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.

[9] ‘Let us take … Hegel’s astonishing move, with which he struck through all logical habits and indulgences when he dared to teach that species concepts developout of each other: with this proposition the minds of Europe were preformed for the last great scientific movement, Darwinism – for without Hegel there could be no Darwin. … We Germans are Hegelians even had there been no Hegel, insofar as we … instinctively attribute a deeper meaning and greater value to becoming and development than to what “is”’ (Nietzsche 2001, p. 218; emphases in original). I owe this reference to Nathaniel Boyd.

[10] This explains, among others, Lacan’s double insistence throughout his teaching that the real is rational (thereby repeating Hegel) and that the real forecloses sense (which is arguably no less a Hegelian claim).

[11] Brecht knew this: ‘I once read his book The Great Logic when I had rheumatism and I couldn’t move. It is one of the greatest humoristic works of world literature. It is about the customs of the concepts, these slippery, unstable, irresponsible existences; how they insult and fight each other with knives and then sit down together to supper as if nothing had happened. They enter so to say in pairs, each is married to its opposite, and they take care of their business as pairs, i.e. they sign contracts as a pair, sue as a pair, attack and break in as a pair, write books and make depositions as a pair, specifically as a totally quarrelsome, disunited pair!’ (Brecht 2004).

[12] Quoted by Freud in his book on jokes; see Freud 2001, p. 121.

[13] See Lacan 2006, pp. 671–702.

[14] This is yet another familiar difference between the Kantian and the Hegelian concept of history. By drawing attention to Hegel’s recognition of historical synchronicity of different modes of production, in other words, the persistence of premodernity within modernity, The Birth of Theory lays the necessary foundations for challenging the standardised (and extremely superficial) readings of Hegel’s philosophy of history as some kind of hyper-teleology.

[15] The word ‘disclosure’ addresses the problem Lacan strived to address with his notion of ‘non-all’. Slavoj Žižek, whose ontological developments follow this Lacanian stance, usually refers to the term ‘incompleteness’. In any case, one should keep in mind that none of the terms presupposes or implies some lost originary ‘closure’, ‘totality’ or ‘completeness’. On the contrary, the disclosure is recognised as constitutive, and this is precisely the point where Plotinus’s conception of a dynamic metaphysical One against the background of the dyad ‘identity/difference’ anticipates the modern epistemic move from the ‘closed world’ to the ‘infinite universe’, in which the mystical tradition played a significant role. See Koyré 1957.

[16] From this perspective, Plato’s Sophist can be retrospectively identified as the privileged predecessor of this recognition. Or rather, what in Plato remained at the level of mere intuition, however correct, became in Plotinus’s philosophy a constitutive feature of the Absolute.

[17] More precisely, from critique that abandoned dialectic to dialectic that appropriated critique.

[18] Marx 1990, p. 165; another significant example: ‘The starting-point of the development that gave rise both to the wage-labourer and to the capitalist was the enslavement of the worker. The advance made consisted in a change in the form of thisservitude, in the transformation of feudal exploitation into capitalist exploitation’ (Marx 1990, p. 875; my emphasis). Conclusion: it is precisely exploitation that perpetuates premodern forms of mastery within modernity.

[19] Marx 1990, p. 280.

[20] See Marx 1990, pp. 176–7.

[21] Marx 1990, p. 166.

A Review of Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital by Matthew T. Huber

Wim Carton

Lund University Centre for Sustainability Studies

wim.carton@keg.lu.se

Abstract

This essay reviews Matthew Huber’s Lifeblood in the context of recent debates on the political economy of climate change. I argue that Huber’s focus on the role of oil in the subsumption of life holds important lessons for how Marxist scholars conceptualise the social relations of fossil-fuel capitalism. Most importantly perhaps, the book invites us to broaden our horizons beyond the generalities of capitalist production, and to take seriously the energy-specific cultural dependencies on historically-cultivated but naturalised consumerist practices and ideas.

Keywords

Lifeblood – fossil capital – climate change – subsumption of life – consumption – generality

Matthew T. Huber, (2013) Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

It has long been held that Marxists devote a disproportionate degree of attention to the sphere of production in their analysis, thereby to some extent marginalising discussions on consumption, exchange and distribution. In a contribution to this journal a few years ago, David Harvey traces this tendency to the analytical framework that Marx borrowed from classical political economy.[1] Like Ricardo and Smith, Marx distinguishes between four levels (or ‘moments’) of analysis: universality (the metabolic relation to nature), generality (social production), particularity (exchange and distribution), and singularity (consumption).[2] Within this framework, Harvey argues, the task of political economy has primarily been to understand the law-like processes operating at the level of generality (i.e. social production), while for example the analysis of consumption patterns, as a singularity, is seen to belong mostly outside of economic enquiry. Though Marx in the Grundrisse explicitly criticises this assumption, highlighting instead the organic and dialectical relationship between production and capitalism’s ‘other moments’, in writingCapital he nevertheless ‘sticks as closely as he can to the bourgeois conception of a law-like level of generality – of production – and excludes the “accidental” and social particularities of distribution and exchange and even more so the chaotic singularities of consumption from his political-economic enquiries’.[3] Harvey notes that this counterintuitive choice, whatever Marx’s reasons for it may have been, is not without consequence, preventing as it does a thorough engagement with the actual processes of history as they develop through the interplay of universal, general, particular and singular processes. Still, according to Harvey, the task of contemporary Marxists grappling with the combined socioeconomic and ecological questions of our time should therefore be to bring these ‘other moments’ of capitalism back to the centre of enquiry.

Some scholars have tried to do exactly this, suggesting theoretical synergies that promise to facilitate the research agenda that Harvey lays out. Brett Christophers, for example,[4] makes the case for a constructive dialogue between Marxist political economy and techno-cultural conceptualisations of performativity in order to deepen the analysis of market exchange. In this book-review/essay, I want to argue that Harvey’s call to take seriously capitalism’s ‘other moments’ is particularly pertinent with respect to our current environmental predicament, and that Matthew Huber’s Lifeblood(2013) illustrates both the necessity and added value of adopting such an approach to the political economy of climate change. While it is admittedly not the book’s primary focus (see below), Lifeblood indirectly speaks to a by-now established interest among Marxist scholars in the capitalist dynamics that drive environmental change.[5] This literature reflects a continued attempt to explore the relationship (and in some cases, entirely collapse the difference) between the universality of ecological processes and the generality of capitalist production, as witnessed, for example, in ongoing debates on the place of nature in the labour theory of value.[6] In line with Harvey’s observation, however, attempts to integrate an analysis of distribution, exchange and consumption into these understandings of environmental change are much scarcer. Marxist and Marxism-inspired scrutiny of the dynamics of climate change, for example, is often primarily focused on the processes of fossil-fuel extraction and production. From there it is only a small step to situating the need for change itself in the sphere of production (i.e. the fossil-fuel industry) and to apportioning blame for inadequate emission reductions primarily to the relatively small but politically-powerful elite (‘Big Oil’) that reaps the direct monetary benefits from continuation of the fossil-fuel bonanza. Confronted with mainstream and apolitical ideas on the need for ‘greener’ consumerism, the debate on climate change then easily breaks down into a false dichotomy between the rendering-responsible of individual consumers, on the one hand, and confronting fossil capital, represented by the economic interests of Big Oil, on the other. Radical voices evidently come down in favour of the latter. Andreas Malm, for example, concludes Fossil Capital with an attack on the ‘we-view’ of climate-change responsibility, which sees humanity as a whole as the culprit, making each and every one of us individually responsible for making more sustainable choices in our everyday lives.[7] Similarly, Naomi Klein attributes most of the blame for ongoing emissions to corporate greed and Big Oil’s manufacturing of climate-change denial,[8] and therefore situates the solution in a confrontation with fossil-fuel industrial interests through movement-building and direct action.

Evidently, there is much in these critiques that is justified and important. A depoliticised focus on the individual consumer as the impetus for change does warrant strong criticism, and yes, as Malm correctly points out,[9] the distribution of responsibility for climate change is tremendously unequal, which makes the lavish high-carbon lifestyles of global elites a prime and necessary target for political action. Nevertheless, is the need to understand and confront the deep dependence on fossil energy served by an exclusive focus on the corporate greed of fossil-fuel capitalists? Can we explain why progress on emission reductions is so agonisingly slow without tackling the countless ways in which economic and political power is reproduced and legitimised outside the sphere of production? Harvey’s call to take seriously how capitalist social relations are entrenched in ‘political subjectivities and the aesthetic, cultural and political preferences of individuals’[10] suggests that we cannot, and that scholars studying the political economy of climate change need to start seeing consumption, together with questions of distribution and exchange, as a necessary part of their enquiry – as an analytical focus that intersects with, rather than necessarily contradicts, attention to the socio-ecological relations of carbon-intensive production processes.

Enter Lifeblood, Huber’s account of the US cultural politics of oil under twentieth-century capitalism. As noted above, this insightful book holds important lessons for debates on the political economy of climate change, even though it is not primarily concerned with climate change or indeed with any of the other environmental concerns that the ongoing economic dependence on oil raises. Essentially,Lifeblood takes the reader on a journey through the twentieth century to narrate the history of American oil dependence and the intertwined cultural, political and economic dimensions of this condition. Huber’s ambition is set out clearly from the start, namely to complement the dominant focus on the ‘big historical forces’ that shape the history of energy use – he mentions global capital, oil kingdoms, geopolitics, finance – with an account of the ‘ordinariness’ of oil as the lifeblood of contemporary capitalism. Oil, Huber makes clear, is first and foremost the stuff that ties the everyday and often banal practices of people’s lives together. To understand the deep US dependence on oil we therefore need to ‘follow social relations, politics, and struggles over how life is lived … far beyond the wells, pipelines, and refineries immediately stained with oil’s toxic residues’ (p. xii). This approach puts the everyday practices of oil consumption at the centre of attention and highlights how these entrenched practices serve to naturalise, justify and reproduce a historically and ecologically specific mode of capital accumulation. As such the book’s focus on ‘the cultural politics of capital’ rightly highlights the crucial but easily forgotten ways in which capitalist power and hegemony operate through cultural forms, everyday consumer practices, and the creation of capitalist meanings, identities and subjectivities centred around particular energy regimes. While Huber’s focus is on the US, in which context his conclusions seem particularly pertinent, it is easy to see how the same argument could, to varying degrees, be applied to other parts of the world as well.

The crux of Huber’sthis argument revolves around the role of oil in the subsumption of everyday life, or what can be described as the increasing dependence on energy-intense commodity relations in the sphere of reproduction. In parallel with how fossil fuels have enabled a deeper subsumption of labour by submitting workers to the requirements of ever-more autonomous machinery in the production process,[11] Huber describes how oil came to play a central role in the commodified satisfaction of everyday needs and the filling of leisure time, thereby strengthening the hegemonic power of capital over life more generally. It did this in part by fuelling particular conceptions of self-determination, freedom and individualism, for example by fostering the idea of an ‘American way of life’ centred around suburban living, individual home ownership and private mobility. Following Foucault, Huber terms this conception ‘entrepreneurial life’. Oil’s ability to ‘saturate the landscape of suburban social reproduction – from gasoline-fired automobility to vinyl-sided homes and petroleum-based food commodities’ (p. 64) thus essentially provided a material basis for ‘the imaginary of an individuated condition, or “life”, that is improvable solely by one’s own effort and entrepreneurial capacities’ (p. 64). The car-centred geographies of suburban America, which were made possible only because of access to cheap and abundant petroleum products, similarly enabled ‘an individuated command over space’ (p. x) that in turn provided fertile ground for neoliberal ideas of freedom ‘composed of atomized individual choosers’ (p. 163). Lifeblood in this way continuously moves back and forth between the material and discursive dimensions of oil consumption as cultural politics. While at times it is not fully clear whether the focus is on one or the other, or both, the overall argument is powerfully made and clearly establishes how material practices of oil consumption/production and an emergent neoliberal discourse reinforced one another, enabling and then consolidating a deeply entrenched cultural dependence on oil.

Pushing back against fossil-fuel fetishism, Huber stresses that none of this is a natural development arising from some power inherent to oil itself. While biophysical properties played an indisputable part in enabling oil’s successes, it was only its gradual exploitation by socio-economic actors that propelled it to the centre of twentieth-century capitalist development. As the material basis for the reorganisation of socio-ecological space, oil ‘merely’ provided an opportune substratum for the exercise of political and economic power. Lifeblood thus traces discourses that align freedom and individualism with car ownership, suburban living and oil-powered consumerism, to the active promotion of such ideas by oil companies in the 1950s, the search for solutions to the US overproduction crisis, and the creation of ‘new subjectivities’ through policies such as Fordism and the New Deal. Huber admittedly spends more time outlining these conditions and political-economic drivers behind the subsumption of life than tracing the exact dynamics through which they end up conditioning people’s lives as fully internalised ideas, which leaves some of the steps underlying his argument implicit. The political implications are nevertheless clear. When oil became the ecological basis for the subsumption of life, it helped to ‘quarant[ine] politics and agency, in the realm of “life” – home, family, and consumption’ (p. 22) and in this way led attention away from demands for freedom and self-determination in the labour process:

[S]omewhere along the way, Marx’s admittedly modernist conception of capital laying a progressive history for emancipatory futures got short-circuited through a kind of reconstruction of a fragmented geography of wage workers as free proprietors whose ‘freedom’ and ‘ownership’ were wholly relegated to the means of social reproduction – specifically the mass dispersal of single-family homes, each with a parcel of land. The real subsumption of life under capital replaces free proprietorship of productive tools and conditions of labor with a world of freedom away from work – a ‘life’ imagined as free despite its reliance upon and subjection to the whim of commodity relations. (p. 79.)

Here, then, we immediately also find the beginnings of an alternative explanation for the enormous inertia of fossil-fuel energy systems, despite overwhelming evidence for their detrimental environmental impacts. As Huber repeatedly notes, it is this deeply ingrained (i.e. historically-cultivated but naturalised) association with ideas of freedom and private ownership that gives oil its social power and makes it exceedingly difficult to get rid of. This provides a political challenge that is far more profound than the scrapping of energy infrastructures or the decarbonisation of the built environment. An assault on (cheap) oil essentially becomes an assault on the emancipation from work, albeit a commodified and neoliberal conception of such, that laborers have carved out in the sphere of reproduction. Huber shows precisely this in his analysis of the 1970s energy crisis, when rising prices and oil shortages became seen as a direct threat to the ‘American way of life’, causing social and economic unrest and setting in motion a range of processes to ensure oil-powered everyday life would continue as usual.

It is really only towards the end of the book that Huber explicitly draws out some of the implications of his argument for climate-change mitigation and the prospects for a renewable energy transition, and even then only briefly. He stops short of placing environmental concerns at the centre of his narrative, even though a fully-fledged extension of his analysis into the political economy of climate change seems logical and perhaps even necessary given the often-divisive nature of the debate. Despite this, Huber offers some welcome insights on the climate question. He argues that if workers have become largely dependent on carbon-intensive commodities for the reproduction of daily life, then it is only logical that they stand to lose from attempts to decarbonise the economy through, for example, increased fuel prices, carbon taxes or outright bans on carbon-intensive practices. It is therefore also logical that they will tend to oppose such policies, which, as Huber notes, de facto puts in question the ability of ‘democracy’ (his quotation-marks) to solve problems like climate change. Huber at one point pitches this impasse as a conflict between workers and ‘environmental technocrats who believe strongly that the only way to a green future is to raise the prices of energy-intensive commodities’ (p. 149), but from the rest of the book one gets a sense that the problem is more substantial than that. For example, if we acknowledge that climate-change mitigation is incompatible with continued (let alone expanded) air travel – as we should – then the conflict is not between workers and particular environmental policies but, more seriously, between the hard facts of climate science and the cultural associations that people make between their annual holiday to far-away destinations and expressions of freedom away from work. Essentially, the subsumption of everyday life here makes labourers complicit in the reproduction of fossil capital, a dynamic that follows from consumption’s placement at the intersection of the (commodified) fulfilment of daily needs and expressions of identity, on the one hand, and the realisation of surplus value on the other. While obviously this dynamic plays out under highly unequal power relations, and through the hegemony of neoliberal ideology, this does not diminish the uncomfortable fact that continued emissions are embedded in more than the corporate gluttony of a small capitalist elite alone.

Huber’s argument in this way holds some (shrouded) lessons for critical voices in the climate-change debate. Framing the climate problem as a matter of greedy oil companies (Big Oil) sabotaging progress on decarbonisation can only ever be part of a fuller explanation for why emissions are not falling as quickly as they should. To place the dominant focus on such narratives is to fail to appreciate the convoluted ways through which the hegemony of fossil capital operates, including the promotion and reproduction of cultural norms and ideas about ‘freedom, security, national pride, and life itself’ (p. 6). Critical scholars thus also need to engage with the geographies of everyday life that enable, reproduce and continuously legitimise the further extraction and consumption of fossil fuels, not out of consumer ignorance or extravagance but simply because access to abundant and cheap energy has for many people become a matter of survival under neoliberal capitalism. Or as Huber puts it,

the failure of the US political system to respond to the challenges of petro-capitalism – war, climate change, and ecological crisis – is more complicated than the simple role of ‘Big Oil’ in corrupting policy makers. It is about a specific regime of capitalism – a regime rooted deeply in the entire architecture of twentieth-century American capital accumulation – that has become structured around a cultural politics of entrepreneurial life. (p. 152.)

If environmentalists ignore these cultural dimensions to fossil-fuel dependence and fail to provide an answer ‘to the populist clamoring for cheap energy for life itself’, Huber adds, ‘the opposition is in danger of at best feeling remote or distant from everyday experience and at worst being completely ignored’ (p. 166). Huber’s analysis therewith sets the scene for a more nuanced, complicated and probably more-uncomfortable account of the environmental crisis that capitalism is currently facing, reframing the problem as a historically developed socio-economic and cultural dependence. This situates the obstacles to alternative energy futures not just in the entrenched denialism of Big Oil, but also in the extent to which progressive voices are able to liberate the cultural values, ideas and material practices that shape everyday life from the grip of oil-infused consumerism.

Towards the end of his essay on Marx’s method in Capital, Harvey makes a similar argument. He suggests that if we see consumerism, and the political subjectivities that attach to it, as a particular reflection of capitalist hegemony, then revolutionary change, including the change necessary to solve climate change, demands that we confront and overcome ‘the fierce attachments of powerful political constituencies to suburban lifestyles and cultural habits’.[12] It demands, in other words, that we first see consumerism for what it is, not just the aggregate of individual lifestyle choices but a cultural pillar of capitalist hegemony, and secondly that we recognise the need to confront these cultural norms and habits with as much political determination and perseverance as we rightly expend on the critique of and political confrontation with fossil-fuel extraction and production. Recent attention, including by Marxists, to the need for a ‘just transition’ (and some of the discussions occurring in the context of a proposed Green New Deal) offers some inspiration for this task. Challenging unsustainable consumer cultures from this perspective is just one more way to chip away at the political legitimacy that fossil capital enjoys by virtue of its grip on the reproduction of everyday life. Reflecting the understanding that ‘actual history demands an approach to an unfolding (even immanent?) dynamic totality in which generalities, particularities and singularities are in perpetual interaction’,[13] a reappraisal of the political ecology of fossil-fuel dependent reproductive relations sets the stage for a more comprehensive critique of fossil capital. Huber’s book spells out in detail the logic and necessity of this approach for the history of oil in the US, and as such provides the beginning of a response to the challenge that Harvey lays out. Lifeblood in this way makes an important contribution towards a fuller understanding of the obstacles we face in the transition to alternative energy futures, and of how to overcome them. Hopefully others will pick up where the book leaves off.

References

Boyd, William, W. Scott Prudham and Rachel A. Schurman 2001, ‘Industrial Dynamics and the Problem of Nature’, Society & Natural Resources, 14, 7: 555–70, <doi:10.1080/08941920120686>.

Carton, Wim, Erik Jönsson and Beatriz Bustos 2017, ‘Revisiting the “Subsumption of Nature”: Resource Use in Times of Environmental Change’, Society & Natural Resources, 30, 7: 789–96, <doi:10.1080/08941920.2017.1320176>.

Christophers, Brett 2014, ‘From Marx to Market and Back Again: Performing the Economy’, Geoforum, 57: 12–20, <doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2014.08.007>.

Clark, Brett and Richard York 2005, ‘Carbon Metabolism: Global Capitalism, Climate Change, and the Biospheric Rift’, Theory and Society, 34, 4: 391–428, available at: <http://www.springerlink.com/index/F318575T61065657.pdf>.

Foster, John Bellamy 1999, ‘Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift: Classical Foundations for Environmental Sociology’, American Journal of Sociology, 105, 2: 366–405, <doi:10.1086/210315>.

