The Sanders Antinomies:

Strategic Questions for Uncertain Times

Michael Bray

Debates amongst socialists about Bernie Sanders's candidacy have, already, a kind of formulaic, antinomical character, both sides of which can lay claim to more or less true, but also relatively abstracted, arguments. For the most part, these debates, picking up from 2016, center on the relationship between electoral campaigns and popular movements: either the Democratic Party is a oligopolistic cesspool that will absorb all leftist deviations or this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to ‘un-stick’ things; either center-left parties exist to co-opt and disaggregate critical movements or no radical left party has every prospered in an environment where there was not a vibrant center-left party. Each side of such antimonies can appeal to a set of authorities for justification, can score internet debate points off one another, but the whole thing often seems to circle around the same old posts, without a clear articulation of, let alone agreement on, what, in the current conjuncture, would count as a victory.

Further, the dogmatic oppositions involved in such debates tend to lead even the most productive responses to get stuck at an equally abstract level of ‘dialectic’. Resolution, it is revealed, lies in the synthesis of the contraries: electoral campaigns and popular movements or, as Nico Poulantzas (frequently invoked in these debates) put it in 1978: ‘the extension and deepening of political freedoms and the institutions of representative democracy…combined with the unfurling of forms of direct democracy and the mushrooming of self-management bodies’.[1] Posed at this level of abstraction, any productive effect, rhetorical or strategic, of such a synthesis is vitiated. Such a ‘resolution’, proffered, immediately triggers a resumption of the debate: Poulantzas’s position is reduced to ‘Eurocommunist’ electoral politics, popular anti-statism is invoked against him, and the circle turns again.

Lost in such debates is that, for Poulantzas, this supposed ‘resolution’ was nothing of the sort. It was, rather, a gesture towards a territory wherein, for any given social formation, such a resolution might conceivably lie. For there is, he insisted, ‘no easy recipe for a solution, since the answers to such questions do not exist – not even as a model theoretically guaranteed in some holy text or other’.[2] In that spirit, this essay does not attempt to resolve the antimonies of socialist strategy that Sanders’s campaign brings to the surface; rather, it attempts to think through them towards some of the specific dilemmas that define the present moment of socialist politics in the United States. Subtending the traditional strategic antinomies, I want to suggest, is an overarching transformation – one stretching far beyond the U.S., in variegated forms – produced by a series of transformations in the global accumulation of capital and the political offensives that helped secure them. A central manifestation of these transformations had been the disaggregation of the ‘popular classes’ and the dissolution of political class formations. That such a situation exists (amidst nascent signs, like the wave of teachers’ strikes, of change) alongside an upsurge in antagonistic and ostensibly socialist politics is a perhaps unprecedented situation in relation to the Marxist tradition. ‘Democratic socialism’ (if that's what it is) is leading, not following, the political formation of some newly articulated working class. Rather than attempt to resolve the antimonies of socialist strategy, then, this essay seeks to begin a process of reconsidering them in light of this conjuncture.

Electoral Questions

One thing all sides in the socialist debates over Sanders at least appear to agree upon is that an independent movement grounded in the working-class is the sine qua non of socialist politics. Such agreement, however, is often mobilized to support more or less dogmatic positions regarding whether such a movement is strengthened or weakened by his candidacy and by socialists' support for it. At the core of these positions is a disagreement about whatindependence means: must workers remain at a distance from the state – and mainstream parties as apparatuses of it – or can they operate within those crucibles to shift the balance of forces?

Framed in this way, the ‘anti-electoral’ position might stretch so far as to include Lenin’s strategy of ‘revolutionary parliamentarism’ in the build-up to October, one that has the benefit, at least according to its most devoted expositor, of having been successful. In his two-volume work, Lenin’s Electoral Strategy,[3] August H. Nimtz demonstrates that Lenin saw the Bolshevik party’s involvement in parliaments as indispensable and ceaselessly advocated for it, even in periods where severe restrictions on suffrage and disproportionate representation between classes led others to call for abstention. Yet, he also saw that involvement as a kind of adjunct to the real sites in which workers’ power would be consolidated. Entry into elections and presence in parliament could serve as key platforms for agitation and propaganda, as well as a vehicle for gauging the ‘maturity’ of the working class and the strength of the party’s position, but they could never provide direct vehicles for their ascension to power.

What defined revolutionary parliamentarism, then, was the electoral and parliamentary assertion of workers’ independence, an insistence on their own platform and party, a refusal to compromise or to govern the system for the ruling classes. Participation in the institutions of ‘bourgeois democracy’ was necessary but only because they provide forums for contact with workers who have not yet been politicized, allowing the party to operate outside the illegal underground. ‘What’s decisive, in other words, in the fate of the electoral process itself takes place outside its very parameters’.[4] One can be in the state, yet at a distance from it, at the same time. Even where a tide of popular politicization might seem poised to bring the party into government, the odds are, as Engels put it, that this ‘will drive the rulers to overthrow legality, that is, to put us in the most favorable position to make the revolution’.[5]

For Nimtz, the success of this strategy is taken to resolve the antimony of electoral participation: such participation is not fruitless, insofar as it provides occasion for propaganda and strength-gauging, but using electorally acquired positions for anything else, above all actual governance, is worse than useless. It is to descend into what Marx, Engels, and Lenin all diagnosed as ‘that incurable malady, parliamentary cretinism, a disorder which penetrates its unfortunate victims with the solemn conviction that the whole world, its history and future, are governed and determined by a majority of votes in that particular representative body which has the honor to count them among its members’.[6] Already in 2014, Nimtz attributed that malady to Syriza and its supporters, and Tspiras’s subsequent capitulation seems to confirm that assessment: faith in Syriza represented a combination of ‘parliamentary cretinism’ and its ‘necessary complement…voting fetishism—that is, the modern but erroneous tendency to equate the right to register a preference for either a candidate or a policy in a public election with the actual exercise of political power’.[7] This could only be all the more so for faith in Sanders and the Democratic Party.

And yet, the full force of this argument seems to depend on something it implicitly assumes: the existence of a political class-formation that has some purchase in subaltern common sense, that can operate independently precisely insofar as it (or its avant-garde) can define its boundaries, render its interests coherent, and grow its ranks, possibilities that depend on it not being betrayed by parliamentary cretins. But does such a formation exist today, in a conjuncture where (at least in countries like the U.S.) the traditional workers’ political movement, grounded across most of the 20^th century in industrial factory production, is weak, if not non-existent? Marxist theory, no doubt, persists, is beginning to flourish again, and provides a critical orientation, but how much of a hold does it have today on common sense? And what degree of consensus is there in such theory today regarding the character such a political formation might take, how it might be developed such a movement?[8] The abstract, structural coordinates of Capital, no matter how emphatically asserted, are not enough here: there is a orienting correctness to a definition of the working class as all those who are exploited or even ‘everyone in the producing classes who has in their lifetimes participated in the totality of reproduction of society’.[9] Yet a concept at that level of abstraction cannot, in and of itself, shape a political movement, lest all of Lenin’s worries after the civil war, and Gramsci’s in a fascist cell, about hegemony and the possibilities for proletarian leadership of the peasantry would have been pointless.

More concretely, one could ask: what if Tsipras had not capitulated? Was that capitulation a foregone conclusion? Certainly, the weakness of the left in Syriza was a key factor in that outcome but would its position relative to fundamental transformation – or just a break with the EU – have been stronger if Tsipras and Syriza had not risen to electoral popularity? Would the masses that voted for Syriza, rallied in the streets, and voted ‘Oxi’ overwhelmingly, have been there if Syriza and Tsipras had not, if the left had remained independent, organizing outside the electoral arena? There is no doubt that the events following the No vote disillusioned and disaggregated the mass resistance that had built up but, again, what if it had not happened that way? Would the successes and failures of a government openly resisting the triad and attempting to relieve some of effects of austerity have advanced the clarity of purpose and goals on the left or led it further into a kind of electoral fetishism? Or both? Do answers to such questions yet exist?

Do we, in other words, have a clear strategy for situations in which the political formation of a subaltern class identity lags behind the development of political-electoral antagonisms? To be clear – though I can only sketch the point here – I do not take the absence of such a formation to be a merely ideological effect of a temporarily victorious of ‘neoliberal politics’, but of the reordering of capitalist social relations that such politics has sought to defend and expand. The increasingly free global flows of capital, shadowed by militarized supply-chains, new ranks of warehouse and transportation workers, and halted flows of migrants; the off-shoring and increasing automation of industrial production; the growth in ‘service work’ as social reproduction labor becomes, to differing extents, privatized and a responsibility of the state; the individualizing, disaggregating submission of individuals to regimes of debt and risk assessment; and the increasing numbers of the gendered and racialized ‘reserve army of labor’, warehoused in ghettos, barrios, hinterlands, and refugee camps, consigned to what Stuart Hall called ‘the common experience of “worklessness”’,[10] have together produced a situation in which traditional political formations of class no longer cohere well with the contents of common sense. Class antagonisms, of course, remain and are clearly intensifying, but, without a coherent political formation, they are often expressed, to the extent they are politically expressed at all, electorally, in more or less incoherent fashion.

The dilemmas for such electoral expressions are exacerbated in the U.S. context: the lack of a parliamentary, percentage-based representative system means that to win 30% of the vote is not to gain a substantial parliamentary foothold for agitation but to fail spectacularly. What propagandistic function would such failures have relative to any nascent independent movement and should we cultivate or remain indifferent to them? Invest all of our energies in helping push a Democratic candidate like Bernie to a majority for the agitational benefits of such a victory, despite the dangerous counter-effects of the inevitable (and already existing) capitulations to party and political realities? Moreover, to the extent that the lack of political formation today rests, to some substantive degree, on the increasing disciplinary, debt-servicing, carceral, police and surveillance functions of the state, might not some alternative practice of governance – the loosening of controls and restrictions, the changing of anti-democratic electoral forms, at least – be an important adjunct or even prerequisite of any growing movement? In place of the old electoral antimonies, it might be more useful to start from a place that admits we do not know the answers.

Questions of Hegemony

With the dissolution of the specific ‘economic-corporative’ formation of the working class that defined it across much of the twentieth century, the electoral question can appear to subsume or exhaust the question of hegemony. This is the historical basis for the rise of the theory and practice of ‘left populism’ identified with Mouffe and Laclau. That these questions are not, in fact, identical explains the strategic dead-end towards which such a vision leads. Conceiving of hegemony as an ‘empty signifier’, without determinate grounds in productive and political relations becomes, in practice, the goal of articulating one’s principles vaguely enough to win electoral victories. But if such victories define a movement’s self-understanding, then, having won, it can only prepare to win again, forever chasing some other, actually hegemonic, force ever further to the right. For Gramsci, as Peter Thomas has shown, a proletariat form of hegemony was not a way of appealing to the masses exactly where they were, but one of renderingsenso commune coherent, of increasing its grasp of its own determinate historical position, the extant possibilities for transformation, and, thereby, increasing the subaltern classes’ capacity to act.[11]

The lack of an existing political formation of subaltern classes can, then, also be grasped, in Gramscian terms, as an absence of alternative hegemonic apparatuses. The causes of this absence are the same transformations in accumulation sketched above, which inaugurated a long process of social and political disaggregation, molecularly dissolving whatever concrete apparatuses the Cold War had not destroyed or the new lefts had begun to build. As the state has instituted more and more forms of molecular competition across the landscape of civil society, everyone has had to become entrepreneurs and imperialists of themselves or else descend into an inchoate mass of the un- and under-employed, discredited by their very failure to promote themselves. The subaltern capacity to act in anything but more or less desperate acts of self-defense was attenuated to the point where even to think that there was an alternative, let alone to act to institute one, became immensely difficult. This was not a failure of thought as such but a symptom of the collapse of those alternative apparatuses that underpinned unifying thoughts and actions and made them possible. You cannot render coherent what barely exists, any more than an inchoate mass can act independently.

It is in this historical context that the Democratic Party undertook its long journey from the center to the right, under the increasing hegemony of professional knowledge workers, trained, precisely, in guiding ships going nowhere in particular, and empowered by increasingly triadic economies wherein elite knowledge workers are richly rewarded for wielding the power of a capital ever more distanced from the masses by massive inequalities, gated communities, and tax havens.[12] It is also in this context that reviving protest has often taken temporary, ephemeral forms, summoned by Facebook and dispersed by riot police, buttressed by discourses that also identified themselves with knowledge work, a fixed-capital infrastructure embedded in the mind itself, so that thought might become deed without needing to worry about anything so tedious as building coherence or constructing hegemonic apparatuses.

Thomas’s book runs counter to this, powerfully insisting on an identity of thought and practice for Gramsci that locates thought as one practice amongst others, caught up the mid-stream of history, reflecting on its own historical determinateness, and seeking out coherence amongst the contradictions of every mass action. Yet his book also deflates this insistence somewhat by having so little to say on how Gramsci’s thought might inform our practice in the present. At the very least, that seems a peculiarly un-Gramscian model of reading. ‘[A]waiting the energies and initiatives of a reviving working-class movement’[13] feels a bit like awaiting Godot. Will we even know him if we see him? For it seems doubtful that the reviving working-class movement in the contemporary U.S. will look like the one that Gramsci helped lead in Turin’s industrial sector.

Rather, in a period of disaggregation and potential re-formation, class struggles have tended to take the form of social reproduction struggles. When a large plurality of a population occupies a shifting position in the relations of production, one not fitting into a pre-existing class formation, the political form of those struggles is not a concretely articulated class politics, but, rather, a collective turn – often towards the state, in the form of “popular” demands – “to resolve the structural contradictions between the spheres of production and social reproduction,” to make life livable.[14] Where ‘labor unions agitating at the point of production (for wages) are weak or non-existent in large parts of the globe…we have rising social movements around issues of living conditions,’ struggles for water or over land eviction or housing.[15] Or electoral campaigns premised on Medicaid for All and the forgiveness of student and other debt.

These struggles can cross over with traditional union actions – as in the wave of teachers’ strikes – but also take forms addressed to the policy-making and economic functions of the state, rather than individual employers (or the state as employer), precisely because it is at those levels where the state has increasingly intervened in social reproduction in the interests of ‘capital-as-a-whole’, driving down the value of wage labor and disaggregating resistance.[16] Such struggles involve a kind of leap immediately to the political or hegemonic level, without a prior ‘corporative-economic’ one. On the one hand, they are vulnerable to various forms of electoral and state manipulations; on the other, they blur the line of where an alternative hegemony is contested and constructed, forming local organizations of struggle and forcing their claims within the apparatuses of the state, prior to the constitution of class-formation, often through an antagonistic figuring of ‘the people’.

In relation to struggles for hegemony, therefore, it is also difficult to define a clear line today based on traditional debates. There can be little argument that any long-term process of increasing the capacity of the subaltern to act must persist in (likely new and experimental) forms of direct organizing, finding sites where people can accomplish things together that give them a sense of their own potential power; yet, there also seems no question that hearing someone like Bernie speak, in a cable news interview, in an speech posted on-line, in a primary debate, can feel like a salutary shock to common sense, a suggestion or confirmation of ideas rarely expressed. In some ways, it was almost as difficult to imagine someone like Sanders appearing on cable news every night as it was to imagine the end of capitalism (as, all the while, the end of the world becomes increasingly easy to picture). In the face of that feeling, the stubborn insistence that supporting Bernie means destroying the working-class movement can sound like the groupuscule logic of the long interregnum, in which the purity of a thought tended to substitute for any hope of its efficacy.

And yet, when Bernie speaks, as he did in his first official interview as a candidate, of how the heart of his campaign has to be a rising social movement, a ‘revolution’, one also strains to grasp the coherence of such a thought. Is it really possible that an electoral campaign could be the vehicle for the consolidation of a movement of movements that could challenge its own candidate further to the left, could keep the failures of a candidate or an office-holder from being the collapse of the movement? It might be worth here revisiting and rethinking the long debate[17] over comunas in Venezuela: as local centers of political and social activity, partially formed and supported by the state, they do not seem to have been able to democratize Maduro’s torpid, corrupt extension ofchavismo but they do seem to have played a critical role in the ability of his regime to resist an imperial-administered coup. Is that a sign of progress or regression? Here again, the old certainties do not seem much help.

To admit that we do not know must also be to experiment openly and widely. But in which way, in what directions? Can we answer any of these questions without a clearer sense of what ‘the proletariat’ today is or means (for itself, above all), or without a clearer sense of how social reproduction struggles might build towards something other than a demand directed to the state? Or can such demands themselves be rendered increasingly coherent in the building of new hegemonic apparatuses? We might do this better, in an experimental spirit, if, rather than deciding answers based on old antinomies, we attempt to reckon with new particularities.

Questions of identity

One set of such particularities, which have taken on a renewed urgency in recent years, also define a strategic antinomy regarding Sanders’s candidacy: gender and race. The antinomy regarding these issues is somewhat different than those discussed above, insofar as it arises only if one already intends to support, campaign, and vote for some candidate in the Democratic primaries. But the issues at stake have a more general relevance for moving beyond the antinomies of electoral politics and hegemony, while also reinstating some of the distinctions between them. That Bernie is an ‘old white guy’, in a nation founded on white, patriarchal settler colonialism, is not an idle or incidental fact.

The strategic antinomy here takes something like this form: either policies and program alone, not the person, should determine one’s support or supporting a white man within an unprecedentedly diverse field (as before, against the first woman with a legitimate chance of becoming president) tendentially functions, whatever one’s conscious intentions, as an endorsement of the white supremacist, patriarchal character of our political and social order. Admittedly, the second proposition is rarely expressed this directly; rather, it is manifested in particular judgments regarding some activity or statement by Sanders or his supporters (‘Bernie bros’) or in a defense of another candidate from slights or criticisms taken to suggest sexism and/or racism. The general implication is usually close to the surface however: a preference for Sanders is a preference for whiteness and maleness.

That this implication – especially in the context of a primary where the Democratic establishment seems determined to throw money at every viable moderate woman or nonwhite person who might disaggregate Sanders’s popularity– is not more often dismissed as a cynical ploy is a function of at least two historical processes:

1) The strategy of today’s Democratic power brokers is, essentially, an extension of the strategy by which liberals attempted to bring to a closure the radical anti-racist, feminist, and queer struggles of the 1970s. That strategy is epitomized in Karen Ferguson’s rendering of the liberal response to Black Power movements: ‘the African American community deserved representation in a pluralistic and meritocratic body politic, but such power should be exercised by the “best and brightest” of the black community as defined by the “best and brightest” of the white community’.[18] After the ensuing conservative onslaught, this vision of ‘diversity’ appears all the more progressive to the knowledge workers now in control of the Democratic Party.

2) At the same time, those struggles themselves embodied real and often fundamental conflicts within, and in reaction against, socialist and new left movements prone to multiple forms of class reductionism, misogyny, racism, and homophobia, both in their programs and, even more so, in their practice. Contemporary experiences make clear, to those who care to notice, that such structural biases have not been resolved within the radical left.

In this light, outright dismissals of such concerns are something worse than mere tone deafness. The idea that criticism of Clinton was driven solely by her gender and not by sober rejection of the New Democratic model of technocratic, tax-code ‘nudging’ of people in ‘progressive’ directions, while locking up ‘super-predators’ and throwing people off welfare, is difficult to take seriously. But there’s also no doubt that hostility to this model of social reproduction management is exacerbated when its spokesperson is a woman. That it’s called the ‘nanny state’ is not accidental and, as the success of Roma shows, even liberals tend to like their nannies more patient, submissive, and loving.

At the same time, the perverse intersectionality of today’s Democratic electoral politics (as with the Clintons’ chameleon-like capacity to support racist policies and, simultaneously, appeal to Black voters) highlights the hopeless decision-algorithms one would be led into if considering campaigning and voting for another candidate. Who to support? Harris, the Black female prosecutor who opposed criminal justice reform and criminalized truancy? Booker, the Black male lawyer who draws large donations from finance capital and backed charter schools on a stage with Betsy DeVos? Warren, the white female academic, might be the most serious alternative (at least for white academics), but her bizarre dalliance with genetic race theory and her disavowal of socialism hardly inspire confidence. If this is the possible that the art of today’s electoral politics summons, then one really might be better off bagging the whole thing.

That Bernie does lead some socialists to think otherwise is, certainly, a function of his policies. His focus on the economic inequities linked to race, gender, and sexuality are productive and it is almost certainly the case, as several have argued, that those policies would be better than any other for (most) Blacks, latinxs, women of all races, the ‘white working class’; basically, for anyone but capital and the ‘best and brightest’. The possibility that a Sanders campaign might help draw the public lines of antagonism along these coordinates is one good reason to consider supporting him.

But there is also, it should be acknowledged, a fundamental limit to this way of figuring the issue. Sanders is correct to reject the view that ‘all that we need is people who are candidates who are black or white, who are black or Latino or woman or gay, regardless of what they stand for, that the end result is diversity’.[19] And yet, if race, gender, and sexuality are all, increasingly, modalities through which class is experienced, they are always also something more, both in the sense that, as structural forms of violence, they long ago developed a degree of historical and political autonomy from class antagonisms, and that class antagonisms themselves are often articulated through these modalities for individuals and groups (both the victims of racism and those whose common sense is structured by it) in ways that cannot directly or easily be translated into some economic united front. ‘Universal’ policies enacted in such conditions will, of a kind of necessity, reproduce inequalities along lines of race, gender, and sexuality. There is a logic to this antinomy as well that resists either choosing one side or arriving at an abstract synthesis.

At play in this irresolution is a tension that still today sets the logics of electoral politics and the building of hegemony apart. A still predominantly white electorate (and one still more or less at home with patriarchal structures, if the votes of white women are any indication) might seem to counsel an ongoing appeal to interests expressed in the universalistic voice Sanders employs, one that addresses the marginalized, but predominantly in a voice that simultaneously speaks of and to the majority. A long-term vision of constructing hegemony, on the other hand, must recognize the need to build up coherence from within particular sites of experience and resistance, from the independent organization of the oppressed. Such coherence could not be strictly ‘economic’, color-blind, or gender-neutral. The specific forms of ‘excessive violence’ involved cannot be overcome by an appeal to the neutral abstractions of class forms in Capital, nor to the postracialism or ‘lean-in’ feminism of today’s professionals.. Efforts to nullify those violences in their specificities and develop communal forms of agency can translate across different groups – this was the promise, for example, of the Chicago Panthers’ original ‘Rainbow Coalition’ – but they cannot be effectively deracinated or neutered. The effort to do so leaves electoral universalism subject to the backlash of contradictorysenso commune. In the era of Trumpism, as what John Narayan calls ‘a promise to re-supply the wages of whiteness in the absence of wages’,[20] the struggle of racialized outsiders, as of women, as of queers and trans, must be central to any politics that hopes to build towards revolutionary coherence (as likewise, to any construction of a truly internationalist or anti-imperialist ‘foreign policy’).

Even at a strategic level, the hegemonic apparatuses forming around these ‘modalities’ are likely amongst the most developed and developing today. They provide more or less independent starting points for new forms of politics. And yet, in history, there has rarely been a form of transformative, mass politics that actually put such issues at its center without rendering them in an abstracted, universalistic voice. The strategic potentials and dilemmas of forming such a politics should not be postponed (again, as always) for the sake of an electoral campaign. But this is not to say that involvement in such a campaign, in particular ways, to particular degrees, cannot be part of such a politics. Again, answers to such questions do not (yet) exist.

In place, then, of mobilizing the old strategic antimonies of debates around the question of the Sanders campaign, I propose we use it as one, amongst many, occasions for asking a series of questions, posed in an active, experimental voice, attentive to determinate histories, and analytically centered on the present balance of forces, their crystallizations in specific institutions and apparatuses, and the openings yet available: What can ‘independence’ mean in the absence of defined political formation of class? What are the possibilities and dangers posed by each specific form of engagement with electoral politics? What do we lose by engaging in them and what do we lose by not engaging? What are the possible forms of political class formations today? What are the possible sites for the building of anti-capitalist hegemonic apparatuses? How can these be grounded in, rather than abstracted from, the particularities of race, gender, and sexuality and struggles against oppression? I don’t pretend that these are the only questions that should be asked, nor that these are necessarily the best formulations of them. I only want to suggest that attempts to answer such questions must be derived from more careful analytic attention to specific existing social formations and to ongoing experimental practices within them. They will, for some time at least, remain provisional.

The old strategic antinomies are, at best, coordinates within which we can begin to develop such questions. The uncertainty here is, in part, an expression of the left’s weakness today: the transformations that capital accumulation and its productive and political relations have undergone, as well as the forces that militarized surveillance states have organized, were largely successful in the disaggregation and absorption of past formations and apparatuses of resistance and hegemony. The persistence of capitalism in a more or less unchanged form since the financial crisis is a symptom of the strengths they achieved. We are not on the cusp of a revolution, in which some set of clear strategic lines might need to be imposed lest the strategic opportunity fade. But we might be on the cusp of some kind of break or breaks in common sense after which a revolution, or a class formation enabling it, might begin to be thinkable.

