ruling class battle to hold on to a sinking structure. Although the momentum is not as prominent as it used to be during the first weeks of the revolution, slogans, chants, and demands are witnessing a sharp politicization that opens endless possibilities for class conscious struggles as the anger of the masses are directed at the main perpetrator of the economic crisis, local banks. Accordingly, state repression has also increased in the last couple of days as 61 protesters directing their anger on local banks in the Hamra neighborhood of Beirut on the 90th day of the revolution were arrested and detained overnight. Mattia Gallo, from Global Project, interviews Elia El Khazen on the recent developments and the “Nationalize the banks” campaign that he is a member of.  Elia El Khazen is a member of the Lebanese based Marxist organization the Socialist Forum and the campaign to nationalize the private banks in Lebanon تأميم المصارف. He is on the editorial board of المنشور and the Historical Materialism journal. His work has appeared on Salvage, Jacobin, and other journals.

How are the social conditions in Lebanon that are leading people to protest in Lebanon? Can you tell us what happened in the last few weeks on the streets of Beirut? What are the images that struck you most in this street protest?

Before I answer this question, allow me to give you a brief overview of the political economy of Lebanon.

Since its post-independence era, Lebanon has historically been one of the favored sites for consecutive laissez-faire and neoliberal experimentation. The erection of a robust banking sector that transcended national capital alongside the formation of the state has been one of the hallmarks of state and class formation in Lebanon. Fleeing the formation of the Zionist state, Palestinian capital in the late 1940s onwards, Egyptian, Syrian and Iraqi capital escaping nationalization back home in the early 1960s and surplus capital from the Gulf from the 1970s onwards has precipitated the solidification of a deregulated banking sector that has, since its inception, embodied one of the most unfettered forms of laissez-faire capitalism. Since the banking sector in Lebanon has been transnational in nature since its inception and since it is the preferred site for local intra-crony capitalist alliances, it comes as no surprise that this sector is responsible for most of the economic collapse that we are now witnessing.

The Lebanese revolutionary uprising that started on 17 October 2019 is the direct result of the accumulation of almost 30 years of austerity measures that have exponentially accelerated in the last couple of months mostly manifesting in the instability of the local currency that has precipitated bread and gasoline shortages all over Lebanon.

The Lebanese Central Bank has been subjecting the country to countless speculative measures in order to stabilize the Lebanese Lira rigidly tying it to dollar solvency. As mentioned earlier, Lebanese’s economy has always revolved around the banking sector, more so since the end of the civil war. This has resulted in a non-productive economy where the import/export deficit is, in part, responsible for the disappearing dollar liquidity but this ratio does not tell the whole story. Most of the Central Bank’s monetary and financial measures have also been contingent upon the liquidity of the dollar currency, i.e. either a constant flow of foreign direct investments, huge state loans or remittances.

Given the increasing shortages in these three forms of dollar flows in the country, due in no small part to the catastrophic public debt that sucks a large part of the dollar deposits and channels them to debtors and local banks, currency instability has become the norm. The crisis started to become clearer last year when local banks (who own most of the public debt) stopped providing housing loans. The housing loans had been frozen between March and September of last year, following the depletion of the support package provided by the Central Bank. In late January, the Central Bank launched a new “stimulus package” worth over $1 billion, the eighth package it had launched since 2012. Against a backdrop of persistently low economic growth and high-interest rates, such packages aim to support the construction and real estate sectors through subsidized loans granted through local banks. These packages are nothing more than a reallocation of wealth that aims to continuously postpone an imminent economic and financial crisis while ensuring that the realization of capital is reproduced within local banks-real-estate-construction trifecta, a financial trilogy that has been benefiting most from the capital reproduction model installed under the Hariri era.

By allocating nearly half of each year’s package to housing loans, the Central Bank and the Lebanese government act as an intermediary that ensures the viability of the banking sector’s capital reproduction which stands at an estimated at $4billion per year.  The manufactured shoring up of housing demand prevents the ultimate collapse of prices and keeps the real-estate bubble afloat. This year, the instability in the currency manifested itself in early October in the form of blocked cash withdrawals and currency conversions by local banks that claimed to be suffering from dollar shortages.

This, in turn, forced bakeries and petrol stations to shut their doors, as they import most of their commodities in dollars and are increasingly obliged to earn profits in a devalued local currency. Even though this financial crisis was temporarily postponed, a series of wildfires that ravaged the country in mid-October exposed the consequences of austerity measures on the state’s ability to respond to catastrophes. The straw that broke the camel’s back came in the form of the last cabinet meeting before Hariri’s resignation that discussed and approved a new round of austerity measures to be deployed to conform with the IMF and the World Bank’s conditions agreed upon during the last CEDRE conference.

The CEDRE conference, an international conference in support of Lebanon’s “development and reforms”, hosted in April 2018, was set to help Lebanon secure soft loans that provided around $10.2 billion and grants amounting to around $800 million but were conditioned by harsher austerity measures to be applied within a year of the conference. The four pillars of the conference include: increasing the level of public and private investment; ensuring economic and financial stability through fiscal adjustment; undertaking essential sectoral and cross-sectoral reforms, fighting corruption and the modernization of the public sector and public finance management and developing a strategy for the “reinforcement and diversification of Lebanon’s productive sectors and the realization of its export potential”. These pillars, if properly discursively deconstructed, constitute a clear imposition of privatization of most of the revenue making sectors of the Lebanese state (mainly telecommunications, which is still profitable due to the fact that it is one of the most expensive services in the world) and an attempt to replace the Lebanese state’s infrastructure budget with FDIs (Foreign Direct Investment which has dramatically dropped from 16% in 2003 to a meager 0.8% this year).

The IMF and the World Bank’s enthusiasm for filling in the FDI gaps left by Gulf capital in Lebanon is only matched by its eagerness to impose privatization as the main form of capital extraction. Under the guise of “fighting corruption” and diversifying the Lebanese economy, the message at the CEDRE conference was clear: If the Lebanese government is unable to increase austerity measures by increasing taxes, it will then ensure the sale of public property, i.e. large sections of the Beirut Port, the Middle East Airlines, Airport Services, the Beirut Stock Exchange, the Regie Libanaise, the national Casino, future Oil Installations, and others. One of CEDRE’s main conditions also implied that the government would refrain from spending on infrastructure projects, i.e. stopping all projects related to infrastructure that stimulates growth and job creation. In essence, then, the CEDRE conference aims to monetize the deepening of the economic crisis by imposing privatization and FDIs as the only viable alternative to what is perceived as the “corruption of the public sector”. The Lebanese ruling class’ continuous destruction of the public sector was set to bear its fruits in yet another internationally sponsored conference that would further inject misery upon misery on the Lebanese populace.

A message that has been clearly adopted by Hariri’s last before his resignation in response to increasing pressure from the streets where he had vowed to further privatize several public sectors and gave a go-ahead to LINOR and ELISSAR real-estate projects. These huge real estate projects are nothing more than an attempt by Hariri to franchise the Solidere project in the periphery of Beirut and the Metn district. Under pressure from the streets, Hariri also declared that the government would not impose any new direct or indirect taxes, during the year 2020 without giving assurances about later years. These series of reforms were just meant to deflate the momentum and divert the anger away from Hariri, as he claimed that these reforms were part of his initial plan but we derailed due to interferences from other sections in the ruling class.

People responded in kind by flooding the streets where they live, regrouping in its biggest squares and demanding the fall of the regime. “We do not trust the government nor do we trust Hariri” was the word of the day on the night of Hariri’s speech as it was reported that more than 2.5 million people roamed the streets of Lebanon across more than 30 cities.

Since Rafic Hariri came to power in the early 1990s, the economy has been completely reliant on foreign investment due to its ties to the dollar currency that is linked to the stabilization of the Lebanese Lira. Furthermore, the monetary system guarantees a fixed exchange rate while adopting a high-interest rate on the differential between the Lebanese pound and the dollar, which allows banks and large depositors to make significant profits by taking on debt. The equation becomes straightforward, large depositors and local banks provide dollars at an interest rate of 5, 6 or 7% in exchange for treasury bonds, when these loans are paid back by the state, these large sums are placed in Lebanese pounds at an interest rate of 25, 30, 35%.

The crisis of over-reliance on foreign investment and dollar solvency reared its head in 2011 as the effect of the economic crisis hit the flow of remittances of Lebanese expatriates combined with a dip in Gulf capital in the Lebanese economy since 2014 (because of low gas and fuel prices) and an increase in economic sanctions since 2016 when Trump came to power. As a result, SMEs (small and medium enterprises), which constitute the majority of the Lebanese economy, have opted to physically displace this insolvency on the Lebanese working class by opting to hyper-exploit migrant labor from the large pool of labor reserve army within the refugee community. This has further exasperated the formation of the local economy that is reliant on dollar solvency remaining within its borders and not leaving it through counter-remittances or remittances leaving the countries. This, in turn, explains the rise in racist discourse within the Lebanese society that blames Syrian and Palestinian refugees for rising unemployment rather than economic engineering and manipulation by the Lebanese Central Bank and the Lebanese financial sector. Additionally, the import/export balance in Lebanon is a largely negative one that favors import and accentuates the problem by adding $15 billion of expenses every year which is also affecting the Lebanese Central Bank’s dollar reserves (since all import expenditures are done in dollars). If the dollar reserves of the Central Bank stood at $35 billion in 2015, it is important to note that the very same Central Bank owed local banks more than $62 billion in local debt, a deficit of $27 billion. The fact that most of our public debt is owned by a handful of the local banks is a huge impediment to the formation of a productive economy. This predicament, however, is also a blessing in disguise for the agents of neoliberalism. Even though Hariri’s economic reforms were overwhelmingly rejected by protesters, which led to his ultimate resignation, the CEDRE conference sponsored by the IMF and the World Bank marked a clear tactical shift from austerity politics to privatization. This marks a dangerous turn in the logic of financialization and late capitalism that highlights the major crisis that neoliberalism is going through especially in its modalities and processes. The current neoliberal order is, however, able to monetize its own failure as political unrest and a crumbling monetary and economic system can however constitute opportunities for neoliberalism in crisis for the further privatization of key economic resources comes for cheap. This is why Hariri’s resignation and burying the CEDRE conference were a turning point in the Lebanese revolution.

What is the importance of this protest in the history of Lebanon?

This is truly a historical revolutionary moment in Lebanon’s history, as we have finally caught up with the revolutionary wave that has swept the region and is being continuously reignited in places like Algeria, Sudan, Jordan, and Iraq. But, as I mentioned earlier, although the revolutionary wave is indeed a continuation of the Arab uprising it also has its discrete material conditions. Without falling into methodological nationalism, we can safely assume that there is a certain specificity to what I’d like to call (borrowing from Mark Fisher) sectarian realism, the idea that it is impossible to conceive a Lebanese subjectivity, a Lebanese economy and a Lebanese superstructure outside of any sectarian affiliation and sectarian structural dependency, to borrow from Mehdi Amel, that has been foundational to the formation of capitalism in Lebanon since the 1860s. This specificity can somehow explain why Lebanon’s revolution came this late within the waves of the Lebanese revolution as sectarian affiliation within a neoliberal era combines individualism with competing sects in the market for limited resources. But sectarian realism is only a viable form of capitalism as long as crony capitalism and its clientelist network are able to provide the services they promise. The financial and economic crisis detailed earlier precipitated the delinking of people from the sectarian market due in large part to the fact that this system was not able to fulfill its promise on a much larger scale that now included all sects. This is why Lebanon benefitted from what Trotsky calls “the privilege of historic backwardness”. Ideologically and from a class perspective Lebanon was not primed for a revolution as the form of financialization described earlier rendered most of its Lebanese working class (now mostly in the service sector) powerless, unorganized and constantly pegged against a migrant working class which is continuously hyper-exploited. As I mentioned earlier, the Lebanese economy has, since the early 1990s, centralized the reproduction of surplus capital around the financial and real estate sectors which in turn continually denies the formation of proletarianized labor outside the service sector. But this privilege has manifested itself clearly with the giant leaps that the masses were able to achieve and was characterized by the chants and slogans and novel forms of organizing that was adopted.

The efficacy of grassroots organizing, combined with the failure of the neoliberal sectarian state to fulfill the false promise of competitive prosperity, generalized a sense of class-for-itself specifically in rural areas. If sectarian neoliberalism's original raison d’être lies in the premise that sectarian divide is not only inevitable but crucial for communal prosperity, what a new round of austerity measures has proven in less than a week’s time is that these premises were conditioned on sectarian competition continually bearing fruit.

The spread of the revolution was instant as it set about to settle long overdue scores with its detached ruling class refuting in its way years and years of empty analysis by most political scientists, who had long buried any revolutionary potential under the rubble of what they’ve collectively agreed to call “the conviviality between the oppressed and the oppressor” and the “overwhelming sectarian nature of Lebanese people and institutions”.

An observation they claimed was now a reality that should be accepted. In the face of these liberal acolytes’ deep and undying faith in institutional progress and stageists strategies of “dual power”, the class struggle has prevailed in the streets, as roadblocks were erected across most working-class neighborhoods within hours.

In this context, decentralized roadblocks are not just temporary alternatives to a call for a general strike by a centralized trade union but aimed at flipping the central and peripheral paradigm on its head. Beirut is no longer the center that is relied upon to inject revolutionary fervor, as the beating heart of this revolution moves from one rural area to the other following the state’s coercion of roadblocks. Roadblocks become then a monument that celebrates the very refusal of participating in the labor market through the sectarian subject formation.

The deepening of class consciousness through a reconfiguration of the Lebanese subjectivity in peripheral rural areas such as Nabatieh, Sour, Tripoli, Jal el Dib constitute, following from Dan La Botz, rural laboratories searching for the cure for capitalism where peripheral working-class scientists mostly serving in the service, financial and educational sectors experiment on the streets in an attempt to revive hollowed trade unions waiting to be born again.

These rural areas do not constitute anymore impenetrable sectarian cantons that are religiously homogenized, essentialized and atomized as competing for sectarian strongholds in the Lebanese psyche but direct battlegrounds of confrontations with the state and its complementary sectarian militias that continuously reaffirm the centrality of the class struggle. The more violent, repressive and humiliating sectarian militias are, the more they reaffirm their role as agents of the ruling class. By insisting on taking down the sectarian system through generalized roadblocks across Lebanon, protesters have actually dismissed the logic of the market, the logic that continually reaffirms that there is no alternative to sectarian competition that vertically binds the atomized individual with his/her sect, and, by association, the sectarian ruling class.

What are the main slogans and claims of this protest? Are there connections with the 2015 street protests?

Since day one, the masses have chanted “The people want the fall of the regime”, a slogan that has been inspirational in the Arab uprising since 2011. A more popular slogan that is almost a decade old in Lebanon but was popularised by the 2015 protests was "All of them means all of them" and a lesser chanted one, but equally poignant, “If Syria and Sudan have one dictator we have 100” - which is a reference to the fact that the neoliberal sectarianism in Lebanon conjoins all members of the ruling class who have dominated the power for decades. “We are the revolution of the people, you are the civil war!” is another more recent chant that refers to the ruling class’ imbrication in the civil war and its role in destroying the very social fabric that is being knitted again by the protesters on the streets. Another important chant comes from the university and school students who took it upon themselves to reignite the revolution as participation was dipping during the second week. Their participation was as crucial as their chants were also on point: “We are not here to study history, we are here to write it”, as students rewrote the history of the revolution and gave it another lifeline.

The beautiful images of cross-border solidarity with other revolutionary comrades across the Arab world in Sudan, Syria, Iraq, Egypt and other countries should however not keep us from asking about the lack of participation of migrant labor in the revolution. Our revolution will not be one that is marred with methodological nationalism that forgoes our Syrian, Palestinian, Egyptian, Sri Lankan, and Ethiopian comrades in the name of homogeneity and finding a “common denominator”. Our comrades have been sidelined, over-exploited and alienated from politicization and organizing for far too long. Their upcoming revolution should be the base on which we build the second and third waves of revolutionary momentum.

What will be the prospect of this protest? Do you think the government will increase repression?

Contrary to Iran, Iraq, Chile and other countries that are witnessing historical revolutions, the Lebanese government has not yet unleashed the full power of its repression on the protesters. Although the number of dead now stands at 7 martyrs, the Lebanese government has opted to use its security apparatus for crowd control purposes opting to outsource violence against protesters to the complementary sectarian militias. Although state repression has seen a sharp rise in the last couple of days, especially with the deepening of the political discourse and actions aimed at the banking sector, the state has not unleashed the full might of its oppressive apparatus. Targeting the banks however has shown the real oppressive depth that the state is willing to let loose to defend a sector that has defined its role since the inception of Lebanon.

This form of state violence is complemented by organized racketeering by sectarian militias belonging to the parties of the ancien regime. It serves two purposes, it first pegs working-class constituents against each other and momentarily relieves the state from its repressive duties. Racketeering, as Charles Tilly reminds us, is not exclusive to para-state organizations that challenge the state but is the original modus operandi of the state that is frequently later outsourced to sectarian militias in order to defend order, legitimacy and the original act of dispossession. Tilly helps us cast doubt over the “failed state notion” that is often paraded in political circles when describing states in the Global South as sectarian militias’ role during the Lebanese civil war reified and vyed for the Lebanese state rather than compromised its authority. The incremental incorporation of belligerent militia groups into the state’s security apparatus only proves that their motivation behind their racketeering during the civil war was nothing more than a continuation of politics rather than an absence of it. It is this incorporation that paved the way for the organic and yet violent passage from unfettered laissez-faire capitalism to savage neoliberalism headed by Rafic Hariri. The sectarian militia’s role in hollowing out and colonizing of state structures went hand in hand with Hariri’s financialization of the Lebanese economy. The Syrian regime’s occupation of Lebanon intensified its grip on Lebanon during the Hariri era in the 90s and ruled with an iron fist that intermittently deployed its satellites to quash trade unions, unorganized workers and activists. One of its most prominent satellites at the time, Hezbollah, stands now as the major pole of counterrevolution in Lebanon and the region.

Hezbollah stands as a major poll of counterrevolutionary repression and organized racketeering. Hezbollah has taken up the primary role of the counter-revolutions as a continuation to its role in Syria, as the so-called resistance bloc had nothing to offer the protesters but conspiracy theories about embassy funding and physical coercion in Beirut and the south of Lebanon. In his infamous second speech, 9 days after the revolution began, Nasrallah questioned the very legitimacy and the spontaneity of the people on the streets deploying conspiratorial narratives around ‘embassy funding’, reviving civil war tropes, humiliating the protesters for being leaderless and confused in their demands and reminding his followers and protesters alike that the Syrian civil war could be a likely scenario if the protests continue. By doing so, Hezbollah, through Nasrallah’s speech, embodied the historical role of petty-bourgeois politics,  increasingly reflecting the backbone of its constituency.

Hezbollah has historically played the role of the intermediary that carefully resolves tensions between sections of the working class and the ruling class and further abstracts the class struggle by constantly projecting it into an unknown, unresolvable future while national liberation remains a constant priority.

As Joseph Daher has shown in his book on Hezbollah, the party continues to receive support from people from different classes, but the party's priorities are increasingly oriented towards the higher classes. This has created friction within the Shia community and specifically within Hezbollah supporters, where lower-class supporters have realized that they are not Hezbollah’s priority, but constituted the recruiting base for Hezbollah’s war on the Syrian people, a war that is bound to benefit to higher classes of Hezbollah’s cadres and their entourage that are increasingly constituted from the upper-middle classes and the Shia bourgeoisie. Nasrallah’s latest speech in early January following Suleimani’s death invited the poor to share the burden of the impending economic collapse alongside the rich as “it is only fair that this catastrophe is shared amongst all classes”

This is why Hezbollah has opted to channel the class friction that has plagued the community it claims to hold away from within its community and reignite a sectarian tension by pushing lower-class Shia supporters against the 17 October revolutionaries. By doing so, Hezbollah not only momentarily solves the growing class tension within the Shia community by redirecting and physically displacing the class contradiction towards a sectarian struggle and dissipating the anger of its working-class towards a sectarian standoff. By doing so, Hezbollah is also able to push against any talk of a technocratic government that is being branded by Hariri and others (backed by the US) in order to guarantee a more politicized government that insures its right to bear arms. By pushing components of its lower-class supporters to clash directly with October 17 protesters, Hezbollah aims to redeploy and magnify the sectarian tactic that was lost on October 17, a tactic that claims that the general public is still entrenched in its sectarian allegiances and is still not ready for a technocratic government. Reifying sectarianism as a counterrevolutionary tactic serves then Hezbollah on two fronts, both internally and externally and helps salvage its alliance with the President’s front that secures the status quo.

The Lebanese army, rarely mentioned as the other major component of the counterrevolution in Lebanon, has also historically played both a passive and an active role complementing the role of militias. Since the ascension of Fouad Chehab to power in 1958, a move orchestrated as a compromise between Nasserist and US hegemony, the Lebanese Army has been a major component of counterrevolutionary practice that has tactically stood on the fence until it was able to take power. Although it is now shackled by its funders (the US and Saudi Arabia), the ruling class is still able to rely on some generals within its ranks that are able to maneuver political frictions in order to repress some areas (Jal el Dib, Zouk, and others) or ignite sectarian tensions within others (Tripoli).

Can you tell us more about the campaign you’re working on?

At the time of writing, Riad Salameh, the governor of the Lebanese Central Bank, had requested from the Minister of Finance, that he be given special status that would allow him to supersede the council of ministers. The measures that local banks are currently taking in terms of their dealings with small depositors, i.e. the complete control over their access to their deposits and salaries in the dollar currency have aggravated dramatically the relationship between banks and the general populace to a point where people started to organize in groups to pressure the banks to cough up their own money.

There is one slogan that I have failed to mention earlier which has to do with what the general public is calling “reclaiming the stolen capital” and what they’re referring to is, in small part, corruption by the crony capitalist ruling class but, in large part, the ever-growing public debt that is eating up more than 40% of the government’s yearly budget to cover the compound interest rate of this debt. The majority of the public/private debt, i.e. more than $50 billion of this debt (out of approximately $85 billion) is owned by local private banks. For this reason, we decided, as a group of leftists, to organize around the issue of nationalizing the banks, which is, given the historical prominence of the banking sector mentioned earlier, not only novel but would have been usually frowned upon pre-October 17 revolution.

We also felt that the socio-economic demands that were part and parcel that drove the masses to protest the first two days were getting drowned out by more populist and liberal demands around corruption and the application of the constitution that did nothing but salvage the ruling class from its self-made crisis. The demand for the nationalization of banks, in an era of the neoliberal crisis caused by public debt (sponsored by CEDRE, the World Bank and the IMF) not only signifies the transfer of ownership of private banks to the public sector - meaning banks to become a public domain, the property of the people, without compensation to their owners - but also reverses years of privatization and austerity measures. Private banks (where crony capitalism is rife) have loaned the state tens of billions of dollars with high and compounded interest rates using state-sponsored treasury bonds. Our campaign has camped in front of most of the bank branches distributing leaflets on the necessity of nationalizing the banks, free food and opened discussions on the economy. We have also recently formed groups in most of Lebanon’s districts to pressure banks in releasing small depositor’s dollars and joined these depositors in groups in order to organize collectively against banks. People’s reaction to the campaign has been largely positive and encouraging as the repressive measures private banks have taken in the last couple of weeks to pressure both the masses and the government have increased the animosity of people towards the banks. We are tapping into this specific anger that comes out of the interaction with the bank to politicize it and direct it towards the center of capital reproduction and dispossession in Lebanon.

As a final and important point, our focus on the banks, alongside a myriad of other leftists organizations and groups such as the youth sector of the Lebanese Communist Party and a newly formed group called شباب المصرف (Youth against the bank) and others have also helped in recruiting working-class Shia to the cause and has helped in reigniting the revolutionary fervor and set the record straight that this struggle is a class struggle and not a sectarian one.

A Review of Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion by Gareth Stedman Jones

William Clare Roberts

Department of Political Science, McGill University

william.roberts3@mcgill.ca

Abstract

Despite the stated aim of this new biography to restore Marx to his original condition, Stedman Jones repeatedly misreads Marx’s arguments. He misidentifies or misconstrues the context relevant for many of Marx’s key texts. In general, Stedman Jones reads Marx through a screen of twentieth-century and contemporary concerns – the politics of recognition and the language of identity – while ignoring historical scholarship that would be awkward for the story he wishes to tell. This review-essay substantiates these criticisms by examining in some detail two major themes of Stedman Jones’s account: (1) Marx’s relation to modern representative democracy, and (2) the role of abstraction in Marx’s critique of political economy.

Keywords

Karl Marx – Gareth Stedman Jones – representative democracy – political economy – socialism

Gareth Stedman Jones, (2016) Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion, London: Allen Lane.

Why does this book exist? As Gareth Stedman Jones admits on the first page of his new biography, Marx’s second century has seen numerous treatments of Marx’s life, from Franz Mehring’s to Mary Gabriel’s and Jonathan Sperber’s.[1] Stedman Jones cites a dozen, give or take. What could justify another 700-page entry in this crowded field?

Stedman Jones must have asked himself this same question. His apology is that previous biographies have offered only ‘descriptive accounts of Marx’s theoretical writings’ (p. xv). By contrast, Stedman Jones sets out to give Marx’s writings their theoretical and political due by treating them ‘as the interventions of an author within particular political and philosophical contexts that the historian must carefully reconstruct’ (p. xv). If Stedman Jones has paid ‘as much attention to Marx’s thought as to his life’, he has also ‘paid as much attention to the utterances and reactions of contemporaries as to Marx’s own words’ (p. xv). The aim, therefore, is to reconstruct the context of Marx’s writings, and to ‘restore’ these writings thereby to their ‘original condition’, stripping away any ‘retouching and alteration’ that has befallen them since Marx’s death.

This is an admirable aim. Innocent, with a whiff of positivism about it, but admirable. Judged according to this stated aspiration, however, Greatness and Illusion is not a success. Despite some bright spots – in particular, the reconstruction of the context and process of writing and publishingCapital – the overwhelming tendency of the book is to misidentify or misconstrue the political and philosophical contexts of Marx’s interventions. The result is a map of Marx’s life that theEconomist can extol – ‘no better guide to Marx’, it declares on the cover of the paperback – but which misleads and confuses the reader truly interested in discovering Marx’s thought, writings, and context.

Despite his stated design, Stedman Jones shows no real concern for figuring out the how and why of Marx’s interventions. He repeatedly misreads Marx’s arguments. He takes Marx’s interlocutors at their word, religiously, even as he claims to know, for instance, when Marx only ‘affected to believe’ something (p. 296). He misidentifies or misconstrues the context relevant for many of Marx’s key texts. In general, Stedman Jones reads Marx through a screen of twentieth-century and contemporary concerns – the politics of recognition and the language of identity – while ignoring historical scholarship that would be awkward for the story he wishes to tell. This may seem a harsh indictment of a book that has been, on the whole, well-received, written by scholar with a long and distinguished career. In what follows, I will substantiate these charges by examining in some detail two major themes of Stedman Jones’s account: (1) Marx’s relation to modern representative democracy, and (2) the role of abstraction in Marx’s critique of political economy. This should make it clear that Stedman Jones’s real project is quite different from his stated one.

1. Representation and Universal Suffrage

A Review of Begegnungen mit Don Quijote. Ausgewählte Schriften by Karl Schmückle

Kaan Kangal

Department of Philosophy, Nanjing University, China

kaankangal@gmail.com

Abstract

This is a review-essay on Werner Röhr’s 2014 edition of fourteen essays by Karl Schmückle in a volume entitled Begegnungen mit Don Quijote [Encounters with Don Quichotte]. Schmückle was one of the MEGA¹ scholars who emigrated from Germany to the Soviet Union in the 1920s. Under the directorship of David Riazanov at the Marx–Engels Institute in Moscow, Schmückle worked as co-editor of Marx’s and Engels’s early works such as the pre-1844 writings,The Holy Family andThe German Ideology, until the institute was shut down by the Soviet authorities in 1931. In this essay I will introduce Schmückle’s intellectual journeys in Germany and the Soviet Union, and focus on his scholarly writings on the young Marx. Schmückle’s writings document his intellectual ambitions in and scholarly contributions to early Marxian research. He also represents the tragic end of a creative generation of German Marxists in the former Soviet Union.

Keywords

Karl Schmückle – MEGA – David Riazanov – Soviet Union – utopia – historical materialism

Karl Schmückle, (2014) Begegnungen mit Don Quijote. Ausgewählte Schriften, edited by Werner Röhr, Berlin: Argument Verlag/InkriT.

The book under review, Begegnungen mit Don Quijote [Encounters with Don Quichotte], is the most comprehensive collection of essays by the philosopher, Marx scholar, and literary critic Karl Schmückle (1898–1938).[1] It contains six philosophical essays from 1923 to 1933 (Logical-Historical Elements of Utopia;A. Deborin: Lenin, the Fighting Materialist;On the History of Political Theories;The First Volume of the Marx–Engels Complete Works;On the Critique of German Historicism; andThe Young Marx and the Bourgeois Society), and eight writings on literature from 1934 to 1936 (Of Freedom and its Chimaera;Praise of the Art of the Explorer;Heroic Reality: On Anna Segher’s New Novel;‘The Way Through February’;History of the Golden Book: A Utopian Reportage;Thomas Mann Against Fascism;The Contemporary Don Quichotte; and Encounters with Don Quichotte).

          The editor, Werner Röhr, gives in his Introduction an extensive overview of previous Schmückle receptions, Schmückle’s political and intellectual biography, summaries of his essays, and the institutional history that forms the backdrop to Schmückle’s academic and literary activities. Schmückle has not enjoyed much scholarly attention besides two studies on his entire work, one by Hans Schleier[2] in his 1982 analysis of Schmückle’s critique of German historicism (first published in the Soviet journal Under the Banner of Marxism back in 1929),[3] and the other by Reinhard Müller,[4] who investigated Schmückle’s 1931‒6 period in the KGB archives in Moscow. Here Müller discovered all the trial documents related to Schmückle’s case (pp. i–ii). With respect to both Schleier and Müller, Röhr draws a broader picture of Schmückle’s intellectual career.