Foster, John Bellamy, Brett Clark and Richard York 2010, The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth, New York: Monthly Review Press.

Harvey, David 2012, ‘History versus Theory: A Commentary on Marx’s Method in Capital’,Historical Materialism, 20, 2: 3–38, <doi:10.1163/1569206X-12341241>.

Huber, Matthew T. 2013, Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Kenney-Lazar, Miles and Kelly Kay 2017, ‘Value in Capitalist Natures’, Capitalism Nature Socialism, 28, 1: 33–8, <doi:10.1080/10455752.2017.1278613>.

Klein, Naomi 2014, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, London: Allen Lane.

Malm, Andreas 2016, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming, London: Verso.

Marx, Karl 1977, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Volume One, translated by Ben Fowkes, New York: Vintage.

Moore, Jason W. 2011, ‘Transcending the Metabolic Rift: A Theory of Crises in the Capitalist World-Ecology’, The Journal of Peasant Studies, 38, 1: 1–46, <doi:10.1080/03066150.2010.538579>.

Moore, Jason W. 2017, ‘The Capitalocene, Part I: On the Nature and Origins of our Ecological Crisis’, The Journal of Peasant Studies, 44, 3: 594–630, <doi:10.1080/03066150.2016.1235036>.

[1] See Harvey 2012.

[2] Marx 1977.

[3]Harvey 2012, p. 10.

[4] Christophers 2014.

[5]Boyd, Prudham and Schurman 2001; Carton, Jönsson and Bustos 2017; Clark and York 2005; Foster 1999; Foster, Clark and York 2010; Malm 2016; Moore 2011, 2017.

[6]See, for example, Kenney-Lazar and Kay 2017.

[7] Malm 2016.

[8] Klein 2014.

[9] See Malm 2016.

[10]Harvey 2012, p. 23.

[11]See, for example, Malm 2016.

[12] Harvey 2012, p. 23.

[13]Harvey 2012, p. 12.

 A Review of Politique et État chez Deleuze et Guattari by Guilleme Sibertin-Blanc

Jason Read

Philosophy Department, University of Southern Maine

Jason.Read@maine.edu

Abstract

Guilleme Sibertin-Blanc considers the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari not via a direct relation to Marx, either in terms of lineage or deviation, but in terms of their particular response to the question of politics and the state. In doing so his work not only reveals the affinity between Deleuze and Guattari’s thought and Marxist theories of the state, especially those considering the question of violence in light of primitive accumulation, but also the usefulness of the latter for the former. Sibertin-Blanc makes a case for the overdetermined reading of the concepts of Deleuze and Guattari, understanding them as simultaneously concepts of material conditions and their expression in ideas.

Keywords

Marx – Deleuze – primitive accumulation – Spinoza – capital – state

Guillaume Sibertin-Blanc, (2013) Politique et État chez Deleuze et Guattari. Essai sur le matérialisme historico-machinique, Paris: Presses universitaires de France.

That Marx and Marxism are central concerns of Sibertin-Blanc’s book should perhaps be obvious from the subtitle, ‘Historico-machinic Materialism’, but it is perhaps equally clear that this relation is oblique. This is not a study of influence, an examination of the way in which Marx’s conception of capital underlies Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of abstract machines and axiomatics, nor is it an examination of the extent to which the latter fits into some pre-existing idea of Marxist theory or politics, however unorthodox. Turning from the subtitle to the title we can see that the central concern of Sibertin-Blanc’s book is not capital, nor the mode of production, but the state and politics. The encounter between Deleuze & Guattari and Marx is framed by what is often seen as a constitutive lacuna in each. It approaches Marx from a sort of blindside; as much as Lenin, Gramsci, Poulantzas and others have offered a theory of the state, Marx’s own remarks are just that: remarks, a few metaphors about machines and the role of the state and of class, but not a fully-developed theory. In a different manner, for better or worse, Deleuze and Guattari are often read as offering very little to politics, at least as it is conventionally understood, constituting something like a minor or micro-politics. Sibertin-Blanc approaches the relation between Marx and the work of Deleuze and Guattari not directly, via influence or orthodoxy, but obliquely through a set of problems having to do with the state, violence and the economy. Thus it is possible to say, following Deleuze and Guattari, that they approach this relation in the middle, in the space between Marx and Deleuze & Guattari, which is also the space between politics and economics.

          One last word on the title, or rather the subtitle: ‘Historico-machinic Materialism’ suggests an attempt not only to read Deleuze and Guattari as within, or at least heterodox to, the Marxist tradition, but also to read the former systematically and, more importantly, as a materialist philosophy. Historico-machinic materialism takes its place alongside dialectical and historical materialism. Sibertin-Blanc’s earlier publication Deleuze et L’anti-Œdipe: la production du désir pushed beyond the clichés ofAnti-Oedipus as a schizophrenic text, or, asPensée ’68, to see it as a materialist analysis of the constitution of desire and subjectivity. Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of psychoanalysis and the family is oriented towards situating the production of desire within conditions that exceed the family, seeing it as a product (and necessary reproduction) of the mode of production rather than as an expression of oedipal dynamics.[1] ‘Machinic’ in this sense becomes the matter of an understanding of the immanence of desire to the mode of production, its univocity – desire is neither a simple effect of the mode of production, nor is it a cause; it is always cause and effect, structured and structuring. Politique et État chez Deleuze et Guattari is focused on neitherAnti-Oedipus norA Thousand Plateaus, but upon both texts understood as simultaneously the development of a single philosophical perspective (historico-machinic materialism) and divided by eight long years of history, years in which French philosophy went from the conflicts over the events of May to the rise of the ‘new philosophers’. It was a decade of depoliticisation asPensée ’68 gave way to ethics, Christianity, and a retreat into philosophy. As much as the two volumes ofCapitalisme et Schizophrénie can be understood to traverse the decade of their conception, constituting something like a counter-history, or, as Deleuze and Guattari would probably prefer, a ‘becoming’ that passes beneath the shift from radicalism to conservatism, there is also something fundamentally anachronistic about the books (even before one gets to the nomads). The emphasis on fascism, on both its historical emergence and its micropolitical legacy, orients the books towards the interwar period even if they are often seen as exemplifying the intersection of political radicalism and ‘high theory’ that typified post-’68 thought. Sibertin-Blanc argues that it is precisely this anachronism at the time of their writing that makes the books relevant today (p. 12).

Sibertin-Blanc’s other major publication of this period, Philosophie politique XIX^e–XX^e siècles, is an examination of the various vicissitudes of the state, its foundation, justification and bureaucracy, etc., and thus it is possible to see Sibertin-Blanc’s work on Deleuze and Guattari as situated between a scholarly exegesis and a practical intervention. Such an itinerary characterises Sibertin-Blanc’s work in general. He is a member of the International Center for the Study of Contemporary French Philosophy as well as a contributor to Actuel Marx, writing on both the history of French philosophy, and the intersecting problems of race, violence and nationalism. Here it is possible to note the proximity of Sibertin-Blanc’s teachers, Pierre Macherey and Étienne Balibar, who seem to have imparted less a lesson in doctrinaire ‘Althusserianism’ than attentiveness to the difficulties of conceptualising the conjuncture. Sibertin-Blanc is not the first to note Deleuze and Guattari’s Marxism, but perhaps the first, or at least the most resolute, in drawing a connection between Deleuze and Guattari and the Marxist tradition that is less about cultural theory, ideology, the commodity and desire, than it is about political practice and intervention.

The common theme that Sibertin-Blanc isolates in Deleuze and Guattari’s work, the point of intersection of their work with political philosophy, is violence, or, more specifically, the intersecting themes of arché-violence, the formation of the state; exo-violence, the violence of the war-machine outside of the state; and endo-violence, the violence of capital and axiomatics. The focus on violence, especially in terms of violence as something that traverses the space between the state and capital, sets up points of comparison with Étienne Balibar’s work on violence, something which has become the explicit focus of Thibault Masset’s La violence chez Deleuze-Guattari et Balibar: mode de production, subjectivation, et politique. In each case it is a matter of understanding the different modalities of violence, from the violence of the state, exceptional and sovereign, to the regular violence of capital, or what Balibar calls ultra-subjective or ultra-objective violence.[2] Violence is understood not just in terms of its putatively exceptional character, as something that appears sporadically in moments of crisis and chaos, but in terms of the way in which it permeates the state and capital, constituting both the institution of violence and the violence of institutions. As Masset argues, the task of a critical political philosophy is making manifest the violence that is concealed in day-to-day existence.[3]

Starting from Marx on primitive accumulation, Deleuze and Guattari insist on not only the fundamentally violent nature of the state, but also its necessary role in constituting capitalism. As Deleuze and Guattari write, ‘It is not the state that presupposes a mode of production; quite the opposite, it is the state that makes production a mode.’[4] The state’s necessary role in constituting capital, in constituting social relations, is pushed farther and farther back in time, a historical displacement that begins with Anti-Oedipus and continues withA Thousand Plateaus. It is not just, as it was for Marx, that the state is the necessary midwife of colonisation, the destruction of the commons, and the overall separation of the emergent workers from the means of production, rather the state is the very condition of labour as such. Labour as an activity separated from other activities, and subject to its specific exploitation and organisation, presupposes the state as the necessary condition of the abstraction and separation of activity. This materialisation of the state then leads to its opposite, to its idealisation. The state is not just a material condition of exploitation, it is also an image of thought; it is an image that stresses interiority, identity and totality. It can only be one if it is the other; the state’s ability to secure and maintain the mode of production is predicated on its claim of totality and universality, and its totality and universality are in part based on its actual efficacy in the realm of forces (p. 29). Even Hegel would not have posited the state as the Idea in history if the state did not have effects in history. The state can be idealised, can become the very figure of the Idea, because it has functioned as a materialisation of power. As Sibertin-Blanc argues, this materialisation and idealisation of the state, its role as both condition of production and figure of thought, makes it hard to place in the history of philosophy. It becomes necessary to think in terms of the materiality of ideality. To think the manner in which the very image of the state, of totality, has material conditions and effects (p. 29).

          The state must be thought of as a kind of antinomy, or as several antinomies; at once material and ideal, historical and outside of history, and it is only by grasping it as an antinomy, which is to say as overdetermined by the specific ways in which this tension is articulated, that one can understand its effects. This is why the writings on primitive accumulation are the most important texts of Marx’s for Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of the state. It is through the transitional dimension of the state that it is possible to grasp its constitutive antinomies. The central antinomy of primitive accumulation is that of the status of the state, as simultaneously legal and illegal, contingent and necessary. ‘Hence the very particular character of state violence: it is very difficult to pinpoint this violence because it always presents itself as preaccomplished.’[5] The state is simultaneously the limit of one system, the destruction of feudalism and multiple powers, and the beginning of another assemblage, one constituted by an apparatus of capture. As reorganisation, a new assemblage, it is still constituted of the violence that constituted the old system, the old power (p. 61). Its existence as something that stands outside of violence, constituting order, is only because it is a reorganisation of that violence. Monopolistic appropriation proceeds, and makes possible, a direct comparison of that which it appropriates. This is the ultimate antinomy of the state, the one that is the kernel of its definition, that the monopoly precedes and constitutes what it is a monopoly of. Hierarchy and asymmetry is not a deviation from an originary equal exchange, but rather the latter’s necessary condition.

Sibertin-Blanc’s reading of Deleuze and Guattari stands thus in sharp contrast with another Marxist reading, that of Fredric Jameson. For Jameson Anti-Oedipus can be considered properly materialist, or at any rate influenced by Marx, at least in terms of its historicisation of desire, butA Thousand Plateaus, in which the state, like many concepts and categories, becomes part of a conceptual opposition positing the nomad against the state, is increasingly idealist, even moralistic. Materialist analysis gives way to dualisms of moralising distinctions. As Jameson writes,

But this may furnish the occasion for saying why the emergence of this or that dualism should be a cause for complaint or critique in the first place. Dualism is, I believe, the strong form of ideology as such, which may of course disguise its dual structure under any number of complicated substitutions. This is so, I want to assert, because it is the ultimate form of the ethical binary, which is thus always secretly at work within ideology.[6]

Jameson’s critique is borne out by the various readers of Deleuze and Guattari that have turned concepts like the nomad, the rhizome, or even immanence itself into something to be unproblematically celebrated. In contrast to Jameson’s interpretation, Sibertin-Blanc not only reads the two volumes together, overcoming the dualism of original radical project and ethical deviation, but in doing so also sees its various dualisms not so much as reducible to an ethical binary, but as expanding into a series of displacements. Thus his reading in some sense echoes Deleuze and Guattari’s methodological approach to dualisms,

We invoke one dualism only in order to challenge another. We employ a dualism of models only in order to arrive at a process that challenges all models. … Arrive at the magic formula we all seek – pluralism=monism – via all the dualisms that are the enemy, an entirely necessary enemy, the furniture we are forever rearranging.[7]

Even primitive accumulation changes its fundamental antinomies in the two texts. It appears in the first as a figure of contingency, of universal history understood as contingency, while in the latter the antinomy is turned towards that of the particular nature of state violence, as simultaneously constituting right and violence. Thus it is possible to see the first as more materialist, concerning the effects on the economy, while the latter is more ideological, or conceptual, concerning the very constitution of the state as a figure of thought. Sibertin-Blanc makes it possible to see these two aspects as constituting a kind of addition, or transformation; it is not a matter of shifting from material effects to conceptual binaries, but of recognising that there are no conceptual binaries without material conditions, and vice versa. It is the same state, the same social relation, thought in terms of its material relations or its conceptual relations, as power and as concept.

The parallel yet distinct relation of the material force of the state and its idea is only one aspect of Sibertin-Blanc’s argument (p. 41). First, and foremost, there is its affirmative nature: social relations or social formations are defined not by their contradictions but by their creative movements of transformation. Gilles Deleuze’s earlier work on Spinoza argued that the relationship between bodies and ideas, the order and connection of ideas and things, is best characterised as parallelism, as the identical order of two different attributes, the order and connection of things and ideas. It is precisely this same process that defines Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of what constitutes social relations, or, in their terms, an assemblage. An assemblage is both a collective assemblage of enunciation and a machinic assemblage of bodies; it is both an intermingling of bodies and an organisation of acts or statements.[8] These two aspects, bodies and statements, actions and events, do not determine or affect each other, but are each affected or determined by their relative deterritorialisation or reterritorialisation, by their processes of abstraction and concretisation. It is this process of differentiation and transformation that constitutes the order and connection of bodies and ideas, actions and statements. Spinoza’s ontology, the ontology of substance grasped in terms of two different attributes, is marshalled in the service of the solution to a problem of political, economic and social theory, the Marxist problem of determinism, of the base and superstructure. Bodies and enunciations, forms of content and expression, must be seen as distinct, as having their own specific causalities and effects. They are connected not by a causal order, i.e. by their effects on each other, but by the general process of deterritorialisation, of abstraction and displacement. Between Spinoza’s substance and Deleuze and Guattari’s process of deterritorialisation is Marx’s mode of production; the latter makes it possible to think of the order and connection not as metaphysics but as a social relation. A mode of production must be thought simultaneously as an organisation of bodies and an order of statements.

Sibertin-Blanc’s reading stresses this innovation, but pushes it in a different direction, one influenced by a different reading of Spinoza. For Sibertin-Blanc it is not the parallelism but rather the overdetermination of the different assemblages, of the different conceptual oppositions, that defines Deleuze and Guattari’s account of social relations. In doing so, Sibertin-Blanc proliferates the various oppositions and dualisms rather than reducing them to a central ethical opposition. Instead of seeing everything reduced to a Manichean opposition between the war machine and the state, the state and its nomads, Sibertin-Blanc argues that it is necessary to grasp the way in which this opposition, an opposition over territory, necessarily intersects with the different strategies and assemblages, with the state as an apparatus of capture, and with the conflict of smooth and striated spaces (p. 102), all of which have their own tensions and oppositions. That the state both constitutes a spatial logic, a domination of space according to the striation of space, the subordination of space to lines, and an apparatus of capture, as well as being an image of thought means that any concrete state, any existing state, can only be thought as the overdetermination of different assemblages. Given that Sibertin-Blanc’s books on Deleuze and Guattari are the product of a thesis written under the direction of Pierre Macherey, it is possible to see this as a conflict of different Spinozisms. Deleuze’s parallelism versus Althusser’s overdetermination (even if overdetermination is a concept defined more through references to Freud and Marx than to Spinoza). In the first, what is stressed is the identity and difference of things and ideas, machinic assemblages of bodies and collective assemblages of enunciation, which must be grasped simultaneously as distinct and as two different perspectives on the same substance, or, in Deleuze and Guattari’s case, on the same process of deterritorialisation. Causal autonomy is maintained along with mutual implication. While in the second, what is stressed is the sheer multiplicity of different causal series, different assemblages; the state must be thought simultaneous as an apparatus of capture and as a phenomenon of overcoding, as both an organisation of political space and the constitution of an image of thought. These multiple assemblages, multiple strategies, must be thought of in terms of their specific articulation, their specific actualisation in a given historical situation (p. 106). Sibertin-Blanc stresses the conjunctural definition of the different assemblages, shifting their opposition from not only any ‘ethical’ opposition of good and bad, but also the residue of base and superstructure or its idealist inversion. There are not just bodies and enunciations, machines and discourses, two different orders, but multiple effects of different assemblages.

Reading Deleuze and Guattari as theorists of overdetermination poses a particular problem when it comes to capital. Capital, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is defined by the destruction of the various codes and apparatuses that have come before. It is defined by its decoding, by the way in which previous forms of social belonging, with their attendant customs, traditions and modes of belonging, are reduced to axioms, to the quantifiable exchange of money and labour-power. This, Sibertin-Blanc argues, is precisely the challenge, a challenge pertaining to any concept of capitalism, or the capitalist mode of production, that is non-teleological; it is a matter of thinking the way in which the capitalist mode of production must be thought of as both a destruction of what came before, of feudalism, and of its own particular transformation, of its continuing to hold itself together in its very destruction (p. 152). In other words, this is the classical problem of reproduction, social reproduction framed against the backdrop of a mode of production that is defined by its constant transformation. This problem could be traced back to Marx’s assertion that with capital, ‘all that is solid melts into air’, which, in an often-cited and memorable way, posed the problem of capitalism as defined by transformation. The capitalist mode of production is not just defined by transformation, but by reduction of the heterogeneity of different assemblages, a heterogeneity that could define the state, to the economy as one overarching axiomatic. Once again this problem is to be found in Marx, specifically in the passages on primitive accumulation. As Marx writes, ‘The silent compulsion of economic relations sets the seal on the domination of the capitalist over the worker. Direct extra-economic force is still of course used, but only in exceptional cases.’[9] As is often the case, both of these propositions become intensified in Deleuze and Guattari’s reading of Marx, less the quotable passages and specific arguments than the general ontology of social relations, an ontology defined by abstraction and transformation. Reproduction must be thought of as a particular organisation of this abstraction and transformation. As Deleuze and Guattari write,

There ensues a privatization of the family according to which the family ceases to give its social form to economic reproduction: it is as though disinvested, placed outside of the field; in the language of Aristotle, the family is now simply the form of human matter or material that finds itself subordinated to the autonomous social form of economic reproduction, and that comes to take the place assigned to it by the latter.[10]

The privatisation of the family does not mean that it is entirely outside of the field of social reproduction; rather it is precisely because it is outside, privatised, that it functions. Whereas previous modes of production, or social production, were defined by the directly political and economic, which is to say productive, dimension of the family. In capital, the family becomes simply reproductive; it can no longer determine or affect status in the relations of production; it can only represent them, which is to say reproduce these relations.

          The dualisms that are the most irresolvable for Deleuze and Guattari are the ones that they inherit rather than invent; they concern the division between capitalism and precapitalism and between production and reproduction. These divisions, themselves integral to Marxism, are reconceptualised by Deleuze and Guattari to become the division between codes and axioms, in the first instance, and that between social production and desiring production, in the latter. In each case the neologisms express a fundamental transformation of Marx’s thought, shifting it more towards questions of subjectivity and desire. They are also divisions more strongly at work in Anti-Oedipus than inA Thousand Plateaus. While axioms continue to play a fundamental role in the latter text, it is less a matter of the distinction between axioms and codes, than the relation between axioms and the nondenumerable, the minority, that are not subject to axioms. The entire language of desiring production and social production also disappears from the second volume ofCapitalism and Schizophrenia, and with it any real focus on the family as a site of reproduction. In its place there is a return to the opposition of molecular and molar in which it is stressed that this opposition is not one of scale; there is a molecular politics of the state just as there is a molar politics of the family. Thus it is possible to see Deleuze and Guattari moving away from the limits of the categorial opposition between capitalism and non-capitalism.