In such a situation, it might be strategically prudent to welcome – to be open to collaboration with – any group of people whose vision is oriented towards some such break, at least until the possibility of some hegemonic apparatus(es) (‘party’ or otherwise) that might meaningfully allow for collective decision making at broader levels arises. We might think too much of ourselves if we think that every strategic decision we, or others, make today has world-making or world-destroying potential; we might think too little of ourselves if we think the old antinomies provide a ‘holy text’ of one form or another than can orient our choices a priori. The lingering crisis and rising antagonisms offer a chance for new forms that might eclipse the limits of the old, while the experience of an impending end of the world makes active engagement with an experimental range of practices and questions all the more imperative. The Sanders campaign may yet prove one retrospective sign that new and better things were still possible.

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[1] Poulantzas 1978, p. 256.

[2]Ibid, p. 265.

[3] Nimtz 2014a, 2014b.

[4] Nimtz 2014a, p. 12.

[5] Nimtz 2014a, p. 27.

[6] Nimtz 2014a, p. 12.

[7] Nimtz 2014b, p. 182.

[8] I do not mean at all to imply that there is not critical work being done on these questions today, but as such work itself makes clear, a definitive problem today is the transformed and transforming character of any ‘proletariat’ today. See, amongst many others, Dyer-Witheford , Moody , Bhattacharya

[9] Bhattacharya 2017, p. 89.

[10] Hall et al., Policing the Crisis, p. 349.

[11] Thomas 2009.

[12] See Bray 2019 for an extended reflection on the political and social functions of ‘mental labor’ in the twentieth century and today, as well as a critique of leftist strategies premised on the universalization of knowledge work.

[13] Thomas 2009, p. 438.

[14] Katsarova 2015, np.

[15] Bhattacharya 2017.

[16] Bhattacharya 2017.

[17] See, for examples, Fernandes 2010, Wilpert 2011, Hellinger 2012, and McCarthy 2013.

[18] Ferguson 2013, p. 9.

[19] Murray 2019.

[20] Narayan 2017.

KARL LIEBKNECHT AND ROSA LUXEMBURG[1]

Grigorii Zinoviev

Translated, edited and introduced by Clayton Black

Three days after the murders of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in January, 1919, Grigorii Zinoviev, chair of the Petrograd soviet, delivered to that body the following tribute. The murders in Berlin heightened the sense of vulnerability among the Bolsheviks, and Zinoviev sought both to underscore the rabid determination of global opposition to socialist revolution and assure his listeners of socialism's inevitable triumph.   

Economic conditions in Petrograd at that moment were already dire, as food supply had collapsed, factory work had come to a halt, and thousands had either been conscripted into the Red Army or fled to the countryside to find relief. The official declaration of "red terror" in September, 1918, contributed to the tensions. The Bolsheviks pinned their hopes on German radicals to spread the revolution into Europe and, once victorious, extend a fraternal hand to the struggling Soviet state. The murder of Luxemburg and Liebknecht and the suppression of the Spartacist uprising cast a pall on those hopes. Zinoviev saved particular scorn for the German Social Democrats as traitors to the working classes and socialism and as puppets of the German bourgeoisie. 

Zinoviev's tribute was published in Volume 16 of his collected works (Sochineniia, vol. 16, Osnovopolozhniki i vozhdi kommunizma; biograficheskie ocherki, Leningrad: Gosizdat, 1924, 198–212). It is important to remember that it was meant to be delivered as a speech, so the paragraphs tend to be short (often only a single sentence) and the punctuation inconsistent. Translation involves difficult decisions about word choice and sentence structure, but I have tried to remain true to the author's meaning without doing violence to his words. Endnotes are Zinoviev's. Items in brackets are the translator's insertions for clarity or, in the case of note 6, correction of Friedrich Ebert's name (identified as "Fritz" in the original). In note 8 I have replaced "proletariat" with "bourgeoisie," as it seems obvious that this was intended. 

Clayton Black, Washington College

Rosa Luxemburg[2] belongs among the few individuals in the contemporary generation of the workers' movement to whom a share of the greatest happiness came: to serve not only as a populariser of the ideas of Marx but also to work farther, to add her own word to the field of Marxist theory. 

Rosa Luxemburg stands in the ranks of the few figures of the Third International who combine the qualities of ardent agitator, brilliant politician and, along with them, one of the greatest theoreticians and writers of Marxism. Possessing all of these first-class attributes, Rosa Luxemburg worked on the stage of the labour movement no less than a quarter century. 

Rosa Luxemburg began her work as a young girl in Poland and then continued it in Germany; she worked also in Russia. She was the true embodiment of an internationalist.

I remember conversations with Rosa Luxemburg in 1906 in the village of Kuokkala in the little apartment of Comrade Lenin, then in semi-emigration after the first revolution had been broken. 

The first person to initiate a theoretical assessment of that suppressed revolution; the first Marxist figure who understood the meaning of our soviets already in 1905, even though they had only just been created; the first European Marxist to clearly appreciate the role awaiting mass revolutionary strikes in combination with armed uprising––this was Rosa Luxemburg. 

Her brilliant books and articles on the mass strike, her speeches in Jena[3] at the German Social-Democratic congress, taking place at the moment of our revolution, her identification of the role that awaited the Soviets of Workers' Deputies to play––all of these points, made over a decade ago, were of colossal historical significance. 

To Rosa Luxemburg belongs the immense credit, which she shares with our comrade and teacher, Lenin, for formulating in 1907 at the international socialist congress in Stuttgart the basic idea for which Liebknecht and Luxemburg perished and for which everything that is honest and heroic in the international working class is now fighting. 

At the Stuttgart congress in 1907 two worlds stood opposed to one another.  Bernstein and the revisionists, as they were called then, insisted that, in essence, the working class should not reject the so-called colonial policy or imperialism (as we would put it now) but carry it out, as they said, in cultural forms and for the benefit of culture.  Even Bebel, who in his declining years made many concessions to the right wing of Social Democracy, even Bebel wavered. And only a small group of Marxists, at the head of which stood Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, said in 1907, eleven years ago: imperialist war is approaching, the bourgeoisie of all countries is leading all of humanity toward this unavoidable catastrophe.

What will be the tasks of worker-revolutionaries when the criminal hand of the bourgeoisie leads Europe to that imperialist war?  And Luxemburg and Lenin answered:  the task will be to use the entire economic and political crisis that will result from the war to lift the masses to struggle against the capitalist order!

In other words, they said then: the task will be to turn the imperialist war into a civil war––into a war of workers, peasants, and soldiers against the bourgeoisie, against the authors of the war!

Rosa Luxemburg, in the ranks of the old, formal, official German Social Democrats, tirelessly and with immense talent fought precisely for this fundamental idea: she first sounded the alarm in the ranks of German Social Democracy and at all congresses demanded acceptance of the mass political strike, at a time when even the best of the then leaders of German Social Democracy did not what to hear of it.

More than once she rebuked the most stalwart leaders of German Social Democracy in the discussion of questions of foreign policy, saying that, when the issue is adopting resolutions, the socialists are very radical, but when it comes to genuine struggle against the war and against the government that called forth this war, then they all "hide in the bushes."  These words of hers at that time seemed enormously brazen: German Social Democracy was at the height of its glory. 

Every Petersburg worker who has been in the ranks of the revolution for several years knows that once, when no one had the nerve to criticize German Social Democracy, when it seemed exemplary in all respects, Rosa Luxemburg already loudly proclaimed that the party was rotting at its roots.

I remember perfectly well the Jena congress of German Social Democrats that took place in 1911; Rosa Luxemburg crossed swords with August Bebel, who at that time leaned to the right, to the side of the old party, having declared war against Rosa Luxemburg for denouncing Social Democracy and for pointing out elements of chauvinism in the policies of the party's C[entral] C[ommittee]. And you know what untouchable authority Bebel enjoyed in the ranks of German Social Democracy; at that congress, speaking with the greatest harshness against Rosa Luxemburg, he all but demanded her departure from the party. Only a small group headed by Clara Zetkin was united with Rosa Luxemburg and sat next to her when the reproaches poured over her. They did not want to listen to Rosa Luxemburg, but she was able to make them listen to her; she accepted the fight, raised the gauntlet thrown by Bebel, the best representative of the Second International, she made that congress, half of which consisted then of hucksters and traitors of socialism, pronounce the word "International."

Rosa Luxemburg sounded the revolutionary alarm, she demanded honesty and loyalty to the banner of the International.

She did not betray herself during the war either. In the course of the entire war, one can say, she did not spend a single month in freedom,––Wilhelm with his gang and Scheidemann[4] with his fraternity played with her like a cat with a mouse––releasing her for several days, and, after a short time, picking her up again and putting her in prison, concocting various accusations, setting trials. They knew that one of the most dangerous enemies of the bourgeoisie, we can say without exaggeration, was and remained Rosa Luxemburg.

To Karl Liebknecht belongs, of course, no less credit. He also stood in the ranks of revolutionaries for nearly a quarter century. Karl Liebknecht––Comrade Trotsky also spoke to you about this––endured the entire revolution of 1905 together with us.

Liebknecht belonged to those few bold spirits in the ranks of German Social Democracy who demanded ten years ago, as it was expressed then, "antimilitarist" propaganda, i.e. revolutionary propaganda among the soldiers. 

We need to return, comrades, to the atmosphere of sleek and decorous Social Democracy and the Second International of that time, when the demands of Liebknecht seemed to be madness. Bebel himself, knowing Liebknecht since childhood and loving him as a son, attacked him harshly for such, in his view, an "adventurist" proposal. What do you mean, go to the soldiers to preach socialism!  German Social Democrats decided that only an adventurer could propose that! They feared that Social Democracy would lose its legal standing that way, that the bourgeoisie would be offended, that the bourgeoisie and the rulling classes would decide that German Social Democracy had ceased to side with the state!

Liebknecht was one of the first to swim against the current. And he succeeded in breaking the ice. For his famous booklet, "Against Militarism," he was imprisoned for months on end.  He was a founder of the union of international youth, which has a great future. We know what an enormous role youth played in our revolution; it played the same in both the German and international [revolutions]. All that is youthful, fresh, honest, and revolutionary, vigorous, and upstanding in the working class has gathered around the banner of the union of youth, of which Liebknecht was one of the founders.

Liebknecht was in poor standing with the leaders of the Second International even before the start of the war, but with the start of the war he landed among the unquestionably suspicious. 

He did not personally participate in the Zimmerwald conference because he had been conscripted; he was sent to the front in the calculation that a stray bullet would remove that dangerous enemy of the bourgeoisie. Liebknecht sent us a letter at the Zimmerwald conference which ended with famous words in response to the slogan that Schiedemann and his fraternity had issued at the start of the war: "Civil peace, reconciliation between classes, between wolves and sheep, between the bourgeoisie and the working class, between the butcher-monarchs and the soldiers and peasants." Such was the official slogan of German Social Democracy. The last phrase in Liebknecht's letter read as such: "Comrades, our business now is to say––no civil peace, but civil war, this is the watchword of our day."

Liebknecht was alone in voting against war credits in the German Reichstag, and his voice resounded across the entire world.

We will also not forget that in France, where the bourgeoisie raised an especially strong wave of chauvinism, where everything German in 1915 was cursed, where workers and soldiers were infected with unusual hatred toward mankind, the name of Liebknecht was pronounced with love! We know only one example from French history when a German socialist was so loved by French workers: I speak of Friedrich Engels.

At the beginning of the war, in 1915, everything German was cursed in France.  The German proletariat was portrayed as a collection of bandits. Some tried to present Scheidemann's policies as though they were a consistent implementation of Marx's teaching. Dozens of articles about this were printed in the most widely distributed bourgeois newspapers, and entire brochures were published to the effect that K. Marx was himself always a pan-Germanist, a proponent of the "great" bourgeois Germany.  And when the entire official, so-called Socialist Party of France gave in to that chauvinist current, the aged Vaillant[5], the old communard, in his elder years having extended his hand to the devil of defencism, nevertheless lost his patience when newspapers began to defame Engels. Ready at that time to drown every German in a spoonful of water, he appeared with an article in which he said: there were only two Germans in Germany who, after the Franco-Prussian war, remained internationalists––Marx and Engels.

Karl Liebknecht enjoyed the same trust and popularity in recent years in France. There is a document––and, probably, there are many of them––that bears witness to the love in France for Karl Liebknecht. Following one frightfully unsuccessful exchange of fire for the French in 1915, the French frontline soldiers gathered in a circle, started a fire, and the survivors––among whom were many French intellectual workers––began to discuss their fate and think about what awaited them further. And right at that moment one thoughtful shout from a soldier resounded: "Are there not, after all, people who are fighting against this hell, even individuals who come out on their own in the course of world history and proclaim "down with the war"[?]  To which another French soldier pronounced: "Yes,Karl Liebknecht." In 1915, in the trenches, where special efforts were made to enflame chauvinism, in France, which was completely engulfed by the flame of chauvinism and hated everything German, four years ago the best people, the best soldiers, the best workers recalled the name of Karl Liebknecht with reverence.

Now imagine the pain that news that Karl Liebknecht is no longer among the living calls forth in the hearts of both German and French soldiers. Imagine what powerful propaganda the very death of such a man as Karl Liebknecht serves for the idea of communism. 

When Karl Liebknecht emerged from prison, from that stone cell, when the raging workers' movement tore him from there, the first movement of his spirit was to recall the working class of the country in which that class raised the banner of the Commune and to which befell the great joy of victory.  K. Liebknecht first of all thought of us, of the Russian revolution, and headed directly to his goal, to the building of the Russian embassy, where our comrades were still at that time, bared his head before the building and said that he sends "brotherly greetings to the first government of the calloused hand."

Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg always felt the most intimate and fraternal connection to our revolution. Precisely for that they were especially hated by the Berlin social democrats. At present Scheidemann and his gang, Ebert[6] and his government, are living exclusively on the charity of rich uncle Wilson[7] and the French imperialists who hope to stave off the wave of Bolshevism. Scheidemann's government enjoys the goodwill of the international thugs only insofar as it enters the struggle against the Russian revolution. 

You remember the recent dialogue between French and German generals.  The French general rebuked the German general for the help that German soldiers supposedly gave to us, the Bolsheviks, in occupied places around Riga. The German general answered, "your excellency, why do you not understand that your accusation is without foundation? Germany is closer to Russia, consequently Bolshevism is more dangerous for us than for you." You see, in conversation with each other these people do not hide what matters.

Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were hated by them for bravely, brightly, and ably defending all that was best in the Russian proletariat; they were dedicated to the Russian revolution and wanted to follow in its footsteps.

Do you want to know why exactly Rosa Luxemburg was killed? Read her speech to the congress of Spartacists,[8] given on 31 December, 1918.  Rosa Luxemburg accused Scheidemann and his gang of wanting to help strangle the Russian revolution. She said, "Look what is happening in Riga and in the occupied places. In Riga, thanks to Scheidemann's odiousness and the work of the German leader of trade unions, August Winnig,[9] German proletarians together with Allied forces and the Baltic barons are coming out against Russian Bolshevik forces. This is so odious that I openly and calmly declare that the German trade union leaders and German Social Democrats are the greatest of scoundrels."

She hurled that right in their faces! Rosa Luxemburg added, "Sitting in our current Scheidemann government are not only betrayers of the proletarian revolution but also genuine criminals!"

The hatred of these leaders of the German proletariat is now obvious! The entire hope of the world bourgeoisie is concentrated on using any sort of barrier to separate the workers of one country from the workers of another country, and, most important, to separate them from the workers of Russia, who defeated their bourgeoisie. And they concentrate their strength, all of their bloodthirstyness, against the people who are broadening the boundaries of the revolution, who are internationalists, who teach the German workers to follow in the footsteps of the Russian communist working class. That is what Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht died for and that is why they are loved by Russia's workers and peasants, who in a whole slew of regions tried to name their villages "Karl Liebknecht village." These peasants, these workers and soldiers will honor forever the names of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg.

Comrades, our hearts are heavy. Recent weeks have been especially difficult. The coming months may be even more difficult for us. At a moment when things are particularly difficult, when our Red Army soldiers, somewhere around Archangelsk or in some other distant front in the cold, poorly dressed and shoed, have to lie side-by-side and return fire from imperialist bands; or when our women workers have to return to hungry children with an eighth of a pound of bread or have to overcome these or other new adversities––at that difficult moment we will remember Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg.

For what did the German communards fight; what were German workers seeking, what were their great leaders––Liebknecht and Luxemburg––seeking? They were seeking what you and I already have. They fully appreciated the meaning of the victory that they could gain. If they were victorious tomorrow––it would not mean that the workers of Berlin would receive two pounds of bread apiece and that there would be foodstuffs in Berlin and that rivers of milk with banks of jelly would flow there. The Berlin communards knew, just like the Petrograd workers in October last year, what they would have to endure after the seizure of power. Perhaps several years of serious impoverishment, struggles, famine, starvation! They knew this perfectly well. And they did not deceive the Berlin workers or tell them that if the communards win tomorrow everyone would be well fed.

No, they said that new conflicts await you. Rosa Luxemburg especially emphasized this. She said, "We stand at the outset of a new struggle. Ahead are months and possibly years of difficult trials, deprivation, struggle."

The Berlin communards knew where they were headed; they went toward it and fell by the hundreds, they gave up the best of their people. Who now, after the death of Liebknecht and Luxemburg, will think of their own personal life?

When the working class sacrifices its blood so selflessly, gives up the best that it has without hesitating for a second, will rank-and-file participants really waver? Will our class, under the influence of whatever deprivations may be, whatever misfortunes may be, really waver for even a moment?

Berlin workers do not lag behind Petrograd or Moscow workers, and now they are the focus of the proletarian struggle for the entire universe. They have followed our path, they have fallen by the thousands, and tomorrow thousands more will fall in the name of achieving what already exists in Petrograd and Moscow and in Soviet Russia.

Is this not the greatest satisfaction for the workers, for the peasants and Red Army soldiers of Soviet Russia? The best in humanity is following our path, seeing the inevitability and rightness of that path. Yesterday was difficult for us, comrades; and today is difficult; these days are difficult for us. With that there should be no doubt that the blood of Liebknecht and Luxemburg will quicken the ripening of world socialist revolution!

Comrades, just as we are feeling in this hall, so, you can be sure, the working men and women of the whole world felt yesterday and feel today. Can you really doubt that the Parisian working men and women, who have such exalted revolutionary traditions––people who, in 1915 with reverence spoke the name of Karl Liebknecht––can you doubt at all that they, like us, are overflowing with determination to struggle to the end and that they also clench their fists and say, "We will avenge the sacred blood of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg!"

And thus say workers of the entire world now. The crime that Scheidemann and Ebert committed will cost them dearly. I am convinced that the best of the German proletariat is repeating to itself, "Can we really tolerate for even one more hour the power of the bourgeois murders who call themselves Social Democrats, who killed Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg––the pride of the international proletariat?"

Now we see the results of the criminal policies of the gentlemen Scheidemanns. 

At first glance, perhaps, what happened in Germany may seem confusing. After all, the same government that calls itself the government of a socialist republic is in power.

Rosa Luxemburg, with characteristic clarity, sketched the situation in Germany in a few words in her final speech. Here is what happened: German Social Democracy, having for many years played a reactionary role in history, was able to seize the soviets through its apparatus of bureaucratic officials, usurp their rights, impose its own policies, and gather everything in its own paws. These gentlemen quickly dressed themselves up as proponents of Soviet power, seized the driving reins, and to get to power German workers will have to step over the corpse of so-called Social Democracy. 

Scheidemann and Ebert are now calling their constituent assembly[10].

Comrades, we dissolved the constituent assembly exactly 12 months ago. Look how the international proletariat views our policies. Who stands for the constituent assembly in Germany? A herd of bankers, Wilhelm's gang, the gang of murderers of Liebknecht and Luxemburg. Not a month passed before the German proletariat declared, "Only over our dead bodies will you come to a constituent assembly." To the bourgeoisie it seems that the proletariat is a corpse over which they will step to get to the constituent assembly. In fact the corpse is the old, rotten Social Democrats who have turned into bourgeois executioners. The workers of Germany will step over it, and together with them we will reach the complete victory of the Third International!

[1]  "Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg," a speech delivered to a meeting of the Petrograd Soviet on 18 January 1919, was published in a special brochure together with a speech of Comrade Trotsky.

[2]  Born in 1870, killed 15 January, 1919.

[3]  The Jena congress of Social Democrats in 1905.

[4]  Scheidemann, Philipp––member of the German Social-Democratic party, prominent deputy in the Reichstag. In the final elections before the war elected vice-president of the Reichstag by the Social Democrats. During the war––leader of the right opportunist wing of the German Social Democrats, social patriot, voted for war credits, led the fight against K. Liebknecht and the "Spartacus" group; after the November revolution of 1918––head of the compromise government of republican Germany.

[5]  Vaillant, Edouard––one of the leaders of the French Socialist party. In 1871 elected to the National Assembly as a socialist, was a member of the Commune; fled, sentenced to death, in 1881 amnestied, in 1884 a member of the Parisian municipality, from 1893 a deputy. Leader of a small group of Blanquists. After 1914 a patriot and defensist. Died during the war.

[6]  Ebert, Fr[iedrich]––one of the leaders of German Social Democracy, president of the German Republic. Prior to the war stood on the right wing of the party, during the war an ardent chauvinist, after the war an irreconcilable foe of the communists.

[7]  Wilson, Woodrow (1857–1924)––"Democratic" president of the United States, formerly a professor.  A pacifist who during the war gave many widely broadcast speeches against the war and proposed the project for creating the League of Nations as a means for promoting peace in the future. In 1917–1918 enjoyed immense popularity not only in liberal bourgeois circles but also among American and West European workers. Many considered him a great prophet who would open a new era in the history of humanity. In the end, however, Wilson signed the Versailles agreement, and the League of Nations became a simple servant of the Entente. The United States refused to ratify the Versailles agreement and did not agree to join the League of Nations. Wilson's prestige suffered a fatal blow, he became a laughing stock for the entire world. In the presidential election of 1920 he was replaced by the "Republican" Harding. Died in 1924 "out of work."

[8]  The Spartacists, i.e. members of the "Spartacus" union (Spartacus was the name of the leader of a well-known uprising of Roman slaves), formed at the beginning of the war by K. Liebknecht, R. Luxemberg, L. Jogiches (Tyszka), and others.  The goal of the union was to fight against official Social Democracy, which had betrayed the cause of the proletariat and supported the military policies of the German [bourgeoisie]. The Spartacists called workers not only to the fight against the war but also to social revolution. In 1916, after the split of the "independent SDs" from the official party, "Spartacus" joined the "independents," preserving, however, its internal autonomy. When the "independents," together with the official SDs, joined the "Council of People's Plenipotentiaries" (a provisional revolutionary government) in November 1918, the Spartacists broke with them and, in December 1918, formed the German Communist party.

[9]  August Winnig––one of the leaders of the Hamburg trade-union movement, prior to the war was editor of the central organ of construction workers,Grundstein (Winnig was a mason by trade) and member of the local Hamburg parliament. Sided with the revisionist wing of the party. During the war became an ardent chauvinist and in 1918 played a leading role in the counterrevolutionary movement in the Baltics. In 1920, during the attempted revolutionary coup in Germany carried out by Kapp, offered his final services.

[10]  The speech was given on 18 January 1919, and 19 January of the same year elections for the National Assembly were to be held. The elections did, in fact, take place, and the resulting National Assembly, in which bourgeois parties dominated, drafted and promulgated the current bourgeois-republican constitution of Germany.

by Hernán Ouviña (translated by Nicolas Allen)

*The following is an excerpt from Rosa Luxemburgo y la reinvención de la política. Una lectura desde América Latina, scheduled for publication on January 15th by Editorial El Colectivo and the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation (Argentina).

Rosa Luxemburg, like many before her, considered the appropriation of surplus-value by the capitalist class to be a basic dynamic of the capitalist system, along with the resistance to exploitation and alienation that such a system necessarily implies. But this is only one – fundamental– dimension of capitalism, just as it is only one point of entry into Rosa’s vast lifework. Throughout her lifetime, Luxemburg came to develop a unique understanding of the particular system of domination known as capitalism: a complex web of power relations and forms of subjugation, a totality encompassing much more than the immediate production process, narrowly expressed in the capital-labour relation.

