by Sam Friedman and Mary Jirmanus Saba

Mike Haynes’s article “The Left, COVID, and the Roads Not Taken” aims to skewer the Left for its failures during the COVID pandemic.[1] In this article, we first go through his argument and show its weaknesses and one or two strengths. We end by suggesting paths the Left can continue to take to centre the public’s health, including responding to the current, and future pandemics.

What Haynes said

Haynes begins his article by claiming that the pandemic is over, and that the disease is now endemic. We would be delighted if he were correct, in spite of doubts discussed below. Since he never defines “endemic,” we will do so, using a definition from Public Health Ontario:[2] “An endemic disease is one that is consistently present throughout a specific region or population. The prevalence of the disease remains stable and its spread is fairly predictable over time.” What Haynes does not discuss, or even mention, is that diseases can be endemic at very different rates of infection, disease, and death. For example, a disease could technically be described as “endemic” if it were reliably and predictably killing 10% of the population of the Earth each year. Luckily, COVID is not even remotely close to this. As of 2 January 2023, the peak of the last wave before we write this—but also, and crucially, a time before already limited reporting systems markedly deteriorated as governments around the world deliberately reduced and degraded their COVID data systems in order to return to “business as usual”—WHO reported a death rate globally of 40 thousand people per week.[3] As we begin to write this piece in September 2023, the world is facing another wave of infections and death. Yet governments worldwide have largely dismantled monitoring systems. According to the US CDC, for example, its reporting on provisional COVID deaths may not represent all deaths, and reporting delays may be “8 weeks or more.”[4] Still, COVID is still the fourth leading cause of death in the US, taking more than 250,000 lives in 2022 in the US alone. And as we discuss below, Haynes totally ignores Long COVID, which, at any given moment, seems to be at least temporarily causing serious health problems in millions of people in the UK, tens of millions in the United States, and far more globally.

To us, these data do not support Haynes’s characterisation of COVID as endemic, although there are many uncertainties about these data and trends. Worrisomely, the rate of viral evolution and the number of circulating variants remain high, which means that the predictability of spread and of death rates is low. (This challenges Haynes’ dismissal of it as endemic.) In any case, these high numbers, and the uncertainties around viral mutation and around Long COVID, belie the apparent complacency of Haynes’ article.

The thrust of Haynes’s argument is a critique of the “lockdown Left” and of the Left in general for failing to confront a number of issues and for having an insufficient presence in the politics of the pandemic. This critique is remarkably unfocused and, to our eyes, seems to be directed at unnamed strawmen. First, he never defines who or what he means by “the Left.” Secondly, he fails to identify who holds many of the views he attacks, with three exceptions: interestingly, in an article directed at criticising the Left in the UK, he mentions the late Mike Davis and Rob Wallace, both Americans, for not showing “any special insight that cannot be found in the many papers about the threat of pandemic disease produced by the thousands of people who work in the huge global disease surveillance networks”. To anyone who knows Wallace’s work or actions during COVID, this is absurd. Wallace’s keen insights into the roots of the pandemic in investment networks and decision-making, in relation to the logic of capital, are not widely presented in the surveillance networks, and Wallace’s practice as part of People’s CDC (which we discuss later) displays insights that Haynes seems not to have considered. The third person he criticises is also an American (who lives and works in the UK), Devi Sridhar, but it is not clear to us whether or why Haynes considers her of the Left.

Haynes is dead on correct in one of his arguments. The Left (at least as we use the term) does not have an adequate understanding of epidemiology or of public health.

Haynes spends considerable effort lambasting those on the Left who go “down the rabbit hole of elimination and the fantasy of zero COVID”. Unfortunately, he does not name anyone who actually held these beliefs. He could have concretised this by discussing what happened in Australia, New Zealand or China, and their varied attempts at COVID suppression. These attempts ultimately failed, in part because a suppression strategy cannot be pursued in one country alone. (In the case of China, certainly, we agree that maintaining public health was in part an excuse for state repression.) It did, however, succeed in holding mortality and illness rates far below those in the UK or the USA for some years.

Haynes argues that the class struggle was abandoned as well as much human interaction. We cannot judge if that was true of the Left in the UK. In the United States, this was decidedly not the case, at least after the last weeks of May 2020. Here, pretty much everyone on the Left was actively in the streets many times as part of the Black Lives Matter movement, for example, and later in the movement opposing hate crimes and stigmatisation directed at Asian Americans. Haynes may have “lived vicariously off a few protests of Black Lives Matter”, but, in the United States, the movement was organised and led to a significant degree by Black members of the Left. (Haynes’s frame here incidentally seems to exclude Black people from the Left). Furthermore, left activists, many of whom had been members of socialist groups similar to the SWP of which Haynes himself was an active member, were deeply involved in health workers’ protests and strikes at the lack of personal protective equipment during this same period of the pandemic (and since).

Haynes claims that “those on the Left who demanded vaccine mandates [should] be ashamed of their inability to make the elementary distinction between a vaccine that reduces the virulence of an infection and one that stops transmission”. Again, this argument fails to name anyone on the Left who was guilty of this, as well as ignoring the involvement of some left scientists in developing and testing the vaccines themselves. Rather, in the US, it is the US administration and its CDC which popularised such confusion (maybe Haynes is counting Rochelle Walensky in his broad sweep of leftists?). In the United States, our discussions of these issues were much more sophisticated. We discussed what the vaccine trials and subsequent research showed at considerable length, including the evidence that vaccination reduced both the probability of infection and that, by reducing the period of active infection, it therefore reduced the probability that an infected person would infect others. Now, it is true that those of us with an understanding of epidemiology were the ones who made these arguments, but we did so both as part of our efforts to teach the Left some of the basics of epidemiology and as a contribution to the politics of the pandemic. (We also note that Haynes does not report on what, if anything, he said on these issues.)

Haynes spends considerable effort attacking the view that mass testing could stop the pandemic. We actually know of no one on the Left who argued that in the US or the UK it would, although this argument was more viable for China and for New Zealand for reasons specific to those countries. Here, Haynes actually did name a name, Devi Sridhar, but does not tie her to the Left (which, admittedly, might not be needed for those readers of HM who live in the UK.) Also interestingly, Sridhar, as a professor of global public health, presumably does know something about epidemiology. We would add that the emphasis on mass testing and tracing in the US, at least, was mainly put forward by the CDC and by state health departments, not by the Left. Those of us in the People’s CDC, for example, have focused on layers of protection (which includes the availability but insufficiency of mass testing as a single tactic).

Haynes discusses risk transfer at some length, but these remarks seem to float in the air, since he does not cite any evidence that anyone on the Left held the views he criticises. Indeed, no one on the Left we know of actually held that the entire world economy should be locked down indefinitely. Nor did capitalists or actual governments do so, beyond the early weeks of the pandemic when the characteristics of COVID were still unclear.

Nevertheless, Haynes focuses on the concept of risk transfer—that wealthier people were protected and could stay at home whereas workers had to risk their lives. However, Haynes also writes, “Now you can, if you want, make an argument that this was necessary, and more lives were saved this way.” The implication is that he did not see it as needed—but he never states his alternative. In particular, he never discusses how workplaces and transportation to and from workplaces could have been made safer, nor does he mention the myriad ways that workers, from Amazon to Fedex to Target struggled for safer workplaces, an effort in which one of the authors of this piece was highly engaged. The same workers warned that bending public health measures for the country’s largest employer would lead to the market consolidation, which we’ve seen since. (We recall vividly a striking Amazon worker in Chicago in March 2020 waving a rubber chicken at a cell phone camera, asking if its purchase was “essential.”)

In addition, as Haynes and we argue, in most countries, many of those who stayed at home (to say nothing of capitalists!) gained in income whereas those who had to work outside of the home or who lost their jobs, lost. This is all true, and something we all opposed. Haynes then tries to make an argument that non-pharmaceutical interventions should have been “trialled” in the rich world. We would suggest that there are severe ethical barriers to doing this—how can you randomise people not to have good ventilation and filtration of air? Not to wear masks in situations where significant viral exposure might occur? Not to have greater spacing and other changes in meat packing factories? Practising public health researchers have long realised that certain interventions have so much face validity that randomised trials are not ethically feasible. In terms of HIV/AIDS, for example, it would have been unethical to exclude people who use drugs from obtaining sterile syringes or people engaging in high-risk sex from using condoms, which would be a necessary part of such a trial. In these circumstances, research has to rely on “natural experiments” and cohort studies, and a large number of these have been conducted for masks.

Haynes does present an alternative course of action for one circumstance: old people in end-of-life private care homes. Such facilities, along with prisons and some other forms of congregate living, were indeed the locations of horrendous and devastating outbreaks. And it was indeed a tragedy and, in some cases, a crime against humanity, that this took place and that people and their relatives were separated in their last days. Haynes proposes a solution to this: mobilising students and faculty as a care army to help out. He fails, however, to show how this would help. Wouldn’t it just mean that students and academics would carry the virus into and out of care homes rather than the staff of these facilities? Wouldn’t such a programme lead the owners of care homes to lay off the low-paid staff members to live on the dole and to rely on the labour of unpaid students and professors? Perhaps—and perhaps not. But Haynes does not seem to think through either the epidemiology or the social impacts of his solution.

Haynes then ends his article with what he called soul-searching questions.

What Haynes failed to discuss

Any article on the Left and the pandemic has to discuss the actual practice of the Left. Haynes does not do that, and we, as leftists living in the United States, do not learn from this article what left activists and researchers have done in relation to COVID. We want to present a few things that left activists have done in the United States, and suggest that members of the British Left probably took part in similar activities, even if Haynes does not mention it.

Before doing so, however, we want to make a caveat. Even more than in the UK, the Left in the United States is very weak, and has not yet fully incorporated analysis of public health and disability politics in the ways necessary to resist an ongoing, disabling pandemic. This is an essential point for reflection and future improvement.

In spite of these weaknesses, the Left took active part in the Black Lives Matter demonstrations and many subsequent related events. Indeed, to a large extent, Black left activists led many such events, as already mentioned.

Left activists took part in many workplace struggles for safer conditions. Most visibly, this was true in the huge healthcare and logistics industries Broad left leaderships of some unions like the Flight Attendants and some health-care unions also were very active in fighting for various mitigation efforts. Left teachers led or were involved in many struggles to force schools to take various mitigation measures before re-opening.

Many members of the US Left took part in safety and unionizing campaigns at work. Some of these were “salters”—that is, left activists who got jobs at a given workplace in order to organise there.

In early 2022, in a context where it was becoming daily more evident that the Biden administration was turning away from a public health approach to the pandemic and towards prioritising the profitability of business and the imperial interests of the United States, a combination of left activists including public health researchers, doctors, nurses, industrial hygienists, and lay leftists came together to form People’s CDC. The authors of this paper are all members, and leaders, of People’s CDC (as is Rob Wallace, whom Haynes criticised). We have emphasized mitigation efforts using “layered protection,” which are pictured in Figure 1.[5]

Figure 1. Layers of protection against SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19

People’s CDC has written and distributed documents criticising CDC’s response to the pandemic, a document on the Urgency of Equity that discussed ways to re-open schools more safely, a number of documents for worker and community groups on how to struggle to implement layers of protection, documents on how to gain access to medical interventions in the context of the US health-care non-system; and weekly issues of “Weather Report” and “COVID This Week” to help others keep abreast of the pandemic, policy towards the pandemic, and selected scientific issues. We have also organised thousands of public comments on health policy decision-making at various government institutions such as Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS), and CDC’s ACIP and HICPAC, among others. Along with a coalition led by healthcare union National Nurses United and representatives from AFL-CIO, we have made progress pushing back on corporate influence on infection control guidance at the CDC’s Healthcare Infection Control Policies Advisory Committee (HICPAC). And we’re just getting started (learn more and get involved at https://peoplescdc.org/.)

The authors of this article have engaged in many other forms of COVID-directed activity. Mary Jirmanus Saba was active in raising COVID safety demands in the Disability Caucus[6] and in the general strike movement during the weeks-long University of California 48,000 person strike in late 2022, demands which were later taken up, and won, by workers at the University of Michigan. Samuel R. Friedman[7] took part in planning strategies to protect harm reduction workers and people who inject drugs from both the virus and from social harms during the early part of the pandemic, and has written or co-written a number of left analyses including a critique of the left response to the pandemic in the USA, a critique of an establishment book, Lessons from the COVID Wars, an analysis comparing responses to the AIDS and COVID pandemics, and a number of articles in public health and epidemiologic journals.[8]

Haynes’s lack of engagement with active COVID politics shows in other ways as well. He fails to mention the ways in which, both during the clearly pandemic phases and more recently, during what he calls the endemic phase, inadequate mitigation and prevention measures have excluded whole groups of people from social activity in which others can participate. For example, relaxation of mask requirements and other mitigation measures have forced elderly people, disabled people and chronically ill people, as well as others who prefer not to risk Long COVID, to choose between a high risk of becoming infected and forgoing the use of public transportation, public schooling, and now healthcare (since CDC guidance has now led many hospitals systems to remove masking requirements.) Similar policies have essentially excluded many from safe access to their workplaces, and to many public events.

Unforgivably, for someone who touts his supposed epidemiologic expertise, Haynes nowhere mentions Long COVID, which has been described as a mass disabling event. In the United States alone, approximately 40 million people (as of mid-September 2023) have had Long COVID, which is over one ninth of the total population. At the moment, it is estimated that perhaps fifteen million people are suffering from Long COVID, and that many of them may do so for the rest of their lives. At any given time, millions are unable to work as a result. As of approximately the beginning of September 2023, among adults, 18% of women and 12% of men report that they have ever had Long COVID.[9] These startling numbers are likely an underestimate as they exclude people with asymptomatic infections. The UK Office for National Statistics reports that as of 5 March 2023, 1.9 million people living in private households (2.9%) had Long COVID, a number which excludes those in institutional care such as many elderly people, prisoners, and others.[10]

Summary

Haynes’s article gives the impression that COVID is under control and that the Left has played a sordid role throughout the pandemic. We are not so optimistic about the state of COVID. It still is infecting a lot of people, and large numbers of people are being incapacitated to a greater or less degree by Long COVID. Attempting to avoid illness is continuing to exclude large numbers of people from access to public life. Given the coordinated abandonment of mitigation efforts globally, and the continuing high global load of active infections, mutations are taking place at a rapid rate, and at best we can be cautiously optimistic that none of them will unleash another wave of massive death. Although we have not discussed it here, international comparisons of the impact of the pandemic make it clear that political incompetence—which often took the form of prioritising the profitability of capital over the health of the working class—probably is responsible for a sizeable proportion of the seven million deaths that WHO reports have resulted from diagnosed COVID globally (which is an undercount, given the number of excess deaths during this period).[11] All in all, then, the number of unnecessary deaths due to COVID—that is, those due to capitalist politics—are comparable in number to those due to genocides that receive massive attention from the Left. We, in People’s CDC, have attempted to make the politics of pandemics more visible to the international Left, to make the culpability of capitalism and colonialism in these horrors clearer to the public, and thus to strengthen the ranks of those who actively try to erase capital and to build an alternative world. We invite Haynes and others around this world to join us in these efforts.

Haynes fails to give any description of the actual activity of the British Left during the pandemic. We are based in the United States and lack the resources to provide such a description. Based on what the US Left has done in the pandemic, and our scattered communications with people in Britain, we seriously suspect that the Left in Britain has by no means been the abject failure that Haynes reports.