The question remains, however: do the various forms of violence that Sibertin-Blanc charts, the originary or arché, exoviolence or nomad, and endoviolence or capital, make it possible to think beyond the opposition of capitalism and precapitalism, understanding their specific temporal heterogeneity, and the opposition between production and reproduction? The first is a theoretical question, one, it is worth noting, that was posed most rigorously by Louis Althusser in Lire le Capital, an important point of reference for Deleuze and Guattari (as well as Sibertin-Blanc). Althusser subjected to rigorous critique any temporal historicisation that saw the present as fully present to itself; insisting instead that historical time must be constructed from the specific mode of production, including its tensions, lags and anticipations. Deleuze and Guattari are not unaware of this aspect of Althusser’s thought;Anti-Oedipus engages with the phenomenon of recoding, of the way in which capital continually resuscitates the codes it decodes, revitalising past beliefs, to become ‘a motley painting of everything that has ever been believed’. However, this tendency to grasp the differential temporality of the present is subordinated to an overarching tendency or direction, hence the term ‘archaisms’. In contrast to this,A Thousand Plateaus offers a more complex temporal structure, especially in terms of the state, which is preceded by attempts to ward it off.[11]

The second question, however, is as much political and historical as it is theoretical; the opposition between production and reproduction framed entirely in terms of the psychoanalytic representation of desire overlooks a more-materialist understanding of the family, not as theatre of the unconscious, but as part of the social factory. At the same time that Deleuze and Guattari were arguing that ‘desire is part of the infrastructure’, Marxist-feminists associated with the wages-for-housework movement were arguing that the family, as a site of the production and reproduction of labour-power, must be understood as part of the infrastructure as well. Since the writing of their initial critique, the boundaries of production and reproduction have blurred, as care-work, emotional labour, and affective labour have become part of the functioning of capital. ‘Desire is part of the infrastructure’ sounds less like a radical critique of Marx and Freud than the slogan of a viral-marketing firm! These are the transformations that risk making Deleuze and Guattari themselves anachronistic; what is perhaps most untenable in their work is the opposition between codes – qualitative, embodied and indirect – and axioms – quantitative, abstract and direct. Sibertin-Blanc has done an excellent job of arguing for the overdetermination of their concept of the state, seeing it as made up of both material and ideal dimensions, of multiple assemblages constituting power, space and identity. What perhaps remains to be done is an overdetermination of their concept of capital, of the economy – the economy cannot be simply identified with production, nor with purely quantitative axioms of labour and money; it must be thought of in terms of its material and ideal aspects, its affective and subjective dimension. This seems like a strange criticism to bring before Deleuze and Guattari, whose entire project is one of thinking the immanence of desiring-production to social production, molecular relations to molar politics. However, much of the role of reproductive work, of the family, and desire, is theorised primarily as an ‘archaism with a current function’ in Anti-Oedipus, and despiteA Thousand Plateau’s emphasis on the minor and molecular, the centrality of the axiom continues this tendency towards abstraction. Thus it is possible to see the way in which two limits of Deleuze and Guattari’s thought intersect, their tendency to periodise history without residual tension or remainder, and their tendency to posit reproduction as archaic with respect to production, limit their efficacy in the present. What is needed is a more overdetermined and asynchronous account of capitalism, and an understanding of how its axioms and social relations, its ultra-objective violence, intersect with and are sustained by the codes of social reproduction, and their corresponding forms of ultra-subjective violence. In this task Sibertin-Blanc’s book provides an immense guide, showing how a rigorous reading of Deleuze and Guattari can produce not just new concepts, but new relations between concepts.

References

Balibar, Étienne 2010, Violence et civilité. Wellek Library Lectures et autres essais de philosophie politique, Paris: Éditions Galilée.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari 1983 [1972], Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated by Robert Hurleyet al., Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari 1987 [1980], A Thousand Plateaus, translated by Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Jameson, Fredric 2009, ‘Deleuze and Dualism’, in Valences of the Dialectic, London: Verso.

Marx, Karl 1977 [1867], Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Volume One, translated by Ben Fowkes, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Masset, Thibault 2013, La violence chez Deleuze-Guattari et Balibar: mode de production, subjectivation et politique, Kindle Edition, Paris: Presses universitaires de France.

Sibertin-Blanc, Guillaume 2010, Deleuze et L’anti-Œdipe: la production du désir, Paris: Presses universitaires de France.

[1] Sibertin-Blanc 2010, p. 98.

[2] Balibar 2010, p. 34.

[3] Masset 2013, location 2042.

[4] Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p. 429.

[5] Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p. 447.

[6] Jameson 2009, p. 198.

[7] Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p. 20.

[8] Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p. 88.

[9] Marx 1977, p. 899.

[10] Deleuze and Guattari 1983, p. 263.

[11] Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p. 431.

edited by Colin Barker and David Nicholls

CONTENTS

Editors’ Introduction – Colin Barker and David Nicholls

Shifting Trajectories: Perry Anderson’s Changing Account of the Pattern of English Historical Development – Robert Looker

Some Notes on Perry Anderson’s ‘Figures of Descent’ – John Saville

A Subordinate Bourgeoisie’? The Question of Hegemony in Modern British Capitalist Society – David Nicholls

In Pursuit of the Anderson Thesis – David Coates

A Review of China and the 21st Century Crisis by Minqi Li

Burak Gürel

Department of Sociology, Koç University, Istanbul

bgurel@ku.edu.tr

Abstract

This essay discusses Minqi Li’s 2016 book on China. Li’s study examines China’s transition to capitalism since the late 1970s, and class-struggles during and after that transition. By linking this transition with the crisis of the capitalist world economy in the second half of the 1970s, Li provides a solid analysis of China’s transformation as the main provider of a ‘spatial fix’ to world capitalism since the early 1980s. The analysis of the forthcoming end of the China-centred spatial fix and the resulting intensification of the crisis tendencies of world capitalism is an important contribution of Li’s study. This essay also points to several shortcomings of the book, among which the absence of deeper reflection on the problems of the theory of ‘socialism in one country’, an uncritical reading of the Maoist legacy, and failure to distinguish socialism from the rejection of neoliberalism appear the most important ones.

Keywords

China – capitalism – crisis – Maoism – spatial fix

Minqi Li, (2016) China and the 21st Century Crisis, London: Pluto Press.

Minqi Li is one of the most prominent figures of the contemporary Chinese left. Coming from a relatively privileged family background, Li received a strict neoliberal, ‘Chicago School’ type economics education at Beijing University between 1987 and 1990. Like many members of his generation, he participated in the ‘democracy movement’ of workers and students that culminated in the Tiananmen Square protests that lasted between 15 April and 4 June 1989. In contrast to the great majority of the movement’s participants, who fell prey to a depoliticisation process and a right turn following the suppression of the movement by the state, Li took the opposite path. Impressed by working-class militancy during the protests and disillusioned by the political inability of the liberal leadership of the student movement to unite with the workers effectively and seize the revolutionary momentum,[1] Li quickly abandoned liberalism and became a Marxist. Due to a speech he gave at the campus soon after the suppression of Tiananmen, Li was expelled from Beijing University and imprisoned between 1990 and 1992. In Li’s own words, during this process he ‘became a leftist, a socialist, a Marxist, and eventually, a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist’.[2]

Li views himself as part of the ‘Chinese New Left’, a loose term referring to a diverse group of intellectuals and activists with a critical stance towards China’s capitalist transformation that refuses to label the 1949–78 period simply as one of economic disaster and unproductive political extremism, and tries to articulate a left-wing alternative built through critical engagement with that experience. As Li notes, ‘today, it is virtually impossible for someone in China to be a leftist without also being some sort of a Maoist (with the only exception of some young Trotskyites).’[3] Although it is true that the majority of Chinese leftists defend certain aspects of Maoism, it seems more accurate to characterise their politics as social-democratic rather than Maoist. From their perspective, reclaiming and reinterpreting certain aspects of the Maoist legacy (such as national independence, land reform, egalitarianism, and ‘mass line’ politics) is necessary in order to reshape the current Chinese political economy along social-democratic lines. However, defending more radical interpretations of Maoism (as a politics of socialist revolution squarely opposed to the contemporary political regime) is out of the question.[4] Minqi Li diverges from this dominant tendency. Although Li seems inclined to give certain concessions to a social-democratic line, a position criticised below, he takes socialist revolution as a serious possibility for today’s China and the broader world and tries to develop Marxist theory in a way that contributes to this endeavour.

Li left China in 1994 and finished his PhD in Economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 2002. He is currently a faculty member at the Department of Economics at the University of Utah. Both institutions are among the (very) few economics departments in Western academia where neoclassical economics is not viewed as the unquestioned truth and Marxist political economy is part of the curriculum and informs research activities. During the last two decades, Li has researched a number of key questions through engaging with various strands of the historical-materialist tradition. He has investigated the tendency of the rate of profit to fall in the contemporary world from a classical-Marxist perspective; analysed long waves and shifting centres of capital accumulation, centre-periphery relations, and the rise and fall of hegemonic states from a world-systems perspective; and engaged with the question of ecological crisis and sustainability in a dialogue with the related literature. He has analysed China’s past and possible future paths with reference to these broader questions. For these reasons, Li’s work deserves close attention and scrutiny.

Li’s first book, titled The Rise of China and the Demise of the Capitalist World Economy, was published in 2008.[5] In 2016 he published his second book, titled China and the 21st Century Crisis, which is the main focus of this review essay. This new book provides a comprehensive historical-materialist analysis of the national, global, historical and contemporary aspects of the rise of China in the world-capitalist system since the 1980s. It starts with a brief discussion of the factors behind late-imperial and republican China’s century-long crisis and its resolution after the revolution of 1949. Li identifies the failure to mobilise the agrarian surplus for industrialisation and military modernisation as the fundamental reason for this decline and China’s subordinate incorporation into the world-capitalist system after its defeat in the First Opium War (1839–42). He stresses the fact that rapid industrialisation (through the effective mobilisation of the agrarian surplus) and human development (through the nationwide expansion of healthcare and education services by the state and rural collectives) during the Mao era prepared the material conditions for the spectacular rise of the Chinese economy since the 1980s (pp. 16–17).[6]

In addition to these Mao-era achievements, Li identifies two other factors behind the post-1980 boom of the Chinese economy. These are, first, the end of the post-WWII economic boom in the mid-1970s and, second, China’s transition to capitalism in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Declining profit rates forced the core and semi-peripheral countries to relocate a significant portion of their industries to peripheral countries where labour costs are low. In line with Giovanni Arrighi,[7] Li notes that cheap labour is a necessary but not sufficient condition of such massive relocation. Peripheral countries should also have decent infrastructure and a sufficiently skilled labour force in order to be able to absorb massive industrial investment. Due to the Mao-era achievements, by the early 1980s China was the only sizeable region in the periphery that could simultaneously provide quality infrastructure and cheap and semi-skilled labour to foreign capital. Referring to David Harvey’s concept of ‘spatial fix’, Li argues that China appeared as the best candidate to provide this type of solution to a world-capitalism in trouble (pp. 72–7, 176–9).

World capitalism was unable to benefit from this sort of spatial fix as long as China kept along its non-capitalist path. Hence, China’s transition to capitalism was the second factor that allowed it to receive large quantities of foreign capital, to become the workshop of the world, and to sustain high economic growth rates for the next three decades. The impasse of building socialism in one backward country and the related bureaucratisation of the party-state prepared the conditions that facilitated the transition to capitalism under Deng Xiaoping’s leadership after December 1978. Capitalist restoration started with the dismantling of the rural collectives, introduction of capitalist-style management practices in state-owned enterprises, and the opening up to foreign direct investment during the 1980s. The defeat of the protest movement of urban workers and students after the Tiananmen massacre on 4 June 1989 eliminated an important obstacle to the deepening of capitalist restoration. This made possible the privatisation of a substantial portion of state-owned enterprises and the elimination of the employment guarantee and other gains of the urban state-sector workers (known as the ‘iron rice bowl’) in the 1990s. The party-state bureaucracy transformed itself into a capitalist class in this process. State and collective assets (created before the 1980s) worth about US$5 trillion were transferred to this new bourgeoisie through privatisation. As a result, by 2006, about 2,900 of the 3,200 people with personal property worth over US$15 million in China were children of senior party-state officials (pp. 19–23, 32–4).

Li’s study empirically explains how China provided a ‘spatial fix’, and therefore a temporary breathing space, for the core and the semi-peripheral capitalist countries by undertaking greater amounts of low-wage manufacturing activities from the 1980s on. For Li, China’s transition from the periphery to the semi-periphery is not yet complete and it therefore continues to provide a ‘spatial fix’ to world capitalism (pp. 73–5). On the other hand, Li predicts that China will join the semi-periphery within a decade, which implies the end of the China-centred spatial fix for world capitalism. South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa are unable to substitute for China as suppliers of an equally large economic surplus to the core and semi-periphery due to their problems of weak infrastructure, a comparatively-unskilled labour force, political instability, and ecological constraints (pp. 77, 179). According to Li, this implies that ‘“spatial fixes” as a historical strategy to revive the capitalist world system has reached its limit’ (p. 75). Deprived of significant surplus extraction from the periphery outside of China, the core regions would experience comparatively greater socio-political instability (p. 77).

China’s transition into the semi-peripheral zone constitutes only one aspect of the structural challenges confronting world capitalism. Li provides us with a detailed empirical analysis of the ongoing crisis tendencies of the world economy. He elaborates on several factors constraining the profit rate, such as the over-accumulation of capital (pp. 79–85), which is central in Marx’s theory of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall; wage increases won through workers’ struggles (pp. 6–7, 62, 68, 78, 183); and energy and environmental constraints (to which Li devotes Chapter 6 entirely). Based on the historical experience of British and American capitalisms, Li suggests that the leading capitalist economy has to sustain a profit rate that is significantly above 10% for the relatively stable operation of the world-capitalist system. He stresses as a fact the collapse of the profit rate in the US during the 1970s and 2007–9, which precipitated the advent of two major world-economic crises. Li then adds that China’s profit rate was 12% in 2012 and has been declining since then. According to Li’s projection, which he admits to being ‘too optimistic’, China’s profit rate will decline below 12% after 2022 and below 10% after 2028 (pp. 86–91). Given the fact that China accounted for almost one-third of global economic growth between 2003 and 2013 and has replaced the US as the greatest contributor to global economic growth since 2008 (p. 98), declining profitability of the Chinese economy signals the strengthening of crisis tendencies within the world economy as a whole. Although Li does not discuss it in explicit terms, this also suggests that it is very difficult, if not altogether impossible, for China to become the new hegemon of the world system. With a declining (US-centred) core and a (China-centred) semi-periphery unable to rise in limitless fashion, world capitalism would face formidable challenges to achieving long-term stability.

In these circumstances, the struggles of the subaltern classes tend to become more widespread and intense. Li starts his book by emphasising that since the start of the world-economic crisis in 2008, ‘mass protests and popular rebellions have transformed the political map throughout the world’ (p. 1). Although China has not witnessed a regime-threatening mass movement since 1989, Li suggests that the country’s transformation into the workshop of the world has eventually led to the rise of workers’ struggles. After more than two decades of labouring under hazardous conditions and repressive management to earn meagre wages, Chinese workers have been waging increasingly militant struggles against capital in recent years. In line with the recent labour-movement scholarship on China,[8] Li underlines the important role played by the new generation of migrant workers (who are registered as rural households but actually work in urban industries) in labour-struggles of today. This new generation is better educated, more determined to stay in the cities, and it therefore has higher consumption standards than the older generations and is more inclined to view class struggle as the main means of meeting its material needs. Demographic factors such as the depletion of rural surplus labour and the decline of the total labour force increase its bargaining power. The approaching end of the era of rapid economic growth under the pressure of the world crisis makes the capitalists of China increasingly incapable of meeting the demands of this new proletarian generation (pp. 28–9).

Li views the increase in the number of ‘mass incidents’ (from 8,700 in 1993 to 60,000 in 2003 and 120,000 in 2008) and various violations of ‘social order’ (from 3.2 million in 1995 to 11.7 million in 2009 and 13.9 million in 2012) as empirical proof of the increasing trend of proletarian and popular struggles in China (p. 182). He compares contemporary China with the experiences of several earlier industrialisers of the semi-periphery (including Brazil, Poland and South Korea) since the end of WWII. The conclusion of this comparison is clearly optimistic. Unlike these countries, which experienced economic crisis in the 1980s and 1990s, ‘when global revolution was in retreat and neoliberalism was advancing in every geographic area in the world’ (p. 40), Li asserts that ‘the coming economic and political crisis of Chinese capitalism will take place as the structural crisis of the global capitalist system is approaching’ (p. 41).

At the end of the book, Li puts forward three possible scenarios for the future of China. The first scenario is the revival of the socialist model of development by the CCP leadership under growing popular pressure but without a regime change and the upheavals involved under such circumstances. The second scenario is the collapse of the present regime and transition to a formal liberal democracy. The final scenario is a long-term and general socio-political collapse and a civil war in the worst case (similar to the pre-1949 period). In light of the purge of the relatively ‘left-wing’ faction of the CCP represented by Bo Xilai (the former Politburo member and party secretary of the Chongqing Municipality) in 2012, Li views the first scenario as highly unlikely. On the other hand, he draws a much more optimistic picture regarding the final outcome of the other two apparently chaotic and painful scenarios. Despite enormous challenges, Li expects a revolutionary re-organisation and unity of the subaltern classes, which would lead to the victory of socialism in China (pp. 183–5).

Li’s work deserves much appreciation for its broad scope, distance from dominant mainstream (non/anti-Marxist) approaches in the literature on the Chinese political economy, and empirically-grounded arguments. Having said this, some parts of the book deserve criticism. My criticism will proceed from relatively minor to major problems with the book.

First, although the explanation of the crisis of the capitalist economy is one of the main preoccupations of his book, Li’s crisis theory suffers from eclecticism. Li mentions three main crisis-theories, underconsumption theory, profit-squeeze theory, and Karl Marx’s theory of the ‘law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall’ (pp. 3, 43–4, 48–51), without saying which one provides the correct/best explanation. It is a well-established fact that these theories provide significantly different (and oftentimes opposite) explanations of the crisis. For instance, according to underconsumption theory, lack of effective demand for consumption goods is the main factor starting major crises. This is not the case for the theory based on the tendency of the profit-rate to fall, which argues that since the exploitation of labour is the only source of profit, increasing organic composition of capital through the substitution of capital for labour periodically leads to falls in the rate of profit and causes economic crisis. As the decline in the profit-rate would eventually lead to a decline in both capital investment and labour employment, the effective demand for capital and consumer goods would also decline and thereby aggravate the crisis. In short, whereas effective demand is the chief factor in initiating an economic crisis according to underconsumption theory, it is an intervening factor but not the chief cause of the crisis according to the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.[9] These are not simply theoretical differences. They have important implications for socialist politics. In contrast to underconsumption theory which ‘stresses the commonality of interests between capital and labour’, Marxism underscores that ‘labour’s gains are capital’s losses and thus contribute to the objective weakening of capitalism rather than to its strengthening.’[10] Therefore, the lack of a clear comparison of crisis-theories is apparent as a shortcoming of Li’s book.

Second, the neglect of the place of the peasantry in the class alliance behind the restoration of capitalism in China is another problem with the book. Li is right in stressing the significance of the urban middle class’ enthusiastic support for capitalist restoration (pp. 22–3). He suggests that, especially after the repression of Tiananmen in 1989, the urban middle class’ pro-capital stance helped the state to isolate the state-sector workers politically, which eventually rendered them defenceless against successive waves of privatisation in the 1990s (pp. 23, 32). Although these arguments sound valid, what is missing in Li’s account is a clear analysis of the position of the peasantry. Regarding the Chinese peasantry of the 1980s, Li suggests that ‘agriculture was the weakest link of the traditional socialist system. Agricultural privatization in the early 1980s was met with little resistance from the peasants (though the official propaganda that the peasants enthusiastically supported privatization was mostly unfounded)’ (p. 23). This point is also valid but insufficient. Official propaganda claiming that the decollectivisation of agriculture was a bottom-up movement initiated and supported by the peasantry is wrong, because it hides the top-down character of the reform in which the party-state leadership used harsh administrative measures against the (not so few) villagers and rural cadres resisting decollectivisation in many regions.[11]

However, recognising the problems of the official propaganda should not lead us to miss the central importance of rural support for the initial pro-capital reforms. The Chinese leadership was well aware that agricultural decollectivisation was not enough to establish pro-capital hegemony over the peasantry. Therefore, as soon as the decollectivisation reform started, the state increased the purchase price of all major agricultural products and decreased agricultural taxes significantly. In fact, agriculture’s terms of trade against industry (which were very unfavourable before 1978, for the purpose of effecting primitive socialist accumulation) improved significantly until the completion of decollectivisation in 1984.[12] Hence, although decollectivisation and price policy were virtually separate areas, the Chinese leadership presented them as components of a single reform package. Hence, huge increases in agricultural prices became a decisive factor behind winning the peasantry to the reform camp.[13] Although the initial spike in agricultural prices was not sustained to the same extent after 1984, the improvement of the peasants’ lot until then was significant enough to keep the peasantry away from any anti-regime mobilisation. This helped the Chinese state significantly when suppressing the workers and students in 1989.[14] In his previous book, Li suggests that in the early 1980s,

Peasants’ incomes also grew rapidly, in fact, more rapidly than the incomes of the urban households […] As the availability of food and other agricultural goods improved, the urban working class also enjoyed a rapid improvement in living standards and began to have access to various modern consumer durables. With these temporary concessions made to the workers and peasants, Deng Xiaoping and the ‘reformers’ were able to consolidate their political power.[15]

This is the only place where Li engages with the question of economic concessions provided by the state and the political orientation of the lower classes in the 1980s. However, he does not explain why urban workers and peasants had significantly different political dispositions in the late 1980s. In neither of his two books does Li provide a systematic analysis of the material basis of the diverse political orientations of the urban proletariat and the peasantry, which seriously impacted the outcome at the critical juncture of 1989. Lack of attention to this question is an important shortcoming of Li’s work.