As Marx used to say, the concrete is the concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations. In that same spirit, we would do well to summon Luxemburg on the 100th anniversary of her death – murdered, in what we would today call a “femicide” – and allow her to shed some light on the multiple, concrete forms of contemporary oppression: in the struggles against patriarchy and coloniality; in the resistances being waged against the instrumentalisation, pillaging and plundering of the natural world and the commons. The proposals she formulated for self-emancipation can help us to understand the nature of what we today call the “subaltern position” and, with any luck, allow us to grasp the emancipatory potential for these types of subaltern struggles being played out across the globe. In brief, these subalternities –women, Indigenous, the natural world– are subordinated within a capitalist system that should be seen as a structure of multiple dominations.

The “Woman Issue”

Whether Rosa Luxemburg can be considered a feminist is still the subject of some debate. Her most superficial readers have tried to dismiss the question altogether, claiming that the issue of women’s liberation was completely foreign to her concerns. What is certain is that in a male-dominated world – or, just as well, inside leftist organizations rife with misogyny, where women were deliberately excluded from positions of power – Luxemburg’s own experience as a woman merits closer examination.

We know, for example, that she was made to suffer all type of sexist insult when engaging in political disputes: “hysterical lady”, “rabid bitch”, “venomous witch”, “whore”, “coarse amazon” and “snotty brat” are just some of the abuses she received.

Luxemburg’s close comrade and biographer Paul Frölich confirms that it was her status as a woman that provoked such hostilities: “She did not content herself with asking modestly for the opinions of the ‘practical politicians’ (Praktiker), but was ‘cheeky’ enough to develop her own views, and –what was worst of all– put forth such convincing arguments that the others had to begrudgingly capitulate” (Frölich, 2010: 42).

The Ecuadorian-Mexican philosopher Bolívar Echeverria stresses the uniqueness of this type of female self-assertion within the history of the organized workers’ movement: “By the end of the 19th century, a woman finding herself in the ‘objective error’ of not being ‘attractive’ still had the opportunity to rectify that error if she cultivated the compensatory graces of ‘male virtue’; but only by doing so in a properly ‘feminine’ way, that is, by disguising or imitating a [masculine] model that would thus be confirmed in its superiority. She could do so only be demonstrating the validity of the productive, bourgeois spirit (i.e., ‘masculine’), a spirit composed in equal parts of ambition, intelligence, wilfulness and realism, and only then by showing herself to be a version of that model whose defects –impulsivity, inconsistency and exaggeration– are attributable to the ‘feminine’ side” (Bolívar Echeverría, 1986: 150).

But Luxemburg paid no mind to the feminine mandate. Far from being a question of “temperament”, her boldness in the face of patriarchal hegemony quickly became the target of malicious invectives. Franz Mehring was quick to point this out in 1907, when Luxemburg had already turned into the object of public ridicule by the Social-Democratic press. In defence of his friend and comrade, Mehring protested, “this tasteless knocking of the most brilliant intellect of all the scientific heirs of Marx and Engels can, in the last resort, only be rooted in the fact that it is a woman whose shoulders bear this intellect” (cited in: Frölich, 1976: 210).

One can only imagine the sense of indignation those false leaders and grey bureaucrats must have felt upon seeing such a display of irreverence in public debate, political rallies and conferences; or in the private sphere, in the manner Luxemburg conducted herself in her social and romantic relationships. The Argentine feminist Claudia Korol reminds us that, even while living her romantic life to the fullest, Luxemburg refused to be emotionally blackmailed by her close political companion and lover Leo Jogiches, “daring to fall in love over and over again, breaking all the conventions set by the party-line concerning the nature of the family, going so far as to fall in love with Kostia Zetkin, the son of her friend Clara, who was 13 years her junior. She was an absolute scandal for a conservative brand of socialism in which the family was conceived along highly patriarchal lines as a disciplinary element” (Korol, 2018: 18).

Where there has been some confusion in the past over Rosa’s “spontaneism”, we can say without reservation that, in matters of the heart, Rosa was fiercely “spontaneist”. She was opposed to any control or oversight where mutual engagement and affections were concerned, just as she was against the imposition of hierarchies in her own relationships. This is most evident in her epistolary exchanges with Leo Jogiches, where she bears her soul and accuses Jogiches of arrogance, coldness and an almost obsessive focus on “The Cause” (written thusly in capitals and quotes, dripping with irony). Biographer Elzbieta Ettinger reveals that Rosa’s spontaneity formed a sharp contrast with [Jogiches’] calculated attempts to “manage her”, and Rosa often accused Jogiches of treating the relationship in a “purely superficial” manner (Ettinger, 1979: 23). When their strained relationship reached an impasse, Rosa even began to consider having a child and raising it on her own.

Generally speaking, there was a profound disconnect between what the German socialist parties preached in theoretical and programmatic terms with respect to women, and what actually took place in reality. Leaving aside some noteworthy passages from Engels’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, it was August Bebel, leading political figure of the Social-Democratic Party of Germany, who first made a serious pass at the issue in Woman and Socialism. First published in 1878, the volume went through 50 editions before 1909 and was translated into 15 languages, becoming one of the most widely read and discussed materials throughout European leftist circles. There, Bebel denounces the plight of the doubly oppressed woman and sketches a detailed analysis of her socio-economic dependence with respect to men, highlighting her lack of fundamental rights. The same considerations weighed heavily in the Social Democrat’s 1891 Erfurt Programme.

But the rhetoric of women’s emancipation largely fell on deaf ears, and practice rarely aligned with the precepts and good intentions of documents and speeches. Ever since the SPD’s famous founding congress in Gotha in 1875, the demand for universal suffrage only ever contemplated the male vote, and as Geoff Eley puts it, in subsequent years “exclusivist misogyny [was] transmuted into generalized cultures of aggressive masculinity, unwelcoming to women” (Eley, 2002: 99), to the point that many party members prohibited their wives and daughters from attending meetings. This masculine hostility was magnified among the German trade unions (who, not by coincidence, considered Rosa their greatest enemy): following their legalisation in 1890, only 1.8% of members were women, and only 9% on the eve of the First World War.

It is true that Luxemburg did not leave behind many texts concerning the women’s struggle. And yet, in her trajectory as a militant as well in her personal life, she showed a unique attentiveness to the principle banners of the feminist movement, albeit never dissociating those demands from the broader dynamics of class struggle. Not only did her everyday conduct and romantic affairs fly in the face of contemporary mores, she was a comrade and personal companion of Clara Zetkin, the principal activist and European propagandist for a powerful brand of socialist feminism. The two women participated together in the 1907 International Socialist Women's Conferences and headed up a largely women-run anti-war campaign across Germany and other countries, which would ultimately cost them long months in prison.

Raya Dunayevskaya has written one of the best books on this often overlooked and little understood side of Luxemburg. Dunayevskaya asserts that the “total disregard of the feminist dimension of Rosa Luxemburg by Marxists and non-Marxists alike calls for the record to be straightened” (Dunayevskaya, 1991: X). Considering that omission, Dunayevskaya calls for further study to be performed on the Polish Marxist as a feminist and revolutionary.

Along with other women of the revolutionary left (like Alexandra Kollontai or Clara Zetkin), Rosa did not see the oppression of women as an abstract question, but rather as a concrete reality wherein capitalism and patriarchy become mutually constitutive, making it impossible to disassociate class exploitation from the subaltern condition of women.

Nor was this a generic, abstract type of intersection. Exploitation and oppression assume a heterogeneous latticework of nuanced situations, albeit structured within a single structure of domination. As Luxemburg put it in “The Proletarian Woman”: “A world of female misery awaits deliverance. Here the wife of the small farmer groans, almost breaking under the burden of life. There in German Africa in the Kalahari Desert the bones of defenseless Herero women bleach, driven to a cruel death from hunger and thirst by German soldiers. In the high mountains of Putumayo on the other side of the ocean, unheard by the world, death screams die away of the martyred Indian women in the rubber plantations of the international capitalists. Proletarian women, poorest of the poor, those with the least rights, hurry to the fight for the liberation of the female sex and the human race from the terrors of the rule of capital” (Luxemburg, 2009: 52).

In that same text, Luxemburg issues the call for an International Women’s Day set to take place during the SPD’s “Red Week,” between March 8 and 15 of 1914, raising the banner for the female vote and equal rights for women: “The day of the proletarian woman opens the Week of Social Democracy. The party of the disinherited places its female column in the vanguard, while it sets off to the strenuous week's work, in order to sow the seeds of socialism on pastures new”. She adds, while “the modern wage-earning proletarian woman thus today enters the public stage as the champion of the working class”, it has been the case that “from time immemorial the women of the people have worked hard” and yet remain the “poorest of the poor, those with the least rights”. She goes on to enumerate the tasks performed by women across the centuries: from the indigenous village, where “she planted grain and milled it, and made pottery”; to the time of antiquity, in which “she served the ruling class as a slave and suckled their offspring at her breast”; in medieval times, where she could be found labouring “at the spindle for the feudal lord”; to the contemporary age, when the supremacy of private property meant that women live “cooped up in the domestic confines of an impoverished household existence”, their labour sequestered from the sphere of social production.

While envisioning a common destiny for both, Luxemburg drew an important distinction between “bourgeois feminism” and the socialist feminism that leftist activists hoped to bring about. The bourgeois variant of feminism, Luxemburg argued, lacked a vision of the totality that would allow for specific, genuine causes like women’s suffrage to be situated within a comprehensive struggle against society’s oppressive structures. Without a sense of the social totality, the struggle becomes a question of “acquiring political rights, in order to participate in political life”, where some bourgeois women may well enjoy “the finished fruits of class rule”. Luxemburg’s activism, inspired in large part by Clara Zetkin’s example, sought to link together diverse struggles in which women would play a leading role in building a far-reaching emancipatory project that embraces, while transcending, specific demands and grievances. Thus, she didn’t hesitate to defend the linkage between the “women’s’ cause” and universal social change, since women, she argued, were tasked with fighting for equality and fraternity for all humankind and the abolition of oppression in all parts of the world.

Luxemburg was dismayed by the militarist chauvinism that took hold of Europe’s Social-Democratic parties during the First World War. She looked on, from behind bars, as women too were swept up in bellicose hysteria: “The leaders of the social democratic women’s movement united with capitalist women for ‘national service’ and placed the most important elements that remained after the mobilization at the disposal of national Samaritan work. Socialist women worked in soup kitchens and on advisory commissions instead of carrying on agitation work for the party” (Luxemburg, 1915).

In her Women’s Suffrage and Class Struggle, Luxemburg insists that while women raise “children or [do] their housework which helps men support their families on scanty wages”, this type of labour “is not productive in the sense of the present capitalist economy no matter how enormous an achievement the sacrifices and energy spent” (Luxemburg, 1912). A hasty reading of these lines might lead one to object that they reproduce the classic Marxist dichotomy between productive/unproductive labour, a schema that has come under scrutiny by many feminists in the last decades. Indeed, it would appear that Luxemburg could not imagine the profoundly productive character of domestic labour, nor its vital importance for what Silvia Federici has termed the “wage patriarchy”.

Despite these reservations, and taking into account that Luxemburg was writing over a hundred years ago, the fact that she was casting light on thereto-invisible realms of reproduction and care work, offering a political analysis of relations of power and subjugation, is all the more remarkable considering her overwhelmingly male surrounding in leftist organizations. A separate passage from the same text brings this point home: “A hundred years ago, the Frenchman Charles Fourier, one of the first great prophets of socialist ideals, wrote these memorable words: In any society, the degree of female emancipation is the natural measure of the general emancipation. This is completely true for our present society” (1912).

Her growing alienation from the entire SPD leadership class, not to mention her early, irreparable rupture with the party cupola, might be read as a principled, militant stance taken by a women who was not afraid to pay the political –and emotional– costs of opposing the masculine arrogance of a political old guard as it embarked on its increasingly conservative drift. Having broken off all links, she, in the words Dunayevksaya, “kept her distance from the leaders who practiced leadership as if they were government rulers, though they did not have state power” (Dunayevksaya, 35: 1991).

Luxemburg practiced a particular brand of women’s solidarity among the party’s female members, but she extended that solidarity beyond the SPD ranks to those who were fighting tooth-and-nail against all injustices while not fearing to question the exclusive and exclusionary nature of the men’s club. As is often the case, her correspondence is the clearest window into this lesser-known side of Luxemburg, where we can best appreciate her sense of sisterhood and solidarity among women (see, for example, her letters to Mathilde Jacob, Clara Zetkin, and Sonia Liebknech). Noteworthy are her letters to Luise Kautsky, a relationship she nurtured despite the fact that by 1910 she had broken off relations with her husband Karl, largely due to the latter’s faintheartedness regarding the general strike and direct action as tools for the democratization of German society (not to mention the authoritarian attitudes that Kautsky adopted in his personal dealings with Luxemburg).

In her life and work as a militant, but also in her own behaviour and private life, Luxemburg upended the social roles that a patriarchal, capitalist division had assigned to her. She was subversive as much in the public as private sphere, and she was a tireless proponent of the belief that women should have the greatest possible agency in the revolutionary struggle. She put her entire body, affect and ideals into the service of the emancipatory project in which she so fervently believed. And she paid for that single-mindedness with her life.  Today, as the streets of Latin America ring out with the feminist cry of Ni Una Menos, we would do well to give her cowardly murder a specific name: a femicide, perpetrated by soldiers drunk on violence and virility who were incapable of tolerating the impudence of that small, larger-than-life, woman.

Indigenous Resistances

During her years as an educator with the SPD School, Luxemburg taught on a variety of subjects. Particularly noteworthy were her classes dedicated to the basics of Marxist political economy. Her intention, since 1908, had been to systematise the lessons developed in that educational space and produce a book entitled Introduction to Political Economy. And yet, amidst a series of setbacks, she was unable to finish the volume. And although she was briefly able to resume the project after a period of incarceration between 1916-17, what is certain is that her assassination frustrated any ambition to develop the manuscript into a finished work.

Apart from offering a straightforward and compelling explanation of political economy, the pages of the Introduction are evidence of Luxemburg’s vocation to render accessible the central categories of Marxism, drawing on numerous examples from history. Perhaps most strikingly of all, more than half the pages are dedicated to the analysis of societies different from and often opposed to capitalist society, to a great extent drawn from the Latin American subcontinent in the age before its conquest and colonization by European powers. Luxemburg provides a generic name for these types of societies: agrarian or primitive communism.

This material is important for several reasons: one, it makes a mockery of the idea that private property is somehow an eternal feature of society, a notion she shows to be false with the support of anthropological studies similar to those Marx was considering in his later years, when he grew interested in the rural commune; it also skewers the profound ignorance of European so-called “wisdom” (of economists, but also historians and philosophers) by showing their complete incomprehension of indigenous peoples. But Luxemburg went further, drawing a parallel between those communitarian forms of social life and the “red spectre” lurking behind the greatest social struggles of 19th century Western Europe: “ In the light of these brutal class struggles, primitive communism as the latest discovery of scientific research showed a dangerous face. The bourgeoisie, clearly affected in their class interests, scented an obscure connection between the ancient communist survivals that put up stubborn resistance in the colonial countries to the forward march of the profit-hungry “Europeanization” of the indigenous peoples, and the new gospel of revolutionary impetuousness of the proletarian mass in the old capitalist countries” (Luxemburg, 2014: 163).

As Michael Löwy notes, the chapters dedicated to analysing these types of agrarian communist societies outnumber those concerning mercantile production and the capitalist economy, and “it is probably why this work has been neglected by most of the Marxist economists” (Löwy & Sayre, 2001: 280). There is also a degree of Eurocentric colonialism behind the downgrading of the manuscript: despite providing the impetus to ponder other –still possible- forms of life foreign to the logic of capital, it has not been given its due centrality in the larger Luxemburg corpus. Perhaps this is down to a scientific strain of Marxism at odds with the worldview and communitarian practices of indigenous peoples throughout the world.

Not unlike how some Marxisms had attributed to Marx an “anti-peasant essentialism”, taking a selection of one-off historical annotations on the peasantry as supporting evidence for the revolutionary centrality of the industrial proletariat, something similar has occurred with Luxemburg. In the aforementioned manuscript and in other writings – first and foremost, The Accumulation of Capital – a very different picture comes into view: far from interpreting agrarian societies as a hindrance to progress, waiting to be atomized and proletarianized, these texts invite us to consider forms of life removed from the market-individualism and bourgeois rationality of capitalist modernity.

Luxemburg wrote numerous paragraphs in praise of these society’s’ organisational methods. She made special mention of the ancient Germanic commune studied by historian Georg Ludwig von Maurer, highlighting how in the “mark” a stateless society without any written law had managed to exist without rich and poor, owners and workers. She singles out the research of Maxim Maximovich Kovalesky, another anthropologist whose friendship with Marx had enabled the German revolutionary to study Lewis Morgan’s Ancient Society, stirring in Marx a series of reflections on communitarian forms of social life.

Perhaps the most arresting passages from the Introduction to Political Economy are those where Luxemburg recognises in Morgan, Kovalesky and Maurer a common pursuit to unearth the universal character of agrarian communism, a feature present – particularities notwithstanding - across all the continents in a given historical epoch and, better still, enduring in the global periphery of the 20th century wherever the ongoing accumulation-by-dispossession is met with resistance. Morgan in particular represents a high-water mark, where “primitive communism, with the democracy and social equality that went together with it, were thereby shown to be the cradle of social development. By this expansion of the horizon of the prehistoric past, he showed the whole present-day civilization, with private property, class rule, male supremacy, state compulsion and compulsory marriage, as simply a brief transition phase that, just as it arose itself from the dissolution of age-old communist society, is bound to make way in turn in the future for higher social forms” (Luxemburg, 2014: 162). 

Later in the same text, Luxemburg makes light work of “the official science of the bourgeois enlightenment”, going so far as to write that their worldview is an “infinitely narrower horizon and cultural-historical understanding than the Romans had two thousand years ago”. The epistemological myopia of the conquistadors, continues Luxemburg, is thrown into bold relief by the autochthonous populations they conquered: “Here the Europeans in their colonies came upon relationships quite foreign to them, which directly overturned all their notions of the sanctity of private property. The English in South Asia had the same experience of this as the French did in North Africa” (2014: 135).

Terms like “savagery” and “barbarism” provide Luxemburg with the opportunity to resurrect and inspect the colonial roots of capitalist modernity. Used to stigmatise those civilisations in which society was organised along the lines of agrarian communism, or where private property was not the dominant organising principle, Luxemburg avers with biting irony that “the descriptions ‘savagery’ and ‘barbarism,’ which were customarily used as a summary description of these conditions, had only a meaning as negative concepts, descriptions of the lack of everything that was considered characteristic of ‘civilization,’ i.e. of well-mannered human life as seen through contemporary eyes. From this point of view, properly mannered social life, appropriate to human dignity, began only with those conditions described in written history. Everything that belonged to ‘savagery’ and ‘barbarism’ indifferently formed only an inferior and embarrassing stage prior to civilization, a half-animal existence which present-day civilized humanity could only regard with condescending disparagement” (2014: 140). 

We should note that these remarks draw short of “romanticising” all existing agrarian societies, be they from the remote past or those that persisted into the 20th century (and into our own). Similar to the Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui, she did not view them as static entities arrested in time, but as dynamic, contradictory movements, and none more so than those – virtually all - affected by the 20th century’s process of capitalist accumulation. Weighing up all these consideration, she arrived at a positive appreciation of agrarian societies without overlooking their ambiguous, even negative elements.

A far cry from the racist, colonial evolutionism that plagued certain strains of Marxism, Luxemburg’s timeless meditations reach us today based on their bold intention to, as Löwy puts it, “adopt the point of view of the victims of capitalist modernization”, offering an antidote to those who would celebrate the subjugation and despoilment of indigenous communities. Moreover, they encourage us to broaden our vistas and embrace the subaltern, oppressed peoples whose struggles may draw on ancestral practices, but just the same contain important emancipatory potential for the present.

Oppressed Nature

Based on the foregoing, it should come as no surprise that Luxemburg felt a special sensibility for the defence of the natural world and the commons. Likewise today, we can assert without hesitation that the natural world is an oppressed subject.

Luxemburg could even be taken as a precocious thinker of the ecological questions that would later come to be known as eco-socialism or Marxist ecology. Her staunch defence of all living things and the land, against the violence exacted by the capitalist drive for accumulation and despoliation, seems to point in this direction.

This facet is one of the least explored among Luxemburg’s multifarious writings. Where it has received attention, it is often to recall her fondness for botany and herbal remedies, as well her affinity for certain animals – mainly cats and birds. This attribute is no less astonishing considering she maintained a heightened vigilance for injustice perpetrated against all forms of life, and yet rarely is this connected back to her broader socialist project. Going somewhat against the grain, we should take Luxemburg’s passion for nature as inseparable from her anti-capitalist, anti-patriarchal and anti-colonial politics.

Once again, her letters reveal the true scope of these concerns – what might be called, tentatively, a desire to abandon the anthropocentric worldview (that is, a properly modernist conception that supposes humankind as a superior being and the centre of the universe, with the natural prerogative to subjugate all living beings). Thus, the question of totality appears again, although under a different guise: where before Luxemburg showed herself concerned with the social totality, the lens has widened to include the entire natural world. As Anna Bisceglie puts it, “all the political leaders and cadres, militants and fellow travellers that Rosa recalls in her letters, these cannot be separated from her lively descriptions of landscapes, or the surroundings where political rallies were held, or for that matter, her tender rendering of all living things, be they sparrows, swallows, robins, bumblebees, wasps, flowers and leaves of all kinds, always accompanied by some artistic reference. There is always a world present in Rosa Luxemburg, sometimes a whole world in all its intensity, other times a mere hint of it. One must feel that world within oneself to truly approach her vision” (Renzi & Bisceglie, 2010: 27).

Luxemburg felt a deep magnetism drawing her towards the natural world. Nature served her as an antibody against the exhaustion that came with relentless political agitation and the everyday bureaucracy of modern life, shielding her from being swallowed up by the rationalization and disenchantment of the world of commodity fetishism and pure quantifiable exchange value. It also lent her an added fortitude to protect her during periods of confinement. As Isabel Loureiro says, “through her contact with nature, Rosa could restore the energies sapped out of her by political combat” (Loureiro, 1999: 25).

A near-infinite number of letters speak of her compassion towards the suffering of animals, especially where this was understood to be the product of humans’ irrational and predatory violence, part and parcel of the vicious circle of accumulation-by-dispossession and the most brutal forms of colonialism. One of the most moving of these letters is written from a Breslau prison cell to her friend Sonia Liebknecht, on Christmas Eve, 1917. There, she shares her “intense pain” upon seeing a group of soldiers beating a wagon-bearing buffalo. Rather than quoting an excerpt here, the extraordinary beauty of her prose, full of compassion for a fellow living being, deserves to be read in full.

Thus, it seems justified to imagine an “elective affinity” between Luxemburg and the indigenous peoples, Afro-descendant communities and peasant organizations who supposed that nature, like human beings, is the holder of rights. Her zeal for imitating birdsong, like the tom-tit announcing the coming spring (“tsvee-tsvee”, she confessed, would be her preferred epitaph), or her personal diary filled with sketches and imprints of the flowers from her diminutive garden, these ephemera can be read in tandem with the theoretical and historical texts intended for political education and intervention, where primitive accumulation is denounced as a destroyer of “natural economies”, ecosystems and the cosmo-coexistence found in the capitalist periphery; these should be read together as complementary elements in order to break with the productivism and anthropocentrism that enshrines the human – male, white, bourgeois adult – at the centre of modernity, to draw a line under the plurality of living things concealed by the homogenizing and reifying concept of “natural resources”.

Contemporary intellectuals and activists marching under the banner of ecofeminism have called for us to rethink our political analyses of patriarchy and capitalism by taking our relationship with nature as a starting point.  Vandana Shiva, for example, has made visible the connections between patriarchal oppression, violence against women and the relentless destruction of the natural world in the name of “progress”. In a similar vein, Silvia Federici is of the opinion that “today, faced by a new process of primitive accumulation, the woman assumes the strength of the main opposition to the total commodification of nature” (Federici, 2014: 90). Mariarosa Dalla Costa has insisted on the importance of building a political agenda around “respect for the fundamental balances of nature, the will for conservation of its self-generating/reproductive powers, a respect and love for all living beings” (Dalla Costa, 2009: 350). In both Federici’s and Dalla Costa’s case, it is impossible to not think of the pioneering work of Luxemburg.