Nonetheless, Haynes’s article does make one important point with which we strongly agree: by and large, the Left has paid too little attention to epidemiology and public health. This is particularly true since the disruptions that climate change is already causing—and these will only increase during the lifetimes of those who read this article—are highly likely to undo whatever control humanity has managed to get over COVID, HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, a host of other diseases, and perhaps additional emerging pandemics.[12]

[1]Haynes, 2023. https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/blog/left-covid-and-roads-not-taken

[2]https://www.publichealthontario.ca/en/About/News/2022/Endemic(downloaded September 21, 2023)

[3]https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/apr/03/peoples-cdc-covid-guidelines

[4]https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#trends_weeklydeaths_select_00

[5]Taken from https://peoplescdc.org/2022/09/12/layers-of-protection/ downloaded 9/24/2023

[6]https://truthout.org/articles/university-of-california-workers-center-disability-justice-in-union-organizing/

[7]Feldman, Justin; Friedman, Sam. Where is the Left on pandemic politics? Tempest. April 18, 2022. https://www.tempestmag.org/2022/04/where-is-the-left-on-pandemic-politics/

Friedman, S.; Kay, S. Marxism and the US Response to the HIV/AIDS and COVID-19 Pandemics. August 25, 2023. Spectre Journal¸ web edition. https://spectrejournal.com/marxism-and-the-u-s-response-to-the-hiv-aids-and-covid-19-pandemics/

Friedman, S. https://blog.petrieflom.law.harvard.edu/2023/07/05/learning-from-the-covid-war/

Sam Friedman. Fatal abstractions: Disease, death, and capitalist abstraction. Tempest Magazine 2023. https://www.tempestmag.org/2023/03/fatal-abstractions/

Friedman, Samuel R., David C. Perlman, Dimitrios Paraskevis, and Justin Feldman. 2023. Sociopolitical Diagnostic Tools to Understand National and Local Response Capabilities and Vulnerabilities to Epidemics and Guide Research into How to Improve the Global Response to Pathogens. Pathogens 12, no. 8: 1023. https://doi.org/10.3390/pathogens12081023.

Friedman SR, Jordan AE, Perlman DC, Nikolopoulos GK, Mateu-Gelabert P. Emerging Zoonotic Infections, Social Processes and Their Measurement and Enhanced Surveillance to Improve Zoonotic Epidemic Responses: A "Big Events" Perspective. Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2022 Jan 17;19(2):995. https://doi: 10.3390/ijerph19020995. PMID: 35055817; PMCID: PMC8776232.

Frank D, Krawczyk N, Arshonsky J, Bragg MA, Friedman SR, Bunting AM. COVID-19-Related Changes to Drug-Selling Networks and Their Effects on People Who Use Illicit Opioids. J Stud Alcohol Drugs. 2023 Mar;84(2):222-229. PMID: 36971722 DOI: https://10.15288/jsad.21-00438

Walters, S.M., Bolinski, R.S., Almirol, E. et al. Structural and community changes during COVID-19 and their effects on overdose precursors among rural people who use drugs: a mixed-methods analysis. Addict Sci Clin Pract 17, 24 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13722-022-00303-8

Friedman SR, Mateu-Gelabert P, Nikolopoulos GK, Cerdá M, Rossi D, Jordan AE, Townsend T, Khan MR, Perlman DC. Big Events theory and measures may help explain emerging long-term effects of current crises. Glob Public Health. 2021 Aug-Sep;16(8-9):1167-1186. https://doi: 10.1080/17441692.2021.1903528. Epub 2021 Apr 11. PMID: 33843462; PMCID: PMC8338763.

Friedman, S.R. Environmental change and infectious diseases in the Mediterranean region and the world: an interpretive dialectical analysis. Euro-Mediterr J Environ Integr 6, 5 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41207-020-00212-9. NIHMSID: NIHMS1637417

Jenkins WD, Bolinski R, Bresett J, Van Ham B; Scott Fletcher; Walters S; Friedman S, Ezell J, Pho M, Schneider J, Ouellet, L. COVID-19 During the Opioid Epidemic – Exacerbation of Stigma and Vulnerabilities. The Journal of Rural Health, 2020. PMID: 32277731 PMCID: PMC7262104. https://doi.org/10.1111/jrh.12442.

Bunting AM, Frank D, Arshonsky J, Bragg MA, Friedman SR, Krawczyk N. Socially-supportive norms and mutual aid of people who use opioids: An analysis of Reddit during the initial COVID-19 pandemic. Drug Alcohol Depend. 2021 May 1;222:108672. https://doi: 10.1016/j.drugalcdep.2021.108672. Epub 2021 Mar 18. PMID: 33757708; PMCID: PMC8057693.

Vasylyeva TI, Smyrnov P, Strathdee S, Friedman SR. Challenges posed by COVID-19 to people who inject drugs and lessons from other outbreaks. J Int AIDS Soc. 2020 Jul;23(7): e25583. https://doi: 10.1002/jia2.25583. PMID: 32697423; PMCID: PMC7375066.

[8]Feldman, Justin; Friedman, Sam. Where is the Left on pandemic politics? Tempest. April 18, 2022.https://www.tempestmag.org/2022/04/where-is-the-left-on-pandemic-politics/

Friedman, S. https://blog.petrieflom.law.harvard.edu/2023/07/05/learning-from-the-covid-war/

Friedman, S.; Kay, S. Marxism and the US Response to the HIV/AIDS and COVID-19 Pandemics. August 25, 2023. Spectre Journal¸web edition. https://spectrejournal.com/marxism-and-the-u-s-response-to-the-hiv-aids-and-covid-19-pandemics/

Friedman, S.R., Smyrnov, P. & Vasylyeva, T.I. Will the Russian war in Ukraine unleash larger epidemics of HIV, TB and associated conditions and diseases in Ukraine?. Harm Reduct J 20, 119 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12954-023-00855-1

Friedman, Samuel R., David C. Perlman, Dimitrios Paraskevis, and Justin Feldman. 2023. Sociopolitical Diagnostic Tools to Understand National and Local Response Capabilities and Vulnerabilities to Epidemics and Guide Research into How to Improve the Global Response to Pathogens. Pathogens 12, no. 8: 1023. https://doi.org/10.3390/pathogens12081023Sam Friedman.

Friedman SR, Perlman DC, Paraskevis D, Feldman J. Sociopolitical Diagnostic Tools to Understand National and Local Response Capabilities and Vulnerabilities to Epidemics and Guide Research into How to Improve the Global Response to Pathogens. Pathogens. 2023 Aug 8;12(8):1023. https://doi: 10.3390/pathogens12081023. PMID: 37623983; PMCID: PMC10457759.

Friedman SR, Mateu-Gelabert P, Nikolopoulos GK, Cerdá M, Rossi D, Jordan AE, Townsend T, Khan MR, Perlman DC. Big Events theory and measures may help explain emerging long-term effects of current crises. Glob Public Health. 2021 Aug-Sep;16(8-9):1167-1186. https://doi: 10.1080/17441692.2021.1903528. Epub 2021 Apr 11. PMID: 33843462; PMCID: PMC8338763.

Friedman, S.R. Environmental change and infectious diseases in the Mediterranean region and the world: an interpretive dialectical analysis. Euro-Mediterr J Environ Integr 6, 5 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41207-020-00212-9. NIHMSID: NIHMS1637417.

[9]https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/covid19/pulse/long-covid.htmdownloaded 9/24/23

[10]https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/conditionsanddiseases/bulletins/prevalenceofongoingsymptomsfollowingcoronaviruscovid19infectionintheuk/30march2023. Downloaded 9/24/23

[11]Friedman, S.; Kay, S. Marxism and the US Response to the HIV/AIDS and COVID-19 Pandemics. August 25, 2023. Spectre Journal¸ web edition. https://spectrejournal.com/marxism-and-the-u-s-response-to-the-hiv-aids-and-covid-19-pandemics/

[12]Friedman, S.R., Smyrnov, P. & Vasylyeva, T.I. Will the Russian war in Ukraine unleash larger epidemics of HIV, TB and associated conditions and diseases in Ukraine?. Harm Reduct J 20, 119 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12954-023-00855-1

Friedman, Samuel R., David C. Perlman, Dimitrios Paraskevis, and Justin Feldman. 2023. Sociopolitical Diagnostic Tools to Understand National and Local Response Capabilities and Vulnerabilities to Epidemics and Guide Research into How to Improve the Global Response to Pathogens. Pathogens 12, no. 8: 1023. https://doi.org/10.3390/pathogens12081023Sam Friedman.

Friedman SR, Perlman DC, Paraskevis D, Feldman J. Sociopolitical Diagnostic Tools to Understand National and Local Response Capabilities and Vulnerabilities to Epidemics and Guide Research into How to Improve the Global Response to Pathogens. Pathogens. 2023 Aug 8;12(8):1023. https://doi: 10.3390/pathogens12081023. PMID: 37623983; PMCID: PMC10457759.

Friedman SR, Mateu-Gelabert P, Nikolopoulos GK, Cerdá M, Rossi D, Jordan AE, Townsend T, Khan MR, Perlman DC. Big Events theory and measures may help explain emerging long-term effects of current crises. Glob Public Health. 2021 Aug-Sep;16(8-9):1167-1186. https://doi: 10.1080/17441692.2021.1903528. Epub 2021 Apr 11. PMID: 33843462; PMCID: PMC8338763.

Friedman, S.R. Environmental change and infectious diseases in the Mediterranean region and the world: an interpretive dialectical analysis. Euro-Mediterr J Environ Integr 6, 5 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41207-020-00212-9. NIHMSID: NIHMS1637417.

By Irina Herb, Dana Abdel-Fatah, Deborshi Chakraborty, and George Edwards

Nancy Fraser begins her most recent book, Cannibal Capitalism, by noting that the ‘current boom in capitalism talk remains largely rhetorical’.[1] Against this backdrop, the book seeks to equip a wider audience with an accessible framework to analyse ‘all these horribles’.[2] To do so, she upcycles and synthesises some of her earlier works, weaving them together through the metaphor of cannibalism which serves to symbolise capital’s undermining of its necessary background conditions.[3]

Closely following her earlier work,[4] Fraser starts the book with an accessible short introduction to the basics of an ‘orthodox’ account of Marx: studying the sphere of production, Marx finds that capital does not expand through the process of exchanging equivalents in markets. Rather, it expands in the process of production, when workers sell their labour-power to capitalists and do not get compensated for all of it(‘exploitation’). As she recounts, for Marx the preconditions for the capitalist mode of production were the violent processes of dispossessing/expropriating people of their means of subsistence and production during the ‘enclosures’ and formal colonialism (‘primitive’ or ‘original accumulation’). This created private ownership of the means of production, ‘doubly-free’ workers, ‘self-expanding value’ and the distinctive role of markets. Quoting Piero Sraffa, she characterises capitalism as a system for the ‘production of commodities by means of commodities’. However, she adds as a starting point for her discussion, ‘one that also relies, as we shall see, on a background of non-commodities’.[5]

From this point onwards, Fraser takes her readers beyond Marx and his scrutiny of ‘the hidden abode’ of production. She takes them to ‘abodes that are even more hidden still’ and ‘still in need of conceptualisation’. In this sense, her work may be seen as the ambitious attempt to fill ‘new volumes of Capital’[6] with a systematic account of the background conditions of possibility for exploitation. These conditions occur not only ‘outside the economy’, but function via logics different to those of the economy. The economy, with its front-story of exploitation and back-story of expropriation follows, as Marx himself had laid out, the logic of capital accumulation: power and resources are invested to produce commodities to be sold for surplus-value on markets. In the realm of unpaid social reproduction, in contrast, gendered ‘angels of the home’[7] in families and communities reproduce the worker without remuneration but driven by ideals of ‘care’, ‘mutual responsibility’, and ‘solidarity’.[8] The realm of politics provides the ‘public powers to guarantee property rights, enforce contracts, adjudicate disputes, quell anti-capitalist rebellions, maintain the money supply’.[9] The realm of non-human ecology provides resources necessary for production and a sink for its waste. Crucially, the functional differences and constructed boundaries between the economy and other ‘zones of non-commodification’, which run according to ‘distinctive ontologies of social practice and normative ideals’,[10] are no pre-capitalist relic but, in fact, fundamental to capitalism.

Based on such an ‘expanded notion of capitalism’, Fraser sheds a clarifying light on crises and processes of (de-)commodification: Rather than focussing on contradictions within the economic realm, she explains domination, destruction, and crises through the construction of boundariesbetween the economy and the non-commodified zones, which are specific to capitalist societies. Each of the realms, as well as racialised expropriation, is understood to stand in a contradictory but interdependent relationship with the economy. These ‘four “contradictions” of capitalism’ each ‘correspond to a genre of cannibalisation and embodies a “crisis tendency”’:[11] Capitalists depend on the non-commodified zones but are structurally pushed to deplete them. For example, capitalists are incentivised to keep the costs of social reproduction as low as possible – providing low standards of work protection, and legal means of tax avoidance – while equally depending on workers to be healthy (enough) to do the work. This contradiction, Fraser notes by drawing on Wallerstein, means that ‘capitalism is not characterised by pervasive commodification and monetisation, rather, commodification is far from universal and where it is present, it depends on zones of non-commodification’.[12]

After outlining her expanded notion of capitalism that conceptualises capitalism as consisting not only of the economy but also its background conditions, Fraser dedicates one chapter to each of them: expropriation, unpaid social reproduction, nature and the polity.

To Fraser, expropriation is ‘integral to capitalist society’[13] rather than an initial stockpiling of capital at the system’s beginnings (so-called ‘primitive accumulation’).[14] She argues that the concept of expropriation shines light on two phenomena: First, the fact that unlike as with exploitation, where ‘doubly free’ workers are paid only part of the value they produce, the concept of expropriation captures how land and labour-power continue to be stolen. The subjects of this theft are not random: According to her, the line between the ‘exes’ runs along the colour line. It is ‘their assignment to two different populations, that underpins racial oppression’:[15]white workers are exploited, whereas value is expropriated from racialised ‘dependent’ subjects.[16] Secondly, political orders enable such theft from racialised groups by legitimising and enforcing constructs like ‘chattels slaves, indentured servants, colonised subjects, “native” members of “domestic dependent nations”, debt peons, “illegals” and felons’.[17] In this sense, ‘the distinction between the two “exes” is a function not only of accumulation but also of domination’.[18]

With her conceptualisation of expropriation as mediated through racism, Fraser picks up on what she calls ‘a profound but underappreciated stream of critical theorising, known as Black Marxism’[19] that flourished between the 1930s and 1980s around figures like C.L.R. James, W.E.B. Du Bois, Stuart Hall, Walter Rodney, Angela Davis, Manning Marable, Barbara Fields and Michael Dawson, and has been reinvigorated by scholars such as Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Cedric Johnson, Barbara Ransby and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. Rather than positing racism as either necessary orcontingent to capitalism, Fraser claims that capitalism providesstructurally enabling conditions for racism and racial oppression.

After presenting the modality in which expropriation relates to exploitation in different historical regimes of racialised accumulation, Fraser concludes that in the present regime of financialised capitalism, in which private debt plays a pivotal role, the line between the two exes has become muddied. We now witness a new hybrid modality of the ‘expropriated-and-exploited citizen-worker. No longer restricted to peripheral populations and racial minorities, this new figure is becoming the norm.’[20]

In her chapter on unpaid reproduction as a background condition for the economy, Fraser notes a deep-seated contradiction or crisis tendency between capital accumulation and social reproduction.[21] Analogous to the periodic crises in the economy, we witness periodical ‘major cris[e]s – not simply of care, but of social reproduction in the broadest sense’.[22] In this context, the ‘division between social reproduction and commodity production is central to capitalism’:[23] parallel to the formation of the split between workers and capitalists, productive and reproductive work were split apart, the latter relegated to a separate, private, domestic sphere, obscuring its social importance and depriving it of remuneration in cash form. Through their association with it, women and feminised groups became structurally subordinated.