Finally, Li’s analysis of the so-called socialist regimes of the twentieth century in general and the Maoist experience in particular suffers from a number of problems. After recognising their successes in ‘achieving both effective capital accumulation and improvement of people’s living standards’, he continues:

However, by the 1970s and the 1980s, socialist states were squeezed between rising labor and resources costs and their inability to compete with the core capitalist countries on the technology frontier. The Communist Party’s ruling elites took advantage of the economic crisis to dismantle the socialist social contract and complete the capitalist transition (p. 185).

Here Li is basically referring to the failure of the practice of ‘socialism in one country’ from Eastern Europe to East Asia. Li makes his point more explicit elsewhere:

The only conceivable alternative would require the Chinese Party and state elites to give up a substantial portion of their material privileges. By sharing material hardships with the working class and continuing to provide workers and peasants with basic social security, the Communist Party leadership might be able to convince the great majority of the population to live within a relatively closed socialist system for a prolonged period of time. If China were to follow this alternative path, it might create a relatively favorable political environment for a new wave of global revolution when neoliberalism enters its own major crisis. The Cuban experience after 1990 has demonstrated that it is possible for a socialist state surrounded by neoliberal capitalism to maintain the basic socialist framework for several decades, provided that the Communist Party leadership was willing to sacrifice its own material interests. But in the absence of a major socialist revolution in a big country, even Cuba has been under growing pressure to undertake neoliberal-style ‘economic reform.’ In China, with the end of the Cultural Revolution, the majority of the Party and state bureaucrats had abandoned their original revolutionary ideals. Any development strategy that demanded the sacrifices of the ruling elites became politically unfeasible (pp. 35–6).

The similarity between Li’s point and Leon Trotsky’s pioneering analysis of the Soviet Union (the only ‘socialist state’ of the time) in his The Revolution Betrayed (1936) is striking.[16] Trotsky was the first Marxist thinker who provided a systematic analysis of the structural limitations and inevitable collapse of the model of ‘socialism in one country’. He also pointed to the possibility of this model’s transition back to capitalism through a metamorphosis of the ruling bureaucracy into a bourgeoisie. According to Trotsky, socioeconomic privileges and the political power of the Stalinist bureaucracy were closely related to the relative isolation and economic backwardness of the Soviet Union. He predicted that as long as it remained isolated, the Soviet Union would come under increasing economic and military pressure from the advanced capitalist countries. After an initial investment-driven economic boom, the country would sooner or later suffer from economic stagnation and crises. Trotsky argued that should the working class fail to overthrow the bureaucracy through a ‘political revolution’ and combine socialist construction in the country with a clearly internationalist policy to accomplish world revolution (for which the reconstruction of the Communist International was absolutely necessary), the ruling bureaucracy might view capitalist restoration as a way to overcome the impasse of ‘socialism in one country’.[17] Although Li’s analysis has idealistic tones (especially when he talks about the bureaucrats’ ‘abandoning [of] their original revolutionary ideals’), he clearly attempts to underline this causal relationship between economic backwardness and isolation and capitalist restoration. Interestingly, there is not a single reference to Trotsky’s work in Li’s book.

This omission seems to be related to a deeper problem in Li’s analysis of the past and present of Chinese socialism. Li glosses over Mao Zedong’s responsibility in the degeneration of Chinese socialism and places the blame exclusively at the door of Deng Xiaoping and his fellow capitalist-roaders. This approach is clearly visible in his remarks regarding the Cultural Revolution. For Li, in the early years of the Cultural Revolution, large sections of the population enjoyed de facto freedom of speech and association. Mass organizations took over power in many cities. Many were inspired by the aspiration for a truly democratic and egalitarian socialist society (p. 30).

He then goes on to explain its failure:

Unable to win the support from the majority of the Party and state bureaucrats, Mao Zedong made one last attempt to save the revolution by directly calling upon the workers and the young students to rebel against the bureaucracy. But the workers and the student rebels were politically inexperienced and divided. The Party and state bureaucrats survived the initial panic and organized counter-attacks. In many cities, the army intervened to support the established bureaucrats. Radical workers and student rebels were brutally repressed. By 1969, the radical phase of the Cultural Revolution came to an end (p. 18).

Li then stresses the unsustainability of China’s hostility to both the US and the USSR during the 1960s. He adds that China started to import technology from the West and Japan and normalised its diplomatic relations with the US during the 1970s, before Mao’s death (pp. 18–19).

The problem with Li’s narrative is his exoneration of Mao(ism) from any responsibility for these events. As Yiching Wu’s careful research on rebel politics during the Cultural Revolution demonstrates, these organisations indeed represented a genuine attempt to counter the growing problem of bureaucratisation and establish a truly democratic socialism. In a political context where explicitly non-Maoist discourse was not allowed and all political organisations (including those waging bloody fights against each other) had to formally present themselves as Maoist, rebel organisations also used a specific interpretation of Maoism to enlist the working masses for anti-bureaucratic mobilisation. As Wu shows, by using an increasingly critical tone against the party-state and insisting upon continuing mass mobilisation until the establishment of a genuine socialist democracy through direct representation of the workers and peasants (with frequent references to the example of the Paris Commune), rebel politics soon trespassed the boundaries set by Mao himself. That is why, instead of countering it, the Maoist leadership actually supported the army’s bloody repression of these rebels.[18] Wu carefully demonstrates the causal links between the suppression of the rebels in 1968–9, the ensuing de-radicalisation/degeneration in the 1970s, and capitalist restoration after 1978.[19] In addition to suppressing the anti-bureaucratic socialist mobilisation, Mao and his allies also insisted on the unscientific description of the USSR as an imperialist and fascist country[20] and gradually established an anti-Soviet axis with the US in the 1970s, which helped the eventual victory of capitalist restoration in China.[21] Neglecting these factors is an important shortcoming of Li’s book.

The political significance of this shortcoming regarding the Maoist experience becomes clear in Li’s discussion of left-politics in contemporary China. Li concludes his book by stating that, ‘as capitalism ceases to be a viable economic and social system, humanity will have to ask if there is any economic and social alternative to socialism, however socialism will come to be defined in the twenty-first century’ (p. 192). Li’s emphasis on the actuality of socialism is laudable. However, his expression ‘however socialism will come to be defined’ requires some caution since he apparently has quite a broad definition of socialism. Li notes that the CCP faction led by Bo Xilai ‘advocated greater state control of the economy and some redistribution of wealth from the capitalist class to the working class’ (p. 36). Other observers similarly defined Bo Xilai’s so-called ‘Chongqing model’ as one based on the mixed economy aiming to pursue complementary growth of the state sector and (national and foreign) private capital.[22] A mixed economy with some redistribution is hardly socialism! Hence, Li’s praise of the ‘Chongqing model’ throughout the book (pp. 1, 15, 36–8, 192) is hardly compatible with his view of socialism as the only viable alternative to capitalism. It gives the impression that he confuses the rejection of neoliberalism with socialism.

In the light of the failures of Stalinism, social democracy, and left-populism, which have led to the disillusionment of the masses with socialist politics in the past and today, distinguishing socialism from other left-projects by stressing its strictly anti-capitalist, egalitarian, democratic and internationalist character is immensely important. Doing otherwise would risk the workers in China and elsewhere undergoing similar tribulations yet again, which would sooner or later help capitalism to recover from its crises. Hence, reading Li’s valuable work critically will help us to think deeply about socialist politics in contemporary China and elsewhere.

References

Ali, S. Mahmud 2005, US-China Cold War Collaboration, 1971–1989, Abingdon: Routledge.

Arrighi, Giovanni 2007, Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the 21st Century,London: Verso.

Bramall, Chris 1995, ‘Origins of the Agricultural “Miracle”: Some Evidence from Sichuan’, The China Quarterly, 143: 731–55.

Bramall, Chris 2004, ‘Chinese Land Reform in Long‐Run Perspective and in the Wider East Asian Context’, Journal of Agrarian Change, 4, 1/2: 107–41.

Carchedi, Guglielmo 2011, ‘Behind and Beyond the Crisis’, International Socialism, 132, available at: <http://isj.org.uk/behind-and-beyond-the-crisis/>.

Day, Alexander F. 2013, ‘A Century of Rural Self-Governance Reforms: Reimagining Rural Chinese Society in the Post-Taxation Era’, The Journal of Peasant Studies, 40, 6: 929–54.

Editorial Departments of Renmin Ribao,Hongqi andJiefangjun Bao 1970, ‘Leninism or Social-Imperialism? – In Commemoration of the Centenary of the Birth of the Great Lenin’,Peking Review, 17: 5–15.

Gray, Jack 1990, Rebellions and Revolutions: China from the 1800s to the 1980s, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Huang, Philip C.C. 1990, The Peasant Family and Rural Development in the Yangzi Delta, 1350–1988, Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Huang, Philip C.C. 2011, ‘Chongqing: Equitable Development Driven by a “Third Hand”?’, Modern China, 37, 6: 569–622.

Hung, Ho-fung 2016, The China Boom: Why China Will Not Rule the World, New York: Columbia University Press.

Li, Huaiyin 2009, Village China under Socialism and Reform: A Micro History, 1948–2008, Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Li, Minqi 2008, The Rise of China and the Demise of the Capitalist World Economy, London: Pluto Press.

Meisner, Maurice 2007, Mao Zedong: A Political and Intellectual Portrait, Cambridge: Polity Press.

O’Brien, Kevin J. and Lianjiang Li 2006, Rightful Resistance in Rural China, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Pun, Ngai and Huilin Lu 2010, ‘Unfinished Proletarianization: Self, Anger and Class Action of the Second Generation of Peasant-Workers in Reform China’, Modern China, 36, 5: 493–519.

Roberts, Michael 2016, The Long Depression: How It Happened, Why It Happened, and What Happens Next, Chicago: Haymarket Books.

Savran, Sungur 2013, Üçüncü Büyük Depresyon: Kapitalizmin Alacakaranlığı, İstanbul: Yordam Kitap.

Shaikh, Anwar 1978, ‘An Introduction to the History of Crisis Theories’, in US Capitalism in Crisis, New York: The Union for Radical Political Economics.

Sicular, Terry 1993, ‘Ten Years of Reform: Progress and Setbacks in Agricultural Planning and Pricing’, in Economic Trends in Chinese Agriculture: The Impact of Post-Mao Reforms, edited by Robert F. Ash and Y.Y. Kueh, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Silver, Beverly and Lu Zhang 2009, ‘China as an Emerging Epicenter of World Labour Unrest’, in China and the Transformation of Global Capitalism, edited by Ho-fung Hung, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Trotsky, Leon 1983 [1936], The Revolution Betrayed: What Is the Soviet Union and Where Is it Going?, translated by Max Eastman, New York: Pathfinder Press.

Vukovich, Daniel F. 2018, Illiberal China: The Ideological Challenge of the People’s Republic of China, Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan.

Walker, Kathy Le Mons 2006, ‘“Gangster Capitalism” and Peasant Protest in China: The Last Twenty Years’, The Journal of Peasant Studies, 33, 1: 1–33.

Wang, Hui 2009, The End of the Revolution: China and the Limits of Modernity, London: Verso.

Wang, Hui 2016, China’s Twentieth Century: Revolution, Retreat and the Road to Equality, edited by Saul Thomas, London: Verso.

Wu, Yiching 2014, The Cultural Revolution at the Margins: Chinese Socialism in Crisis, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Xu, Zhun 2012, ‘The Chinese Agriculture Miracle Revisited’, Economic and Political Weekly, 47, 14: 51–8.

Xu, Zhun 2013, ‘The Political Economy of Decollectivisation in China’, Monthly Review, 65, 1: 17–36.

Zhao, Yuezhi 2012, ‘The Struggle for Socialism in China: The Bo Xilai Saga and Beyond’, Monthly Review, 1 October, available at: <http://monthlyreview.org/2012/10/01/the-struggle-for-socialism-in-china/>.

[1]Lisuggeststhat ‘thestudentmovementhadthesupportofthegreatmajorityofurbanresidentsthroughoutthecountry. Topursuethisoption, however, theliberalintellectualsandstudentshadtobewillingandabletomobilizethefullsupportoftheurbanworkingclass. ThiswasaroutethattheChineseliberalintellectualssimplywouldnotconsider’ (Li 2008, p. xiii). WangHuimakesasimilardiagnosis,albeitwithaless-blamingtone: ‘Thefailureofthemovementisdirectlyattributabletoitsviolentsuppressionbythestate. Yet, indirectly, itisalsoattributabletothemovement’sinabilitytoestablishbridgesbetweendemandsfordemocraticpoliticsanddemandsforequality, aswellasitsinabilitytoformastablesocialforce. Thismadeitimpossibletolinkthemovement’sdirectgoalswithitsmaterialconditions’ (Wang 2009, p. 35).

[2]Li 2008, p. xiv.

[3]Li 2008, pp. xvi–xvii.

[4]TheworksofWangHui, probablythemostprominentfigureofthe ‘ChineseNewLeft’, arethebestexamplesofthissocial-democraticperspectiveanditsparticularreadingofMaoism (Wu 2009; Wu 2016). On the socio-political context of contemporary Chinese social democracy, see Vukovich 2018, pp. 54–6.

[5]Li 2008.

[6]AverysimilaranalysisofthehistoricalbackgroundofChina’srisesincethe 1980scanbefoundinHung 2016, pp. 34–51.

[7]Arrighi 2007, p. 351.

[8]SilverandZhang 2009; PunandLu 2010.

[9]Shaikh 1978.

[10]Carchedi 2011. ForagoodcomparisonofMarx’slawofthetendencyoftherateofprofittofallwithothercrisis-theories, seeRoberts 2016, pp. 9–30. OnthepoliticaldifferencebetweenMarxistandunderconsumptionisttheoriesofcrisis,seeSavran 2013, p. 168.

[11]Li 2009, pp. 267–8; Xu 2013.

[12]TerrySicularprovidesthebestempiricalaccountofthisruralpopulistturninChinabetween 1978 andthemid-1980s (Sicular 1993).

[13]ContrarytothestandardmainstreamaccountclaimingthatdecollectivisationplayedakeyroleinincreasingagriculturalproductivityinChinabetween 1978 and 1984, theavailableempiricalevidenceshowsnosignificantrelationshipbetweenthetwo (Bramall 1995; Huang 1990, pp. 222–51; Xu 2012). ItisthereforehardtodisagreewithChrisBramall’scontentionthat ‘theprimarymotivationbehindtheimpositionofdecollectivizationin 1982–3 wasundoubtedlypolitical. Deng’snewregimewaseagertobuildsupportinthecountryside, anddecollectivizationservedthatpurposebycreatinganewclassofcultivatorswhohadalargestakeinthenewsystem’ (Bramall 2004, p. 125). ItseemsclearthattheChinesegovernment’srapidincreaseoftheprocurementpricesoffarmproductsandsignificantcutsinagriculturaltaxessimultaneouslywiththedecollectivisationreformsignificantlyhelpedtolegitimisethelatterintheeyesofthevillagers.

[14]Ontheabsenceofthepeasantryfromtheprotestmovementsofthe 1980s,seeWang 2009, pp. 23, 28. Ontheemergenceoftheruralcrisisandtherisingtideofruralprotestinthe 1990s,seeDay 2013, p. 940; O’BrienandLi 2006; Walker 2006.

[15] Li 2008, p. 60.

[16]Trotsky 1983.

[17] ‘Thejuridicalandpoliticalstandardssetupbytherevolutionexercisedaprogressiveactionupontheback­wardeconomy, but upontheotherhandtheythemselvesfelttheloweringinfluenceofthatbackwardness. ThelongertheSovietUnionremainsinacapitalistenviron­ment, thedeeperrunsthedegenerationofthesocialfabric. A prolongedisolationwouldinevitablyendnotinna­tionalcommunism, butinarestorationofcapitalism (Trotsky 1983, pp. 300–1).

[18]ForsimilaraccountsdemonstratingMao’spersonalresponsibilityintherepressionoftherebelmovementin 1967 and 1968, seeGray 1990, pp. 353–65; Meisner 2007, pp. 178–86.

[19]Wu 2014. The major problem in Wu’s (otherwise very insightful) account is the absence of systematic analysis of the relationship between the PRC’s international isolation, economic backwardness (despite the strong growth performance during the Mao era), and the problem of bureaucratisation.

[20] Editorial Departments of Renmin Ribao,Hongqi andJiefangjun Bao 1970, p. 7.

[21] For a detailed analysis of the geopolitical dimensions and consequences of the Sino-American alliance against the Soviet Union, see Ali 2005. With its patronising and nationalistic attitude towards the PRC, Soviet bureaucracy (from Stalin to Brezhnev) played a significant role in the aggravation of Sino-Soviet relations. Ali’s book shows that both sides of the Sino-Soviet conflict sought the cooperation of the USA against the other and the PRC won that competition (Ali 2005, pp. 63–72). The Sino-Soviet conflict was one of the most shameful episodes of the history of the international left and played a significant role in the transition to capitalism from Eastern Europe to East Asia in the 1980s and 1990s. A Marxist analysis of it that goes beyond geopolitics is still lacking. We also lack a historical-materialist account of the relationship between the relatively backward, isolated and bureaucratic character of the PRC, the defeat of the anti-bureaucratic movements in the late 1960s, the Sino-American alliance of the 1970s and the PRC’s gradual transition to capitalism from the late 1970s onward.

[22]Huang 2011; Zhao 2012.

A Review of Ancient Irrigation Systems of the Aral Sea Area: The History, Origin, and Development of Irrigated Agriculture by Boris V. Andrianov, andSoviet Archaeology: Schools, Trends, and History by Leo S. Klejn

Marcus Bajema

Independent Researcher, The Hague, Netherlands

mjbajema@hotmail.com

Abstract

In this review-article, I discuss one aspect of the history of Soviet science, that of archaeology. This subject has not received much attention, but nevertheless should be of interest to Marxists today, both for its successes and its failures. The two books under review are complementary, in that one gives a general picture of the initial development and mature existence of Soviet archaeology, while the other presents the fruits of a specific research project in Central Asia. Further thoughts are added on what the findings of Soviet archaeologists have to offer contemporary Marxism, especially with regard to comparative studies of early class societies.

Keywords

Marxism – archaeology – Soviet Union – Khorezm

Boris V. Andrianov, (2016) Ancient Irrigation Systems of the Aral Sea Area: The History, Origin, and Development of Irrigated Agriculture, edited by Simone Mantellini with the collaboration of C.C. Lamberg-Karlovsky and Maurizio Tosi, Oxford: Oxbow Books,

Leo S. Klejn, (2012) Soviet Archaeology: Schools, Trends, and History, translated by Rosh Ireland and Kevin Windle, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

As noted by Leo Klejn in his book, Soviet archaeology has by and large remained what he terms a ‘Great Unknown’ in the West.[1] Examples to back up this statement are not hard to find in the literature. One book that explores the relationship between archaeology and Marxism in general ignores the USSR, without providing any explanation for this.[2] Similarly, a review-article on the same topic holds Soviet archaeology to be intrinsically uninteresting because of the dogmatism that results from state interference.[3] Even a more sympathetic account of the archaeology of the USSR remains oblique.[4] In general, despite a few exceptions, in-depth engagements with one of the main forces of twentieth-century archaeology are simply lacking.[5]

          This is unfortunate, as the October Revolution provided the impetus for the encounter of Marxism and archaeology. Marxism had not seen any significant engagement with archaeology at a methodological level before 1917. Some of the early Soviet work in the 1930s was pioneering for the discipline as a whole, such as the sociological interpretation of artefacts or the use of scientific techniques to study the history of tools.[6] The impact of this encounter was felt beyond the borders of the Soviet Union, either through its impact on a Western archaeologist such as Gordon Childe,[7] or directly through the scientific ties between socialist nations.[8] The pivotal role of Soviet archaeology demands an understanding of its characteristics, whether or not one agrees with its positions. Furthermore, there existed considerable diversity in the Marxist approaches of different Soviet archaeologists, and their work should not be conflated with Stalinist dogma.