Beginning in the 1980s, at a time when the environmental question was still a marginal concern for most leftist organisations, the historian Luis Vitale attempted to draw up a history of Latin America from the point of view of a totality based on a non-dichotomous interrelation between “nature” and “human society”. His pioneering book, entitled Toward a History of the Environment in Latin America, proposed a series of interpretations that renew the same concerns touched upon by Luxemburg, sounding the alarm for a coming civilizational collapse: “Contemporary Marxism faces a great challenge: to provide a theoretical, programmatic and political answer for the environmental crisis, starting by developing a clear conception of the totality constituted by nature and human society. Insofar as this key issue is concerned –and which will only be resolved on the terrain of class struggle– the survival of humanity is being played out. Rosa Luxemburg’s dilemma between ‘barbarism and socialism’ is more relevant now than ever” (Vitale, 1983: 108).

Originally published at https://www.laizquierdadiario.com/Para-Althusser-la-filosofia-debe-sacudir-las-cosas 

There has been increasing interest in Althusser's work in recent years. This has included different attempts to provide a more complex and comprehensive view of the development of his thought, as well a greater emphasis on the "the late Althusser". From your perspective, what are the reasons for the renewed interest in Althusser? 

Part of the growing interest in Althusser can be explained by the history of the publication of his work, both before and after his death. The posthumous publications, which now outnumber the texts he published during his lifetime, have irreversibly changed the way we think about Althusser, as well as, perhaps, the way we think about the “structuralist moment” in France (which includes what in the English-speaking world is called “poststructuralism”) that so decisively influenced a whole series of disciplines internationally. The publication of François Matheron’s selections from a late manuscript on what Althusser called the “materialism of the encounter” or “aleatory materialism” very soon after his death in 1990, shattered the reigning consensus (above all, in the English-speaking world) that Althusser was a structuralist or even a structural functionalist. While some commentators, like Toni Negri, insisted that the late Althusser represented a fundamental break from the positions expressed in work of the sixties, many of us today recognize that the late work is not entirely discontinuous with the earlier writing and in fact allows us to read the early texts in a new way that is more attuned to their contradictions which in different forms persist throughout his oeuvre. It was Althusser himself who declared in “Lenin and Philosophy” that to read philosophy en materialiste is to draw lines of demarcation within it to mark the conflicts that make it what it is. To take Althusser seriously is to apply this protocol of reading even (or especially) to his own work.

To do so, however, we must identify and remove some of the obstacles that prevent us from reading Althusser in a new and different way: the readings that have already been done for us and that are repeated in academic liturgies of various kinds that portray him as a partisan of structure against agency whose theory renders social change, let alone revolt, unthinkable. The posthumous publication of Machiavelli and Us, as well as his critique of Lévi-Strauss (“Sur Lévi-Strauss,” 1966), however, has made it very difficult to continue to dismiss Althusser as a “structuralist.” We are now able to see a kind of materialism of the encounter at work in “Contradiction and Overdetermination” (1962), where Lenin (the Lenin who recognized the enormous accumulation of factors necessary to the February Revolution) is a kind of stand-in for Machiavelli, just as Machiavelli is in part a stand-in for Lenin in the later work. Althusser’s interest in Mao’s “On Contradiction” stemmed from the fact that it was the first genuinely Communist attempt to theorize the complexity of the historical contradiction, beyond the Hegelian formula of the identity or even unity of opposites.

The posthumous publications are admittedly of varying quality and many are manuscripts started only to be abandoned Althusser, but thanks to them, we now have a much clearer sense of the problems he set out to solve, his conception of the nature of the conjuncture in which he wrote and the specific tasks it imposed on theoretical work.  He certainly understood the 1960s as a time of extraordinary theoretical and conceptual productivity in a number of fields where each development  as well as a time of political mobilization and struggle, the latter in the some sense the condition of the former. He saw the practice of philosophy as the elaboration of theses that were judged, not true or false, but correct or incorrect, on the basis of their effects: did they move things, open the way for thought and knowledge, change the relationship of forces between ideas and concepts in philosophy? Althusser’s notion that there exist in philosophy and elsewhere relations of force between ideas that have nothing to do with their truth, and that the truth of the true, if I can put it that way, is established and maintained only through struggle, seems terribly relevant today with the growing power of racist and neo-fascist movements globally. Every philosopher writes in a specific conjuncture and does so in order to “faire bouger les choses,” to shake things or open things up, as we say in English. Althusser proposed a theory of philosophical practice that required of him a precise account of the theoretical conjuncture, the objective alliances that took shape between concepts and theories, rather than between people and parties understood on the basis of their declared allegiances or intentions, as well as their effects. From this perspective, a single text by a non-Marxist (but by no means an anti-Marxist) like Foucault (e.g.,Surveillir et punir) might have more to contribute, in spite, or because, of its contradictions, to the theory and practice of class struggle, as well as the struggles against the forms of racism and sexism, than a thousand treatises on false consciousness.

In your book Althusser and His Contemporaries, you say that one of the problems facing any attempt to analyse Althusser is that the current understanding of structuralism is simplistic. How would you complicate this understanding? What elements or themes have been overlooked in the accounts of structuralism?

The conception of philosophy I discussed above made it impossible for Althusser simply to dismiss the enormous body of work today categorized as “structuralist” as “idealist” or “functionalist.” His task, as he saw it, was to identify the conflicts and contradictions, the unevennesses and discrepancies, proper to the various forms of inquiry gathered under the name of structuralism. Althusser in this way was a kind of Hegelian: a philosophical doctrine can only be grasped on the basis of its essential contradictions. Obviously, “contradiction” here ceases to signify failure or error, and refers instead to the constitutive antagonism that makes a specific philosophy what it is. At the heart of the linguistic model, itself perhaps the central reference point for various structuralist projects in psychoanalysis, anthropology, sociology, literature and film, Althusser understood that the structure in question was not simply a synonym for organization or order, but in fact represented an attempt (even if it did not succeed) to produce a new theory of causality. He tried to draw lines of demarcation that would separate out and identify what in the work of his contemporaries was irreducible to existing notions of determination and of cause and effect.

This was particularly important for the development of Marxist theory and practice, much  of which depended on the model of base and superstructure, according to which the economy was determinate in the last instance. The entire political, legal and cultural superstructure was explained by means of the concept of expressive or emanationist causality. The economic base produced not only the economic, but also the extra-economic means of its own reproduction. While this concept excluded the idea that culture was produced freely and spontaneously, it did so at the cost of understanding its material existence and the form of determination proper to it. This is what led Althusser to declare that “ideology has a material existence,” consubstantial with the apparatuses, practices, rituals and prescribed discourses in which it was said to be expressed.  This set of problems led him to formulate the concept of structural causality, retaining the notion of structure but only in the form of a structure that is strictly speaking absent because it exists nowhere but in its effects. This concept derives to a great extent from Althusser’s reading of Spinoza and the latter’s discussion of the immanent cause, even as it is expressed in the language Lacan used to theorize the unconscious as something other than a hidden repository of meaning. Is it possible to conceptualize a cause that does not precede or transcend its effects?

In your discussion of an exchange between Althusser and Pierre Macherey, you say that in Lire Le Capital there are two different concepts of "structure", one closer to Hegel and another closer to Spinoza. Can you explain the differences between them?

In the first edition of LLC, published in 1965, Althusser used the phrase “latent structure” and “the effects of latent structure” (phrases he had used in his earlier essay on Bertolazzi and Brecht) alongside the following statement: “a structure is immanent in its effects, the immanent cause of its effects in the Spinozist sense of the term, that its entire existence is in its effects.” Macherey cautioned Althusser against the use of “latent structure,” precisely because it implied that structure was not immanent in but hidden or concealed behind or under that of which it was the structure. In psychoanalysis the opposition between the latent and manifest content of a dream often suggested a hidden truth concealed by a veil of appearance and requiring a hermeneutic method that could penetrate beyond the surface, a notion that Lacan opposed from the beginning of his teaching. Further, “latent,” derived from the Latin verblateo, to lie hidden or out of sight, later acquired in French another meaning: latent came to mean embryonic, the condition of something at the earliest stages of its development. This later meaning inevitably recalled notions of the potential and its realization, and thus also an immanent teleology, like Aristotle’s example of the tree contained in the seed as its end. A latent structure in this sense might be seen as a version of the formal combinatory that Althusser often criticized, a system containing every combination of pre-given elements, but in a potential rather than actual state. To understand and formalize the rules that govern these combinations, however, amounts to a formalization of possibility instead of necessity. For Marxism, such a view might be expressed as a formal combinatory of modes of production, that is, a theory of possible modes of production and their combination, but also a theory that as such cannot explain the passage from the possible to the necessary and the potential to the actual. In part, the notion of structural or immanent causality was designed to expose such views to criticism and to open the way not to a concept of possibility, but to a concept of necessity.

Macherey, particularly in his contribution the special issue of Les Temps Modernes devoted to structuralism in 1966, pushed Althusser’s formulations fromLLC even further: if structure has no existence outside of its effects, it does not, strictly speaking, exist even within “its” phenomena. It exists nowhere, an absent cause whose absence allows the possibility of thinking singularity and irregularity. Perhaps the most compelling expression of this concept of structure is the notion of “the structure of the conjuncture,” the structure of the combination of diverse, conflicting and dispersed elements irreducible to a logic of history.

Does this contradictory view of structure persist throughout Althusser's work?

I would put it this way: this contradiction or set of contradictions appears and reappears through his work, although in different contexts and formulated in different ways. In the essay on the Ideological State Apparatuses, for example, Althusser provides an entirely functionalist explanation (almost identical to what he criticizes in Lévi-Strauss) of the ISAs, as if they are the means capitalist society creates in order to reproduce itself. It is an explanation in which class struggle, or any kind of struggle, plays little or no role. Moreover, when he argues that “the formal structure of ideology is always the same,” endowing it with a transhistorical existence in which the interpellation of the individual occurs in the same or similar form throughout human history, Althusser comes close to reconstructing a kind of combinatory. What makes this example particularly interesting is the fact that Althusser’s revisions to the formulations contained in the original manuscript, published in 1996 under the title Sur la reproduction, consisted of removing nearly all the references to resistance and to the contradictory“sous-produits” produced by the ISAs, transforming the more complex original version into a quasi-functionalist text. Even if we assign a tactical and therefore conjunctural meaning to these changes, it remains clear that Althusser had not yet completely settled accounts with the very notion of structure that he criticized.

Although the term “structure” appears less frequently in Althusser’s very late work on aleatory materialism than in For Marx, he has recourse to the term when his meditations on the aleatory led him to the very problem for which the notion of structural causality served as a marker. Here Althusser argues that “instead of thinking contingency as a modality of necessity, we must think necessity as the becoming-necessary of the encounter of contingencies,” and refers to “the structure of the encounter” that neither precedes nor follows from the conjunction of elements, but is the cause that coincides entirely with its effect, the “becoming-necessary” of the encounter that “takes,” the moment that a singular thing, perhaps a world or a mode of production, emerges with the laws and tendencies that allow it, for an indefinite time, to persist in its being. And although Althusser’s references are to Epicurus and Lucretius rather than Spinoza and to the void rather than a plenum, we can see the recurrence of a problem that that the existing theories of causality cannot define, let alone resolve.

What is your view of  Althusser's reading of Machiavelli. What does Althusser contribute to our understanding of Machiavelli?

Machiavelli occupied a very special place in Althusser’s theoretical universe. Like Spinoza, he was the object of a kind of obsession that kept Althusser, until the end of his life, returning to Machiavelli’s texts. When he first decided to devote a seminar to Machiavelli in 1962, Althusser reported in his correspondence with Franca Madonia feeling a kind of reverence for his work, but without being able to able to explain to his students why. The problem was not understanding the texts as such, but of grasping Machiavelli’s philosophical significance, the sense in which Machiavelli was not just a political thinker, but a philosopher or perhaps even an anti-philosopher, in that nearly every variant of the philosophy of his time was oriented to a knowledge of providence and of the ends for which all things were created. Machiavelli’s realism proceeded through a derealization of the existing notions of the real and reality to demonstrate the impossibility of the prince necessary to the formation of an Italian nation, in turn the necessary condition for peace and prosperity. But Machiavelli was also the thinker of the occasion (occasione), the kairos, brought unexpectedly by fortune, the moment at which the chance to overturn the existing order makes its fleeting appearance. This is the moment that Lenin in the “Letters from Afar” (1917) said might easily be mistaken for a miracle, given the sheer number of events that combined to produce it, the moment revolutionaries must be able to recognize because in it lies the only possibility of revolutionary change. Alongside historical regularities and patterns, a quasi-cyclical time governed by repetition, there lies another time, irreducible to the first marked by discontinuities and irreversible thresholds.

It follows then that Machiavelli was, as Althusser noted, “the first thinker of the conjuncture,” who refuses the rule of the universal over the singular. He not only thinks about the conjuncture but in it, compelled to account for the relations of force that constitute its conflictual system and writing in response. In a very important sense, Machiavelli treated his own utterances as interventions and calculated the means by which he might shift the relations of force at the level of writing. He saw the great histories of the Greek and Roman writers as documentation of historico-political experiments whose results were necessary to his own project of understanding the present. They taught that “one had to be of the people to know the prince,” meaning that the sovereign’s power, irrespective of law and custom, rested on the people, their support, their acquiescence or their opposition. In one of Althusser’s most beautiful and unforgettable passages we can certainly hear the voice of Machiavelli: because the class “struggle develops, even for those who have seen clearly in advance, without the aid of any superior instance judging and deciding each question, we must speak here, paradoxically, of error without truth and of deviation without a norm. An unmastered fault, a hesitation, aberration, defeat or crisis, which slowly develops or suddenly gapes in the midst of reality, a reality without truth or norm: that is error, that is deviation” (“Unfinished History”, Introduction to Dominique Lecourt, Proletarian Science?).

What kind of relationship could be established between Althusser's political and theoretical during the sixties and seventies? You use the concept of "theoretical conjuncture" to understand Althusser's philosophical interventions and the different moments in his theoretical trajectory. How does this concept help us grasp the turning points in his thought?

Althusser argued in Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists, thatall philosophy intervenes in the conjuncture in which it exists.  Why is this necessarily the case?“From the very beginning we have been able to speak of philosophy only by occupying a definite position in philosophy. For in philosophy we cannot, like Rousseau's Noble Savage in the Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inégalité parmi les hommes, occupy an empty corner of the forest. In philosophy every space is always already occupied. Within it, we can only hold a position against the adversary who already holds that position.” To be a Marxist in philosophy is to determine which philosophical approaches and doctrines are dominant at present and what the effects of this always temporary domination might be, both inside and outside of philosophy. It is also to understand as clearly as possible which philosophies resist this domination, even if only objectively, without the knowledge or consent of the philosophers involved. To understand a philosophy, including, above all, one’s own on the basis of its measurable effects, results in a constant adjustment of one’s theses and categories to break the hold of the dominant philosophies and open the way to new theoretical developments.

It is fascinating to read Althusser’s assessments of the philosophical conjuncture of the mid-1960s, an extraordinary moment by any account. He understood the power of a kind of humanism, itself rooted in the liberal tradition, on the one hand, and the power of formalism and functionalism, on the other, as well as the power of the unity that had been forged between them. These positions in no way corresponded to specific political parties or movements, except perhaps in the sense that the end of the Stalin regime and the partial social-democratization of some of the European Communist Parties (e.g., the PCI) provoked a movement away from “dogmatism,” meaning any emphasis on the texts of Marx, Engels and Lenin (except for the newly published works of the young Marx). Maoism, which emerged in France in the mid-sixties, marked a reaction against this “revisionism.” We now know that Althusser opposed both the Stalinism that was alive and well in France (and whose relations with Maoism were always very complicated) and the revisionism that could take a structuralist or phenomenological form. Until the late seventies, when Althusser openly criticized both the organizational forms and the politics of the PCF from the left, the Trotskyist currents tended to champion Lukacs and the Frankfurt school to what they held was Althusser’s Stalinist theory.

On the question of politics and the theoretical conjuncture: what was the relation between Althusser’s work and the May 68? Is Rancière correct in his critique of Althusser?

Althusser spent May 68 in a psychiatric hospital and could not personally participate in the struggle. This does not mean, however, that he did not regard the May events as a defining moment in modern French history. The belief that the Althusser shared the negative evaluation of the “infantile leftism” or “anarchism” of May typical of the PCF leadership is both widespread and completely false. Few of his critics are aware that he responded to an attack on the student revolutionaries by Michel Verret in a text, “A propos de l'article de Michel Verret sur le mai étudiant,” published in 1969, in La Pensée. Althusser offered a defence of the mass mobilization of students, even as he recognized its contradictory character. Althusser criticized the PCF and the CGT for failing to account for the radicalization of young workers in “workers’ May” and rejects the populism and anti-intellectualism of the critique of the students. In fact, he points to the PCF’s isolation from students and youth as a serious error for which the party must take responsibility and attempt to rectify.

Perhaps more importantly, I would argue that Althusser was one of the few to recognize, perhaps as early as the fall of 1968, that the occasione in Machiavelli’s sense, the opening in which revolution is possible, had closed and that the most important task was to explain the failure of a revolt so apparently favoured by fortune. We might recall that in the manuscript published after Althusser’s death, he identifies the PCF as an ISA and therefore part of the reproduction of class rule. I see the ISAs essay as a response to the aftermath of May that takes the form of an answer to the question Spinoza poses in the introduction to the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus: what makes men fight as bravely for their servitude as for their salvation? It was an analysis of this type, rather than a secularized messianism that promised everything to the faithful, that made revolutionary strategy possible.

Rancière’s critique of Althusser was based on his overestimation of both the power and the malevolence of the PCF (and of Althusser himself, portrayed by Rancière as an intellectual functionary whose doctrine changed in accordance with the party’s line). To say that Althusser’s Marxism was “a philosophy of order, whose every principle served to distance us from the uprisings that were then shaking the bourgeois order to its core” and that even his emphasis on the analysis of the conjuncture was merely a cunning way of preserving a place for a science and scientist of the conjuncture, and therefore for specialists, intellectual elites etc., is to treat his philosophical work as a series of beautiful lies that must be exposed as such. Rancière’s book tells us little about Althusser, but quite a bit about Rancière’s own positions and the contradictions that led to the collapse of French Maoism as a significant force on the left. Fortunately, the positions he appears to take in Althusser’s Lesson, particularly his opposition to Althusser’s critique of the subject, are soon forgotten and Rancière continues to undertake important explorations in theory and politics.

You talked about Trotskyists readings of Althusser. Are there not some Trotskyists, especially in the UK, who saw Althusser as having made an important contribution to Marxism?

Certainly, the group around the New Left Review (above all, Perry Anderson) played a vital role in publishing Althusser’s texts, and to a lesser extent commenting on them, above all in the crucial period between 1968 and 1976. During this time, most of those around theNLR, with the exception of Anderson himself, were not only active members of the British section of the Fourth International (the International Marxist Group), but also played an important role in the FI’s international bodies. TheNLR then was a place where one could find translations of recent Marxist work from France, Italy and Germany, as well as from Latin America representing many different schools of thought. One could find an article by Ernest Mandel next to a piece by Althusser—something that was extremely unusual at the time. That said, much of the commentary on Althusser in theNLR or published by New Left Books/Verso was not terribly useful. The great exception, of course, is Gregory Elliott, whose book on Althusser (1987) made possible a new and different reading. Anderson’s Althusser was very structuralist, a fact that made his response to Thompson’sPoverty of Theory rather ineffectual.

While the British International Socialists (later the Socialist Workers’ Party) was extremely hostile to Althusser and regularly dismissed him as a Stalinist and an idealist, it was out of this current that the best book in English in the 1970s appeared: Alex Callinicos’s Althusser’s Marxism. In a certain way, he was able to see Althusser as a thinker of the conjuncture and to relate Althusser’s notion of overdetermination to Trotsky’s analysis in theHistory of the Russian Revolution. Because Callinicos knew Lenin quite well, it was an easy step to take. Unfortunately, he did not pursue this work any further.

In the US, Michael Sprinker, who was a member of Solidarity, an organization whose roots lay in both the IS tradition and the Trotskyism of the FI, made important contributions both to the study of Althusser and to the effort to publish his works in English.

Originally published in French in Période

Verso has just republished your first book The Philosophy of Praxis. Marx, Lukács and the Frankfurt School, which is a study of the Lukácsian sources of a critical Marxism extending up to Adorno and Marcuse. Could you briefly retrace this genealogy and explain how it has been important for your background as well as how it could provide the matrix for a contemporary philosophy of technology?

In fact, my book begins with the early Marx because he created the first version of what I call the philosophy of praxis. The key problem of this version of Marxism is what Marx called the “ realisation ” of philosophy. Philosophy of praxis aims to be more than a social or political philosophy. It treats proletarian revolution as a sort of philosophical method, capable of resolving the fundamental antinomies that characterise the whole Western philosophical tradition since its origins. This means not simply the realisation of ethical ideals in social reality but the practical resolution of the fundamental ontological antinomy of subject and object.

This extraordinary ambition is clear in Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts. Marx calls for the unification of nature and history through labour in a post-revolutionary society, a radically revised version of the demand for subject-object identity in German idealism. Lukács’s concept of subject-object identity inHistory and Class Consciousness is constructed differently and refers primarily to the social world, but the programme he repeatedly announces is no less encompassing than Marx’s.

This programme is less obvious in Adorno and Marcuse because they no longer look forward to a proletarian revolution. But their Marxism too is supposed to have ontological significance, even if they problematise its practical realisation. Marcuse more than Adorno refers to this, but even in Adorno’s supposedly negative dialectic the disappointed hope in revolution is decisive. After all, he begins Negative Dialectic by saying, “Philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to realise it was missed.” Marcuse quite explicitly formulates the implications of a possible revolutionary future : “ The rational transformation of the world could then lead to a reality formed by the aesthetic sensibility of man. Such a world could (in a literal sense!) embody, incorporate, the human faculties and desires to such an extent that they appear as part of the objective determinism of nature. ”

What is the significance of this reinterpretation of the Marxian critique of capitalism in terms of “ rationality ” rather than “ alienation ” or “ exploitation ” ?

Alienation and exploitation are still important concepts for the philosophy of praxis, but you are right to point out also the importance of the concept of rationality for this tradition. Already in Marx, the revolution promises a rational society by which he means a society in which the universality of a cooperative ethos is reconciled with the practical problems of economic life. In Lukács and the Frankfurt School, the problem of rationality is much more concretely formulated in terms of the role of rational technical disciplines and forms of social order. Unlike the early Marx, these philosophers inhabit modern societies, that is, societies based on the bureaucratic management of a technologically organised social life. As Foucault was later to argue more or less independently, such societies perpetrate what Marx called alienation and exploitation precisely through rational organisation. The question of revolution then becomes entangled with a critique of the forms of rationality that characterise modernity : the economies, technical disciplines, bureaucracies and technologies. Although certainly influenced by romanticism, the philosophy of praxis rejects the romantic opposition of reason and emotion or “ life ” for a dialectical critique of the formalistic rationality that prevails in the existing modern societies. This is what Lukács calls ” reified ” rationality and the confrontation with its various forms continues to preoccupy the first generation of the Frankfurt School.

In your last book published in French, Pour une théorie critique de la technique, you introduce the category of “ dystopia ” as a central trope in the critique of modernity (catastrophe as anti-utopia). You seem to plead for a critique that goes “beyond dystopia” in terms of “democratic rationalization.” Could you explain the stakes in this conceptualization?

The romantic critique of reason takes the form of dystopian narratives in 20th century science fiction. Novels such as Brave New World stage the confrontation of reification and human individuality without mediation or hope of a resolution. The extrapolation from trends such as NSA surveillance supports similar dystopian fears today. Such narratives gain plausibility from our difficulty imagining a transformation of the technical environment and our doubt in the existence of a historical agent capable of realizing such a transformation in any case. This leads to a politics of despair, either total withdrawal or terrorism.

A radical alternative must project such a transformation and identify a possible agent. Today neither imposes its presence. Nevertheless, from a historical perspective, the new social movements around issues such as ecology suggest the possibility of solutions. These solutions are perhaps already beginning to be visible in the impact of the movements on technical choices, for example, the turn away from nuclear energy toward renewable sources in Germany. Perhaps the movements can grow to be more significant in the future. I call their achievements “ democratic rationalisations ” because they are technically rational solutions that satisfy democratic demands, rather than the sort of technocratic solutions parachuted from above we are accustomed to in the technical sphere.

Now, it is reasonable to interpret these phenomenon quite differently, for example, as the dying embers of an oppositional culture born in the 1960s and doomed to disappear in the face of the new phase of consumer society inaugurated by the Internet and smart phones. I do not deny that this is a plausible alternative interpretation. But I do argue that the current situation is ambiguous. Dystopian conclusions are premature. If we were making a Pascalean wager, the choice would be clear.

You trace a middle path between an apolitical “ technophilia ” and a radically “technophobic” position which is always threatened by reactionary deviations. Could you review certain experiences, for example with the Minitel, with which you support the transcendence of this pseudo-alternative you consider ineffective?