Schmückle in Historiographic Context

Karl Schmückle is one of the forgotten intellectual figures in Western Marxist circles whose political and philosophical formation was shaped by the First World War and the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. Like many others of his generation, Schmückle was first radicalised, and then emerged as a Marxist, at the beginning of the 1920s. His biographical and geographical background has much in common with what is nowadays called ‘Western Marxism’. Biographically, he was a student of Karl Korsch in Jena, an acquaintance and, later, co-worker of Georg Lukács, and one of the first international correspondents of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research and the Marx–Engels Institute in Moscow. Over a decade younger than both Lukács and Korsch, but of the same age as Marcuse, Schmückle was, like Marcuse, drafted into the German Army in the War, and subsequently became a member of a soldiers’ council. Geographically, he was, like Adorno and Horkheimer, native to South-West Germany (Enzklösterle-Gompelscheuer, close to Karlsruhe), where Lukács and Marcuse were trained (p. iii). Berlin and Jena, where Schmückle studied, were well-known political and intellectual centres of the German Left. His doctoral dissertation on utopia, which was printed in the same year (1923) as Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness and Korsch’s Marxism and Philosophy, documents Schmückle’s expertise in French socialism, Hegelian philosophy and Marx’s political economy. It was also one of the first, if notthe first, historical-materialist studies on utopia in the postwar period. Schmückle, like Lukács, participated in the preparation of the MEGA¹ edition of Marx’s and Engels’s early manuscripts at the Marx–Engels Institute in Moscow, and, like Korsch and Marcuse, made extensive contributions to a modern understanding of the young Marx and Engels.

          If what Perry Anderson asserts is true, that Lukács and Korsch were ‘the real originators’ of ‘Western Marxism’, then Schmückle clearly belongs to the same lineage.[5] But if Schmückle truly ‘formed [a] nodal point of juncture at which “Western” and “Eastern” currents met within Marxism in the twenties’,[6] then it would be rather dubious to claim that ‘philosophical’ Marxism ‘begins with Lukács’ alone.[7] Žižek rightfully asserts that Lukács’s 1923 book is ‘one of the few authentic events in the history of Marxism’.[8] One might easily add Korsch and Gramsci’s names next to Lukács’s, as Anderson does. But what about Schmückle?

          In contrast to the familiar figures of ‘Western Marxism’, Schmückle’s case consists in the fact that he did not ‘finish on top’, ‘write the histories’ and ‘hand out the medals’. Rather, he belongs to the ‘silenced’ or ‘defeated’ side of Marxism that is reclaimed today by a ‘revisionist’ historiography.[9] Schmückle’s life and works register a constellation of motives and the fate of a politically engaged movement that did not resign the theoretical tradition but nonetheless ended with the 1930s Purges in the Soviet Union. Russell Jacoby would probably call this a ‘success of Soviet Marxism’ that coincides with ‘the defeat of other Marxisms’.[10]

          The present review-essay does not attempt to redefine the concept of ‘Western Marxism’ but gives a few reasons to reconsider the origins and legacies of Marxism, even if they are partially lost or forgotten. Of course, much of what is said for Lukács or Korsch and how they ‘enabled’ the next generations ‘to produce an extremely rich theoretical tradition’ cannot be said for someone like Schmückle, who did not have any comparable impact on the theoretical tradition.[11] So the question is whether he can promise any fruitful potential for the theory and its history today. I will leave that judgement to the reader.

Schmückle’s Pre-Moscow Period

There are two stages to be mentioned that shaped Schmückle’s early political aims. The first is when he was seriously injured in Flanders/Ypern in the First World War, and sent to Dresden. This was when Schmückle first became familiar with the communist worldview. Following his recovery, he was transferred to Ulm, which at that time was, after Potsdam, the second largest garrison city in Germany. Schmückle participated in the November Revolution in a soldiers’ council and as a member of the Red Soldiers’ League. After his discharge from the military in 1919, he went to Tübingen to study philosophy and theology. With Felix Weil, who later founded the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research in 1923, and Heinrich Süßkind, the editor-in-chief of the Rote Fahne, Schmückle co-founded the Free Union of Socialist Students. The union invited speakers such as Clara Zetkin, Willi Münzenberg, and Edwin Hoernle (p. iv). Participation in student organisations, in addition to lectures on political philosophy, made up the second crucial stage in Schmückle’s political-ideological development.

          On Clara Zetkin’s advice, Schmückle went to Berlin to study Marxist political economy, and sat in on the lectures of Social-Democratic professors such as Heinrich Cunow, Ignaz Jastrow, Paul Lensch, Emil VerHees, and Werner Sombart (p. v). Schmückle also took one seminar by Gustav Mayer, one of the first historians of German labour history, on the early works of Marx and Engels. In 1921, Schmückle switched to the University of Jena, once famously known for German Idealism, then subsequently for mathematical logic, where he attended lectures on socialism and communism by Gerhard Kesler and Karl Korsch (p. vi).[12] In 1923, Schmückle participated in the First Marxist Study Week [Erste Marxistische Arbeitswoche] financed by Felix Weil and organised by Richard Sorge. The following were also present: Bela Fogarasi, Hede and Julian Gumperz, Margarete Lissauer, Georg Lukács, Heide and Paul Massing, Friedrich Pollock, Karl August and Rose Wittfogel, Konstantin Zetkin, Hedda and Karl Korsch, Christiane Sorge, Käthe Weil, Ludwig and Gertrud Alexander, and Kuzuki Fukumoto.[13] Contemporary questions of crisis, questions of methodology, the problems concerning the organisation of Marxian research, and Karl Korsch’s then-unpublished manuscript Marxism and Philosophy were discussed (p. vii). Expectations for a second meeting of the same study group came to naught when a more ambitious alternative, the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, took its place. Under the direction of Carl Grünberg, the Institute started working closely with the Marx–Engels Institute in Moscow.

Logical-Historical Elements of Utopia

Schmückle finished his doctoral dissertation in 1923, and had been attending courses by Franz Gutmann, Gerhard Kessler, and Otto Koellreuther on national economy, finance, the monetary system, and political theory (p. ix). Considering the subjects Schmückle had covered in his final exams, he picked quite a radical topic for his dissertation: Logical-Historical Elements of Utopia. Schmückle investigated here two generations of utopians, one from the seventeenth century (More, Campanella, Mably, Morelly, and Meslier), the other from the nineteenth century (Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier).

          ‘The first appearance-form of utopia’, Schmückle writes, ‘is the utopian state’ (p. 28). Thomas More defines the social order as a matter of organisation of things by and within the state, while Campanella personifies the idea of utopia with an enlightened prince, a wise ruler, or the ‘god of sun’.[14] For Campanella, the privileges and state monopoles naturally transform into governing organs of the utopian republic. They serve to keep the metabolic exchange between nature and man in harmonic balance (p. 29). The second appearance-form of utopia is words in action, or the practical unity of nations against tyrants and despots. ‘Infinity of miseries’, as Meslier the atheist and rebel once put it, is manifested in the paradise of the property, enjoyment, and lust of the wealthy, on the one hand, and in the trouble, pain, and worry of the poor, on the other (p. 31). Morelly, like Campanella, ascribes to society a mechanistic concept of automatism, whereby the individual substances of the social automaton function as the organs of a greater whole. The crucial point Morelly stresses is that the natural harmony is to be balanced by the social machine (p. 34). The harmony that these early social utopians had drafted was precisely the opposite of contemporary society in their times. Schmückle points out that this characteristic distinguishes them from the ‘religion of daily life’ of the late bourgeois apostles of social harmony (p. 35).

          Schmückle stresses that, in contrast to early utopians, some sort of social empiricism, holistic understanding of society, and a weaker reference to state affairs were all significant for the late utopians (p. 38). Saint-Simon recognises industrial development as the main basis for the ideal future society because it already provides the material preconditions for eliminating idleness and poverty. Labour as the basic substance of all human capacities ensures the overcoming of the present society as such. Fourier, by contrast, focuses on repressive moralities, and the contradiction between pain and happiness. The driving force of society is to be found contained, for Fourier, in human passions, affections, and natural desires. The antagonistic relations of society are, in last instance, a matter of individual antagonisms (p. 40). Fourier’s notion of ‘harmonic, natural contradiction’ embeds into a ‘real contradiction’ as a ‘mere negation of negation’ of his time (p. 48).

          The more intensely the new modes of economic production face inherited factors and relations of production, and the more they penetrate wider spaces and masses of production, the more clear becomes the bigger picture of social reality, and how it might be conceptualised otherwise (p. 32). The historical process of the relations between producers and means of production determines the material ground for all the utopian ideas concerning how to interpret and change the world. For Schmückle, it is significant for the early utopians that they represent the social disharmonies of the real world in their utopian counter-images (p. 35). Although he does not directly refer to Marx, Schmückle obviously has in mind a passage from The Class Struggles in France, where Marx differentiates utopians from doctrinaire socialists:

... utopia ... subordinates the whole movement to one of its elements, ... puts the cerebrations of the individual pedant in place of common, social production and, above all, wishes away the necessities of the revolutionary class struggles by petty tricks or great sentimental rhetoric ...[15]

Schmückle at the Marx–Engels Institute

Schmückle’s doctoral study remained relevant for his entire career due to his later work on state and social theories from Machiavelli to Hegel, and on the early worldview of the young Marx. His essay on Hobbes’s theory of state was published by the Marx–Engels–Archive in Russian in 1930, while he was working on a project for the Frankfurt Institute about the historical development of bourgeois state theories. He wrote one of his late essays (History of the Golden Book) for the 400th birth-anniversary of Thomas More, based on an imaginary interview with More who travels to Moscow and makes observations on Soviet daily life. Schmückle’s late work on the young Marx and bourgeois society was also dedicated to uncovering Marx’s utopian roots from the perspective of the later Marx.

          After his graduation, between 1923 and 1925 Schmückle worked as editor and writer at various Communist papers, such as Freiheit,Bergische Volksstimme,Arbeiter-Zeitung,Rote Fahne andDie Internationale (p. xii). In 1925, at David Riazanov’s prompting and on the formal advice of the Frankfurt Institute, the KPD leadership agreed to send Schmückle to work at the Marx–Engels Institute in Moscow. Schmückle arrived in the Soviet Union in 1925, and became a member of the Communist Party (Bolshevik) the following year (p. xxi).[16]

          Due to his previous studies on the utopians, and Marx’s early writings, Schmückle possessed considerable expertise regarding what was of great need for the Marx–Engels Institute. Under the directorship of David Riazanov, the Institute had planned to publish Marx’s and Engels’s complete works starting from their earliest periods. Schmückle was a perfect match for this project.

          The complete works of Marx and Engels (MEGA¹) were designed to be published in 42 volumes, unedited and in their original languages. Thanks to its financial resources, and Riazanov’s international contacts, the institute established a group of prominent Marx scholars such as G.E. Czóbel, A. Deborin, G. Lukács, I. Luppol, W. Rohr, I. Rubin, F. Schiller, A. Thalheimer, P. Weller and, of course, K. Schmückle.[17]

          Under Riazanov’s supervision, the institute published three volumes from the first section (volumes I/1.1 (1927), I/1.2 (1929), and I/2 (1930) on Marx’s works and writings up to the beginning of 1844, including letters and documents), and three volumes from the third section (volumes III/1 (1929), III/2 (1930), and III/3 (1930) on Marx–Engels correspondence between 1844 and 1853, 1854 and 1860, and 1861 and 1867). The institute also prepared four volumes from the first section (The German Ideology in I/5 (1932), Marx’s and Engels’s works from May 1846 until March 1848 in I/6 (1932), Engels’s works from 1844 until July 1846 (1932),The Holy Family and Marx’s writings from 1844–5 in I/3 (1932)), and one volume from the third section (Marx–Engels correspondence between 1868 and 1883 in III/4 (1931)), which were published after Riazanov’s removal from the institute, and his replacement by V. Adoratskii (pp. xx–xi). Schmückle was named editor or contributor in volumes I/1.1, I/1.2, and III/3. Although his name was not mentioned, he had also contributed to volumes I/3, I/5, and III/4. Besides his editorship in MEGA¹, Schmückle translated Plekhanov’sFundamental Questions of Marxism [Osnovnye Voprosy Marksizma] (1929), and the eighteenth volume of the first German edition of Lenin’s complete works (p. 325). In addition, Schmückle wrote essays on Marx’s early philosophical understanding, and on the utopian state theories and political philosophies of More, Machiavelli, and Hobbes. 

The Young Marx and Engels in MEGA¹

Volume I/1.1 contained Marx’s dissertation on early Greek philosophy, his poems from 1841, twenty-eight articles Marx had published in the Rheinische Zeitung between 1842 and 1843 (includingProceedings of the Sixth Rhine Province Assembly,The Leading Article in no. 179 of the Kölnische Zeitung, andJustification of the Correspondent from the Mosel), the letters and articles fromDeutsch–Französische Jahrbücher (includingOn the Jewish Question andContribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right), and some other materials.[18]

          Unlike Franz Mehring’s four-volume edition, MEGA¹ focused on presenting everything either published or left unpublished by the young Marx and Engels, completely and accurately (p. 127). For example, the seven notebooks of Marx’s doctoral dissertation, and the preparatory manuscripts of theContribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right were published in MEGA¹, while they were missing in Mehring’s edition. In his foreword in the first volume of MEGA¹, Riazanov highlighted Mehring’s arbitrary selections and editorial corrections. Mehring did not include, for example, the chapter on Saint Max when he had published the materials fromThe German Ideology, because he did not find it ‘significant’. Riazanov argued that this kind of textual manipulation obscured particular moments of Marx’s and Engels’s development, from Feuerbachian humanism to scientific socialism.[19]

          In a review-essay on the first volume of MEGA¹ written for theRote Fahne in 1927, as well as in the articleThe Young Marx and the Bourgeois Society published byInternationale Literatur in 1933, Schmückle pointed out that the accuracy of the MEGA¹ material served not only to provide a better understanding of Marx’s and Engels’s transition towards scientific materialism, but also countered the distortions and falsifications of contemporary anti-Marxist criticism coming from the bourgeois front (p. 150). For Schmückle, the MEGA¹ project had stymied all attempts to exploit the early Hegelianism and Feuerbachian humanism of the young Marx and Engels for bourgeois anti-Communist purposes. As a matter of fact, the first volumes of MEGA¹ were dedicated to documenting the scientific development of Marx and Engels. Hence, the question as to how their shift to a more mature position had taken place did require further scholarly studies. This was what Schmückle tried to clarify in his article on the young Marx and bourgeois society.

The Young Marx and the Bourgeois Society

In Schmückle’s understanding, there are two ways to look at the early Marx: we can either detect the main problems that concerned Marx’s early studies on philosophy and economics, and try to comprehend how the young Marx conceptualised society, revolution, and political worldviews, or we can read the early Marx backwards, namely from the point of view of the later Marx. The first reading concentrates on Marx’s transition from idealist dialectics to dialectical materialism, from his critique of religion to the critique of the bourgeois state and society, and from democratic-revolutionary emancipation to radical proletarian-communist revolution (p. 163). The second reading tracks the path that leads back from Marx’s later theory of economics to his early sources. Schmückle believed that these two readings do not alternate but rather supplement each other. Marx’s theory of fetishism in Capital, for example, is a product of his late economic studies that go back to his early views on bourgeois society under the influence of the Young Hegelians and French utopian socialists (p. 155).

          Marx states in his dissertation notebooks that every philosophical system is to be expounded from the point of view of its historical existence. All the objective determinations need to be distinguished from the ‘phenomenological consciousness of the subject’ in order to grasp the true unity of the subject and object.[20] According to Schmückle, the Ancient Greek concept of atomism officiated as the most abstract concept at encompassing all the objective determinations of the world, from which Marx had deduced his principle of subjectivity. Substances are, for the early Marx, social forces that build up the ideal or spiritual reality, and the state is the central organ that organises all the social agents surrounding it (p. 167). The crucial point Marx highlights, according to Schmückle, is not simply that a philosophical system is objectively related to the historical world, but that it is about ‘the modality of the relation of philosophy, as subjective consciousness, towards reality’.[21]

          Marx’s early attempt at an inversion of Hegelian dialectics gained a political character in his articles in the Rheinische Zeitung. Marx was defending in this period a radical-democratic view of people as substances and active subjects of the state that must fight for the right form of the state, make the law become ‘the conscious expression of the people’s will’, and transform the people from an object of suppression of the feudal-absolutist state into an emancipated subject of social history (p. 173). Schmückle points out that, for the early Marx, the questions regarding the concrete subject of this transformation, and the internal mechanisms of the alleged antagonisms and struggles in the present society, remained unclear (p. 179). Later on in his Paris period in 1844, Marx was would ultimately conclude that the political economy of bourgeois society provides the key to understanding the historical development of human societies, and that its reflection forms in ideological superstructures such as politics, law, and philosophy (p. 192). This was when Marx’s theory had obtained its first insights concerning the fundamental character of the economic structure that preconditions all the existential and motional laws, and the superstructures of bourgeois society (p. 151).  

          For Schmückle, the critical potential and the systematic approach of Marx’s political economy gained their mature content in Capital for several reasons. Marx consciously expressed the main subject-matter, and the ultimate goal of his critique of political economy inCapital: bourgeois society and its concrete forms of appearance. The purpose of the Marxist critique of political economy is, accordingly, to demystify the economic laws of motion of bourgeois society. To discover the rational kernel of the fundamental laws of capitalist society, and to separate it from the mystical shells of ideological distortions, Marx had to investigate all the structures, interconnections, reciprocal relations, and causal chains in the economic life of capitalist society (pp. 161–2).

          The ‘enchanted, perverted, topsy-turvy world’, as it had once been described and criticised by the late utopian socialists, in which ‘Monsieur le Capital and Madame la Terre do their ghost-walking as social characters’, was recognised by the late Marx as an inverted camera obscura image of the real world that needed to be placed back on its feet.[22]Capital was dedicated to unravelling the ideological distortions and uncritical reflections of economic relations of production, commodity fetishism, developing subject–object inversions, and reification genetically from the very logic of the capitalist production and accumulation processes (p. 106).

The Marx–Engels Institute in 1931, and Afterwards

In February 1931, the Joint State Political Directorate [OGPU] raided the Marx–Engels Institute. It shut down the institute for over a week, searched all the rooms, archives, libraries, manuscripts, and print materials, and interrogated institute co-workers. OGPU officials were looking for a collection of documents on Mensheviks handed to David Riazanov by one of the institute members, a well-known Marx scholar, and former Jewish Bund supporter and Menshevik, Isaak Iljič Rubin. In December 1930, Rubin was accused of being a member of a Menshevik counter-revolutionary organisation, and sent to prison in March 1931.[23] Under interrogation, Rubin had implicated Riazanov in the Menshevik conspiracy. With the splitting of the institute, Riazanov was dismissed from the directorship, and deported to Saratov.[24] Riazanov denied all the allegations, and stated at his trial that he had not committed any crime, whatsoever.[25]

          After Riazanov’s replacement by Adoratskii in February 1931, the Party Central Committee organised a commission to reform the institute (p. xxxix). The members of the commission were assigned to evaluate and write reports on the previous 243 members of the institute and voted for the disposal of 109 non-Party, and 22 Party members. In one of these reports, Schmückle had been described as ‘useful, provided that there is strong leadership at the institute’. Georg Lukács, to give another example, had been characterised as an ‘honest and loyal co-worker’. Based on his ‘philosophical views, [Lukács] is not a Marxist’. Schmückle’s wife, Anne Bernfeld-Schmückle, was not considered as reliable. Since almost all of the prominent scholars were removed in the purge, one commission member was asked to prepare a new list for scholar candidates (pp. xl–xli). The institute as well as the MEGA¹ project did survive, until a second wave of purges in the late 1930s associated with the famous Moscow Trials.

          Immediately after his removal from the institute in 1931, Schmückle started working for different political and literary papers, including the daily Deutsche Zentral-Zeitung between 1931 and 1934, and the bimonthlyInternationale Literatur between 1934 and 1938 (p. xlv). Schmückle’s essay on the early Marx and bourgeois society was published by Internationale Literatur for the fiftieth death-anniversary of Karl Marx. Schmückle also became a member of the German division of the International Union of Revolutionary Writers [IVRS] in 1932, participated as editor in joint projects between the IVRS and Moscow-based publishing houses, and published works of Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht and Clara Zetkin (p. xlviii).

          Internationale Literatur published two remarkable essays by Schmückle on Cervantes’s Don Quichotte in 1936. Schmückle had been familiar with the novel for a long time, but Cervantes became politically important especially after Don Quichotte was attacked by the Spanish fascist poet Ernesto Jiménez Caballero in 1932. Caballero had claimed that Cervantes’s novel contains elements closely tied to the ideas of the early Enlightenment and Bolshevism. After Franco’s coup in 1936, an immense campaign to defame Cervantes had arisen. Schmückle considered Don Quichotte important, not simply because it reflected the historical and literal background of the contemporary class antagonisms in Spain, or because it was used by fascists against Bolshevism, but also because Schmückle had found therein hidden ties between the humorous dialectic of fantasy and reality, and the inversions of bourgeois society that were criticised by the social utopians, and Marx (p. 281).

The Party Tribunal against Schmückle in 1936

The so-called ‘Trotskyist-Zinovievist Counterrevolutionary Bloc’ that was accused of planning to assassinate Stalin, and other Soviet leaders, including Kirov back in 1934, was alleged to have been an active threat to the Soviet leadership since the beginning of 1930s. The pretrial depositions and confessions of Zinoviev and Kamenev portrayed an inner-Party opposition that had been ongoing since 1932.[26] The bulk of the arrests that were allegedly linked to the Trotskyist conspiracy were of leading cadres. Since the military conspiracy of Tukhachevskii had been uncovered in 1937, the Party leadership acted swiftly against anything that involved the Trotskyist bloc, and the interrelationship among the anti-Soviet conspiracies. The previously-convicted former members of the Marx–Engels Institute had been interrogated, and their identities, personal and professional relationships, and ideological views were investigated. Karl Schmückle was one of them.

          As a by-product of the massive media campaigns against the anti-Soviet conspiracies, the Literaturnaia Gazeta on 27 August 1936, and then, two days later, theDeutsche Zentral-Zeitung, had denounced Schmückle as a Trotskyist betrayer. Under the chairmanship of the Hungarian writer Alexander Barta, eighteen writers and three Party officials (including Hans Günther, Hugo Huppert, Alfred Kurella and Georg Lukács)[27] were asked to participate in a closed Party session (4‒9 September 1936) to investigate the inner-Party enemies, Trotskyists, and deviationists within Soviet scientific, philosophical and literary circles (p. lxxi).

          Some complained that they felt threatened and challenged by Schmückle. Others praised him, and his valuable work. Georg Lukács, on the other hand, claimed that Schmückle was a ‘party enemy’ and a ‘counter-revolutionary’, who had hid himself behind the ‘mask of a man loyal to the Party’. Lukács voted for Schmückle’s liquidation, and suggested investigating his personal contacts. According to Günther, Schmückle was an opportunist and a hidden enemy, and a close friend of Heinrich Süßkind, who had recently (9 August 1936) been arrested by the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs [NKVD]. Lastly, Huppert made allegations concerning Schmückle’s hostility towards the Party (pp. lxxiii–lxxv). Schmückle was included in the so-called German operation of the NKVD, arrested in 30 November 1937 for espionage, and was executed on 14 March 1938 (p. lxxii).

The Legacy of Karl Schmückle

Karl Schmückle, like many others, was rehabilitated in the late 1950s by the Moscow Military Tribunal. He was one of the victims of the Soviet purges in 1930s, and he shared the same fate as that of many creative intellectuals in the former Soviet Union. Schmückle’s essay collection documents not only Schmückle’s work, but it also represents the early international collaboration in Marxian scholarship between Germany and the Soviet Union, and provides a very useful source for and highly valuable contribution to our contemporary understanding of the history of Marxism.

          Schmückle’s greatest contribution was, perhaps, his original conception of the utopia phenomenon. The Marxist tradition in the twentieth century had been for the most part strongly antipathetic to utopianism, as Ruth Levitas remarks. Utopia was usually associated with a ‘construction of blueprints of a future society that are incapable of realisation’.[28] But the same utopianism was attached to Marxism by its opponents, as well. Certainly, there were notable exceptions such as Alexandr A. Bogdanov, Walter Benjamin or Ernst Bloch. However, only a minority view shared the idea that utopian conceptions can be valuable for Marxist thinking. Schmückle did not aim to deploy the concept of utopia to justify anything that crudely rejects bourgeois society, or merely to speculate about a future society. He rather found a critical and fruitful potential in the utopian narrative.

          Utopias are valuable not because they stand apart from concrete time and place, or historical facts and the real subjects of society, but because they express symptoms of social disintegration, represent anticipatory structures of the past, and signal transformative impulses within present-day society. Schmückle does not – like Caballero – fear, but rather embraces what Cervantes’s Don Quichotte makes us experience, namely, an intelligent mockery of our own incapacity to dominate social contradictions between now and then, real and imaginary, or essential and illusionary. Utopia suspends for a while what something is, and in so doing, it enables us, at least intuitively, to sense how it might be otherwise. I shall leave the last word to the young Marx to articulate the function of utopia:

... nothing prevents us from making criticisms of politics, participation in politics, and therefore real struggles, the starting point of our criticism, and from identifying our criticism with them. In that case we do not confront the world in a doctrinaire way with a new principle: Here is the truth, kneel down before it! We develop new principles for the world out of the world’s own principles. ... We merely show the world what it has really been fighting for, and consciousness is something that ithas to acquire, even if it does not want to. The reform of consciousness consistsonly in making the world aware of its own consciousness, in awakening it out of its dream about itself, inexplaining to it the meaning of its own actions. ... It will then become evident that the world has long dreamed of possessing something of which it has only to be conscious in order to possess it in reality.[29]

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Marx, Karl 1978 [1850], The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850, in Marx/Engels Collected Works, Volume 10, Moscow: Progress Publishers.

Marx, Karl 1982, ‘[Karl] M[arx] an [Arnold] R[uge], Kreuznach, im September 1843’, in Marx–Engels–Gesamtausgabe, Volume I/2.1, Berlin: Dietz.

Marx, Karl 1998 [1894], Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Volume III, inMarx/Engels Collected Works, Volume 37, Moscow: Progress Publishers.

Marx, Karl 2004 [1894], Das Kapital. Kritik der politischen Ökonomie. Dritter Band. Hamburg 1894, inMarx–Engels–Gesamtausgabe, Volume II/15.1, Berlin: Akademie Verlag.

Mehring, Franz 1923, ‘Vorwort des Herausgebers’, inAus dem literarischen Nachlass von Karl Marx und Friedrich Engels. 1841 bis 1850. Erster Band. Von März 1841 bis März 1844, edited by Franz Mehring, Berlin: Dietz Verlag.

Müller, Reinhard 1991, Die Säuberung. Moskau 1936. Stenogramm einer geschlossenen Parteiversammlung, Hamburg: Taschenbuch.

Müller, Reinhard 2005, ‘Don Quijote im Moskauer Exil. Cervantes, Thomas Mann und Karl Schmückle’, Mittelweg, 36, 2: 72–6.

Riazanov, David B. 1995, ‘Moe pokazenie. Nr. 1. 18 Fevralia 1932’, in G.D. Golovina and J.G. Rokitanskii, ‘«Ya ne sovershalni kakogo prestuplenia». Dve saratovskie rukopisi akademika D.B. Riazanova. 1932–1934 gg.’, Istoricheskii Arkhiv, 2: 201–21.

Rjasanow, David Borisowitsch 2007, ‘Vorwort zur MEGA 1927’, UTOPIE kreativ, 206: 1095–1111.

Schleier, Hans 1982, ‘Karl Schmückles Auseinandersetzung mit dem bürgerlichen deutschen Historismus’,  Jahrbuch für Geschichte, 25: 305–40.

Schmückle, Karl 1929, ‘Zur Kritik des deutschen Historismus’, Unter dem Banner des Marxismus, 3, 2: 281–97.

Shmyukle, K. 1929, ‘K kritikenemeckogoistorizma. Ranke I princip legitimizma’, Pod Znameniem Marksizma, 10–11: 44–56.

Vasina, Ljudmilla 1994, ‘I.I. Rubin – Marxforscher und Politökonom’, in Vollgraf, Sperl and Hecker (eds.) 1994.

Vollgraf, Carl-Erich, Richard Sperl and Rolf Hecker (eds.) 1994, Beiträge zur Marx–Engels–Forschung. Neue Folge 1994. Quellen und Grenzen von Marx’ Wissenschaftsverständnis, Hamburg: Argument Verlag.

Zhao, Yulan 2014, ‘The Historical Birth of the First Historical-Critical          Edition of Marx–Engels–Gesamtausgabe. Part 3’, Critique, 42, 1: 11–24.

Žižek, Slavoj 2000, ‘Postface: Georg Lukács as the Philosopher of Leninism’, in Lukács 2000.

[1] I would like to thank to Chris O’Kane for his proof-reading, and the anonymous referee for encouraging remarks and suggestions on a previous version of this paper.

[2] Schleier 1982.

[3] Schmückle 1929; Shmyukle 1929.

[4] Müller 1991, pp. 76–9; Müller 2005. See also Litvin 1999, p. 217.

[5] Anderson 1989, p. 29.

[6] Anderson 1989, p. 32.

[7] Anderson 1989, p. 29. Schmückle’s social origins, political orientation, the reason for his geographical displacement, and the reason for his death were also different from those of other ‘Western Marxists’. Unlike Lukács et al., his father was lumberjack. At the beginning of 1920s he became an active KPD member and emigrated to the Soviet Union. There he became a Bolshevik Party member and remained loyal to his parties until he was accused of being a spy. Ironically, one of the names that reinforced the claim that Schmückle was a ‘hidden enemy’ of the Soviet people was Lukács himself. In contrast to Schmückle, Lukács did not face any death sentence, and could return to his native country after the Second World War. Considering many Western Marxists escaped from fascist danger to the Soviet Union, Schmückle’s case is far from being ‘unique’ or a mere ‘exception’.

[8]Žižek 2000, p. 151.

[9] Jacoby 2001, p. 2.

[10] Jacoby 2001, p. 4.

[11] Fracchia 2013, p. 89.

[12] Perry Anderson’s claim that the first generation of so-called ‘Western Marxism’‘had never been integrated into the university system’ is simply wrong. When Schmückle was attending Korsch’s lectures in Jena, Korsch was already a lecturer at the department of law, and became a full professor in 1923. See Anderson 1989, p. 49.

[13] Here Röhr’s mention of the Japanese scholar might be a typo. However, Fukumoto Kazuo (1894–1983), the famous theoretician of the Japanese Communist Party, who went to Germany to study, joined the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) and then left for Japan in 1924, seems the person more likely to have participated in the meeting. Beside this wild guess, it is worth mentioning that Martin Jay’s list does not include Fukumoto at all. See Jay 1973, p. 5. Jan Hoff, on the contrary, assures us that the name of this scholar was Fukumoto Kazuo. See Hoff 2009, pp. 19, 78, 97, 98.

[14] In their compendium of utopia, Frank and Fritzie Manuel mention that Maksim Gorkii had read Campanella’s The City of the Sun when he was in Italy, had talked about it to Lunacharksii and Lenin, and that Campanella’s depiction of science became an inspiration for the official discourse of Socialist Realism. See Manuel and Manuel 1997, p. 272.

[15] Marx 1978, pp. 126–7; Marx 1960, p. 89.

[16] The claim, as asserted by Röhr, that Schmückle became a member of CPSU, is erroneous. When Schmückle arrived in the Soviet Union, the name of the Party was the ‘All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks ‒ VKP(B)’. The party changed its name to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (KPSS) only in 1952.

[17] Hecker 1994, p. 150.

[18] Zhao 2014, p. 19; also see Mehring 1923, pp. vii–ix; Langkau 1983, p. 120.

[19] See Rjasanow 2007, pp. 1100–1.

[20] Marx 1975b, p. 506; Marx 1968, p. 246.

[21] Marx 1975b, p. 492; Marx 1968, p. 218.

[22] Marx 1998, p. 817; Marx 2004, p. 804.

[23] Vasina 1994, p. 149.

[24] Burkhard 1985, p. 46.

[25] Riazanov 1995. 

[26] Getty 1987, p. 122.

[27] Lukács’s involvement in Schmückle’s case disproves Perry Anderson’s claim that ‘[f]rom 1929 onwards, Lukács ceased to be a political militant, confining himself to literary criticism and philosophy in his intellectual work’. See Anderson 1989, p. 31.

[28] Levitas 2010, p. 41.

[29] Marx 1975a, p. 144; Marx 1982, p. 488.

A Review of Time in Marx by Stavros Tombazos, Time, Capitalism and Alienation by Jonathan Martineau, and Marx After Marx by Harry Harootunian

George Tomlinson

Brunel University

gstomlins@gmail.com

Abstract

Three recently published books, by Stavros Tombazos, Jonathan Martineau, and Harry Harootunian, join a now established body of literature that highlights the temporal aspects of Marx’s work. Their differences notwithstanding, these books are united by the conviction that, at its core, capitalism is an immense and complex organisation of time, and thus that the importance of Marx’s work is realised by its singular contribution to our understanding of this. Each book is centrally concerned with the historically specific character of capital’s temporal order, such that each presents a new reading of the relationship between capitalism and historical time.

Keywords

Marx – time – history

Stavros Tombazos, (2014) Time in Marx: The Categories of Time in Marx’s ‘Capital’, with a Preface by Georges Labica and Postface by Daniel Bensaïd,Historical Materialism Book Series, Leiden: Brill,

Jonathan Martineau, (2015) Time, Capitalism and Alienation: A Socio-Historical Inquiry into the Making of Modern Time,Historical Materialism Book Series, Leiden: Brill,

Harry Harootunian, (2015) Marx After Marx: History and Time in the Expansion of Capitalism, New York: Columbia University Press.

What does Marx’s work tell us about the relationship between time and history? The best answer to this question seems to be, simultaneously, quite little and a significant amount. Quite little, because nowhere in his oeuvre is there an explicit examination of this relationship; a significant amount, because a now theoretically robust literature[1] demonstrates that this oeuvre constitutes one of the greatest resources with which to explore this relationship. A number of Marxists after Marx have, of course, taken up this question (Walter Benjamin, Louis Althusser, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Ernst Bloch are the prominent examples), but what the ongoing output of books and articles on this relationship indicates is that our understanding of Marx’s contribution to it is far from exhausted. As a result (apart from the shared conviction that Marx’s work releases us from the straitjacket of historicism, the suffocating confines of Benjamin’s well-known ‘homogenous empty time’),[2] there is little, currently, that might be identified as a ‘majority opinion’ within the relevant literature. Whatever the reason – it is too early, the scope and complexity of this relationship renders consensus impossible, etc. – this is not a problem, but indeed a creative opening that lends itself to theoretical ‘play’,[3] as Kostas Axelos might say. Accordingly three of the latest books, by Stavros Tombazos,[4] Jonathan Martineau, and Harry Harootunian, to enter this arena not only possess different tones, tenors, and styles, but represent distinct – and quite distinctive – interventions into the capitalism–time–history nexus.

Tombazos’s Time in Marx is best read as a contribution to what in the Marxian literature has come to be known, variously, as the ‘New Hegelian Marxism’, the ‘New Dialectics’, and ‘Systematic Dialectics’. This is a unique contribution, for three reasons. First, it not only predates the well-known Anglo-American works in Systematic Dialectics over the last twenty years,[5] it prefigures them, which is to say that it anticipates the kinds of arguments and methodologies that guide these later works. It is, in other words, a pioneering articulation of the Hegel/Marx confrontation that overtly emphasises the influence of the late Hegel on the late Marx: the place of the Logic withinCapital, as opposed to theContribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Second,Time in Marx ‘out-systematises’ its successors: the ambition and scope of what comes in its wake largely pales in comparison. Whereas much of the later literature in Systematic Dialectics takes a cautious approach, stressing what it sees as Marx’s selective and changing use of Hegel’sLogic andEncyclopaedia, hence limiting itself to particular sections of the three volumes ofCapital (the first six chapters of Volume One being the most common),Time in Marx noticeably differs and stages the Hegel/Marx confrontation across all three volumes. There is in these pages a steadfast conviction in the structural integrity ofCapital as a whole, the consequence being a fidelity to Marx that is both philosophically creative and restrictive. Third and finally,Time in Marx stands apart in its singular focus on the complex temporal character of Marx’s work. There is (to my knowledge) no other work in Systematic Dialectics that does the same, no other work in this literature that contends that the overriding framework through which Marx’s critique of political economy must be grasped is, necessarily, a temporal one. Tombazos’s choice of time as ‘the guiding thread’ of his analysis is not arbitrary; on the contrary, ‘capital is, precisely, aconceptual organisation of time’.[6]

Predictably, Time in Marx is divided into three parts which correspond, in order, to the three volumes ofCapital. The first part is structured by what Tombazos calls ‘The Time of Production’, which he characterises as ‘a linear and abstract temporality, homogeneous, a time that is supposed to be calculable, measurable’.[7] The predominant subject of this section is labour-time, understood as both a transhistorical economic law[8] and – his primary concern – a ‘regulatory principle’ specific to capitalism. Accordingly, this is where three (wholly intertwined) forms of capitalist labour-time take centre stage: socially necessary labour-time, abstract labour-time, and surplus labour-time. This is also where several of the most precise and sophisticated formulations of Time in Marx make their appearance. Some highlight the social basis of capitalist labour-time: socially necessary labour-time is notoriginally a quantity but a social relation, a regulatory link that ‘can only be quantified through the effect of a difference that manifests itself in it’,[9] and abstract labour-time is the condition of the individuation of the act of labour, such that it ‘introduces a division within itself that is usually called the “division of labour”’.[10] For its part, surplus labour-time constitutes what Tombazos calls ‘the hidden time of the commodity’, because it emerges from the difference between the labour-time necessary for the production of a commodity and the labour-time necessary for the reproduction of the labour-power whose use produces this commodity.[11]

Other passages in Part One are revealing as much for their actual content as for what they potentially enable. Consider the following on the value/use-value, thus abstract/concrete labour, relation:

In the usual way of reading Capital, the commodity divides itself into abstract and concrete labour, into value and use-value, without being able to be value if it is not also use-value, and vice versa. This is correct but insufficient. Abstract labour divides itself, within itself, into abstract labour (universality) and abstract/concrete labour (particularity). Use-value is not only an aspect of the commodity, but also an aspect of value, a particularisation of it. … Use-values can only have a meaning as particularisations of value … . It seems to us more correct to say that the commodity is divided into value and value/use-value in order to highlight the non-independent (and neutral) character of use-values under capitalism. Thus, abstract labour appears in two forms: as a simple unity with itself (value, universality) and as a ‘composed’ unity (value/use-value, abstract/concrete labour, particularity).[12]

This is an important passage, because it reminds us that use-value, hence concrete labour, only exists consequent to the commodification of labour-power, which is to say that abstract labour produces, within itself, concrete labour as its dialectical exterior, and thus that living labour is only ‘external’ to capitalwithin the production-process.[13] Yet there is also an opportunity here (which Tombazos misses) to investigate the problem of ‘concrete labour-time’, such that, on the one hand, this social individual form of time is already always subsumed by a purely social form of time (concrete labour-time is only actual in its dialectical subordination to abstract labour-time), and, on the other hand, it must, on some level, be understood as different than abstract labour-time (there is, after all, a dialectic at work here). The extent of what Tombazos offers (this is representative of the secondary literature more generally) is that ‘individual time has a particular content … that is experienced subjectively’,[14] but this tells us little about what a concept of concrete labour-time might resemble.

Hegel’s Logic undeniably makes its mark on Part One. Tombazos gives considerable attention, in summary, to the relevance of ‘measure’ to the exchange relation, to the ways in which ‘essence’ bears on Marx’s exposition of value, and to how Marx’s illustration of the movement from simple circulation to the circulation of money-capital is indebted to the transition from ‘chemism’ to ‘teleology’.[15] Yet it is Part Two of Time in Marx, ‘The Time of Circulation’, wherein the Hegel/Marx confrontation is at its most productive. Departing from the premise that ‘the second volume ofCapital has been almost completely forgotten’,[16] Tombazos goes to great lengths to demonstrate that this volume not only constitutes the ‘key’[17] for understanding Capital as a whole, but also that the source of this is nothing other than Hegel’s system. The place of Hegel in the early chapters ofCapital Volume Two (above all Chapter 4, ‘The Three Figures of the Circuit’) not only lends these chapters a systematicity equal to the systematic development of the value-form in the early chapters ofCapital Volume One, it endows them with a power that their counterpart in Volume One does not have: the ability to present the various forms of capital itself,subsequent to the establishment of capital as self-expanding value.

The section of the Logic upon which Part Two ofTime in Marx hinges is ‘The Syllogism’ (Chapter Three of ‘The Doctrine of the Concept’). Drawing on the figures of this syllogism, Tombazos shows the extent to which Marx’s presentation of the different positions and relations between money, the commodity, and production inCapital Volume Two can be grasped as a critical appropriation of theLogic which nevertheless corresponds to the different positions and relations between, respectively, universality, particularity, and singularity within this syllogism. This is, as Tombazos describes it, ‘the syllogistic structure of capital’,[18] and after the Logic, it correlates to the sense in which, as the ‘Idea’, capital is a processual ‘living being’ – a teleological ‘living organism’ – that divides itself, within itself, into three processes:[19] the ‘living individual’, or ‘shape’ (the circuit of productive capital); the ‘life-process’, or ‘assimilation’ (the circuit of commodity capital); and finally the ‘genus-process’ (the circuit of money capital). The details of this homology between Hegel and Marx (which, to my knowledge, the rest of Systematic Dialectics does not address) cannot be taken any further here.[20] It must suffice to state that, for Tombazos, the circuits of money, productive, and commodity capital make up, in turn, the ‘valorisation, conservation and auto-critique/self-control of value’,[21] such that as a ‘triple autonomous movement’,[22] and hence as a ‘rich and complex organisation of rhythms’,[23] ‘social capital’[24] – the subject of Capital Volume Two – is Marx’s most complete expression of the life of capital.

Two points follow from this. First, Time in Marx constitutes a useful, if underdeveloped, account of the discourse of ‘life’ in Marx’s critique of political economy more generally. There is a consistent appeal to ‘life’ (Leben) in this critique – there is a consistent use of life-related terms – but there is no theoretical discourse on the ‘life of capital’ (indeed, the same can be said of ‘the life of the worker’, ‘living labour’, human beings’ ‘means of life’, etc., insofar as ‘life’ here only functions ontologically around the concepts with which it is joined). Given its emphasis on the ‘life-processes’ and ‘life-circuits’ of social capital,Time in Marx makes a step towards addressing this absence. Second, Tombazos’s analysis of the syllogistic structure of capital establishes a basis upon which ‘The Time of Circulation’ is philosophically secured as a ‘cyclical’ temporality. While ‘The Time of Production’ is for Tombazos an abstract linear time, ‘The Time of Circulation’ is a cyclical temporality, but – and this is crucial – this temporality has no meaning beyond the ‘ordinary’ or ‘vulgar’ conception of time (to use a Heideggerian expression) unless it is grounded, as it is here, in Hegel’s dialectical exposition of the syllogism. In this way, the times that form Tombazos’s ‘The Time of Circulation’ (and Marx’sCapital Volume Two) – particularly ‘turnover time’ (Umschlagszeit) as the sum of production time and circulation time[25] – are not reducible to quantity alone.

Part Three of Time in Marx touches on the central categories and topics ofCapital Volume Three: cost, price, and profit, as well as the derivations of industrial capital and ground rent, leading to the well-known ‘Trinity Formula’. Yet it is Tombazos’s exploration of capitalist crises, coming out of the ‘Law of the Tendential Fall in the Rate of Profit’, which offers the most promise. Inasmuch as social capital is ‘a rich and complex organisation of rhythms’, it is, because of this, equally the permanent tendency towards crisis, such that its rhythmic unity contains the permanent possibility of ‘a kind of “arrhythmia” … a momentary disturbance of the system’s coherence’.[26] This point, made in passing in Part Two, comes to the fore in the closing chapters of Time in Marx, and opens the door to a rare critique ofCapital: whereas Marx investigates the ‘periodical crises linked to the industrial cycle, which are therefore “normal”, necessary and inevitable moments of capitalist production’, he leaves unanalysed ‘the structural crises that are abnormal or extraordinary in that they cannot be overcome by the spontaneous or endogenous mechanisms of the system’.[27] This critique is important in its own right, but for the purposes of this review it carries additional weight, because it frames Tombazos’s articulation of the relationship between capital and historical time. He states:

Far from acting in a social environment that it only conquers, capital produces its objective contents that are this environment. It produces its own history. Each particular stage of capitalism, each recovery from a structural crisis, is the peace that capital concludes with itself. … This correspondence between ‘subjectivity’ and ‘objectivity’ is not that of the conceptual totality of capital with an external empirical reality, with a neutral historical time. Rather, it is the relative correspondence of the former with the objective determinations it produces. … Capital as an ‘Idea’ is the correspondence of a logical order of time – obeying its own immanent criteria – with historical time. This correspondence is a permanent relation of tension and conflict, a relation of sometimes hidden and sometimes evident contradiction. Crises, particularly structural crises, are violent moments of confrontation between antagonistic forces. They open up various possibilities, among which is that of a new ‘peace’ between the ‘subjective side’ and ‘objective side’ of capital. This is why capitalism is a coherent system of determinations, at the same time completed and open, dynamic and in movement.[28]

This passage is noteworthy, because it demonstrates another point of difference between Time in Marx and the rest of so-called ‘Systematic Dialectics’: it rejects the notion that the systematicity of Hegel’s and Marx’s systematic dialectic is defined by its separation from – indeed opposition to – a ‘historical dialectic’. This is a tenet of much of the literature in Systematic Dialectics: history and historical time must be excluded from the domain of the systematic.[29] Tombazos obviously contests this. Yet the question that must be posed here is whether or not he goes far enough. That is, do history and historical time merely form the ‘objective side’ of the dialectic of capital, the ‘empirical world’ that is dialectically tied to the ‘subjective side’ – the ‘thought’ or ‘universal reason’ – of capital, such that a ‘mutual fertilisation’ and ‘contradictory unity’ between the universal logic and particular history of capital exists?[30] Or are history and historical time manifestations of the dialectic of capital itself, from both the standpoint of its objectivity and subjectivity, such that it makes no sense to relegate history and historical time to capital’s ‘empirical world’? Tombazos repeatedly states that there is ‘no relation of separation’[31] between the logic and history of capital,[32] but why speak of ‘logic’ and ‘history’ as discrete entities in the first place? What is the point of insisting upon their inseparability if they are (from the standpoint of the process that is capital) indistinguishable in the first place? Is the subjective side of capital, its ‘logical order of time’, not already always historical? Thus the question is not one of ‘coincidence’, ‘correspondence’, or ‘confrontation’, but identity (which contains conflict and crisis within it). The logic and history of capital are not the subjective and objective sides of the dialectic, respectively, but two different expressions of one and the same thing.[33]

These questions cast a critical lens on other aspects of Time in Marx, from lapses into positions consistent with Systematic Dialectics[34] to, of much greater consequence, its most comprehensive concept: the ‘organic time of capital’. In short, this concept (which, incidentally, Martineau does not question and Harootunian approvingly cites)[35] denotes the unity of ‘The Time of Production’ and ‘The Time of Circulation’. It is Tombazos’s culminating formulation of ‘the time of capital’ (assuming that it is possible to speak of such a thing). Yet the fact is that this unity is better understood as ‘the historical time of capital’, a time whose abstract contours are introduced in the second volume of Capital, and subsequently concretised in the third volume. Amongst other things, this reformulation casts light on the need to actually construct a concept of a ‘structural crisis’ of capital (which Tombazos does not do), a necessary step towards thinking social and historical time after capitalism. As it stands, Tombazos leaves the relationship between crises and historical time within the terms of capital’s attempt to resolve every crisis, particularly structural ones: the mediation of linear, progressive time.

          If Time in Marx is on the whole faithful to Marx, Martineau’sTime, Capitalism and Alienation takes a more ‘heretical’ approach. Yet the peculiar thing about this book is that, like Moishe Postone’sTime, Labor, and Social Domination,[36] its heresy seems to be unconscious, by which I mean that Martineau does not acknowledge, let alone address, the extent to which he has transformed several of the most basic categories of Capital. The heart of this is an analogical extension (straight out of Postone) of abstract labour-time and concrete labour-time into ‘abstract time’ and ‘concrete time’, which, when presumed to be consistent with Marx, leads to other interpretive problems and thereby obscures some essential dimensions of Marx’s work (specifically its deeply dialectical character).Time, Capitalism and Alienation is therefore liable to accusations of a ‘misreading’ of Marx, and while there certainly are formulations and passages that I consider misguided, reducing this book to this vein not only risks complicity in a kind of Marxological arrogance, it neglects the actual contributions made by Martineau’s ‘points of heresy’.[37] This book raises new and complex questions that we cannot ignore.

In contrast to the vast scope of Time in Marx, the focus ofTime, Capitalism and Alienation is more directed (its subtitle, ‘A Socio-Historical Inquiry into the Making of Modern Time’, does not reflect the fact that its overriding concern is the relationship between capitalism and the clock). And whereas Tombazos gives us a Marx with few interlocutors (essentially Hegel), Martineau – much to his credit – synchronises a more diverse range of material and accordingly produces a more synthetic book. The purpose of this study is consequently quite ambitious:

[I]t seeks to delineate some of the characteristics of capitalism’s mode of social time and to examine how processes of capitalist value formation and appropriation affect and/or construct a historically specific relationship between an ‘abstract’ time-form (known as clock-time) and ‘concrete’ times … . [T]o provide an analysis of social time in a way that emphasises the commodification of time … and also [treat] the commodification of time not as a once-and-for-all event, but as a conflictual process implying a tendency by capitalism to create and reproduce an abstract time framework which alienates, subsumes, reduces and abstracts from concrete social times,while being contested and resisted by women and men as embodied historical agents thriving for the reappropriation of their concrete times, bodies and lives.[38]

There are multiple things to attend to here, the course of which will take us through the book.

The first is Martineau’s conception of ‘social time’, or more specifically ‘social time relations’. A guiding premise of this book is that ‘time is a social phenomenon’,[39] and Martineau dedicates the first chapter to the theoretical and methodological implications of this insight. This begins with a ‘conceptual mapping’ of alienation and reification, which unfortunately omits some important facets of Marx’s theorisation,[40] and is arguably misplaced within the overall structure of the book, insofar as its link to social time is only established in the final chapter. This is followed by some remarks about the relationship between ideas and contexts more generally, highlighting the works of Neal Wood, Ellen Meiksins Wood, and István Mészáros. However, the better part of the first chapter is concerned with constructing a concept of social time out of the modern social sciences, for it is this avenue, Martineau contends, that offers a potential ‘resolution of what Paul Ricœur has called time’s fundamental aporia betweencosmological andexperiential conceptions’.[41] In short, it is sociology[42] that directs us towards an overcoming of time’s objective–subjective divide.

Martineau thus casts his lens on two leading figures in sociological ‘time studies’: Norbert Elias and Barbara Adam. In Elias’s Time: An Essay (1992), we have a conception of social time borne from a rejection of the dualisms between ‘nature’ and ‘society’, and ‘individual’ and ‘group’, one that yields a distinction between (natural) ‘time’ and (social) ‘timing’. This is not a new dualism on a different plane, but rather entails a relation between a means of orientation, such as a clock or calendar (time), and the synthesising power of human social activity (timing). While this is a historically and culturally changing relation, what is common to all societies is time’s ongoing derivation from and dependence on timing. Added to this is Adam’s ‘timescape’, a concept which ‘provides a space for understanding the threading of different time forms in coexistence as a process of hierarchisation’.[43] Adam’s emphasis on multiple temporalities is important, but what truly interests Martineau is the question of hierarchy, because it enables him to locate social-property relations, and thus the logics of power and struggle, at the heart of his concept of ‘social time relations’ (the absence of this in Elias’s account is, rightly, taken to task). The stage is now set for a return to the book’s defining argument: ‘social time relations in capitalist societies are dominated by clock-time: capitalist clock-time occupies a hegemonic position in the hierarchy of temporalities that form capitalist social time relations, alienating, subordinating, colonising, absorbing and/or marginalising other conceptions and practices of time and concrete temporalities’.[44]

However, Martineau first takes a historical detour (a fairly long one: Chapter 2), beginning with the emergence of the mechanical clock in European urban centres in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and culminating in clock-time’s ‘development into a social time infrastructure’[45] during the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Topically, this chapter covers a massive amount of territory: the relation between technology and the social, historiographical controversies surrounding the invention of the mechanical clock, the place of work bells in medieval life, the relations between ‘the time of the Church’ and ‘the time of merchants’ (Martineau’s critique of Jacques Le Goff here is particularly strong), pre-capitalist concrete times in light of Mikhail Bakhtin’s ‘grotesque realism’, the transition from feudalism to capitalism more generally (led by Robert Brenner’s account), and finally Isaac Newton’s ‘absolute time’ as a theoretical manifestation of the temporal infrastructure of clock-time. Despite this enormous range of subjects and source material, Martineau’s message is admirably consistent. It has two components: first, clock-time is increasingly constitutive of pre-capitalist social time relations, but it cannot be understood as ‘hegemonic’ within these relations; second, the time of pre-capitalist social practices – above all labour – is in many respects ‘dominated’ by clock-time, but it is not alienated by this time, because clock-time does not penetrate the very fabric of the practices themselves.[46] However, this consistency is not without its costs. Some of it hinges on an uncritical presentation of the sources that cultivate it, a notable example being Martineau’s wholesale endorsement of Brenner’s work, leading to declarations such as ‘England’s capitalist development is endogenous’.[47] This flies in the face of Marx’s analysis of ‘originary accumulation’ (ursprüngliche Akkumulation, on which Martineau remains silent), and thereby shuts the door on the problems that capitalism creates for the concept of ‘origin’ more generally.[48]

Chapter 2 clearly functions as a counterpoint to the third and final chapter, where the focus is on the inextricable fusion between clock-time and capitalist social relations. Clock-time historically precedes (and will presumably exist after) capitalism, but capitalism constitutes a historically unprecedented mode of production wherein clock-time is the hegemonic form of social time. At the heart of this is the valorisation process. Value formation and appropriation ‘take hold of clock-time’s infrastructure’[49] in such a way that concrete times (which cannot, crucially, be reduced to ‘the-concrete-time-of-labour’)[50] are subsumed and thus alienated by ‘abstract time’: an ‘independent’ time which, after Postone, comprises a form of ‘abstract domination’ that structures general social experience.[51] Consequently, there is an ‘intricate relationship between abstract clock-time and value’;[52] ‘abstract time is a fundamental part of the whole edifice of capitalist value formation’.[53] This interpretive framework guides the whole of Chapter 3, including a detailed analysis of World Standard Time, the return to the question of the alienation/reification of time (‘put simply, time is alienated because of its commodification. It is bought and sold on the market’),[54] and finally an account of concrete times as struggles against abstract time (the two examples given are women’s control over pregnancy and childbirth, and the resistance of Australian Aborigines to British colonialism). Given the scope of Martineau’s concept of ‘concrete time’[55] (it far exceeds that of Postone’s, which is ‘limited’ to the production of material wealth), it is not surprising that these struggles are animated by countless concrete times that ‘form an inextinguishable substratum of natural, social, bodily and human processes, which can never be subsumed, even as abstract time strives to alienate them and bring them under the logic of value formation’.[56]

Martineau is clearly aware that his ‘concrete time’ represents a distinct extension of the scope of Marx’s ‘concrete labour-time’, but it is less clear (because it remains unanalysed, indeed unasked) what effects Martineau understands this to have on the intelligibility of Marx’s system more generally (e.g. the difference and relation between the production and circulation processes, the difference and relation between labour-time and free/leisure time).[57] This points to a related but more fundamental issue, one that constitutes the defining difference between Martineau and Marx, and one that, since it is passed over with no commentary, constitutes what I consider to be the defining limitation of Time, Capitalism and Alienation. This is the presumed consistency, and hence conflation, of Marx’s ‘abstract labour-time’ and Martineau’s ‘abstract time’/‘clock-time’.[58] The problem here is one of manifestation (Erscheinung) and thus measure. Whereas for Martineau ‘different concrete times of different concrete labours are abstracted, reduced to abstract time, and made commensurable through their expression in clock-time units’,[59] for Marx it is not the clock but money which renders equivalent different concrete labour-times. To put this another way, abstract labour (-time)[60] ontologically depends upon the clock – its homogeneity, quantifiability, and divisibility is predicated on clock-time – but it is not equivalent to it. Abstract labour controls the clock (most directly by its measure of concrete labour), such that, in capitalism, the clock is subservient to money as a temporal form. Thus money, in both its function as a commodity and as capital – as the ‘materialisation of universal labour-time’[61] and as value made formally independent – is the real manifestation of ‘abstract time’. For Marx, money, not clock-time, is the hegemonic capitalist social time relation.

Perhaps the most apparent corollary of this difference is Martineau’s continual reference to ‘the commodification of time’ (and the corresponding political call for the ‘decommodification’ of time). From Marx’s perspective, this is mistaken: time itself is not commodified. Rather, it is labour-power that is commodified, producing the abstract labour – the socially necessary labour-time – that is both the presupposition and result of commodification more generally. It is the use of labour-power that yields a form of time without which commodification cannot (re)occur. This dovetails with Marx’s contention that ‘we should not say that one man’s hour is worth another man’s hour, but rather that one man during an hour is worth as much as another man during an hour’.[62] This is crucial, because it avoids the disaggregation of the unity of the concept of ‘labour-time’ (Arbeitszeit), a unity, at least from Marx’s standpoint, that risks being jettisoned by concepts such as ‘abstract time’. The hyphen within ‘labour-time’ is important: it registers the ontological unity ofArbeitszeit.

For all this, it is impossible to deny that Time, Capitalism and Alienation raises questions that Marx’s work either does not ask or inadequately tackles. What is the relationship between value and the clock? Between the innumerable concrete times of human life and capitalism more generally? And how do we imagine, let alone practise, a politics of time which potentially unseats value as the self-mediating ground of the social? Again, the problem is not the construction of concepts such as ‘abstract time’ and ‘concrete time’ to help us answer these vital questions, but an unacknowledged departure from the source in whose name they are constructed. There is nothing wrong with departing from Marx to answer these questions – indeed, we must – but this would have been a more persuasive book had Martineau recognised, and engaged, the extent to which Marx is being transformed. As it stands, it reproduces many of the problems of Postone’sTime, Labor, and Social Domination. However, and unlike Postone, Martineau does not flirt with what Antonio Negri calls ‘the complete realisation of the law of value’:[63] he rejects a conception of subsumption wherein ‘a complete absorption or eradication of concrete times by abstract time’[64] occurs, for this would signal the death of capitalism.[65]

On this count, Martineau is squarely in line with the most consequential US historian of Japan to date. In a career that now spans over fifty years, Harry Harootunian’s oeuvre includes pioneering books on Tokugawa nativism (Things Seen and Unseen, 1988), the Meiji Revolution (Toward Restoration, 1970), intellectuals’ deliberations on capitalist modernity (Overcome by Modernity, 2000), and the question of everyday life (History’s Disquiet, 2000). SinceHistory’s Disquiet, a signature move of his work has been to pit the indissociable histories of capitalism and colonialism against the culturalisms of area studies (particularly ‘Asian Studies’) and postcolonial studies alike. At the heart of this is the conviction that unlike the provincialisms of area and postcolonial studies, the history of capitalism – whose ‘area’ is the world as such – bears witness to the fundamental unevenness reproduced by labour processes, and therefore cannot be grasped by a linear, progressive conception of historical time (historicism). Historical capitalism, indeed history itself, is better comprehended as stratified layers of multiple and discordant temporalities, where past temporal forms are synchronised, but never always or fully, by the imperatives of the present.[66] The present is the prime mover of historical time, but its hegemony is continually liable to disruption by its received pasts. For this reason, as Harootunian asserts, ‘each present … supplies a multiplicity of possible lines of development’.[67]

This is the outlook of Marx After Marx, but it now comes with a twist: the object of critique is no longer area and postcolonial studies, but ‘Western Marxism’, a name that for Harootunian signifies a clear prioritisation of circulation over production, and a concomitant ‘distancing from the economic for the cultural … which contributed to valorising a specific (and provincial) cultural endowment as unique, superior, and universal’.[68] The accused include Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness (for its reliance on Max Weber’s instrumental rationality, to be precise), the early Frankfurt School (‘with its insistence on the commodification of life at the level of mass consumption and culture’),[69] and finally Negri and his followers, ‘who have presumed the final completion of the commodity relation everywhere’.[70] In turn, Harootunian has been accused of creating a ‘simplified image’, and thus a ‘fantasy construct’,[71] of Western Marxism, first by neglecting vital differences between its purported agents, and then by declaring that it ‘[made] a provincial culture serve as a universal standard for the rest of the world to follow … [promoted] a unique cultural configuration as a model of imitation’[72] (there is very little, if any, evidence for this). In the end, however, what matters is the reading of Marx and the Marxists (who are not Lukács, Adorno or Negri) which animates this book. ‘Western Marxism’ is overstated in Marx After Marx, but it does not overdetermineMarx After Marx. Rather, it is a symptom of a particular, and particularly unique, interpretation of Marx and some of his most significant (largely non-European) interlocutors. We turn, then, to the concept which singlehandedly inspires this book: subsumption.

Marx After Marx lives up to its title. There is a genuinely new Marx being presented here, because Harootunian has armed Marx’s concept of subsumption with the capacity to express the relationship between capitalism and history itself. More specifically, he has granted Marx’s concept of ‘formal’, as opposed to ‘real’, subsumption the exclusive rights to this relationship. As a result, the difference he establishes between these two kinds of subsumption (chiefly in Chapter One, ‘Marx, Time, History’) is remarkable. To begin, the real subsumption at work in these pages is not the usual account guided by Capital Volume One (the production of relative surplus-value underpinned by transformations of the labour-process itself, e.g. cooperation, the division of labour, the use of machinery), but rather a notion that indicates the ‘untroubled completion’ of capitalism, a concept that Marx needed ‘in order to present capitalism as a completed totality’.[73] ‘Real subsumption’ imagines capitalism released from its ‘disturbing subsidiary circumstances’ (Marx’s words), such that it is effectively ‘a model … a proto-ideal type, which envisions the possible realisation and completion of the commodity relation in an as yet unrealised future, in a last instance that never comes’.[74] In short, one might say, the only thing that is ‘real’ about real subsumption is its methodological purpose and function, driven by Marx’s ‘analytic desire to totalise capitalism’.[75] In this sense, an overriding problem of Western Marxism is its presumption that real subsumption has actually been achieved, announcing the end of unevenness and thus ‘the final completion of capitalism’s domination of everyday life’.[76]

This depiction of real subsumption (which simultaneously seems to disavow Negri and turn Marx into a late Negrian) paves the way for the enthusiastic inquiry, bordering on enshrinement, of formal subsumption. On the whole, the relation between formal and real subsumption in Marx After Marx is not a mutually constitutive one, an interplay or continual crossing-over from one kind to another, or what Tomba elsewhere describes as the ‘reciprocal co-penetration between absolute surplus-value and relative surplus-value’.[77] Harootunian’s relation is instead one of diametric opposition: while real subsumption invokes a mystical world where valorisation is finalised everywhere, ‘whereby value has trumped history’,[78] formal subsumption demands the sober confrontation with the messy reality of history, and thereby with the radical openness and incompleteness of capitalism. As the ‘principal logic of capitalist development’[79] and ‘general rule of all capitalist development’[80] (phrases that recur across Marx After Marx, and modifications of a single sentence in ‘Results of the Immediate Production-Process’),[81] formal subsumption is a temporalising form that ‘through its protean capacity to appropriate from the past what it found useful to capitalism, constantly introduced practices that embodied past times in every present’.[82] Therefore, ‘we must recognise in it the form of history itself’;[83] it entails ‘the categorical logic delegated to express the sensible materiality of historical change’.[84] So strong is Harootunian’s investment in formal subsumption that it might be taken as a challenge to Marx’s claim that communism is the riddle of history solved.

This commitment to formal subsumption comes down to the idea that it is the binding agent, the ‘connecting hinge’, between history and capital’s abstract logic (like Martineau, and after Postone, ‘capital’ in this work is essentially synonymous with ‘abstract logic’), and thus between the old and new more broadly, generating a ‘constantly changing historical landscape’ whose repository is the untimely and uneven temporalities of everyday life.[85] This argument directs the entire book, but it does not shoehorn it, as each of the chosen interlocutors reframes, qualifies and extends its contours. Indeed, a brilliant dimension of Marx After Marx is the fact that the evolution of its argument reflects the protean capacity of formal subsumption itself. A shared feature of Lenin’sThe Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899) and Rosa Luxemburg’sThe Accumulation of Capital (1913) is the insistence that originary accumulation is ‘always immanent’[86] to the logic of formal subsumption, be it through the wage-form yoking itself to existing forms of exploitation in the agricultural countryside, or the colonial violence that underpins the dependence of capitalism on ‘noncapitalism’ more generally. The concept of ‘passive revolution’ in Antonio Gramsci’s The Southern Question (1926) is the ‘equivalent political form’[87] of formal subsumption, because it transferred the encounter between the economic ‘new’ and ‘old’ to a tactic which recruited and mobilised ‘what was near at hand’: the fluid and uneven mix of ‘different classes and political ambitions that constituted the “revolution”’.[88] José Carlos Mariátegui’s appeal to surviving traces of archaic Incan communal orders is in no way a romantic desire for the recovery of an ‘Inca utopianism’,[89] but rather a hedge on an unheralded Peruvian socialism, made possible by formal subsumption and its ‘coexisting different contemporaneities … constant collision of pasts in presents that are never completed but always left open’.[90] The sustained attention to ‘feudal remnants’ in China (Wang Yanan) and Japan (Yamada Moritarō and Uno Kōzō) inevitably runs into formal subsumption as the optic through which the historical ‘lateness’ of these nation-states can be theorised, without resorting to historicist – and racist – claims of ‘backwardness’.

The overriding image/metaphor that Harootunian employs to bring Marx and these interlocutors together is the palimpsest, as it evokes the ‘stratigraphic history’[91] – the vertical layering – that formal subsumption produces. Conversely, the methodological ‘fiction’ (Luxemburg’s word)[92] of real subsumption, which ‘[misrecognises] a model for real existence’,[93] regards the residues of older economic and political forms as wholly removed by later arrivals, and therefore relegates history to a ‘homogeneous, unitary, and linear trajectory of time’.[94] But is the concept of real subsumption really guilty of these charges? Does it, ultimately, ‘literally imagine’ capitalism as a ‘completed totality’?[95] The connection of real subsumption to the discourse of ‘completion’ is so deeply entrenched in Marx After Marx that to answer these questions in anything but the affirmative risks destabilising, if not dismantling, the theoretical edifice upon which this book is built. Yet if one believes (as I do) that real subsumption (in tandem, of course, with formal and hybrid subsumption) is squarely at the heart of the unevenness and necessary incompletion of capitalism and history alike, then this edifice cannot stand. Of critical importance here are the conceptions of ‘totality’ and ‘totalisation’ at work inMarx After Marx. After Sartre,[96] totalisation in Marx is not, as it is often understood to be, an ‘adding up’ of innumerable multiplicities into a single, ‘completed totality’. It is, on the contrary, the creation of difference, a unification whose unity is the process of its disintegration. In this sense, capitalism is a totalityprecisely because it cannot and never will be completed.

This opposing vision, between Harootunian and Marx, of the relationship between capitalism and totalisation is the gateway to a new relationship between subsumption and history, one that unsettles Marx After Marx but nonetheless maintains its commitment to ‘deprovincialising Marx’ and hence to world history. This begins with removing real subsumption from the misty realm of the ‘ideal model’ and returning it to where Marx clearly locates it: within the production-process of capital, which is to say within the actuality of the historical present of capitalist labour-processes. If real subsumption ‘is logically implicit in the concept of capital’,[97] so too are the material coexistence and interplay between formal and real subsumption. This does not preclude the possibility of stretches of chronological time, across various places in the world (particularly colonised societies), where formal subsumption is the predominant or even exclusive mode of capitalist appropriation, whereby there are no changes in the labour-processes themselves, and ‘nothing … has changed but [the worker’s] soul’.[98] But it is one thing to accept this possibility, as Marx does,[99] and another to turn formal subsumption into the law of world-historical capitalism, the ‘general rule of all capitalist development’. Harootunian puts such a heavy burden on formal subsumption that, on Marx’s terms, he denies ‘capitalist’ status to the world he brings into focus. After Marx, real subsumption constitutes the ‘specifically capitalist mode of production’; it defines a capitalist society as ‘capitalist’, such that it enables capitalist production to ‘[establish] itself as a mode of productionsui generis’.[100] To insist on the presence of real subsumption in the non-European world does not erase the traces of older modes of production, nor does it put a fully-fledged industrial capitalism – complete with factories and machines – where it does not belong, but simply suggests the need to recognise some transformation of labour-processes themselves, in the vast majority of places where capital arrives on the scene.

As it stands, this distinct priority afforded to formal subsumption has two peculiar consequences. The first is that it reproduces the premise of many Western Marxists that the scope of subsumption extends beyond the production-process of capital to society as a whole. Against Marx (who explicitly limits subsumption to the production-process), Harootunian’s interpretation of Lenin as ‘[extending] the scope of formal subsumption to include areas outside the economic domain’,[101] of Gramsci as ‘[transferring] … formal subsumption from the economic to the political register and beyond’,[102] and of formal subsumption as ‘defining the social totality’[103] of Italy and Peru, ironically aligns with Jacques Camatte’s declaration of ‘the total subsumption of labour under capital’,[104] Fredric Jameson’s pronouncement that ‘everything has been subsumed under capitalism’,[105] and Negri’s claim that we have entered ‘the phase of the total subsumption of society’.[106] There is of course a palpable difference of content here, between Harootunian and the others, but the formal relationship between subsumption and totalisation is the same: subsumption, whether formal or real, stretches to all facets of social life. This is reinforced by the fact that Harootunian accepts the Western Marxist notion that real subsumption corresponds to ‘capitalism as a completed totality’ (his only point of contention is the presumption of realisation).

The second consequence of formal subsumption as ‘the general rule of all capitalist development’ is a one-sided, and therefore problematic, understanding of the relationship between capitalism and ‘noncapitalism’, which is to say between capitalism and ‘prior’ or ‘older’ practices. This, in turn, simplifies the historical-temporal relationship between the ‘new’ and ‘old’ more generally. As one might expect, Harootunian’s formal subsumption offers scarce acknowledgement of capital’s incessant reproduction of existing practices as ‘past’, and thus presents far too neat a separation between ‘capitalist production’ and ‘prior practices that are at hand’. This reproduction is only mentioned in passing,[107] presumably to mitigate the presence of real subsumption and the new ‘olds’ it creates. There is in Marx After Marx no consideration of the inescapable equivocation that marks the capitalist ‘old’ from the start, no analysis of the conjoined but contradictory olds put into service by formal and real subsumption. The result is that the standard (chronological) conception of the ‘old’ guides this work, despite the ‘coexisting different contemporaneities’ showcased by its stratigraphic history. When real subsumption is denied, so too is capital’s ongoing designation of existing capitalist labour-processes as either ‘insufficiently capitalist’ or as outright ‘noncapitalist’ (this is part and parcel of its totalising process). This is important, because it is the basis of the argument – central toMarx After Marx – of the permanence of originary accumulation.[108] More broadly, it is the basis of the ‘constantly changing historical landscape’ that Harootunian attributes to formal subsumption alone. Capitalism constantly revolutionises itself, and thus generates the historically new within itself, because of formal and real subsumption. When given the exclusive rights to the relation between capitalism and history, formal subsumption actually diminishes the dynamism of the historical present.[109]

It is suggestive that Marx After Marx never broaches the conceptual history of subsumption itself, specifically the manner in which Marx’s work decisively modifies, but is nonetheless indebted to, the emergence of subsumption as a modern, critical concept in Kant, and the introduction of new social and historical dimensions to subsumption in Hegel.[110] Whatever the reasons for this absence, it reinforces a well-known standpoint on the relationship between Marx and philosophy as such: the position, after Louis Althusser and Georges Labica, that Marx eventually ‘breaks’ with philosophy. For Harootunian, once Marx ‘liberated history from philosophy, time or temporality is left to temporalise itself in the present’,[111] in accordance with ‘real history’ as ‘the actual empirical existence of men’.[112] The problem here is larger than the endorsement of empiricism as the anti-philosophical meaning of history, and with it a certain faith in the self-sufficiency of history (which is not an adequate solution to the faith in the self-sufficiency of philosophy). At a more basic level, the problem is the lack of a sustained consideration of Marx’s deeply ambivalent, but thereby productive, relationship with philosophy. The Grundrisse andCapital do not break with philosophy, but enhance it; to paraphrase Balibar, philosophy has been kicked out the front door, only to sneak back in, enriched, through the window.[113] Harootunian undeniably deepens our understanding of the relationship between capitalism, time, and history. However – and this point extends to Martineau and Tombazos as well – one is left wondering in what ways, precisely, Marx’s work problematises, and is problematised by, the philosophy of time and history more generally. Despite – in fact, precisely because of – Marx’s vexed relationship to this philosophy, this is, I believe, the most important question surrounding the concept of historical time.

Sartre famously declared that ‘far from being exhausted, Marxism is still very young, almost in its infancy; it has scarcely begun to develop’.[114] It is, for this reason, the unsurpassable philosophy of our time: ‘we cannot go beyond it because we have not gone beyond the circumstances which engendered it’.[115] Nearly fifty years on, this rings true for these three books, if not the body of work on capitalism, time, and history more broadly. What these books reveal is that the theoretical and political potential of Marxism is not only not exhausted, but that such exhaustion is impossible: Marxism is as incomplete as the capitalism and history to which it is joined. In this regard, the particular limits of these books – of every book that confronts the capitalism–time–history nexus – introduce future lines of enquiry which, in turn, will introduce others.[116]

References

Arthur, Christopher J. 2004, The New Dialectic and Marx’s ‘Capital’,Historical Materialism Book Series, Leiden: Brill.

Axelos, Kostas 2015 [1966], Introduction to a Future Way of Thought: On Marx and Heidegger, translated by Kenneth Mills, edited and introduced by Stuart Elden, Lüneburg: Meson Press.

Balibar, Étienne 1995, The Philosophy of Marx, translated by Gregory Elliott and Chris Turner, London: Verso.

Balibar, Étienne 2015, ‘Foucault’s Point of Heresy: “Quasi-Transcendentals” and the Transdisciplinary Function of the Episteme’, Theory, Culture & Society, 32, 5–6: 45–77.

Bensaïd, Daniel 2002, Marx for Our Times: Adventures and Misadventures of a Critique, translated by Gregory Elliott, London: Verso.

Bonefeld, Werner 2010, ‘Abstract Labour: Against its Nature and On its Time’, Capital & Class, 34, 2: 257–76.

Camatte, Jacques 1988 [1976], Capital and Community, translated by David Brown, London: Unpopular Books.

Harootunian, Harry 2007, ‘Remembering the Historical Present’, Critical Inquiry, 33: 471–94.

Harootunian, Harry 2010, ‘Who Needs Postcoloniality? A Reply to Linder’, Radical Philosophy, 164: 38–44.

Harootunian, Harry 2015, Marx After Marx: History and Time in the Expansion of Capitalism, New York: Columbia University Press.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 1969 [1812], The Science of Logic, translated by A.V. Miller, London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 1991 [1817], The Encyclopaedia Logic (Part I of the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences, with the Zusätze), translated by T.F. Geraets, W.A. Suchting and H.S. Harris, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company.

Jameson, Fredric 2011, Representing Capital: A Reading of Volume One, London: Verso.

Martineau, Jonathan 2015, Time, Capitalism and Alienation: A Socio-Historical Inquiry into the Making of Modern Time,Historical Materialism Book Series, Leiden: Brill.

Marx, Karl 1963 [1847], The Poverty of Philosophy, New York: International Publishers.

Marx, Karl 1964 [1932], The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, New York: International Publishers.

Marx, Karl 1970 [1859], A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, New York: International Publishers.

Marx, Karl 1976 [1867], Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Volume One, translated by Ben Fowkes, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Marx, Karl 1978 [1885], Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Volume Two, translated by David Fernbach, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Marx, Karl 1993 [1939], Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), translated by Martin Nicolaus, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels 1965 [1932], The German Ideology, London: Lawrence and Wishart.

Moseley, Fred and Tony Smith (eds.) 2014, Marx’s ‘Capital’ and Hegel’s ‘Logic’: A Reexamination,Historical Materialism Book Series, Leiden: Brill.

Negri, Antonio 1996, ‘Twenty Theses on Marx: Interpretation of the Class Situation Today’, in Marxism Beyond Marxism, edited by Saree Makdisi, Cesare Casarino and Rebecca E. Karl, New York: Routledge.

Negri, Antonio 2013 [1981], Time for Revolution, translated by Matteo Mandarini, London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Osborne, Peter 2008, ‘Marx and the Philosophy of Time’, Radical Philosophy, 147: 15–22.

Osborne, Peter 2010, ‘A Sudden Topicality: Marx, Nietzsche and the Politics of Crisis’, Radical Philosophy, 160: 19–26.

Osborne, Peter 2015, ‘Out of Sync: Tomba’s Marx and the Problem of a Multi-layered Temporal Dialectic’, Historical Materialism, 23, 4: 39–48.

Osborne, Peter 2016, ‘Marx after Marx after Marx after Marx’, Radical Philosophy, 200: 47–51.

Postone, Moishe 1993, Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sáenz de Sicilia, Andrés 2016, The Problem of Subsumption in Kant, Hegel and Marx, PhD Thesis, Kingston University.

Sartre, Jean-Paul 1963 [1960], Search for a Method, translated by Hazel E. Barnes, New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Sartre, Jean-Paul 2004 [1960], Critique of Dialectical Reason, Volume One: Theory of Practical Ensembles, translated by Alan Sheridan-Smith, London: Verso.

Sohn-Rethel, Alfred 1977 [1970], Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology, translated by Martin Sohn-Rethel, Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press.

Tomba, Massimiliano 2013, Marx’s Temporalities,Historical Materialism Book Series, Chicago: Haymarket Books.

Tombazos, Stavros 2014, Time in Marx: The Categories of Time in Marx’s ‘Capital’, with a Preface by Georges Labica and Postface by Daniel Bensaïd,Historical Materialism Book Series, Leiden: Brill.

[1] In addition to the three books reviewed here, see in particular Postone 1993, Bensaïd 2002, Tomba 2013, Osborne 2008, and Bonefeld 2010.

[2] One is hard pressed today to find anyone who advocates a historicist reading of Marx, so much so that the novelty of the anti-historicist position is quickly fading, if not already gone. A corollary of this is the frequent presupposing of precisely what needs to be explained: capitalism as the condition of homogenous empty time. As Peter Osborne suggests, ‘critical reference to historicism as a falsely linear and homogeneous conception of historical time has become a familiar trope of left-academic discourse over the last two decades, largely as a result of the still-growing influence of Benjamin’s writings. However, it often has a citational or positional function, rather than an analytical or theoretical one’. Osborne 2016, p. 51.

[3] See Axelos 2015. Axelos’s concept of ‘play/the game’ (le jeu) is difficult to pin down, but it is undeniably motivated by the place of ‘das Spiel’ in Heidegger. Broadly speaking, it signifies the sense in which the world deploys itself as a play of time, and is thereby the basis of the creative openness of what Axelos calls ‘planetary thought’.

[4] Tombazos’s Time in Marx was actually published in France in 1994, but was relatively unknown (at least by Anglo-American readers) until it was translated and republished a few years back.

[5] The paradigmatic example here is Arthur 2004. See also Moseley and Smith (eds.) 2014.

[6]Tombazos 2014, pp. 3, 5. ‘Conceptual’ in the active sense of ‘The Doctrine of the Concept’ in Hegel’sLogic.

[7]Tombazos 2014, p. 3.

[8] ‘Economy of time, to this all economy ultimately reduces itself’. Marx 1993, p. 173.

[9]Tombazos 2014, p. 4.

[10]Tombazos 2014, p. 29.

[11]Tombazos 2014, p. 85.

[12]Tombazos 2014, pp. 29–30. The problem with this passage is not that use-values are dependent on value, but that they are ‘neutral’ (the use-value of labour-power is by no means neutral).

[13] The point here is to emphasise the highly asymmetric dimension of the dialectical relationship between abstract and concrete labour, and thus value and use-value. Concrete labour and use-value are not only dialectically tied to abstract labour and value, but also only exist within abstract labour and value, as, to use Sartrean language, ‘exteriorised interiors’ of abstract labour and value. This unsettles the transhistorical validity of the categories of concrete labour and use-value, and suggests – against Marx – that they are only intelligible as economic categories specific to capitalism. Thus if the commodification of labour-power is historically specific to capitalism, and if it is a condition of the production of abstract labour and value, then concrete labour and use-value only exist consequent to this commodification.

[14]Tombazos 2014, p. 18.

[15] Unlike the chemical process (simple circulation), the teleological process (capital) not only presupposes but posits the moments of its self-renewal.

[16]Tombazos 2014, p. 119.

[17]Tombazos 2014, pp. 2, 120.

[18]Tombazos 2014, p. 140.

[19] ‘The living being is the syllogism whose very moments are inwardly systems and syllogisms … but they are active syllogisms, or processes; and within the subjective unity of the living being they are only One process. Thus, the living being is the process of its own concluding with itself, which runs through three processes’. Hegel 1991, p. 292 (§217).

[20] It is important to keep in mind that ‘production’ in the second volume of Capital (the ‘circuit of productive capital’) denotes the capacity of the living organism to preserve/maintain itself, not the manner in which this being reproduces itself as more than itself, in which it ‘gives birth’ to more than what it already is (this is the function of the circuit of money capital). To put this another way, whereas the production-process in the first volume ofCapital corresponds to the production of surplus-value, this is, from the standpoint of the second volume ofCapital, registered by the circuit of money capital, not that of productive capital. As Marx puts it, ‘the general form of the movement P … P′ is the form of reproduction, and does not indicate, as does M … M′, that valorisation is the purpose of the process’. Marx 1978, p. 172.

[21]Tombazos 2014, p. 144.

[22]Tombazos 2014, p. 144.

[23]Tombazos 2014, p. 144.

[24] ‘Social capital’ or ‘total social capital’ (gesellschaftlichen Gesamtkapital) inCapital Volume Two is the successor to ‘capital in general’ (Kapital im Allgemeinen) inCapital Volume One, although it is crucial to state that the former does not invalidate the latter. Rather, ‘social capital’ expresses within itself (which ‘capital in general’ does not) the three metamorphoses, the three cycles/circuits (Kreislauf), of the life of capital.

[25]Tombazos 2014, p. 168. It is worth noting that ‘circulation time’ is not, for Tombazos, the same thing as ‘The Time of Circulation’ (nor is ‘production time’ the same thing as ‘The Time of Production’). The former is contained within the latter, and entails the simple conception of ‘circulation’ qua the time of the purchase of commodities intended for production and the time of the sale of produced commodities (Tombazos 2014, p. 167).

[26]Tombazos 2014, p. 145.

[27]Tombazos 2014, p. 274. This dovetails with Peter Osborne’s claim that whereas Marx is undoubtedly a thinker of crisis, it is unclear whether he is a theorist of crisis, whether, that is to say, he ‘propound[s] something that might legitimately be called a “crisis theory”’. Osborne 2010, p. 19. However, Tombazos’s ‘structural crisis’ is not the same thing as what Osborne calls ‘the all-pervasive, general-historical character of the concept of crisis in its modern form’, which includes ‘the historico-political notion of a crisis of the capitalist system as a whole, as a condition of a transition to a new mode of production’. Osborne 2010, p. 20.

[28]Tombazos 2014, p. 300.

[29] This is certainly the standpoint of, again, Arthur 2004, and Moseley and Smith (eds.) 2014.

[30]Tombazos 2014, p. 303.

[31]Tombazos 2014, pp. 6, 303.

[32] Although he also contradicts himself on this point, for instance on p. 62. See endnote 34, below.

[33] One consequence of Tombazos’s relegation of history to the ‘objective side’ of capital is an unavoidable slide into stagism and thus historicism, wherein historical time is only realised in the specific moment and place of its dialectical correspondence with the ‘logical time’ of capital. The point, rather, is to grasp history as the totalising and temporalising manifestation of capital itself, from all of its sides.

[34] At one point, Tombazos suggests that ‘indeed, the exchanges outlined in the first chapter of Capital are not historical but logical’ (Tombazos 2014, p. 62). This is a misguided and common standpoint of Systematic Dialectics, as well as other (non-Hegelian) representations ofCapital. For instance, in his Kantian rereading of commodity exchange as thea priori synthetic matrix of the social, Alfred Sohn-Rethel states that ‘the exchange abstraction excludes everything that makes up history, human, and even natural history’, and that through the exchange relation ‘time becomes unhistorical time’. Sohn-Rethel 1977, pp. 48–9, 56. These positions obscure the fact that history and historical time are immanent to the systematic development of the value-form inCapital.

[35] Harootunian 2015, p. 25.

[36]Time, Labor, and Social Domination remains – at least in the Anglo-American context – the predominant touchstone of secondary literature on Marx, time, and history. Of the three authors reviewed here, it has the strongest and most direct impact on Martineau, although Harootunian dovetails with Postone on some matters (Tombazos wroteTime in Marx beforeTime, Labor, and Social Domination was published).

[37] I am appropriating Balibar’s recent reading of Foucault. See Balibar 2015.

[38]Martineau 2015, pp. 4, 8.

[39]Martineau 2015, p. 3.

[40] In the section entitled ‘From Species Being to Alienation’, Martineau highlights consciousness as that which, for Marx, differentiates human beings from other animals (Martineau 2015, p. 12), and also maintains that the 1844 Manuscripts ‘examines three interrelated forms of alienation’ (Martineau 2015, p. 14). First, Marx’s stance, articulated inThe German Ideology, is that it is not consciousness but the production of the means of life that actually differentiates humans from other animals (Marx and Engels 1965, p. 42); second, there are in fact four interrelated forms of alienation in the1844 Manuscripts: Martineau does not identify the alienation of one individual human being from another, one worker from another, as the fourth and final form (Marx 1964, p. 114). Both of these are indelibly social dimensions of Marx’s human; their omission weakens Martineau’s conceptualisation of ‘social time’.

[41]Martineau 2015, p. 23.

[42] This italicisation is a rather cryptic way of drawing attention to the paucity of Martineau’s engagement with the philosophy of time in the post-Kantian European tradition (a point to which I will return in relation to all three books). His only general engagement is also mistaken: an account of Norbert Elias’s argument, but one that he does not contest: ‘Philosophers, for their part, have made time a feature of human consciousness, of the human power to reason. They have not examined how time is learned, and how it is socially constructed’ (Martineau 2015, p. 42). The first sentence is selective, and the second is demonstrably untrue.

[43]Martineau 2015, p. 45. Dovetailing with the previous endnote, it is remarkable how much Elias’s and Adam’s work is indebted to Heidegger’sBeing and Time: the former’s ‘timing’ is basically a socialised rendition of ‘originary temporality’ (ursprüngliche Zeitlichkeit), whereas the latter’s grounding of time in the finitude of human existence directly aligns with the concept of ‘being-towards-death’.

[44]Martineau 2015, p. 46.

[45]Martineau 2015, p. 47.

[46]Martineau 2015, pp. 47, 104. The ‘time of labouring practices’ was not alienated, because ‘themoment of appropriation did not correspond to themoment of production’ (Martineau 2015, p. 105), as is the case in capitalism.

[47]Martineau 2015, p. 95.

[48] Insofar as a ‘mode of production’ is a totalising abstraction of multiple, actually existing societies, the desire to locate the ‘origin of capitalism’ in a particular time, place, and phenomenon (let us say sixteenth-century English agrarian relations) is misguided. That is, capitalism is capitalism by virtue of the fact that, as a world system of social forces and relations irreducible to linear causation and time, its ‘origin’ belongs to no one time, place, or phenomenon. Barbados or Peru is as much ‘the first capitalist country’ (Martineau 2015, p. 95) as England (Martineau basically endorses the old story that ‘capitalism began in the West’, and thus utilises the categories of ‘West’ and ‘non-West’ in an uncritical fashion). In short, capitalism significantly destabilises the concept of ‘origin’ (and with it the concept of ‘transition’). This is the lesson of the ongoing originary accumulation of capital, and it is, to varying degrees, lost on the major writers on the ‘origin of capitalism’ (e.g. Robert Brenner).

[49]Martineau 2015, p. 106.

[50]Martineau 2015, p. 114.

[51]Martineau 2015, p. 140.

[52]Martineau 2015, p. 120.

[53]Martineau 2015, p. 120.

[54]Martineau 2015, p. 132.

[55] ‘Concrete time is … both a result and a condition of the encounter between humans, their practices, and temporal socio-natural material realities. It is time as (re)produced by the combinations and ruptures of these processes of interaction between humans, their social relations, and their world. … [B]y the experience and reproduction of human life’ (Martineau 2015, pp. 115, 148). In a word, Martineau’s concrete time is everything.

[56]Martineau 2015, p. 148.

[57] The question of free/leisure time in capitalism is raised, but only in passing (Martineau 2015, p. 144). There is no mention of Marx’s multiple passages on free/leisure/disposable time in the various drafts of Capital.

[58] Martineau affords a slight conceptual distinction between ‘abstract time’ and ‘clock-time’ (Martineau 2015, p. 111), but the fact is that they are largely interchangeable in this book, as evidenced by the frequent use of ‘abstract clock-time’.

[59]Martineau 2015, p. 118.

[60] For Marx, ‘abstract labour’ and ‘abstract labour-time’ are two different expressions of one and the same thing. The ‘time’ of ‘labour-time’ is inseparable from the ‘labour’: this ‘time’ is not something that can be tacked on to, or severed from, ‘labour’. More on this in a second.

[61] Marx 1970, p. 49.

[62] Marx 1963, p. 54.

[63] Negri 2013, p. 27.

[64]Martineau 2015, p. 148.

[65] This despite the fact that Martineau clearly extends the scope of Marx’s concept of subsumption beyond the production-process of capital (where Marx clearly intended it to remain).

[66] The influence of Tomba 2013 is clear.

[67]Harootunian 2015, p. 53. See also Harootunian 2010, p. 43.

[68]Harootunian 2015, p. 5.

[69]Harootunian 2015,p. 68.

[70]Harootunian 2015,p. 4.

[71] See Osborne 2016, pp. 48–50. The problem with this review is that it fixates on Harootunian’s construction of Western Marxism, at the expense of the real interlocutors in Marx After Marx (most of whom are not even mentioned). In effect, Osborne’s review reproduces the Eurocentrism that Harootunian opposes.

[72]Harootunian 2015,p. 236.

[73]Harootunian 2015, p. 67.

[74]Harootunian 2015, p. 68.

[75]Harootunian 2015, p. 68.

[76]Harootunian 2015, p. 1.

[77] Tomba 2013, p. 155. On the whole, because Harootunian’s use of ‘hybrid subsumption’, particularly in his discussion of Lenin’s The Development of Capitalism in Russia, mitigates the otherwise stark opposition he sets up between formal and real subsumption. The difference here between Harootunian and Tomba is ironic, given that the former’s conception of historical time is highly indebted to the latter.

[78]Harootunian 2015,p. 1.

[79]Harootunian 2015,p. 14.

[80]Harootunian 2015,p. 16.

[81] ‘[Formal subsumption] is the general form of all capitalist production-processes [formelle Subsumtion … ist die allgemeine Form alles kapitalistischen Produktionsprozesses]’. Marx 1976, p. 1019. Undeniably, the scope of ‘capitalist development’ is broader than capitalist production-processes.

[82]Harootunian 2015,p. 26.

[83]Harootunian 2015,p. 59.

[84]Harootunian 2015,p. 63.

[85]Harootunian 2015,p. 29.

[86]Harootunian 2015,p. 108.

[87]Harootunian 2015,p. 130.

[88]Harootunian 2015,p. 130.

[89]Harootunian 2015,p. 139.

[90]Harootunian 2015,p. 151.

[91]Harootunian 2015,p. 143.

[92] It is worth noting that Luxemburg never explicitly utilises the concept of subsumption in her writings, a fact that Harootunian acknowledges in relation to formal subsumption (Harootunian 2015, p. 93). This points to a larger tendency in Marx After Marx, in which many of the interlocutors are read as engaging formal and real subsumption, ‘even though the process is not named as such’, ‘without naming it as such’, etc.

[93]Harootunian 2015,p. 99.

[94]Harootunian 2015,p. 64. For a different perspective on ‘layering’ and its philosophy of time, see Osborne 2015.

[95]Harootunian 2015,p. 8.

[96] See, namely, the Introduction to Sartre 2004.

[97] Arthur 2004, p. 76.

[98]Harootunian 2015,p. 86.

[99] Marx 1976, pp. 1020–1.

[100] Marx 1976, p. 1035.

[101]Harootunian 2015,p. 85.

[102]Harootunian 2015,p. 121.

[103]Harootunian 2015,p. 137.

[104] Camatte 1998, p. 45.

[105] Jameson 2011, p. 71.

[106] Negri 1996, p. 159.

[107]For example, Harootunian 2015,pp. 39, 65–6, 233.

[108] ‘Insufficiently’ and ‘non-’ capitalist labour-processes are dialectically tied to ‘sufficiently’ capitalist ones, and thus re-subject to formal and real subsumption. Essential here is the re-separation of the means of production from the producers, a process which is in no way predominantly marked by coercion and violence, but which is never absent the latent possibility (everywhere) and overt actuality (somewhere) of originary accumulation.

[109]Marx After Marx thus stands in tension with, for instance, Harootunian 2007.

[110] See Sáenz de Sicilia 2016.

[111]Harootunian 2015,p. 45.

[112] Harootunian 2015, pp. 42, 44. Ironically, the notion that ‘temporality temporalises itself’ comes from Heidegger. The expressions ‘real history’ and ‘the actual empirical existence of men’ come from Marx. The assertion that Marx ‘liberates’ history from philosophy dovetails with Postone’s claim that ‘the historical specificity of the critique of political economy delineates Marx’s final break with his earlier transhistorical understanding of historical materialism and, hence, with notions of the philosophy of history’. Postone 1993, p. 258.

[113] Balibar 1995, p. 27.

[114] Sartre 1963, p. 30.

[115] Ibid.

[116] Consider, for instance, the guiding premise of Martineau’s book, namely that ‘time itself has a history’ (Martineau 2015, p. 4). This is of course true, but an immediate response to this is also that ‘history itself has a time’. To his credit, Martineau raises this as an area of future research in his conclusion (Martineau 2015, pp. 165–7). It would be worthwhile to investigate the manner in which the modern conception of ‘history’ as a collective singular (following Reinhart Koselleck) is predicated on clock-time, such that the clock is at the crux of why history appears as outside of and opposed to the individuals that constitute it.

The Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice (CSSGJ) at the University of Nottingham has organised a one-day workshop Revisiting the ‘Mode of Production’: Enduring Controversies over Labour, Exploitation and Historiographies of Capitalism on the 1^st July 2019. The event was dedicated to the re-examination of two important debates in historical materialism related to the conceptualisation of the mode of production and domestic labour that were thriving in the 1970s and attracted fresh interest more recently. We were delighted to host two distinguished contributors, Jairus Banaji and Silvia Federici as keynote speakers who presented alongside other prominent authors, including Andreas Bieler, Tony Burns, Neil Davidson, Jens Lerche, Alessandra Mezzadri and Benno Teschke. In this blog post, Jokubas Salyga and Kayhan Valadbaygi, the organisers of the workshop, share video-recorded proceedings of the event.

In the provocative monograph Theory As History: Essays on Modes of Production and Exploitation (Brill Academic Publishers, 2010), Jairus Banaji sets out to survey the role of labour and exploitation within the historical-materialist tradition. Covering forty years of intellectual engagement that traces its pedigrees to the famous debate around ‘modes of production’ in the 1970s, this recent republication of articles in one volume invites us to reconsider longstanding questions surrounding the historical transition to capitalism. It further challenges the ways in which we continue to deploy fundamental concepts such as the ‘mode of production’, ‘relations of exploitation’ and ‘wage labour’ to understand the current conjuncture.

Banaji brings to light the issue of ‘abstract scholastic formalism’ that is shown to proceed problematically by identifying simple categories to read off the character of a given ‘epoch of production’ (mode of production). For example, the manner in which labour is subjugated is taken to form the defining basis of a given mode of production (serfdom = feudalism, free wage labour = capitalism). Likewise, the category of the ‘market’ can be conceived in this way, when it is assumed that given its necessity to the capitalist mode of production, all commodity markets are capitalist by definition. This method of enquiry is incapable of accounting for the presence of wage-labour and commodity markets in earlier epochs of production. Elements characterising modes of production, therefore, have to be understood in relation to their specific laws of motion, operative at two levels, namely the individual capital and total social capital.

What follows from this careful re-reading of Marx is the implication that capital accumulation has been historically characterised by a considerable flexibility in the structuring of production and in the forms of labour used in producing surplus value. The ‘orthodox’ conceptions of capitalism, which see the sole basis of accumulation in the individual wage earner conceived as free labourer eradicate a great deal of capitalist history. Effectively, they tend to assume away the contribution of both enslaved and collective (family) units of labour power. Against this backdrop, Banaji’s conceptualisation offers an alternative that sees ‘free’ wage-labour as one form of exploitation among many, alongside sharecropping, labour tenancy, and various kinds of bonded labour. These specific individual forms of exploitation that apparently belong to various modes of production, might be nothing but the ways in which labour is recruited, exploited and controlled by capitalist employers.

More recently, Banaji’s work has endeavoured to integrate the rich pre-industrial historiography of capitalism into theory by reinstating the notion of merchant capitalism as both a valid and consistent category with Marx’s own writings. Rather than viewing merchant capital as a dependent agent of industrial capital in line with ‘orthodox’ understanding, he unearths the imperative historical role of merchants already prior to industrialisation, for example in transporting goods, organising and financing voyages, exerting control over and organising of household producers into putting-out systems, financing, managing and owning plantation industries among other undertakings. This implies that the function of merchant capital is not reducible to buying and selling but instead can be viewed through a four-fold taxonomy that includes organisational patterns in the long history of pre-industrial capitalism, related to: i) the Verlagssystem, ii) international money markets, iii) ‘colonial trades’, iv) produce trades. While this and other themes are subjected to scrutiny in the forthcoming bookA Brief History of Commercial Capitalism (Haymarket Books, July 2020), Banaji’s presentation at the workshop sought to unpack this taxonomy in detail and address the historical manifestations of state-merchant nexus in the era of commercial capitalism.

Jairus’ talk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZ73_Q-pZy8

The 1970s had also witnessed a proliferation of debate and dissensus around the role of domestic (or household) labour in capitalism. Concerned with the formation of the ‘family wage’ in the late nineteenth century, participants tended to advance highly theoretical and abstract contributions that remained bereft of deeper historical detail. Advancing central ideas of the International Feminist Collective (Wages for Housework campaign in 1972) that emphasised capital’s dependence on unwaged reproductive labour of the housewife, Silvia Federici’s work embarks upon reassessing historical origins of capitalist sexual division of labour and unpaid work in the accumulation process.

Published in 2004, Caliban and the Witch (Autonomedia) offers a novel interpretation of the primitive accumulation problematic by shedding light on the sixteenth and seventeenth century witch-hunts in Europe and the ‘New World’. In this account, expropriation of European workers from their means of subsistence and the enslavement of the Native Americans and Africans to the mines and plantations attest to necessary but not sufficient conditions for the emergence of capitalism. Of decisive importance is the transformation of the body into a work machine and the subjugation of women to the reproduction of the workforce. Not only the notion of accumulation is broadened to include the mechanisms of class rule that are inseparable from and built upon hierarchies of gender, race and age, but also the sphere of reproduction is considered to be the source of value-creation and exploitation. A wide-ranging record of Federici’s publications also opens up a broad array of conceptual questions predicated on the puzzle whether household labour activities can be treated as a labour process or not. This prompts us to probe what is the product of household labour? Is it the people, commodities or labour power? Does the product have value and if so, how to determine it? What are the circumstances, conditions, and constraints of domestic labour? How does domestic labour relate to the processes of reproduction of labor-power, to overall social reproduction, to capital accumulation? Could a mode of reproduction of people be analytically detached from the mode of production? To what extent answers to these questions are instructive in accounting for the origins of women’s oppression?

In the panel Women, the Body and ‘Primitive Accumulation’: Past and Present dedicated to Federici’s work, she revisited the centrality of witch-hunts in the moments of capital’s genesis. In doing so, it was accentuated that rather than reserving primitive accumulation and witch-hunts to specific time-periods, the latter attest to central pillars of analysis in grasping contemporary dynamics of commodification of all aspects of social life.

Silvia’s talk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jh3B7BZi9G8

Stimulating serious reconsiderations of foundational historical materialist concepts, the reception of Banaji and Federici’s publications has invited many supportive and critical engagements, in turn generating new avenues for reflection about capitalism as a systemic ‘totality’. In their own distinctive ways both interventions provide important theoretical guidelines and raise pertinent questions relating to: the relationship of ‘concrete’ and ‘abstract’ categories in the development of historical knowledge about socio-economic change, definition of the ‘mode of production’, dichotomies between ‘free’ and ‘unfree’, ‘waged’ and ‘unwaged’ labour, vectors of systemic violence and statecraft in theorising transition to capitalism. Challenging stagist emphasis on the qualitative difference embodied in capitalist relations of exploitation both exhibit propensities to conceive of capitalist development as a multi-linear phenomenon, thereby engendering the necessity to depart from Eurocentric understandings of modernity.

One of the central aims of this workshop was to interrogate whether bridging Banaji and Federici’s contributions together offers a richer repertoire of methodological resources for a comprehensive grasp of capitalist mode of production. It aspired to put the two highly original approaches in dialogue with their sympathetic critics in the hope of generating new avenues for future enquiries. To this end, each keynote was followed by the panel of two contributions. Critically engaging with Banaji’s work, The Mode of Production and Forms of Exploitation panel featured interventions by Tony Burns and Jens Lerche. Andreas Bieler and Alessandra Mezzadri explored the themes developed in Federici’s work in theInteriorities of Production and Social Reproduction: Domestic Labour Debate panel.

Tony Burns (University of Nottingham): Marxism and the Concept of a Social Formation

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfAnrHt9FFk

Jens Lerche (SOAS): Seeing Beyond so-called Unfree Labour: Real Unfreedoms, Marxist Political Economy and Labour Regimes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KOep9Z_LFc

Andreas Bieler (University of Nottingham): Is Capitalism Structurally Indifferent to Gender?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODcGQU3BFi8

Alessandra Mezzadri (SOAS): Social Reproduction, Forms of Exploitation, and Value: From Housework to Informal Labour Debates

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIfGsal_tvA

In light of recent interest in the notion of ‘uneven and combined development’, the objective of the final panel was to scrutinize this current of historical sociology in depth. Advancing their own idiosyncratic interpretations of the concept, both supportive and critical of ‘Political Marxism’, the 2003 Deutscher Memorial Prize winners, Neil Davidson and Benno Teschke enquired to what extent the idea of UCD help us to broaden analytical horizons beyond Eurocentric historiographies. How UCD could be grounded in the theorisation of mode of production? Who does the combination and what is actually combined? Whether UCD could be used as a transhistorical category? If so, does it not risk becoming trivial by aiming to explain everything? What are the concrete manifestations of UCD in contemporary capitalism? What are the political implications behind it? And finally, is permanent revolution still possible in the 21^st century?

Neil Davidson (University of Glasgow): Capitalist Modernity, Uneven and Combined Development and the Nation-State Form

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcQ_FGLXQSw

Benno Teschke (University of Sussex): Reflections on Eurocentrism in Uneven and Combined Development and Political Marxism

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83i99wdtRDA&t=1s

Pepijn Brandon

If you get nauseated by the perverse state of contemporary world politics and the slavish way in which mainstream media help to sustain the spectacle that is Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Rodrigo Duterte or their local variants, here is the perfect antidote: read Marx’s journalistic articles for the New York Daily Tribune.

Marx contributed to the Tribune as European correspondent between 1852 and 1862. This was certainly not the highpoint of his life, personally or politically. Exiled to London by the defeat of the 1848 revolutions, the Marx family had to survive as refugees in a hostile city, harangued by dire poverty. During the 1850s, Karl and his wife Jenny endured the loss of four children (Edgar, Guido, Jenny, and one before being named). Apart from financial contributions from Engels, writing for theTribune was Marx’s only steady source of income. It is thus not surprising that his contributions for the US newspaper have often been treated as little more than bread writing, performed purely out of economic necessity and containing little that is of interest for understanding his thought.

Luckily, recent biographers of Marx have given more positive attention to his journalism. In the decade that he wrote for the Tribune, an estimated 487 articles sent by Marx were published in the paper (some were published anonymously, making it impossible to settle on a definitive number). Of these, 350 were written by Marx, 125 by Engels, and 12 were written jointly. Together, these articles fill most of the pages in the volumes of hisCollected Works dedicated to the period between the demise of the wave of radicalism of 1848 and the founding of the First International. They contain running commentary on world events, mostly concerning international and domestic politics but also reporting on economic trends and strike movements. Recent reinterpretations of Marx’s thought have stressed the meaning of this enormous body of writing as a source for the development of his thinking on such diverse issues as monetary policy, the causes of the US Civil War, and British working-class politics. Unlike many other writings by Marx in this period that at the time reached at most a couple of hundred friends, admirers and émigré adversaries, his journalism spoke to a mass audience. Reaching a circulation of 200,000 in the 1850s, theTribune for which Marx wrote was the largest newspaper in the world of its day, and Marx according to the editors was its most respected and best paid European correspondent.

It is unavoidable, this being Marx, that his journalism has given rise to large controversies, and some serious misreading. The most famous controversy revolves around Edward Saïd’s use of the 1853 article ‘The British Rule in India’ as proof of a deep and consistent orientalism in Marx. Indian Marxist Aijaz Ahmad has countered that Saïd’s citations from this 1853 article were one-sided and selective, while Kevin Anderson more recently has argued that, while elements of Orientalism can be detected in Marx’s attitude in 1853, these disappeared in the articles on India from 1857 under the influence of the Sepoy Uprising. Much more can be said about this debate. In this letter, however, I want to bypass the important debate on these sometimes latent, sometimes openly expressed negative attitudes toward non-European peoples, and concentrate on a group for which Marx’s utter contempt was explicit, unsubtle and uncontestable: British politicians.

Marx, of course, was a staunch defender of the extension of democracy, even within the framework of capitalist society. In one of his first contributions for the Tribune, he had gone so far as suggesting that because of the size and maturity of the proletariat on the British Isles, general suffrage might give sufficient power to the working classes to move directly to socialism, without a bloody revolution. But this trust in democracy did not translate into any love for parliament itself, its traditions, or its members. Unlike most contemporary and later observers who swooned for the great democratic traditions of British constitutionalism, Marx saw the scuffles between “bourgeois landowners” and “aristocratic bourgeois” represented by Whigs, Tories and the liberals of the Manchester School for what they were: the paragon of class privilege. That he held this view on the House of Lords, that festering sore of aristocratic compromise, goes without saying. On 23 August 1853, Marx reported:

As to the House of Lords, its doings admit of a very short résumé. It has exhibited its bigotry by the rejection of the Jewish Emancipation bill, its hostility to the working classes by burking the Workingmen’s Combination Bill, its interested hatred of the Irish people by shelving the Irish Land bills, and its stupid predilection for Indian abuses by re-establishing the Salt monopoly. It has acted throughout in secret understanding with the Government that whatever progressive measures might by chance pass the Commons, should be canceled by the enlightened Lords.[1]

Marx was hardly more complimentary for the House of Commons, with its “rotten foundations”, empty speechifying, and toothless moral outrages. He lambasted the impotence of Parliament in the face of the ineffective foreign policy of Aberdeen’s coalition government which, according to Marx, was secretly in cahoots with the Russian Tsar. He equally detested Parliament’s complicity in the anti-working-class policies followed by this government at home. With great irony, Marx consistently employed the phrase “Ministry of All the Talents” – a general term for governments that included members of more than one party – to describe a government that he saw as void of any special talents.

Rather than citing an endless list of small examples, I want to give a long abstract from one article. The year 1853 saw a rapid increase in strikes, that Marx frequently reported on for the Tribune. These strikes, more than anything else except perhaps the attitude of British politicians towards the Russian Tsar, for Marx functioned to illustrate the hypocrisy running through bourgeois politics of his day. In these reports, extraordinary contempt was always reserved for the claim of the ruling and middle classes and their representatives in Parliament to defend high morals against the amoral behavior of the poor. Living among the urban poor himself, Marx himself could be full of middle-class disdain against the “lumpen proletariat”. But, as is the case with all such examples of prejudice in Marx, he lost this attitude as soon as there was sign of a social confrontation that pitted the group that he had previously derided against the powers that be. And so, in an article published in theTribune on 29 July 1853, we find Marx at his best when defending a rather surprising group against the moralising repression of the British government and its allies in parliament, the press, and polite society: cab drivers, who manned the many hundreds of horse-pulled cabs orhansoms that swarmed the streets of London, as their motorised equivalents do in cities all over the world today. Just as taxi drivers today, cabbies in nineteenth century London had a reputation for scamming their passengers, and with great moral aplomb the “Ministry of All the Talents” decided to put a stop to this practice by introducing a maximum charge. The cabbies went on strike, and Marx came out behind them full force.

So let us give the floor to the old man himself.

London looked as if London had gone out-of-town. There were and there continued to be empty places where we were wont to see something. And as the eye was amazed at the emptiness of the places, so the ear was amazed at their tomb-like tranquility. What was it that had happened to London? A cab-revolution; cabmen and cabs have disappeared, as though by miracle, from the streets, from their stands, from the railway stations. The cab-proprietors and the drivers are in rebellion against the new Cab act, that great and almost “unique” act of the Ministry of all the talents. They have struck.

It has often been observed that the British public is seized with periodical fits of morality, and that, once every six or seven years, its virtue becomes outrageous, and must make a stand against vice. The object of this moral and patriotic fit happened for the present to be poor cabby. His extortions from unprotected females and fat city men were to be put down, and his fare to be reduced from 1s. to 6d. per mile. The sixpenny morality grew epidemic. The ministry, by the organ of Mr. Fitzroy [the Under-Secretary of the Home Department – PB], brought in a draconic law against Cabby, prescribing the terms of the contracts he had to fulfil with the public, and subjecting at the same time his fares and his “Hansoms,” his horses and his morals to Parliamentary legislation. Cabby, it appears, was to be forcibly transformed into the type of British respectability. The present generation could not do without improvising at least one virtuous and disinterested class of citizens, and Cabby was selected to form it. …

Day after day was Cabby moralized, sentenced, imprisoned. At last he made sure that he was unable to pay his proprietor the old rent with the new tariff, and proprietor and driver seceded to their Mons Sacer [Holy Mountain – PB], to the National Hall, in Holborn, where they came to the terrible resolution which for three days has produced the cab-desolation of London. Two things they have already effected: firstly, that the Ministry through the organ of Mr. Fitzroy, have amended their own act so much as nearly to annihilate it; and secondly, that the Eastern question, the Danishcoup d’état, the bad harvest, and the approaching cholera have all disappeared before that one great struggle of public virtue, which persists in paying only 6d. per mile, and the private interest which persists in asking 12 pence.

Again this would not have been Marx, if his report on a local strike would not have illustrated a fundamental point about the nature of society:

Within a certain conventional limit , the laborers shall be allowed to imagine themselves to be free agents of production, and that their contract with their masters are settled by mutual convention; but that limit passed, labor is to be openly enforced upon them on conditions prescribed by Parliament, that permanent Combination Committee of the ruling classes against the people.[2]

[1] First published on www.indoprogress.com on 26 September 2019

https://indoprogress.com/2019/09/marx-tentang-politik-inggris-dan-kusir…

[1] Karl Marx, ‘Affairs Continental and English’, The New York Tribune, 23 August 1853,Marx Engels Gesamtausgabe²Volume I.12, 308.

[2] Karl Marx, ‘Financial Failure of Government – Cabs – Ireland – The Russian Question’, The New York Tribune, 29 July 1853,Marx Engels Gesamtausgabe²Volume I.12, 255-256.

A Review of Contemporary Trotskyism by John Kelly, and Against the Grain, edited by Evan Smith and Matthew Worley

Sean Ledwith

York College

sledwith@yorkcollege.ac.uk

Abstract

This review-essay contends that Trotskyism is an essential ingredient of the reconfiguration of the British left underway in the era of Corbynism. Followers of the tradition inaugurated by Trotsky have played an indispensable role in the survival of the notion of working-class self-emancipation into the twenty-first century. Nevertheless, Trotskyists have made a number of strategic and tactical misjudgements since the Second World War, as recounted in Contemporary British Trotskyism by John Kelly andAgainst the Grain, edited by Smith and Worley. Coming to terms with this legacy is vital to the future of radical left politics in the UK. The two volumes reviewed here both make valuable contributions to such an evaluation.

Keywords

Trotskyism – permanent revolution – entryism – united front – Keynesianism – internationalism – Corbynism – identity politics – Stalinism – reformism

John Kelly, (2018) Contemporary Trotskyism: Parties, Sects and Social Movements in Britain, Abingdon: Routledge,

Evan Smith and Matthew Worley, eds., (2014) Against the Grain: The British Far Left from 1956, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Introduction

In the summer of 2016, Jeremy Corbyn found himself challenged for the leadership of the Labour Party after just one year at the helm. Among those who would probably have preferred Corbyn not to be the leader was his own deputy, Tom Watson. The latter used the leadership campaign as an opportunity to lash out at the influence of what he regarded as a malign minority within the party: ‘There are Trots that have come back to the party, and they certainly don’t have the best interests of the Labour party at heart. They see the Labour party as a vehicle for revolutionary socialism, they’re not remotely interested in winning elections, and that’s a problem’.[1] Watson’s colloquial reference to the Trotskyist movement in the UK represented an unwitting acknowledgement of the remarkable resilience of this strain of the far left in British politics. It also marked the revival of a pejorative term that many thought had disappeared from mainstream discourse, rendered obsolete in the era of apparently all-conquering neoliberalism.

Almost eighty years after a Stalinist assassin ended the life of its progenitor in Mexico, Watson’s ham-fisted intervention turned the spotlight once again on a political current that has had seemingly negligible impact on the hegemonic echelons of the British political system, and yet which continues to consistently attract adherents, albeit in modest numbers. The particular target of Watson’s ire was the Momentum group, which operates as a semi-detached pressure group both within and without the Labour Party. Watson compared Momentum in unflattering terms with the Militant Tendency that had challenged Neil Kinnock’s project in the 1980s to re-set the party on the trajectory that would ultimately lead to Blairism. Kinnock spectacularly confronted Militant at the 1985 party conference, in which a memorable exchange of hostile finger-jabbing and yelling led to a walkout by the far-left contingent.[2]

As an adherent of the centrist wing of the party, Watson clearly hoped his attempt to draw parallels between the activities of Militant and Momentum would adversely affect the authority of Corbyn. Alas for Watson, not only did Corbyn enhance his majority in the 2016 leadership campaign, the following year Labour came within an electoral whisker of taking the keys to Number Ten itself. In the 2017 election, Momentum was widely credited, even by its ideological opponents within the party, as playing a major role in increasing the Labour vote by almost 10% from the previous poll two years earlier.[3] Momentum is explicitly not a Trotskyist grouping but the relevant point is that many of its enemies – and some of its supporters – believe it to be. Corbyn’s attachment to policies that Watson and his ilk regarded as synonymous with the far left had clearly not damaged his electoral appeal; in fact, for those in the labour movement who look more beneficently on the role of ‘Trots’, it was precisely his unambiguous commitment to principles such as anti-austerity, nationalisation and anti-imperialism that was responsible for Labour’s remarkable performance.

In light of this apparent revival of the relevance of Britain’s Trotskyist current, it is timely that John Kelly, Lecturer in Management at Birkbeck, University of London, has published the most thorough and informative guide to the movement so far. Contemporary Trotskyism: Parties, Sects and Social Movements in Britain accumulates a wealth of statistical, historical and political sources to provide a scrupulously balanced assessment of the far left in the UK which is refreshingly free of the bile and invective that have blighted debates within the movement itself for decades. Kelly is a former member of the Communist Party and evidently does not regard himself as a follower of the USSR’s most famous dissident, yet he is frequently willing to recognise moments in postwar British political history when Trotskyists have been integral to progressive change. He notes, for example:

The Anti-Nazi League, initiated and led by the SWP, played a significant part in rolling back the electoral advance of the far right National Front in the late 1970s whilst the Anti-Poll Tax Federation was even more successful, helping to destroy Margaret Thatcher’s poll tax and at the same time contributing to her downfall as Prime Minister.[4]

In addition to Kelly’s book, any reader looking to deepen their understanding of the Corbyn-inspired optimism of revolutionary socialists today can learn a lot from the slightly wider focus of Against the Grain: The British Far Left from 1956, edited by Evan Smith and Matthew Worley. As well as incorporating alternative accounts of the history of British Trotskyism, this collection includes insightful assessments of other components of the radical fringe beyond the Labour Party, such as anarchism, feminism and the multiple iterations of the Communist Party. Together, these two volumes provide not only insightful analyses of the evolution of the British far left but also vital clues as to why its importance is surely far from over, especially in light of the resurgence of its nemesis on the far right.[5]

Both works help fill a lacuna in the chronicling of British Trotskyism that has been evident since the turn of the century. The last full-length analysis was John Callaghan’s British Trotskyism, published in the mid-1980s. Since then, of course, we have witnessed the full playing-out of the neoliberal counter-revolution that has not only permeated the thinking of the premier party of the British ruling class but also that of its rival from the social-democratic tradition. The Blair and Brown eras of New Labour appeared to have sealed the tomb of Trotskyist influence in the UK forever. Callaghan’s study was indubitably the best guide to the movement at that point, but the political water that has flowed under the bridge renders much of his analysis obsolete. For example, he concluded that volume with an observation that ‘unless, in opposition to all the historical evidence, it is believed that these radicals will obtain political satisfaction by transforming the Labour Party, independent socialists must expect that they will once again seek a genuine socialist alternative’.[6] Callaghan was not alone in his judgement that it was inconceivable that figures such as Corbyn, John McDonnell and Diane Abbott would one day occupy the upper echelons of the party.