This contradiction has been tackled differently in different phases of capitalism: during the era of mercantile capitalism, reproduction in the core mainly continued to take place within households and churches, while in the ‘periphery’, social bonds were violently upended through looting, enslavement, and the dispossession of Indigenous people. In the liberal-colonial phase, women (and children) flocking into factories brought about a crisis of social reproduction and gender roles – a phenomenon famously and controversially commented on by Marx and Engels. This was managed by creating ‘the family’ in its modern restricted form. Drawing on Maria Mies, Fraser mentions the concept of ‘housewifization’ while also noting that poor, racialised and working-class women could never live up to the ideals of housewifery. As Fraser notes, this ‘struggle to ensure the integrity of social reproduction became entangled with the defence of male domination’.[24] In state-managed capitalism, the core dealt with the contradiction by enlisting state power in the form of welfare and the family wage, whereas social reproduction remained mainly beyond the purview of government in the periphery. In today’s financialised capitalism, new developments include divestment from social welfare, recruitment of women into the paid workforce and, resulting from that, a dual organisation of social reproduction: commodified for those who can afford it and privatised for those who cannot, with household debt and global care chains playing an increasing role.[25]

Fraser understands the natural world as a further noneconomic background condition for capitalist economies. ‘More than a relation to labour, capital is a relation to nature’,[26] Fraser insists. A capitalist economy depends on nature’s biophysical wealth to pile up value, but any responsibility for the ecological harms wrought – carbon dioxide flooding the atmosphere, islands of plastic rising from the seas, deforestation driving lethal pandemics – is routinely denied: ‘the damages are the flip side of profits’.[27] From the perspective of capital, nature is the ontological other of humanity, an infinite ‘realm of stuff, devoid of value’, but, in reality, the natural world is unable to self-replenish without limit. This predatory and extractive relation to nature thus leads to the eventual exhaustion of resources and destabilisation of ecosystems, a dynamic that in turn undermines capitalist society’s own ecological conditions of possibility. This, for Fraser, is ‘capitalism’s ecological contradiction’ – programmed as an iron law within the very structure of the economy.

Back in 1988, James O’Connor outlined this general schema as the ‘second contradiction of capital’, while in the spring of 2020, Andreas Malm[28] identified this theory as manifesting in crisis: with workers forced to shield themselves away from deadly pathogens, large parts of the economy ground to a halt. Yet the originality of Fraser’s contribution lies in the insistence that capitalism’s ecological contradiction cannot be isolated from the ‘system’s other constitutive irrationalities and injustices’.[29] The system denies social reproduction when it destroys life-sustaining ecosystems. It creates racially marked populations for expropriation when political powers enable resources to be extracted. Notwithstanding the divisions capitalist society enforces between the domains of economy, state, care and nature, Fraser maintains that all spheres are intimately connected, any one contradiction inescapably interacting with contradictions elsewhere. The central point being that we cannot fully anatomise capitalism’s ecological crisis without grasping the mutually interacting contradictions that constitute capitalist society.

Building on the concept of boundary shifts and struggles, Fraser aims to provide for the above abstractions a concrete form. From ox-turned mills to coal-fired industrialisation, through oil-fuelled automobility to carbon-traded ‘green capitalism’, she demonstrates the distinct ways in which each stage of capitalist development organised its relation to nature and managed its contradictions. Fraser endeavours to show not only how each ‘socio-ecological regime’ generated their energy and extracted their resources but also the concrete meanings that each regime ascribed to nature. To elaborate this latter point, Fraser wades into debates animating certain lines of ecological Marxism, as she tries to get a firmer grip on the ‘slippery’ term that is ‘nature’. She presents the reader with three natures: Nature I – a scientific-realist conception of nature as an objective force; Nature II – a structural analysis of the capital–nature relation – and Nature III – the object studied by historical materialism, concrete and changing over time. With ecosystems services, carbon-trading schemes and environmental derivatives now littering the capitalist imaginary, there is a green veneer to the inter-subjective beliefs that motivate the capitalist class (Nature II). But, whilst their actions may bring forth lithium mines or enclose lands for carbon credits (Nature III), very little will be done to tame the biophysical realities of global warming (Nature I). Whilst this tripartite schema of nature reminds us to remain vigilant against green illusions and technological fixes, it may be noted at this point that it is not clear what advances this somewhat clunky terminology offers to understanding beliefs about nature that a concept like ideology does not.

In her chapter on the polity as a background condition, Fraser outlines how, in capitalist societies, the economy crucially relies on public powers to guarantee property rights, enforce contracts, adjudicate disputes, quell anti-capitalist rebellions, and maintain the money supply.[30] In this context, she engages with the question of what causes the crisis of democracy and what its solution could be. She bluntly opposes what she calls ‘politicism’[31] – the liberal idea that the crisis is a consequence of the decline in the political ethos and the power of constitutional regimes. In this narrative, the solution is seen to lie within the political realm, an approach Fraser criticises for overlooking ‘extra-political society’.[32] While eschewing such liberal interpretations of the political crisis, Fraser also claims to avoid the ‘economism’ of past Marxists. In this line, Fraser’s fundamental contribution is her effort to connect the political crisis with the social, ecological, and economic crises.

Similar to Lenin’s attempt to understand the metamorphosis of capitalism from one avatar to another, Fraser outlines different stages of capitalism to understand the origin of today’s crisis. The current stage of capitalism is analysed through the prism of financialised capitalism where central banks and global financial institutions have become leading players[33] while simultaneously relying and freeriding on ‘public powers to establish and enforce its constitutive norms’.[34] These newly empowered global institutions have become sovereign in their function without being answerable to the public or the state, while their functioning is tremendously consequential to the public. To her, this conglomeration manifests itself in economic crises (e.g. Greece in 2015), political crises (e.g. Brazil in 2017–18), and the current refugee crisis.[35] Furthermore, Fraser argues that populism and populist regimes need to be understood as having come into power as a reaction to the onslaught of financialised capitalism. In this context, she criticises popular social movements for operating in the shadow of liberal hegemony, functioning as ‘junior partners of the progressive-neoliberal bloc’.[36] Precisely because of their previous and ongoing deep entanglement with neoliberalism, creating mistrust on the part of common working people, these movement failed to put up substantial opposition to the populist regimes.

Fraser ends the book by announcing the hope that ‘socialism is back!’, and goes on to advertise for it. Her vocal support for a socialist future certainly facilitates the mainstreaming and destigmatising of the discussions on socialism in academia. Apart from this zeal, however, Fraser’s book represents a theorem concerning today’s capitalist crisis rather than a manifesto for the future: her primary contribution is geared towards understanding capitalism and its crises. Therefore, when the reader turns to the chapter that promises to speak about ‘what we can do’, they should expect a short and limited intervention on socialism which side-lines some of the questions truly at stake. For example, the failure of twentieth-century socialism is often attributed to the lack of democracy and the hegemonic presence of the party in society and state functioning. Therefore, Fraser’s emphasis on the importance of inclusivity in decision-making is well-placed.[37] Yet, past socialist experiments have never disagreed in principle on the importance of inclusivity in the decision-making process, but nevertheless often failed on that score in practice. Therefore, at this point, a discussion of ‘what we can do’ will have to go beyond simply repeating calls for inclusivity. Here, thorny and nitty-gritty questions around the transformation to socialism (and the role of violence within it) and multiparty democracy in a post-revolutionary society remain to be discussed. Secondly, Fraser reiterates the classical socialist approach that a ‘socialist society must democratise control over social surplus’.[38] Yet, again, such attempts have failed in the past – for example in ‘Leninism’, where the state became the custodian of the surplus, which led to state capitalism rather than to the socialist redistribution of surplus – thus the debate on the ownership of surplus must go deeper, asking critical questions about the relationship between state and capital, including the state’s role in accumulating surplus and its redistribution.

Concluding Remarks

Fraser is not the first to claim that in capitalist societies the economy relies on ‘noncommodified zones’ such as unpaid ‘housework’, nature, the polity, and racism (as a mechanism to justify expropriation). Yet, surely, she may be credited for her attempt to bring disparate insights from older Marxist figures, including Karl Marx and Rosa Luxemburg, and newer voices from the realms of Marxist Feminism (Eli Zaretsky, Lise Vogel, Nancy Flobre, Barara Laslett, Johanna Brenner, Susan Ferguson, Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya) as well as figures from the ranks of eco-Marxism (James O’Connor, Jason Moore) together into one expanded notion of capitalism. Not only does her framework allow for connections between these different thinkers, it also helps elucidate political and strategic implications. This may be illustrated by way of an example: In Capital, Marx already drew on the example of a teacher to show that the same type of work (teaching) can occur both productively (in a private school) and unproductively (in a public school). Fraser now helpfully adds to the distinction between the productive and unproductive: her framework of different non-commodified zones is not only potentially easier to understand but also allows for more complexity than Marx’s binary distinction. In particular, it creates more space to theorise unproductive work commissioned by the state (care homes, childcare, etc.) – an important point of debates amongst Marxist Feminists. Furthermore, her framework helps us discern and politicise an important question: ‘In which realm should which work occur?’ ‘Moving’ activities from one realm to another shifts the boundary between these realms and therefore their size and power. To Fraser, these ‘boundary struggles’ are the ‘very stuff of social struggle in capitalist societies – as fundamental as the class struggles over control of commodity production and distribution of surplus value that Marx privileged.’ To her, they ‘decisively shape the structure of capitalist societies’.[39]

Two issues arise from Fraser’s framework that deserve further discussion.

Firstly, Fraser’s conceptualisation of different forms of oppression leaves room for debate. At a general level, the fact that she ascribes the particular types of domination respectively to each one of the (re-)productive spheres (plus expropriation) might be seen as a tempting proposition, since it appears to afford simple, clean answers – gendered oppression occurs in the realm of unpaid social reproduction, racism through the process of expropriation, ecological destruction within the realm of nature, and ‘political domination’[40] within the realm of politics. In doing so, she claims that her framework ‘brings together in a single frame all the oppressions, contradictions, and conflicts of the present conjuncture’.[41] Yet, unfortunately, the story of oppression is more complex – both with regard to questions of intersecting oppressions and with regard to forms of marginalisation that inevitably fall outside of her narrow framework. For example, readers may be surprised to find that queerness and queer-hatred hardly play a role, while ableism is not mentioned. These omissions are crucial – in particular, the case of queer-hatred would likely bring into question the idea that each form of discrimination fits neatly within a single box.

More specifically, Fraser’s emphasis on expropriation to conceptualise racism has certainly added to the debate in important ways. Yet, it should be discussed whether her use of the concept may be doing both too much and too little at the same time. Too much in the sense that it is dubious whether the ‘two exes’ are really fit to do as much of the analytical lifting to explain racism as she seems to suggest: Expropriation does not seem sufficient to explain racism in all its different historical and global formations, not to mention its relationship with other categories like religion, ethnicity, or caste. It is also worth remembering that the US American case, which Fraser appears to prioritise, does not translate easily to other contexts. Furthermore, Fraser’s heavy reliance on the concept of expropriation to capture the theft of land and labour from racialised groups and to motivate political orders, comes at the cost of neglecting important superstructural factors, including the ideological dimension of racism.[42] In addition, it seems unclear to what extent her explanation of racism holds today: After discussing the blurring line between the two exes in the current regime of financialised capitalism, Fraser rightly asks, ‘why does racism outlive the disappearance of the sharp separation of the two exes?’[43] Yet, this question remains largely unanswered, left as an exercise for future discussions: How can we conceptualise racialising dynamics in financialised capitalism? What are the political and social implications of the conflation of the ‘two exes’? Does Fraser’s model appropriately capture the past but fall short in explaining racialisation processes in the present? Or is there a deeper underlying issue that renders her model questionable more generally?

Fraser’s application of expropriation may do too little in the sense that it is empirically and conceptually unclear why she restricts the reach of expropriation to explaining racism, rather than domination and oppression more generally. For example, women have been, and at points continue to be, legally excluded from voting, certain forms of work or holding their own bank accounts.[44] Fraser herself discusses how patriarchal legislation (accompanied by norms) has rendered women vulnerable to conducting unpaid ‘housework’. Here, she not only seems to court a logical contradiction when she refrains from using the concept of expropriation in the context of patriarchy. She also curiously omits Federici’s and other feminists’ argument that before there was the expropriation of the land, there was the expropriation of the female body.[45]

Taking into account that, in a later chapter, Fraser turns to expropriation to make sense of ecological destruction,[46] it seems apt to ask: could there be a larger conceptual issue concerning expropriation in Fraser’s overall framework? It is at least noteworthy that Fraser seems to conceptualise expropriation on a par with the realms of nature, social reproduction and polity as ‘non-economic normativities’[47] which serve as background conditions to the economy. Yet, nature, social reproduction, polity, and economy are realms within which (re-)production occurs, whereas exploitation and expropriation describe the mode of non- or under-compensation. In this sense, rather than conceptualising expropriation as occurring adjacent to the non-commodified zones, we should discuss whether expropriation ought to be conceptualised as occurring within the economic realm,between the economy and its background conditions andwithin the realms of the background conditions.

Secondly, what is an anti-capitalist struggle? Against the backdrop of her contention that the economy depends on non-commodified zones, Fraser states that ‘what counts as an anti-capitalist struggle is thus much broader than Marxists have traditionally supposed’.[48] While this is certainly a valid (albeit not a new) point, a problem arises: She eschews the truly tricky question of which struggles are anti-capitalist and which prolong its life. At points, the reader might get the impression that any struggle is anti-capitalist, given that it may undermine the background conditions of the economic sphere. More prominently though, Fraser offers a scathing critique of those movements which have failed to be anti-capitalist in their struggles. She understands them to serve as ‘front men […] by casting a veneer over the predatory political economy of neoliberalism’. This ‘unholy alliance ravaged the life conditions of the vast majority and thereby created the soil that nourished the Right’.[49] She furthermore criticises ‘that romantic view [which] is held today by a fair number of anti-capitalist thinkers and left-wing activists’ who ‘too often […] treat “care,” “nature,” “direct action,” “commoning,” or (neo) “communalism” as intrinsically anti-capitalist’.[50] From our perspective, the point here is not to dismiss her critique of romanticised (and oftentimes depoliticised) ideas of anti-capitalism. Rather, the point is of an analytical and pragmatic nature: how far will activists get when they learn that some forms of activism are ‘too romantic’ or too ‘neo-liberal’ and yet are unable to learn what actually constitutes anti-capitalist struggles? Here, Fraser unhelpfully downplays a question which has been and still is hotly debated: how do struggles get co-opted? And when is care-work in non-commodified zones, which is at times associated with anti-capitalist resistance, accidentally propping up and perpetuating the system by keeping its background conditions running? When could non-commodified zones serve as pockets for resistance and foster the formation of alternatives?

To conclude, Cannibal Capitalism should not be missed by anyone who is interested in making sense of current crises. It is also a must-read for those involved in analytical debates on overarching Marxist frameworks which synthesise work on social reproduction, racism, the state, and ecology.