The question as I pose it concerns the possibility of public agency in the technical sphere. A technocratic ideology prevails in modern societies, according to which all technical decisions must be made by experts. Public action appears irrational, “ ideological ” from this perspective. But we know very well that the experts make mistakes like everyone else. Two kinds of limitations on their wisdom have appeared in recent years. On the one hand, the experts tend to overlook hazards such as pollution and need to be reminded of them by the protests of the victims of their wonderful inventions. On the other hand, the experts tend to overlook potentialities of those inventions that correspond to public demands they have not anticipated. The best example of this latter phenomenon is communication on computer networks.

The first experience with this public contribution to the evolution of a technical system took place in France with the Minitel. It is perhaps forgotten today that the Minitel was for a decade by far the largest and most successful version of what we enjoy today with the Internet, that is, a computer network delivering information and communication to a mass audience. But like the Internet, the Minitel system was not designed for human communication. It was intended as a system of information delivery only and communicative applications were initially introduced by hackers and then taken up enthusiastically by millions of users. This is an example of a democratic rationalization with broad implications for how we understand technical development.

Many important contemporary social struggles are concerned with this question of technology. Could you review the way in which you articulate in your book the concepts of technique andexperience, in order to better define a concrete and effective place in which to think the modalities of an emancipatory politics for which the question of technology is one of the main stakes?

Somewhere Plato says that the users of technical artefacts know them best. While we, in our technologically advanced society, can doubt this, users and also victims of side-effects certainly know something. The technocrats have always denied this but they are constrained today more and more to deal with what Foucault called “ lessavoirs assujettis “ (“subjugated knowledges”) of those subordinated in technical systems. Science is often cited as the ultimate source of our technical knowledge, but we also learn now from the direct experience of ordinary people. They are even solicited by computer companies to test new products in order to gauge their reactions. And, of course, medical side-effects of pollution and other problems with technology generally come to the attention of the society through the problems and protests of ordinary people.

The official technical knowledge is formulated in rational technical disciplines that are specialised and influenced by technical traditions. The specialisations appear increasingly narrow and outdated in the face of environmental crisis, and the traditions are heavily influenced by an earlier stage of capitalist development in which, for example, the elimination of skill from production was an imperative of progress. These are sufficient reasons to doubt the all-encompassing wisdom of the experts. Their knowledge must be supplemented by the lessons of experience, formulated in everyday language by ordinary people who live inside the technical systems the experts create. Authentic progress requires a fruitful interaction between technical rationality and experience.

Whether that interaction will lead to socialist revolution, as the philosophy of praxis demands, is not the right question in our present circumstances. Contemporary social movements around technical issues are in fact de-reifying and so significantly related to the politics of rationality of the philosophy of praxis, but they do not aim at the overthrow of the capitalist system. The aspiration for socialism must not displace the actual movements for improvements in the technical systems that will be inherited by any revolutionary society should one be created. The failure to tolerate and learn from such movements in the Soviet Union and China has had horrendous consequences. The precise articulation of movements for technical and radical social change remains to be worked out in a future we must hope will be one of productive turmoil rather than useless violence or the peace of the grave.

Hans Hautmann (1943–2018) on the Austrian council movement and why it was so much stronger than its counterpart on the other side of the German-Austrian border.

One of, if not the most significant historians of the Austrian workers’ movement, Hans Hautmann, died on 3 July 2018. Born in August 1943 to Leopoldine and Rudolf Hautmann, Vienna’s first Communist chief of police, Hautmann was one of the foremost experts on the history of the Austrian council movement and Austrian socialism. He taught for many decades at the University of Linz, where he served as the director of the Department of Austrian History from 1981 onward and co-founded the Alfred Klahr Gesellschaft zur Erforschung der Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung, of which he served as president until 2006. Over the years, Hautmann published numerous articles on Red Vienna and the history of the Communist Party of Austria. His most famous book, Geschichte der Rätebewegung in Österreich 1918–1924, was published in 1987 and remains the most comprehensive study of the Austrian workers’ councils, which attracted massive levels of working-class support compared to similar movements in other European countries.

Hautmann belonged to a generation of post-war scholars who understood teaching and research as inherently political. A dedicated member of the Communist Party of Austria, Hautmann viewed his work not as a purely intellectual activity, but rather as a means of passing down experiences to help inform the political praxis of new generations of socialists.

While Austrian politics today stand for the re-emergence of the far right as a hegemonic force, Hautmann represents a markedly different social alternative, characterised by solidarity and democratic self-determination. Although the movement to which Hans Hautmann was committed no longer exists in this form, it lives on in Hautmann’s work, which remains a vital source of inspiration to all seeking to change the future by understanding the past.

In memory of Hans Hautmann and his contribution to left-wing history and politics, we are re-publishing his 2017 interview with Benjamin Birnbaumer, which originally appeared in the French journal of Marxist theory Période.The two discussed Hautmann’s career and the role of democratic self-determination in overthrowing capitalism.

Your history on the Austrian council movement appeared in 1987. What kind of response did this book about class struggle and revolutionary history receive, in a moment when the alleged triumph of neoliberalism was being proclaimed?

The reaction to the book was limited at the time of its publication, despite the fact that at 815 pages it represented the most thorough study of the Austrian council movement and revolution up to that point. There were only a few reviews, all of which came from leftists.

If the book had appeared ten years earlier in the middle of the 1970s, while the council system was being actively discussed within the student movements in France, Germany, Italy, etc. as an alternative to bourgeois democracy, things would have been different. I couldn’t publish then, however, as the book required years of tedious research into primary sources and documents, which I undertook in the 1970s.

In addition to your book, you’ve published a great deal on the history of the workers’ movement. How did you come to focus on class issues, and what’s your take on the future prospects of Marxist historiography?

I came from a Communist household, which definitely had something to do with me becoming a historian of the labour movement. The topic of my 1968 dissertation (Die Anfänge der linksradikalen Bewegung und der Kommunistischen Partei Deutschösterreichs 1916–1919) and my work as an assistant at the Institute for Contemporary History at the University of Linz, where I was based at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for the History of the Labour Movement, pushed me further in this direction.

I consider Marxist historiography’s current prospects to be good, because the contemporary conditions of unrestrained capitalist globalisation have given rise to a need for approaches which are capable of critiquing them.

How is a council republic radically different from bourgeois democracy? Perhaps you could touch on the question of the right to vote. Historically, this was a point of contention in the workers’ movement—the Bolsheviks’ decision in the midst of the October Revolution to expand suffrage only to people who lived from their own labour, for example, was harshly criticised by Rosa Luxemburg.

Council democracy is a form of direct democracy characterised by a thoroughly unique decision-making process. It is based on the imperative mandate—with voters’ permanent control over elected officials as its maxim—which ensures the democratic accountability of elected officials by allowing voters to recall them at any time.

Both an advisory and decision-making body at the same time, the purpose of the council is to forge an extremely close relationship between the electoral base and mandate holders, allowing for constant decision making and checks on power from below. It was conceived as an alternative to parliamentary democracy and as a potential means of dissolving the ‘bourgeois state’. The alternative to emerge in the place of this state would be the ‘council republic’, which would realise the principles of council democracy by implementing a socialist economy.

Like the Bolsheviks in Russia, even the reformist Social Democrats in Austria viewed councils as a means of organising both manual and intellectual labourers along class lines. In turn, they banned owners of private companies from voting in them. Moreover, in order to stand for election in an Austrian council, one was required to ‘share the goal of overthrowing the capitalist mode of production, to recognise class struggle as the means of emancipation for working people, to belong to their trade union and to be at least 20 years old’.

How do you account for the international character of the council movement, which emerged simultaneously in several European countries following the end of World War I?

The international character of the council movement emerged out of the European proletariat’s common experiences and interests under conditions of imperialist war and intensified capitalist exploitation and oppression, and the struggle for a new socialist order.

Austria held a place of distinction within the council movement, in that its councils existed longer and, due to their solid foundation, were able to actively intervene in economic and social life. Could you elaborate on what made Austria’s councils exceptional and in which areas their interventions were the most extensive?

One thing that made Austrian councils exceptional was that the rules governing their formation, electoral procedures, electoral participation, and transparency were more developed than their counterparts in German and Hungary. Another was that Austrian councils took it upon themselves to reorganise municipal systems of food distribution, housing, healthcare, childcare, and education at the grassroots level.

During the Austrian revolution, the councils searched for hoarded foodstuffs, distributed smuggled goods to the needy, reported vacant living spaces, prevented capricious evictions by landlords, poured their energy into supporting hungry children, intercepted weapons and munitions bound for counterrevolutionary states, and provided free consultation on social matters of all kinds. In this sense, they were a truly unique phenomenon in Austrian history and a shining example in the tradition of what one could call the healthy initiative of awakened, self-conscious masses of workers.

What was the relationship like between the Social Democratic Party of Austria and the soldiers’ and workers’ councils? After all, according to the councils’ statutes, their goal was the ‘abolition of the capitalist mode of production’ through the ‘means of class struggle’.

With view to both the workers’ and soldiers’ councils as well as the Communists, Austrian Social Democracy followed a markedly different political line than that of Social Democrats such as Friedrich Ebert, Philipp Scheidemann, and Gustav Noske in Germany: the Austrian Social Democrats attempted to tame their rivals on the left while going out of their way to avoid violence.

In this vein, the Social Democrats expanded the workers’ councils into a ‘parliament of the entire working class’ in March 1919. This was done in order to maintain relations with the Communists, to engage them in dialogue, and if possible to bring them in line with the Social Democratic strategy of ‘being ready for action’. The Social Democrats hoped to convince the Communists that the council republic experiment lacked long-term prospects, and if that failed, to secure a majority to vote the Communists down.

Failing to win over Social Democratic workers and achieve a majority in the workers’ councils for a variety of objective and subjective reasons, the Communist Party of Austria was confronted with a situation in which any attempt to go beyond Social Democratic reformism could have been defamed before the masses as ‘contravention of the resolutions of the workers’ council’ and a ‘lapse in proletarian discipline’. Austromarxist leaders took advantage of this situation to the fullest, yet their strategy could only succeed insofar as they portrayed their differences with the Communists as a question of tactics rather than goals: after all, the Social Democrats also promised the radicalised worker masses to lead them to socialism in 1918–19.

How did the ruling class attempt to break the strength of the councils, and to what extent did the councils have to deal with repression?

In 1918–19, the Austrian bourgeoisie was dramatically weakened both economically and politically and in no condition to commit violence against the council movement. As if the loss of control over traditional institutions of state power such as the police weren’t bad enough for the bourgeoisie, the disintegration of [Austro-Hungarian] Imperial and Royal Army meant that there was no unified force capable of fighting the working class like in Germany, with its Freikorps, ‘Baltic troops’, ‘Orgesch’ and ‘Orka’ associations.

The standing military of the republic, the Volkswehr, would have been useless for a counterrevolution given that the soldiers’ councils occupied a decisive position of power within it. For the time being, the tactical manoeuvring of the bourgeois political camp was limited to imitating the council model by establishing ‘citizen and estate councils’ or ‘farmers’ councils’ that swapped out the demands of the ‘Marxist’ councils with a highly general demand for ‘equality’. However, these proved to be short-lived and disappeared from view entirely as the revolutionary wave ebbed following the fall of the Hungarian Soviet Republic in August 1919.

Subsequently, as the declining power of the workers’ and soldiers’ councils became increasingly obvious, the bourgeoisie took note and abstained from open provocations or attempts to suppress the councils.

What influence did the revolutionary wing of the Austrian labour movement manage to exert within the councils? After all, the Communist International viewed Communist majorities in the councils as a prerequisite for a Communist seizure of power.

The Communists received approximately five per cent of the nationwide vote in the workers’ council elections held in spring 1919. In Vienna, they won ten per cent of mandates in the bodies of the council. In the Vienna soldiers’ councils, they were particularly well-represented in the ‘Volkswehrbatallion 41’, the successor to the Red Guards of the 1918 November Days. However, the vast majority of the soldiers’ councils were thoroughly Social Democratic in nature.

Lenin and the Comintern’s explicit order that the Austrian Communists secure a majority in the councils before attempting to seize power put them in a difficult position. Given that the party was far away from anything close to a majority, some began to argue that the resolutions of the workers’ council should only be recognised ‘conditionally’, depending on whether or not they were ‘revolutionary’. This progressed so far that for a while Communists even disputed the workers’ council’s claim to represent the will of the working class, condemning the institution as a ‘mere executive organ of capitalist society’.

Only after a resolution positively highlighting the councils was passed at the Second World Congress of the Comintern in the summer of 1920 did the Austrian Communists revise their tactics. They now accepted that the workers’ council had possessed a correct analysis of the balance of forces all along and that it was a ‘pure, uncorrupted proletarian institution’. They promised to henceforth ‘persuade objectively’ and to ‘imbue the councils with the Communist spirit’.

However, this long overdue shift to a more realistic assessment of the political situation ultimately came too late. Against the backdrop of the rapid decline in the power of the councils from 1921–22, the Communists gradually withdrew from the workers’ councils and did not participate in the council elections held in the summer of 1922.

Despite fading away in the early 1920s, to what extent can the council moment be seen as making a fundamental contribution to class consciousness and anti-fascism among Austrian workers? Although the Social Democrats ultimately quashed the councils and transformed them into the Republikanischer Schutzbund, their paramilitary organisation, often it was members of the latter who were the first to take up arms against fascism—against the Austrofascist regime—in the Austrian Civil War of 1934.

The period in which Austrian workers were active in the council movement was very important and had far-reaching consequences. It is vital to understand that, in many ways, the Austrian workers’ movement occupied a unique position in Europe until 1934.

The Social Democratic Party of Austria was the largest, most well-organised workers’ party in any capitalist country. The Austrian working class became armed in November 1918 and was the only party that remained so even after the revolutionary crisis following World War I subsided. During the same period, there was no other organisation in the capitalist world comparable to the Republikanischer Schutzbund.

In Austria, an independent working-class culture flourished like nowhere else. Initiatives associated with Red Vienna such as public housing for workers, progressive taxation, expansion of the welfare and healthcare systems, and school reform were unparalleled in their scope and quality by those implemented by other Social Democratic parties. Alongside Spain, Austria was the only country in which the working class waged an armed resistance against a fascist takeover. Austria was also the site of the only instance of Social Democrats suddenly defecting from their party and joining a Communist Party en masse—a conscious, deliberate decision made by many in the wake of 1934. Of course, not all of these phenomena can be seen as a direct result of the council movement. That said, the movement needs to be given credit for the fact that the experiences that tens of thousands of Austrian workers collected in the school of council democracy gave them a highly developed level of class consciousness, the indispensable basis for all the developments I’ve mentioned.

To what extent does the council, as an organisational principle, strike you as relevant for contemporary social struggles? To invoke a few examples from the recent past, during the first, reform-oriented SYRIZA government in Greece, it appeared that there were no organisations independent of the government. In contrast, the political scientist George Ciccariello-Maher describes the first years of the Chavez regime in Venezuela as being strongly influenced by local forms of self-government existing in tension with the national government, and initially contributing to a deepening of the Bolivarian Revolution.

The idea of the council system as an alternative to bourgeois parliamentarianism will live on in the future. However, I am convinced that we are very far removed from the conditions it would take to turn it into a reality today: a society-wide upswing in revolutionary activity involving the mass participation of organised, disciplined, solidary, tenacious, and class-conscious working people who ultimately share the desire to replace the capitalist order with socialism.

Translated by Adam Baltner. This edited version of the interview originally appeared in Ada Magazin.

Apart from being a very productive scholar, you have also been engaged in political debates and activism, for example as part of the academic advisory council of Attac. Which experiences and events politicized you, and which role has political activism played throughout your life and career?

I do not think of myself as a political activist, but, of course, others may have a different impression. This would also hold true for my membership in the academic advisory council of Attac. This council is less active than the respective council of Attac France. The geographic and social centrality of Paris seems to help to organize joint projects. The German council has produced publications which aim at explaining economic, political and social developments to a larger public. Its members are active in the yearly summer school of Attac and we were, for example, active in the alternative summit to the G20 summit in Hamburg. At the moment we endeavour to prepare a new edition of our “ABC” of Globalization. All of this may be termed “activism”, but it is perhaps not a very active activism.

I have certainly been perceived as a political activist when I was a member of the founding council for the University of Bremen. It was active from 1968 to 1972. For this “founding Senate” of the future university, the government of Bremen engaged an equal number of professors, assistants and students. It was hoped that their equal representation in the founding process would prevent the fierce conflicts which at the time had erupted in other universities. When the professors in this council insisted that the preparation of the teaching should be worked out by professors to be engaged before the opening of the new university, the government followed the demand of students and assistants and let them go. It authorized the assistants and the students to suggest professors for the council who were willing to take part in a democratic planning process. This astonishing decision provoked uproar in the media. Once and again it was pointed out that democracy was not appropriate for some tasks, amongst them the planning of a university. (“Should a surgeon ask his assistants or students before taking out an appendix?”) Before it had even started, the university was termed a hotspot of revolutionary machinations. And when the first councils were set up for deciding the curriculums the media used every stupid argument which was raised in the course of long and serious debates to bolster their criticism. Later on, we debated if one should perhaps not open up every discussion to the general public if one did not have the means to contradict interpretations. One of the results of these very fierce public debates was the advent of students from all over the country who wanted to experience new forms of studying and discussing contents which differed from the mainstream. I was still teaching in Göttingen when the university in Bremen started. But when I got there in 1974, students told me that they were always sad when at the end of the term there were no longer any courses. Often, they organized study groups during vacation. I have referred to this founding process at length because it left me with two very important insights. The first one concerns Marxism at the university. As long as students experience the Marxian critique of political economy as a critique of mainstream analysis it can and often does provoke very fruitful theoretical reasoning and very convincing analysis. When students lack this background and Marxism becomes part of an official curriculum than it is transformed from a political project into a subject of teaching and examination among others. The second insight concerns the movement for the reform of universities. Not only in Bremen, but in Bremen more pronounced than elsewhere, the advocates of reform, wanted to make use of the state’s power to regulate education in order to achieve reforms, thereby renouncing the traditional autonomy of universities. This resulted in the fact that the state, and once again, the government in Bremen preceded this development, claimed to not only regulate general structures but each curriculum and even minor administrative aspects. At the time we analysed the traditional autonomy of universities as the institutional form which safeguarded the privileges of professors. While this was undoubtedly correct, the loss of autonomy then reduced the possibility of students influencing decisions.

I do not conceive of myself as having been a participant in the so-called movement of 1968. But, of course, this movement was present in my everyday life at the university. One of my nicest memories is a course on the first volume of Capital at the end of the 1960s. When students asked me to not only teach such a course and to also give out credits, I told them that I did not know Marx yet. They convinced me that this should not prevent the course. This resulted in somewhere around 300 students and me, all reading Volume I ofCapital for the first time. It turned out to be a memorable experience because even in this very large group we did manage to work together. Later on, I bought another copy ofCapital I because I felt embarrassed looking at the notes which I inserted at the time.

You were professor of the theory of society and the state in Bremen. In comparison to North America and England, there seem to be very few critical and leftist scholars in German universities today. Do you agree with that? During your time in academia, how do you think the role of Marxism and leftist thought has changed in Germany? And how do you think it will evolve in the future?

During the 1970s quite a few Marxists were engaged as professors in German universities. This was not only due to the movement for the reform of universities and the political movements of the time but also to the fact that the founding of a series of new universities led to the creation of additional university jobs. But, of course, leftist scholars were only engaged because student insisted on taking part in the selection processes. Two main developments have contributed to the end of this situation. The first one is due to the first economic crisis after World War II with its repercussions on labour markets, even on labour markets for academics. This induced more and more students to try to very quickly collect their credits and to concentrate on topics which would make it easier to find employment. There are, of course, still individuals and groups striving to better understand capitalism through studying Marx and there are still teachers endeavouring to assist them. But as far as I know these endeavours are often pursued outside of universities. Given my experiences with the integration of Marxism into official curriculums, I hesitate to wholeheartedly deplore this situation. But, of course, we do need academic teachers who are capable of teaching the critical analysis of capitalist societies. If some of those have, indeed, got a job at the university, there is, at the moment, hardly any fight for the enlargement of their number. And many amongst my generation of academics have contributed to this development. While in the early 1970s it was still fashionable to cite Marx and maybe even read some of his analyses, this changed when governments decided to engage decided non-Marxists. But it also changed because many of those who had become professors because students had fought for their engagement became more and more eager to be noticed by their national and international colleagues and therefore no longer concentrated on the development of forms of teaching which included students in the processes of research. In Bremen, this change was marked by the establishment of curriculums which, once again, followed the established opinion that one had to absolve processes of acquiring knowledge before one could take part in processes of research. Today, curriculums still contain “projects”, but they are very different from the interdisciplinary organizations of learning to research by doing which were practiced at the height of the students’ movement.

I hesitate to answer the second part of your question. After all, developments are not only different from university to university but often also from department to department. And since developments in universities are in some way or another always connected to the political and social climate in a certain society at a certain time, this answer would require a prognostic into which I would not want to venture.

Benno Teschke, in an interview, pointed out that in the 1980s and 1990s (one might add that this is the case even today), you were one of the very few historical sociologists in Germany, while this genre of research was alive and well in the UK and France, standing in the tradition of the Annales school or the Marxist historians like Hobsbawm and Thompson. Do you agree with the categorization of your work as historical sociology, and with the assessment that your work was in this respect unique in Germany? To better understand your trajectory in the academic context of Germany, could you talk about how you would situate your work in relation to other currents and trends in historiography and political science throughout time?

After having studied social sciences I wrote my dissertation and my habilitation in political science. But since I never conceived of myself as a political scientist and since German historians do not like it if somebody calls him- or herself a “historian” who has not studied history at the university, I usually do not specify my research in terms of academic disciplines. But, of course, “historical sociology” does fit quite nicely. Benno Teschke’s remark was made in reference to the Marxist debate about the theoretical conception of the capitalist state which has become known as derivation theory. In that context I was indeed an exception. But otherwise, I do not think that historical sociology is more or less absent amongst German colleagues. In the last decades, there have been many publications about National Socialism which I would range under that topic, and Hans Medick, Alf Lüdtke, Hans Gerhard-Haupt, or Jürgen Kocka, to name just a few, also practice historical sociology. And even if I never agreed with his theoretical concept, Hans-Ulrich Wehler’s analyses can also be termed “historical sociology”. To not position myself in the field of historical research, does not prevent me to have opinions about some of its fashions. I have, for example, never been really convinced by developments which were propagated under the heading of ‘linguistic turn’ (after all, the analysis of prevalent modes of linguistic expressions is a matter of course in historical research) On the other hand I have practiced quite a bit of micro-history when I was engaged in the research and publication of the local history of Bremen. And when Ulrich Welke and I researched the social history of German Seafaring, we worked in 18 different archives, some of them in towns which used to be in Prussia and are in Poland today. I really enjoyed this stint in archival research. To sum up my answer to your question: I refrain from positioning myself in relation to current trends.

Most anglophone readers will primarily be familiar with your monograph on the constitution of bourgeois state power. I would argue that the main thread that connects your book “Impersonal power” with your new book “Market and Violence” is the discussion of the relationship between the state and the capitalist economy. This is a topic you have written about since the 1970s, when the bourgeois state was heavily discussed among the left of West Germany. What got you engaged in this debate, what are your central positions and which theorists and historians have been influential for them?

The relation between the capitalist economy and the state, has, indeed, been a dominant focus of my research. Early forays into state analysis, however, were still very much focused on ideology. The adequate title for my habilitation would have been “The political economy of the American Dream”. At that time, I thought that was much too fancy and choose Zur politischen Ökonomie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft. Die historischen Bedingungen ihrer Konstitution in den USA [which would have been: The political economy of bourgeois society. Historical conditions for its constitution in the USA] I mention this early analysis (it was published in 1973) because the experience of trying to analyse the historical constitution of a certain state protected me against the functionalism in the so-called derivation debate about the state. This debate was provoked by two concepts which, though fundamentally different, tried to grasp the special character of the capitalist state at the end of the 20^th century. Not only soviet mainstream conceptions of the ‘theory of monopoly capitalism’ but also leftist social democratic versions of this concept stated that the development of productive forces would produce a contradiction between these forces and existing social forms of production and hence provoke revolution against the power block which had arisen from the amalgamation of the state and monopolized capital. The theoretical concept of “late capitalism” (Spätkapitalismus), most notably put forward by Jürgen Habermas and Claus Offe, was of a different brand. A rising need for political steerage of the economy was taken to also necessitate political measures which wouldensure the loyalty of the masses. Since these could never be enough, the crisis of late capitalism was conceived as a crisis of the legitimation of state power. Both theoretical concepts not only stressed the necessity for revolution but also its possibility. In an essay, which in retrospect can be considered as having started derivation theory, Wolfgang Müller and Christel Neusüß denounced the “theory of state monopoly capitalism” as well as the “theory of late capitalism” as new brands of revisionism. While they did not object to the assumption that societies could to a certain extent be stabilized as well as changed through politics, they insisted that any materialist analysis has to define the structural limits of any such strategy, a requirement always neglected by adherents of revisionism. In their opinion the “concentration on politics” had to be rejected. Instead, state theoreticians should endeavour to explain the form of the state and the structural limits to politics which this form implies. In other words: theoretical analysis has to explain why the political form of capitalism is the separation of state from society. This was to become the leitmotiv of the derivation debate. Its participants have tried to answer Pashukanis’ question why class domination in capitalism is not exercised by an apparatus of the dominating classes but, instead, takes on the form of public power. All of them agreed that it was not sufficient to describe the relation between state and society as being inherent in state activity, because it was exactly the “separation” of the state from society which had to be seen as the expression of the social order of capitalist societies. As far as the explanation of the “separation” was concerned, different solutions were suggested and – often fiercely – defended. Looking back, it becomes clear that the most remarkable position has been formulated by theoreticians whose arguments centred on the generality of law. Bernhard Blanke, Ulrich Jürgens and Hans Kastendiek contended that the most general precondition of capitalist forms of production and reproduction is the protection of any form of private property by the state. The production of commodities makes it imperious that capital owners can freely dispose over the means of production including their use of labour power. But the exchange of commodities necessitates regulations which not only protect the owners of capital but all owners of private property. Therefore, the state has to be formally neutral in its relation towards the different forms of property. This formal neutrality is embodied in the principle of the generality of the law. And it is exactly this neutrality towards the fundamentally different forms of private property, i.e. the property of one’s own labour power on the one and the private property of capital on the other hand which makes the capitalist state an integral part of the class structure of capitalist society. It was only with this theoretical concept that the mere instrumental explanation of the class character of the capitalist state was overcome.

While participants in the derivation debate assumed that this political form is produced by the necessities of the reproduction of capital, my own research into the historical constitution of bourgeois states led to the hypothesis that there is no direct causal relationship between the constitution of bourgeois political forms and capitalism becoming dominant. Today, I would insist that the class character of the state can (!) be present in the state form, but that capitalism can also function in societies where there is no formal neutrality of the state. I have since criticized the derivation debate on the capitalist state by pointing out that the theoretical concept of an institutionally neutral political form was a product of the historical situation in which it was formulated. Derivation theory is very much a child of the decades after World War II in Germany when and where it appeared as if equality before the law was actually a necessity for the reproduction of capitalism. It was the rejection of the historical analysis of capitalist state power which allowed its logical deduction from the general structures of capitalism, thereby condemning this theoretical concept to remain useless for the explanation of political forms which contradict the political forms of capitalism which had been deduced from Marx’ analyses.

Your new book “Market and Violence” is subtitled “The Functioning of Historical Capitalism”. The subject of your book is, simplified, the role and persistence of coercive and violent labour relations and modes of accumulation in the history of capitalism. You argue that the history of these phenomena leads us to question some fundamental premises of both liberal and Marxist theories of capitalism. Can you elaborate a bit on your critique of certain Marxist and liberal theories of capitalism and what you think they get wrong? What is the basic argument of your book, and in how far is it a critique of those Marxist and liberal theories?

Having looked at the actual history of capitalism I concluded that – exceptions apart – owners of capital use every means to achieve profits that are available to them at a given time and at a given place. This includes the use of direct violence against persons. While I refuse to discuss if there is more or less violence today than hundred years ago, the history of capitalism has not confirmed the notion that capitalist forms of exploitation generally tend to overcome the violence which was present in historically earlier forms. If, in some places and during some periods, violence has indeed been reduced, this has always been achieved by political measures. And these have usually been demanded by widespread critique and opposition. Unfortunately, there is no guarantee for such political achievements to remain effective independently of the continuous presence of critique and opposition. That these findings contradict fundamental assumptions of liberal concepts goes without saying, because for liberalism the history of mankind has already reached its destination with the advent of capitalism. Marx and Marxists contradict this conviction. But they also conceive of capitalism as a progressive stage in the history of mankind, not only because it was progressive in relation to pre-capitalist forms of economy and society but also because, according to Marx, the inherent dynamics of capitalism prepare the historical possibility of socialism. If there are different strands of theoretical conceptions about the revolutionary transformation and if we can detect different conceptions in Marx’s own writings, I am quite sure that it was his concept of revolution which led to his refusal to accept that capitalism did not always and everywhere rely on the double freedom of laborers. Since he expected that laborers would organize and educate themselves in order to achieve the revolutionary transformation to socialism, he could not very well accept that slavery was a capitalist form of labour.

If we accept that slavery and various other forms of forced labour have been – and still are – made use of for capitalist production and that there have been - and still are - capitalist forms of appropriation which are pursued by practices which not only make use of market forces but also of violence, we have to specify the theoretical content of Marx’s analysis in Capital. The theoretical beauty of this analysis is the fact that Marx’s critique of the political economy of capitalism made it possible that he did not have to make capital owners responsible for all the evils inherent in capitalism. Once the capacity to labour of many men, women (and children) was transformed into a commodity, the violence inherent in the anonymous forces of the market could replace the practice of direct violence against laborers. Marx’s theory of value enabled him to explain that even if nobody cheats and everything is exchanged according to its value, the productive capacity of labour power reproduces the capital relation, i.e. the class difference. While I criticize any attempt to use value theory in order to calculate profits or even a tendency of profits to rise or to fall, I think it is at the heart of Marx’s ability to focus on capitalism as a system. This focus enabled him to explain that the reproduction of capitalism is possible without the use of direct violence against persons. Whenever this historical possibility is mistakenly conceived of as historical necessity, the analysis of capitalism is transformed into a philosophical concept of history. This transformation is present in Marx’s theory of revolution but it is also present in all those Marxist theories which define capitalism as a system of production which necessitates the double freedom of laborers.

One aspect of your new book as well as your earlier work that stands out to me is the very productive and critical discussion of Marxist theory and historiography. While you reject certain interpretations of Marxism, e.g. a conception of the modern state as an effect of the development of the productive forces, a theory of the logic of capitalist economies that suppresses violent labour relations etc., you draw on and discuss other authors from the Marxist tradition, such as Etienne Balibar, Jairus Banaji, Charles Post and others. How would you describe the relevance that Marxism had for your work and your intellectual biography?

I find it very difficult to name specific authors as sources for my own theoretical concept. Let me start out with Marx. When trying to analyse the fundamental contradiction between slavery and Jeffersonian political concepts for my habilitation, I looked at various historical analyses but not yet at Marx. When I did look at Marx later on I disagreed with his analysis of modern slavery as far as the US was concerned. This experience probably encouraged me to insist on the necessity of historical analysis of the capitalist state power as opposed to its logical derivation from Capital. After having started to describe the historical development of bourgeois states in England, France and the various Germany States and having already written 500 pages, I threw all of this in the waste paper basket and started anew. (I also decided that if an analysis of several German states could not be achieved, I should not take the usual way out by simply concentrating on Prussia.) When I try to remember what induced me to change my theoretical concept, I do not recall any Marxist authors, instead I very vividly recall the impact of writers like Frederic William Maitland or Marc Bloch. In any case, the experience of writingImpersonal Power probably ruined me for any functional theoretical concept. It also ruined me for any concept of class struggle which conceives of classes as social groups. The class character of capitalism is inherent in any labour relation, but neither does this preclude the path to socialism nor to any specific development for capitalism. During my research forImpersonal Power Friedrich Gerstenberger insisted that it is not possible to grasp the development of state power without taking into consideration the social forms of its military. Benno Teschke introduced me to the relevance of political sovereignty, a topic which has since remained one of my fields of interests, Robert Brenner helped me to understand why merchants very rarely tended to become champions of bourgeois revolutions. I could go on. Your question probably intends to detect if I see myself theoretically affiliated to any school of interpretation. I am not. Except for a very strict critique of any concept which to my opinion reproduces orthodox Marxism, I try to take into consideration many different arguments, and I stubbornly refuse to accept for example, that citing Brenner puts me into the drawer which is labelled political Marxism.

I am not sure what started me to research the continuous presence of violence in capitalism. However, the experience of researching maritime labour must have had an important impact. I sort of stumbled into maritime history in the 1990s because at that time the “Deutsche Forschungsgesellschaft” did not allow to make use of their funds for dissertations. After having decided to at least for a short time collaborate with Ulrich Welke who was not only a former student of mine but also a former seafarer, I very soon noticed that research in maritime history could contribute to my understanding of state power. This research introduced me to archival research. Theoretically, our book Vom Wind zum Dampf led us to question the assumption that maritime labour was already capitalist labour in the 16th or 17th century. That sailors were paid did not make them into proletarians as long as their skills and their knowledge did still have to be taken into consideration for the running of a sailing ship. We developed a much more precise concept of industrial labour than was heretofore present in maritime history and came to the conclusion that when capitalist forms of labour were already present on ships of the navy they had not yet arrived on most ships of the merchant marine because sailors were not yet labouring under the strict command of the representative or the owner of the ship. This, of course, resulted in a critique of widely held notions about masters aboard merchant ships. In the merchant marine the unrestricted power of captains came much later than is often assumed. After having finished this book, Ulrich Welke and I decided to try to analyse present day maritime labour. This, of course, necessitated a grasp of the dynamics of globalized capitalism. It helped that both of us were teaching in the department of economics. After having obtained funding for this research we, first of all, organized many discussions with Seafarers in order clarify our research concept. We then went along on voyages of different types of ships for periods varying between ten days and almost four weeks. I count the chance to experience globalization at its social (and geographical) fringes as one of the great privileges of my academic life. This research into the actual conditions of maritime laborers has imbibed me with a thorough scepticism against the effects of political governance. Because, once the development of ‘flags of convenience’ had been accepted and even furthered by the governments of formerly leading maritime states, it was very difficult to establish international regulation, not to speak of international control. While we have never actually been on one of those ships where extreme exploitation is practiced, we heard and saw enough to realize that working and living conditions of seafarers are dictated by fierce economic strategies.

For me, one of the most impressive examples of the general thesis of the book was your discussion of slavery in the Confederate States of America, a topic heavily discussed in recent years. You identify the question whether slavery would have disappeared without the Civil War as one of the central disagreement among scholars of US slavery. As an illustration of your more general thesis: What is your position towards this question, and why?

While I point to the fact that slaves could and have been used in industrialized production and that slave owners as well as manufacturers managed to overcome the local fixation of slave labour by developing methods of renting out slaves, the most important argument against the conviction that slavery and capitalism are not compatible has been produced by the practices of former slave owners who developed all sorts of “Ersatz- slavery”. The Black Codes which were passed in the South after the end of the Civil War have been motivated by endeavours to tie blacks to agrarian production. They had to be given up. But vagrancy laws, the widespread use of peonage and the renting out of convicts more or less achieved the same goal. All of these forms bound labour to a certain employment. None of these forms hindered the development of capitalism.

You argue that around the time of the First World War, capitalism in Western Europe was “domesticated”. The most important aspect of this “domestication” was the legalisation of unions. This happened at a time when capitalism was already “normalized”, that is, institutions and the state had already managed to make working people accept their status as workers dependent on private relations of wage-labour. Could you explain what the “domestication” of capitalism entails, exactly, what its historical preconditions were, and why it was such a paradigm-shifting development in the history of capitalism?

What I have termed the domestication of capitalism has been termed the development of the social state by others. “Domestication” puts the emphasis on the acceptance of the right of trade unions to collective deliberation by capital owners. If some of those realized that – at least in the long run - deliberation could be more advantageous than the violent suppression of strikes, this never put an end to the joint actions of capital owners without prior state activities. In the USA these activities only arrived on a national level in the 1930s, in Germany, for example, they arrived at the end of World War I. I make use the term “domestication” in order to stress the fact that – just like in the domestication of wild animals - the undomesticated nature of capitalism can never be totally eliminated. One of the most striking examples is the development of National Socialism in a country where, after World War I, capitalism was already relatively domesticated. In sum: domestication is provoked and defended by social movements. We all had to learn that the domestication which was thought to have come to stay in the most advanced capitalist societies in the first decades after World War II turned out to be a rather thin political layer when capital owners started to make use of globalization in order to get rid of its encumbrances.

In your book you cite a study of the International Labour Organization, estimating that in 2013 27 million people in the world lived and worked under modern slavery. By 2016, this number has increased to about 40 million. In your book, you don’t stick to the official legal definitions of slavery and compulsory labour, but introduce the term “unbounded exploitation” to grasp both modern slavery as well as other labour relations that entail violence. What does “unbounded exploitation” mean, exactly, and what does it encompass that terms like slavery don’t? 

The choice of terminology has been made into a political statement when colonial powers decided to prohibit slavery and then argued that it actually was no longer existent in their colonies. British governments were especially inventive. Since the colonial state did not have jurisdiction over household matters in India, it was not responsible for the forms of exploitation which were practiced in households. Many colonial governments simply looked the other way. Of course, all the forms of forced labour to which natives were subjugated by colonial states in the name of civilization and progress could have been termed slavery, but members of colonial states insisted on the fact that if they often did not pay these workers, they did not buy them. When the International Labour Office was founded in 1919, its board decided to evade terminological controversy by making use of the term ‘forced labour’. Since the continued presence of outright slavery could not be overlooked, the League of Nations decided conventions against slavery. The Economic and Social Council of the United Nations prohibited slavery as well as institutions and practices which resemble slavery. Today, social scientists and activists often make use of term slavery as a moral category thereby stressing the atrocity of certain forms of exploitation.

I have chosen the term “unbounded exploitation” for two reasons. Firstly, it allows the integration of practices which ruin the health of people, be they laborers or not, as well as of practices which make body parts into commodities, of threats to the life of trade union activists, of the violence inherent in the trade in drugs or persons as well as other systematic practices of violence for the sake of appropriation. My second reason for making use of this term is more obvious in German. Because “entgrenzte Ausbeutung” refers to the fact that since the first decades of the 20th century one convention after the other defined limits of exploitation. In other words: they defined what sort of capitalist exploitation was to be internationally accepted. Unbounded exploitation transgresses these limits (bounds). Of course, these conventions, though most of them have been ratified by the respective national political bodies and have therefore been integrated into national law, have not effectively transformed reality. They can, nevertheless, be referred to as expressions of official international opinion by opponents of certain practices, thereby adding to the legitimacy of certain demands.

I think when talking about your concept of “unbounded exploitation”, it would be worthwhile to for a moment shift our attention to the second part of the word, “exploitation”. Exploitation is a concept that in recent decades has either been ignored by social scientists, or was confined to a very narrow definition applying exclusively to “productive” wage labour, mostly in the industrial sector, where it is closely related to concepts like profit and a labour theory of value. Your use of the term does not fit to either of these trends; rather, you feature it very prominently and apply it to a great variety of types of work. What were the reasons for you to choose exploitation as a category, what does it encompass, and how would you define it?

The use of the term “exploitation” seemed a matter of course. The focus of my analysis was not on the productivity of capitalism, but instead on the possibility to make capitalism productive even when men, women and children are forced to labour in extremely harsh conditions. If “exploitation” of laborers is present in any capitalist labour relation, my focus was on practices which transgress this capitalist normality by making use of force either in the labour process as such or in binding laborers to a certain place of work. Used in this sense “exploitation” is a political term. Its content depends on the notions of right and wrong in capitalism prevailing at a certain time and at a certain place. By referring myself to international conventions I also refer myself to their definition of the difference between accepted exploitation and ‘unbounded exploitation’. But in spite of this reference to institutionalized definitions I also take the liberty of using my very personal notion of what I conceive of as being insufferable and therefore intolerable.

I interpret your work as a fundamental questioning of the dichotomy of “free” wage labour and slavery. Your empirical work seems to suggest that rather than a clear distinction, there exist a myriad of hybrid-forms of labour relations that cannot be grasped by a simple dichotomy of wage labour and slavery. Trying to grapple with similar problems, theorists like Marcel van der Linden or Tithi Bhattacharya have called for an expanded conception of class, transcending its confinement to more traditional definitions of the working class. You seem to be more reluctant to use the concept of class; especially, you criticise the construct of a “global proletariat”. What is your critique of the concept of class, especially the global working class? What are the political implications of your critique for the left trying to grapple with the challenges of a globally interconnected capitalism?

For me the analytical term ‘class’ is the expression of the fundamentally contradictory interests which are present in any labour relation. If one uses ‘class’ in order to talk about positions in social hierarchies – a usage which used to be very common in England and France in the early decades of the 19^th century – one can highlight differences, but loses the notion of contradiction which is at the heart of Marx’s analysis of the class relation. In this case the concept of class is made use of to describe social situations. In my opinion to talk of a global working class amalgamates description with the theory of revolution. After all, in Marx’s analysis classes were conceived of as the agents of revolution. And if, for example, John Holloway writes about the “Cry” of all the oppressed or Hardt and Negri about the ‘multitude’ than they do just that: they try to combine description with a concept of revolution. If this may be politically encouraging, its theoretical foundation is not tenable. Marcel van der Linden and Tithi Bhattacharya argue differently. But if we use the concept of class in the context of the analysis of actual social and political forms of capitalism, it is impossible to not at the same time assume that people act according to their economic position. If this assumption was always problematic it was much less so in the second half of the 19^th century in the first capitalist societies. Geoff Eley and Keith Nield have very convincingly argued that class analysis arose out of the fact that at the turn from the 19^th to the 20^th century there were proletarian milieus which favoured the development of solidarities which then, in turn allowed the development of a socialist and communist programmatic. Even in that time and in the first industrialized societies ‘class’ was a fictive entity in so far as it was conceived as a social group which would act in a certain way. These milieus hardly exist in present day capitalist societies. If conflicts over the appropriation of the results of labour are present in any labour relation, this does not make them into parts and parcel of class struggle. In order to perceive of a global conflict between classes we would have to assume that solidarity could overcome competition on a global scale. Instead of giving in to the temptation of defining global classes we should endeavour to not only analyse the practices of exploitation but also those of competition.

Last, but certainly not least: Which specific political steps, in your opinion, are necessary to challenge the continuing existence of violent, coercive, hazardous work relations today? Where do you see the left’s responsibility here? During your research, did you encounter any noteworthy political projects that specifically challenge forms of unbounded exploitation?

I concluded that the economic rationality of non-violent forms of appropriation, most of all those of exploiting labour power, does not prevent violence to be made use of if there is no state action against these practices. It follows that governments have to be induced to act accordingly. Such critique is existentially necessary where and when the exploited can only voice their demands by endangering their economic reproduction and even their life. International conventions demand certain state activities, but they are never enough to actually set these in motion. National as well as international public critique is essential.

Trying to grasp the actual reality of capitalism, I learned about many admirable examples of either individuals or groups who opposed being robbed of their means of living. And I have also come to admire people working steadfastly in non-government organizations in order to inform the wider public about living and working conditions, thereby to influence private behaviour as well as to provoke state actions. In some cases, the information about evils is only possible if journalists, researchers and activists are willing to endanger their freedom or even their life.

If there are many projects and demands focusing on problems in the national sphere, which merit all the support we can give them, the globalization of capitalism has also globalized the realm of political responsibility. At the moment two internationally set forth demands seem to me to be of utmost importance. One concerns the demand to tax multinational enterprises as unitary firms, the other concerns the establishment of the legal liability of enterprises for the working conditions of their laborers regardless of the location of their firms.

Such demands clearly focus on the reform of capitalism. I do not know of any convincing strategic concept for the transition from capitalism to socialism nor do I know of any clear conception of the society to be built after the end of capitalism. But I do think that reform of capitalism is possible. And if such reforms will change the life of children, women and men for the better, than I think that they are worth fighting

Avoiding Sundays on the Long March Against ‘Correct’-Line Marxism: A Reply to Beverley Best[1]

by Dick Bryan and Michael Rafferty

Beverley Best’s article in Historical Materialism journal carries the strange title ‘Political Economy through the Looking Glass: Imagining Six Impossible Things About Finance Before Breakfast’. Whatever such a paper may be about, its implicit claims to having the ‘correct’, clear, simple truth are indeed bold.

As it turns out, the paper is a review essay about Marxism and modern finance, and more particularly a critical evaluation of two books about financial derivatives (described perhaps in the spirit of Looking Glass temporal displacement as ‘recent contributions’, though they were published 14 and 12 years ago), along with some later research by the authors of the latter book. The latter book is Capitalism with Derivatives: A Political Economy of Financial Derivatives, Capital and Class. The earlier book wasFinancial Derivatives and the Globalization of Risk, by Benjamin Lee and Edward LiPuma. Ben and Ed can speak for themselves, so this reply to Beverley’s essay relates only to her engagement with our work.

A significant part of Beverley’s essay is polemical, asserting sweeping propositions we are said to advocate, which she then determines to disprove. So, let us tag some of those before we move to substantive issues. Beverley would have it that we argue that there is now “a new mode of capitalist accumulation altogether” (p. 77) (we are unsure what a mode of accumulation might be) and that that we believe we are witnessing “the displacing of the principal site of value-generation from production to circulation” (p. 78) (in anyone’s framing, that’s an oxymoron). She thinks we don’t understand the difference between abolishing value (a struggle against capital) and abolishing value theory (an anti-Marxism) (p. 93) As if!

Where her depiction is partially correct is that we do contend that some of “the traditional categories of critical political economy are no longer adequate to the analytical tasks” (p. 78) (though we would say to some analytical tasks). But we find puzzling her desire to prove,contra our work, that “traditional formulations of Marxian categories such as class, exploitation and value-form remain entirely relevant and, indeed, necessary for an accurate grasping of the mode of social domination in the era of financialization”. We are not in dispute over their relevance. Our question, however, is: whose version is ‘traditional’, is it always a virtue to be ‘traditional’ and what constitutes ‘accuracy’?

Our position, to state it clearly at the outset, is that the current period, like many that have preceded it, presents challenges to many ‘traditional’ Marxisms. Sticking to nineteenth century dichotomies between production and circulation, or finance and production when developments over the last few decades have been blurring these categories seems conservative for its own sake. And invoking a version of value theory that appears ahistorical risks confusing taxonomy with theory. We are instead inclined to the position of Karl Korsch (1935) who said that the only orthodox thing in Marxism is the method:

All the hotly disputed questions in the field of historical materialism – questions which when phrased in their general form are just as insoluble and just as meaningless as the well-known scholastic disputes about the priority of the hen or the egg – lose their mysterious and sterile character when they are expressed in a concrete, historical and specific manner.

Let us now turn to a few theoretical, conceptual and empirical arguments Beverley aims at our work. We won’t address every issue, but have picked a few of the core ones.

Fictitious Capital

Beverley spends significant space challenging our statements on fictitious capital, for she believes we do not understand its meaning and significance. She starts with the proposition that our argument is that “we no longer need the category of fictitious capital in the analysis of derivatives markets and financialization more generally” (p. 80). She then produces several quotes from us that clearly contend a critically different proposition: that finance should not be reduced to the category of fictitious capital. So, let us be clear. There can be double counting of capital when both the physical form and its monetary representation are both counted as ‘capital’. And we can readily call this ‘fictitious’, and hence ‘fictitious capital’. Our concern is that there are too many people who want to describe all or most of finance as ‘fictitious’. Beverley recounts:

[S]tocks, shares, bonds securities and financial derivatives are all examples of fictitious capital (p. 82)

That seems to cover a good part of finance – almost everything other than credit and financial advice.

But how significant is the concept of fictitious capital in building an understanding of contemporary finance in the context of value theory? Clearly, Beverley thinks it is pivotal. To explain, she gives the reader a common-sense illustration of fictitious capital in the form of a derivative. She describes a hypothetical I.O.U. arrangement with the reader and contends that this is ‘fictitious capital’ “because it does not constitute newly created capital ... [but] ... represents a redistribution of value between different pockets” (p. 83).

The trouble with Beverley’s illustration is that her I.O.U. isn’t capital at all (it is the interpersonal repayment for a lost bet). And it is not a derivative, either. What Beverley misses is that the nature of fictitious capital depends not on the form of the contract, but on the purpose of the loan. That’s the difference between money and money capital. If, for example, Beverley’s I.O.U. involved repayments from investing in industrial capital, then it might well be interest-bearing capital, and certainly not fictitious.

But let us move on. The growing liquidity of financial capital is surely one of the hallmarks of the era of financialisation. Its partial detachment from underlying, more fixed assets gives it ease and speed of turnover. Finance can move rapidly between different forms of fictitious capital, and just as easily into and out of interest-bearing capital. Fictitious capital is not so much a stock but a moment in the movement of capital. It may stay fictitious for literally fractions of a second before returning to the form of interest-bearing capital. Consistent with this, Beverley classifies financial derivatives as part of fictitious capital (double counting), although at another point she says that “derivatives are regularly converted into money capital” (p. 89). We can add: and vice versa, and not just regularly, but with enormous rapidity.

So, in her framing, capital can readily move between being ‘fictitious’ and ‘real’, and this is said to be theoretically vital. But, in reality (which is somehow a different domain from the ‘real’ that describes capital)m we cannot separate them. In a “concrete, historical and specific manner”, to use Korsch’s phrase, it seems very hard to disentangle fictitious capital from other forms of finance. Perhaps Beverley and we differ as to which analytical level is more important: our concern is that the concept of a discrete fictitious capital is being expected to do far too much analytical work that can never be validated empirically.

Production and Circulation; Productive and Unproductive labour

Beverley claims we believe there is production of value inside circulation. We do not hold that view – at least no more than she does herself. Nonetheless, her point of emphasis is that there is a “critical distinction between production and circulation in analysis, even if in reality these spheres are inseparable”. This is an interesting take on ‘traditional’ materialist method: the empirical inseparability is put entirely aside in favour of upholding conceptual distinctiveness.

But the ‘reality’ of ‘inseparability’ should surely tell us something about the difficulty of the analytical categories. In Volume II of Capital and in Part I ofTheories of Surplus Value, we see Marx grappling with clarifying the distinction between productive and unproductive (circulation) labour. Marx, engaging Smith, Ricardo and the Physiocrats, takes us through any number of hypothetical illustrations – like the waged cook, actor, piano worker or clown who are productive of surplus value, but the jobbing tailor and servant, who exchange against revenue, and thereby are not (1962: 156-76). Marx also tells us that in the midst of processes that look circulatory there are processes of production: he talked, for instance, about transportation and storage as productive activities (1885: Ch.6). What are we to make of Marx’s deliberations 150 years on, as an engagement not with Physiocrats but with global finance? Has the clown become a financial service worker? Is transport now about fibre-optic cable and wi-fi? Is storage about satellites and blockchain? Maybe, but answering these questions is about being creative; not ‘traditional’. It surely has to be context-specific; not canonical.

Beverley recognises (pp. 90-91) that there is indeed commodity production within finance (perhaps readers will hear that as production inside circulation; but it makes sense to us!). “Financial products and services are themselves commodities that are produced and sold (or issued for a fee)” (p. 90). Derivatives, bonds and securities, earlier considered as fictitious capital when seen as the notional value of outstanding positions (p. 82), are here described, in another dimension, as commodities because they are produced by means of wage labour and capital.

In reference to derivatives she continues:

[T]he contracts themselves, as financial commodities, constitute commodity-capital, and again, exhibit the same characteristics of all commodities produced under these circumstances (p. 90).

As such, they are sites of value and of surplus value production. That might seem clear, but two critical issues follow. First, Beverley then contends that the conceiving and designing of contracts is the only dimension of commodity production and surplus value production inside finance (p. 91). But, if that activity is productive then, by the same logic, so too is the labour of brokers who, for a fee, provide the service of undertaking research, running the models, etc. to advise clients on what and when to buy and sell. The actual execution of the trade (pressing a button) can be understood as ‘unproductive’, but that act looks like a small part of the labour process. Further, maybe the fees charged for holding accounts with financial institutions are also productive: they are charges for the services of storage.

We are not here seeking to re-draw the line between production and circulation. Our point is simply that, when you open up the details of financial labour, the distinction between service production and circulation seems to be of little practical import. Those who want a clear delineation of ‘productive’ and ‘unproductive’ labour need clear, and empirically verifiable explanations of the portion of the costs, revenue and profits of financial institutions tied to the specific task of ‘trading’.

Second, of those workers who are ‘productive’ – and we can here focus on those identified by Beverley – what is the value of the commodities they create? What is the value of constant capital they use up, and what is the rate of surplus value they generate? Are they highly skilled with high productivity (Marx refers to skill as multiple units of labour)? Are they working with high technology? What is the organic composition of capital in derivative production: it appears to be high, but how do we value the intangible capital with which they work?

Unless we know these answers, we cannot know the values of the financial service commodities. We cannot tell what part of the costs, revenues and profit of ‘finance’ is attributable to productive capital (and what part is fictitious).

Regardless of these problems, Beverley thinks that:

The fees collected in this way [‘conceiving and designing of financial commodities’] do constitute a substantial portion of the profits of many financial firms (p. 91).

To emphasise, Beverley argues that this profit is not derived from circulation, but directly from surplus value production inside finance. We are not sure how her ‘traditional’ categories enable her to calculate that conclusion but we think it is probably right.

Nonetheless, a contradictory set of propositions now shatters her ‘traditional’ analysis when she wants to show how the dichotomies between productive/unproductive and fictitious/real are critical to understanding the current financialized era. She contends, pace Kliman and (she believes) Marx’sCapital (p. 87), that the challenge for contemporary capitalism is the scale of fictitious capital and unproductive labour:

[S]urplus-value becomes increasingly difficult to come by in quantities that make investment in productive industry worthwhile for the capitalist class,

and follows that up with the statement that:

 it is simply incorrect and profound mystification [for Bryan and Rafferty] to suggest that capital proceeds to invent new methods and mechanisms for creating value ... [like] commodifying risk. (pp. 87-88).

Yet she has just argued precisely the opposite: that there is significant commodity production in derivative and other financial products and it is creating significant value, surplus value and profit.

The measure of value and a politics that follows.

Beverley emphasises that accumulation continually hits barriers. But, in the current era, we believe this barrier is not, as she argues (and simultaneously disproves), the expansion of financial markets appropriating surplus in circulation.

The period popularly called ‘financialisation’ can also be framed as capital’s struggle to deal with the absence of a stable unit of account. At a basic level, capital cannot produce its own unit of account. This is a role for the state, albeit now under some sort of challenge from crypto currencies. But we know the unit of account is not stable. Interest rates and exchange rates can be volatile, and anchor asset measures like treasury bonds have also been volatile, especially associated with ‘quantitative easing’.

We have argued elsewhere that the rise of derivatives (most of them relate to interest rates and exchange rates) is associated with attempts by capital to hedge that volatility by trading the risks of exposure to interest rate and exchange rate changes. It is, no doubt, an ultimately unsuccessful strategy. But it’s the only strategy available.

This poses two questions for contemporary value theory. First, is capital’s (attempted) management of the unit of account, to create hedges against its volatility, itself a process of production, to compensate, as it were, for the state’s retreat? We are open-minded on this, but it perhaps frames the fictitious moment, in which the value of capital is being continually adjusted against financial volatility. Understanding that is necessary for the very conception of value in the current era.

Second, as Beverley reminds us, “for Marxism the category of value is, not least, an accounting category ... a definite magnitude (p. 94). So, with values of different monies of account volatile, how are prices of production (labour values transformed, via competitive criteria, into money prices) to be measured? Some value theorists might say that prices of production are denominated in an abstract money. But, for those of us who want something more materially grounded, the question of whether value is denominated in US dollars, Euros or bitcoin makes a real difference, and that difference is in a process of continual change.

So, if the unit of account in which value is measured is itself endogenous to the market, readers may see why we would gesture to the monetary form of the unit of value itself having to be variable (floating) in order to measure socially necessary labour time denominated in hours. This is not about abandoning value theory, but applying it in the context of contemporary finance.

It suggests to us that attempts to measure the rate of profit in terms of a fiat money (and then to project its decline based on propositions empirically delineating productive from unproductive labour) looks like a project that pivots entirely on bold and theoretically-dubious assumptions. That does not seem like an analytical site ripe with political implications.

We think that a closer look at the process of accumulation within finance opens up other possibilities that are indeed about contributing to abolishing the system of value (Beverley thinks our goal is simply the abolition of value theory!) In particular, we draw attention to the securitisation of household subsistence payments. Household contractual payments on housing (mortgage, rent), education, utilities, and insurance (access to health care) are, especially in the US, being bundled up, rated for default risk, and sold as financial assets (securities) where the underlying asset of the security is exclusively those contracted payments.

Beverley sees these payments as associated only with consumption (p. 97). We argue that, beyond consumption, these household payments are reconfigured as financial assets. If we stop at subsistence as just consumption, we miss the class dimension of financialised subsistence.

While working-class household income is becoming more volatile and the capacity to purchase subsistence more precarious, the fact that that subsistence is increasingly locked into financial contracts is significant. It is, for reasons we won’t pursue here, costly and difficult to default on these contracts. So, households increasingly find themselves absorbing financial risk: their income gets more precarious, but they regularly pay the bills if they possibly can because they have no choice. Accordingly, there is a risk surplus (or spread) opening up, expressed as risk-absorption by households. For capital, where a risk/return trade-off is axiomatic, this widening spread would require higher rates of return to elicit new investment. For households who cannot choose to not subsist, the risk is simply absorbed.

We think this risk spread is analytically significant because it involves a class underwriting of the rate of return on capital. Maybe readers won’t want to think of it as a source of surplus value, but it is a source of surplus that is captured by capital. How we incorporate it into a value framework remains an open question, but it is not to be ignored analytically or politically.

Politically, a potential source of resistance to capital lies in ‘organising’ default rates on contract payments that will threaten the value of securities far more quickly that a strike in a workplace will threaten the profits of an employer. The securities market is far more liquid and leveraged than the underlying market: it is analytically and strategically different from a strike against an electricity company or a landlord. It is a confrontation with capital in general because it imposes politically a barrier to capital’s capacity to generate liquidity (via securitisation). Surely this framing opens up a politics specific to the processes of financialisation. It is not, as Beverly depicts it (p. 91), a politics of class defeat (strategically failing to pay a bill is a defeat only within a neoliberal framing). It opens possibilities with more potential than Beverley’s preferred framing of household interest payments as ‘financial expropriation’: a grandiose term that merely provides a new label to describe either a one-off theft by capital (repossession during the GFC), or a process of revenue extraction dating back thousands of years. By contrast, we are talking about finding capital’s vulnerability at its leveraged, liquid frontier.

So perhaps some readers of this response will still say that we don’t understand ‘traditional’ Marxism and are, in some deep sense, ‘wrong’. There is nothing we can do about that, except to say that invoking ‘tradition’ as the source of ‘correctness’ seems scholastic, fundamentalist and sterile - and an odd place for Marxists to seek inspiration.

Others might find the ideas we have been developing interesting, but outside of Marxian value theory. But value theory is a tool for understanding class relations; it is a tool of a materialist method. Historical materialism, we believe, is about framing developments in class and value and considering their political possibilities. What is ‘core’ and untouchable in the way we use categories will always be a subject of debate, but it is important that is a debate within Marxism; not framed as one between traditionalists who know, and the renegades who don’t. That debate will involve a long march. It perhaps shouldn’t start on a Sunday, but it should be preceded by a good breakfast, to help clarify thought.

References

Korsch, Karl 1935 ‘Why I am a Marxist’, Modern Quarterly 1935, transcribed by Andy Blunden for Marxists.org, 2003.

Marx, Karl 1885 Capital, Volume II. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978.

Marx, Karl 1963 Theories of Surplus Value, Part I. Moscow: Progress Publishers.

[1] "I always love to begin a journey on Sundays, because I shall have the prayers of the church to preserve all that travel by land or by water." Jonathan Swift

DOUG ENAA GREENE, Communist Insurgent: Blanqui's Politics of Revolution, Chicago: Haymarket, 2017[1]

Reviewed by Ian Birchall

If the name Blanqui is still quite widely known, the man behind the name remains obscure. The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that “Blanquism” is “the doctrine that socialist revolution must be initiated by a small conspiratorial group, advocated by the French revolutionary communist Louis Auguste Blanqui (1805-1881)”.[2] Lenin's phrase “we are not Blanquists” is often quoted out of context – he was advocating a “revolutionary government, which directly expresses the mind and will of the majority of the workers and peasants”[3] - by people who may well not be Blanquists but are certainly not Leninists in any sense of that term. So, those interested in the history of the socialist movement should welcome this new book by Doug Enaa Greene. Brief and accessibly written, it presents the main elements of Blanqui's life in a perspective which is sympathetic to his revolutionary goals while being rigorously critical in its approach.

French, and indeed European, socialism emerged from the French Revolution. “Equality”, the second term of the revolutionary slogan “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”, became a contested concept; equality before the law or economic equality? There were many variants and Babeuf and his followers pursued the idea to its logical conclusion. For a few brief years, mass popular democracy flowered; as an article probably by Babeuf related, common people would flock round the National Assembly debating with their representatives.[4] Napoleon, and after him the restored monarchy, drove this democracy back underground. Babeuf's organisation, which had sought to campaign openly, was labelled and condemned as a “conspiracy”. But, for the following generations, conspiracy was all that remained; Babeuf's comrade Buonarotti, who had survived the trial at which Babeuf was executed, spent the next four decades trying to regroup the believers in “true equality”;[5] the secret societies known as the carbonari strove to keep the principles of 1789 alive.

It was in this environment that the young Blanqui grew up. Born in 1805 to a middle-class family, he became radicalised as a student and soon showed his capacity for leadership and revolutionary activism. In 1830, the reactionary Bourbon monarchy was overthrown by the “Three Glorious Days” of insurrection in Paris, when Blanqui played a part in the street-fighting. It was replaced by king Louis-Philippe, whose reign Greene describes as “the rule of the bankers”. [p. 25]

During the 1830s, Blanqui began to build up an organisation. This was essentially based on a top‑down cell structure, in which each recruit knew only a few other members. In 1836, he was arrested and jailed, but freed the following year after an amnesty. He immediately set about building a new organisation, the Society of Seasons, bringing together some nine hundred armed men.

At the time, there was a ban on bearing arms, so Blanqui's organisation had to be illegal; wealthier supporters gave money to the working-class activists to purchase gunpowder. The demand for the right of all citizens to bear arms was once a radical and popular demand; now it has been taken over by Donald Trump and the National Rifle Association, and one wonders if even Blanqui would have welcomed universal ownership of bump stocks.

In 1839 Blanqui made his most monumental error. Objective conditions seemed to favour a rising. There was economic crisis and rising unemployment; the king could not form a stable cabinet. Blanqui had several hundred armed men who met regularly for review. One Sunday when they assembled he told them that this time it was for real, that they were to seize the town hall. Despite Blanqui's careful military planning, the whole thing was a débâcle. As Greene explains:

Blanqui had expected that a single heroic strike would awaken the revolutionary élan of the workers. Instead, the Parisian population watched in confusion on May 12, as the Seasons launched their insurrection, and they took no part in it. This was the fatal flaw in Blanqui's conception of revolution; the masses played no role in liberating themselves. [p. 55]

As subsequent history was to show, the combination of objective and subjective factors is a much more complex matter.

It was back to jail, this time for much longer. Greene describes vividly the squalid conditions of imprisonment, and especially the harsh punishment cells, where Blanqui spent a considerable amount of time, and where it was impossible to sit or stand properly; an attempt to escape failed. His personal life was torn apart - his beloved wife Amélie-Suzanne died and his wife's parents raised his only surviving son as a monarchist so that he became totally estranged from his father. But nothing could undermine his commitment to the revolutionary cause.

He was out of jail again by the time of the 1848 Revolution. This time, the Republic was proclaimed and a provisional government was established in Paris. Elections were announced. Blanqui very lucidly saw the dangers inherent in the situation. The weight of established ideas was such that they could not be dispersed within a few weeks. He urged that the elections be postponed for a year, with a temporary dictatorship which would carry out the necessary task of political education, especially among France's large rural population. He was proved right, when elections installed a right-wing government and later in the year made Louis-Napoléon president; within five years the left had been crushed and the Republic overthrown.

Yet Blanqui's position was a problematic one. By advocating a temporary dictatorship, he was clearly rejecting democracy; the idea that the oppressed and exploited should be the agents of their own emancipation was still not a central part of his thinking. In 1839, he had imagined that the mass of the population would immediately respond to action by a revolutionary minority. In 1848, he still had not resolved the question of the relationship between the revolutionary minority and the mass of the population.

Blanqui himself was swept aside by the events of 1848. Caught up in a premature insurrectionary movement in May, he was again sent back to jail, and when the real crunch came in June, with the working-class revolt in defence of the National Workshops (what Marx called the “ugly” revolution as opposed to the “nice” revolution of February)[6] he was unable to contribute his organisational skills. He later wrote an acute critique of the workers' tactics, stressing the importance of organisation[7] - “Organisation is victory, dispersion is death” – but, while being right in retrospect may have some educational value, it did not help to prevent a massive working-class defeat.

More years in jail, with another failed escape, did not break Blanqui's spirit; he read, wrote and thought, and in 1859 he was back at liberty. Based in Belgium, he rebuilt his organisation, with a hard core of up to 2,500 professional revolutionaries and a periphery of sympathisers (who included the future prime minister and strike-breaker Georges Clemenceau!). As war with Prussia loomed, he saw the situation as a rerun of the revolutionary wars of the 1790s and called for the defence of France as the native land of revolution, launching a paper called La Patrie en danger (the homeland in danger). It was a position which would be echoed in 1914, with much more catastrophic results, when almost the whole of the French left urged the population into the trenches. But I think Greene is mistaken when he claims that Blanqui's chauvinist positions “were shared across the far left”. [p. 117] Thecommunard Jules Vallès has left a vivid description in his autobiographical novel of an anti-war demonstration that went ahead despite massive popular hostility.[8]

Now it was Blanqui against Blanquism. In August 1870, as the Empire crumbled, his comrades called for an insurrection. Blanqui regarded this as dangerously premature but was outvoted, and as a disciplined revolutionary he went along with the decision which led to another débâcle. [p. 112] After one more failed rising in October, Blanqui went into hiding and was eventually arrested the day before the founding of the Paris Commune. As Greene notes, “in a cruel twist of fate, Blanqui missed the revolution that he had struggled for decades to achieve”. [p. 124] Attempts to negotiate his release by the communards failed; the forces of reaction clearly feared his abilities all too much.

Maurice Dommanget has argued that Blanqui would have organised a march on Versailles and that this might have forced the Thiers government to flee and be discredited.[9] Perhaps. But socialism in one city (none of the provincial communes lasted more than a few days) was never viable; if Blanqui had been freed, his almost certain fate would have been death or exile.

Jailed in particularly miserable conditions, enduring cold and allowed no visitors, and learning the terrible news of the crushing of the Commune, Blanqui tried to console himself by some cosmological speculation. He wrote and published a short pamphlet called Eternity by the Stars. It was a strange little essay, in some ways anticipating multiverse theory. Blanqui argued that in a universe that was infinite in space and time, all possible worlds had already existed an infinite number of times. Though, for obvious reasons, he did not make the point explicitly, the implication was that there were worlds on which the Commune had triumphed.

For Blanqui, it was a brief diversion at a difficult time, and he soon reverted to his more earthbound political preoccupations. Wisely, Greene only devotes a couple of paragraphs to the episode. Unfortunately, the often idolised Walter Benjamin, perhaps projecting his own pessimism, picked up on the pamphlet in his Arcades project and claimed, quite contrary to all easily available evidence, that this work marked the end of Blanqui's life and showed a final abandonment of his revolutionary aspirations. Even more culpably, many so-called “scholars” have, out of ignorance or negligence, echoed Benjamin's claims.[10]

For Blanqui, however, the struggle was not over. As the demand for an amnesty for the communards was intensified, Blanqui made his contribution to the movement. While still in jail, he contested various elections, raising his political profile and increasing pressure for his release. In 1879, he was at last freed and he flung himself into frenetic activity. He travelled around France speaking at meetings, visited Italy and met Garibaldi, wrote a pamphlet arguing for the replacement of the standing army by a popular militia, and launched a short-lived daily newspaper for which he wrote frequently. He also gave support to the movement for women's rights, a clear break with the Jacobin tradition which, based on the artisan class where the family was a unit of production, had always opposed women's involvement in politics. (This deplorable abdication by the Jacobin left continued well into the twentieth century – it was Vichy which gave French women the right to vote.)

Finally, one night in December 1880, aged seventy-five, he returned home after midnight from a meeting, still arguing passionately; then he keeled over and died a few days later. If ever the phrase “fighting to the last breath” was appropriate, it was for Blanqui.

It is an exciting and inspiring story, and Greene has told it economically and effectively, in a book that deserves a wide audience. One hopes it will contribute to a revival of interest in Blanqui. For those who wish to pursue the subject further, the excellent website based at Kingston University provides a wide range of material dealing with Blanqui and his context and there is also a recently published selection by Verso Books.[11] All those interested in enriching the study of the history of socialism should give their support and encouragement to such initiatives.

But what, it might be asked, is the value of studying a socialist like Blanqui who obviously belonged to times very different to our own? Greene's work raises a number of interesting questions about approaches to the study of the history of socialism.

In 1971, in the aftermath of the great general strike in France, and inspired by the writings of Che Guevara and Régis Debray, New Left Review published Blanqui's “Instructions for an Uprising” with an unsigned presentation, apparently drafted by editor Perry Anderson. While this made a fairly orthodox critique of Blanqui's limitations (especially the “absence of a dialectic” in his thought), it noted among his “strengths” the detailed knowledge of “the tactical use of balconies”.[12] Entertaining as it is to imagine the erudite members of the NLR board leaving their libraries to hurl missiles from balconies, it is scarcely plausible to think that Blanqui's detailed recommendations could be of relevance in a different context. Because Blanqui recognised that insurrection was an art,[13] and precisely because he gave great attention to detail, his work was very much rooted in its time. Perhaps Eric Hazan was a little premature in writing the obituary of the barricade,[14] but street‑fighting in the twentieth or twenty-first century is necessarily very different to what it was in the nineteenth.

At the other extreme, Blanqui can be seen simply as a moral example, someone who showed great commitment and self-sacrifice. The problem with this is that it loses all the specificity of Blanqui, his role in a particular place and time. There is no direct link between abnegation and political goals; people have shown great dedication to many different causes. Certainly, advocates of religion or charity have sometimes shown as much self-sacrifice as believers in socialism.

And stress on revolutionary self-sacrifice can lead to a cult of asceticism. It is said that, when at liberty, Blanqui would sleep in mid-winter without blankets and with the window wide open to prepare himself for his next spell in jail (he spent over half his adult life in prison). But revolutionary organisations which stress abnegation – large financial contributions, hyperactivity – often condemn themselves to small memberships. One organisation in the tradition of Blanquist moralism, the Lutte Ouvrière tendency in France, which stresses a high level of personal commitment – for example discouraging members from having children – has been described by some critics as an organisation of “soldier-monks”.[15]

Another reason often given for studying figures like Blanqui is that they are said to be “precursors” of modern socialism, in particular of Marx and Lenin. Now the relation between Blanqui and Marx and Lenin is a topic of considerable interest, which Greene discusses at some length in his book [pp. 147-53,155-8] and on which he has published various articles.[16]

Nonetheless, it is a problematic topic. In the Stalinist period, the discussion of “precursors” was strongly discouraged.[17] The work of Marx, Lenin … and Stalin was presented as revealed truth, or, in more sophisticated accounts, as an “epistemological break” which led to the foundation of a new science. To show them developing slowly and messily, by trial and error, would undermine their authority.

Alternatively, looking at thinkers like Blanqui as precursors could become a form of what E.P. Thompson famously described as “the condescension of posterity”.[18] In this view, they were merely stages on the way to a subsequently established definitive truth. Thus, the writings of Marx and Lenin came to be seen as scripture, so that, for example, the question of political organisation was said to be resolved by something known as “the Leninist party”, when in fact Lenin was constantly changing his mind about organisational questions,[19] and in his final speech to the Communist International urged his followers to think for themselves[20] (something his followers like Zinoviev and Stalin were very reluctant to advise).

Peter Sedgwick made a sharp critique of such a view of history, comparing it to the religious notion of the “Apostolic Succession”:

The task of socialist theory has too often been conceived as one of establishing an Apostolic Succession from the ideas of certain revered forerunners to those of their (usually self‑enthroned) successors in the present day. Part of this task naturally consists of casting documentary doubt upon the validity of rival ideological orders. To those confirmed in any of the various true faiths, it may be intolerable to confront a historical record which shows the saints as heretics, and the heretics as at least part-time saints.[21]

In such an approach, “precursors” like Blanqui would be measured against the “great teachers” and, in effect, given scores out of ten for how closely they approximated to the established truth. Greene leaves us in no doubt that he aligns himself with Marx and Lenin, yet he is always anxious to draw out the positive value of Blanqui's thinking rather than to simply dismiss him as an inferior competitor.[22]

Tony Cliff used a rather different metaphor:

Another point about ideas is that you cannot patent them. You cannot say who was the first one, the originator of a great idea, because ideas are like a river and a river is formed from lots of streams. Engels is one of the streams contributing to Marxism. Therefore I don’t like the idea of speaking of him as secondary to Marx, because then he is not seen as an independent stream contributing to the overall Marxist movement.[23]

On this basis, the socialist movement would be a river that continued to absorb new tributaries, and sometimes to encounter obstacles or to be divided, without any definitive concluding state in sight. Blanqui would thus be a particular tributary, with its origins in a specific terrain and which helped to transform the dimensions and velocity of the river it entered.

Greene, in general, seems to take a rather similar approach in the way that he describes how Blanqui viewed the history of the movement he saw himself as a part of:

The revolutionary effort, the will to fight and to win against insurmountable odds, can unveil unseen roads to communism. And these roads are not given to anyone in advance but are revealed in the course of struggle. [p. 109]

And perhaps it would be fair to see this also as a description of the way Greene regards his own work. He has written elsewhere that the history of Marxism has no final conclusion, but is a constant process of renewal:

Previous forms of Marxism, even when a revolutionary rupture with revisionism, can turn into new orthodoxies and dogmas, which show their exhaustion by adopting, in either theory or practice, the politics of revisionism. The Marxist struggle against revisionism in fact is never finished, since Marxism needs to be continually renewed through ruptures not only with revisionism and orthodoxy, but by remaining true to its revolutionary soul.[24]

On such a view, neither the past nor the future is static. The past has been a constant process of evolution, and there is no single defined goal. Sartre argued a rather similar position in a discussion of ends and means:

If the end is still to be made, if it is a choice and a risk for man, then it can be corrupted by the means, for it is what wemake it and it is transformed at the same time as man transforms himself by the use he makes of the means. But if the end is to bereached, if in a sense it has a sufficiency of being, then it is independent of the means. In that case one can choose any means to achieve it.[25]

Blanqui himself said something analogous in his critique of the Utopians:

Communism and Proudhonism argue vigorously on the bank of a river over whether there is a field of corn or wheat on the other side. Let us cross first, we will see when we get there. [p. 21][26]

Thus, Blanqui's development was a process of trial and error. However absurd the 1839 insurrection might look in retrospect, it was not wholly implausible that the Parisian masses, who were obviously oppressed and ground down, would flock to the banners of their liberators. Blanqui had to go through the experience, which made him aware of new problems in 1848. As Greene concludes, “he asked the right questions, even if he provided the wrong answers, about how to make a revolution.” [p. 141]

Many of the arguments Blanqui took up may seem very remote, yet they sometimes have modern parallels. This he noted with irritation the widespread argument against socialism - “Who will empty the chamber pot?” [p. 21] Technology has solved that particular problem, but the argument about who will do the dirty and unpleasant jobs in a socialist society is still a recurring question.

Blanqui was constantly attempting to understand himself historically. In particular, this meant reference back to the French Revolution. Marxists today constantly refer to 1917 (despite George Galloway's admonition that we should stop talking about “dead Russians”[27]), not because anybody seriously expects to re-enact it, but because it is the only experience of proletarian revolution that we have. Likewise, in 1848 and 1871, there was constant reference back to 1789.

It is interesting to see that Blanqui did not have a fixed relationship to the French Revolution. To begin with, he identified, as most of the radical left did, with Robespierre and the Jacobin tradition, but later he came to be more sympathetic to Hébert. admiring his revolutionary virtue, his atheism and his faith in the people. [pp. 100-1] Now, Hébert was not a particularly significant revolutionary thinker; he was noted for his vigorous vocabulary rather than for any profound grasp of philosophy or strategy. But it is interesting to note that Blanqui was looking for an alternative to Jacobinism, the influence of which has for two centuries weighed heavily on the French left, and of which there have been some important critiques, notably that by Daniel Guérin.[28] Inasmuch as the Jacobin tradition is a powerful contributory factor to laïcité, which remains a political question of great relevance in modern France, Blanqui's thought is part of a process we are still living with.[29]

Blanqui also remains relevant to an understanding of ultra-leftism, which remains a significant problem for left-wing tactics, especially at times of upturn in the movement. One of the questions with which Blanqui was grappling throughout his life was the relation between the revolutionary minority and the mass movement of the oppressed classes. It is a question which has come up again and again, in different forms, in the history of the revolutionary left. In the aftermath of the Cuban Revolution, some tendencies on the Latin American left used to talk about the “small motor”, meaning the activity of a guerrilla foco, which would at some point detonate action by the mass movement.[30]

Likewise, there has been a recent renewal of interest in Paul Levi and his critique of the German Communist Party's “March Action” in 1921. There are clearly parallels between Blanqui's 1839 attempted insurrection and the March Action, though the latter was far more costly and its initiators far more irresponsible.[31]

Another topic which Greene touches on in his concluding section, though unfortunately all too briefly, is that of Blanquism after Blanqui. Blanqui's remarkable character, his dedication and shrewd political intelligence, drew followers around him and enabled him to hold his organisation together. After his death, the organisation disintegrated; it suffered splits and some of its members supported the incompetent charlatan Boulanger in his brief bid for power. There are obvious parallels with Leninism after Lenin, Trotskyism after Trotsky, and perhaps some more recent figures…

Yet all was not wasted. A new period was opening up, in which the conspiratorial organisations of Blanqui were giving way to mass working-class organisations. Many of Blanqui's followers went on to join the Socialist Party (SFIO), the majority of which, in 1920, formed the French Communist Party. Paul Lafargue, the first great French Marxist, admired Blanqui, writing “Blanqui transformed us, corrupted us all. … To Blanqui falls the honour of having made the revolutionary education of a part of the youth of our generation”. [p. 92] Just after Blanqui's final release from jail, Lafargue wrote to him, urging him to become part of a new socialist party that Lafargue was organising with Jules Guesde. (Blanqui does not seem to have responded to the invitation.) [pp. 138-9]

In short, Greene's book does not close the argument but opens it up. One hopes that it will be widely read and discussed.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anderson, Perry 1971, “Presentation of Blanqui”, New Left Review, I/65, January-February

Babeuf, Gracchus 1796, article in L’Éclaireur du peuple, No 6, pp 9 - 27 germinal IV.

Benjamin, Walter 1999, The Arcades Project, Cambridge Mass. & London: Belknap Press.

Birchall, Ian 2016a: “Upturned carts, cobblestones, pieces of furniture...”, Review 31 athttp://review31.co.uk/article/view/373/upturned-carts-cobblestones-pieces-of-furniture

Birchall, Ian 2016b, “Why did Walter Benjamin misrepresent Blanqui?” at http://grimanddim.org/historical-writings/2016-why-did-walter-benjamin-misrepresent-blanqui/

The Blanqui Archive at https://blanqui.kingston.ac.uk/

Blanqui, Auguste 1926, “Les enseignements militaires de la guerre de rues en 1848”, Le Militant rouge, no. 11, November (revised version of an article written in 1849).

Blanqui, Louis Auguste 2018, The Blanqui Reader:Political Writings, 1830–1880, Edited byPeter Hallward and Philippe Le Goff, Translated by Mitchell Abidor, Peter Hallward, and Philippe Le Goff, London and New York: Verso Books.

Bourseiller, Christophe 1989, Les ennemis du système, Paris: Robert Laffont.

Brown, Lesley (editor) 1993, The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Claudon, Jean-Jacques & Présumey, Vincent 2017, Paul Levi: L'Occasion manquée, Rochefort en Terre: Éditions de Matignon.

Cliff, Tony 1985-86, Lenin (three volumes), London: Bookmarks.

Cliff, Tony 1996, Engels (lecture given atMarxism 1996 conference) at https://www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1996/07/engels.htm

Conrad, Jack 2009, “Dead Russians”, Weekly Worker, 12 March.

Cushion, Steve 2016, A Hidden History of the Cuban Revolution: How the Working Class Shaped the Guerrilla Victory, New York: Monthly Review Press.

Cyr, Frédéric 2013, Paul Levi, rebelle devant les extrêmes, Quebec: Presses de l’Université Laval.

Debray, Régis 1967, Revolution in the Revolution? Armed Struggle and Political Struggle in Latin America, New York & London: MR Press.

Dommanget, Maurice 1947, Blanqui, la guerre de 1870-71 et la Commune, Paris: Domat.

Fernbach, David (ed.) 2011, In the Steps of Rosa Luxemburg: Selected Writings of Paul Levi, Leiden: Brill.

Greene, Doug Enaa 2016a, “The Rise of Marxism in France” at http://links.org.au/node/4684

Greene, Doug Enaa 2016b, “At the Crossroads of Blanquism and Leninism”, at http://links.org.au/node/4708

Greene, Doug Enaa 2016c, “The final aim is nothing: the politics of revisionism and anti‑revisionism” at http://links.org.au/node/4677.

Guérin, Daniel 1957, “La révolution déjacobinisée”, Les Temps modernes, April athttps://bataillesocialiste.wordpress.com/documents-historiques/1957-04-la-revolution-dejacobinisee-guerin/

Hallward, Peter 2017, “Blanqui and Marx: A Reply to William Roberts”, Jacobin, June 28, athttps://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/06/blanqui-marx-french-revolution-paris-commune-jacobins

Hazan, Eric 2015: A History of the Barricade, London: Verso.

Johnstone, Monty 1983, “Marx, Blanqui and Majority Rule”, Socialist Register athttps://www.marxists.org/archive/johnstone/1983/xx/majority.htm

Lenin, Vladimir 1917, “The Dual Power”, Pravda No. 28, April 9, 1917 at https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/apr/09.htm

Lenin, Vladimir 1922, “Five Years of the Russian Revolution” at https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/nov/04b.htm

Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich 1977, Collected Works Volume 7, London: Lawrence & Wishart.

Rouch, Jean-Louis 1984, Prolétaire en veston: une approche de Maurice Dommanget, Treignac: Les Monédières.

Sartre, Jean-Paul 1983, Les Cahiers pour une morale, Paris: Gallimard.

Schiappa, Jean Marc 2008, Buonarroti (1761-1837): L’Inoxydable, St-Georges d’Oléron: Les Éditions Libertaires.

Sedgwick, Peter 1960, “The Fight for Workers’ Control”, International Socialism (1st series), No. 3, Winter 1960-61, athttps://www.marxists.org/archive/sedgwick/1960/xx/workerscontrol.htm

Thompson, Edward 1980, The Making of the English Working Class, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Trotsky, Leon 1930, “The Art of Insurrection” from The History of the Russian Revolution athttp://blanqui.kingston.ac.uk/critical-assessments/leon-trotsky/#chapter-43-the-art-of-insurrection

Vallès, Jules 1964, L’Insurgé, Paris: Livre de poche.

Wolfreys, Jim 2015, “After the Paris Attacks: An Islamophobic Spiral”, International Socialism, No. 146, athttp://isj.org.uk/after-the-paris-attacks/

[1] Page references given in brackets in the text. Translations from French, other than those directly quoted from Greene, are my own.

[2] Brown 1993, Volume I p. 239.

[3] Lenin 1917.

[4] Babeuf 1796.

[5] See Schiappa 2008.

[6] Marx & Engels 1977, p. 147.

[7] Blanqui 1926.

[8]Vallès 1964, pp 200-01.

[9] Dommanget 1947, p. 128.

[10] Benjamin 1999, pp. 15, 25-6, 111; Birchall 2016b.

[11]The Blanqui Archive; Blanqui 2018.

[12]Anderson 1971. (For the attribution to Anderson see http://blanqui.kingston.ac.uk/critical-assessments/new-left-review/ )

[13] See Trotsky 1930.

[14] See Hazan 2015; for a critique of his “premature burial” of the barricade, see Birchall 2016a.

[15] “Moines-soldats”: the term was coined by Olivier Biffaud in Le Monde, 14 August 1987. See Bourseiller 1989, p. 46.

[16] See Greene 2016a, Greene 2016b.

[17] See Rouch 1984, pp. 85-6.

[18] Thompson 1980, p. 12.

[19] Cliff 1985-86.

[20] Lenin 1922.

[21] Sedgwick 1960.

[22] For a (Eurocommunist) comparison of Marx and Blanqui entirely in Marx's favour, see Johnstone 1983.

[23] Cliff 1996.

[24] Greene 2016 c.

[25] Sartre 1983, p. 191.

[26] For more on Blanqui's view of history and social change see Hallward 2017.

[27] Conrad 2009.

[28] Guérin 1957.

[29] See for example Wolfreys 2015.

[30] See Debray 1967 passim. For a rather different perspective on the Cuban Revolution see Cushion 2016.

[31] See Fernbach 2011, Cyr 2013, Claudon & Présumey 2017.

Call for papers

Capitalism has been able to attenuate but not resolve the contradictions of capital, doing so by occupying and producing space, extending urbanism, programming consumption, expanding the frontiers of primitive accumulation, and sustaining the reproduction of the relations of production. This is not an inexorable process; nor are its participant-witnesses ignorant of the continued constitution and presence of spaces of non-capitalism. Yet within considerations of the survival of capitalism there has been less focus granted towards the social reproduction of the relations of production comprising gendered, racialised, ecological, decolonial and class hierarchies. It was Henri Lefebvre in The Survival of Capitalism who indicated that the theory of reproduction brings out the imperative for critical analysis to consider the false “new” within capitalism. ‘The falsenew gets christened neo-something or other’, he stated. But under neoliberalism what is the relation between the fragmentation of space and the capacity of the relations of production to produce space on a planetary scale? How does the jigsaw puzzle of the rural and the urban come together in processes of “development” forming the survival of capitalism? Where are the spaces of social reproduction embedded in the materialisation of the relations of production and their ongoing arrangement? On which terrains of confrontation are the social reproduction of the relations of production that decentre and contest the survival of capitalism located? How do cultural relations participate in, or potentially resist, processes of social reproduction? How does culture in the broad sense of the term constitute a field in which the dynamic tension between representation and material (re-)production plays out?

The organisers of Historical Materialism Sydney 2018 invite proposals for panels and individual papers dealing with these themes or any other topics that engage with historical materialist thought from critical sociology and geography; heterodox economics and the critique of political economy; cultural, literary and aesthetic theory; political science and theory; history and historiography; philosophy; law; science studies and any other relevant discipline.

Abstracts should be no more than 250 words in length and should be sent to hmaustralasia@gmail.com by September 30, 2018.

All conference information including registration, venue and program details will be available at www.hmsydney.net as it becomes available.

Keynote Speakers

Lisa Adkins

Lisa Adkins is Head of the School of Social and Political Sciences at The University of Sydney. Her home Department is Sociology and Social Policy. She is also an Academy of Finland Distinguished Professor (2015-19). She has previously held Chairs in Sociology at the University of Manchester and at Goldsmiths, University of London. She has served as a member of the Australian Research Council’s College of Experts (Social, Behavioural and Economic Sciences Panel), 2011-13. Lisa’s contributions and interventions in the discipline of Sociology lie in the areas of economic sociology, social theory and feminist theory. Her recent research has focused on the restructuring of labour, money and time in the context of the growth of finance. A book based on this research –The Time of Money – will be published in 2018 by Stanford University Press. The book appears in the Currencies: New Thinking for Financial Times series edited by Melinda Cooper and Martijn Konings. Her recent research has also focused on the condition of unemployment and on wageless life. This has been supported by the Australian Research Council, the Academy of Finland and by a 2018 National Library of Australia (NLA) Fellowship. Lisa is joint editor-in-chief of the journal Australian Feminist Studies (Routledge/Taylor&Francis).

Andreas Bieler

Andreas Bieler is Professor of Political Economy and Fellow of the Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice at the University of Nottingham, UK.  Prof. Bieler’s main research interest deals with the global dynamics of capitalism, neoliberal globalisation and the possibilities for resistance. Particular emphasis is placed on the potential role of trade unions in resistance to restructuring, the possibilities for labour movements more generally to establish links of transnational solidarity across borders, as well as theoretical discussions of how these struggles can be conceptualised from a historical materialist perspective. Moreover, he has analysed struggles over the future European Union model of capitalism and the possibilities of national economic-political models different from a neoliberal, Anglo-American model of capitalism. His most recent book, co-authored with Adam David Morton, isGlobal Capitalism, Global War, Global Crisis, published by Cambridge University Press. He runs the blog on Trade unions and global restructuring, providing analytical commentary on labour movements and their attempts to resist exploitation in today’s neoliberal, global capitalism.

Melinda Cooper

Melinda Cooper graduated from the University of Paris VIII in 2001 and is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Sydney. Her research focuses on the broad areas of social studies of finance, biomedical economies, neoliberalism and new social conservatisms. She has recently completed a manuscriptFamily Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism, which has been published in Zone Book’s Near Futures series. She is one of the editors of the Journal of Cultural Economy and (with Martijn Konings) of the Stanford University Press book series Currencies: New Thinking for Financial Times. You can consult the book series here.

Image: George Grosz – Tempo der Strasse (The Tempo of the Street), 1918

The international forum The Great Transition took place from May, 17th to May, 20th 2018 in Montreal. The event was financed by Historical Materialism, the Rosa Luxembourg Foundation, the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), and a variety of unions and academic units.

The event was an immense success, with over 300 panellists and 20 keynote speakers from 12 countries. In total, 1600 people attended the event, more than twice our expectations! The event was bilingual, with keynote panels as well as many panels simultaneously translated in French or in English.

The goal of the event, like other Historical Materialism conferences, was to create a space of discussion and debate on capitalism, neoliberal globalization and socialist strategies. Our goal was to criticise the current system, but most of all, to organise a post-capitalist forum for activists, academics and the public at large.

We therefore organised the event around three axes, to discuss not only the capitalist system, but also credible alternatives and post-capitalist strategies. The first day of panels and keynote speeches presented criticisms of the current system, the second day tackled the theme of strategies and struggles for a global transition, and the third was on post-capitalist models. These three days together formed a gigantic forum promoting and discussing a great transition. 

The organising committee believed that it was crucial to talk about a transition from capitalism, but also the transitions against all systems of oppression. In our understanding, a post-capitalist transition will be incomplete if not simultaneously feminist, anti-racist, democratic, open to indigenous knowledge, and environmentally sustainable. Doing so, we welcomed scholars and activists on a variety of topics such as political economy of capitalism, the ecological crisis, imperialism, patriarchy, social movements, workers movements, indigenous struggles, feminist alternatives and radical democracy. Panels were either formed and submitted by participants, or the editorial committee arranged panels with a special care for coherence between papers, consistency and gender parity.

The next Great Transition, if possible, will be full of challenges. We are already in a process of reflecting on successes and potential improvements. On the one hand, one of our main goals - to create lasting relationships between activists and academics - could have been an even greater success. The event attracted a great number of academics, activists and the public at large, but we will need to rethink our networking approach to create greater synergy between these groups.

On the other hand, The Great Transition could have achieved an even greater gender sensibility. For example, while we managed to have equal number of male and female keynote speakers, women were overly represented in overtly feminist panels instead of being solicited as experts on all topics. Furthermore, many of our keynote speakers were younger and less experienced than their male counterparts. These two aspects represent common problems faced by women in academia, i.e. to be locked into certain topics, or to act as a token that has to measure against older and better-known men. Next time, we will also aim to avoid all-male panels (manels), an achievement we did not reach for this edition.

In the end, the participants of TheGreat Transition were able to discuss and organise the transitions and they all greatly appreciated the forum. The excellent quality of the panels and of the general logistics, as well as the atmosphere ofcamaraderie were celebrated by participants. We felt this event was an excellent indicator of the capacity of the left to organise intellectually and practically, and if nothing else, gave us hope for the future.

Maïka is a doctoral candidate in political science at the University of Toronto and lecturer in critical studies of gender and globalization. She was one of the two spokespersons for the event The Great Transition.

----

For more information and web diffusion of the panels:

Visit our website: https://thegreattransition.net/home/

Like our Facebook Page:https://www.facebook.com/transition2018/

HM website page: http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/hm-montreal

Examples of panels

How does the economy dominate our lives?

Kari Polanyi

Johanna Bockman

Alain Deneault

Critical philosophies and anti-capitalist struggles

Frank Fischbach

David McNally

Bruno Bosteels

Feminism, antiracism and class struggles

Himani Banerji

Diane Lamoureux

Dalie Giroux

Strategies for change in the 21^stcentury

Bhaskar Sunkara

Jane McAlevey

Ethan Miller

A version of this interview appeared in French at http://revueperiode.net/la-valeur-de-lart-entretien-avec-dave-beech/ 

1°) What is the current state of debates around the issues of a marxist approach of artistic production ? Are there different or dominant intellectual currents that can be identified ? On what aspects relate the most important disagreements ?

Marxism has an excellent record of engaging seriously with art and culture. Mostly, however, Marxism, like the rest of aesthetic philosophy, art history and art criticism, has focused its attention on the artwork itself, the experience of artworks and art’s discursive framings rather than artistic production. When Marxists and other leftists have approached artistic production, however, they have done so unfortunately according to one of two misperceived paradigms. Either artistic production is considered to be work or work-like, or it is considered to be the negation of work in an idealised conception of art as nonalienated labour. These two models of thinking are still dominant today among theorists, activists and campaigners. The heyday of the idea that the artist represents a future condition in which work and pleasure will be reconciled has long passed but there are still traces of this in the anti-work movement in which people will be liberated from work and will therefore engage more in cultural activities among other things. At the same time, there is a lot of political work being done today to guarantee wages for cultural work not only by artists but also interns, assistants and art teachers. What all of this lacks, which I have tried to put right in my book Art and Value, is a specific economic analysis of artistic production.

2°) In your book Art and Value. Art's Economic Exceptionalism in Classical, Neoclassical and Marxist Economics (Brill, 2015), you point at the limits of marxist theory concerning the economic analysis of art within capitalism. What are the limits, inconceived dimensions or impasses in current Marxist theory of artistic production ?

My book is in two parts. In the first part I survey the historical record of economics in its discussion and analysis of artworks, and in the second part I begin with an assessment of the record of Marxism – particularly Western Marxism – in its theory of art’s commodification and similar conceptions of art’s incorporation by capitalism, but the rest of the second part of the book is an attempt to reconstruct a Marxist economic analysis of art. In the first part I raise a string of objections to the way that mainstream economics has normalised artistic production as commodity production or focused exclusively on the sale and resale of works of art rather than analysing the economic circumstances under which artworks are produced. So, it is not just the limits of Marxist theory that concerns me in the book, but the failure of mainstream economists and Marxists alike to develop an economics of art based on the specific analysis of the exceptional condition of artistic production. The absence of a Marxist economics of art is only part of this much broader neglect.

3°) What is your own contribution to this Marxist theory ? In other words, what do you propose in your book in order to provide a way out of the current theoretical impasse ? How do you renew the discussion about art's production and specific economy within capitalist system ?

I have confronted the Marxist theory of art’s commodification and related theories of art’s incorporation in the culture industry and art’s participation in the Spectacle. My chief claim is that the various theories of art’s capture by capitalism ought to be proved through economic analysis rather than merely asserted theoretically, assumed as a corollary of the argument that capitalism has subsumed all life, or derived from a sociological analysis of the art as a luxury market. Of course, I’ve also provided the outlines of what I think is an adequate economic analysis of art that focuses on art’s mode of production rather than focusing exclusively on transactions within the art market. While the art market appears to be a typical capitalist operation, an analysis of artistic labour suggests a graphically different assessment of the relationship between art and capitalism. The principle feature of art as a mode of production is that artists have not been converted into wage-labourers as is necessary for the capitalist mode of production.

Western Marxism has since the 1930s has been characterised by factional debate, but one thing that has gone almost completely unchallenged is the thesis that art has been commodified. The art market is a very substantial global trading operation and so, if you measure commodification by the presence of markets in certain goods, then the argument for art’s commodification appears to be a safe bet. Once this is established it is a short step to more expansive theories of reification, culture industry, spectacle, real subsumption and so forth, in which it is not only the objects of cultural production that are commodified but also the subjects who experience them. However, I argue that Marx’s analysis of the transition to capitalist commodity production does not turn on the transformation of modes of distribution, circulation and consumption but to the social relations of production. Moishe Postone, Michael Heinrich and Peter Hudis make this argument better than I do but my contribution to Marxist theory on this score, I would say, is that I not only apply the theory of capitalist production to artistic production but demonstrate that, despite the buying and selling of artworks, artistic production was never fully converted to capitalist commodity production and therefore artworks are not, strictly speaking, commodities at all in the capitalist sense.

4°) You have some disagreements with Christian Fuchs' theories about digital labour and digital cultural commodities