          The two books reviewed here therefore provide a much-needed service, even if they are translations of works published much earlier.[9] New chapters have been added to Klejn’s book, however, and the Andrianov volume benefits from the helpful explanatory essays that have been added to it. Both men began their career in archaeology in the last years of Stalin and can be seen as insider figures of Soviet archaeology. Klejn’s book discusses the schools and ideas of Soviet archaeology as a whole, as well as its personalities and debates. By contrast the work of Andrianov is very specific in providing an account of ancient irrigation systems in the Aral Sea area, one that is explicitly guided by Marxism-Leninism. The two books complement each other in that one discusses general ideas, while the other outlines the application of specific ideas within the setting of a major Soviet research project.

Soviet Archaeology and its Phases

Before turning to Soviet archaeology proper, it is necessary to establish the preconditions for the encounter between Marxism and archaeology. Interestingly, both evinced important parallels in their initial development in the nineteenth century. Both derived from the Enlightenment, yet in separate ways they each also initiated significant breaks with it. In the case of archaeology, in the nineteenth century it developed the Three Age system of stone, bronze, and iron ages. This build upon earlier ideas put forward by Mercati and others in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which were themselves partially derived from the Epicurean work De rerum natura by the Roman poet Lucretius.[10] In the Renaissance and Enlightenment, the ideas of Lucretius were extended beyond archaeology to broader, philosophical discourse on the development of society, as reflected in various schemes of stadialism.[11] These schemes indicated a new approach to history, but there was no scientific procedure to establish their validity.

          It was the method of ‘closed finds’ developed by Scandinavian archaeologists, starting with Thomsen, in the early nineteenth century that allowed for the scientific demonstration of the validity of the Three Age system.[12] ‘Closed finds’ refers to objects found together in archaeological contexts certain to be roughly contemporary, such as graves and hoards. Based on the copious archaeological material in the Danish national museum, Thomsen was able to determine that finds occurring together in closed contexts could be grouped into distinct sets. These distinct sets formed the basis for a sequence of stone, bronze, and iron ages, the absolute dates for which were set first by connections with historically-known cultures and later, in the twentieth century, by dating methods based on the physical sciences. Furthermore, through archaeological and other sources such as environmental studies, the characteristics of each of the three ages could be analysed in a more refined and reliable way than in the Greco-Roman and Enlightenment speculations on the contents of these stages.

          The subsequent demonstration of the enormous time-depth of the geological history of the earth, together with the establishment of the phases of the Old Stone Age (Palaeolithic), led to the emergence of archaeology as a rigorous scientific discipline. Another new development was that Marx and Engels went beyond stadialism in theoretical terms, by outlining with precision what lay behind the historical process: the fundamental role of social labour for the reproduction of humankind. By starting with the forces and relations of production, modes of production could be recognised. These modes of production in turn formed the economic basis for the political and ideological patterns of a variety of social formations. In a well-known passage from Capital, Marx outlined what this means for the reconstruction of history:

Relics of bygone instruments of labour possess the same importance for the investigation of extinct economic formations of society as do fossil bones for the determination of extinct species of animals. It is not what is made but how, and by what instruments of labour, that distinguishes different economic epochs. Instruments of labour not only supply a standard of the degree of development which human labour has attained, but they also indicate the social relations within which men work.[13]

This passage of Marx is pregnant with implications for archaeology, and the usefulness of that discipline for Marxist understandings of history. However, while Marx and Engels clearly saw the need for knowledge about the pre-capitalist past, archaeology as a discipline remained firmly within the institutional clutches of nation states. Changing intellectual trends in the later nineteenth century resulted in archaeology becoming dominated by cultural-historical approaches, including in imperial Russia.[14] At a technical level the methods developed by Scandinavian archaeologists were used to delineate regional variations in a much more refined way, by distinguishing sets of finds not just by age but also by their cultural distinctiveness from contemporary neighbours. The cultural-historical approach, though far from uniform, favoured highly particularistic accounts of cultures and explained change by reference to ethnic migrations. The October Revolution provided a break with this pattern in creating a new kind of state animated by Soviet power, which in turn led to a new kind of archaeology. Klejn looks at Soviet archaeology from different perspectives: generations, personalities, and research trends and debates. There is a clear advantage in this, as it allows him to give an intimate and multi-faceted account of the field in which he made his scholarly career.

Yet despite the clarity of his language, the book remains hard to grasp for outsiders, mainly because of the diffusion of discussion on what were distinct phases in the development of Soviet archaeology between different chapters on debates, personalities, and so on. This diffusion can be seen very well for the initial development of archaeology along Marxist guidelines in the late 1920s and 1930s. This topic is treated directly in seven different chapters on trends, debates and key personalities. Yet for the reader not well-versed in the period it is a challenge to piece together these different fragments into a coherent whole. For example, the crucial early role of RANION in the late 1920s and early 1930s is not discussed in depth, or even explained, but mentioned only in passing in the biographies of key figures.[15] Furthermore, Klejn notes how one of these individuals, the archaeologist A.V. Artsikhovsky, was later accused of following the ideas of Bukharin,[16] but no mention is made of the important role Bukharin played in RANION. In this way, the account given by Klejn remains oblique at points, owing to the diffusion of crucial episodes between a large number of chapters. A more conventional chronological account would have brought the different strands together, though at the cost of sacrificing some of the diversity highlighted by Klejn.

The history of Soviet archaeology begins with the signing by Lenin of the decree establishing the Russian Academy of the History of Material Culture (RAIMK, later renamed GAIMK) on 18 April 1919. Yet the engagement between Marxism and archaeology in the post-revolutionary period started slowly, owing to the material realities of the civil war and its aftermath. From Klejn’s book it becomes apparent that there are three features basic for an understanding of Soviet archaeology. The first of these factors is the continuous expansion of research in terms of the number and scale of expeditions and investment in field techniques and laboratory facilities, reflecting the priority given to science by the state. Second, archaeology in the USSR was defined and integrated institutionally as part of history departments. The ultimate aim of archaeological research was to contribute to resolving the great questions of history, rather than those of the natural sciences (as for many pre-revolutionary Russian archaeologists) or those of anthropology (as in the USA).

Finally, Klejn notes the pervasive atmosphere and language of struggle in Soviet praxis, both for socialism and against the forces opposing it.[17] Although he does not explicitly mention the term, it is hard to separate Klejn’s account of struggle from Lenin’s notion of partiinost, implying the necessity to take a position supporting the party and foregoing misguided pretensions of non-partisanship. This notion of struggle persisted throughout the life of the USSR, but was most pronounced, and carried the most serious consequences, during the years of Stalin, who adapted it for carrying out his Purges. The notion ofpartiinost and the Stalinist persecutions should not be conflated, however, as the latter precisely involved the establishment of the power of the bureaucracy that Lenin feared.[18]

Dialectically, the struggle for a Marxist archaeology also implied a struggle against something else, this something else being the pre-revolutionary cultural-historical archaeology that was focused on using archaeological materials to trace ethnically-based cultures and their migrations. This approach was now referred to pejoratively as ‘artefactology’, to be replaced by an approach that seeks to trace productive forces and social relations in different periods through archaeological finds. The photograph of an exhibition at GAIMK in 1933 in Klejn’s book visualises this shift in emphasis, which goes to the core of what archaeology is about as a discipline.[19] Instead of tracing ethnic groups, Soviet archaeologists would now pioneer new methods for analysing tools for use-wear, for reconstructing Palaeolithic settlements, and for inferring social relations from burials. These things would not be treated on a similar scale in Western archaeology until the 1960s.[20] Yet the adoption of such methods in Soviet archaeology was not simply a struggle to replace older ideas by new ones, it also involved intense struggles between individuals and institutions that in the end served to undermine the fruitful application of the new methods.

Initially the struggle for a sociological approach to archaeological remains, and, in parallel, the struggle against artefactology, was relatively clear-cut and limited to rhetorical attacks. However, in the 1930s the praxis of struggle in combination with Stalin’s purges led Soviet archaeology to go off the rails. The initial phase in this can be seen in the campaign against a group of Moscow archaeologists associated with RANION. In 1929 this group had put forward a set of ideas for a Marxist archaeology based on what they called the ‘ascending method’. In their vision archaeology could move from the reconstruction of productive forces (the base) through the remains of tools toward relations of production, political systems, and ideology (the superstructure). These ideas came under attack from Leningrad, where GAIMK researchers faulted the Moscow group for isolating archaeology from history. In their view, archaeology should concern itself solely with describing the remains it uncovers, and leave interpretation to history as an overarching discipline. The institute in which the Moscow group was working was disbanded, and its members forced to recant their ideas in order to join the new Moscow branch of GAIMK.

The Communist Party leadership of GAIMK favoured stadialism, grouping the archaeological remains together with other sources in a succession of modes of production. Their approach is different from the philosophical stadialism of the Enlightenment, while also adding what may be seen as a sociological approach to the technical stadialism of the Three Age system used in archaeology. These additions consisted of sophisticated causal explanations of historical change, as opposed to cultural-historical references to ethnicity, and the outline of modes of production. Yet the stadialism of the USSR in the 1930s is peculiar, and should be distinguished from other Marxist versions of stadialism. This is because the initial Soviet perspective on stadialism was shaped by the linguistic theories of N.I. Marr, who was one of the few prominent members of the Russian Academy of Sciences to welcome the Bolshevik revolution. Klejn describes Marr as being strong in literary philology but prone to flights of fancy in linguistics, focusing on doubtful reconstructions of phonetic correspondences between otherwise highly-distinct languages. These ideas were rejected by linguists in Russia and the West alike.

Marr’s initial ideas on the class character of works of literature were extended later to include language itself, thus not just linguistic expressions of ideology but phonetics itself had to be grasped through the lens of social relations. Hence the development of language can be included within a stadialist scheme of development, as noted by Klejn:

The Japhetic and Indo-European language families turned out to be not local formations, not groups of related languages (languages interconnected through their descent from a common ancestor), but ubiquitous stages in the development of speech. The foundation of this development was not a segmentation of ethnic groups and languages, not a division, but on the contrary hybridization and merging: from a multitude of tribal dialects, through a number of stages, to a future common language of humanity. Not only an identical pattern of thought, but allied to it a unified grammatical structure for languages at one and the same stage, was determined by economic and social similarity.[21]

Because of his support for Soviet power and his pre-revolutionary credentials, Marr’s star rose rapidly and he was to add leadership of GAIMK to that of the Oriental faculty. From this position of power, he employed the language of partiinost to establish his linguistic theories as the paramount ones in Soviet scholarship. The critics of his ideas were said to belong to the enemy camps of the West and of those stuck in pre-revolutionary mentalities, while Soviet science supposedly made breakthroughs in linguistics not limited by the old dogmas. Furthermore, in this phase of the history of the USSR the theories of Marr were in line with the Communist Party’s policies on nationalities, since, as Klejn notes, Stalin himself endorsed the future merging of all languages into a single one for all humankind.[22] The struggle in scholarly discourse mirrored that of power, and this would have ramifications beyond the propagation of erroneous theories like that of Marr. From the early 1930s archaeologists had been arrested for various reasons, especially in the Ukraine, but in 1937 with the coming of the Great Purge the GAIMK itself was liquidated and its Party leadership and their associates were executed. Archaeology was put back into the more conventional setting of the universities and the Academy.

The war then led to the loss of many more archaeologists. In its aftermath smaller purges picked off yet more people, now including the followers of Marr’s version of stadialism who were being accused of ‘cosmopolitanism’. The result of all this was that after its initial promising start, Soviet archaeology was severely hampered in its engagement with Marxism by the impact of ideological struggles for and against. Nowhere can this be seen better than for Stalin’s version of stadialism of the Short Course of 1938, with its succession of primitive-communal, slave-holding, feudal, capitalist, and socialist modes of production.[23] As an organising principle for a book on Soviet archaeology published in 1955 and translated into English in 1959, it presents a disjointed picture of the history of the lands that make up the USSR. Slices of the archaeological record are treated as exemplars of certain modes of production, such as the slave-holding states of the Greco-Roman northern Black Sea coast,[24] but no coherent thread emerges to connect the different parts. Here stadialism is upheld theoretically, but fails to persuade in practice. This was the result not just of ideology, for the materials of Soviet archaeology proved insufficient for a synthesis by the very sympathetic Marxist archaeologist Gordon Childe, as noted by Klejn.[25]

One interested outsider has noted that the key problem of Soviet archaeology was the inability to properly allow data to modify and rework its theories, owing to the constraining political factors.[26] Yet this neglects that in a socialist state, politics and scholarship are not readily separable, as the goals of understanding, criticising, and changing the world depend on each other. What matters, rather, are the specifics of the political programme being pursued. Klejn’s discussion of the post-Stalin developments in Soviet archaeology makes this clear. Especially after Khrushchev’s thaw the intensity of partiinost lessened, although it certainly did not disappear. For archaeology this meant the co-existence of multiple trends. As noted by Klejn,[27] the so-called ‘autochthonists’, who emphasised the long-term continuity of peoples, were the most powerful group in archaeology from the middle of the 1950s to the end of the USSR.

Based on the chauvinism of the late Stalin era and the rejection of Marr and ‘cosmopolitanism’, their work sought to boost patriotism by proving the autochthony of the Slavs and other important ethnic groups in the Union. Their work essentially retraced the methods of cultural history and its association with nationalism, albeit in the different context of Soviet power and its policy on nationalities. It was in this domain that struggle still played an important role, as can be seen in Klejn’s overview of the debate on the influence of the migrants from Scandinavia (the Varangians) on the medieval kingdom of Kievan Rus’.[28] Acknowledging the important role of these Varangians, an idea actually closer to Marxism than its opposite, carried with it the threat of persecution for its supposed anti-Soviet and unpatriotic stance.[29] Yet the focus on ethnicity was far from exempt from critical discussion, and never dominant in the sense of crowding out other approaches.

As discussed by Klejn,[30] new research trends emerged that improved methodology in the description of archaeological remains, the study of the technologies behind these remains, and in studying their ecological context. Marxism was not neglected either, its emphasis on a materialist account of history coexisting with the cultural-historical focus on ethnicity. Apart from a short-lived attempt under Khrushchev to try to reinstate Marr and his ideas, the main current through which Soviet archaeology engaged with Marxism was through a form of sociology, which had been banned by Stalin. Klejn calls this ‘archaeological sociology’, and criticises the trend for its separation of the archaeological remains and theoretical models, while also noting the willingness of its participants to engage with Western authors.[31] As the book by Andrianov is part of this trend, this criticism of Klejn will be addressed as part of the review of that book.

Ancient Khorezm and the Comparative Study of Irrigation-based Productive Forces

One shortcoming of Klejn’s book is that the major archaeological projects of Soviet archaeology are mentioned only in passing, as part of the careers of individuals or to illustrate a scholarly debate. The result is that his book sometimes seems quite abstract, rather than being rooted in what the trowel and the brush brought to light. It is here that the book by Andrianov on the irrigation systems of the Aral Sea area can be useful for providing a good example of Soviet archaeology getting to work on its materials. Andrianov’s work was part of the Khorezm Archaeological-Ethnographic Expedition (KhAEE), established under the auspices of the USSR Academy of Sciences in 1937. The term ‘Khorezm’, also known under its Greek rendering ‘Chorasmia’, refers to a large oasis region in the delta of the Amu-Darya (Oxus) river, presently divided between Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. In antiquity and medieval times Khorezm was home to an urban civilisation with a distinct state and intellectual tradition, forming part of a broader Iranian cultural sphere through linguistic affinity. The task of the KhAEE was to study the historical trajectory of this area from prehistory to the present, using a combination of large-scale excavation, aerial and field surveys, as well as ethnographic and environmental studies. To contrast this region with a nearby one, research was also carried out in the delta of the Syr-Darya (Jaxartes) river. The scale of research and the combination of different field methods were then without parallel in world archaeology, as noted by US scholar Lamberg-Karlovsky in one of the introductory articles to Andrianov’s book.[32]

Although initiated and led in its first decades by S.P. Tolstov, the KhAEE outlived him and work in the field continued until 1997. Its collective ethos of purpose, honed in the often-difficult conditions of fieldwork, allowed other individuals to develop their own research skills and interests within the signposts of the overall project. Andrianov’s work on irrigation is a good example of this, carried out in the field with Tolstov and guided by the priorities of Soviet science, but with the synthesis and conclusions formulated as befits a formidable scholar in his own right. It is important to emphasise that major field projects would serve to enable and direct individuals to pursue research topics, something left largely unaddressed in Klejn’s emphasis on personalities and ideas. Of course, the need to fund large-scale projects also raised their societal relevance. The prominent role for the study of irrigation by the KhAEE is connected by Andrianov to the drive to revitalise the lands of Central Asia after the revolution, based on a directive by Lenin.[33] In a ‘combined approach’ the historical component is indispensable for modern irrigation efforts, and in his conclusions Andrianov directly connects his research to Soviet policy.[34] The past is in this sense inseparable from the present, and it includes not just an understanding of the physical geography of the Khorezm region, but also the long-term societal development that took place there.

The key advantage of a project such as KhAEE is that it can allow for the development of a causal framework relating the natural environment to the development of the forces and relations of modes of production, as well as the political and ideological patterns of social formations. Andrianov’s perspective on this needs to be grasped in the context of 1960s Soviet geography. Whereas Stalin had initiated a struggle against ‘geographical determinism’ in the late 1930s, in the 1960s his view was explicitly rejected by the Party and, as a consequence, understanding the role of the natural environment in the development of society could be pursued anew.[35] Again, this shows the presence of living and creative versions of Marxism that were able to challenge Stalinist dogma. Key influences on Andrianov in this regard were the pre-revolutionary Russian geographers D.N. Anuchin and L.I. Mechnikov, the work on plant domestication by N.I. Vavilov, as well as the work of Marx and Engels (in particular the Dialectics of Nature and theAnti-Dühring). Contemporary scholars, both from the West and the USSR, also receive much attention.

Andrianov’s perspective clearly acknowledges the role of nature in shaping the development of society, yet he also explicitly rejects a mono-causal role for nature in social changes such as the collapse of states and urban civilisations.[36] He seeks to understand the interplay between the environment, technology, and ideological and political structures within a dialectical causal framework. Furthermore, this dialectical understanding of the relation between humans and nature is not something applied to the evidence after it has been gathered, but is intrinsic to the combined use of the methods of the natural and the social sciences. As much becomes clear in Andrianov’s conceptualisation of the landscape as an archaeological feature in itself:

The cultural landscape is a complex natural-historical formation, in which the effects of influences of different historical periods are gradually accumulated. In every historical period the influence of society on the environment has been limited by the degree of knowledge of natural laws and the level of technological development, which in turn was determined by the laws of social development. Under the influence of different forces, continuous changes take place in the environment, the result of which have an impact on the earth’s surface, space and time. Landscapes have their own history.[37]

Grasping the history of the landscapes of Khorezm and the Syr-Darya delta was made possible by the combined methods of aerial and field survey, environmental and ethnographic studies, and large-scale excavations. The strategy of research is inseparable from the theoretical perspective that informs it, calling into question the applicability to Andrianov’s work of Klejn’s notion that ‘sociological archaeology’ used models from outside archaeology in a cosmetic way. Clearly, the close interface between theory and practice of the ‘combined approach’ raises the question of how the findings are to be evaluated. Assuming a reasonable correspondence between the archaeological remains and the reconstructions of the KhAEE,[38] the criterion hinges on the coherence of the interpretation of the long-term historical development of the Khorezm and Syr-Darya delta areas. In this regard the book is a great success. While the terminology is that of ‘orthodox’ Marxism, the evidence from the field prevents its concepts from going stale. Like the desert soils being rejuvenated after receiving water from irrigation works, Andrianov’s conceptual apparatus gains a sharp, critical edge upon engaging with the archaeological evidence for the development of irrigation. This evidence entails not just Khorezm, but also similar cases from Eurasia, Africa and the Americas.

For the development of irrigation in general, Andrianov argues that it was coeval with the emergence of agriculture itself.[39] He follows Vavilov in recognising a number of distinct regions for the origin of plant cultivation, as illuminatingly illustrated in figure twelve.[40] In the initial development of irrigation, humans adapt their technological schemes to what nature has shown them to work. The themes of learning from natural examples and adapting ‘nature’s techniques’ recur at several points in Andrianov’s book, not least in the development of irrigation in Khorezm.[41] A distinction is made here between irrigation schemes adapting themselves to nature and those able to control the flow of water,[42] the latter being associated with the emergence of class society and the development of the Khorezmian state. Based on the archaeological research, Andrianov is able to recognise a succession of different irrigation techniques, each successively more complex.[43] These advances in the forces of production can be related to three different kinds of relations of production, which in succession are the prehistoric communal, the antique slave-owning, and the medieval feudal modes of production.