References

Bhattacharya, Tithi 2017, ‘Introduction: Mapping Social Reproduction Theory’, in Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression, edited by Tithi Bhattacharya, pp. 1–20, London: Pluto Press.

Cooper, Melinda 2017, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism, New York: Zone Books.

Federici, Silvia 1975, Wages against Housework, Bristol: Falling Wall Press/The Power of Women Collective.

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

Ferguson, Susan 2020, Women and Work: Feminism, Labour, and Social Reproduction, London: Pluto Press.

Fraser, Nancy 2014, ‘Behind Marx’s Hidden Abode: For an Expanded Conception of Capitalism’, New Left Review, II, 86: 55–72.

Fraser, Nancy 2022, Cannibal Capitalism: How our System is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet – and What We Can Do About It, London: Verso.

Fraser, Nancy and Rahel Jaeggi 2018, Capitalism: A Conversation in Critical Theory, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Luxemburg, Rosa 1975 [1913], Die Akkumulation des Kapitals. Ein Beitrag zur ökonomischen Erklärung des Imperialism, inGessamelte Werke, Bd. 5., Berlin: Dietz Verlag.

Malm, Andreas 2021, Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century, London: Verso.

Marx, Karl 1974 [1857/1858], Grundrisse der Kritik Der Politischen Ökonomie, Berlin: Dietz Verlag.

Morgenstern, Christine 2002, Rassismus – Konturen einer Ideologie.Einwanderung im politischen Diskurs der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Hamburg: Argument Verlag.

Müller, Jost 2002, ‘An den Grenzen kritischer Rassismustheorie. Einige Anmerkungen zu Diskurs, Alltag und Ideologie’, in Konjunkturen des Rassismus, edited by A. Demirovic and M. Bojadzijev, pp. 226–45, Münster: Verlag Westfälisches Dampfboot.

[1] Fraser 2022, p. 1.

[2]Fraser 2022, p. xii.

[3]Fraser 2022, pp. xiii–xiv.

[4]Fraser 2014; Fraser and Jaeggi 2018.

[5]Fraser 2022, p. 5.

[6]Fraser 2022, p. 8.

[7]Fraser 2022, p. 61.

[8]Fraser 2022, p. 18.

[9]Fraser 2022, p. 12.

[10]Fraser 2022, p. 20.

[11]Fraser 2022, p. 24.

[12]Fraser 2022, p. 18.

[13] Fraser 2022, p. 33.

[14] Fraser 2022, p. 36.

[15] Fraser 2022, p. 29.

[16] Fraser 2022, p. 36.

[17] Fraser 2022, p. 33.

[18] Fraser 2022, p. 37.

[19] Fraser 2022, p. 27.

[20] Fraser 2022, p. 47.

[21]Fraser 2022, p. 54.

[22]Fraser 2022, p. 53.

[23]Fraser 2022, p. 9.

[24] Fraser 2022, p. 60.

[25] Fraser 2022, p. 68.

[26] Fraser 2022, p. 83.

[27] Fraser 2022, p. 83.

[28] Malm 2021.

[29] Fraser 2022, p. 90.

[30] Fraser 2022, p. 12.

[31]Fraser 2022, p. 115.

[32]Fraser 2022, p. 115.

[33]Fraser 2022, pp. 127–8.

[34]Fraser 2022, p. 119.

[35]Fraser 2022, p. 131.

[36]Fraser 2022, p. 136.

[37]Fraser 2022, p. 153.

[38]Fraser 2022, p. 154.

[39]Fraser 2022, p. 21.

[40]Fraser 2022, p. 25.

[41]Fraser 2022, p. xv.

[42] See for example: Morgenstern 2002; Müller 2002.

[43] Fraser 2022, p. 49.

[44] For example, West German married women required their husband’s written consent to join the workforce until 1977 and to hold a bank account until 1958. In some countries similar arrangements remain in place until today.

[45] Federici 2004.

[46] Fraser 2022, p. 89.

[47] Fraser 2022, p. 18.

[48]Fraser 2022, p. 25.

[49]Fraser 2022, p. 136.

[50]Fraser 2022, p. 22.

By Marcus Bajema

Marx was once described as having discovered the continent of history for science, previously occupied by philosophy.[1] However, the continent is even now far from fully explored and remains partly hidden from us by dense fogs generated by ideological discourse. What struck me most in The History of Work by Lucassen (hereafter abbreviated asWork) andThe Dawn of Everything by Graeber and Wengrow (hereafter abbreviated asDawn) is the power and centrality of discourse relative to scientific evidence. Hence, before turning to the books themselves, it is important to take note of their intellectual context. Since the 1990s, a new genre has emerged in Western Europe and North America that seeks to address the ‘big questions’ of human nature and history, indeed even within the context of the history of the universe itself.[2] One thinks here of authors such as Francis Fukuyama, Steven Pinker, Jared Diamond, Yuval Harari, and many other lesser stars of this new constellation on the intellectual firmament.

Although the political and other persuasions of these authors obviously vary considerably, common factors exist that allow for recognising them as belonging to a single genre. First of all, there is an overall drive, to an almost manic extent, to claim that the new work overturns established wisdom and dogma. These claims are often paralleled by a studied eclecticism in method, relying instead on the power of argument and (generally overstated) wit.[3] Both characteristics are radically distinct from earlier treatments of grand historical synthesis or philosophical anthropology, which relied on rigorous scholarly discipline and positioning within complex philosophical systems. To some extent, it is also possible to see a certain commodification of ideas for mass publics and elites alike, especially in the form of the lucrative speaker booking-fees that the more famous authors are able to claim.[4]

Secondly, the genre is characterised by a very specific subjectivity, attuned to the sensibilities and concerns of a fairly circumscribed group of people. This statement may sound strange, given that millions of books are being sold, until it is remembered that the claim of these books is to provide an account of ‘one and all’. Yet this coverage of ‘everything’ in practice seems to revisit either the tired obsession with the rise of ‘the West’ in relation to the ‘rest’, or, more neutrally, revolve around a generic modernity and its genesis in the deep past. This path has been well trodden before, so one wonders if it is not time to enlarge the scope of ‘everything’ a bit. By that, I mean not just to include the great civilisations of the ‘non-West’ but also what Eric Wolf termed the ‘people without history’ – for do they not belong to ‘everything’, too? The authors are generally more focused on their present audience, even providing in some cases a set of lessons.[5]

In effect, the ruminations on long-term history and ‘deeply rooted’ human characteristics allow for grappling with the social, political, and environmental issues of the day under the calming effect of the aeons. Call it a form of collective psychoanalysis... The charm of both Dawn andWork is that the authors seem to follow the genre while, at the same time, radically subverting it. Lucassen highlights his unease with the way in which ‘conventional working people’ are misconstrued by a dominant entrepreneurial and consumerist global culture.[6] Graeber and Wengrow, both having written important books going against the dominant strains of thought, give the distinct impression of mischievously wanting to throw everything up into the air.

At the same time, however, both books seem to share both the innovative drive and methodological eclecticism of the broader genre, although Dawn does so to a much greater degree thanWork. What holdsDawn together, other than force of argument, are several first principles, notably of freedom, but also of play, the sacred, the bases of social power, and, if hardly invoked, communism.[7] Yet it should be emphasised that these principles are used to explore the diversity of social life and never to reduce it to a common template. Indeed, the authors offer powerful critiques of teleological reasoning, in which the play-principle plays an important role. Briefly, this principle refers to behaviour not able to be captured in a functionalist sense, but unconstrained from such ends and pursued for its own sake. Elsewhere Graeber had speculated on it as constituting freedom at a sub-atomic level.[8] In Dawn its use is more understated but deployed to devastating effect against conventional ideas of the emergence of agriculture.

Even so, Dawn deconstructs and rebels against theories rather than explicitly building a grand synthesis of its own. In this the book notably differs fromWork, which does tag more closely to methodological strictures. Lucassen uses a taxonomy of different forms of labour developed as part of a research project at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam.[9] Lucassen is also more rigorous in his chronological approach, which gives his exposition a more systematic structure than that of Dawn, which wanders the earth without much regard for coherence in space and time. The work is focused on concrete historical cases and eschews theorising, citing approvingly Robert McC. Netting’s description of an ‘empirical social science of practical reason’.[10] This position is fair in itself but also reveals itself, as we shall see, in the acceptance of notions that the more critical Dawn would rightly deconstruct.

All of this is crucial for understanding the actual treatments of different historical eras in both works, which I would like to subdivide into four parts. We start with early humankind in the Palaeolithic, before moving on to the emergence of agriculture, the question of the subsequent development of cities and states, and the transition from antiquity to what we may term the modern world. Alas, with regard to the first part, both books start out on the wrong foot. For I would argue that the treatment of early humankind in Dawn andWork is quite inadequate. The reader will look in vain here for an engagement with the concerns of Palaeolithic archaeology in its broadest sense. Granted, this is a notably difficult field for social theory, as it is more closely attuned to the biological and physical sciences. The modes of explanation and timescales are far removed from those of social theorists, who traditionally have used the ethnographies of contemporary or recent hunter-gatherers to make analogies with the deep past.

Still, archaeologists are making advances to grasp the interconnections of human biology, ecology, (stone) technology, social relations, as well as artistic expressions.[11] Strangely, both Lucassen and Graeber and Wengrow largely bypass these studies and opt (mostly) for ethnographical analogy and the limited available evidence on Palaeolithic social relations. What is completely missing is a consideration of what Marx called the metabolism between humans and nature, including the human capacity for abstract labour, a notion that as we shall see below sits well with recent work in Palaeolithic archaeology. At least, in Work, we can discern some misgivings regarding the use of ethnographical analogy, and an insightful discussion, based on the work of Sarah Hrdy, of how the development of alloparenting in early humans led to reciprocal labour relations. At the same time, for Lucassen, the entire era from 700,000 to 10,000 BCE is characterised by the development of reciprocity, with technology, climate, cognition, and so on, only appearing as extraneous factors.

Graeber and Wengrow place a much greater emphasis on diversity, yet they, too, do not really address the main debates of Palaeolithic archaeology. Partly, this is because their primary aim seems to be to counter modern ideological notions of a state of egalitarian simplicity at the origin of humankind, which they trace back to Rousseau’s Second discourse. Their take on Rousseau is bound to be controversial, as is their peculiar take on the Enlightenment. For Marxists, it is notable that the authors view the initial state of egalitarianism in ideal terms, as shared beliefs that are implemented to varying degrees in practice.[12] They argue that this inferred ideal state is a figment of the imagination, one that has pernicious consequences by reducing the ‘noble savages’ to a condition where they lack imagination and agency.[13]

However, the Second Discourse can be understood quite differently. Like a number of Greco-Roman thinkers before him, Rousseau described the early life of humankind in terms of a progressive negation of the present.[14] His ‘pure state of nature’ is a life without everything we now have in our lives, from family, technology, property to social ranks and the political state. Even so, in Rousseau the solitary humans of this early state have emotions that will later enable them to live together in a society. From the initial pure state of nature humans are brought to civilisation by a series of accidents, with that condition itself also inherently carrying the seeds of its own demise.[15] In that sense the pure state of nature does not just negate present-day civilisation, it also expresses its potentiality. In the same way, civilisation also carries within itself the potentiality for its own collapse, not directly to the pure state of nature but more likely to the state of war that lies at the origin of the social contract.[16]

This interpretation of Rousseau is quite distinct from the idealist view that Dawn seeks to disprove. Graeber and Wengrow aim to do so by bringing up a vast number of cases of hunter-gatherers known through ethnography. These cases show a great diversity of social life, with many of them greatly diverging from the inferred egalitarian ideal. Many of these cases can be connected with the archaeology of the periods preceding them, showing that the patterns are not the result of the inter-cultural exchange (often in an imperialist or colonialist form) within which ethnography was performed and in fact helped to constitute. The key question is whether the insights from ethnography and recent archaeology can be related to the findings of Palaeolithic archaeologists. This is not easy, and Graeber and Wengrow acknowledge that there is little to go by in terms of evidence for the social relations of early humankind.[17]

They assemble the ethnographical evidence not so much to interpret specific Palaeolithic sites or to argue that it represents an ancestral condition of humankind, but rather to argue for possibilities.[18] In some cases, this works really well, for example in their argument that Palaeolithic societies may have spanned very large distances indeed, challenging our idea of a society as something occupying only a small area of land. The main focus of the authors, however, is to disprove the egalitarianism attributed to Rousseau. To this end, they assemble the evidence from certain burials and monumental structures from the very last phases of the Palaeolithic, which show great efforts of labour, careful craft, and the use of rare and especially valued materials. In essence this evidence is simply deposited next to the insights gained from ethnography, and the reader is nudged toward accepting a loose identity between them.

For the implications, consider the following argument made by the authors on the relation between property and the sacred.[19] Based on a number of ethnographical examples, Graeber and Wengrow argue for a close similarity between property rights and the sacred. This connection can be seen, for example, in the notion that the gods are the true owners of the land and in the limited access to religious knowledge and ceremonies that constituted a form of social power. Their argument is that the private property that emerged in Europe is similar, in the sense that this property is set apart and only to be touched by the owner, being ‘sacred’ to him or her.[20] In a further move of argumentative acrobatics, they then argue that the burials and structures of the last part of the Palaeolithic imply a presence of the ‘exclusive rights to claims over property’,[21] in the sacred sense. Hence, the basic principles behind private property were present in the Palaeolithic, QED.

Even if one accepts this claim, and what it implies for the notion of an original ideal of egalitarianism, it actually proves very little, if we consider Rousseau’s argument from negation. For, if all of these principles were present during the last phases of the Palaeolithic, the question of what came before remains. For these principles are negated by an absence in previous eras, even if considering the scarcity of the archaeological evidence. Graeber and Wengrow never consider the principles of human social life that they derive from ethnography in relation to what Palaeolithic archaeologists have discovered about what makes us human. Yet there is much there that is significant for grasping what is specific to human social life, and the capacity for technology and symbolic thought. To juxtapose the ethnography of recent hunter-gatherers and a selective set of evidence from the end of the Palaeolithic achieves little to that end. The implication that this period is to be seen as a kind of demonstration of the principles of human social life should be resisted, for any such ‘foundation’ would be negated by what preceded it, as Rousseau showed in the Second discourse.

Marx’s Capital, in fact, proves a better guide to the deep human past than eitherWork orDawn, if we consider its basic ideas and approach rather than the accumulated scientific evidence. For, in the chapter on the labour process and valorisation, Marx posits not just the metabolism with nature as the basis for any labour process, he also briefly traces its deep prehistory. He notes how the earth itself provided humans with their original set of tools, both instruments of labour and those serving to hold the materials of labour.[22] Of course, there is also an important cognitive aspect to this, as humans produce in the mind before they proceed to actually materially produce something.[23] All of this dovetails well with the kind of approaches that can be seen in recent Palaeolithic archaeology, which focus on the distinction between instruments and containers in early technology, and the broader interrelations with environmental factors, cognition, and forms of social life.[24]

No doubt, Marx does not fill well with the ‘big questions’ genre as described here. Yet, surely, his emphasis on the broader context of early humankind is more satisfying in an age dominated by the impact of climate change than a focus on social relations to the exclusion of everything else. And, in fact, a bit more use can be made of Marx’s Capital for grasping the theoretical background of the accounts of the origin of agriculture and settled life inDawn andWork. In the chapter on absolute and relative surplus-value, Marx makes an important argument that draws upon the ‘ethnography’ of islands in the East Indies.[25] There, humans can comfortably subsist on the wild sago tree, comfortably meeting their needs with just twelve hours of work per week. Thereby, he notes, nature provides the inhabitants of these islands with much leisure time, even if they remain dependent on nature.