The other essential guides to British Trotskyism predating the subjects of this review were the two volumes written by Sam Bornstein and Al Richardson, also from the 1980s. Against the Stream andWar and the International were rigorously detailed accounts of the organisations that operated in this tradition in the periods before, during and just after the Second World War. These volumes remain indispensable for that era, but, similarly to Callaghan’s book, can offer few insights to the reader looking for an understanding of the impact of Trotskyists in the UK in this century.[7]

Splitters

To some non-adherents of the Trotskyist tradition, its history and politics are absurdly reminiscent of the legendary scene in Monty Python’s Life of Brian, in which Reg (played by John Cleese) and his miniscule People’s Front of Judea hurl abuse at the one-man Judean People’s Front sat nearby, denouncing him as a splitter! Meanwhile the Roman army looks on in bored incomprehension as the ridiculous bands of revolutionaries offer more of a threat to each other than to the imperial status quo.[8]

John Kelly identifies 22 organisations in modern Britain that non-Trotskyists might label as the twenty-first-century equivalent of the squabbling sectarians depicted in the film (in addition to six so-called Fourth Internationals!). The author is to be commended not least for disentangling and decoding in a systematic manner this plethora of labels and allegiances, which can be disorientating even for those who have spent decades of activism on the far left. The range of acronyms alone is enough to give even the most dedicated political analyst a headache. It is often impossible not to be reminded of the Python scene when reading about some of the cleavages that have occurred among Trotsky’s followers in the UK – the author recounts, for example, how:

The League for Socialist Action, Marxist Worker Group and the Socialist Labour Group all joined the IMG and successor organisations whilst the Revolutionary Marxist Group joined Big Flame only a few years before the latter’s dissolution. The Marxist Worker Group was a splinter from Workers Power; the LSA split from IMG in 1976; and the SLG broke from the WRP in 1974.[9]

Frequent passages such as this illustrate the exasperation that some who are initially attracted to far-left politics can feel after a period of immersion in its often-Byzantine manoeuvrings. Kelly’s study also provides one or two moments of unintentional humour when exploring how this rivalry between some of these factions takes on laughable proportions. The Alliance for Workers’ Liberty grandly declared in 1983 that it would not be discussing cooperation with the Socialist League because ‘we are not at one with the SL, we are at war with them’. Similarly, when the possibility of working alongside another organisation was broached in the 1990s, the AWL response was: ‘We are gearing up for war with the Socialist Party. The SP have invited us to talks. OK. But we are still out to supplant and replace them.’[10]

It is easy to mock these episodes of delusional recrimination as examples of what the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges might describe as ‘two bald men fighting over a comb’. However, such ideological contestations are not unique to the Trotskyist movement, and in earlier eras of the history of the left Marx and Lenin conducted theoretical battles in an equally ferocious manner, sometimes with world-historical consequences. Many observers of the 1903 London conference of the Russian Social Democrats probably felt that the schism between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks was unnecessary, and yet no-one now would dispute its monumental significance. This does not justify every accusation of ‘splitter’, of course, but it should be a reminder that theoretical and tactical battles are unavoidable among revolutionaries seeking to grapple with the protean nature of the capitalist system. In noticeable contrast, the Labour Party is notorious for downplaying theoretical interchange in the name of an anodyne ‘broad church’ approach to internal differences.

Trotskyism and its Enemies

Kelly’s attempt to explain the supposedly intrinsically fractious nature of the Trotskyist movement, however, is less helpful. He falls back on a hackneyed analogy with religious sects, particularly those within the Christian tradition, which are equally infamous for discovering apparently abstruse reasons for splitting off from one another. Citing the definition of a sect as supplied by US sociologist of religion Bryan Wilson, Kelly posits that the behaviour of the multiple versions of the Trotskyist paradigm can be comprehended as secular versions of groups such as the Moonies and Jehovah’s Witnesses:

most groups regard themselves and their members as the vanguard of the working class, a term as elitist in meaning as the religious notion of the elect. Many operate probationary periods of membership and extensive education programmes; expulsions are not uncommon … and there have been, and still are, many charismatic Trotskyist leaders, past and present, most notably Tariq Ali, Tony Cliff and Gerry Healy.[11]

No one who has spent a significant period in or around Trotskyist groups would deny that these features are frequently evident. However, as an analytical device, the comparison with religious sects is only a marginally more sophisticated one than the Monty Python scene. The fragmented nature of the movement surely has to be placed in the larger context of the hostile forces that sought to throttle it in its infancy. The contested creation of the Fourth International in 1938 took place amid a backdrop of abductions, assassinations and infiltrations by the Stalinist-dominated Comintern. The Trotskyist movement within the USSR itself was annihilated with ruthless ferocity.[12]

Trotsky and his followers were also confronted with the unprecedented theoretical dilemma of a state that was formally committed to the ideals of Marxism and yet appeared to be reproducing all the worst aspects of exploitation and oppression under capitalism. The kudos acquired by both the Communist and Labour parties during and immediately after the Second World War created immense pressure on the left outside those two organisations to conform to the notion of a non-revolutionary road to socialism. In addition to these constraints, Trotskyists have had to deal with not inconsiderable subversion by the secret services of the British state.

In light of these external pressures, the point of interest is surely not so much that British Trotskyists turned on each other at regular intervals, but that they survived in any form at all. Gratuitous and personalised polemics clearly have occurred persistently in the history of the movement, but the milieu of paranoia and suspicion in which Trotskyists have operated is not entirely self-created. Exacerbating these tendencies among those whose commitment to classical Marxism went beyond lip service was clearly in the interests of the ruling classes on either side of the Berlin Wall. A certain amount of messianism and utopianism, it could even be argued, was necessary for Trotsky’s followers to inoculate themselves against the siren songs of Western capitalism and Eastern Stalinism, as the two hegemonic systems appeared to carve-up the globe in the postwar era.

Definitions

Kelly’s exposition commences with a characteristically incisive discussion of the definition of Trotskyism. The casual and unconsidered use of the term by the likes of Tom Watson belies the decades of life-and-death struggle by Trotsky and the first generation of his followers to construct a living and theoretical tradition that would equip them to survive the twin menaces of fascism and Stalinism in the inter-war period. The author condenses the concept into nine constituent elements:

The theory of permanent revolution, the united front tactic, transitional demands, critical analysis of the Soviet state, the necessity for a new fourth international, the necessity to build revolutionary, democratic-centralist vanguard parties, the necessity to build militant organisations to challenge trade union bureaucracy, the insistence on revolution not reform and the characterisation of the imperialist epoch.[13]

Of course, the vituperative activities of certain Trotskyist groups imply that any attempt to summarise the core beliefs of the tradition would trigger an instant rebuke from certain quarters, but most interested observers would probably accept the validity of Kelly’s selection. His expositions of each of these, however, is not always as sure-footed. Trotsky’s application of the united-front tactic is contrasted with ‘Lenin’s dismissive (and ill-informed) claim that parliamentary elections merely allow workers “to decide once every few years which member of the ruling class is to repress and crush the people through parliament”’.[14] This is a crass simplification of Lenin’s attitude to the role of bourgeois elections, which was, in reality, consistently informed by their relative significance in the ebb and flow of class struggle. August Nimitz has collated substantial evidence that Lenin always closely followed the outcomes of elections in capitalist states and would recommend participation in them by revolutionaries when tactically appropriate.[15]

Kelly also re-treads the wearily-familiar notion that the Stalinist distortion of the legacy of 1917 was rooted in ‘the restriction of political pluralism, authoritarianism and coercion, the willingness to use violence against political opponents as practised by Lenin and Trotsky in the early years of the workers’ state’.[16] Kelly thankfully avoids tired Cold War stereotypes most of the time, but he is amiss here by not contextualising such measures in terms of invasions by twenty-nine foreign armies and the atrocities committed by deranged counter-revolutionary generals such as Wrangel and Yudenich.[17]

Aside from these caricatures, perhaps the only significant omission from Kelly’s criteria of Trotskyist politics is the centrality of the self-emancipation of the working class. The inviolability of this principle was apparent in Trotsky’s political practice on numerous occasions: notably his advice to Lenin that the October insurrection should take place in the name of the soviets, and not just the Bolshevik Party; and his refusal to initiate a military coup against Stalin in 1927 when it was apparent the bureaucratic apparatus was steering the state away from proletarian priorities. Some Trotskyist organisations have not necessarily adhered to this principle, but that does not detract from its role as arguably the defining principle of the best attempts to reproduce the strategy of the founder in the modern era.

Strands

Kelly’s coherent exposition of the history of British Trotskyism guides the reader through this often-treacherous labyrinth with alacrity and concision. He identifies three broad strands of the movement that took shape in the aftermath of the Second World War: labelled by him as the Orthodox, Mainstream and Third Camp, respectively.[18]

These three tendencies emerged out of the Revolutionary Communist Party that briefly unified the factions of Trotskyists in the UK in the second half of the 1940s. This fleeting period of unity was terminated, according to Kelly, because the postwar economic and political landscape did not match the expectations of the movement as handed down to them by Trotsky himself in his voluminous commentaries of the 1930s: ‘Stalinism in the USSR had survived and spread into Eastern Europe; social democratic and communist parties were still strong; Trotskyist forces were extremely weak; and the world capitalist economy had not sunk into a new depression but was in the early stages of what would prove to be a prolonged period of growth.’[19]

The sobering realities of the capitalist order that unfolded in the years following 1945 took many within the movement by surprise, largely because Trotsky himself had presumed the conclusion of the second great inter-imperialist conflict of the twentieth century would follow the pattern of the first. In other words, a wave of proletarian revolutions, the crumbling of parties committed to the status quo, and massive economic dislocation. In addition, Trotsky had assumed the USSR, traumatised by the cumulative impact of collectivisation and the Great Purges, would not withstand the burden of waging war against the powerhouse of the Nazi state. Instead, as the postwar global order took shape, the Trotskyists had to make sense (without their figurehead) of Western economies re-invigorated by Keynesian demand-management, the Stalinist state expanding its sphere of influence deep into Eastern Europe, and the expeditious absorption of Communist resistance movements into the tepid reformism of social democracy. The inability of many of Trotsky’s followers, coalesced as the Fourth International, to read the political situation perhaps attained the point of reductio ad absurdum with James Cannon’s declaration in 1946 that, as Stalin remained in power, the Second World War was clearly not over but was simply moving into a new phase![20]

The disorientation experienced by the postwar Trotskyists became the trigger for the fragmentation of the RCP into the three broad lineages identified by Kelly. What the author defines as Orthodoxy was embodied in the faction led by Gerry Healy that evolved into the Workers Revolutionary Party. The premise of this organisation, counter-intuitively for most observers, was that Trotsky’s projections of the postwar landscape had actually not been invalidated by events and would, in fact, be affirmed by a crisis of the system that lay just around the corner. The apocalyptic and hyperbolic rhetoric of Healy’s party would be sustained right up to its implosion in the mid-1980s. Even in 1980, as Thatcher’s neoliberal revolution was eviscerating the left, WRP members were put on standby for insurrection:

The Tories have been preparing, training and equipping the forces of the capitalist state for mass violence and mass repression … the party must actively prepare for semi legality and possible illegality. Semi legality means building a secret apparatus in the party which runs parallel with its public work...[21]

The chiliastic mentality lampooned by Monty Python was most evident in this branch of the British Trotskyist tradition. A more sober response to the reconfiguration of the post-1945 world came from Tony Cliff, the exiled Palestinian Jew whose breakaway from the RCP would emerge as the modern Socialist Workers Party, characterised by Kelly as part of the Third Camp tradition. Cliff and his followers at least pioneered a more creative approach to the intellectual legacy of Trotsky by characterising the USSR as a variant of the trend for state capitalism that had emerged in other economies in the 1930s, and which explained the long boom of Western capitalism as being driven, not only by Keynesianism, but also by turbo-charged military spending to off-set the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.[22]

Kelly argues there was a greater level of theoretical rigour and sophistication apparent in Cliff’s organisation: ‘for the more heterodox SWP, the pull of orthodoxy is always present but less compelling. An additional factor behind the greater degree of internal debate in the IS/SWP derives from group composition because it is clear that Cliff’s group has proved far more successful than any of its rivals in recruiting a substantial number of intellectuals.’[23] The SWP sustained this promotion of theoretical innovation for many decades, but after the death of key figures at the start of this century such as those of Cliff himself, Duncan Hallas and Chris Harman, the party has unsurprisingly struggled to retain its reputation for pioneering applications of the Marxist method, and has more recently been plagued by internal disputations leading to schisms.

A second broad framework of the movement identified by Kelly is identified as Institutional Trotskyism, with the aforementioned Militant Tendency as the best-known exponents in the modern era. The differentia specifica of this brand for many decades was the conviction that the best place for supporters of the Trotskyist tradition is inside the Labour Party. Ted Grant, the most high-profile theoretician associated with Militant, justified this approach – known as entryism – with reference to Trotsky’s guidance in the 1930s to his followers in France to pursue membership of the country’s biggest reformist party. Phil Burton-Cartledge, in his chapter ‘Marching Separately, Seldom Together’, recounts the high tide of British entryism in the 1980s:

The discipline of entry work allowed Militant activists to capture party structures and use them to advantage to open up more of the host to their influence. By adapting itself with some success to the political conditions of postwar working class politics, it built itself up as a distinctive Trotskyist brand that became something of a household name.[24]

It is the folk memory of this period within Tom Watson’s centrist iteration of Labour politics that led him to lash out in 2016 at the prospect of a similar phenomenon taking place during Corbyn’s leadership. The Militant Tendency succeeded in grabbing headlines in the mid-1980s and probably created a larger audience for Trotskyist ideas in Britain than has ever occurred before or since; but their moment in the spotlight was short-lived, as the Labour Leader of the time, Neil Kinnock, mobilised the apparatus of the party and purged the entryists for at least a generation. The meteoric rise and fall of Grant’s entryism led most members of Militant to abandon the ‘Institutional’ road in 1991 as a proven failure, and form what today is known as the Socialist Party.

Kelly briefly outlines other, more isolated strains of British Trotskyism such as the so-called Radical and Workerist traditions that can be included among the ‘seven families’ of the movement, but his systematic and helpful delineation of the three main versions above lies front and centre of his study. The author is to be applauded for not only creating a coherent and systematic mental map of the Trotskyist tradition but also for keeping up with its ongoing fissiparous tendencies; noting, for example, that the SWP has recently experienced an inauspicious four splits in just five years.[25]

Fault Lines

The fault lines that have ruptured the British Trotskyist movement over several generations have consistently run along a number of crucial strategic questions. Tom Watson’s outburst in 2016 highlighted how its relationship with the Labour Party is one of these issues that has bedevilled the movement. The controversy has its roots in Trotsky’s advice to his French followers in the 1930s to insert themselves into the dominant French reformist party of the era, the SFIO. This was partly informed by his painful awareness that lack of unity between the forces of the left in Germany had permitted Hitler to rise to power; and a more optimistic feeling that the radicalisation coalescing around the figure of Leon Blum in France had created a new audience for the far left in that country. At the same time, Trotsky had advised his British followers to conjoin themselves to the equivalent of the SFIO, initially the Independent Labour Party and subsequently the Labour Party’s youth wing. Trotsky illuminated the thinking behind the French turn with a typically brilliant metaphor:

In the revolutionary struggles that are beginning, our frail cruiser will throw itself into battle – but in the wake of large political formations, which are starting to put their ranks in battle order through the united front. The manoeuvre itself absorbs the entire attention of the crew, whose ideas are fixed anxiously on the horizon, and the tougher the struggle becomes the more the respective general staffs will be able to isolate our frail ship, even to sink it.[26]

Entryism was also posited on the analogy of using a reformist organisation as a protective womb in which to safeguard the fragile gestation of a genuine, revolutionary movement. The questions inevitably arose, however, of the duration of the gestation and in what conditions birth should actually take place. For Trotsky himself, the essential basis of entryism was that it should involve no compromising of the explicitly revolutionary principles of the embryo and that it should be a short-term manoeuvre. As Burton-Cartledge recounts in his chapter contrasting the practices of Militant and the SWP on entryism, the founder of the former, Ted Grant, deployed Trotsky’s words to justify more lasting immersion into the Labour Party, beginning in the 1950s. Grant told his supporters at the beginning of the 1950s: ‘when the masses first begin to move, they always turn to the traditional mass organisations. They will turn to the Labour Party time and time again because there is no alternative – no mass revolutionary party.’[27]

Contrary to Trotsky’s guidance, Grant’s supporters regarded the manoeuvre as a long-term operation and it was almost three decades later that the denouement took place with Kinnock’s theatrical attack on Militant at the Labour Party conference in 1985. As Burton-Cartledge rightly observes, Militant had created unprecedented wider awareness of the Trotskyist agenda. However, their rapid capitulation to the Kinnockite offensive indicated that Trotsky was right to warn of the corrosive effects of long-term entryism. Two Militant MPs were expelled from the Labour Party as mainstream media ‘Trot’-hunting intensified, and then Grant’s organisation itself fractured in 1991 over the issue of whether to pursue or abandon the entryist tactic. The lesson from this episode would appear to be that attempts to change the Labour Party from within will only have the incremental effect of changing the entryists themselves from revolutionaries into reformists. Kelly also reflects on the problems this type of experience creates for contemporary Trotskyists:

Factional work inside radical left parties, or external support for leftist parties such as Corbyn’s labour party, also raises a far more profound question, first aired in the early 1950s debates about deep entryism. If some Trotskyist policies and demands can be successfully promoted through the medium of a radical left party, then what is the point in building independent revolutionary parties?[28]

Entryism in the Age of Corbyn

The relationship contemporary Trotskyists in the UK seek to establish with Corbyn’s Labour must surely be the defining question for them in this period. The current Labour Leader has succeeded spectacularly in popularising socialist ideals for a mass audience and has reproduced the enthusiasm for the left that has been apparent elsewhere with Greece’s SYRIZA, Spain’s Podemos, and La France Insoumise. Even the heart of the capitalist beast, the US itself, has witnessed Bernie Sanders’ remarkable 2016 bid for the Democratic nomination on an explicit platform of socialist commitments. There is clearly a current of left radicalisation underway in this austerity-ridden era that parallels the one Trotsky detected in the 1930s.

The astonishing swelling of Labour membership under Corbyn (approaching 600,000 members) is no doubt partly made up of formerly disillusioned middle-aged revolutionaries who had despaired of ever seeing a mass mobilisation of the left in Britain.[29] The liberalisation of the party’s membership rules in the 2016 leadership campaign must have been especially tempting for radical leftists to re-enact a version of the entryist tactic. Workers Power, one of the smallest fragments of contemporary Trotskyism, opted for this route: ‘200,000 people decide that they want to be in the Labour Party, they’re going to want some action and they want to see some results, they obviously want to discuss where to go and what to do … this is the place to be.’[30]

Aside from the history of Militant, however, there are significant indicators that the project of incubating revolutionary socialism in the Labour Party remains a forlorn one. For all his undoubted personal and political qualities, Corbyn is outgunned in his own parliamentary party by the entrenched power of the keepers of the Blairite flame. The battles inside the party today over Brexit, Trident renewal, the role of Momentum and antisemitism are all skirmishes in a conflict between left and right that has been fought many times before and always with the latter prevailing. Even if Corbyn and the Labour left were to achieve dominance in the party itself, there would be, of course, the even greater structural obstacles to the reformist project erected by the British state: the FPTP electoral system, the hostility of the mainstream media, the unelected and unaccountable bastions of bourgeois power in the police, civil service and army. Trotsky’s warning to socialists in the 1930s about the nature of Labour remains impressively prescient today: ‘the extreme rights continue to control the party. This can be explained by the fact that a party cannot confine itself to isolated left campaigns. The lefts have no such system, nor by their very essence can they … with them [i.e. the right] stands bourgeois society, as a whole, which slips them ready-made solutions.’[31]

Permanent Revolution Then

The outbreak of a revolutionary wave in the Arab world in 2010–11 highlighted another issue that has frequently proven contentious in the ranks of Trotsky’s British followers: attitudes to revolutions in states outside the Western capitalist heartlands of the global economy. The concept of permanent revolution is integral to the theoretical legacy of the founder, and for many commentators is the defining feature of the entire Trotskyist corpus of thought. The idea, in its original formulation by Trotsky, was posited on the basis of the peculiar relationship between revolutions in the developing world and the established capitalist powers such as Britain, France and the US. Nascent proletariats were emerging in the former category that were politically capable of linking up with their equivalents in the core to construct a unified challenge to the entire system.

In Kelly’s articulation, a revolution outside the West ‘would not stop at the stage of democratic reforms because the power and demands of the working class would push it in the direction of a socialist revolution: one revolution would thus flow inexorably and uninterruptedly into the other in a process of permanent revolution.’[32] Furthermore, the October Revolution had appeared to be the triumphant vindication of this grand strategy as the toppling of the tsarist autocracy had triggered a wave of insurgencies and revolts across the entire globe, particularly in Central Europe. The internationalism implicit in this outlook became another defining characteristic of the Trotskyist tradition that set it apart from the Stalinist mutation that came to dominate the established Communist parties with their ‘national roads to socialism’.[33]

The post-World War II global system, however, created a problem for the theory of permanent revolution that was to prove as troublesome for Trotskyism as the rebooting of the world economy and the consequent durability of social democracy. The second inter-imperialist war had triggered a seismic wave of upheavals across what used to be called the Third World that lasted deep into the 1960s. Often blurring into national-liberation struggles, these revolutions inaugurated regimes in locations such as China, Cuba and Vietnam that were explicitly committed to versions of ‘Marxism’. The quandary confronting Trotskyists in Britain was whether to display allegiance to such states in the name of permanent revolution or to reject them as distortions of the template. The case that would lead the SWP to adopt the latter position was that the urban working class was not central to any of these upheavals and that other social forces, such as rural guerrillas or middle-class intellectuals, appeared to be at the helm.[34]

Other factions of the movement eagerly embraced ‘Third Worldism’ as an alternative to the apparently-quiescent working class of the West and the monstrous tyrannies of the East. Sometimes this commitment took some remarkably direct forms. One unexpected revelation in Ian Birchall’s illuminating contribution, ‘Vicarious Pleasure: The British Far Left and the Third World’, concerns the activity of Labour MP John Baird in the 1960s. Birchall states that the MP for Nottingham was ‘probably a clandestine member of the Fourth International’ whose support for the nationalist regime in Algeria included overt activity such as lobbying in Parliament and covert activity such as currency smuggling. Birchall also cites a Militant member from the UK who, in the same cause, used his expertise as an electrical engineer to disable electric fences in the North African desert.[35]

Predictably, this era also witnessed further examples of the contradictions and tensions within the British Trotskyist movement. As a notable case of the movement’s ability to periodically pool its resources and collectively apply pressure at one point, most of the factions converged to support the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign in the late 1960s. The iconic demonstration outside the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square attracted 100,000 people and was, according to Birchall, primarily the consequence of preparatory work by the International Socialists, the predecessors of the SWP. One year later, however, Birchall recounts how Chris Harman, one of the most prominent members of this group, was vociferously heckled by other sections of the far left at a meeting to mark the death of Vietnamese premier Ho Chi Minh.

Harman was one of the key organisers of the Grosvenor Square event, but also insisted that support for Ho’s struggle against US imperialism should not preclude discussion of his role in purging Vietnamese Trotskyists just after World War II.[36] Birchall concludes his insightful chapter by soberly noting how the regimes that once inspired passionate support from sections of the Trotskyist movement are now clearly embarked on policies of re-integrating themselves into the global capitalist system, and no longer attract the aspirations of revolutionaries in the West:

Today of the erstwhile array of so-called workers’ states and regimes supposedly moving beyond capitalism, only Cuba retains any significant body of supporters. If China is praised nowadays, it is not for egalitarianism and spreading world revolution, but for its proactive and interventionist role in international financial affairs.[37]

Permanent Revolution Now

The debate about the nature of revolutions in the developing world has resurfaced in the Trotskyist movement in the wake of the Arab Spring that exploded across the Middle East at the start of the second decade of this century. On the one hand, these events would appear to vindicate key elements of Trotsky’s theory, as uprisings in countries such as Egypt and Tunisia have decapitated comprador ruling elites due to large-scale urban mobilisations, often organised by trade unions and socialists. However, the scarcity of embedded revolutionaries in any of these locations ensured that the notion of a transition to socialism in the style of 1917 remained a forlorn hope. The revolution in Syria, in particular, has proved to be a cause of divisive and protracted dispute among British Trotskyists.[38] That country’s descent into a centrifugal labyrinth of horror and sectarianism has re-ignited arguments from the 1960s about the attitudes of revolutionaries in the West toward those battling for change in the peripheral and semi-peripheral sectors of the global system. Kelly cites one modern Trotskyist group, Socialist Fight, which even expressed support for ISIS and its operations in Syria and Iraq.[39] Most supporters of the far left would struggle to understand how any socialist could defend an organisation that terrorises urban populations and feeds off sectarian hatred. The problem the Syrian imbroglio has highlighted, however, is not dissimilar to the dilemma confronted by the followers of Trotsky in previous generations and discussed by Birchall.

Struggles in the developing world will often challenge the local and global elites, but in the absence of Bolshevik-type organisations with a critical mass, such struggles are likely to be spearheaded by other social forces. In the case of Syria in 2011, an authentic challenge to a neoliberal regime by a mass movement with significant input from leftist elements has metastasised into a militarised cul-de-sac with an appalling cost in human lives.[40] The intervention in the conflict by regional and global powers has further complicated the question of how far the theory of permanent revolution can be regarded as a viable perspective in the age of Trump and Putin.

Neil Davidson, a former member of the SWP, constructed a formidable critique in his study, How Revolutionary were the Bourgeois Revolutions?, coincidentally published shortly after the Arab Spring erupted. Davidson’s argument, in essence, is that the classical phase of bourgeois revolutions – encompassing the revolutionary ruptures that facilitated the rise of capitalism in England, the US and France – was actually atypical and that the later ‘revolutions from above’ in states such as Germany, Japan and Italy, with reduced proletarian input, have proved to be the more familiar route for subsequent transitions occurring in pre-industrial societies. Consequently, according to Davidson, the scenario of a bourgeois challenge to the feudal order being co-opted by an insurgent working class –pace 1917 – is simply a non-starter in the twenty-first century.[41]

The tumultuous events in the Middle East since 2010 clearly do not fit neatly within the template established by the events of 1640, 1776 or 1789. However, Tony Cliff’s innovative refinement of Trotsky’s paradigm in the form of the theory of deflected permanent revolution perhaps provides the best tool for assessing the current situation in the region. Significant subaltern mobilisations in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria and elsewhere have failed to convert mass activity into explicitly socialist bids for power. Although courageous revolutionaries guided by a broadly Marxist perspective have been present in these locations, the resources available to them have been dwarfed by those afforded to reformist or Islamist elements. Applying Cliff here, it might be said that the Sisi regime in Egypt and the meteoric rise and fall of ISIS in Syria represent deflections – albeit of dissimilar natures – of permanent revolution by non-proletarian forces.[42]

A defence of the overall Trotskyist approach to revolution outside the West could certainly take encouragement from the scale of urban insurrection in the Arab Spring. The inability of leftist groups to flourish in its wake is perhaps less a consequence of deficiencies in the theory of permanent revolution and more a reflection of decades of political contortions by the region’s Stalinised Communist parties.

Balance Sheet

Kelly’s concluding balance sheet of the achievements and weaknesses of Trotskyism in the UK alludes to some flaws and failings that any attempt to maintain the tradition must take seriously. The author recounts how many of the key leaders associated with Trotskyist parties have been middle-aged, white males who have displayed characteristics that might be described as charismatic by supporters, or as tyrannical by sceptics. According to Kelly, a ‘dysfunctional consequence of the pattern of leadership in Trotskyist organisations is aggressive behaviour by leaders towards those beneath them in the hierarchy, particularly where the leader in question has an abrasive and authoritarian personality’.[43]

Furthermore, this egregious tendency, he argues, has sometimes manifested itself in episodes of misogyny and sexual assault that have blighted the reputation of the brand. The most infamous of these was the damning exposure in 1985 of Gerry Healy’s reign of terror within the WRP; but even as recently as 2013, the SWP was ruptured by allegations of a rape cover-up within the senior echelons of the party.[44] Sue Bruley in ‘Socialist Women and Women’s Liberation’ claims this strain of sexism also featured in that party’s earlier history. Describing her experience in the 1980s, she observes: ‘IS/SWP in particular was so keen to recruit male industrial militants that it was prepared to overlook the reproduction of traditional gender roles within the organisation and in members’ private lives, thus perpetuating patriarchal ideology and women’s oppression.’[45]

Kelly links this problem to what he claims is the ongoing issue of the ‘tensions and problems at the interface between identity politics and Trotskyist politics’.[46] As the former have emerged as perhaps the dominant paradigm of oppositional ideology in the neoliberal era, the author contends adherents of the latter have struggled to reconcile themselves to the new and diverse strands of struggle: ‘Whereas the exploitation of labour by capital is self-evidently a product of the capitalist mode of production, the oppression of women and gays has existed for millennia, sanctified by the patriarchal and misogynistic values of Christianity and Islam, and its relationship to capitalist exploitation is therefore problematic and contentious.’[47]

Kelly’s negative assessment of the ability of Trotskyist theoreticians to accommodate identity politics might appear to some to have been vindicated by the controversy that erupted within the movement in autumn 2017 over the status of the struggle for transgender rights.[48] However, defenders of the tradition would point out that the subsequent debate has generated a number of sophisticated re-formulations of a Marxist approach to sexuality by female activists who occupy leading roles in one contemporary Trotskyist organisation.[49] Such interventions serve the dual purpose of obviating Kelly’s contentions that contemporary far-left groups are paralysed by ‘a persistent inability to engage in critical self-reflection’[50] and that they are still male-dominated. High-profile female activists from a Trotskyist background have featured prominently in major mobilisations in the UK in the twenty-first century, and hopefully this would suggest that any residual misogyny on the far left will not survive the rise of the #MeToo generation.[51]

Stubborn Facts

Adherents of Trotskyism today need to assimilate Kelly’s most fundamental criticism that there is an inverse relation between the scale of the goals of the tradition and its performance over four decades: ‘Neither in Britain nor in any other country have Trotskyists been able to move beyond small groups of militants and build a stable, mass party wielding substantial political influence. Allied to this failing is the fact that almost 80 years after the foundation of the Fourth International no Trotskyist group has ever led a revolutionary struggle for power in any country in the world.’[52]

Phil Burton-Cartledge makes an equally sobering observation on the prospects of organisations in the UK that seek to sustain the praxis of the revolutionary left: ‘The political space for party-centred Leninist-Trotskyist politics has contracted and the continued commitment by the present government to even greater flexibility in the labour market will work against developing the constituency the far left needs’.[53]

These are stubborn facts that cannot be casually wished-away by upholders of the tradition. Kelly’s valuable dissection of the movement, however, is primarily aimed at an academic audience and does not attempt to offer a practical alternative to the laborious task of constructing the formations that Trotskyists have embarked upon with a resilience the author himself acknowledges. Leftist alternatives to the party-building paradigm have emerged in this decade, but all have failed to offer a sustained challenge to the system.

Likewise, Smith and Worley’s collection of essays contains a plethora of insightful analyses of the numerous alternatives to Trotskyism that have featured on the British far left, such as anarchism, Maoism and Eurocommunism, but falls short of outlining a new trajectory that might succeed where these have largely failed.

Autonomist thinking flourished in the wake of the Occupy movement, but then withered under the onslaught of militarised police forces. SYRIZA appeared to rally the Greek anti-capitalist movement until the EU rammed a heavy dose of austerity down its throat. Bernie Sanders’ valiant endeavour to radicalise the US Democrats culminated in the debacle of Trump’s election win. Corbynism has galvanised the British left but its figurehead is looking increasingly isolated as his enemies from within and without the Labour Party look to terminate his leadership. However, the remarkable rise of Corbyn in 2015 (and his re-election to the party leadership the following year) actually illustrates, in part, the irreplaceable role of Trotskyism in the contemporary British left.

A crucial part of his initial appeal to disillusioned Labour supporters was his consistent support over decades for causes such as the anti-apartheid struggle, Palestinian rights and rejection of Britain’s craven support for US military adventures in the Middle East. Many of these movements have not only featured Trotskyist activists in central roles but also would probably not have survived without the exceptional commitment of such individuals. Corbyn’s stunning capture of the leadership of the Labour Party (and its subsequent transformation into Europe’s biggest political party) should be seen partly as a reflection of a molecular shift to the left in British social and political attitudes. Political support for policies such as nationalisation of public utilities, progressive taxation and independence from the US in foreign policy have been matched in the social sphere by increasing tolerance of gay rights, mixed marriages and religious diversity.[54] Trotskyists over multiple generations who have campaigned for these values, alongside inevitably greater numbers of non-Trotskyists, deserve a greater level of recognition than Kelly awards them.

Few would have predicted a generation ago that a visiting US President in 2018 would not be able to set foot in the capital city of his closest ally because of the fear of public opposition on a grand scale.[55] This is the outcome of countless activists over many decades deploying Trotsky’s strategy of the united front – consciously or otherwise – to confront racism, sexism, militarism and all the other social pathogens embodied by Trump. Valid questions remain over the most appropriate organisational form for revolutionary socialists in the UK. It would be inconceivable, however, that whatever vehicle might emerge in the future would not include substantial input from the more-perspicacious followers of the Prophet who have absorbed the spirit, if not always the letter, of his message. In this sense, it might be said Trotskyism has become the untranscendable horizon of the modern British left.

References

Agerholm, Harriet 2017, ‘Jeremy Corbyn Increased Labour’s Vote Share More than any of the Party’s Leaders since 1945’, The Independent, 9 June, available at: <https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/jeremy-corbyn-election-result-vote-share-increased-1945-clement-attlee-a7781706.html>.

Aitkenhead, Decca, Heather Stewart and Jessica Elgot 2016, ‘Labour: Corbyn Camp Hits Back at Tom Watson “Trotsky Entryists” Comments’, The Guardian, 9 August, available at: <https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/aug/09/trotskyists-young-labour-members-jeremy-corbyn-tom-watson>.

Alexander, Robert 1991, International Trotskyism, 1929–85: A Documented Analysis of the Movement, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Bambery, Chris 1987, ‘The Politics of James P. Cannon’, available at: <https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/bambery/1987/xx/jpcannon.html>.

BBC News 2017, ‘British Attitudes Survey: More Britons “Back Higher Taxes”’, 28 June, available at: <https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-40408576>.

Birchall, Ian 1974, Workers Against the Monolith: The Communist Parties Since 1943, London: Pluto Press.

Bornstein, Sam and Al Richardson 1986a, Against the Stream: History of the Trotskyist Movement in Britain, 1924–38, London: Socialist Platform.

Bornstein, Sam and Al Richardson 1986b, War and the International: History of the Trotskyist Movement in Britain, 1937–49, London: Socialist Platform.

Callaghan, John 1984, British Trotskyism: Theory and Practice, Oxford: Blackwell.

Cliff, Tony 1990, Deflected Permanent Revolution, London: Bookmarks.

Connelly, Katherine, Elaine Graham-Leigh, Feyzi Ismail and Lindsey German 2016, Marxism and Women’s Liberation, London: Counterfire.

Davidson, Neil 2012, How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions?, Chicago: Haymarket Books.

German, Lindsey and Andrew Murray 2005, Stop the War: The Story ofBritain’s Biggest Mass Movement, London: Bookmarks.

House of Commons Library Research Briefings 2019, ‘Membership of UK Political Parties’, 9 August, available at: <https://researchbriefings.parliament.uk/ResearchBriefing/Summary/SN05125>.

Kelly, John 2018, Contemporary Trotskyism: Parties, Sects and Social Movements in Britain, Abingdon: Routledge.

Kidron, Michael 1970, Western Capitalism Since the War, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Le Blanc, Paul 2015, Leon Trotsky, Chicago: Haymarket Books.

McKenna, Tony 2018, ‘Revolution and Counterrevolution in Syria’, International Socialist Review, 108, available at: <https://isreview.org/issue/108/revolution-and-counterrevolution-syria>.

Molyneux, John 2003, What Is the Real Marxist Tradition?, Chicago: Haymarket Books.

Nimtz, August H. 2014, Lenin’s Electoral Strategy from Marx and Engels through the Revolution of 1905: The Ballot, the Streets – or Both, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Platt, Edward 2014, ‘Comrades at War: The Decline and Fall of the Socialist Workers Party’, New Statesman, 20 May, available at: <https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2014/05/comrades-war-decline-and-fall-socialist-workers-party>.

Rees, John 1997, In Defence of October: A Debate on the Russian Revolution, London: Bookmarks.

Renton, David 2019, The New Authoritarians: Convergence on the Right, London: Pluto Press.

Smith, Evan and Matthew Worley (eds.) 2014, Against the Grain: The British Far Left from 1956, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Trotsky, Leon 1926, ‘Problems of the British Labour Movement’, available at: <https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/britain/probs/ch01.htm>.

Tunks, Kiri 2013, ‘Sex Matters’, Morning Star, 8 August, available at: <https://morningstaronline.co.uk/a-c509-sex-matters-1>.

Walker, Peter 2018, ‘Donald Trump to Almost Entirely Avoid London during UK Visit’, The Guardian, 6 July, available at: <https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jul/06/donald-trump-to-avoid-london-during-uk-visit>.

Yassin-Kassab, Robin and Leila Al-Shami 2016, Burning Country: Syrians inRevolution and War, London: Pluto Press.

[1] Aitkenhead, Stewart and Elgot 2016.

[2]Kelly 2018, p. 59.

[3]Agerholm 2017.

[4]Kelly 2018, p. 232.

[5] Renton 2019.

[6] Callaghan 1984, p. 205.

[7] Bornstein and Richardson 1986a and 1986b.

[8] <http://montypython.50webs.com/scripts/Life_of_Brian/8.htm>.

[9] Kelly 2018, p. 58.

[10] Quoted in Kelly 2018, p. 90.

[11] Kelly 2018, p. 12.

[12] Le Blanc 2015.

[13] Kelly 2018, p. 35.

[14] Kelly 2018, p. 21.

[15] Nimtz 2014.

[16] Kelly 2018, p. 31.

[17] Rees 1997.

[18] Kelly 2018, p. 72.

[19] Kelly 2018, p. 42.

[20] Bambery 1987.

[21] Quoted in Kelly 2018, p. 48.

[22] Kidron 1970.

[23] Kelly 2018, p. 88.

[24] Smith and Worley (eds.) 2014, p. 83.

[25] Kelly 2018, p. 67.

[26] Quoted in Alexander 1991, p. 349.

[27] Quoted in Smith and Worley (eds.) 2014, p. 82.

[28] Kelly 2018, p. 238.

[29]House of Commons Library Research Briefings 2019.

[30] Quoted in Kelly 2018, p. 70.

[31] Trotsky 1926.

[32] Kelly 2018, p. 19.

[33] Birchall 1974.

[34] Molyneux 2003.

[35] Smith and Worley (eds.) 2014, p. 195.

[36] Smith and Worley (eds.) 2014, p. 199.

[37] Smith and Worley (eds.) 2014, p. 204.

[38] McKenna 2018.

[39] Kelly 2018, p. 83.

[40] Yassin-Kassab and Al Shami 2016.

[41] Davidson 2012.

[42] Cliff 1990.

[43] Kelly 2018, p. 100.

[44] Platt 2014.

[45] Smith and Worley (eds.) 2014, p. 169.

[46] Kelly 2018, p. 210.

[47] Kelly 2018, p. 209.

[48] Tunks 2013.

[49] Connelly, Graham-Leigh, Ismail and German 2016.

[50] Kelly 2018, p. 239.

[51] German and Murray 2005.

[52] Kelly 2018, p. 236.

[53] Smith and Worley (eds.) 2014, p. 98.

[54]BBC News 2017.

[55] Walker 2018.

A Democracy of Forms: Levine, Latour and the New Formalism

A Review of Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network by Caroline Levine

Carolyn Lesjak

Department of English, Simon Fraser University, British Columbia

clesjak@sfu.ca

Abstract

Caroline Levine’s Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network proposes a new model of formalist criticism able to attend to the range of forms organising not only literary texts but also the larger social world. Against current modes of reading – influenced by Foucauldian notions of power as monolithic – Levine’s vision of formalism imagines forms as multitudinous, overlapping and unpredictable in their ‘encounters’. In her claim to ‘suspend causality’ in order to allow us to see these encounters in new ways, Levine’s formalism – and new formalisms more broadly – shares affinities with the work of Bruno Latour. As with Latour, the larger structures and logics within which Levine’s forms meet disappear, thereby proffering an illusory freedom from determination, or a democracy of forms, which mitigates Levine’s ability to speak to the twin crises of our time, namely global capitalism and climate change, and typifies non-causal, Latourian-based theories of literary texts and the social today.

Keywords

literary theory – formalism – critique – Bruno Latour – causality – slow violence

Caroline Levine, (2015) Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

There is a sense of relief in the response to Caroline Levine’s Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network that bespeaks a real fatigue with older protocols of reading and current practices of literary criticism.[1] Highly celebrated by the likes of traditional Victorian scholars, a range of critics working under the umbrella of ‘new formalism’, and many interested in new ways of thinking about political criticism (Bruce Robbins enthusiastically blurbs the book as a ‘trumpet blast of a manifesto’), Levine’s call for a new formalist criticism – referred to as ‘strategic formalism’ in its initial articulation[2] – turns our critical attention away from what have been increasingly felt as the tired, routinised variants of Foucauldian accounts of literary works in which power is seen as monolithic, and any given text’s response reduced to either reproducing or resisting that power. Significantly, for Levine, these models envision a unidirectional flow from the social to the text, in which social forms determine textual forms. They also come replete with assumptions about the function of different forms, taking for granted, for example, that bounded wholes are always repressive and in need of disruption, a critical practice central to deconstruction, but, as Levine shows, still very much in use in a range of contemporary criticism, from New Historicism to Gender and Queer Studies. Against this critical orthodoxy, Levine aims to offer a more open-ended, ecumenical approach to form, able to treat social and aesthetic forms as separate and multitudinous, and to understand power in more nuanced and multi-faceted ways. Intending, in part, to turn literary criticism ‘upside-down’ (p. 122), Levine proposes a ‘new formalist method’ (p. 3) that neither assumes ‘that social forms are the ground or causes of literary forms’ nor ‘[imagines] that a literary text has a form’ but instead asks the following ‘two unfamiliar questions: what does each form afford, and what happens when forms meet?’ (p. 16).

            As Levine’s subtitle announces, she is concerned with four key forms: wholes, rhythms, hierarchies, and networks. She employs, as she herself acknowledges, a very broad definition of form as ‘all shapes and configurations, all ordering principles, all patterns of repetition and difference’ (p. 3). Of central importance is the work of forms, which ‘[make] order’ and hence ‘are the stuff of politics’ (p. 3). Forms for Levine are highly mobile in a way that genres, for instance, are not: they are portable, moving across contexts and time periods, and they are unpredictable, insofar as the interactions among forms have no predetermined outcomes, but instead are aleatory and often lead to surprising results. In thinking about forms in this way, Levine draws heavily on design theory, and the language, specifically, of ‘affordances’. Rather than seeing forms in any kind of singular fashion, forms have ‘potential uses or actions latent’ (p. 6) in them, as do the materials – glass, cotton, a fork, etc. – of designed things: glass, for example, ‘affords transparency and brittleness’; likewise, forms such as enclosures ‘afford containment and security, inclusion as well as exclusion’, while networks ‘afford connection and circulation’ (p. 6). Neither singular nor infinite, affordances ‘[allow] us to grasp both the specificity and the generality of forms – both the particular constraints and possibilities that different forms afford, and the fact that those patterns and arrangements carry their affordances with them as they move across time and space’ (p. 6). Because forms have particular constraints and possibilities, and can travel, and are, as Levine asserts, the ‘stuff of politics, then attending to the affordances of form opens up a generalizable understanding of political power’ (p. 7). In its broadest claims, then, Forms hopes to show how formalism is in fact indispensable to politics; a better formalist method, attentive to the affordances of form, will not only provide better accounts of how power works but also reveal ‘elements or fragments of more or less developed systems of alternatives’ (p. 12) within current systems of power.

            With these general principles about form and its affordances in hand, Levine devotes a chapter to each of her forms. While the first two chapters, on wholes and rhythms, look at how like forms meet, the later chapters on hierarchies and networks consider how ‘unlike forms encounter one another’ (p. 93) – the latter being the much more common state of affairs, whether in the social world or within literary texts. Levine’s final chapter then turns to The Wire, the proof of the pudding, as it were, since, as she frames this reading in her Introduction, the series brings the four major forms she analyses together; as a result, it ‘could provide a new model of literary and cultural studies scholarship’ (p. 23). Throughout these chapters, Levine ranges widely over varied terrain, from a discussion of the nuns of Weinhausen and the affordances of the cloister as a bounded whole at once imprisoning and empowering, to the mélange of temporal rhythms within educational institutions and the structuring of summer vacations, to the court case that ensued over whether a sculpture of Brancusi’s was art or not, to a reading of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem ‘The Young Queen’, and on to an account of the contending hierarchies within Sophocles’sAntigone and modern bureaucracies. The range and number of examples necessarily leave any individual discussion at a fairly general level; they lead, as well, to what can at times seem like quite naive and/or self-evident readings of certain social and political situations, in which Levine’s attention to the local formal nuances of power relations seems not so different from the kinds of strategising we all engage in as we navigate personal, familial, institutional, national, global, racial, sexual, etc. relations and the overlapping power dynamics that inevitably come into play. In her reading, for example, of an encounter between two hierarchical forms, gender and bureaucracy, described in Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s feminist study of American women sales-workers and managers in a 1970s corporation, she first notes, following Kanter, that the rarity of women in the corporation led to a paradox: despite being marked as private by virtue of the gender binary, that self-same binary was reversed as the individual women essentially became ‘public characters’ as a result of their small numbers. Significantly, they also upheld the division between public and private spheres by occupying the traditional role of the public male persona in the office, keeping their feelings to themselves ‘to become insiders in the public world outside the home, while masculine insiders, traditionally bearers of the external (reason, the workplace, the public), could afford to express their inner feelings because they were so firmly on the inside of the outside’ (p. 105). Kanter’s study then looks at a different scenario in which two women are hired by a corporation and describes the different outcomes in work and gender relations depending on whether the women are successfully played off against one another by their male co-workers or become allies (in a ‘strategic deployment of the allied pair’, in Levine’s language) to counter their tokenism and ‘create and sustain their own antihierarchical form: an alliance of equals’ (p. 106). About this study, Levine concludes: Kanter’s study ‘shows that when hierarchies collide, they reroute and deform as much as they organise, unsettling divisions between public and private and masculine and feminine. Her study also makes clear that the structure of the pair, when it interacts with the other hierarchies in play – the career ladder, the gender binary – carries unpredictable effects with the potential to produce new hierarchies, competitions, or alliances’ (p. 106). It is hard, however, to see these effects as particularly ‘unpredictable’; nor does formalism per se seem necessary to yield such an account. And this ‘alliance’, while certainly important and notable, is only antihierarchical up to a point, as current workplace politics attest. In short, such ‘reroutings’ have appreciable limits.

            Other readings offer similarly heartening yet limited openings. Framed by the claim that bounded wholes and networks can work in concert with one another, Levine rewrites Diana Fuss’s analysis of Emily Dickinson’s famous seclusion in her father’s house in formalist terms, arguing that a ‘containing space’ or physical enclosure (her bedroom) is shown to be ultimately enabling, since it allowed Dickinson freedom from domestic duties and access to a ‘public world of letters’ (Fuss’s term). Dickinson’s ‘strategic embrace of a bounded enclosure’ thus permitted her to ‘take part in a larger, more sprawling and energizing network: a transnational literary community’ (p. 119). For Levine, the significance of Dickinson’s example is twofold: to show that ‘neither form has the final organizing word – neither always regulates the other’ (p. 119) and to argue that this need not mean we give up but rather commit to understanding more fully the ‘specificity of each form – what kind of network is it? what rules govern it? – ... and what the affordances of each network can entail for other forms’ (p. 119). Again addressing the network, this time in a reading of Dickens’s multiplot novel, Bleak House, Levine highlights the ‘enormous variety of connectors that link people’ and that extend beyond Dickens’s own nationalism to the far corners of the globe. She compellingly notes that the narrative’s extensive ‘web of connections’ and its ‘complex model of distributed networks’ force a rethinking of novelistic character, in which characters like the itinerant sweeping boy, Jo (constantly being told to ‘move on’), are at once caught in and completely neglected by this web. But what we then learn about the ‘unlikely ties’ among Dickens’s characters beyond these descriptions of them is less clear, especially in terms of the more distant ties that structure Jo’s existence even as he is unaware of them.

A version of ‘close but not deep’ reading, these accounts are not so much wrong – indeed, they offer many insights, especially about the neglected middle ranges of reading between standard models of close reading and the kind of distant reading Moretti has advocated – as incomplete.[3] Essentially reformist in nature, they stop short of any kind of economic analysis; formal structures are invariably about power relations rather than economic exploitation, and thereby open to strategic remedy, as in Dickinson’s case, or so varied and multiple, as in Dickens’s novel, as to defy any apprehension of an organising totality. Formalism of the sort Levine proposes ‘reveals many opportunities, large and small, to hamper networks and their coordinating power’ (p. 131), as well as those of wholes, rhythms, and hierarchies, within the logics at hand; it has less to say about a politics addressing the logic of capital itself. Often, too, the value of Levine’s formalist language is less revelatory than Levine imagines it to be. Why exactly do we need the language of nodes and networks rather than systems, structures and processes to understand the myriad connections in Bleak House, for example? It bears repeating that within Marxist thought there are plenty of examples of structural analyses that in no way assume some kind of obvious, unmediated or ‘closed’ relation between economic and social or political formations; in fact, it is precisely the complex mediations between micro- and macro-levels that constitute the object of Marxist theory.[4] But without an attentiveness to rather than a jettisoning of the logic of capital and its totalising operations we will only be left able to ‘hamper’ networks and power, to use Levine’s language, rather than grasp and overturn them; despite her stated aim of opening up political possibilities, then, the space for these possibilities is far less ‘alternative’ than promised.[5]

            Lest these reservations seem churlish given Levine’s ambitious and worthy aims, I want to underscore that they speak to a larger, crucial aspect of Levine’s overall approach that is echoed in a range of recent calls for new methods of reading and analysis and therefore is important, I think, to identify and open up to spirited critique – namely, her emphasis on forms as encounters that collide and elude any kind of causality. As Levine characterises her approach, it relies ‘on a kind of event I call the “collision” – the strange encounter between two or more forms that sometimes reroutes intention and ideology’. Specifically, Levine avers that thinking about ‘the movement and assembly of forms’ in terms of collisions ‘[unsettles] the power of another explanatory form in literary and cultural studies: the dialectic’ (p. 18). Equating the dialectic with binary oppositions, Levine proposes that:

binary opposition is just one of a number of powerfully organizing forms and that many outcomes follow from other forms, as well as from more mundane, more minor, and more contingent formal encounters, where different forms are not necessarily related, opposed, or deeply expressive, but simply happen to cross paths at a particular site. Suspending the usual models of causality thus produces new insight into the work of forms, both social and aesthetic. (p. 19.)

We are extremely sad to be sharing the news that Kevin Floyd, a path-breaking theorist of queer Marxism and Professor at Kent State University, has died. Kevin was the author of The Reification of Desire: Towards a Queer Marxism (University of Minnesota Press, 2009) as well as a large number of articles and chapters that together laid the ground for a new theoretical foundation for queer Marxism.  He presented atHistorical Materialism conferences in London, New York and Toronto and published in the journal. His favourite intellectual milieu was the Marxist Literary Group, where he played a leadership role and published in its journalMediations.

Kevin’s work clearly saw queer Marxism not as the assimilation of queer theory into a Marxist frame, but as the result of a transformative process that changed our conception of both queer theory and Marxism.  He dug deep into the Marxist tool chest to develop approaches to sexuality that drew on concepts such as reification, showing that the understanding of queerness was not just the application of Marxist thinking to a new substantive area, but the critical development of key aspects of historical-materialist theorising. The Reification of Desire, for example, includes an important critique as well as a rich application of Lukacs’s conception of reification.

Along with his important theoretical contributions, Kevin was a truly lovely human being.  He was warm, encouraging, open and playful.  He engaged with the work of others in a remarkably generous spirit, not drawing back from clear critique yet open to the contributions they made, even where he disagreed.  We hope that as well as sharing grief at the loss of a wonderful member of our community, we will also recommit ourselves to engaging with his audacious, challenging, and inspiring work. 

In honour of Kevin’s memory, the following piece has been made freely available: https://brill.com/view/journals/hima/24/2/article-p61_4.xml?language=en&fbclid=IwAR2G_30x1jstAtZ66HBo2y_oArJuMYL7rSZ0KIePh5AP1kfUKtKMWSdtKLA

Thanks

Historical Materialism, Marxist Feminist Stream, HMSPEN

Historical Materialism Montreal presents:

The Great Transition: Building Utopias

May 21^st-24^th 2020 atUniversité du Québec à Montréal, Québec, Canada

Organized in collaboration with the Nouveaux cahiers du socialisme.

Extended deadline: Monday November 25^th, 2019

The deadline for submissions for The Great Transition 2020 has been extended to November 25. Feel free to share this invitation with the academic colleagues and militants within your network!

Among the panelists who will be with us in 2020, we can already name Geneviève Azam, Mirai Chatterjee, Walden Bello, Tithi Bhattacharya, Jayati Ghosh, Asad Haider, Gustavo Petro and Pablo Solon, among others. We will also have the pleasure of hosting a collaboration between Red Wedge and Locust Review, including an original art exhibit, literary readings and presentations.

The multi-faceted crisis we are going through requires the creation of new utopias. This is why The Great Transition: Building Utopias invites you to reflect on alternative models and new political strategies in tune with our current situation.

You will find more details in the call for papers. Submissions must be sent through this form before November 25^th, 2019.

The Great Transition Collective
info@lagrandetransition.net
TheGreatTransition.net

A Review of The Birth of Theory by Andrew Cole

Samo Tomšič

Humboldt Universität zu Berlin

tomsicsa@hu-berlin.de

Abstract

This book review of Andrew Cole’s The Birth of Theory examines his philosophical position and the distinctive contribution of this volume to the ongoing renewal of materialist dialectics. It provides an overview of the author’s take on the history of dialectical thought, notably on the complex relation between the medieval and modern dialectic, before finally turning toward Cole’s engagement with Hegel and Marx. The review affirms Cole’s attempt to renew strong continuity between the Hegelian and Marxian dialectical method and, in parallel, proposes to extend this dialectical framework to psychoanalysis, which, despite not standing in the foreground of Cole’s volume, affordsThe Birth of Theory strong implicit conceptual guidance.

Keywords

dialectic – materialism – Marx – Hegel

Andrew Cole, (2014) The Birth of Theory, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Sometimes groundbreaking developments require no more than a minimal displacement within a familiar and apparently charted field. The history of dialectics is undoubtedly a plausible candidate for a terrain where one would probably not expect any major surprises. Or, an engaged attempt at re-actualising the historical material, combined with close reading of classical texts, may challenge the habitual narratives of the history of dialectics and produce maximal consequences, which end up redrawing the cartography and reshaping the panorama of the entire field in question. Andrew Cole’s The Birth of Theory contains just such a displacement, and it concerns probably the most challenging name in the history of philosophy, theenfant terrible of dialectical thought, G.W.F. Hegel.

The name can hardly be pronounced without recalling the weight of polemics that revolve around his place and role in the history of philosophy. If Whitehead could write that ‘the safest general characterisation of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato’,[1] then the nineteenth and twentieth centuries did not only produce a series of more-or-less pertinent footnotes to Hegel, but his philosophy moreover sparked an entirely new conflict, one that seems to be significantly more heated than the polemic around Plato. Post-Hegelian thought is, so to speak, marked by a new affect, which accompanies the quarrels: viz. whether Hegel stands for something good or bad, whether his developments are considered progressive or reactionary, whether thinkers depict one unique or several mutually-exclusive Hegels, and so on. One could indeed sustain that Hegel became the name of an inevitable, maybe even forced choice, comparable to the notorious ‘your money or your life’.[2] Whatever side one ends up choosing, the decision remains, in one way or another, marked by the coordinates and consequences of the Hegelian break, and on least at some level one continues tarrying with Hegel.

Another immense question falls within this general philosophical framework; this concerns the relation between Hegel’s dialectics and Marx’s critique of political economy. Even for us today it would be all too hasty to assume that everything involved in this relation has been sufficiently clarified. To this degree, the question of this relationship itself has in no way lost its relevance. In addition, this issue is only apparently ‘esoteric’, ‘abstract’ (i.e. purely theoretical) or ‘exegetical’: the sharpness, radicality and efficacy of Marxist thought significantly depends on the attitude Marxism as such adopts toward apparently abstract theoretical questions, and more specifically, toward the speculative kernel of Marx’s work and method. The complex issue of political organisation is already a paradigmatically theoretical question, the flipside of conceptual production and elaboration of theoretical strategies that will orientate thinking and other modes of action in a way that will awaken political subjects from their inertia and disturb their immersion in the world of appearances, fetishisations and mystifications. Marx’s efforts, theoretical as well as organisational, show that the practice of dialectics not merely provides the necessary orientation in thinking which eventually amounts to what Lacan called ‘vacillating the appearances’, but is as such indistinguishable from political practice. Dialectics, one could say, is a perpetual process of working-through (I refer here to Freud’s notion of Durcharbeiten), which confronts political subjects with the imperative to work against the resistance of the system.

Again, for Marx, political practice begins on the level of thought and concepts. The dichotomy of theory and practice is thereby most certainly abolished. But the question remains to be answered of whether Marx’s endeavours continue or break with the founder of modern dialectics. Different positions regarding this question evidently imply different Marxisms: Hegel thereby remains a symptom, with respect to which every Marxist eventually has to take a position. Marx positioned himself in a most ambiguous manner, which explains why Hegel’s name continues to haunt Marxism as an unresolved problem and conflictual element, causing unrest in Marxist thought. Everyone is familiar with the famous phrases from the first volume of Capital, in which Marx summed up his critical relation to Hegel:

My dialectical method is, in its foundations, not only different from the Hegelian, but exactly opposite to it. For Hegel, the process of thinking, which he even transforms into an independent subject, under the name of ‘the Idea,’ is the creator of the real world, and the real world is only the external appearance of the Idea. With me the reverse is true: the ideal is nothing but the material world reflected in the mind of man, and translated into forms of thought.[3]

Things seem to be clear: the relation is not merely that of difference but of opposition. This opposition apparently consists in the fact that the materialist appropriation of dialectics inverts the causal relation between the ideal and the material, which consequently abolishes the primacy of the ideal. Material causality stretches its consequences into the world of ideas, introducing dynamics, instability and change into what various philosophical idealisms have always conceived as the static, stable and thus unchangeable. Or, we know that Marx does not speak here about sensual materiality but instead targets what his chapter on fetishism describes as the sinnliches übersinnliches Ding, the sensual-suprasensual thing. What he pinpoints is namely the materiality of relations, and more precisely the materiality of discourses, or modes of production, which organise sensuous materiality and overdetermine what takes place in the world of objects, the commodity universe, and more generally in all registers of human reality, be it subjective or social. The materiality Marx targets is thus already immaterial, a thorough negation of sensuality, the false immediacy of which he never ceased to denounce and question.[4] This is precisely what allies Marx’s critical project with that of Hegel’s dialectic. In this way it should be in no way surprising that, after insisting on methodological opposition, Marx nevertheless relativises his apparent rejection of Hegel:

I criticized the mystificatory side of the Hegelian dialectic nearly thirty years ago, at a time when it was still the fashion. But just when I was working at the first volume of Capital, the ill-humored, arrogant, and mediocre epigones who now talk large in educated German circles began to take pleasure in treating Hegel in the same way as the good Moses Mendelssohn treated Spinoza in Lessing’s time, namely as a ‘dead dog’.[5]

What Marx’s rejection attacks is all of the small academic masters, who determine the movement of opinion and bury Hegel as hastily as they turned his theory into fashion. In opposition to all these small (Anti-)Hegelians, the efficacy of Hegel’s thought and method lies in their untimely character. This is what Cole’s book extensively and perceptively demonstrates. Marx correctly intuited that ‘Hegel’ stands less for an ‘absolute master’ in the ivory tower of philosophy – this would make Hegel significantly less interesting – than for a battleground that one cannot enter without first taking a decision. Such a decision, as Marx highlights, consists precisely in assuming either an idealist or a materialist position. And even here there are ambiguities and nuances. Are we really materialists if we practise empiricist or economic reductionism in a universe where the very notion of matter has been significantly transformed and the assumption of immediate sensual experience is dramatically challenged? Does Hegel’s presumably ‘idealist’ dialectics not contain a series of crucial materialist lessons, which need to be exposed by means of focusing on what Marx described as its ‘rational kernel’? Doing away with Hegel involves more than simply dismissing yet another idealist philosopher. The move risks losing sight of the antagonisms and struggles immanent to thought as such. Even though one could critically question several formulations in these and other excerpts from Capital, it is perhaps more constructive to strengthen the accent on the immanent tension and conflictuality of thought, which is the true expression of dialectical movement. This is precisely where Andrew Cole’s engagement comes in.

Cole intervenes in the midst of the heated debate surrounding Hegel, not in order to call for a calming of passions or to seek some compromise or balance, but in order to expose a series of distortions which have sustained the postmodern resistance to dialectic.[6] It is in this context that Cole reaffirms the dialectic as a necessary tool for a truly materialist orientation in thinking and as an indispensable component of critique. In contrast to other famous attempts that reaffirm the dialectic by returning to Hegel,[7] Cole’s work reaches back to the forgotten medieval sources of the modern dialectic. As a result of this examination of the ‘dialectical link’ between medieval philosophy and Hegel, The Birth of Theory outlines an unprecedented reading of the history of dialectic which not only shows the significance of medieval philosophy in an entirely new light, but also delivers a fresh perspective on the complicity of Hegel’s ‘absolute idealism’ (as it continues to be labelled) and Marx’s historical materialism.

One of the central topics of discussion in The Birth of Theory is the opposition between hermeneutic interpretation and what the book’s concluding chapter extensively examines under the term ‘dialectical interpretation’ (p. 133).[8] Their main difference consists in the fact that hermeneutical interpretation privileges the production and the economy of sense, if one may so speak, knitting the web of meanings and moving within the interplay of significations. Such interpretation bypasses the kernel of a problematic that has preoccupied an entire tradition of modern thought from Descartes via Marx to Lacan and beyond: namely the gap that separates appearance from the real. Dialectical interpretation, on the other hand, circulates precisely around this gap. Thus Hegel’s greatest contribution to the general orientation of thinking and to the notion of critique in particular consists in the fact that he mobilised an apparently outdated method in an epoch governed by experimental science (Newton) and critical philosophy (Kant). By means of this mobilisation, Hegel’s entire philosophical effort consisted in showing the dialectical kernel intrinsic to modern ontology, epistemology and politics.

In this framework the problematic of becoming and the question of relational being become crucial. Nietzsche, whom militant anti-Hegelians such as Deleuze and Foucault considered the perfect antipode to Hegel, recognised in the notion of becoming the most important Hegelian invention,[9] a concept without which we would hardly have the Nietzsche, Deleuze or Foucault that we are all familiar with. Cole acknowledges and examines the details of this indebtedness in the first chapter of The Birth of Theory, significantly titled ‘The Untimely Dialectic’ (pp. 3–23), thereby openly arguing that if there were ever a paradigmatic case of an untimely thinker in the Nietzschean sense, it would be Hegel. For in opposition to hermeneutics, which remains excessively focused on the question of sense, to the extent that it confounds it with the real itself,[10] the dialectical interpretation recognises in conflictual becoming the main feature both of the concept and of the real. It focuses on the dynamic of the real and on the life of concepts, approaching them from the viewpoint of their relationality, instability and conflictuality. Hegelian dialectics thus ‘teaches us how to talk about concepts, how to describe their becomings and dissolutions in real time’ (p. 157). Alluding to the main accomplishment of psychoanalysis, another practice that is incomprehensible outside its historical and methodical continuity with the dialectical interpretation, one could say that, by detaching concepts from their psychological bearers, Hegel brought about the first consequential decentralisation of thinking.[11]

Hegel’s philosophy was surely misread, misunderstood and mistranslated, yet one should not conclude that we need to engage in reconstructing some ‘transcendental’ original, uncorrupted by the wrongdoings of translation or interpretation. Most recently with Freud it became clear that the dichotomy of original and translation should be abandoned in favour of a more sophisticated and dynamic relation between concepts and thought. In any case, erroneous translations have significantly shaped the perception of Hegelianism, and one cannot but recall the Italian wordplay traduttore-tradittore,[12] which associates the practice of translation with treason. Translations are never neutral, and one could say that the translator’s act of betrayal is all the more effectively overlooked when one assumes to undertake the necessary precautions against betraying the ‘authentic’ and ‘original’ meaning. Tendentious deformations are part of the structure of translation and they sneak into the text no matter how carefully translators may carry out their task under the waking eye of consciousness, since the structure of the original already concedes room for deformations.

Speaking of the link between deformation and translation, Freud famously associated both activities in his discussion of unconscious work (such as the intellectual work in dreams, joke techniques, symptom formations etc.) and more generally with thinking as such. Dream-work, for instance, translates the latent content of thoughts into their manifest content, which then constitutes the most evident component of the end product, the dream. Or, the dynamic and multiple achievements of this intellectual work are already codified in the corresponding German terms. Entstellung (deformation) literally means ‘to displace’ (ent-stellen), andÜbersetzung (translation) ‘to transpose’ (über-setzen). In both cases we are dealing with a spatial dimension, where content is removed from one place and transferred to another. But Freud was less concerned with the translation of one content into another, their adequacy or inadequacy. This would indeed bind his technique of interpretation to hermeneutics, which, as mentioned, translates one meaning into another, seeking deeper (precisely latent) meaning behind the manifest surface. Instead, Freud introduced a method of interpretation which on the one hand targets the logic of this dynamic, its rational character, and on the other hand seeks the unconscious tendency demanding the distortions beyond the layers of meaning. In this way, deformation and translation become more than simple hermeneutical problems driving the proliferation of sense that presumably point toward some original or authentic meaning. They now appeared as operations in the service of unconscious desire, for which Freud argued that it assumes the role of negativity in the mental industry of meaning. When Lacan later spoke of ‘the dialectics of desire in the Freudian unconscious’,[13] he openly associated Freud’s method of interpretation with the horizon Hegel opened up in the history of dialectic.

One could object that this history has little to do with The Birth of Theory, from which the psychoanalytic problematic is entirely absent. Content-wise this is may be true, but not when it comes to Cole’s strategy, which consists precisely in focusing on symptomatic details in the history of dialectic. According to his reading, these details, such as errors in translation and their corresponding narratives of the history of dialectic, demonstrate the discrepancy between the way Hegel appears to his philosophical observers, whether they be pro-Hegelian, like Jameson and Žižek, or anti-Hegelian, like Foucault and Deleuze, and the tendency that guides Hegel’s own historicalEntstellung-Übersetzung of premodern dialectic into modernity. For this is precisely Cole’s main effort in his book: to show that Hegel’s philosophical development, as well as his main contribution to philosophy, consists in aproductive deformation (again in the psychoanalytic sense of the term) of the medieval dialectic, as it was progressively shaped in the historical sequence stretching from Plotinus via Proclus and Pseudo-Dionysus to Nicolas of Cusa (Chapter II, ‘The Medieval Dialectic’) – a series of thinkers who grounded the mystical tradition, this perfect opposite to what is usually imagined under the general label of medieval philosophy, namely scholasticism.

To repeat again, just as the task of the psychoanalyst consists less in translating manifest content back into latent content, and more in unveiling the logical mechanism through which the unconscious tendency reaches satisfaction in and through the distortive intellectual achievements of unconscious work, The Birth of Theory dives into the seemingly familiar history of dialectic, not in order to translate the manifest Hegel (that we all believe we are familiar with) back into some more authentic, genuine and true latent Hegel, but to reveal both the affirmation and transformation of dialectic in Hegel’s philosophical act. For some this may sound counter-intuitive, but Cole situates the birth of dialectical materialism in this Hegelian act, showing in what precise way Hegel determines the overall displacements that marked post-Hegelian thought, while also revealing what in Hegel was subject to repression.

Cole draws attention to the striking absence of detailed discussion of medieval philosophy in the history of dialectic. Its predominant narratives simply blend-out the specific continuity between the medieval and the Hegelian dialectic, both of which depart from the dyad ‘identity/difference’.The Birth of Theory on the other hand returns to the Neo-Platonic and mystic sources in order to propose an alternative historical narration of dialectic and its vicissitudes, while in the same move revealing the properlymaterialist features of Hegel’s appropriation of medieval dialectic in the epoch of critique. It should go without saying that the critical tradition, inaugurated by Kant’s systematic confrontation with metaphysical dogmatism, defined itself against the background of denouncing dialectic as an anachronistic remnant of scholasticism. Yet the actual novelty and power of the medieval dialectic lies elsewhere than in its scholastic practice. The Middle Ages sustained two distinct dialectical traditions, of which the scholastic one remains in continuity with the Antique notion of dialectics, understood as a mere rhetorical practice, whereas the mystical one takes off from a groundbreaking displacement in ontology, which extends dialectical features to the very structure of being. In this way, the mystical tradition introduces something that appears scandalous from the perspective of traditional ontology, but which will play a crucial role both in Hegel’s philosophy and Marx’s critique of political economy, namely the concept of unstable and relational being.

From the perspective of Cole’s developments the main question to ask is, then, not so much what Hegel thought, which returns us back to the dyad of manifest and latent content, but, more importantly,where he thought, a question targeting both the actual historical circumstances in which Hegel’s thought took shape and the general topological framework that supports the deployment of dialectical thought. More precisely, with Hegel it becomes evident that the space of dialectics is importantly marked by the problem of negativity, which makes this space significantly more dynamic and discontinuous than the ordered space of critique that Kant describes in his transcendental aesthetics. The strength of Hegel’s thought and method resides in the place from which he thinks, and this place is intimately linked with Hegel’s recognition of the spatio-temporal synchronicity or coexistence of feudalism and capitalism: ‘Hegel thinks at the temporal conjunction of the medieval and the modern’ (p. xv). This is what characterises the historical-political circumstances in which Hegel’s critique of German political conditions took shape, and Cole convincingly shows that Hegel addresses the conjunction in question over and over again throughout his work. The intertwining of two distinct epochs and social modes of production enabled Hegel to introduce a concept of history in which a non-teleological becoming driven by contradiction and negativity, rather than some presupposed teleological orientation toward a higher political good, expectedly plays the central role.[14] In other words, Hegel indeed takes off from a vision of history, which acknowledges non-linearity anduneven development as two defining features of its consistency and becoming.

Being situated in the grey zone between different historical epochs is also what Hegel has in common with another major dialectician discussed in The Birth of Theory, Plotinus, who thinks at the historical conjuncture of Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, and whose main achievement consists in the fact that he ‘expands dialectic beyond rhetoric and the pondering of “both sides” to ontology, metaphysics and cosmology’ (p. 36). Plotinus brought the developments and problems that preoccupied ancient Greek philosophy to a critical limit and in the very same move inaugurated a new historical sequence; he brought about a discontinuity, which can be broken down into the transformation of dialectic from rhetorical practice to the dialectic of identity and difference. This concerns not only the movement of language but also and above all the movement of the highest metaphysical principle (the One, the Absolute). Hence, while for the classical Greek philosophers the dialectical was restricted to discourse and became manifest in the confrontation of two competing positions – a confrontation, which tore thinking out of its immersion in the unstable and deceiving world of appearances and oriented it toward stable and unalterable metaphysical truths – for Plotinus and the mystical tradition ontological reality itself contains a deadlock, which should be categorised as dialectical (see Chapter 2, ‘The Medieval Dialectic’). Dialectic henceforth stands for a specific encounter of thinking with the dynamic becoming of ontological entities; or to phrase it following Lacan, who equally recognised the importance of medieval mysticism and Neo-Platonism, language touches the real when its immanent disclosure meets ontological disclosure.[15] With Plotinus dialectic became the privileged method that determines the points of such an encounter; it is no longer preoccupied exclusively with the contradictions between and within different intellectual opinions (which was still the case in the Platonic and Aristotelian tradition).

Discussing a crucial excerpt from Enneads (5.3), where the Absolute (the metaphysical One) is most openly conceived as a figure of (non-)relation, Cole formulates the core of Plotinus’s displacement in ontology in the following manner: ‘Plotinus offers … the first example of a specific dialectical process, whereby difference emerges from the repetition of the same’ (p. 9). With the extension of dialectics from the conduct of discourse in polemical confrontation with opinions to the recognition of the internal dynamic of metaphysical reality, Plotinus formulates an unprecedented problematic which obtained its modern rearticulation in Hegel. Various Post-Hegelian philosophies and Marx’s critique of political economy developed this problematic further, as did other disciplines such as structural linguistics and psychoanalysis. As already mentioned, this problematic can be covered by the term ‘relative being’, which Plotinus definitively expressed in the complicated and dysfunctional relation between identity and difference. With the invention of medieval dialectic, an entire ontology is for the first time grounded upon the full recognition of the inscription of negativity into being:[16] ‘the repetition of identity, and the failureof such repetition to produce a copy, is the way to difference and multiplicity’ (p. 156, my emphasis). It should go without saying that this ontological lapsus, this dimension of failure inscribed into being as its defining feature, stands at the very core of the modern philosophical, epistemological and political problematic.

The Birth of Theory is evidently marked by an internally doubled return: a return to Hegel by means of a return to the medieval dialectic. In this way, the philosophical break initiated by Hegel and perpetuated in post-Hegelian theory appears in a new light. By the term ‘theory’, Cole understands ‘the move away from philosophy within philosophy’ (p. xi), or ‘the move from Kant to Hegel’ (p. xii). Theory thus stands for the consequences of Hegel’sinventive renewal of dialectical thought in the universe of critique, a move from critique to dialectic,[17] which is evidently not a move backward, even if Hegel renews a method that his contemporaries considered premodern and obsolete. Hegel’s move contains a materialist turn, which brings him suspiciously close to Marx. This is precisely one of the main endeavours ofThe Birth of Theory, to make a case against the repeated opposition of Marx and Hegel, seeing in the latter a ‘not-yet-materialist’ and in the former a ‘no-longer-Hegelian’. One might summarise Cole’s position in this polemic by saying thatThe Birth of Theory could also bear the title (or subtitle)The Materialist Rebirth of Dialectic. In order to become materialist, the medieval dialectic of identity and difference needs to be reinvented in the modern context, and it needs to be reinvented twice: first with Hegel, who uses it as a critical tool to expose the persistence of feudalism in the modern world and thereby reveals an important feature of capitalist modernity – uneven development; and then with Marx, who provides the first systematic application of materialist dialectic to capitalism in order to expose its structural contradictions, one of the essential ones being again – uneven development. If Hegel and Marx still appear to us as different, the reason for this appearance should be sought in the historical circumstances, in which their thought took shape and to which they appliedthe same dialectic: German feudalism in the case of Hegel, English capitalism in the case of Marx.

Return to the Middle Ages in order to unveil a materialist Hegel? Nothing seems more bewildering and scandalous from the perspective of conventional readings of the history of dialectic and the history of materialism. One of the truly groundbreaking intellectual achievements of The Birth of Theory lies precisely in challenging such conventions. Of course, Cole pursues a double agenda here: elaborating a materialist reading of Hegel, which goes hand in hand with a speculative reading of Marx. By affirming the strong continuity between Marx and Hegel on the terrain of dialectic, Marx’s critical project is contrasted to its predominant readings, whether Marxist or non-Marxist, which often enough tend to conceive of Marx’s materialism all too naively, one could almost say in a vulgar empiricist way. Marx is a materialist thinker preciselybecause he thinks dialectically, meaning that he thinks the contradictions of his time and space using the same method with which Hegel had already thought the contradictions of his time and space. The modern materialist turn in the history of dialectic thus begins already with Hegel and not only with Marx, this self-proclaimed corrector of Hegel, who embraced his reinvented dialectic only on condition that it learn to walk on its feet. This is what Hegel had already taught the medieval dialectic (and, one could add, Plotinus the ancient Greek dialectic). Yet one cannot recognise this great accomplishment so long as one sticks to the habitual Marxist parlance, according to which Hegel mystified dialectic and therefore provided a merely distorted expression of the contradictions that left their mark on modernity.

In order to demonstrate the materialist character of Hegel’s reinvention of medieval dialectics, Cole admirably returns to the two most popular and often enough all-too-hastily commented motives in Hegel and Marx, the dialectics of lord and bondsman, on the one hand, and fetishism, on the other. Recalling the historical circumstances in which Hegel’s philosophy took shape, Cole shows that Hegel’s choice of terms does not address some transhistoric conflictuality or invariant of class struggle but in fact engages in an exemplary materialist critique of feudal institutions and social relations. One tends to forget the banal yet, for the correct overall understanding of Hegel’s thought, crucial fact that ‘Hegel effectively lived in the Middle Ages’ (p. 66) and that, by taking industrialised England as the universal model of modernity, Marx overlooked the fact that Hegel’s engagement with his historical-political surroundings had already articulated a strikingly similar critique of ideology. By acknowledging the actual social circumstances which influenced Hegel’s philosophical maturity, Cole draws attention to the aforementioned problem of uneven development, which has significantly marked modernity, and which continues to leave its mark on the present development of capitalism. Today, for instance, one equally tends to forget that Wall Street should not be taken as representative of the entire complexity of capitalist reality and that the co-existence of heterogeneous temporalities and historical epochs, the persistence not only of elements of feudalism but also of slavery, needs to be thought again and again as one of the defining features of the proverbial capitalist hybridism.

Cole’s expertise as a medievalist enables him to expose connections and continuities where others might see nothing but differences, discontinuities and incompatibilities; thus he repeatedly denounces historical and theoretical amnesia, the reproduction of clichés and oversimplifications, when it comes to the relation between medieval and modern thought; this is even more strikingly the case when it comes to the persistence of medieval relations of domination and subjection in the modern political and economic framework. In the first volume of Capital Marx rigorously traces the progressive historical transformation of the feudal lord into the capitalist, and the bondsman into the proletarian. Or, hand in hand with the social implementation of the capitalist mode of production goes a certain afterlife of feudal relations, their adaptation to the new conditions: ‘If feudalism comes to an end, we can be certain that a certain feudal contradiction survives well into the age of capital, and it is this contradiction that remains central to Marxist thought’ (p. 84). Marx was on the trail of this contradiction when he recognised in the capitalist a new social embodiment of the old master, and when he referred to the ‘misty realm of religion’[18] as well as to the notion of the fetish in order to draw attention to the continuous mystification of actual social contradictions.

Reading Marx we constantly observe that he proceeds in a much more ‘speculative’ way than the ‘down to Earth’ Marxists would be willing to admit. There is a deep misunderstanding regarding the effort to think abstract thought in conjunction with concrete historical circumstances and material conditions. Marx was no vulgar materialist. And there is a strikingly similar misunderstanding regarding Hegel’s effort to think concrete historical circumstances and material conditions in a speculative way. This does not mean that he ‘mystified’ the actually existing contradictions; on the contrary, he rigorously demonstrated that only by moving beyond the world of appearances and empirical materiality can one expose these contradictions in the first place. Hegel was no vulgar idealist. Instead he demonstrated, just like Marx in his mature critical project, the complex intertwining of empirical materiality and discursive materiality, and he found in the medieval dialectic the privileged tool for theanalysis (in the sense of decomposition and even demystification) of appearances. This is the precise point at which Hegel adds a materialist twist to the medieval dialectic. He uses it in order to think ‘the temporal conjunction of the medieval and the modern’ (p. xv), uneven development as a defining feature of history, or, in other words, the coexistence of different historical orders within the same epoch. The German-speaking lands in Hegel’s time serve as the paradigmatic historical example of such temporal non-synchronicity, but the point is that the same structural feature defines today’s globalised capitalism. This is where ‘Hegel himself appears most Marxist’ (p. xiii). Cole thereby seems to make a case for the recognition of a double historical foundation of the critique of political economy. Marx’s insight into the contradictory logic of the capitalist mode of production is surely indispensable; but we also need Hegel’s critical insights into the insufficiencies of classical political economy, which had already prevented Adam Smith from recognising the link between the rise of capital and the necessity of uneven historical development. Thus the critique of political economy is anchored in the recognition of historical coexistence, maybe even in the historical fusion of premodern relations of domination with the mobilisation of modern scientific knowledge for the organisation of social production.

The critical attack on political economy is indubitably the most crucial feature that unites Marx and Hegel. According to Marx’s criticism, the idyllic scenarios which depict the modern reign of ‘Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham’[19] distort the actual picture in which capitalism both structurally and empirically perpetuates serfdom, inequality and dispossession; whereas, by introducing ‘Bentham’ – a name that stands less for the presumably narcissistic nature of human beings than it does for the self-love of capital itself – Marx indicates the structural tendency of capital to self-valorise. Hegel, in his turn, invalidates Smith’s political-economic accounts in relation to his own historical time and space, which is neither the time nor, evidently, the space of English capitalism. Only from the dialectical perspective can one recognise that political economy is structurally blind to the contradictions of the commodity-form and to the fact that it perpetuates their mystifications with its entire conceptual apparatus. Marx’s prosopopoeia of commodities in the conclusion of the section on fetishism thus shows that the language of political economists merely rephrases everyone’s spontaneous conduct toward the objects of value and is ultimately the same as the hypothetical speech of commodities.[20]

While Marx indeed believed that he had demystified dialectics, Cole shows that he had ‘merely’ applied it to new political-economic conditions, and in doing so had recapitulated Hegel by revealing the persistence of premodern forms of domination deep within modernity. On the historical level, Marx thematised this historical continuity in his discussion of so-called primitive accumulation, while on the formal level the same continuity is addressed through the notion of fetish – but here, too, Marx had an important predecessor in Hegel, whose early critique of feudalism revolves around the fetishist function of the host. Cole thereby outlines the homology, if one may so speak, between the Eucharist and commodity, the former being ‘the fetishised medieval commodity – the figure yet screen for uneven social relations and relations of expropriation and alienation’ (p. 93), just like the products of labour in capitalism, for which Marx showed that they effectively blur the contradiction between labour and capital. The logic of the fetish remains unchanged and the main problem continues to revolve around the ‘commodity’s two bodies’ (p. 98).

From the viewpoint of fetishism, even though the object of fetishisation changes, it becomes clear that Marx and Hegel are united by a strange parallax: ‘what the Middle Ages are to Hegel, modernity is to Marx … both stand on the same side of theory, dialectic, and critique, and they are only divided (or inverted) by history’ (p. 102). When it comes to fetishism this displacement from Hegel to Marx and from feudalism to capitalism reflects the well-known reversal within social relations that Marx describes as the ‘social relations between things’.[21] This, however, does not mean that relations between humans have been repressed, reduced or simply abolished but, on the contrary, that the thingly character of these relations is effectively overlooked: ‘it is not that the relations between persons are replaced by relations between things …. It is rather the opposite: the relations between things now appearas relations between persons’ (p. 95). This is what non-dialectical thought systematically overlooks in the world of appearances in which it is embedded; and by missing this sophistication in the constitution of social bonds, it simultaneously ignores the immanent decentralisation (specifically, alienation) of thinking, its non-identity with itself. Again, reality and thinking are both immanently dialectical, meaning that they are significantly marked by a fundamental gap between the way they appear to the conscious observer (this is, the level of political economy, but also the level to which Kant’s critique restricted philosophy) and the way their structuration reveals itself to thinking from the dialectical point of view. It was none other than Hegel who taught philosophy to think systematicallywithin this gap, and it is in this precise sense that even the most passionate anti-Hegelians remain deeply indebted to Hegel. Not to mention Marxism, for which Hegel conceptually and methodologically remains a crucial condition of possibility.

The present review does not pretend to cover the rich conceptual developments, theoretical reorientations and critical perspectives that make up Andrew Cole’s impressive contribution. It restricts itself to those aspects which envisage Marx’s dialectical method in its broader historical framework and affirm the underlying philosophical alliance between speculative philosophy and the critique of political economy, or, if one prefers, between theoretical practice and political practice. However, despite this selective philosophical presentation there should be no doubt that Andrew Cole has produced an indispensable classic of the broadest possible interest. WithoutThe Birth of Theory we would continue to lack crucial historical and conceptual insights into the quarrels and intricacies that have so heavily influenced the orientations of modern theory. Moreover, these also determine the space in which Marxist thought has operated since its very beginnings. Andrew Cole offers a captivating demonstration of the efficacy of dialectical thought. This is accompanied by a series of new insights into the history of dialectics that prompt us to look anew at this tradition and to critically rewrite it.The Birth of Theory is therefore obligatory reading for anyone involved in the reaffirmation of critical and materialist thought today.

References

Brecht, Bertolt 2004, ‘On Hegelian Dialectics’, available at: <http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/hegel-brecht.html>, accessed 20 May 2016.

Freud, Sigmund 2001, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume 8,Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, translated from the German under the General Editorship of James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud, London: Vintage Books.

Jameson, Fredric 2010, Valences of the Dialectic, London: Verso.

Koyré, Alexandre 1957, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe, Baltimore, MD: The John Hopkins University Press.

Lacan, Jacques 1998, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, translated by Alan Sheridan, New York: W.W. Norton.

Lacan, Jacques 2001, Autres écrits, Paris: Éditions du Seuil.

Lacan, Jacques 2006, Écrits, translated by Bruce Fink, New York: W.W. Norton.

Lacan, Jacques 2007, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVII:The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, translated by Russell Grigg, New York: W.W. Norton.

Marx, Karl 1990, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Volume One, translated by Ben Fowkes, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Milner, Jean-Claude 2002, Constats, Paris: Éditions Gallimard.

Nietzsche, Friedrich 2001, The Gay Science, edited by Bernard Williams, translated by Josefine Nauckhoff, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Whitehead, Alfred North 1978, Process and Reality, New York: The Free Press.

Žižek, Slavoj 2013, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, London: Verso.

[1] Whitehead 1978, p. 39.

[2] See, for instance, Lacan 1998, p. 246. Lacan uses the example in order to explain alienation.

[3] Marx 1990, p. 102.

[4] Modern science significantly transformed the notion of matter; what we are dealing with now is ‘matter without qualities’, whereby the materiality of (discursive) relations falls in this category. See Milner 2002, pp. 119–21.

[5] Marx 1990, pp. 102–3.

[6] Cole’s main polemic targets notably the Deleuzian and Foucauldian aversion to Hegel. It is no coincidence that the first chapter of Cole’s book (‘The Untimely Dialectic’) engages in a reading of Nietzsche, who was for Deleuze and Foucault the name to be opposed to Hegel and to dialectical thought in general.

[7] See notably Jameson 2010 and Žižek 2013.

[8]The Birth of Theory is divided into three sections (Theory, History, and Literature) containing two interventions each. Part One clarifies the notion of theory by moving from the ‘anti-philosophical’ to the openly dialectical Nietzsche and then examining the features of the medieval dialectic. Part Two discusses the relation between history and dialectics in both Hegel and Marx, exposing strong homologies in their positions. Finally, Part Three turns to what was for Deleuze the anti-dialectical discoursepar excellence, literature, and explores Hegel’s critical reading of Adam Smith before moving on to the affirmation of dialectical interpretation against the historicism of the Frankfurt School, deconstruction and Deleuze and Guattari’s phenomenological style. In this way, the discussion of the dialectical method in Hegel and Marx reveals its potential for being extended to the experience of language in general. This could be a fruitful meeting-point for Cole’s developments with Lacan, whose theoretical work is known for its dialectical take on the problematic of language and, more generally, outlines a philosophy of language which is both dialectical and materialist.