The evidence for the prehistoric period is limited, though some irrigation systems have been dated to the later second millennium BC and the first centuries of the first millennium BC. These were relatively small-scale systems adapted to natural features. Based on estimates of the length, width, and depth of the canals, Andrianov is able to estimate the amount of labour that would have been required to both construct them and to keep them from silting up. These estimates are based on the evidence from Sumerian texts that a working man with a metal shovel can move three cubic metres per day, lowered by Andrianov to two cubic metres per day for pre-metal periods. The amount of labour estimated for the best-known prehistoric irrigation system is estimated at around one hundred workers, congruent with the size of the excavated village next to it.[44] In very generic terms, Andrianov notes that the subsistence strategies of prehistory seem to resemble those of recent communities in the area such as the Karakalpaks.[45] He refrains, however, from using the ethnographic materials to infer relations of production for the prehistoric period. In general, Andrianov applies commendable caution when adequate sources are not available, noting the diverse possibilities offered by the limited evidence.

The next major period is that of antiquity (in Russian: antichnost),[46] which covers the sixth century BC through the fourth century AD. This period marks the emergence of cities, advanced craft-work, Zoroastrianism and sciences associated with it, and of course the state and class-society. Although at times forming part of the Achaemenid and Sassanid Persian empires, the Khorezmian state was mostly independent, and notably its capital Toprak-kala was excavated by KhAEE.[47] With the development of cities, there also emerged a countryside with farmsteads for the cultivation of grains and vines. The water that these plants required was supplied by new kinds of irrigation works that could draw water directly from the river, and which extended for tens or even hundreds of kilometres. The labour that went into constructing and maintaining different irrigation works was estimated by Andrianov at thousands of workers, in some areas more than the estimated population.[48] For him this implied the coordinating force of the state, the ability to compel that he had already inferred for ancient Egypt,[49] though others had earlier noted the possibility of communities working together to create a larger irrigation system.[50]

A number of arguments help to bolster Andrianov’s case, albeit indirectly as direct textual evidence for the organisation of labour is lacking. Not only were the labour requirements outstripping the demographic base of localities, the initial returns of labour were also meagre as inefficient systems limited the amount of land that could receive water from irrigation works.[51] Furthermore, he contrasts the elaboration of irrigation systems in Khorezm with the enduring simplicity of irrigation in the Syr-Darya area, also studied by KhAEE, where a central state organisation never emerged.[52] For Andrianov these factors point to a pattern of compulsion for huge labour mobilisations to construct and maintain the irrigation works, while cultivation still took place within a communal framework.[53] As time passed, irrigation systems and cultivation became more efficient, with the chingir water-lifting device of the medieval period making possible a much more refined system for supplying fields with the much-needed moisture.

After the collapse of antique society between the fourth and sixth centuries AD, the later medieval period saw the reconstruction of the Khorezmian state along feudal lines. The irrigation works were rebuilt too, now so efficient that the labour demands could be met by the higher population densities enabled by the higher agricultural productivity.[54] Overall, Andrianov succeeds in tracing the long-term development of the forces and relations of production together, taking into account the structuring role of the land yet also noting that cycles of growth and collapse cannot be understood apart from social relations.[55] His dialectical method is also integral to the field techniques of the KhAEE, as the notion of the cultural landscape mediates between the combination of techniques used for studying it archaeologically and the interpretation of the historical interplay between the forces and relations of production in the Khorezm region. As such, the book by Andrianov mitigates Klejn’s conclusion of the separation between the Marxist models of the ‘sociological school’ of Soviet archaeology and the archaeological sources it investigated.

Conclusion

The KhAEE and Andrianov’s book detailing its study of past irrigation reflect the paradoxes of Soviet archaeology well. Its founder S.P. Tolstov created a cosmopolitan and egalitarian safe-haven within its confines, including for many people of Jewish backgrounds, yet he was also a co-author, in 1937, of an article on methods of sabotage in archaeology and ethnography.[56] Another paradox is that Andrianov’s work, so well-supported and apparently congruent with state policy, had very little impact. A new cultural landscape appeared after the 1960s in the form of the dried-up Aral Sea bed, illustrating how the relations of production can be more destructive than many a force of nature. Being distinguished neither for its ethics nor for its effectiveness, there is little to glorify in Soviet archaeology in the way Klejn notes was common, especially in the Brezhnev period.[57] Yet the phenomenon of Soviet archaeology should not be dismissed out of hand, and its more creative attempts to connect Marxism to the archaeological sources ought not be obscured by Stalinism.

Rather, the reader of Andrianov and Klejn might ask what was particularly distinctive about it, what distinguished it from Western archaeology. According to Klejn there is little to distinguish Soviet archaeology as Marxist,[58] but a comparison with Western approaches shows that this is not the case, especially considering the role of the productive forces. Andrianov showed that an emphasis on the role of productive forces could produce good work. His model of humans first learning irrigation from natural examples and then creating techniques to control rivers applies ideas that go back to the works of Greco-Roman philosophers, such as Epicurus’s Letter to Herodotus.[59] Marx’s contention that the labour of animals is one-sided, determined by their physical and mental abilities, but that humans produce universally,[60] allowed him to extend these Classical insights to capitalism and its antecedents. Soviet archaeologists further used Marx’s ideas to provide a theoretical basis for comparing the historical trajectories of different world regions.

A good example of this is the work by V.M. Masson to develop a scheme of early civilisations (or early class society) in the New and Old Worlds based on distinct kinds of agriculture.[61] Some of his conclusions have to be modified based on new evidence.[62] Yet the notion that differences in the basic agricultural techniques, which constituted the main productive forces in early civilisations, are the key to understanding their development remains plausible for Western researchers too.[63] Soviet scholars also solved the problem of the broader social-geographical contexts, noting the importance of broader interaction spheres for the development of early civilisations and other kinds of societies.[64] Of particular note has been the idea of ‘metallurgical provinces’ characterised by distinct ways of metal-working, with vast spatial extensions across Eurasia.[65] These provinces have attracted considerable interest from Western scholars as a way to grasp the long-term historical trajectories of larger areas, unconstrained by the confines of the conventional division into culture-based areas.[66]

Taken together, these studies can be used to investigate the differences between world regions in terms of agriculture and technology. For example, the different crops in Eurasia and Mesoamerica, together with the initial lack of metallurgy in the latter, explain important differences in the forms of urbanism and historical trajectories of these two regions.[67] In this regard the Soviet emphasis on productive forces allowed it to break new ground, both methodologically in the introduction of new methods for studying artefacts and theoretically in its approach to cross-cultural comparison. These Soviet studies are of particular relevance in light of recent calls to engage again with the ecological dimension of Marxism,[68] especially considering recent discussions on the so-called Anthropocene.[69] Some authors in this trend have shown an interest in and an appreciation for certain aspects of ecological work in the USSR,[70] and the archaeological strand of this work should be considered as well.

Regardless of such achievements, a major outstanding problem in Soviet archaeology was relating the productive forces, accorded a primary role, to political systems and cultural phenomena. Here shortcomings can be noted in particular in the historical understanding of culture, as can be seen in the discussion of Zoroastrianism in Andrianov’s book.[71] It is not plausible to suppose that the essence of this great religion, which endures today, is really to be seen as the outcome of a struggle between nomadic and settled herders. It is not that there were no good approaches to culture in Soviet archaeology, as an extensive 1970s debate on the origin of art makes clear,[72] but the problem remained of relating them to the productive forces. It is here that Western Marxism made greater strides, in its recognition of the key role of the relations of production as an intermediary for political and cultural phenomena.[73] Using new models, the emphasis on the relations of production enabled Western Marxist archaeologists to understand and compare the various social formations across the world.[74] Furthermore, it also enabled them to develop more refined models on the social role of cultural phenomena.[75]

The different understanding of the balance between the forces and relations of production may be one of the reasons why there has been so little engagement with Soviet archaeological studies by Western Marxists. Yet the Soviet failure to adequately grasp the sequence of relations from the forces to the relations of production, and further to politics and culture, is interesting in itself. The problem was certainly recognised. For example, a philosophically-inclined Soviet historian such as Eero Loone argued for a model that explores the relations between economic, administrative, and mental forms of activity in a non-deterministic way, though still within a coherent framework that begins with the productive forces.[76] Social science can then investigate the variation between different societies through a programme of comparative research, ascertaining global differences in connections between economies, political systems, and cultural phenomena.[77] It may be that this form of Marxism does not explain everything about society, but it would be enough to sustain a Marxist political praxis that can understand the world and is internally pluralist and democratic.[78]

Western Marxists have argued that comparative studies of past social formations have an important part to play in bringing about a form of socialism than is democratic and pluralist, by showing how the past has impacted contemporary society and what alternatives existed.[79] The focus on the relations of production and a neglect of the forces of production make it more difficult, however, to adequately grasp the ecological challenges facing humankind today. Therefore, the challenge still seems to be to develop a framework that can allow the productive forces a significant role alongside the relations of production. The Lucretian notion of aleatory materialism developed by Althusser can be helpful in this regard, because despite its emphasis on the relations of production it also recognises the independence of elements that have combined after their encounter.[80] The recognition of the plurality of different temporalities allows for understanding the relations between different elements historically,[81] eradicating lingering effects of stadialist approaches. In developing this framework, it can be useful to learn from the experiences and findings of Soviet archaeology as related in the books of Andrianov and Klejn.[82] Hopefully in the future more translations of some of the major Soviet archaeological works will appear.

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[1] Klejn 2012, p. 3.

[2] Patterson 2003.

[3] Tantaleán 2014, pp. 4683–4.

[4] Trigger 2006a, pp. 326–44.

[5] A clear exception is the unpublished PhD dissertation by Jovan Howe on Soviet theories of the development of humankind and the first phase of history shaped by the communal mode of production (Howe 1980).

[6] Semenov 1964.

[7] See the chapter on Childe in Klejn’s book and Trigger 1980 for an overview of his intellectual development. Childe’s Marxist views are succinctly outlined in Childe 1954.

[8] For example, Soviet archaeology powerfully shaped that of China in the 1950s, establishing long-lasting patterns; see Zhang 2011.

[9] Klejn’s book was originally published in Russian in 1993, that of Andrianov in 1969.

[10] Clarke 1968, pp. 4–8.

[11] Wilson 2016.

[12] Trigger 2006a, pp. 121–38.

[13] Marx 1976, p. 286.

[14] Trigger 2006a, pp. 248–61.

[15] Klejn 2012, pp. 237, 243, 289, 291. An initialism of ‘Russian Association of Social Science Institutes’, RANION brought together established but non-Marxist academics with the new Bolshevik generation. As an influential lecturer there, Bukharin advocated a view of historical materialism that put forward an internal relation between society and nature, rather than that these were part of two distinct realms. As noted by Howe in his 1980 dissertation, these views were specifically targeted by another perspective, one that emphasised the internal development of society as external to nature (Howe 1980, pp. 115–20).

[16] Klejn 2012, p. 242.

[17] Klejn 2012, pp. 86–8.

[18] Lewin 2005, pp. 80–3.

[19] Klejn 2012, p. 29, figure 2.10.

[20] Trigger 2006a, p. 344.

[21] Klejn 2012, p. 203.

[22] Klejn 2012, p. 209.

[23] Stalin 1939, p. 103.

[24] Mongait 1959, pp. 185–217.

[25] Klejn 2012, pp. 168–73.

[26] Trigger 2006a, p. 344.

[27] Klejn 2012, pp. 53–4.

[28] Klejn 2012, pp. 115–20.

[29] As noted by Klejn, the role of the Varangians was acknowledged by Marx and the prominent early Soviet historian M.N. Pokrovsky, but this became unacceptable in the chauvinistic atmosphere of the later Stalin period (Klejn 2012, pp. 115–17).

[30] Klejn 2012, pp. 73–9.

[31] Klejn 2012, pp. 69–72.

[32] Andrianov 2016, pp. 37–9.

[33] Andrianov 2016, p. 65.

[34] Andrianov 2016, p. 254.

[35] Stalin justified his position on the peculiar basis that changes in geography take place over much longer periods than changes in the development of society; see Stalin 1939, p. 118. Here the natural environment and human history are walled-off from each other as if they were separate spheres. For a good contemporaneous account of the 1960s debate, see Matley 1966.

[36] Andrianov 2016, pp. 253–4.

[37] Andrianov 2016, p. 78.

[38] The technical volumes of the data used in Andrianov’s book are not readily available, yet the book itself does contain technical descriptions that are accompanied by photographs and illustrations revealing much detail of the archaeological findings.

[39] Andrianov 2016, p. 98.

[40] Andrianov 2016, pp. 266–7.

[41] Andrianov 2016, p. 69.

[42] Andrianov 2016, p. 146.

[43] Andrianov 2016, p. 250.

[44] Andrianov 2016, pp. 150–3.

[45] Andrianov 2016, pp. 143–4.

[46] The term antichnost refers to the ‘Classical’ cultures of the first millennia BC and AD, and unlike as in Western archaeology it refers to the broad geographical sphere of the Classical world oroikoumene and not specifically to Greece and Rome. Hence, it also includes the Achaemenid Persian empire. See Khatchadourian 2008 for Soviet studies ofantichnost in the Caucasus.

[47] Mongait 1959, pp. 270–2.

[48] Andrianov 2016, pp. 158, 167, 189.

[49] Andrianov 2016, p. 115.

[50] Mongait 1959, p. 265. The potential for self-organising communities to create larger-scale irrigation works is emphasised in recent Western studies; see, for example, Stride, Rondelli and Mantellini 2009.

[51] Andrianov 2016, p. 160.

[52] Andrianov 2016, pp. 248–9.

[53] Andrianov 2016, p. 250.

[54] Andrianov 2016, p. 179.

[55] Andrianov 2016, pp. 253–4.

[56] Arzhantseva 2015.

[57] Klejn 2012, pp. 41–2.

[58] Klejn 2012, p. 145.

[59] Where he posits that the human development of technology was initially driven by imitation and adaptation of natural features, see Inwood and Gerson (eds.) 1994, p. 16.

[60] Marx 1976, pp. 283–4.

[61] Masson 1988, p. 129.

[62] The idea that Mayan civilisation was sustained by slash-and-burn agriculture has since been refuted by new archaeological research. See Houston and Inomata 2009, pp. 233–9.

[63] Blanton 2004; Scarborough 2003.

[64] Masson 1988, pp. 111–22.

[65] Chernykh 1991.

[66] Goody 2012; Wilkinson 2014.

[67] Kohl and Chernykh 2003; see also Chernykh 2011. Andrianov in his book also noted these Old and New World differences, based on the original formulation of Engels (Andrianov 2016, pp. 133–4).

[68] Foster and Burkett 2016.

[69] Kunkel 2017.

[70] Foster 2015.

[71] Andrianov 2016, pp. 153–4.

[72] Running for several years in the journal Soviet Anthropology and Archaeology, starting with Stoliar 1977.

[73] See Patterson 2003, chapters four and five, for an extended discussion of Western Marxist approaches to archaeology, which focus almost exclusively on delineating forms of society and their transformations.

[74] Trigger 2003. See McGuire 2006 for the relationship between Trigger’s work and that of Childe.

[75] Routledge 2014.

[76] Loone 1992, pp. 159–65.

[77] Bashilov and Gulyaev 1990, p. 13.

[78] Pluralism would arguably have been possible in Bukharin’s approach to Marxism and science, but it can be most clearly recognised in the writings of the later 1960s. As noted by Howe in his 1980 dissertation, a comprehensive effort took place to reinvigorate Marxist views of world history through the internationalist series The Laws of History and the Concrete Forms of the World-historical process (Howe 1980, pp. 290–301). Only the first volume on prehistory appeared in 1968, with the overall effort meeting the same dismal fate as the contemporaneous Prague Spring.

[79] Trigger 2006b.

[80] Especially significant in this regard is his discussion of the mode of production in the light of aleatory materialism; see Althusser 2006, pp. 197–203.

[81] Morfino 2014, pp. 152–64. Note here the difference with Stalin’s contention, discussed in Footnote 35, that history and the environment cannot be discussed together, as their distinct temporalities prevent interaction.

[82] Andrianov’s work on the KhAEE, in particular the contrasts drawn between Khorezm and the Syr-Darya, seems quite compatible with the perspective in aleatory materialism of history as a sequence of encounters and non-encounters. In this regard, it is also important to note the existence of different modes of production existing side by side in broader geographical areas; see Andrianov and Monogarova 1976. The potential connection of aleatory materialism to the notion of combined and uneven development, as outlined by Van der Linden 2007, needs to be further explored.

A Review of Anti-Imperialist Modernism: Race and Transnational Radical Culture from the Great Depression to the Cold War by Benjamin Balthaser

Františka Zezuláková Schormová

Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures, Charles University, Prague

frantiska.schormova@gmail.com

schormof@ff.cuni.cz

Abstract

The text is a review of Benjamin Balthaser’s Anti-Imperialist Modernism: Race and Transnational Culture from the Great Depression to the Cold War (University of Michigan Press, 2016).

Keywords

Benjamin Balthaser – anti-imperialist modernism – transnationalism – Popular Front – 1930s

Benjamin Balthaser, (2016) Anti-Imperialist Modernism: Race and Transnational Radical Culture from the Great Depression to the Cold War, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

In his poetry collection entitled Dedication, Benjamin Balthaser writes about American Communists’ experience in the 1950s of burying incriminating books. The cultural artefacts of the Popular Front that he discusses in his bookAnti-Imperialist Modernism: Race and Transnational Culture from the Great Depression to the Cold War did not literally have to be buried, but nevertheless they were suppressed and refashioned and their original message was forgotten inwhat Alan Filreis calls the ‘ruthless campaign to deradicalize modernism’.[1] Filreis, one of the pioneers of the reconsideration of the period, suggests that this campaign still resonates in criticism. Balthaser’s book adds new perspectives to this thesis and enriches the field by exploring the international allegiances of the Popular Front, challenging the Cold War version of the movement.

There have been several reconsiderations of 1930s culture and its image since the end of the Cold War, most notably by Barbara Foley, Alan Wald, Alan Filreis, Cary Nelson, and others (Balthaser also frequently refers to the cultural historian Michael Denning and the literary scholar Laura Doyle). Balthaser broadens his critique by drawing attention to transnational allegiances of the time. Cuba, Haiti, the Soviet Union and Mexico do not only serve as destinations, they actively participate in creating anti-imperialist modernism.

The first chapter, ‘This Land Is My Land: Cuba and the Anti-Imperialist Critique of a National-Popular Culture in the United States’, deals with the journeys of Clifford Odets, Langston Hughes, Josephine Herbst and Ernest Hemingway to Cuba. Balthaser analyses different ways in which they represent the island in their writings, and how they, through Cuba, perceive the interconnections between empire, race and class. According to Balthaser, the cultural memory of the Popular Front is dominated by its nationalist wing: these text and stories provide a counter-narrative.

In the second chapter, ‘Travels of an American Indian into the Hinterlands of Soviet Russia: Native American Modernity and the Popular Front’, Balthaser introduces yet another aspect omitted from the usual narrative of the 1930s. Here, it is transnational socialism and the internationalist vision of Native American identity. He focuses on the journey of a Nez Percé  anthropologist Archie Phinney to the Soviet Union, in order to underline the Native community’s involvement with the far left and its transnational allegiances. This journey is discussed in relation to Native American fiction, especially D’Arcy McNickle’s novel The Surrounded (1936). The literary modes of Native American self-determination and self-expression do not, in Balthaser’s view, clash with modernism: on the contrary, they become an expression of it.

          Modernist aesthetics and its reorientation is the topic of the third chapter, ‘The Other Revolution: Haiti and the Aesthetics of Anti-Imperialist Modernism’. Two examples of this reorientation are Orson Welles’s screenplay for an adaptation of Heart of Darkness (1939) and C.L.R. James’sThe Black Jacobins (1938). Both use Haiti as the site from which to reconsider modernism. According to Balthaser, both Welles’s script and James’s book locate modernism not outside of, but rather at the very heart of the colonial project. Furthermore, the chapter links these works to the Hands-Off Haiti campaign, illuminating the complex relationship of anti-fascism and anti-imperialism, a topic that recurs throughout the book.

After Cuba, Haiti and the Soviet Union, Balthaser turns his attention to California. In the fourth chapter, ‘The Strike and the Terror: The Transnational Critique of the New Deal in the California Popular Front’, he introduces representations of New-Deal California that are vastly different from the representations familiar from John Steinbeck’s novels or Dorothea Lange’s Farm Security Administration photographs. These present, he argues, a patriarchal, conservative and racially bounded narrative. He provides a counter-narrative of the US working-class left by exploring contemporaneous labour journals. The journals (often written in Spanish) link violence against workers in the US to US imperial violence abroad. Here, Balthaser also focuses on visual representation, examining photographs of bodies of workers: the wounded, broken bodies of colour are juxtaposed with Lange’s white families.

In the next chapter, ‘An Inland Empire: Fascism, Farm Labor, and the Memory of 1848’, attention is drawn to the way in which Emma Tenayuca, Carey McWilliams and Carlos Bulosan used the memory of the contestation of Mexico to address the present crisis in their writing. Balthaser reads them together with Mexican-American and Filipino journals in order to demonstrate how the memory of 1848 served as a link between the discourse of anti-fascism and the critique of imperialism. By showing that the anti-imperialist and anti-fascist campaigns had a common vocabulary and agenda, he presents another counter-discourse to the memory of the Popular Front as legitimising imperialist nations in its anti-fascist efforts.

 ‘Cold War Re-Visions: Red Scare Nationalism and the Unmade Salt of the Earth’ is the title of the final chapter. Here, Balthaser provides background to one of the main claims that underlie the book: that our vision of the Popular Front and its place in cultural memory was significantly shaped by the Cold War. This is explored through his discussion of the 1954 motion pictureSalt of the Earth, which depicts the Mine-Mill Local 890 strike. Balthaser compares the original script, which was the result of collaboration between the Old Hollywood Left and the Mine-Mill labour union, with the final motion picture. While the unpublished original script drew connections between the systematised violence against women, people of colour, and the workers in the US and US foreign policy, in the actual motion picture, the internationalist critique was suppressed. The tension between the original script and the motion picture reveals new perspectives on contemporaneous cultural production, its aims and limits: the internationalist vision of the labour and Civil Rights movement, inherited from the prewar years, was no longer held to be practicable.

The story of Salt of the Earth, the last gasp of Popular Front modernism, closes the narrative of the book. The Popular Front is traditionally associated with anti-avant-garde cultural production aimed at a wide audience: through his critical attention to Popular Front modernism, Balthaser joins Nelson, Filreis and others who explored the range of relations between radical engagement and modernist literature. Balthaser locates modernism in the Global South, in the former colonies, in bodies of colour, in popular stories. He does not attempt to construct an alternative canon of modernism. He argues that modernism was the first global art form, and that anti-imperialism runs in its blood. The changing social and cultural imagery challenged the notion of empire, national identity, race, class, and also gender.

In Anti-Imperialist Modernism, the Popular Front is seen as a movement with international allegiances and an international cultural conscience, a movement that was able to link the violent domestic politics of the US and its imperialism abroad in a new way, and in the process accommodate various forms, genres, and sites of resistance. However, Balthaser does not deny the deep ambiguities of  the period of thisalliance between radicals, socialists and liberal Democrats. His aim is not only to recuperate forgotten texts but alsoto ‘restore an entire web of connections’.[2] By presenting authors, texts and cultural artefacts that draw from these connection, Balthaser challenges the simplistic narrative of a notionally cosmopolitan 1920s and nationalistic 1930s. In his attempts to stress the continuous history of the American left, Balthaser’s project ties in with that of the main chronicler of the US ‘Literary Left’, Alan M. Wald. Often, Balthaser challenges Wald’s understanding of the Popular Front. Wald has dealt with the subject repeatedly, exploring the forms of the Popular Front’s patriotism and also its cultural production. As he writes in one of his early essays, ‘radicalism’s traditional ties with the avant-garde were definitely broken during the Popular Front’.[3] Wald explored the exclusions made in the name of the anti-fascist mission in the second book of his American Literary Left trilogy, Trinity of Passion: The Literary Left and the Antifascist Crusade: ‘The Popular Front strategy would leave unaffected the homegrown racists, fascists, and other reactionary forces, who would make no comparable sacrifice of their own.’[4] Despite his more critical attitude towards both the cultural production and the politics of the Popular Front, Wald has always attempted to challenge the homogenised version of the past. Balthaser’s project therefore does not appear as contradictory to, but rather a logical continuation of this process. Balthaser’s thesis also complements current reconsideration of the 1950s. The Cold War influenced not only the cultural production of its time, but also how New Deal culture was seen: the result was, as Filreis puts it, ‘the version of the “thirties” constructed in the “fifties”’.[5] Cary Nelson shows how this version was universally accepted: academia, himself included, was ‘trapped within that ideology and that impoverished memory for more than thirty years. But we ceased to see it as an ideology and instead lived it as one, as a self-evident fact of nature.’[6] Political decisions determined by historical situations and framed as purely aesthetic became an integral part of later narratives concerning the 1930s. Here, Balthaser harmonises with Nelson, who claims that the depoliticised canon of modernism is the ‘discipline’s testimony before HUAC’.[7]

Among other things, an international perspective was lost in this testimony. As Balthaser stresses in the last chapter, the Popular Front was gradually forced to defend its Americanness, and prewar allegiances were forgotten. The fighters for Civil Rights had to give up their international perspective in order to push through domestic changes: in this respect Balthaser’s text resonates with reconsiderations of the Civil Rights movement, as triggered by Mary L. Dudziak’s Cold War Civil Rights (2000).

In order to complicate a ‘sanitized, nationalist 1930s nostalgia’,[8] Balthaser combines literary and discursive analysis with meticulous archival research. The scope of his materials is admirable: pamphlets, newspapers, novels, poetry, scripts, motion pictures, photographs. The scope further strengthens his view of modernism as a broad movement that did not limit itself only to apocalyptic poems and experimental prose. He applies various theoretical approaches without stating one dominant method or theory: in his analysis, he relies on Transnationalism, Foucauldian power analysis, postcolonial theory (most significantly, there is an unacknowledged debt to Edward Said’s 1993 book Cultureand Imperialism), and others. Also, the bilingual scope of the chapters on California is noteworthy: in presenting Spanish-language materials, he implicitly detracts from the notion of anti-imperialist modernism as an exclusively anglophone project.

The range and scope of the materials is sometimes overwhelming. However, Balthaser organises them well, and his line of argument remains clear. One the other hand, the chapters often read like separate articles (two chapters, the second and the sixth, had been published previously). The book suffers somewhat from the lack of a Conclusion: the final chapter, which deals with Cold War revisionism, does not draw together the issues discussed throughout the text. Occasionally, one can spot errors, such as Franz Werfel’s unfortunate loss of a syllable when he is described as ‘Austrian-Jewish [author] Franz Werf’![9]

The book is dedicated to Balthaser’s grandfather, Hyman Mozenter, ‘who as a union organizer, victim of the Cold War blacklist, and unrepentant revolutionary set an example for the entire family and is the reason I write what I write.’[10] The ways past leftist engagement can contribute to the present are stressed in the book: Balthaser often links the prewar movements to more-recent events, such as the Occupy Wall Street movement or the opposition to the Iraq War (the Black Lives Matter movement is not mentioned, but its complicated relationship to the US leftist scene also ties in with Balthaser’s argument). He claims that the leftist movements of today could profit from the forgotten transnational perspectives of the 1930s: in his view, latent anticommunism from the 1950s onwards is the reason why social movements lost not only these perspectives, but also international solidarity. As he writes, ‘rather than looking at the Popular Front for seeds of its own failure, activists and intellectuals today can learn much from the multiple entry points thismovement has left available to us.’[11] Or, as Wald puts it in his article ‘Marxism in Noir’,

The way we remember our past governs our own dreams for the future. […] Sooner or later, we look to the past for shared, or at least recognizable, political experiences that might be retrofitted and rebooted; tactics and strategies that have succeeded or failed; causes and explanations for economic and social trends that have persisted or morphed; and even role models, candidly reported, for how to live our chosen lives as Marxists. Marxism doesn’t embalm history; it seeks to join a living past to present changes.[12]

Anti-Imperialist Modernism is an important contribution in the struggle to revive the legacy of the 1930s left. It recovers the cultural production of a whole generation and draws attention to the anti-imperialist modernist vision of these creators. In doing so, it forces us to reconsider modernism, to reconstruct forgotten transnational allegiances, and to see the Popular Front anew. Because of the range of sources it relies on, it is not only useful for historians and scholars of literature, but also brings new perspectives to studies of race and ethnicity, Indigenous Studies, Working Class Studies, Film and Media Studies, and others, and  should be read by activists and the general public interested in social change.

References

Balthaser, Benjamin 2016, Anti-Imperialist Modernism: Race and Transnational Radical Culture from the Great Depression to the Cold War, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

Filreis, Alan 2008, Counter-revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945–1960, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.

Nelson, Cary 2003, Revolutionary Memory: Recovering the Poetry of the American Left, London: Routledge.

Wald, Alan M. 1992, The Responsibility of Intellectuals: Selected Essays on Marxist Traditions in Cultural Commitment, Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press.

Wald, Alan M. 2007, Trinity of Passion: The Literary Left and the Antifascist Crusade, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.

Wald, Alan M. 2016, ‘Marxism in Noir’, International Socialist Review, 101, available at: <https://isreview.org/issue/101/marxism-noir>, accessed 26 November 2017.

[1] Filreis 2008, p. 20.

[2]Balthaser 2016, p. 31.

[3]Wald 1992, p. 93.

[4]Wald 2007, p. 49.

[5] Filreis 2008, p. xi.

[6] Nelson2003, p. 68.

[7]Ibid.

[8]Balthaser 2016, p. 36.

[9]Balthaser 2016, p. 204.

[10]Balthaser 2016, p. vii.

[11]Balthaser 2016, p. 223.

[12]Wald 2016.

Pepijn Brandon

In 1944, the Caribbean anti-colonial thinker Eric Williams wrote his classical work Capitalism and Slavery. The book argued that the enormous wealth that Britain pumped out of the slave-plantations in the West-Indies in the eighteenth century contributed significantly to the Industrial Revolution, and thereby to the birth of modern capitalism. For 75 years now, historians have debated the merits of the “Williams’ Thesis”. But in this discussion, the Netherlands and its colonial empire have been largely ignored. Often quite conservative imperial historians in the Netherlands saw the question of slavery’s contribution to capitalism as irrelevant because the Netherlands was so much later than Britain in going through its industrial revolution. This argument conveniently ignored the great importance of Dutch commercial capital to the wider breakthrough of European capitalism. In general, these historians usually argued that the contribution of slavery in the Dutch West Indies was small. They also tended to treat the history of colonisation, violence and slavery in the Americas as completely separate from the history of Dutch colonialism in Asia, as if the two had nothing to do with each other. However, on all three counts, the narrative is now shifting, even among historians working in the Netherlands. This can help to provide a basis for rewriting the history of the global involvement of the Dutch empire in slavery, that brings together the Atlantic and Indian Ocean world and that shows how the wealth amassed in both hemispheres fed into European capital accumulation, with Dutch capital in the role of initiator, enforcer, organiser, and intermediary.

Dutch merchants were involved in global slavery from the sixteenth century onwards. They remained so until the first half of the 1860s, when the Dutch were the last European nation to formally abolish slavery in its colonies. Even then, the Dutch stipulated further forced labour from their formerly enslaved subjects. In the East Indies, this was organised in the form of the “cultivation system”, which had already replaced slavery by other types of coerced labour in the preceding period. In Suriname and other Dutch Caribbean colonies, the emancipation decree of 1863 demanded another ten years of “apprenticeship” on the plantations, in which the African population was obligated to keep on working for their former masters. The role of the Dutch Empire in global slavery was extensive, including the transportation and sale of hundreds of thousands of captives in both the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean region, and the operation of slave labour in colonies that at various points of time included Northern Brazil, New Amsterdam (now New York), Suriname, South Africa, today’s Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and many other parts of Asia. The first large-scale “experiment” with plantation slavery by the Dutch did not take place in the West, but on the nutmeg-producing Banda Islands in the Southern Moluccas, after VOC-governor Jan Pieterszoon Coen organized a genocidal campaign against the indigenous population. In most areas under VOC-control, however, the Dutch combined slavery with many other forms of forced labour. This was different in Atlantic colonies such as Suriname, that became organised completely around the institution of  largely African plantation slavery and in which other forms of coerced labour like white indentured labour or forms of enslavement of the indigenous population were pushed to the margins.

As for Britain and France, the largest surge of this “classical” form of commercial slavery that was central to Eric Williams’ argument in the Dutch Empire took place in the course of the eighteenth century, when Atlantic circuits of commerce and finance exploded on a massive scale. And, as Williams himself suggested many decades ago, the main revenues were not drawn from the slave-trade per se, but from the goods produced on the plantations by the back-breaking labour of the enslaved: sugar, coffee, tobacco, indigo, cacao and other products for European markets. My colleague Ulbe Bosma and have publishd a long article in the main Dutch journal for social and economic history that challenges the notion that the Dutch only drew marginal economic benefits from this eighteenth-century plantation slavery in the Atlantic world. The article sums up the results of the work of a team of researchers that for the past five years looked into the importance of slavery in the West-Indies for the Dutch economy. Taking as our starting point the year 1770, which was an average year for the second half of the eighteenth century, we show that 5.2 percent of the Dutch GDP was based directly on plantation slavery. That figure alone already shows that we are talking about a sizeable sector. Recently, a study executed by US economists working for the federal government concluded that the weight of the entire “digital economy” – Silicon valley, e-commerce, the digital infrastructure up to and including the cable companies – is around 6.5 percent of the US GDP today. However, a mere percentage of GDP only gives us one part of the story of the economic weight of slavery. It is also important to know where in the economy the revenues drawn from slavery landed up. In the case of the Netherlands, this was largely in the massive commercial sector located in the western part of the country, the Netherland’s richest province Holland. There, according to our calculation, by 1770 a massive 10.36 percent of GDP was based on Atlantic slavery. That this percentage was so high was a direct result of the importance of slave-produced goods in the Dutch trading sector, which still dominated the economy at the time. Of all goods that went through Dutch harbours, expressed in value, 19 percent was produced directly by slaves. Another 4 to 5 percent were goods to provision the plantations and the slave-ships.

Dutch capital profited not only from the exploitation of the slave-colonies controlled by the Dutch colonial companies and the state. From the time of the Dutch Revolt in the late sixteenth century onwards, Amsterdam had functioned as a crucial hub of wider European trade and finance. In the seventeenth century this distributing role had prominently included the trade in colonial goods, but in absolute terms European bulk carrying trade dominated the circuits of capital investment. This gradually changed in the eighteenth century, when the Dutch were outcompeted in other areas, but were able to compensate for this by the increasing weight of the trade in colonial goods from both the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean region. By the second half of the eighteenth century, the Dutch not only imported coffee and sugar from Suriname, but also handled millions of pounds of coffee and sugar produced on France’s main plantation colony St. Domingue. This relationship between the Dutch economy and St. Domingue persisted, until a revolution by the enslaved in 1791 led to emancipation and the forming of independent Haiti. Meanwhile, a tight network of bankers, merchants, mortgagers and financiers tied the still thriving Amsterdam financial market to planters in the Spanish colonies, the small Danish Caribbean colonies, and the US South.

These arguments for the Dutch Atlantic economy show that the question of the relationship between capitalism and slavery posed by Eric Williams should be approached in a much broader framework than just the connections between the British Industrial Revolution and Britain’s sugar complex in the West Indies. It also challenges the idea of some Dutch historians, that Atlantic slavery was only of marginal importance to the Dutch economy. But much more than that can be done, if the history of slavery is truly approached on a global scale. This does not necessarily mean a simple copying of the methods used to calculate the economic significance of Atlantic slavery and applying it to the VOC Empire. While, in the Atlantic world, plantation slavery became the point towards which all commercial activities gravitated, in Asia the colonial empires mostly combined many different forms of coerced labour at the same time, so that it becomes hard to estimate what constitutes profits from slavery per se. Also, by and large, plantations in the Atlantic world were owned directly by Europeans, while in Asia the VOC often relied on intermediaries such as kings, landed aristocracies, or Chinese merchants and tenant farmers. Perhaps more important at this stage than overcoming these difficulties for making precisely comparable calculations, however, is to face the challenge of bringing the underlying histories of colonial slavery into a common framework. The connections between slavery in the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean World did not end with the Dutch experiences with plantation slavery on the Banda Islands, that were carried over by VOC and WIC personnel across the oceans to the Atlantic world. They continued up to the era of the formal abolition of slavery, when Johannes van den Bosch oversaw the ‘modernisation’ of plantation slavery in Suriname before he became the organiser of the cultivation system on Java, and when indentured labourers from India and Indonesia were transported to Suriname to build the new coerced labour force after the 1863 Emancipation decree. Rewriting the history of Dutch colonial slavery in such a connected way would be greatly strengthened by cooperation between researchers working on these topics in Indonesia, the Caribbean, and the Netherlands. In the Netherlands itself, historians are gradually starting to come to terms with this more global story of slavery’s importance for Dutch capitalism. At long last.

The article was originally published on indoprogress.com on 27 June 2019, under the title Kapitalisme Belanda dan Perbudakan,  https://indoprogress.com/2019/06/kapitalisme-belanda-dan-perbudakan/

A Review of Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and The Rise of Austerity Politics by Kim Phillips-Fein

Michelle Esther O’Brien

Department of Sociology, New York University

michelleobrien@nyu.edu

Abstract

This article reviews the Marxist literature on the New York City fiscal crisis of 1975, putting into context the recent narrative history Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics by Kim Phillips-Fein. I argue the most influential account of the fiscal crisis, that provided by David Harvey’sA Brief History of Neoliberalism, can obscure the causes driving the generalisation of austerity politics. Instead, I turn to Robert Brenner’s account of the crisis as rooted in a global overcapacity in manufacturing. Phillips-Fein makes a valuable contribution in detailing how crisis organises elites, and how austerity can come to be seen as inevitable by social democrats.

Keywords

neoliberalism – austerity – New York City – fiscal crisis – social democracy – Kim Phillips-Fein – Robert Brenner – David Harvey

Kim Phillips-Fein, (2017) Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics, New York, NY: Metropolitan Books.

On 25 March 1976, student and faculty protestors occupied Hostos Community College of the City University of New York (CUNY) in the Bronx, New York. The working-class Puerto Rican activists, representative of the demographic of the school, were attempting to halt the school’s closure. They seized the custodial keys, wrapped chains and deadbolts around the building’s entrances, and barricaded doors with furniture. On the roof, student-government officers set up look-outs for police. In the President’s office, students set up a child-care centre. They hosted radical film screenings and teach-ins at the occupied school, and held discussions on a more dramatic revisioning of the school’s administration. On April 4, they were evicted by police, but by that summer the state legislature was to pass a measure that provided funding specifically ear-marked for Hostos. The same bill that saved Hostos, however, introduced tuition fees for the first time at New York City’s public university system.

       Eugenio María de Hostos Community College had been opened in an abandoned tyre factory only six years previously, explicitly oriented towards Puerto Rican and other Spanish-speaking youth of New York. Hostos’s opening was part of a broader series of progressive changes which CUNY had implemented in response to mobilisations by Black and Puerto Rican students. Since its founding in 1847, CUNY had been free, designed to be accessible to working-class immigrants. Free higher education was one of the outstanding features of New York City, but prior to the 1960s its benefits were only readily accessible to white students. Inspired and shaped by the Civil Rights, Black Power, and Puerto Rican nationalist movements, student protests through the late 1960s successfully opened up the city’s schools to larger numbers of students of colour. Among the victories of anti-racist student mobilisations was the establishment of Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, oriented to African-American students, and Hostos in the Bronx.

       The occupation at Hostos was one of many protests against cuts to city-funded programmes throughout the city in 1975 and 1976, forced by events that came to be known as the New York City fiscal crisis. Six months prior to the occupation of Hostos, in October 1975, an alternative response to this fiscal crisis was evidenced in the teachers’ union president Albert Shanker’s capitulation in using union pension funds to purchase bonds issued by the city, their employer. At the end of 1974, the New York City government was running out of money. Financial executives cast increasing suspicion on the city’s years of heavy borrowing to fund its array of programmes on a dwindling tax base. With the global economic downturn of 1974, the financial firms that had long facilitated city borrowing now balked. Neither the New York State nor the Federal government was willing to lend the city bailout funds. Encouraged by the NYS Governor and the US President, a group of financial executives stepped forward to offer a solution: New York City needed to abandon its longstanding liberal, social-democratic legacy, to drastically cut its employees and programmes, and to adopt genuinely balanced budgets. Once the city had made dramatic enough changes, they argued, this would restore investor confidence in purchasing city bonds, and put the city on a sounder fiscal footing. The first configuration of financial intervention in the city was the Municipal Assistance Corporation (MAC), an entity composed of concerned financial executives that would play a determining role in city budgets, and in turn sell new, more reliable, bonds to investors. Initially, however, too few investors in the bond market were willing to purchasing MAC’s bonds.

       Instead, MAC turned to the unions of the city’s own employees. Public-sector union presidents became convinced that bankruptcy of the city could mean an annulment of their collective bargaining agreements, and be a potential disaster for their members. (Their assessment of the dangers of bankruptcy in this political context were never tested or clear.) Beginning with AFSCME District Council 37, the unions devoted their own pension funds to purchasing MAC bonds at a moment when no other government entity or private-sector assistance was forthcoming. Through the autumn of 1975, the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), representing all teaching employees of the city’s Department of Education, was in contentious contract negotiations with the city, battling massive teacher lay-offs and dramatic increases in classroom size. UFT president Albert Shanker balked at joining AFSCME in purchasing the city’s bonds.

       On the evening of October 16, the executive board of the UFT voted not to purchase the bonds, citing concern about the wisdom of investing a massive sum of member pensions in unstable, fiscally-unsound city bonds. They left unstated the potential conflict of interests arising from the UFT having a considerable fiscal stake in their employer, or how this might be an abandonment of potential leverage over the contract-negotiation process. With the UFT pulling out, it seemed certain to all that the city was entering fully into default.

       City-government officials spent all night planning how to proceed with default and steps towards filing for formal bankruptcy. That morning, the city stopped exchanging bonds that had become due. The city’s default was world news, horrifying officials across the US and Europe, and sending markets reeling. The night before, the Governor called Shanker’s personal friend, real-estate developer Richard Ravitch, to convince Shanker to change his mind. A police car had rushed Ravitch to Shanker’s apartment late that night. They talked through the night, and again the next day. In her 2017 book Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics, Kim Phillips-Fein writes:

Shanker went back to the governor’s office to meet the press around two in the afternoon. As he spoke to the reporters, looking worn and exhausted, he made it clear he was under pressure far more intense than he had ever anticipated. He still thought the mayor and the governor had been ‘extremely destructive’ to the school system and the entire frame of collective bargaining through their unilateral cuts. His union, he insisted, had been the victim of ‘blackmail.’ But it was an unusual sort of coercion, for no single individual could be blamed. ‘Look,’ Shanker told the crowd, ‘the pressure is not from the Governor, and it’s not from the Mayor. The pressure is from the situation.’ (p. 175.)

       Ultimately, public-sector city unions would purchase $2.5 billion in MAC bonds, more than any other buyer. Bailing out the city led city unions to largely abandon an unwavering opposition to austerity cuts, and brought the interests of union presidents in line with those of financial executives in insisting on fiscal restraint.

       Following World War II, New York City had the most comprehensive public goods available anywhere in the US: public hospitals and accessible health insurance, public housing and rent control, a cheap subway system, free high-culture public entertainment, comprehensive public libraries, and an unusually generous welfare system. All these programmes were accessible to the city’s poor and working-class people, including the city’s large immigrant and Jewish populations. These programmes were made possible by the political strength of the city’s working class, highly organised in unusually militant labour unions. Various policies limited access to these benefits for the city’s growing Black and Puerto Rican populations. In the 1960s, these communities successfully organised to gain access to the city’s social goods – to CUNY, to public-sector jobs, to trade-union power, and to welfare support. Yet the fiscal crisis put these programmes under unprecedented attack.

       Through the 1960s, the city’s budgets had come under increasing strain. While Phillips-Fein only briefly outlines the prior causes of the fiscal crisis, other sources have identified them in more detail.[1] New York, the largest manufacturing centre in the country following the war, had deindustrialised much earlier and more rapidly than other cities. Industrial firms and many workers moved to the suburbs through the 1950s and 1960s. The financial industries and corporate headquarters of firms left in Manhattan used their political leverage to decrease their own tax burden. Through the late 1960s and early 1970s, the city had managed the decrease in the tax base through a significant growth in short-term loans and creative accounting. Through their refusal to purchase further debt at the end of 1974, the city’s banks had precipitated the crisis.

       What followed was a year of high drama, and one of the most written-about and debated events in what came to be called the advent of neoliberalism. Financial executives and political elites began to see the crisis as an opportunity to forge a new political path for New York, and ultimately the country. Introducing tuition fees at CUNY was just one instance of a massive realignment of city policy away from meeting the needs of the city’s poor and working classes, and towards prioritising the interests of financial-services firms and professional elites. It was a turning point for American capitalism, and the political orientation of capitalist elites.

       The narrative details of these two anecdotes – the Hostos occupation on the one hand, Shanker being pressured into purchasing city bonds on the other – are examples of the significant contributions offered by Fear City. The book’s name is taken from a campaign by the New York Police Department against lay-offs: flyers were distributed to tourists warning them they should take care in visiting ‘Fear City’, given the city government’s lack of commitment to public safety. In the myriad published accounts of the crisis, none have previously offered the rich description and riveting intrigue of Phillips-Fein’s writing. Addressing what could have been taken to be an already over-saturated topic, Phillips-Fein manages to make it refreshing and lively.

       Phillips-Fein’s account is centred on a narrative of city-government political decision-making between 1974 and 1977. The book effectively depicts the changing temperament and expectations of actors as the crisis unfolded. What had seemed impossible at one point would abruptly shift, and suddenly felt inevitable. The Mayor, union presidents, the Comptroller, key financial executives – all were constantly revising their political calculus, their hopes and fears, and the range of what they believed they could accomplish. The first two-thirds of the book centres on the dramatic interplay between the city’s elites. The last section of the book centres on popular-resistance struggles in the face of the crisis, ranging from the protest at Hostos (dominating the chapter on CUNY) to an entire chapter on the 16-month occupation of a firehouse in Greenpoint-Williamsburg to stop its closure. Phillips-Fein demonstrates throughout a political sympathy for the city’s working-class movements, an appreciation of the city’s remarkable social-democratic programmes, and a recognition that events were the result of political decisions that could have been made differently.

       Phillips-Fein’s extensive narrative does not include any major new theoretical arguments as to the causes of the crisis, nor as to its relevance for understanding the emergence of austerity politics. She features several highlights from the extensive resistance to budget cuts, but does not offer a systematic mapping of the city’s progressive movements, nor any speculation regarding what might have enabled these movements to be successful in halting austerity. The book traces Mayor Abraham Beame’s changing understanding of what the city was facing – from what he saw as a mean-spirited and unnecessary capital strike to an inevitable and necessary reckoning – without offering a fleshed-out independent assessment of these structural conditions. Instead, the new material is focused on the actors themselves: their biographical backgrounds, their personal networks, their changing motivations and worldviews, their concrete actions and the consequences. These actors she follows include a few social-movement leaders, mid-level financial executives, labour-union presidents and city-government officers. At this level of abstraction, her work is remarkable and successful.

       If Phillips-Fein had chosen to make a new contribution to a structural understanding of the crisis, she would have had to contend with an already-crowded landscape of four decades of Marxist literature. For a time, New York’s fiscal crisis was a favourite topic of Marxist analysis, and has repeatedly surfaced as a concern to Marxist scholars.

       In the midst of the city’s financial crunch, many critical and thoughtful accounts tried to make sense of its dramatic political implications. Published in 1977, immediately after the crisis, The Fiscal Crisis of American Cities collects many of the era’s social-democratic commentators’ analyses of the causes and implications of the crisis.[2] Some of these writers built dynamic careers critically responding to the political events the crisis engendered, including Francis Fox Piven, Kirkpatrick Sale, Robert Fitch, John H. Mollenkopf and William K. Tabb. Though written before the full political implications of the crisis became clear, this collection correctly assessed that city government was no longer an economically viable vehicle for progressive social-welfare initiatives. Suburbanisation and sunbelt migration of both firms and the middle class meant social welfare could only be sustained through taxation that extended beyond the borders of cities. Phillips-Fein echoes these conclusions when she briefly sketches one of her only counterfactual scenarios: ‘One can even imagine that the fiscal crisis could have prompted some effort to redraw the boundaries between cities and their suburbs in ways that might make more resources available for city governments’ (p. 314).

       Two of the book-length accounts subsequently written by the contributors to The Fiscal Crisis of American Cities are worth highlighting. William K. Tabb published the most thorough Marxist account of the crisis in 1982 withThe Long Default.[3] Tabb offers clear evidence challenging the growing conservative narratives of the crisis, rejecting accounts that blame greedy labour unions, lazy poor people of colour, or liberal indulgence. He traces the circulation of accounts of New York’s experience on the national political stage. Tabb makes the strongest claims for an alternative to the political conditions created by the crisis, concluding that locally-controlled institutions, a liberal–labour coalition infused with other social movements, and a ‘much wider concept of economic democracy’ could pursue national economic redistributive policies (p. 127).

       Robert Fitch’s account of the fiscal crisis took a new tack, explicitly blaming the financial executives who had helped shaped city planning in the 1950s and 1960s, provocatively titling his book The Assassination of New York.[4] The book’s sensational cover featured Chase Bank president David Rockefeller driving a bulldozer through the city, figuratively representing his considerable role in forcing the city’s rapid deindustrialisation. My own independent research in the Rockefeller archives has corroborated Fitch’s accusations: In the two decades prior to the fiscal crisis, Rockefeller and others set out to remake New York by actively displacing manufacturing, wholesale and shipping firms from the city, and driving a massive office-building construction boom. Rockefeller envisioned a city that would someday serve as the financial headquarters for a world increasingly dependent on global trade. Fitch, writing at the beginning of the 1990s, could not yet easily have seen how remarkably successful this vision would become through the city’s boom in the 1990s and 2000s, no matter how grossly unequal the rewards of that growth would prove.

       The 2000s saw another new wave of research and commentary. Joshua Freeman’s Working Class New York, clearly a major influence on Phillips-Fein, put the crisis in the remarkable context of New York’s postwar ‘social-democratic polity’.[5] Phillips-Fein broadly shares Freeman’s political framework and analytical lens, and her work could be seen as a much more detailed elaboration of the one chapter of Working Class New York wherein Freeman describes the years of the crisis itself.

       In 2007, labour scholar and activist Kim Moody published another history with New Press, this time fiercely criticising the complicity of organised labour in the crisis, analysing the subsequent rightward turn of the city’s Democratic Party elites.[6] Like Moody, Phillips-Fein discusses the move of the municipal labour-union leadership to invest $2.5 billion of their union’s own pension funds in bailing out their employer, the city. This was a considerable amount in terms of the budget figures of the time, and literally saved the city from bankruptcy. Moody is particularly horrified by union presidents such as Shanker using pension funds to bail out the city, and how thoroughly this compromised their ability to effectively oppose austerity. For Moody, affiliated with the union-dissident journal Labor Notes, this was an almost inevitable betrayal by union bureaucrats of their members. Phillips-Fein, deploying a different political lens, emphasises the immediate events and psychology of these figures, as evidenced by Shanker’s case.

       The most influential Marxist account of the New York City fiscal crisis, however, was made in four short pages. David Harvey’s 2005 A Brief History of Neoliberalism has been much more widely read and cited than any other book discussing the topic.^[7]Harvey repeats much of what has already widely been said about the crisis: the causal importance of deindustrialisation, suburbanisation and the onset of the 1974 recession, and citing Freeman in calling it a ‘counterrevolution from above’.[8] It ‘amounted to a coup by the financial institutions’[9] that left working-class life in New York in a shambles. While many commentators saw the events in New York as a precursor to the turn against social services on the part of Thatcher and Reagan, Harvey’s account most dramatically locates New York as the world-historic turning point of a new, neoliberal era.

       Harvey memorably calls the fiscal crisis an effort to ‘restore class power’, his recurring definition of neoliberalism. Harvey’s influential book understands neoliberalism as a political project of capitalist elites. Business firms and their ideological and political allies advanced a successful political project through the 1970s and 1980s to roll back social democracy, concentrate political power, and institute policies to redistribute wealth upwards. New York City’s fiscal crisis easily matches this narrative, given the obvious and visible collusion of financial executives and political elites in transforming the city’s political future. Harvey is correct in drawing a link from the ‘coup’ of New York’s fiscal crisis to the role of business mobilisation in backing Thatcher and Reagan’s attack on organised labour, and the new political common sense of inescapable austerity. This was a helpful lens for a generation of anti-capitalist activists, influential in the rise of Occupy Wall Street and in contemporary European popular mobilisation against austerity.

       Phillips-Fein certainly provides ample material to substantiate such a framework. The decision-making of specific investment firms clearly precipitated the crisis. By all accounts, the Ford administration held off from bailing out the city as a calculated political decision to indicate a new, more lean future for the Federal government, other regional and city governments, and America’s working class. Phillips-Fein focuses on the members of the Ford administration who actively pushed the policy approach of punishing New York City for its liberal excesses. Three subsequently played major roles in Washington politics: Alan Greenspan, Donald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney. Ford could have chosen to bail out New York with no immediate consequences; that he chose not to was motivated by a class-based political project. Present-day Americans live in a country remade by the political rule of the very people who facilitated that decision.

       Unfortunately, however, the centrality of New York to Harvey’s narrative of neoliberalism obscures as much as it elucidates. Both New York’s deindustrialisation and its turn towards fiscal austerity were pursued by powerful political elites, and it is easy to trace similar movements of the capitalist class in pursuing austerity elsewhere. But today, four decades later, the politics of austerity have become more broadly generalised, suggesting much deeper structural roots. Though the turn away from social democracy, regulated labour markets, and expansive welfare programmes came slowly to some countries, and more rapidly to others, it came inevitably in one form or another. Nearly the only countries remaining that have successfully expanded their welfare-state programmes in the last twenty years are those with access to considerable oil revenue: Venezuela, Iran, Norway and, in a very different sense, the gulf states. In those countries that have maintained some measure of social democracy, such as Sweden, governments have developed other polices to pursue the same goals of labour-market activation and flexibilisation that characterise anglophone neoliberalism. By emphasising a coup by ‘a powerful cabal of investment bankers’,[10] Harvey’s account, and in other ways the entire literature on New York’s fiscal crisis, can give rise to an inadequate understanding of what drives neoliberal policy.

       Since the mid-1970s, across a wide range of very different political conditions, in country after country, state officials occupying positions of national power have nearly all drawn the same conclusion: social-democratic programmes and sustained wage increases can no longer fuel a virtuous cycle of Keynesian economic growth. Neoliberal think-tanks, supply-side monetarist economists, and business coalitions did not stage a coup in every nation; but they did consistently offer a novel solution to a genuine, unresolved structural crisis faced by capitalist states. The expression, ‘There is no alternative’, popularised by Margaret Thatcher, had previously been declared by the Manhattan Borough President in 1975 at the inception of MAC (p. 126). Before their defeat, the contemporaneous insurgency and resistance of working-class movements insisted that there was an alternative. Now, with the world transformed, we are confronted by the question of why we in fact see so very few alternatives in capitalist state policy. How can we understand and explain the near-ubiquity of neoliberalism and austerity?

       Phillips-Fein does not deal with such questions. But interestingly the narrative, psychologically-grounded details of her account do contribute an important component to the enrichment of our understanding. It is here her work makes its most unexpected and significant theoretical contribution. Phillips-Fein, by tracing the changing expectations of the actors themselves, sharply illustrates that they were facing considerable structural pressures. Shanker citing ‘the pressure from the situation’ described the experience of every government and union official as they faced an escalating hopelessness they could see no other way out of. This situation was not simply engineered by capitalist financiers. Those financial executives directly involved in the restructuring of the city were clearly acting from a class-based worldview, one that saw elite participation and elite interests as the appropriate future for the city. But they also faced their own structural conditions in the form of market pressures, particularly an increasingly-global capitalist credit market. The Municipal Assistance Corporation, the initial board of corporate executives who had taken on the task of saving the city, was at first unable to sell bonds to anyone but the labour unions. The extent of the requisite austerity measures implemented by the city was not determined by any one political actor, but by signalling to a much vaster and anonymous world of investors that the city was on a sounder financial footing.

       In responding to the markets, finance executives and other elites of the city were able to act politically in novel and bold ways, ways most of them had not previously foreseen. Capitalist elites did not simply engineer the crisis; their interests and strategies were organised by it. Phillips-Fein writes:

There was no premeditated plan to seize and transform New York’s government, nor were the actors who gained power during the crisis simply acting upon an ideology constructed in the abstract. But the scare of the near-bankruptcy brought together the elite groups within the city, and enabled them to act in concert in ways that otherwise would have proved difficult to attain. (p. 306.)     

This isn’t simply an offhanded claim; it is demonstrated in the blow-by-blow account of events she traces throughout the book.

       Marxist accounts of the world economy are divided on whether capitalism enjoyed a full recovery following the mid-1970s recession. Some, most notably the ongoing work of Robert Brenner, argue it did not. For Brenner, overcapacity in manufacturing through the entry of Japan, Germany and later successive waves of other exporting nations has created a persistent suppression of the average rate of profit. The apparent economic recoveries since then have been successively weaker, driven by commodity and investment bubbles, and do not reflect capitalism’s escape from a basic structural weakness. In 1999,[11]Historical Materialism featured a lively debate on aNew Left Review essay from the previous year outlining Brenner’s argument. This later became the most extensive account of this framework,The Economics of Global Turbulence.[12] If Brenner is correct, and the underlying structure of the world capitalist economy has been in four decades of tumultuous and worsening crisis, it is less surprising that nation after nation has had to adopt measures that shift the cost of the crisis onto workers and the poor. Phillips-Fein adds to this an illuminating case study on how actors otherwise sympathetic to social-democratic policies might face objective conditions in which they can see no alternative, and how capitalist actors may be galvanised, politicised and structurally organised by the conditions of crisis.

       This is not to say, of course, that the claims of neoliberal economists should be taken seriously at face-value, nor that the representatives of the working class should continue to capitulate to neoliberalism at every turn. Nor would I argue that social democrats in New York and elsewhere could not have pursued a far more left-wing, militant way out of the crisis through an encroachment on private investment. It is to suggest, however, that a certain form of the social-democratic state, resting on an expanding and profitable industrial economy, is no longer as politically viable as some may hope. The occupying students of Hostos in 1976, and the others fighting cuts throughout the city, saved many programmes in the course of their struggle. Yet they faced underlying structural, economic conditions that posed considerable obstacles to preserving the full range of social goods New Yorkers had enjoyed. Phillips-Fein, in offering a thoroughly political and interpersonal account of one of the major events of American capitalism, unexpectedly offers us a necessary understanding of how such conditions come to be seen as insurmountable to some, and as a new opportunity to others.

References

Alcaly, Roger and David Mermelstein (eds.) 1977, The Fiscal Crisis of American Cities, New York, NY: Vintage.

Brenner, Robert 1998, ‘The Economics of Global Turbulence (Special Issue)’, New Left Review, I, 229, available at: <https://newleftreview.org/issues/I229/articles/robert-brenner-the-economics-of-global-turbulence-special-issue>.

Brenner, Robert 2002, The Boom and the Bubble: The US in the World Economy, London: Verso.

Brenner, Robert 2006, The Economics of Global Turbulence: The Advanced Capitalist Economies from Long Boom to Long Downturn, 1945–2005, London: Verso.

Brenner, Robert 2009, ‘What Is Good for Goldman Sachs Is Good for America: The Origins of the Present Crisis’, 2 October, Los Angeles, CA: UCLA Center for Social Theory and Comparative History, available at: <https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0sg0782h>.

Fitch, Robert 1993, The Assassination of New York, London: Verso.

Freeman, Joshua B. 2000, Working Class New York: Life and Labor Since World War II, New York, NY: The New Press.

Harvey, David 2005, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Moody, Kim 2007, From Welfare State to Real Estate: Regime Change in New York City, 1974 to the Present, New York, NY: The New Press.

Phillips-Fein, Kim 2017, Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics, New York, NY: Metropolitan Books.

Tabb, William 1982, The Long Default: New York City and the Urban Fiscal Crisis, New York, NY: Monthly Review Press.

[1] See, for instance, Freeman 2000; Moody 2007; Tabb 1982.

[2]Alcaly and Mermelstein (eds.) 1977.

[3]Tabb 1982.

[4]Fitch 1993.

[5]Freeman 2000.

[6]Moody 2007.

^[7] Harvey 2005. At the time of writing, Google Scholar gives it 17,730 citations; Freeman gets 258, Fitch 198, Tabb 166, Alcaly and Mermelstein 110, and Moody 88. At the time of writing, Phillips-Fein has received only one.

[8]Harvey 2005, p. 46.

[9]Harvey 2005, p. 45.

[10]Harvey 2005, p. 45.

[11] See Historical Materialism, Volume 4, Issue 1, pp. 9–180.

[12]Brenner 1998; See also Brenner 2002, 2006 and 2009.