Marx uses this example as a contrast to the modern extraction of surplus-value, which depends upon maximising the number of hours that workers labour. There is, for him, no natural drive to accumulate surplus; rather, it depends on something that is lacking in the East Indies at that time: compulsion. Drawing upon a richer set of evidence, essentially the same argument was made by the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins in his classic article on ‘original affluent society’. In this article, Sahlins argued for more leisure time among hunter-gatherers compared to modern workers and the absence of an innate drive for accumulation. [26] Notably, in both Dawn andWork, the authors’ take on Sahlins’ argument allows for making sense of their account of the transition from hunting, gathering, and fishing to cultivation and pastoralism.

To start with Work, Lucassen notes the qualifications that have been put forward by later research to Sahlins' argument, but, importantly, adds the time spent on care and alloparenting, as well as social obligations. What really distinguishes humans from non-human primates, for him, lies in the amount of time spent in social activities, enabled by more efficient methods of acquiring and preparing food.[27] He argues that social activities can be seen in a functionalist way, as a means to increase the chance of survival. Lucassen explores the interconnections between these specifically human social relations and technology and the environment, in a way he did not really do for the emergence of humankind itself. For example, he notes the shift from ‘immediate return’ (especially the hunting of large animals) to ‘delayed return’ forms of hunting and gathering (including collecting) during the later Palaeolithic.[28]

The ‘delayed return’ strategy allowed for the storage of foodstuffs, as well as more sedentary ways of life, something that became more pronounced with the shift to agriculture. Yet, as Lucassen rightly emphasises, the process of domestication of plants and animals was a drawn-out one that took place over thousands of years, in different parts of the globe. In social terms, labour relations were still characterised by reciprocity, but within a very different setting. Rather than being organised in bands, as in the Palaeolithic, Lucassen sees an interaction between households and tribes in the Neolithic. That is a rather generic picture, but he provides more detail on the impact of agriculture on the dynamics of these households, especially with regard to alloparenting and the burdens of both agricultural labour and an increased tempo of childbirth on women.

Lucassen cites Jared Diamond’s claim that increased population density and community size beyond a few hundred people created a need for central authority and use of force to control conflicts.[29] Yet, at the same time, he notes the presence of a persistent egalitarianism, which could endure for thousands of years. In effect, early farming communities were ‘trans-egalitarian’, in the sense that there was the potential for inequality and hierarchy to emerge but, at the same time, equality persisted over very long periods of time. Lucassen sees more evidence for the emergence of inequality among the societies of pastoral nomads that emerged in inner Eurasia and among the margins of the Fertile Crescent. As already noted by Engels, livestock was more suitable as a form of property than crops, and Lucassen adds the greater propensity of warrior cultures among pastoral nomads.[30]

In Work, then, the coming of agriculture creates a tendency for surplus, property, and inequality to emerge and develop, but in the face of a counter-tendency of persistent egalitarian social relations. The account inDawn, however, is much more radical. As noted earlier, apart from their focus on disproving a primordial egalitarianism, Graeber and Wengrow also put forward a different way of conceiving of hunting-gathering societies as encompassing enormous territories. According to them, people were free to abandon their community, travel for up to thousands of kilometres, and join another community. Apart from this freedom of movement, they also had the freedom to disobey authority and to (collectively) change the rules of social life, often on a seasonal basis that saw large gatherings of people. These constitute the three original freedoms.[31]

The increased sedentism of hunter-gatherers, and especially of farmers, put an end to the first freedom, that of habitual long-distance migration. But the conceptualisation of this process in Dawn differs from that ofWork, as well as most accounts of the development of agriculture, in moving away from seeing it as a tendency. Rather, in perhaps the strongest part of the book, Graeber and Wengrow deconstruct teleological and functionalist views of domestication, emphasising instead contingency and the importance of the play principle. Early farming, in their eyes, constitutes more an experiment, a play with cultigens without directly fulfilling a deep-rooted need. As proof of this they point to the slowness of the process, compared to the minimum amount of time required biologically.[32] Over a long period of time, there were moves into and out of agriculture and hunter-gatherer lifeways.

Graeber and Wengrow also point to the importance of the interactions between different communities that came with sedentary societies, in particular hunter-gatherers and early farmers. They see here a process of ‘schismogenesis’ at work, by which different societies define themselves relative to each other as opposites.[33] They discuss a number of examples, for example the case of temperate Europe, where an initial adoption of agriculture failed to take hold and was suppressed. Furthermore, the argument in Dawn against teleological reasoning does not stop with denying the functionalist account of the emergence of agriculture as satisfying a societal need, it also denies it in its result. For they deny that the result of agriculture, in the form of higher population densities and the possibility of surpluses, would in turn lead to socio-economic inequality and socio-political hierarchies.

Specifically, they argue against the view of Jared Diamond and others, which as we saw was accepted by Lucassen in Work, that increased group size automatically demands some form of central authority. This idea is, in part, thought to derive from the limits of the human brain to process social information, which limits close social groups to about 150 people.[34] Graeber and Wengrow point out the complexities of this matter, noting that larger gatherings among hunter-gatherers regularly transcended this number, while showing clear alternative forms of social interaction to socio-political hierarchy. More importantly, the first cities also show how larger groups could interact over a long period of time in a small space, without the hierarchical arrangements that would conventionally be expected for them. Graeber and Wengrow here build upon recent work by archaeologists that has yielded convincing demonstrations of this, in particular for the early cities of Mesoamerica such as Teotihuacan and Tlaxcallan.[35]

At the same time as denying an iron causal connection between scale and hierarchy, they deny, too, that there is such a thing as a single template of the state that emerges concurrently with the first cities. Instead, there exist, echoing Max Weber, three sources of social power: charismatic, through control over violence, and through control of information.[36] These can be combined in different ways to generate different socio-political configurations, some resembling more closely European views of the state and others radically distinct from it. There also exist what might be termed ‘post-revolutionary’ forms, where existing hierarchically-oriented and autocratic states were overturned and followed by more egalitarian forms. They point to the transition from the Classic to Postclassic Maya as an example of such a reversal away from autocracy.[37]

Overall, then, an interesting picture emerges. Just as there exists no primordial egalitarianism for Graeber and Wengrow, so there is no inevitable turn to the modernity of the state. Instead, we can see a host of possible alternatives, based on the freedom of human beings to create their own social arrangements. In this, they sometimes put forward audacious hypotheses. Highlighting the central role of women in what is the true backbone of civilisation, the techniques of everyday life, they propose, if somewhat in the margins of their overall argument, that social life of Minoan Crete was, in the main, controlled by women.[38] Owing, in part, to its intellectual history, this idea is likely to find many detractors.[39] However, if one shifts away from the reliance on art in Dawn to substantiate their hypothesis, to include household archaeology, then the hypothesis gains strength in a (strongly) modified form, as recent work shows.[40]

Lucassen is more conventional in Work regarding the development of hierarchy and the state, but the recent findings of greater egalitarianism in certain early cities and states have influenced him as well. First, he notes how, in Mesopotamia, the development of cities was at first characterised by tributary-redistributive labour relations, which existed for thousands of years before the first state institutions developed there.[41] At the same time, there was quite some variation between Mesopotamia and other cases of early cities and states, most importantly China, Egypt, and India.[42] Lucassen then traces the emergence of the state, with its mass capture of slaves and deployment of military and corvée labour. Again, Mesopotamia is of special interest because of what followed the massive state concentration of economic life during the short-lived Ur III dynasty of the late third millennium BCE.

The collapse of the dynasty led to the decentralisation (or ‘privatisation’) of Mesopotamian economic life, with the newly configured state being just one powerful actor among a plurality.[43] Most notably, the marketplace now emerged as an important institution, including evidence for the first millennium BCE for contracting wage-labour, both of the self-employed and slaves, by institutional employers such as temples. Of course, the presence of markets, commercial exchange, and forms of wage-labour leads to the question as to the capitalist character of economic life in these societies, a thorny debate that Lucassen can sidestep by having done away with the term altogether. As we shall see below, however, this move will come to haunt his analysis for the most recent era.

The first millennium BCE also saw an even more prolific spread of ‘capitalism’ in Eurasia due to what Lucassen terms ‘deep monetisation’. He sees coinage primarily in relation to the need to pay a wage, with the introduction of small denominations allowing for payment of as little as a day’s work or even less.[44] In one of the best parts of the book, Lucassen does an admirable job of tracing the different trajectories of monetisation in the Mediterranean, India, and China. He points out the complexities of the intertwined ‘labour market’ and slavery, and how coinage gradually changed the enduring tributary-redistributive regime of Egypt. Notably, the development of coinage was carried along quite different lines in China, where it is most closely connected to work performed for the state, with either a free labour market or mass slavery being largely absent. As such, Lucassen stresses variation, also bringing up developments in the pre-Columbian Americas.

Differences can also be noted in the trajectories of deep monetisation, with de-monetisation taking place in both Europe and India during the later first millennium CE, while China continued along its earlier path. Eventually, coinage returned to both Europe and India, which once again show the presence of commercialised economies. These developments set the scene for another strong and insightful chapter in Work, on the globalisation of labour relations between 1500 CE and 1800 CE. Lucassen distinguishes between a number of different ‘islands’, which followed different pathways of development. In East Asia there is a labour-intensive regime, which, for a long time, retained parity with the capital-intensive regime in western Europe, the latter also drawing upon slavery and colonial-tributary relations in overseas regions. Finally, there is the labour-extensive, (second) serfdom-based regime of eastern Europe.

At this point, something strange happens in Work. Lucassen abandons his comparative analysis of different labour regimes between different world regions, and instead treats post-1800 labour relations thematically. Although his analysis is still interesting, I felt this to be snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, in that the patterns of the previous chapters are not clearly connected to the current era. For example, he treats the industrial revolution briefly, but does not really explore how it is to be related to the capital-intensive regime of western Europe discussed in the previous chapter. Similarly, Lucassen discusses unfree labour and the shortcomings of the welfare state in post-revolutionary China and the Soviet Union, but is that really all that can be said about these regimes? Is it not more interesting to relate these developments to what came before, to the labour-intensive and extensive regimes that preceded them? This lack of an explicit connection between past and present seems a missed opportunity.

On reflection, it seems to me that this move may be, at least in part, attributable to the power of contemporary discourse. Of particular note in this is the debate between primitivism and modernism in what used to be known as economic anthropology. The denial of market exchange in the ancient world by Polanyi and others, and the emphasis on redistributive alternatives, has crumbled in the face of the evidence accumulated over the previous decades.[45] Lucassen’s discussion of the Mesopotamian economic trajectory in Work is a case in point of this progress. Consequently, there is a sense that the tenets of modernism have won out, and, as such, it has become something of a trend to disparage the ideas of Polanyi and his ilk as a rear-guard resistance to the inexorability of modern economic logic. Unfortunately, owing to a combination of less than rigorous methodology and the prevalence of contemporary ideology, the humanities and social sciences sometimes follow such fashionable trends even where their intellectual strength would not be so apparent to outsiders.

Lucassen is no devotee of this trend, for he recognises tributary-redistributive relations in many cases. However, he also remains within the boundaries of the primitivism/modernism debate, in the sense that market exchange and wage-labour seem to function as indicators of modernity. He emphasises in his discussion of pre-coinage Mesopotamia that there all the basic categories of labour relations were present, and that from then on ‘the history of work may be conceived as an endless shift between these basic forms’.[46] For, during the second and first millennia BCE in this area, independent labour for the market and parties employing labour were added to the previously introduced reciprocal, tributary-redistributive, slave, and wage-labour. From such a perspective, it is less surprising to see a gradualism in his account of the long-term domination of market economies, even if taking into account the shifts, alternatives, and reversals along this route. Markets followed a template established early on.

Furthermore, and here the Dutch scholarly context of Lucassen’s work is significant, it builds upon studies that emphasise the long-term dynamics of market exchange.[47] What vanishes here, of course, is either viewing the emergence of capitalism in early modern England as a relatively minor variation on a theme, or somehow equating capitalism itself with a labour market and hence extending it back to Mesopotamia. Lucassen, as noted earlier, simply drops capitalism as a concept of relevance. From a strictly empirical perspective, it might, indeed, be less relevant to his taxonomy of labour relations. For one could indeed earn a wage from a market long before capitalism emerged. Yet does the accumulation of capitals hold no relevance for the history of work? This is unimaginable, but the question of capital and the conditions for its accumulation is obscured by the debate on markets in the primitivism/modernism debate. And, aside from that, it is also an intrinsically uncomfortable one as it reintroduces the rawness of class and domination into the bloodless discourse of systems of distribution and exchange.

It matters quite a bit, in fact, if the wage-labour exchanged on the marketplace is that of slaves and self-employed farmers or artisans or of a mass of proletarians who are dispossessed of the means of production. Although, in each, labour is exchanged for a (monetary) reward, the conditions for capital accumulation are vastly different. Indeed, in the briefest of asides on market exchange in ancient Mesoamerica, Marx implies that, despite the vastness of markets there, the medium of cacao beans used in exchange made it simply impossible to accumulate capital in a lasting way.[48] What distinguished capitalism, of course, is the process of primitive accumulation that led to a decisive shift in the conditions for capital accumulation. It would be highly instructive to trace the ‘prehistory’ of primitive accumulation, especially in relation to the early forms of capital accumulation, things already hinted at by Marx. Doing so may also shed new light on the significance of the ‘great divergence’ between western Europe and East Asia.

For, if, in China, Japan, and to some degree also India, it is possible to see a labour-intensive rather than capital-intensive pathways, the question may be asked whether the latter path was the only one to a ‘modern economy’. That is, could not the different civilisations of East Asia have achieved the same ‘level’, in terms of quantitative indicators, as the economies of western Europe, but with qualitatively quite distinct relations of production? That this should appear a radical question is only because it is customary to reason from the result, from the violent interventions and opening up of China, India, and Japan and the socio-economic changes these events brought. Imperialism, of course, depended upon the geopolitical situation in Europe and North America, which could easily have been different in ways that would have allowed a more independent trajectory for East Asia.

The question of alternatives can be thought through more comprehensively. For might there not be some connection between the distinct patterns traced by Lucassen before 1800 for different world regions and what came after? Might, in other words, there not be lurking considerable divergence within the convergence of labour relations he emphasises so strongly in the last two chapters of Work? In particular, one thinks of the Russian Revolution and the Soviet system that it brought about, and its conceptualisation within the context of the Russian imperialist state and its peculiar form of capitalism. Such questions were hotly debated among Soviet historians, and the ideas of the ‘New Direction’ in Soviet historiography are, in some ways, still relevant for grasping the durability of alternative Russian pathways of economic development.[49] Conversely, might the different, labour-intensive trajectories in East Asia and their enduring effects have some relevance for understanding the different fates of the Russian and Chinese Revolutions?

All of these questions are subsumed under Lucassen’s emphasis on the global convergence of labour relations. One wonders what Graeber and Wengrow would have written about such questions in the sequels they had planned for Dawn, but sadly prevented by the untimely death of David Graeber.[50] Even so, Dawn andWork cover enough of the same terrain to draw some general conclusions as to their methods and findings, especially in relation to the genre of ‘big questions’ identified at the beginning of this review. As noted earlier, the eclecticism marking this genre can be seen most clearly inDawn, with its relentless overthrowing of accepted ideas and positing alternatives that, at times, are more like advance hypotheses than arguments fully thought through. Their daring ideas about the Bronze Age civilisations of Crete and the Indus valley are a case in point. These ideas could be indulged more easily, however, if they were the result of a systematic, methodological approach.

Here, however, Dawn is found wanting. Graeber and Wengrow formulate a number of principles that structure the discussion, but lacking is an exploration of the causes behind the different patterns that they so enjoyably present to the reader. For example, why did societies in Mesoamerica develop along such different lines that Graeber and Wengrow can hold them up as examples disproving accepted wisdom? Surely, some reasons can be found to explain this difference? Marx, as we saw, gave a clue, and more recent scholarship has explored the issue from similar angles.[51] To seek causes does not imply subjecting societies to a straitjacket of theoretical discourse. Rather more radically, the contrary cases presented in Dawn could actually help to induce a rethinking of historical causation still further away from unilineal models of development. To achieve this end, a stronger methodological framework will be needed.

As noted, Lucassen in Work is more focused methodologically given his use of the taxonomy of labour relations developed at the IISH. He also admirably explores historical causation in a comparative sense. Certainly, the eclecticism of the genre is absent in the book, making it a breath of fresh air in the rather stale mixing bowl of opinionated argumentation that characterises the genre. At the same time, the critical aspect of comparison is snowed under, at times, by the focus on the overall, global historical trajectory. This focus can be seen in that several alternatives, notably Mesoamerica again, are not thought through as alternatives, but, rather, are merely situated in their historical place within the overall scheme of things. Lucassen’s reluctance to theorise also prevents him from taking a more critical stance at times, as we saw with the acceptance of Jared Diamond’s ideas on scale and authority, even in the face of the recognition of durable egalitarianism.

Of course, if either Dawn orWork had emphasised a critical methodological discussion, this would have lessened their coverage of ‘everything’, or, at least, have placed the discussion at a level of abstraction less appealing to many readers. Here, we come to the question of the other major aspect of the ‘big questions’ genre, that of subjectivity and audience. As noted earlier, Lucassen is deeply uneasy with the dominant narrative of globalist capitalism. With the convergence of labour relations, it is not clear that much can be done about this, it seems. In his ‘outlook’, he notes the continuing appeal of reciprocity and egalitarianism, based on our long evolutionary past.[52] He argues that there are two ways to achieve this. The first is by the levelling of incomes through a welfare state, in which some inequality and aggrandisers are tolerated. The second way is through what he terms a ‘redistributive theocracy’, which encompasses both ancient cases like Egypt and the various civilisations of the pre-Columbian Americas, and, in the modern era, the Soviet Union.

Lucassen does not express a preference between the two options, but one can safely assume that few among his readership fancy living in a redistributive theocracy with all kinds of unfree labour. As such, one can infer a broadly social-democratic subjectivity for Work, if not necessarily a left perspective that is worker-centred. It accepts the convergence of labour relations through globalisation and cannot imagine either regional or future alternatives to this development. There appears to be no place for a future form of free and associated labour in the taxonomy of labour relations. By contrast, inDawn, the authors positively crave something radically different, which they frame as part of recovering the ancient freedom to shape the society in which one lives at will. They effectively mobilise an enormous amount of evidence for alternative forms of social life to present this freedom as more or less common sense. As such, its subjectivity is both radical and voluntaristic, and this argument will appeal greatly to those activists and strategists that favour direct action.[53]

Yet this argument of Graeber and Wengrow only really holds if one accepts their view of the ‘dawn’, where they emphasise freedom rather than egalitarianism as the defining principle. As noted in this review, this is a partial view of the Palaeolithic, and, moreover, ignores the radical critique of origins found in Rousseau. Search all you will, it is quite impossible to discover a set of principles on which social life is based and which neatly allows us to make sense of ‘everything’. Behind the freedom of Dawn and the reciprocity ofWork lies an abyss that negates their attempts to make sense of it all, and which includes a complex interaction between biology, ecology, technology, language, and symbolism, as well as forms of social interaction. For starters, decentring the metabolism of humans within nature makes it hard to make any sense of the human condition. In addition, the human will itself may not be so free, when considered from the perspective of deep prehistory.[54]

For Marxists, then, Dawn andWork are of twofold interest. First, they represent a left-wing expansion of the ‘big questions’ genre that is of some ideological significance. For both question, in radically different ways, the standard view of a transition to a communist society. InWork, this is simply beyond the pale, being somehow lumped in with the category of redistributive theocracies. The critique ofDawn is more subtle, in that it changes the terms of future possibilities rather than denying them. It eschews the mode of production, the basis for thinking a transition in ‘traditional’ terms, instead positing principles that remain present in any kind of society, such as the ‘private property’ rooted in the sacred. Thus, any society is, in effect, a mixture of the same things that have been around since the last phase of the Palaeolithic, albeit in radically different proportions. Gone, then, is the possibility of arranging society in a qualitatively different way, in making a decisive break with past principles and proceeding from new ones.[55]

Additionally, the voluntaristic view of social change is rather incredible, in that the material conditions are pushed far to the back in favour of the notional freedom to change social arrangements based on late Palaeolithic pedigrees. This ties in with the rejection of the mode of production in Dawn, and, indeed, the absence of any comparative evaluation of the causal factors driving different forms of societies. However, provided that a historical-materialist reader holds on to their concepts and methodology, there is in fact much to learn from and enjoy inDawn andWork, just as, for example, much can be learned from the work of Thomas Piketty. The examples and analysis of a great variety of cases that diverge from previous ideas about historical development provide a challenge that calls for a response, one that harnesses both the weightier conceptual framework of historical materialism and new ways of creating and interpreting large historical datasets. In this way the fresh findings from the historical sciences will not spoil from the theoretical indigestion that results from the discourse of the ‘big questions’ genre.

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Graeber, David 2011, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, New York, NY: Melville House.

Graeber, David 2014, ‘What’s the Point If We Can’t Have Fun?’, The Baffler, 24, available at: <https://thebaffler.com/salvos/whats-the-point-if-we-cant-have-fun>.

Graeber, David and David Wengrow 2021, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, London: Penguin.

Harari, Yuval Noah 2018, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, London: Jonathan Cape.

Hirth, Kenneth 2020, The Organization of Ancient Economies: A Global Perspective, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Holmes, Brooke 2013, ‘The Poetic Logic of Negative Exceptionalism: From a State of Nature to Social Life in Lucretius, Book Five’, in Lucretius: Poetry, Philosophy, Science, edited by Daryn Lehoux, Andrew Morrison and Alison Sharrock, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kohler, Timothy, Michael Smith, Amy Bogaard, Christian Peterson, Alleen Betzenhauser, Gary Feinman, Rahul Oka, Matthew Pailes, Anna Marie Prentiss, Elizabeth Stone, Timothy Dennehy and Laura Ellyson 2018, ‘Deep Inequality: Summary and Conclusions’, in Ten Thousand Years of Inequality: The Archaeology of Wealth Differences, edited by Timothy Kohler and Michael Smith, Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press.

Kowalewski, Stephen 2012, ‘A Theory of the Mesoamerican Economy’, Research in Economic Anthropology, 32: 187–224.

Lucassen, Jan 2021, The Story of Work: A New History of Humankind, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Markwick, Roger 2001, Rewriting History in Soviet Russia: The Politics of Revisionist Historiography, 1956–1974, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Marx, Karl 1973, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, translated by Martin Nicolaus, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

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

Marx, Karl 1986, ‘Drafts of The Civil War in France’, inMarx/Engels Collected Works, Volume 22, Moscow: Progress Publishers.

Morris, Ian 2015, Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels: How Human Values Evolve, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 1997, The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, edited by Victor Gourevitch, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sahlins, Marshall 1972, Stone Age Economics, Chicago, IL: Aldine Publishing Company.

Scott, James 2017, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Van Bavel, Bas 2016, The Invisible Hand? How Market Economies Have Emerged and Declined since AD 500, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

[1] Althusser 2017, p. 24.

[2] The ‘cosmic connection’ is made most evident in Christian 2018. See also the Big History project sponsored by Bill Gates for an attempt to disseminate this approach to classrooms worldwide.

[3] The chapter entitled ‘My correct views on everything’ in Morris 2015 is a case in point.

[4] Both Yuval Harari and Niall Ferguson, top-end exemplars of the genre, are listed for fees of over 100,000 dollars for in-person speaking events, as listed on the website of the Aurum Speakers Bureau (<https://www.aurumbureau.com/speakers/>).

[5] Harari 2018.

[6] Lucassen 2021, p. ix.

[7] The controversial and provocative statement on communism as a habitual, everyday practice is hardly referred to in Dawn, however, in contrast to Graeber’s earlier ‘big question’ book on debt: Graeber 2011, pp. 94–102. Why this should be so is hard to fathom, and the principles of neither exchange nor hierarchy in that book are invoked inDawn.

[8] Graeber 2014.

[9] The taxonomy and the justification for the definitions used can be found on the website of the project, Global Collaboratory of Labour Relations 1500–2000 (<https://iisg.amsterdam/nl/data/datawebsites/history-of-labour-relations-1500-2000>).

[10] Lucassen 2021, p. xvii.

[11] See especially Gamble 2013, a book that cannot be recommended enough given that it places all these interactions within a clear spatio-temporal perspective, highlighting the role of different migratory episodes in deep human history.

[12] Graeber and Wengrow 2021, pp. 147–8.

[13] Graeber and Wengrow 2021, pp. 94–5.

[14] Campbell 2003, Appendix B. See also Holmes 2013 for a broader exposition of description-by-negation in the case of Lucretius, an author crucial for the later reception of Greco-Roman ideas on early humankind.

[15] See, on this, Althusser 2019, especially the figure on p. 75.

[16] Rousseau 1997, pp. 185–6.

[17] Graeber and Wengrow 2021, p. 100.

[18] Graeber and Wengrow 2021, p. 143.

[19] Graeber and Wengrow 2021, pp. 177–84.

[20] Graeber and Wengrow 2021, pp. 180–1.

[21] Graeber and Wengrow 2021, p. 184.

[22] Marx 1976, p. 286.

[23]Marx 1976, p. 284.

[24]Gamble 2007 develops his account of the development of technology, and much else, in early humankind precisely on the basis of the material forms of containers and instruments.

[25] Marx 1976, pp. 650–1.

[26]This essay was collected in Sahlins 1972.

[27] Lucassen 2021, p. 41.

[28] Lucassen 2021, p. 31.

[29] Lucassen 2021, pp. 89–90.

[30]Lucassen 2021, pp. 84–8. Cf. Engels 1990, pp. 162–3. This perspective seems altogether more plausible than the exaltation of nomadic warriors in Scott 2017, Chapter 7, especially pp. 231–4.

[31] Graeber and Wengrow 2021, p. 456.

[32] Graeber and Wengrow 2021, pp. 255–7.

[33] Graeber and Wengrow 2021, pp. 79–80.

[34]The implications of this number were more fully explored by Dunbar and his colleagues during the Lucy to Language project, discussed at length in Gamble, Gowlett and Dunbar 2014. Just as significant, and perhaps more so, than the inferred need for charismatic leadership to ‘control’ large groups of people, is the exploration of the links between increased community size and various communication technologies.

[35]Although not referred to in Dawn, much insight can be gained from attempts to calculate Gini coefficients of unequal access to goods, which show Teotihuacan with remarkable low scores that indicate high degrees of equality: Kohler, Smith, Bogaard, Peterson, Betzenhauser, Feinman, Oka, Pailes, Prentiss, Stone, Dennehy and Ellyson 2018, pp. 293–5, Table 11.1. The case of Tlaxcallan is well-documented both via ethnohistory and archaeology: see Fargher, Blanton and Espinoza 2010.

[36] Graeber and Wengrow 2021, p. 396.

[37] Graeber and Wengrow 2021, pp. 407–9.

[38] Graeber and Wengrow 2021, pp. 463–8.

[39]Much has been written on Minoan archaeology and its connection to modern intellectual trends, and even mythmaking, most notably in Gere 2009. As a result, it is now rather hard to disentangle interpretations of Minoan society, for example as having women in positions of power, from the intellectual context within which they were formulated.

[40] For example, Driessen 2012.

[41] Lucassen 2021, pp. pp. 91–3.

[42] As summarised insightfully in Lucassen 2021, p. 78, figure 3.

[43] Lucassen 2021, pp. 100–2.

[44] Lucassen 2021, p. 118.

[45]A good overview of the state of the field can be found in Hirth 2020.

[46] Lucassen 2021, p. 100.

[47]In particular, but certainly not limited to, the work of Bas van Bavel on the cyclical development of market economies, starting with medieval Mesopotamia: Van Bavel 2016.

[48]Marx 1973, p. 833.

[49]Markwick 2001, pp. 89–97.

[50]Important clues can be found in an early article of Graeber’s on the mode of production, where he counters moves to read capitalism into the world of Greco-Roman antiquity by turning the tables, arguing, instead, that modern capitalism can be seen as an extension of ancient slavery: Graeber 2006. See, on this question also his insightful discussion of Roman law in Debt: Graeber 2011, pp. 198–207.

[51]Kowalewski 2012.

[52] Lucassen 2021, pp. 435–7.

[53]Inspired by Kropotkin, Graeber argued for a close connection between ethnography and direct action, e.g. Graeber 2008, even as he disavowed attempts to demarcate his status as that of an anarchist anthropologist.

[54] Ironically, it is through ethnography that the limits of individualist conceptions of personhood had been first recognised, and which is now also explored for early humans: see Gamble 2007, Chapter 5.

[55] Marx 1986, p. 491.

By Stephen J. Miller

Marxists have long debated how to conceptualise the absolutist states of early modern Europe. Absolutism calls to mind royal sovereignty, whereas feudalism indicates decentralised seigneurial authority. Absolutism thus gives the impression of opposing feudal authority. If absolutism militated against feudalism, did it therefore represent progress? Did it emerge along with, or on account of, capitalism? Friedrich Engels argued in 1884, in The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, that absolute monarchies developed in a period of equilibrium in the class struggle between the old feudal nobility and the new urban bourgeoisie. The state power, mediating between the two social classes, acquired a degree of independence from both of them. Absolute monarchy took power from the nobles but left them with indirect influence in the royal court, army, and the higher administration, and allowed them to plunder the peasantry and state treasury. The monarchy, at the same time, protected the bourgeoisie through tariffs, monopolies and a relatively orderly administration of public affairs and justice.[1]

These reflections shaped Marxist and non-Marxist interpretations of the absolutist state for about a century. Georges Lefebvre’s The Origins of the French Revolution, long the standard work on the subject, presented the nobility as a privileged class enjoying the benefits of feudal rights. The nobility fought to take power back from royal absolutism in the eighteenth century. During this same period, the bourgeoisie grew in wealth and numbers, thanks to the expansion of industry and commerce, elaborated an enlightened ideology, and took power from the nobility in 1789.[2]

Since the 1970s, a growing number of historians, guided by Marxists, challenged this view of the monarchy. They showed that French kings constructed absolutism by consolidating the feudal authority of nobles, integrating them into the state, and managing their divergent interests. The nobles used the various branches of the state coercively to take the surplus from peasant production, like they had under feudalism, rather than through capitalist free contract. In so far as the bourgeoisie developed, it did so in accordance with this feudal logic, parlaying gains from trade into positions within the absolutist state.

Jon Elster does not take up these debates directly, but the evidence and insight, elaborated in France Before 1789: The Unraveling of an Absolutist Regime, place this book within the succession of histories of absolutism written since the 1970s. A Norwegian scholar, Elster earned his PhD from the Université Paris 5 René Descartes in 1972 with a dissertation on Karl Marx written under the direction of Raymond Aron. He has written dozens of books, including titles on ancient Hebrew and Greek thought, Leibniz, the social sciences, and the sociology of rationality and irrationality. Elster achieved renown as a theorist of analytical Marxism, an intellectual movement of the 1980s, which applied techniques of the social sciences, such as rational choice theory, to elucidate Marxist concepts.

Elster finds that one of the enduring features of the entire period, from the personal reign of Louis XIV in 1661 until the Revolution of 1789, was the possession of power as hereditary property. Patrimonial governance precluded bureaucratic rationality. The king, as the ancestral holder of the state, had the right to evoke cases from the tribunals and have them judged by his agents, making the royal administration judge in the cases brought against it. Such patrimonialism was replicated on the local level in the form of seigneurial justice, owned by lords, whose judges decided cases regarding feudal domains. The number of gallows on the lords’ domains reflected their rank in ancien régime society. Elster argues that seigneurial justice, like venal offices and other forms of hereditary power, distinguished elites from common subjects much more than did tax exemptions.

It was Marxist scholars of the 1980s and 1990s who drew attention to the patrimonial features of absolutism. Indeed, it is strange, given Elster’s dissertation and books on Marx, that he has ignored this literature in France Before 1789. William Beik, for instance, argued that venality tied absolutism to its feudal past by consecrating a new form of private ownership of public authority, allowing rich and influential subjects to share in the profits and prestige of the state. Louis XIV could not take government power from the holders of venal and seigneurial rights, because he did not have a bureaucracy at his disposal or an alternative means of maintaining order. Kings therefore relied on provincial elites, who used the king’s name to wield government authority to their advantage. ‘Landlords combined the power to command and judge with the right to collect dues and dominate the local economy, each power supported the other.’[3]

Though Elster has ignored Beik, he refers to Herbert Lüthy’s similar argument that rent extraction permeated the monarchy. Wealth expanded in the eighteenth century, Lüthy maintained, as upper-class consumption of luxury goods stimulated artisanal production. The century saw industrial and technical progress without much capitalist concentration nor changes to the social structure. Peasant smallholders did not suffer expropriation and did not benefit from the prosperity. The dominant class appropriated the peasants’ and artisans’ surpluses thanks to official positions embedded in the monarchy. The crown had eliminated the feudal competitors for power, transforming them into clients, by the second half of the seventeenth century. Henceforth, feudalism consisted of a hierarchy of rights and properties within the state (entitling their possessors to revenue) rather than a hierarchy of fiefs as it had in centuries past. This ancien régime feudalism limited the king’s power, because the state offices diverted revenue from royal coffers to the private fortunes of elites.[4]

Rafe Blaufarb has shown that patrimonial authorities extended beyond state offices to the landholding system of the ancien régime. Feudalism, as understood in the eighteenth century, denoted a constitutional form based on privately-owned public power and hierarchical landholding. Every time a lord took possession of a fief, the tenants had to drop to their knees publicly and ceremonially acknowledge that they held their properties from their new master. This tenurial system, which remained until the revolutionary era, injected notions of lordly superiority and personal servitude into property ownership.[5]

One of the merits of France Before 1789 is to show that when venal officers, especially the high justices orparlementaires, referred to the monarchical constitution, they meant both the rentier offices in the state described by Lüthy as well as the feudal property described by Blaufarb.Indeed, Elster drew on his years of study of political psychology to explain how the persistence of feudal rights fuelled the violent upheavals of the revolutionary era. Face-to-face contempt, which the peasants routinely experienced in their dealings with the lords and their stewards, left deeper marks than did envy at a distance. The nobles’ power over their tenants in the form of seigneurial justice stirred more resentment than did their tax exemptions. Seigneurial exactions heightened the peasants’ sensitivity to conjunctural events and bred interpretations of malignity. Subsistence crises, for instance, led the populace to seek culprits. People believed that the nobles intentionally starved the people.

Elster offers a more informative overview of ruling-class exactions than have previous historians. Few societies have an inequality extraction ratio of 100 percent. This ratio would mean that a small upper class receives the whole national product minus what is needed for working people to survive. ‘In contemporary France … [the inequality extraction ratio] is about 32 percent. In England and Wales in 1759, it was 55 percent. In France in 1788, it was 76 percent, comparable to the Roman Empire in 14 A.D.’[6]

Elster, in a word, offers an inciteful analysis of the power relations of French absolutism and the political attitudes these relations elicited. Since Elster’s focus, clearly conveyed in the title, is ancien régime France, it may seem unfair to criticise the absence of a temporal and spatial analysis of how this regime came into being or how it differed from other early modern states. Yet this absence results from Elster’s intellectual formation. Ellen Meiksins Wood argued – in a 1989 essay on ‘Rational Choice Marxists’, including Jon Elster – that this school of thought describes social forms as already-given, static property relations peopled with rational individuals in possession of endowments and relational attributes. Rational Choice Marxism specifies the context in which rational choices are made. But how this context came into being – and how the conflicts, characteristic of it, shape the evolution of history – is beyond the remit of Rational Choice Marxism.[7] Thus, although Elster’s evidence and argumentation show that the elites of all three estates pursued positions of prestige and power and that they used the positions to appropriate the economic surplus of the realm, he does not show how these social relations related to the feudal past or capitalist future, how they emerged or changed over time. The index does not even contain entries for feudalism, capitalism, or the bourgeoisie.

Henry Heller, by contrast, contends that capitalist exploitation of labour-power became more prevalent, at the expense of feudal rent extraction, over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Heller thus reaffirms Lefebvre’s depiction of a rising bourgeoisie anxious to break open the stifling structures of the ancien régime. Other scholars, such as William Sewell, argue that, although the expansion of manufacturing and commerce did not give rise to a bourgeoisie conscious of itself as a revolutionary class, the growth of commodity production did enlarge the ranks of the wealthy educated classes, lay the basis for a public sphere of intellectual debate, and alter conceptions of social difference from the qualitative to quantitative, from birth to wealth. People’s participation in the logic of the market – in which a person’s value depended on their capital rather than their hereditary rank – nurtured notions of civic equality inimical to privilege and arbitrary government.[8] One finds no trace of these arguments in France Before 1789.

Elster, we have seen, instead focuses on the structure of lordships and offices offering access to prestige, power, and wealth. Yet, because he does not distinguish these structures from what preceded them, he leaves the reader with no way of understanding why elites came to rely on heritable forms of authority. For this historical dimension, one need only consult the Annales School. Guy Fourquin, synthesising this research, showed that serfdom declined, as the pressure and resistance of peasant communities led the lords of Mâconnais, Normandy, Picardy, and all the regions of the West, as well as the Île-de-France, to grant liberty to their dependents in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. These enfranchisements consisted of legal documents which detailed fixed annual payments owed by the peasants in lieu of the arbitrary levies previously imposed by the lords. Serfs in other parts of France were tempted to flee to these places of liberty. Villagers across the realm, seeing the proliferation of emancipations, no longer tolerated servile bonds.[9]

Robert Brenner elaborates that, from the twelfth century onward, the lords sought to stem the erosion of their income – as the value of the fixed payments diminished due to inflation – by attracting peasants to schemes of colonisation. The lords enticed peasants to clear and farm new lands with offers of freedom from arbitrary levies and the right to inherit their plots. Other lords in northern France and neighbouring areas had to offer similar advantages to dissuade their dependents from fleeing and joining these colonisation projects.[10]

The feudal regime continued to erode in this way until the emergence of royal authority toward the end of the crisis of the fourteenth century. Royal tribunals asserted their authority relative to the lords’ jurisdictions, but based their judgements on local customs, and thereby enshrined seigneurial law in the jurisprudence. The courts recognised the heritability of peasant tenures yet perpetuated the seigneurial burdens on them. As the peasants reoccupied abandoned lands in the period of reconstruction after the Hundred Years’ War, the lords made periodic surveys to keep a record of rights and verify which parcels belonged to their domains. They carried out these surveys at shorter intervals and with greater precision in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The lords enjoyed the right, acknowledged over a large part of the realm, to claim from their peasants, every twenty or thirty years, the costs incurred in revising the volumes detailing the exactions to which the peasants were liable. The tribunals of emergent absolutism thus authorised innumerable petty encroachments, which accumulated a seigneurial burden on the peasants. The intendants, primarily fiscal agents, kept this feudal reaction in check by protecting rural communities, as sources of royal taxation, from excessive exploitation but, as servants of the crown, respected the seigneurial regime as a mainstay of the state and social order.[11]

By the eighteenth century, France’s resources consisted of fertile and diverse lands, and a large laborious population. The peasants had to make a living as well as pay taxes, seigneurial dues and tithes. They could hope to enlarge their holdings and improve the status of their families. Although they rarely achieved all these goals, their efforts to do so explain France’s wealth and power relative to other monarchies of Europe. Peasants engaged in many varied activities to meet the needs of their families and generate the necessary surplus for taxation. Specialisation was the dangerous exception since cornfields were particularly liable to crop failure. The typical peasant was therefore an amalgam of market gardener, mixed farmer, vine-grower, day labourer, spinner or weaver, blacksmith, or nail-smith, occasionally an innkeeper, and usually a poacher and sometimes a smuggler.[12]

The labouring population, in this way, retained control over the means of subsistence and production. France did not go through a process of primitive accumulation in which unfree peasants and independent producers became free wage workers left with nothing but labour to sell. Since the peasants continued to produce their own food and most of the other goods they needed to survive, money and commodities could not be transformed, through the purchase of labour-power, into capital.[13] To the contrary, the exploitation of the peasants remained within the feudal mode of previous centuries. The emergence of the absolutist state did not entail a struggle for power against the autonomous authority of feudal lords. Over the course of the early modern period, the monarchy expanded its authority, and multiplied the number of venal tribunals, by enforcing the legal customs negotiated during the class conflicts of the feudal era. Although these customs confirmed the heritability of the peasants’ plots of land and fixed their payments to the lords, the customs also confirmed seigneurial jurisdictions and privileges.

Elster analyses the peasants’ resistance to the demands of the state and lords. He draws on his knowledge of political psychology and rational choice theory to show that, although people felt indignation when they observed an injustice targeting another person, this emotion proved weaker than the one triggered by being the actual victim. Observing injustice at a distance could still incite collective action when large groups of observers felt indignation together. Alternatively, when many people suffered together as victims, their responses depended on perceptions of what others would do. People turned out in numbers when they felt sure that they would not be acting alone. Such collective action typically consisted of resistance to the demands of the authorities, or of attacks on property, records, or persons. Insurrections rarely consisted of indiscriminate looting.

Meiksins Wood argued, in her essay on Rational Choice Marxism, that, however illuminating the foregoing mode of analysis may be, it abstracts its subjects from historically specific relations and endows them with choices characteristic of autonomous individuals in a capitalist society. In the case of eighteenth-century France, these relations encompassed the peasant community, the original characteristic of French rural history, which formed the basis of the peasants’ livelihood and conception of justice.[14] The peasants held plots of land in different parts of villages to avoid seeing adverse weather or crop disease wipe out their entire harvest and subsistence. It would have been irrational to expend the time and money required to fence off the strips of land and exclude one another’s farm animals from them. Villagers therefore had common crop rotations and gathered their cattle in a herd with rights to pasture over all the land after the harvest. Common rights formed an even stronger bond than these traditions of collective farming. Households depended on common grazing areas in waste or woodlands even when they had access to meadows and fallow fields. Woodlands also provided timber. Marshes provided peat and rushes. Peasants used the brush on heaths for bedding, and the turves, broom, and bracken for mulches. These terrains also served as a reserve of arable land when the population expanded. The collective resources and grazing rights made smallholders and manual labourers less dependent on hiring themselves out to noble and bourgeois landowners. The intendants, moreover, helped keep the rural community together for the purpose of policing, raising militia men, and collecting taxes.[15]

Elster never acknowledges the existence of the peasant community, even though it had formed the framework of political calculations since at least the year 1000. During the crisis of the feudal economy in the early decades of the fourteenth century, the lords’ encroachments on collective rights to moors and forests, used by the peasants for pasture and additional farmland, sparked bitter, violent uprisings. Unrest hardly abated over the following centuries. Peasants and artisans took part in at least 8,500 rebellions against restrictions on use rights, seigneurial exactions, and above all fiscal officers from 1660 to 1789. The passing of time did not change the violent character of these episodes. The solidarity of the common people remained everywhere the norm.[16]

These rebellions, pitting the peasant community against the authorities, arose out of what Robert Brenner has termed the social-property relations of early modern France. Members of communities perceived that the tax officials and powerholders were the sources of their misery. The monarchy financed a massive structure of offices by increasing taxes on the peasant communities, whose members had established essentially full property rights in the land. Seigneurs maintained relatively restricted access to demesne land and feudal levies on the peasantry, and thus had less ability or interest in resisting the expansion of the absolutist state. The monarchy effectively reorganised much of the aristocratic class within itself by assembling a patrimonial group. Many nobles no doubt asserted particular privileges, such as tax exemptions and the liberties of local estates, against the centralising monarchy. Yet they also saw the absolutist state as a critical source of offices and other forms of privilege supported ultimately by arbitrary taxation.[17]

Pierre Goubert estimated that, under Louis XIV, a tenth of the population, comprising nearly all the nobility, most of the clergy and the whole of the bourgeoisie – the privileged classes, in a word – lived off the revenue scraped from the land by the inhabitants of the countryside and swelled and transformed by their labour and the labour of town workers. The privileged classes received a third of the common people’s surplus by dint of their land managers and sharecroppers, and another third by dint of seigneurial rights: quitrents, as well as the innumerable fees, minor exactions, levies on property sales and so forth. Another means of receiving revenue from the land consisted of pensions, benefices, offices, and governorships bestowed by the king on his favourites and loyal servants.[18]

The bourgeoisie – comprising officials on the road to ennoblement, state pensioners (especially in Paris), elites with a private income, and even some members of trades and manufacturers – took nearly as much revenue from the country as did the nobles. Members of the bourgeoisie owned land, only less than did nobles. They received revenue from loans to the peasants and from positions as the nobles’ land managers. They also gained revenue by belonging to the companies of tax farmers, which granted the king the estimated revenue of his dues and taxes, and then collected an even greater sum from the peasantry. The bourgeoisie thus obtained wealth in the same way as the nobility did. The middle classes aimed to join the second estate.[19]

Of course, the bourgeoisie, despite sharing the same forms of wealth and status as the nobles, led a revolution against them in 1789. Elster offers intriguing insights into how it was possible for the bourgeoisie, as exploiters, to lead a revolution against nobles belonging to the same dominant class. Offices and privileges, Elster explains, formed a cascade of ranks, each one publicly displaying to the ones below that they were beneath consideration, worthless, or deserving of scorn. Since the nobles enjoyed hereditary rights to the top ranks in the monarchy, it was only natural for them to believe in the quality of their biological endowment. New nobles could prove this quality over the course of at least two or three generations. Nobles created a cult of ancestry and old aristocratic names. During the 1500s, the Estates General proved incapable of uniting and imposing regular meetings on the crown because of interminable conflicts over préséance. In 1614, for instance, the nobles reacted furiously to the Third Estate’s claim to be the nobles’ ‘younger brothers’ and thus of the same blood. Meetings of the Estates General degenerated into internecine strife when such issues of vanity andamour-propre were at stake. Contempt for subordinates did not stop at the Third Estate. Town judges looked down on merchants, who did the same to the labouring population. The only way to avoid enduring public displays of contempt was to acknowledge one’s inferiority.

Elster argues that, in relations between the bourgeoisie and nobility, the resentment of contempt had a more powerful impact than did the envy of the nobles’ privileges. The obverse of contempt is shame. When the pain of shame seemed to come from intentional expressions of contempt, the pain turned into anger. ‘The French Revolution became inevitable when the reaction of the members of the third estate to the contempt of the nobles changed from shame to anger’.[20]

However, because Elster ascribes the context for such psychological responses solely to the status relations, rather than the origins and evolution of this context, he offers no explanation as to why it took until 1789 for contempt to cause anger and thereby provoke revolution. Nobles had shown contempt to the Third Estate for centuries. What changed at the end of the 1780s? Perry Anderson offers clues as to why the revolution came about when it did. He pioneered the historiography of absolutism as the consolidation of the feudal order, dislocated by the class struggles of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, rather than as a power independent of the bourgeois and noble classes. The paradox of French absolutism, Anderson argued, is that at the moment of its triumph – when the augmented army and authority of the Sun King provided the model for monarchs across Europe – Louis XIV failed to impose himself on the Continent. The reason is that the parliamentary monarchy of England had grown stronger thanks to the country’s capitalist economy and the rationalised state apparatus in the wake of the century of revolution. The War of the Spanish Succession ushered in Britain’s imperial dominance over much of the globe at the beginning of the eighteenth century.[21]

Elster presents the contrary logic by which the French state operated. He reasons that absolute rulers could not make credible promises, because they had the patrimonial authority to undo their promises. They thus did not enjoy good credit. Lenders preferred a system which would allow them to withdraw funds at any time. Such a system required that the crown always have a certain amount of cash on hand. But after 1680, the crown’s coffers were always empty. The monarchy repeatedly used various forms of bankruptcy such as the debasement of the currency, the suspension of reimbursements, cuts to interest rates, and the use of the ‘flight forward’ of future revenues to pay for current expenses. Investors had little confidence in royal finances, and the crown had to pay high rates of interest, leaving less revenue for ordinary expenses. The ‘escalation of debts was due in large part to the fact that the kings were unable to make themselves unable to break their promises’.[22]

Again, however, without an explanation of why France developed patrimonial structures of government, and how these structures differed from England’s – where an elected parliament of capitalist landowners underwrote state finances – one has no way of understanding why these weaknesses precipitated a collapse into revolution in 1789. Because of England’s capitalist economy and streamlined state, it sustained the financial strains of warfare better than France did. England not only defeated France in the Seven Years War (1756 to 1763) but also drove Louis XV’s government into precarious financial straits. The American War of Independence (1775 to 1783) hastened the budgetary crisis, which obliged Louis XVI to call the Estates General in 1789. The stage was thus set for the contempt, perennially shown to the largest stratum of the dominant classes – the jurists, office holders, rent and dues collectors of the Third Estate – to cause shame and anger when it became clear that the high clergy and nobility intended to preserve their monopoly over the most lucrative, honorific, and powerful posts in the state. The upper social strata of the Third Estate then put themselves at the head of popular revolts and made a revolution in favour of legal equality and careers open to talent.[23]

To sum up, Elster has drawn on his erudition in political psychology, rational choice theory and Marxism to make France Before 1789 a rich book, which depicts a patrimonial monarchy in vivid detail. Elster shows not only that the king’s possession of sovereign power allowed him to punish recalcitrant elites, but also that these elites’ possession of offices and seigneurial domains allowed them to impose themselves on common subjects. Indeed, the possession of seigneurial justice demonstrated the lords’ place in the governmental hierarchy and distinguished them from the rest of the population. The lords, clergy, and monarchy, Elster maintains, imposed an extraordinarily high rate of exploitation, leaving the peasants with only about a quarter of their harvests.

The patrimonial essence of the monarchy, however, made it difficult for the kings to execute edicts. Elites possessed offices and lordships as property and could refuse to enforce policies. The kings’ ownership of supreme power also weakened the financial system. The monarchy did not contend with a chamber representative of the landed classes, which might guarantee government assets and impart confidence in state finances. Kings could plunder treasuries and break monetary contracts. Investors had little confidence in royal finances, and kings had to pay ruinous rates of interest.

France Before 1789 portrays, moreover, the bitterness, which accumulated within and below this hierarchy of powers and ranks. Each possessor of authority, from the king down to rural judges, showed contempt to subordinates. Elster convincingly argues that the resentment of contempt motivated royal subjects more than did the jealousy of privileges. Face-to-face contempt left deeper marks than did envy at a distance. This contempt bred shame and then, in the 1780s, the anger that exploded in the Revolution at the end of the decade.

One does not learn from France Before 1789 how theancien régime came into being. Elster’s mode of analysis posits the hierarchy of offices and seigneuries as a given and then proceeds to describe the social relations and psychological effects of this governmental system. The origins of the social relations and where the conflicts, which the social relations made possible, might lead is absent from the book.

Elster, for instance, entertains the possibility that the peasants could have used their resources to invest in cattle or put new land under cultivation. He argues that they often refrained from doing so because of the possibility of new taxes appropriating the potential gains. Such reasoning, however, assumes individuals who choose rationally between various courses of action, as if within a capitalist society. Their horizontal relations, which shaped the peasants’ economic calculations, are missing. Their resources, to be exact, comprised structural relations making the resources relevant. In particular, the peasant community maintained the subsistence plots and use rights.

The peasant community, moreover, made possible the class struggles anterior to the ancien régime monarchy, struggles that ultimately brought it into being. Thanks to the strength of peasant communities, the rural population forced the lords to offer enfranchisements in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Peasants thus asserted control over the lands from which they saw to their subsistence. This prior history put pressure on the lords, over the following centuries, to build their own political community – the monarchy’s hierarchy of powers, which Elster describes so well – capable of defending the nobles’ lands, seigneurial rights, and state fiscal levies on the peasant community.

References

Anderson, Perry 1979 [1974], Lineages of the Absolutist State, London: Verso.

Beik, William 1985, Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth-century France: State Power and Provincial Aristocracy in Languedoc, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Blaufarb, Rafe 2016, The Great Demarcation: The French Revolution and the Invention of Modern Property, New York: Oxford University Press.

Bloch, Marc 1966 [1931], French Rural History: An Essay on its Basic Characteristics, translated by Janet Sondheimer, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Brenner, Robert 1996, ‘The Rises and Declines of Serfdom in Medieval and Early Modern Europe’, in Serfdom and Slavery, edited by M.L. Bush, London: Longman.

Brenner, Robert 2003 [1993], Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653, London: Verso.

Comninel, George 1987, Rethinking the French Revolution: Marxism and the Revisionist Challenge, London: Verso.

Elster, Jon 2020, France Before 1789: The Unraveling of an Absolutist Regime, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Engels, Friedrich 1990 [1884], The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, in Collected Works, Volume 26, London: Lawrence and Wishart.

Fourquin, Guy 1975, ‘Le temps de la croissance’, in Histoire de la France rurale. Tome 1. La formation des campagnes françaises des origines à 1340, edited by Georges Duby and Armand Wallon, Paris: Seuil.

Goubert, Pierre 1970 [1966], Louis XIV and Twenty Million Frenchmen, translated by Anne Carter, New York: Vintage Books.

Heller, Henry 2006,The Bourgeois Revolution in France, 1789–1815, New York: Berghahn Books.

Heller, Henry 2009, ‘The Long Durée of the French Bourgeoisie’, Historical Materialism, 17, 1: 31–59.

Heller, Henry 2015, ‘Introduction’, in Jean Jaurès, A Socialist History of the French Revolution, abridged and translated by Mitchell Abidor, London: Pluto Press.

Jones, Colin 2003 [2002], The Great Nation: France from Louis XV to Napoleon, London: Penguin.

Jones, Peter 2016, Agricultural Enlightenment: Knowledge, Technology, and Nature, 1750–1840, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lefebvre, Georges 1988 [1939], The Coming of the French Revolution, translated by R.R. Palmer, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Lüthy, Herbert 1998 [1959], La Banque protestante en France de la révocation de l’édit de Nantes à la Révolution, three volumes, Third Edition, Paris: Les ré-impressions des Éditions de l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales.

Meiksins Wood, Ellen 1989, ‘Rational Choice Marxism: Is the Game Worth the Candle?’, New Left Review, I, 177: 41–88.

Meiksins Wood, Ellen 2016, ‘Britain versus France: How Many Sonderwegs?’,Historical Materialism, 24, 1: 11–29.

Meuvret, Jean 1987, Le Problème des subsistances l’époque Louis XIV: La production des céréales et la société rurale/Texte, Paris: Éditions de l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales.

Miller, Stephen 2020, Feudalism, Venality and Revolution: Provincial Assemblies in late-Old Regime France, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Nicolas, Jean 2002, La rébellion française: mouvements populaires et conscience sociale, 1661–1789, Paris: Éditions du Seuil.

Parker, David 1996, Class and State in Ancien Régime France: The Road to Modernity?, London: Routledge.

Sewell, William 2010, ‘The Empire of Fashion and the Rise of Capitalism in Eighteenth-Century France’, Past and Present, 206: 81–120.

Sewell, William 2014, ‘Connecting Capitalism to the French Revolution: The Parisian Promenade and the Origins of Civic Equality in Eighteenth-Century France’, Critical Historical Studies, 1: 5–46.

[1] Engels 1990, p. 271.

[2]Lefebvre 1988, pp. 1–2, 16, 36, 45, 47, 49, 86, 217.

[3] Beik 1985, p. 29. See also pages 13 and 219.

[4] Lüthy 1998, pp. 12, 15–16, 19–20.

[5] Blaufarb 2016, pp. 4, 8–9.

[6] Elster 2020, p. 63.

[7] Meiksins Wood 1989, pp. 74–5.

[8] Heller 2015; Heller 2009; Heller 2006; Jones 2003; Sewell 2010; Sewell 2014.

[9] Fourquin 1975, pp. 542–4, 556, 564–5.

[10] Brenner 1996, p. 254.

[11] Bloch 1966, pp. 128–34.

[12] Goubert 1970, p. 34.

[13] Anderson 1979, pp. 17–18; Parker 1996, pp. 14, 27.

[14] Meiksins Wood 1989, p. 48.

[15] Meuvret 1987, pp. 10, 12–13, 29–30, 35, 37; Jones 2016, pp. 92–3; Bloch 1966, pp. 164, 175, 180–1, 220–1, 229.

[16] Fourquin 1975, pp. 626, 628–9; Bloch 1966, pp. 39–41, 44–5, 47, 164, 175, 185–6, 227–9; Nicolas 2002, pp. 29, 56, 76–7, 156, 158, 181.

[17] Brenner 2003, pp. 654, 659, n. 20; Parker 1996, pp. 99–101, 112.

[18] Goubert 1970, pp. 46–7.

[19] Goubert 1970, pp. 46–8.

[20] Elster 2020, p. 232.

[21] Anderson 1979, pp. 105–6.

[22] Elster 2020, p. 230.

[23] Miller 2020; Comninel 1987; Meiksins Wood 2016, p. 12.

By Jacopo Galimberti

In English-speaking scholarship, the last few years have witnessed a growing interest in the relationship between the visual arts and Italian politics from the onset of the ‘miracolo economico’ (the ‘economic miracle’ starting around 1958) to the oil crisis of the mid-1970s, or, to put it slightly differently, from the publication of Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks to ‘the years of lead’ – a moniker that has demonised a decade also marked by resounding victories both in the factories and in the civil-rights sphere. Italian cinema masterpieces, from the films of Federico Fellini to those of Michelangelo Antonioni, were studied in Anglo-American universities early on, and Arte Povera artists have been exhibited in major venues outside Italy since the early 2000s, but what recent years have brought to the fore is a sustained engagement with the way in which art was shaped by the social conflicts that animated the growth and decline of Italian Taylorist ‘society’, and not only in terms of the ‘mode of production’. A new generation of art historians and visual-studies experts have embedded the narratives of postwar Italian art into an ebullient political landscape of great theoretical complexity, as demonstrated by the recent translation of classics of Italian leftist thought into English (e.g., Mario Tronti’sWorkers and Capital (1963), Alberto Asor Rosa’sThe Writer and the People (1965), and Franco Fortini’sA Test of Powers (1965)). Recent books such as Jaleh Mansoor’sMarshall Plan Modernism, Lindsay Caplan’sArte Programmata and Paola Bonifazio’sThe Photoromance must be given credit for their attempts to reconnect political jargons and violent social conflicts to artistic production, complementing the insights of an older generation of ‘Italianists’ including Robert Lumley, John Foot and David Forgacs, to name but a few. The parallel shift from male to female scholars is intentional here.

The Italian Left had a firm grip on large sections of the culture industry in these tumultuous decades; accordingly, any meaningful discussions of the arts and their environment cannot help but examine leftist culture and its contrasts or compromises with a classist, Catholic and sexist right-wing elite, as well as with the long shadow cast by the Fascist dictatorship well after World War II. Such is the framework within which two monographs from the 2020s operate: Romy Golan’s Flashback, Eclipse: The Political Imaginary of Italian Art in the 1960s and Ara Merjian’sAgainst the Avant-garde: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Contemporary Art and Neocapitalism. These two volumes share a similar timeframe and a pronounced interest in politics, as well as a keen attention (though particularly in the former) to temporality and its structures.

In fact, Golan’s title reads almost like a statement in favour of a history of art that defies a reassuring linear narrative while also avoiding the pitfalls of what François Hartog (a key interlocutor for Golan’s meditations) has dubbed ‘presentism’. If the word ‘flashback’ retains its conventional meaning in the book, and describes the sudden irruption of the past into the narrative flow, what ‘eclipse’ indicates, in temporal terms, is less clear, but the chapters suggest that it is something akin to a momentarily veiled event. It is tempting to understand ‘eclipse’ as part of the semantic field of ‘repression’, but Golan deliberately omits any references to psychoanalysis, opting instead for a terminology derived from photography and film studies. The interrelations between three key notions of the book, flashback, eclipse, and mise en abîme, are unpacked in the Introduction, ‘An eclipse, once it is recognised as such, can mask a flashback. And a flashback can include, nested in, either another flashback or an eclipse. When nested, they produce an effect of amise en abyme’.[1] Despite her commendable attempt to complicate mainstream art-historical approaches to the regimes of temporality – what François Hartog has achieved through notions such as chronos,kairos andkrisis – Golan’s evocative vocabulary might find objections in an audience persuaded that historical studies should adhere to the imperative of documentary evidence, and refrain from using a metaphorical language.[2] Yet Golan asserts the validity of her methodology, contending that a

number of connections I make between artists and events, especially in the longer flashbacks, might appear to be a stretch, the result of associative thinking, and indeed, many of the flashbacks and eclipses in this book are mine, but a degree of speculation is within the logic of the visual thinking on which this study is founded. […] The images know more than we do. The artworks and the images thereof generate both real and imagined narratives about the connection between the present and the past that historians cannot grasp with documents alone.[3]

by Peter Kulchyski

Men make their own history, but not of their own free will; not under circumstances they themselves have chosen but under the given and inherited circumstances with which they are directly confronted.

- Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte