A version of this interview appeared in French at http://revueperiode.net/le-role-de-la-prison-dans-la-lutte-des-classes-entretien-avec-ruth-w-gilmore/

Clément Petitjean: In Golden Gulag, you analyse the build-up of California's prison system, which you call “the biggest in the history of the world”. Between 1980 and 2007, you explain that the number of people behind bars increased more than 450%. What were the various factors that combined to cause the expansion of that system? What were the various forces that built up the prison industrial complex in California and in the US?

Ruth Wilson Gilmore: Sure. Let me say a couple of things. I actually found that description of the biggest prison building project in the history of the world in a report that was written by somebody whom the state of California contracted to analyse the system that had been on a steady growth trajectory since the late 1980s. So it's not even my claim, it's how they themselves described what they were doing. What happened is that the state of California, which is, and was, an incredibly huge and diverse economy, went through a series of crises. And those crises produced all kinds of surpluses. It produced surpluses of workers, who were laid off from certain kinds of occupations, especially in manufacturing, not exclusively but notably. It produced surpluses of land. Because the use of land, especially but not exclusively in agriculture, changed over time, with the consolidation of ownership and the abandoning of certain types of land and land-use. It also produced surpluses of finance capital – and this is one of the more contentious points that I do argue, to deadly exhaustion. While it might appear, looking globally, that the concept of surplus finance capital seemed absurd in the early 1980s, if you look locally and see how especially investment bankers who specialised in municipal finance (selling debt to states) were struggling to remake markets, then we can see a surplus at hand. And then the final surplus, which is kind of theoretical, conjectural, is a surplus of state capacity. By that I mean that the California state’s institutions and reach had developed over a good deal of the 20th century, but especially from the beginning of the Second World War onwards. It had become incredibly complex to do certain things with fiscal and bureaucratic capacities. Those capacities weren't invented out of whole cloth, they came out of the Progressive Era, at the turn of the 20th century. In the postwar period they enabled California to do certain things that would more or less guarantee the capacity of capital to squeeze value from labour and land. Those capacities endured, even if the demand for them did not. And so what I argue in my book is that the state of California reconfigured those capacities, and they underlay the ability to build and staff and manage prison after prison after prison. That's not the only use they made of those capacities once used for various kinds of welfare provision, but it was a huge use. And so the prison system went from being a fairly small part of the entire state infrastructure to the major employer in the state government.

So the reason that I approached the problem the way I did is because I'm a good Marxist and I wanted to look at factors of production, but also to make it very clear – and this has to do with being a good Marxist – that these factors of mass incarceration, or factors of production, didn't have to be organised the way they were. They could have become something else. Therefore I begin with the premise that prison expansion was not just a response to an allegedly self-explanatory, free-floating thing called crime, which suddenly just erupted as a nightmare in communities. And indeed, in order to think about crime and its central role in California's incarceration system, I studied, like anybody could have, what was happening with crime in the late 1970s and early 1980s. And not surprisingly, it had been going down. Everybody knew it. It was on front pages of newspapers that people read in the early 1980s, it was on TV, it was on the radio. So if crime did not cause prison expansion, what did?

CP: So what was happening more specifically in California? How did those surpluses come together to create this mass prison system? 

RWG: Well, they came together politically. In a variety of ways. During the 1970s, the entire US economy had gone through a very long recession. It was the time when the US lost the Vietnam war, when stagflation became a rule rather than an unimaginable exception -- which is to say there was both high unemployment and high inflation. In that context, throughout the United States, people who were in prison had been fighting through the federal court system concerning the conditions of their confinement, the kinds of sentences that they were serving, and so forth. Many of these lawsuits were brought by prisoners on their own behalf. They slowly made their way through the courts. Eventually, in California but in many other states too, in the late 1960s and again in the mid-1970s, the federal courts told the state prison system: "Do something about this, because you're in violation of the Constitution." At first it might seem that the Vietnam War, stagflation and the violation of prisoners’ constitutional rights are unrelated. But indirectly, building prisons and using crime became a default strategy to legitimise the state that had become seriously delegitimised due to political, military, and economic crises. Prison expansion became a way for people in both political parties to say: "The problem with the United States is there is too much government. The state is too big. And the reason people are suffering from this general economic misfortune is because too much goes to taxes, too much goes to doing things that people really should take care of on their own. But if you elect us, we will get rid of this incredible burden on you. There is something legitimate we can do with state power, however, which is why you should elect us: we will protect you from crime, we will protect you from external threats." And people were elected and re-elected on the basis of these arguments. Again, even though everybody knew that crime was not a problem. It's pretty astonishing to me. I lived through this period and went back and studied it later. I found in the California case -- and I currently have students who are studying other states -- we keep coming across similar patterns: economic crisis, federal court orders, struggles over expansion, increased role of municipal finance in the scheme of prison expansion.

In California, people who had come up through the civil service, working in the welfare department, or working in the department of health and human services, eventually were recruited to work on the prison side because they had the skills to manage large-scale projects designed to deliver services to individuals. And they brought their fiscal and bureaucratic capacities over to the prison agency in order to help it expand and consolidate. We actually see the abandonment of one set of public mandates in favour of another – of social welfare for domestic warfare, if you will. And I can't say, nor should anybody, that the reason all this happened was because of a few people who had bad intentions distorted the system. But rather we can see a systemic renovation in the direction of mass incarceration: starting in the late 1970s, when Jerry Brown, a Democrat, was governor of California, as he is now; then taking off enormously in the 1980s under Republican regimes; but never going down. It didn't make any difference which party was in power. And the prison population did not begin to go down until elaborate and broad-based organising combined with a long-term federal court case (again!) compelled system shrinkage in the last several years.

CP: In the book, you argue that prisons are “catchall solutions to social problems.” Would you say that the rise of the prison industrial complex illustrates, or means, deep transformations of the American state, and marks the dawn of a new historical period for capitalism, one where incarceration would be not only the legitimate but the only way of dealing with surplus populations?

RWG: Honestly, fifteen years ago, I would have said yes. Now, I say "pretty much, but not absolutely yes". Because it's almost worse than the way you framed the question. Rather than mass incarceration being a catchall solution to social problems, as I put it, what has happened is that that legitimising force, which made prison systems so big in the first place, has increasingly given police – including border police -- incredible amounts of power. What has happened is that certain types of social welfare agencies, like education, income support, or social housing, have absorbed some of the surveillance and punishment missions of the police and the prison system. For example in Los Angeles, a relatively new project, about ten years old, focuses on people who live in social housing projects. Their experience has been shaped by intensive policing, criminalization, incarceration and being killed by the police. Under the new project they have opportunities for health, tutoring for children, all kinds of social welfare benefits if and only if they cooperate with the police. In the book Policing the Planet, my partner and I wrote a chapter that goes into rather exhaustive details about that case.

CP: Would you say that those shifts herald a new historical period for capitalism?

RWG: This is a tough question, as you know, for a bunch of reasons. One is that we've all learned to lisp: everybody used to say "globalisation," now it’s "neoliberalism," and people are more or less talking about the same thing. My major mentor in the study of capitalism is the late great Cedric Robinson, who wrote an astonishing series of books, but the one that completely changed my consciousness is Black Marxism. Robinson argues that capitalism has always been, wherever it originated (let's say rural England), a racial system. So it didn't need Black people to become racial. It was already racial between people all of whose descendants might have become white. Understanding capitalism this way is very productive for me when thinking about the present. One issue is what's happening with racial capitalism on a world scale. A second issue has to do with particular political economies, especially those that are not sovereign, like the state of California: how does political-economic activity re-form in the context of globalisation’s pushes and pulls? Certainly, California's economy continues to be big. It moves up and down a little bit, but if it were a country, it would be in the top seven largest economies. However, the mix of manufacturing, service and other sectors has changed over time. There's still a lot of manufacturing in the state, although it tends to be more value-added, lower-wage manufacturing, sweatshops and so forth. And far less steel, and producer goods, and consumer durables.

How, then, should we analyse in order to organise in places like California, New York, Texas, with their various and variously diverse economies, characterised by organised abandonment and organised violence? How can we generalize from the racist prison system to a more supple perception of racial capitalism at work, to understand and intervene in places where states no less than firms are constantly trying to figure out how to spread capital across the productive landscape in ways that will return profits to investors as quickly as possible? The state keeps stepping in while pretending it's not there. And here I’m not talking about private prisons, which are an infinitesimal part of mass incarceration in the US, nor of exploited prisoner labour, which also doesn’t explain much about the system’s size or durability (which, as we’ve already seen, is vulnerable). Rather, I am talking about how unions that represent low to moderate wage public sector workers, which have a high concentration of people of colour as current and potential members, might join forces with environmental justice organisations, biological diversity/anti-climate change organisations, immigrants’ rights organisations, and others to fight on a number of fronts group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death -- which is what in my view racism is. And if that’s what racism is, and capitalism is from its origins already racial, then that means a comprehensive politics encompassing working and workless vulnerable people and places becomes a robust class politics that neither begins from nor excludes narrower views of who or what the “working class” is.

CP: In the book, you develop a critical perspective strongly influenced by David Harvey's critical geography. What does this perspective reveal specifically about mass incarceration?

RWG: I became a geographer when I was in my 40s because it seemed to me, at least in the context of US graduate education, it was the best way to pursue serious materialist analysis. There are so few geography PhD programs in the United States. And I'd been thinking that I was going to train in planning because it seemed the closest to what I wanted to do: to put together “who”, “how,” and “where” in a way that did not float above the surface of the earth but rather articulated with the changing earth. I actually stumbled into geography. I happened to come across Neil Smith at a Rethinking Marxism conference and was really taken by his work; not only had I not thought about geography, I hadn’t taken a geography course for three decades, since I was 13. So at the last minute, instead of mailing my application to the planning department at Rutgers, I mailed it to the geography department. And the rest is kind of history. Enrolling in geography brought me into the world of Harvey’s historical geographic materialist way of analysing the world. I took very seriously what I learned from David, what I learned from Neil and a few other people, and tried to build on it, having already had a long informal education with people like Cedric Robinson, Sid Lemelle, Mike Davis, Margaret Prescod, Barbara Smith, Angela Davis, and many others. And I think that had I not been trained in geography, or beguiled by geography, maybe, I would not have thought as hard as I did about, for example, urban-rural connections – their co-constitutive interdependencies. And I know I wouldn't have thought in terms of scale -- not scales in the sense of size, but in terms of the socio-spatial forms through which we live and organise our lives, and how we struggle to compete and cooperate. And I certainly would not have conceptualised mass incarceration as the "prison fix" had I not read David's Limits to Capital and thought about the spatial fix as hard as I could. We're colleagues, now, David and I. We enjoy working together and debating toward the goal of movement rather than having the last word.

CP: Can you elaborate on what you mean by "prison fix" compared to Harvey's "spatial fix"? 

RWG: What I mean in my book is that the state of California used prison expansion provisionally to fix – to remedy as well as to set firmly into space – the crises of land, labour, finance capital and state capacity. By absorbing people, issuing public debt with no public promise to pay it down, and using up land taken out of extractive production, the state also put to work, as I suggested earlier, many of its fiscal and organisational abilities without facing the challenges that were already mounting when the same factors of production were petitioned for, say, a new university. The prison fix of course opened an entire new round of crises, just as the spatial fix in Harvey displaces but does not resolve the problem that gave rise to it. So in the case of communities where imprisoned people come from, we have the removal of people, the removal of earning power, the removal of household and community camaraderie, you name it – all of that happened with mass incarceration. In the rural areas where prisons arose we can chart related de-stabilisations: rather than, as many imagine, rural prison towns acquiring resources displaced from urban neighbourhoods, the fact is the two locations are joined in a constant churn of unacknowledged though shared precarious desperation – which was the basis on which some of the organising I described above took form. In other words infrastructure materially symbolised by the actual prison indicates the extensively visible and invisible infrastructure that connects the prison and its location by way of the courts and the police, the roads for families to visit and goods and incarcerated people to travel, back to the communities of origin expansively incorporating the entire intervening landscape. One of the things I tried to do in the book, framing it with two bus rides, was to give people a way of thinking about what I’ve just said that’s more viscerally poignant. Thinking about the movement across space and the movement through space gives us some sense of the production of space.

The purpose of Golden Gulag was not to make people say "Oh my God, we've all been defeated!" but rather to say "Wow, that was really big, and now I can see all the pieces. So perhaps instead of thinking there's nothing to be done, what I recognise is there's a hundred different things that we could do. We can organise with labour unions, we can organise with environmental justice activists, we can organise urban-rural coalitions, we can organise public sector employees, we can organise low-wage, high-value-added workers, who are vulnerable to criminalisation. We can organise with immigrants. We can do all of these things, because all of these things are part of mass incarceration." And we did all that organising!

CP: That's a perfect transition to another set of questions about organising against mass incarceration. Are there resistance movements within prisons comparable to what happened in the 1970s, with the 1971 Attica uprising for instance? 

My area of expertise doesn't happen to be on that. Orisanmi Burton is someone who is doing fantastic research on that question. Of course, one of the things that's happened in California prisons, particularly the prisons for men, is that their physical design, as well as the design of their management system, were deliberately aimed by the Department of Corrections, starting in the late 1970s, to undermine the possibility of the kind of organising that had characterised the period from the early 1960s to the mid-1970s. Especially the ones called 180s, or level 4: those are the high-security prisons. They're not panopticons, but prisoners can't evade being under surveillance. There have been not only automatic lockdowns, but also the reduction of education and other in-prison programs, even places where people in prison can gather, such as day rooms, classrooms, gyms, places where prisoners could do the time with some however modest ongoing sense of self. All of the design changes were intended to undermine prisoner organising and solidarity.

One hugely notorious thing that happened in the California system in particular in the late 1970s, that may or may not have happened in other systems, is that the Department of Corrections, was experimenting with ways to keep prisoners from developing solidarity with each other and against the guards. In the early 1970s, California prisoners had notoriously declared "Every time a guard kills one of us, we're going to kill one of them until they stop killing us." And there were seven incidents over some years. A guard killed a prisoner, prisoners killed a guard. Not necessarily the guard who killed the prisoner, but somebody died because somebody died. So the department, right before its big expansion began, was trying to figure out what to do. And it came up, not surprisingly, with a solution that was designed to foster inter-prisoner distrust. The managers declared that certain categories of prisoners belonged to certain ethnic or regional gangs, and then fomented discord between the gangs. In a time when desegregation was becoming the law of the land, the Department of Corrections started segregating people in prisons according to the gangs and then to racial and ethnic groups. This is all well documented, there are case files and lawsuits, and an incredible archive, still to be thoroughly read and written about. And there were countless hearings about this practice throughout the 1990s. I sat through hours of testimony, in which the Department insisted, and has until this day: "No, we were just responding to what objectively existed." Whereas others who testified, including former prison wardens, said: "No, this didn't exist: you made it. You created it."

What the Department “created” led to development of something called the Security Housing Unit (SHU), which is effectively a prison within the prison. The first one in California opened in 1988 and the second in 1989. In the latter, called Pelican Bay State Prison, people in the SHU had staged several hunger strikes beginning in 2013. And some of the people in that unit, segregated according to their alleged gang affiliation, some of whom had been in that prison within the prison for more than twenty years, had accepted and projected the rigid ethnic, racial, and regional differences as meaningful and immutably real. But as they were trying, as individuals, to sort out a way for them to get out of the prison in the prison and go back to the general prison population, they became increasingly aware of what had happened historically, a dire reform of which they were the current expression. And so in recent years, these people in four “gangs” eventually declared that the only way to solve the problem inside was, to use their word, to end the hostility between the races. Which is an astonishing thing. I've been inside a lot of prisons, including Pelican Bay. And the transformation of consciousness from what I learned from interviewing people in prisons for men about their conditions of confinement in the early 2000s compared with the organising and analysis that emerged in the last five or so years is astonishing.

I also want to add something about the prisons for women. In the prisons for women, the level of segregation was never as high -- to the extent, for example, that they had not separated out people who were doing life on murder and people who were doing a year on drugs. Whereas in a prison for men people are segregated according to custody level (what they are serving time for having done) plus segregated in a number of other ways including race and ethnicity. And so, in part because of the social and spatial organisation of the prisons in the period that featured the crackdown on organising in prisons for me, there was a high and growing level of organising among the people in prisons for women. So during the last fourteen or fifteen years, as the state of California was trying to build fancy new so-called “gender responsive” prisons for women – to allow mothers to be locked up with their kids, for example -- people inside those prisons, however they identified in terms of gender, wrote and signed "Don't do this for us, because that's just going to expand capacity to lock people up. It's not going to make our lives better." Three thousand people did that organising in prisons for women, and their self-determination and bravery occurred at great personal risk to themselves because locked-up activists are wholly at the mercy of guards and prison managers. 

CP: What about the organising outside of the prisons? And in particular in communities directly affected by mass incarceration?

RWG: The organising outside has been quite rich and varied over the years. In my experience, some of which I write about in a new chapter to the upcoming second edition of Golden Gulag, people who at the outset started doing work on behalf of one person in their family or even maybe two people in their family, thinking this was an individual, or greatest scale, household problem, came to understand through their experiences -- working with others, mostly women, most of whom were mothers -- the political dimensions of what they originally encountered as a personal, individual, and legal problem. That's one kind of organising that has persisted for many years now, 25 years of more. There's also the organising that we, meaning the groups Critical Resistance and California Prison Moratorium Project, helped to foster between urban and rural communities, under a variety of nominal issues which I described earlier: biological diversity (we took up on behalf of the lowly Tipton kangaroo rat) but also environmental justice (air quality, water quality for instance). We managed to develop and wage campaigns bringing people together across diverse issues and diverse communities in rural and urban California, so that they could recognise each other as probable comrades rather than presumed antagonists. And that has happened over and over again.

Going back to the fact that the number of people in prisons in California has gone down in recent years: the public explanations for that, the superficial or above-the-surface explanation, is that in 2011 the state of California lost yet another lawsuit, Brown v. Plata, also called “Plata/Coleman,” and was ordered to reduce the number of people held in the Department of Corrections’ physical plant (33 prisons plus many camps and other lockups). The federal lawsuit demonstrated that approximately one person in prison a week was dying of an easily remediable illness because of medical neglect. During the two decades between the beginning of the legal campaign and its resolution, some of the original litigants had long since died. Ultimately, the right-wing Supreme Court of the United States (the court that handed George W. Bush the presidency in the year 2000) could not deny the evidence. There were just too many bodies. In its final judgment that court agreed with lower court rulings, affirming that California could not build its way out of its problem.

But the question that few people who have followed this story ever asked themselves is "How come California, that had been opening a prison a year for 23 years, suddenly slowed down to almost a halt and only opened one prison between 1999 and 2011? And the answer is all that grassroots organising that I described earlier. We stopped them building new prisons. We made it too difficult. And we showed in our campaigning that whenever the department built a new prison, allegedly to ease crowding, the number of people in prison jumped higher than the new buildings could hold. The new relationships on the ground, organised by prison abolitionists – though the vast majority of participants themselves were not necessarily abolitionist – compelled these courts, who had never summoned any of us as serious witnesses for anything, to say that California could not build its way out of its problem and that it had to do something else. So now a lot of anti physical plant expansion activity in California has shifted to jails, not prisons. (Jail is where someone is held pending trial or if their sentence is only a year or less. Prison is where someone is sent to serve a sentence for a year and a day or more.) The jails are now expanding because once California complied with the Supreme Court ruling, the state, in order to reduce the number of people it locks up, made resources available to the lower political jurisdictions -- the counties -- to do whatever they wanted in exchange for retaining people convicted of certain crimes locally rather than sending them to state custody. (This adjustment is called “realignment.”) The counties could have taken those resources and said to convicted people "Go home and behave yourselves.” They could have taken the resources and changed guidelines for prosecutors so there would be fewer convictions. They could have put the resources into schools or healthcare or housing. But – and this gets back to the nagging question of state capacity and legitimacy -- a little more than half of the state’s 58 counties have thus far decided to build new jails. And then we see in reverse the phenomenon I discussed earlier, about welfare state agencies absorbing surveillance and punishment agencies. The sheriffs, who run the jails, now insist that they need more and bigger jails for reasons of health: "We have to supply mental health care and counseling to troubled people. We need to deliver social goods, and the only way we can do it is if we can lock people up." So the new front is fighting against “jails-instead-of-clinics,” “jails-instead-of-schools,” and so on. The work brings new social actors into the mix, and, as we discussed earlier, it enables the broadest possible identification of purpose in class terms.

To give you a few other examples of the kinds of solidarity that we managed to bring into action over time in California, there was a prison that was supposed to have opened in 2000 but we slowed it down. We didn't manage to stop it, but as I said, after opening a prison a year up to 1998, there were none opened between 1999 and 2005. That prison was scheduled for construction by a member of the Democratic party who had just been elected governor, and he was paying back the guards' union, who had given him almost a million dollars to help with his campaign. So then we got busy and organised as many different ways as we could. And one of the ways we could organise, it turned out, was with the California state employees association, which is part of an enormous public sector union in California. And they represent all kinds of workers in the prisons except the guards, because the guards have their own stand-alone union. And much to our surprise, the members of state employees union were willing to go up against the guards and oppose that prison. When they finally agreed to meet with the abolitionists they said: "Look. The guards get whatever they want. What we do, as secretaries, school teachers, locksmiths, drivers, mechanics gets squeezed more and more. We see the lives of the people in custody getting worse and worse, with no hope for getting back to a normal life when they get out -- as most people do. And the union that we're part of represents people who work in the public sector, in housing, healthcare, so on and so forth, in the cities and counties as well as at the state. So if we recognise who our membership is and what they do, there's no reason for us to support this prison. Even if we might lose a few members who would have the jobs in the new prison, there’s more to our remit, as a public sector union.” That completely surprised me, and for a heady political moment we had half a million people throughout California calling for a prison moratorium. It's hard to keep those kinds of political openings lively, but it lasted long enough to interrupt the relentless schedule that the prisons in California had been on since the early 1980s. 

CP: From an outsider’s perspective it seems that the Black Lives Matter movement gave a new impetus to debates around prison abolition in radical circles. What does it say about the history of the abolition movement? What's the current balance of forces? What do strategic debates look like?

It’s true that #Black Lives Matter has got people thinking about and using the word "abolition". That said, the abolition that they have helped put into common usage is more about the police and less about the prisons. Although of course there is a connection between the two. It’s been amazing to me and many of my comrades to see left liberal politicians, or magazines like The Nation or Rolling Stone, seriously ask whether it is time to abolish the police. The ensuing debates tend to be the obvious ones: insofar as abolition is imagined only to be absence – overnight erasure – the kneejerk response is “that's not possible”. But the failure of imagination rests in missing the fact that abolition isn’t just absence. As W.E.B. Du Bois showed in Black Reconstruction in America, abolition is a fleshly and material presence of social life lived differently. Of course, that means many who are abolition-friendly falter at what the practice is. All the organising I’ve described in our conversation is abolition – not a prelude, but the practice itself. There was a recent attack on abolitionists by some historian who decided, without studying, that abolitionists are a deranged theology. He knew a little, for example, about the Brown v. Plata case, but zero about the on-the-ground moratorium organising that realised the Plata/Coleman theory (“overcrowding”) as sufficient cause for which the remedy would not be more of the same. Abolition is: figuring out how to work with people to make something rather than figuring out how to erase something. Du Bois shows, in exhaustive detail, both how slavery ended through the actions and organised activity of the slaves no less than the Union Army, and, since slavery ending one day doesn't tell you anything about the next day, what the next day, and days thereafter, looked like during the revolutionary period of radical Reconstruction. Abolition is a theory of change, it's a theory of social life. It's about making things. 

CP: What does the central role of mass incarceration in maintaining the status quo imply in terms of class struggle strategies? Do anti-incarceration struggle and abolition organising play a more strategic role today?

RWG: Here's a way of thinking about that in the US context. In the United States today, there are about 70 million adults who have some kind of criminal conviction -- whether or not they were ever locked up -- that prohibits them from holding certain kinds of jobs, in many types of jobs. In other words, it doesn't make any difference what you allegedly did: if you've been convicted of something, you can't have a job. So just take a step back and think about that for a second, just in terms of sheer numbers. If we add the number of people who are effectively documented not to work, with the additional 7 or 8 million migrants who are not documented to work, the sum equals about 50 percent of the US labour force — mostly people of colour, but also 1/3 white. Half the US labour force. So it seems that anti-criminalisation and the extensive and intensive forces and effects of criminalisation and perpetual punishment has to be central to any kind of political, economic change that benefits working people and their communities, or benefits poor people, whether or not they're working, and their communities. This should be a given, but often it's not. In part that’s because "mass incarceration" has, unfortunately but for understandable reasons, come to stand in for "this is the terrible thing that happened to Black people in the United States." It is a terrible thing that happens to Black people in the United States! It happens also to brown people, red people … and a whole lot of white people. And insofar as ending mass incarceration becomes understood as something that only Black people must struggle for because it's something that only Black people experience, the necessary connection to be drawn from mass incarceration to the entire organisation of capitalist space today falls out of the picture. What remains in the picture seems like it’s only an anomalous wrong that seems remediable within the logic of capitalist reform. That's a huge impediment, I think, for the kind of organising that ought to come out of the various experiments in worker and community organising that can produce big changes. Everything is difficult in the US right now, for all the obvious reasons I won’t waste space on now. That said, I look with hope for all indications of ways to shift the debate and organising. The answer for me is to consider in all possible ways how the preponderance of vulnerable people in the US and beyond come to recognise each other in terms not just of characteristics or interest, but more to the abolitionist point and purpose. 

Chris Rumble reviews Marx Returns by Jason Barker (2018, Zero Books). Following several disappointing portrayals, a new novel by the author and filmmaker takes an ingenious look at why Karl Marx might have been right after all.

Rationality, Islam, and Decolonisation with Maxime Rodinson

By Selim Nadi. Translated by Joe Hayns.

This piece was originally published in Revue Période: http://revueperiode.net/le-savant-et-le-militant-rationalite-islam-et-decolonisation-chez-maxime-rodinson/

Selim Nadi is a French PhD Student and a member of the editorial board of the French journals Période andContretemps.

Joe Hayns would like to thank Ian Birchall, Selim Nadi, and Maïa Pal for their help and encouragement. All mistakes are his. You can follow him @JoeHayns

The outstanding intellectual Maxime Rodinson is known above all for his magisterial study, Islam and Capitalism (1966), and for his intense militant activity, notably with the Parti Communiste Français (PCF), of which he was a member from 1937 to 1958. In this article, Selim Nadi addresses the relations between Rodinson’s scientific work and political engagement, through an appraisal of Rodinson’s analyses of the tactical and strategic possibilities that Islam offered to anti-colonial struggles. From the Algerian national liberation struggle, to the dialogue between Rodinson and Edward Said, to the Iranian Revolution, this article revisits the challenges faced by Rodinson in his efforts to think through and work with revolutionary processes in the Muslim countries.

I have always perceived a certain contradiction between political engagement and rationality […] Experience and age help. I’ve realised that the more our activism advances, the more one sees, in each instance, that irrationalities drag on practical currents. (Maxime Rodinson, Entre Islam et Occident. Entretiens avec Gérard D. Khoury [Between Islam and the West. Interviews with Gérard D. Khoury.])

It was in 1957, when he was 23 years old, that Mohamed Harbi - then member of the Algerian FLN – met Maxime Rodinson (1915-2004) for the first time. Harbi was already familiar with the works and interests of Rodinson. In an interview with Sébastien Boussois, Harbi explained that at that time, those researching the Arab countries were typically Islamologists who conferred an absolute role to religion, making it the Alpha and Omega of their analyses. Hence, according to Harbi, the principal ‘radical scholars’ (‘contre-universitaires’) of the time for the students and militants were Claude Cahen (1909-1991) and Maxime Rodinson. Harbi was like all his comrades interested not only in Maghrebin societies, but more generally in the ensemble of the Middle East, his studies helped by an exceptional linguistic ability.

When Rodinson met Harbi, his position vis-à-vis the PCF, which he would quit two years later, was already critical. After his departure in 1958, Rodinson took more and more distance from political militancy, whilst remaining firmly convinced that Marxism proposed the most pertinent methodology for analysing non-European societies, notably for those colonised or previously colonised countries. It’s this aspect of Rodinson’s political thought that will most interest us here: his theorisation of anti-colonialism – and, in particular, his reflection on the strategic role Islam could play as an instrument of mobilisation. It seems that, beyond the colonial question itself, this aspect of Rodinson’s thought allows us to return to what he named an ‘independent Marxism’, in his response to a question from Egyptian sociologist Ibrahim Sa’ad ad-Din, during a conference in Cairo, in 1969. Since an ‘independent Marxism’ should not be confounded with a sort of ‘academic neutrality,’ it is interesting to consider what this approach contributes to Rodinson's analysis –  notably, during his dialogues with militants, like Amar Ouzegane, or intellectuals, like Edward Said. This should be done without attempting to mask the limitations of this ‘independence’, which was accompanied by Rodinson’s distancing from any organisational engagement, albeit without his ever falling into an apolitical neutralism.

An erudite polyglot of the first order, Rodinson published a number of works that became authoritative far beyond Marxist social scientist circles. Having published translations of Arabic and  also Turkish, and taught Ethiopian and Old South Arabian, and as capable of writing on the poetry of Nazim Hikmet as on Arab cuisine, Rodinson published a number of foundational texts on linguistics (on the incompatibility of consonants in Semitic language root words, for example), and on the emergence of capitalism in Muslim countries (his work Islam and Capitalism remains without doubt his most known and discussed work) and, too, on the historical evolution of anti-Semitism, without counting his many reviews of works. Such erudition seems extraordinary, in the literal sense of the term, in the current context. But, Rodinson was also a political militant, a long-time member of the PCF, raised in a strongly politicised family (his father had, perhaps, played chess with Trotsky). In his memoirs, Rodinson recalled that he’d attended his first demonstration with his mother in 1927, following the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti. From that moment, Rodinson never stopped having one foot in the sphere of militancy. It would seem, nonetheless, that throughout his lifework, he more and more took distance from the militant world, without ever depoliticizing either. Nor was he sparing in analysing the international situation, for example during the Gulf War of 1991. Rodinson was constantly gripped by the need forscientificité andrationalité.

It seems essential then for us to inquire into his analysis of tactical and strategic questions, especially into an element that was impossible to ignore in the revolutionary processes dynamising  the ‘Third World’: the powerful tactical power offered by Islam for mobilising the masses against colonialism and imperialism. The present article explores Rodinson’s debates with militants and intellectuals, as well as some texts that were - rather than mere reactions to burning questions - imposed by circumstance and that dwelt over first-order strategic problems.  

On Rodinson, Pierre Vidal-Naquet wrote that ‘not only was he a man with a great library - he read and interpreted the books he possessed. He was the greatest érudit that I ever encountered’ [1]. It is essential we discover, or rediscover, thisérudit, through restoring his thought in the debates and political issues of the second half of the 20th century.

Islam and the ‘psychology of the masses’

The ideal is not remote, situated in another world; it is produced by earthly transformations. But, it requires the total devotion of the individual. As with Mazdeism, every thought, every word spoken, and every action has a cosmic value. It builds, on the earth, the Bonne Cité (the Good City). This had been, for Ouzegane, theCité Communiste, interlinked with the international communist movement; it is now, for him, the Algerian Muslim Cité, with a socialist structure. The national addition, secondary and largely insignificant in the first ideology, has become primordial. (Maxime Rodinson, 'From Communism to the FLN’)

In his study of French anti-colonialism since the 16th century [2], historian Claude Liauzu explained that, during the Algerian revolution, the religious factor was largely underestimated by the French anti-colonialists, who principally perceived Algeria through the eyes of their laïcs (secular) Arab comrades. It was in this context that Rodinson appeared clearly as a dissonant voice, for his thinking that the Muslim religion’s imbrication in social and political relations was a key element of anti-colonial struggles in Muslim countries. Rodinson never searched for an ideal-type of anti-colonial militant, revolutionary andlaïc, but rather always began with the necessity of analysing actually existing society, rather than building a political analysis on an imagined social reality. The role that Rodinson confers on Islam in the anti-colonial struggles stands out especially in his dialogue with Amar Ouzegane (1910-1981). Ouzegane, an Algerian militant, was counted amongst the founders in 1936 of the Parti Communiste Algérien (PCA), before being excluded for ‘nationalist deviances’ in 1947. In a review, published inLeMonde Diplomatique in 1962 (and re-published inMarxisme et monde musulman) of Ouzegane’s book,Le meilleur des combats (The Best Battle) -  in which Ouzegane lengthily responded to a 1960 text of Larbi Bouhali, who’d succeeded him at the PCA secretariat – Rodinson discussed the strategic role that Islam might play as a political instrument. In his book, Ouzegane did not invoke any theological argument to explain the importance of Islam in the context of revolutionary Algeria, but did, though, very much insist on the social role played by the Muslim religion. In his review, Rodinson cites Robespierre’s appraising of atheism as an ‘aristocratic’ phenomenon during the French Revolution in order to comment on Ouzegane’s claim that atheism was a kind of marker of the French labour aristocracy [3]. However, despite Rodinson having had a sincere political sympathy for Ouzegane, he remained no less critical of the role that religion can play as a political instrument and tactic.

Whilst Rodinson is largely known for his study of the development of capitalist in the Muslim countries, he was equally interested, in a profound way, in the ‘use’ that Islam might be put to towards non-religious ends – especially, the role that the Muslim religion might play in independence struggles. As Rodinson wrote, in an article published in the Partisans journal in 1963, the leaders of national liberation struggles, whether they were atheists or not, should not ignore the potential to mobilise the masses that religion offered. In the case of the Muslim countries, for example, it was clear that religious oppression played a central role in national oppression. In the article, Rodinson again mobilised Ouzegane’s point of being less concerned about whether Muslim dogmas were true or false, than with seeing Islam principally as a social and political instrument. Thus – and it was on precisely this point that Rodinson made his critique – according to Ouzegane, militant atheists were not necessarily mistaken in the worldview, but rather in the mis-comprehension of the ‘social psychology’ of the Algerian masses. Rodinson considered Islam as neither a good nor a bad ideology a priori, but rather insisted on the need to produce analyses of the religion that account for its social conditions in which it developed. As he wrote at the beginning of the his book De Pythagore à Lénine, ‘the best way to comprehend nothing of a phenomenon is to isolate it, and to consider it, from either the interior or the exterior, as if it is the only one of its type’ [4].

Nevertheless, in the case of the national liberation struggles, Rodinson was fairly sceptical of the utilisation of Islam as a primary 'mobilisation tool'; indeed, he considered such an approach to the religious question as potentially dangerous for the newly independent states, and rejected the concept of the 'social psychology' of the masses mobilised by Ouzegane. According to Rodinson, the danger resided in that, 'pushed to the limit by some peasant' - a politician like Ouzegane, for example, who later became a minister in the newly independent Algeria:

would have to confess to believe the same thing as him. Maybe, by mental restriction, he would decide that he himself does not believe in what are, for the modern, rational spirit, the most shocking aspects of the peasant’s faith, for example believing in the mare of Borâq [a Pegasus with a woman’s head - Ed. Note]. But, he would have dispossessed himself of the right of critiquing these aspects. Practically, he would align himself with the peasant’s faith. What’s the import, one might say, of this half-spoken alignment, if the peasant is convinced to construct socialism, suffering and sacrificing, albeit whilst believing in following the precepts of Allah and of the Prophet Mohammed? We’ve sacrificed so many things for the revolution, among others, the search for the truth in its various guises. Why not go all the way? [5]

Rodinson would write something similar some years later, at the end of his classic work, Islam and Capitalism, on the subject of the attachment of the Algerian poor to Islam, and the potential consequences of its political instrumentalisation:

It must be seen that this attachment, before it being an expression of faith, and although it may indeed lead many souls towards values that are strictly religious in character, is nonetheless fundamentally a national, and a class, phenomenon. The poor see in Islam that which distinguishes them from the foreign oppressor and from the Europeanized upper strata, infidels in deed or spirit. The Muslim ‘clergy’, in large part poor, discredited by the occupier, faithful to the values of the traditional society in which they lived, belongs to the poor, constitutes their leadership and speaks to them in their own language, a language at their level. But, with independence, however, the ‘clergy’ climbed step-by-step the social ladder. The more-or-less exploiting upper layers increasingly proclaim their attachment to Islam in their frenetic search for an ideological guarantee for their social and material advantages. The more 'clerics' rise in the social strata, or even simply integrate into the nation, the less Islam will be for the disinherited an exclusive ordering principle. [6]

In such circumstances, if a conflict were to erupt in post-independence Algeria, for example, the peasant would, according to Rodinson, follow the religious over the political leader. It is here that the ‘Frenchness’ of Rodinson - something he revealed most in the last period of his life, when he would take against ‘the communitarian plague’ [7] - becomes explicit: according to him, it may be necessary, for the political education of the formerly colonised masses, to put into motion certain secular measures, as in the Christian countries, such as the separation of church and state. If there was nothing of the laïcard about him, at least in the sense we mean it today - he did not perceive Islam as a regression, [though] neither as more advanced - it is clear all that same that he wrote in a certainAufklärung (Enlightenment) tradition, for which scientific truth was above any political consideration. Thus, aboutIslam and Capitalism, George Labica wrote in 1967:

One can’t deny [...] the merit of his calling for and even provoking confrontations, like all authentically generous thought, where mutual loathing [anathèmes réciproque] and trials of motives might finally be replaced by the rigours of scientific examination. [8]

This rationalism, sometimes a little tainted with Eurocentrism, does not however in any way signify either a ‘war’ against Islam, or against ‘religion’ as such, or a call to ‘enlighten’ colonial subjects. In his preface to James Thrower’s book Marxist-Leninist ‘Scientific Atheism’ and the Study of Religion and Atheism in the U.S.S.R., Rodinson suggests that the ‘Western’ critique of religion had merely replaced religion with a new ideology, which though conserved the same functions:

This critique of religion, practised in the West since the Enlightenment - the Marxist and Soviet theses are the latest form, sometimes coarse, sometimes refined - appear as no more than interested, practical politics, as some vulgar maneuver. It is also an effort towards replacing the traditional religions with a new ideology, endowed with the same functions. [9]

Rodinson’s relationship with the enlightenment tradition, with atheism and with religion, is present in a number of his works - notably in his magisterial biography of the Prophet [10]. It was a point to which he returned in his preface of Kazem Radjavi’s 1983 book, La révolution iranienne et les moudjahédines:

I am myself a rationalist, a loyal son of the European tradition of the Aufklärung. But, I long ago renounced the idea, which flows quite naturally from this tradition, that religion is equivalent to an absolute night of the spirit, with the corollary being that to break from religion was to enter a world of true thought, demythologised, transparent, with an absolute equivalence between reality and the concept of it. Similarly, it is necessary to renounce the idea that an alienated vision of the world might not result from a class holding of proprietorship over means of production (or of men, or the earth), from the exploitation which results, and from the utilisation of religion towards better acceptance. [11]

Thus, the amicable critique Rodinson addressed to Ouzegane’s perspective was more concerned with the political consequences of the use of Islam as a tactic in the national liberation struggles than over the Muslim religion as such. In the same way, according to Rodinson, there was never anything intrinsically anti-socialist in Islam, defending the idea that the only barrier to socialism in the Muslim countries would be to put in place anti-Muslim politics.

Communism and colonialism

Rodinson’s interest in the relations between Islam, Muslims, and communism is one of the explanations for his fascination for the Tartar Bolshevik Sultan Galiev, who opposed those revolutionaries who wanted to struggle against Islam, and defended the idea of the necessity of, so to speak, ‘Marxising’ Islam. As Matthieu Renault wrote:

There is not for Sultan Galiev any incompatibility between socialist revolution and Islam: it is not necessary to work towards the destruction of Islam, but rather to it’s despiritualisation, to it’s ‘Marxisation’.[12]

In 1960, Rodinson had published a text on Sultan Galiev in Les Temps Modernes. This article was a presentation of a book, published by Alexandre Bennigsen and Chantal Quelquejay, on ‘Sultangaliévisme’,The National Movements of the Muslims of Russia, Vol I: ‘Sultangaliévisme’ in Tartarstan. The text in question is interesting for more than its title, notably for showing the fascination that Maoism exercised over Rodinson (he saw in Sultan Galiev a precursor to Maoism), and for the reference to the development of an African-Asian bloc that Rodinson compared with a Colonial International, which Sultan Galiev had called for, to ‘assure the hegemony of the underdeveloped, colonial world over the European powers’. [13]  If Rodinson was interested in the figure of Sultan Galiev, it was especially for Galiev’s supporting the fact ‘that there are contradictions in the socialist regime’ [14], for example those concerning the question of national minorities within the USSR, in explicit reference to Mao’s celebrated text of August 1937,On Contradiction. Rodinson’s leaving the PCF, near the time he wrote the Galiev article, is particularly illuminated by the criticism he addressed to communist organisations [15] for the near-absence of a targeted struggle to overcome these contradictions:

Every time someone puts a light on one of these contradictions, concretely, it is either denied or minimised. Naturally, the dogmatiques search not at all to analyse, to explain, or to find the causes and the repercussions. They represent the politics followed by Communist leaders (dirigeants) in every phase, as though determined by a superior wisdom which faithfully follows all the fluctuations of the national and global conjuncture, since they are armed with the infallible ‘compass’ of Marxist teaching. [16]

He added further:

Altogether, until a very recent time, and with some understandable excuses, the communist dirigeants have been as little lucid as to the capitalist world in regards the dreams of the colonised people. [17]

Thus, to summarise the conception Rodinson had of the relations between communism and colonialism, it is evident that he wished to struggle against the white hegemony and the racial-colonial contradictions within socialism and communism, being reasons that revolutionaries ought to, according to Rodinson, study Sultan Galiev - but, he perceived that the direction in which Islam was developing in the newly independent countries was potentially dangerous politically. Rodinson had moreover never been a Third Worldist, as the movement had existed in France in the 1960s and ‘70s, writing in the prologue to Islam et capitalisme:

I do not the subscribe to the mystique of the Third World, now so widespread in Left circles, and do not beat my breast daily in despair at not having been born in the Congo or somewhere like that. Nevertheless the problems of the Third World are indeed crucial [...] [18]

In the same way that he thought that scientific truth should not be sacrificed on the altar of anti-colonial revolution, Rodinson wrote in his small book La Fascination de l’Islam (1978) that the solution to problems that the Third World would face would not be found in the nationalist ideology of the former colonisers, ideology which, though Rodinson recognised its pertinence, involved a number of limitations, from a scientific point of view. [19]

Rodinson thus attempted to navigate across a political minefield when it came to discussing the relation between Islam and anti-colonial struggles. From 1958, the year in which Rodinson quit the PCF, through the 1970s and 1980s, he more and more evolved towards an ‘independent’ perspective, without ever becoming, for that, a ‘renegade’. As Gilbert Achcar wrote in his preface to the English edition of Marxism and the Muslim World:

[...] While remaining very much involved in political discussions [...] [Rodinson] developed a critical open brand of Marxism, which he labelled ‘independent’. His relationship to Marxism evolved into an effort to salvage Marx’s method of enquiry along with key tenets of his thought, while engaging in provocative, iconoclastic debates with organised Marxists: from seeking at first to convince or influence them - the perspective that informs the essays gathered here - to an increasingly disenchanted and mordant attitude as the Communist movement went deeper into agony. [20]

The Islamic Revolution

Multiple cases of spirituality have existed. All have finished very quickly, in general, by subordinating worldly ideas, posed initially as flowing from a spiritual or ideal source, to the eternal laws of politics, which is to say the struggle for power. (Maxime Rodinson, L’Islam politique et croyance)

Another major event which inspired Rodinson to reflect on the relations between revolutionary processes and Islam was the Iranian Revolution of 1979. To properly grasp Rodinson’s interventions over Iran, it is essential to briefly return to the origins of the revolutionary uprising of 1979.

From the beginning of 1960s, the Shah’s Iran had known an economic crisis, coupled with a political crisis, without precedent. Faced with the aggravation of political crisis, the government of the Shah ordered in 1963 a series of reforms which entered into posterity under the term the ‘White Revolution’. These reforms had as objective the establishing of a stable economic, social and political base for the regime, favouring two groups: middle class peasants and the petite bourgeoisie of functionaries. The objective of the Shah, and of his Prime Minister Ali Amini, was to ‘modernise’ the country. The big losers of the reforms were, in the first place, the traditional middle class of the bazaars. Their position was constantly menaced by capitalist development of Iran. In parallel, the rural exodus was accelerated, and a large number of agricultural workers migrated towards the towns, in search of the ‘grand civilization’ their radios said was in full expansion, without finding, in fact, work there. There was a huge gulf between the promises of the regime and Iranians’ expectations. This development was visible, on the one hand, from the modernisation of Iranian economic life by the state, involving a process of cultural development and, above all, of the productivity of the working class, and on the other, the persistence of older forms of exploitation. The Shah’s modernising force was also strongly marked by a will towards ‘secularisation’ - a centralised forced march - that progressively turned religious authorities against him, especially an Ayatollah who would become leader of the Islamic Revolution: Ruhollah Khomeiny. The Shiʻah ‘clergy’ would come to marshall the majority of the opposition, taking the lead from 1975 onwards, from a left opposition affected by state repression. In effect, despite the façade of political liberalisation, political repression increased, with the economic modernisation of Iran paired with a reinforcing of the repressive apparatus. In the 1970s, the assassinations and torture were the everyday lot of the greater part of the opposition. According to Maryam Poya [21], the state’s repression led to the crystallisation of the opposition into two tendencies: a guerilla movement on the one hand, and a Shiʻah ‘clergy’ on the other. In 1975, those existent political parties were dissolute, and only SAVAK-supervised trade unions were authorised. The Shah announced the establishment of a single-party system, financed by ‘the free world’. Over the 1970s, it was thus the Shiʻah clergy that took the leadership of the opposition, and who called for a massive mobilisation against the regime of the Shah. The ‘clergy’ organised the opposition around the rejection of ‘Westernisation’ and of the submission to the imperialism incarnated in the Shah. The Islam mobilised as a means to speak with the masses was an Islam of liberation, directly addressing the political and social conditions of the majority of the population. It was without a doubt Ali Shariati who furnished the most important theoretical formulation of this liberation struggle, in defining Islam as revolutionary praxis. It was this revolutionary role conferred to Islam that provoked a number of European intellectuals to respond - including Rodinson.

In a Nouvel Observateur article on the 19th February 1979, entitled ‘Khomeyni et la “primauté du spirituel”’ (‘Khomeyni and “Spiritual Primacy”’) Rodinson elaborated not only on the significance of the Iranian revolution, but also on the reactions that it provoked amongst French intellectuals. In the introduction which accompanied the re-publication of the article in L’Islam, politique et croyance (Islam, Politics and Belief), Rodinson wrote that:

The hope, dead or moribund for a long time, for a global revolution, one which would liquidate the exploitation and oppression of man by man resurged, timidly at first, then with more assurance. Could it be that, in a most unexpected fashion, this hope is coming to be embodied now in the Muslim Orient, up until now hardly promising, and more precisely, where man is lost in a universe of medieval thought? [22]

Returning to the fervour that the revolution had provoked in a number of intellectuals, Rodinson noted, as he had in his debate with Ouzegane, that ‘the mobilising force are Islamist slogans’, adding later that ‘the Iranian liberal democrats and Marxists were asking more and more whether they had been mistaken in dismissing the traditional religious fervour of the people’ [23]. 'The Iranian revolution seemed, indeed, to justify the disquietude expressed by Rodinson on the subject of post-independence Algeria, and added to the désillusion of many of its most fervent supporters - Iranian and Europeans - faced with a new regime, and with the utilisation of Islam by the state.

The essay which Rodinson particularly addressed was Foucault’s. In their work Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson somewhat caricature Rodinson’s critique of Foucault when they write:

While we find many of Rodinson’s critiques of Foucault compelling, we certainly cannot agree with his argument for the advantages of a purely socioeconomic approach to the realm of the political over a philosophical one.

In this study, we have argued that there were particular aspects of Foucault’s philosophical perspective that helped to lead him toward an abstractly uncritical stance toward Iran’s Islamist movement. If a philosophical perspective per se were the problem, how then could equally philosophical feminist thinkers like de Beauvoir and Dunayevskaya have succeeded in arrivingat a more appropriately critical stance toward the Iranian Revolution? [24]

Indeed, whilst it’s true that in Islam, Politics and Belief  Rodinson wrote that ‘the spirits of philosophical formation (...) are the most exposed to seduction by theoretical slogans’ [25], Afray and Anderson never referenced Rodinson’s other texts - those which would have allowed them to nuance their criticism. One issue is that the question of philosophical grounding of Foucault, occupied no more than a limited place in the criticism they addressed to Rodinson; another is that Rodinson was far from arguing for a ‘purely socio-economic’ approach. Rodinson, who was considered as, in part, philosophe-like [26], aimed at professional philosophers  - French, above all - the reproach of writing on every subject without being properly informed, and of a certain form of idealism:

The culture currently fostered in the universities - and especially the École normale supérieure - houses philosophical dissertations without much information or serious argument: they keep clear of concrete problems, and even of more general problems [27]

Rodinson’s reproach of Foucault was above all for the weak knowledge of the subject he dealt with. But, beyond Foucault, Rodinson’s essay in the Nouvel Observateur at the moment of the Iranian revolution was part of his more general reflecting on the place of Islam in revolutionary processes. Much ink was spilled on the role of Islam and religious leaders in the revolutionary processes at the end of the 1970s and early 1980s. Hence, in his classic AllThat Is Solid Melts into Air (1982), the great American theoretician of modernity Marshall Berman (1940-2013) made several references to the Iranian revolution, notably when he wrote, on Act Four, Part Two of Goethe’sFaust:

The alternatives, as they are defined in Act Four, are: on one side, a crumbling multinational empire left over from the Middle Ages, ruled by an emperor who is pleasant but venal and utterly inept; on the other side, challenging him, a gang of pseudo-revolutionaries out for nothing but power and plunder, and backed by the Church, which Goethe sees as the most voracious and cynical force of all. (The idea of the Church as a revolutionary vanguard has always struck readers as far fetched, but recent events in Iran suggest that Goethe may have been onto something.) [28]

This question - how to position oneself vis-à-vis revolutionary processes in motion? - is essential in the thought of Rodinson. In his much-cited preface to Kazem Radjavi’s book, Rodinson did not condemn  the revolutionary process for its religious references - this argument had long been central to his reflections. He was interested above all in the practices of the Khomeinist government post-revolution:  

It is often very difficult to appreciate the moment when the justifiable defence measures of a new regime degrade into cruel, barbaric procedures. These are able also to co-exist so easily with continued, important ameliorations for the great masses. We ought to hesitate before compromising these ameliorations through denouncing these cruelties. We are here before terrible dilemmas. But, experience has taught us that there are lines which we should not allow to be crossed without doing all we can to prevent it, a point beyond which the cruelty of means irredeemably corrupts the best of ends. I believe this point has been reached in Iran. [29]

For Iran, as for Algeria, far from making Islam an explanatory factor of the revolutionary or postrevolutionary process, Rodinson rather attempted to apply a rational analysis  - ‘the only relatively certain guide we have’ [30] - to the Muslim world.

As Gilbert Achcar notes in Marxism, Orientalism, Cosmopolitanism, the end of the 1970s marked ‘a major turning point in Oriental and Islamic studies’ [31]. Achcar gave three principal reasons for this evolution: the Iranian revolution of 1979 and the establishment of the Islamist Republic; the development of the armed Islamic rebellion against the left-wing dictator of Afghanistan; and the publication of Edward Said’s classicOrientalism, in 1978. On the first two points, we have seen that Rodinson did not at all see either the religious or the ‘Oriental’ character of these processes as determinant. However, the theoretical interventions of Rodinson were not limited to an analysis of social process in the Muslim world; he also debated the most important intellectuals of the time, foremost among whom was Edward Said.

The Fascination of Islam, Orientalism, and the theory of two sciences

In 1980, the same year of the French publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism, Rodinson published a collection of texts under the nameLa fascination de l’Islam. Rodinson was considered a major intellectual by Said, though he was not his principal intellectual reference. Hence, when Said addressed the ‘canonical theses supported by the Orientalists, whose ideas on the economy never go beyond affirming the fundamental incapacity of Orientals for industry, commerce, and economic rationality’ [32], he mobilised Rodinson’s bookIslam and Capitalism as a counter-example, and affirmed the work as marking a rupture from those clichés about the ‘Orientals’. In the same manner, he called Rodinson amongst ‘theérudits (...) and the critics who have received an Orientalist education [and who] are perfectly capable of freeing themselves from the old ideological straightjacket of orthodoxy.’ [33]

In the introduction of the 1993 edition of The Fascination of Islam, Rodinson seems to have also held Said in high esteem:

I implore my readers to read Edward Said’s book, Orientalism, the French translation of which, appearing near the time of the first edition of my small book, had a great success.

The work of this Palestinian, now professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Columbia in New York, greatly cultured in English and French literature, has had a large success in the Anglo-Saxon world. He has provoked in the professional Orientalist milieu something close to a trauma. They certainly had the habit of seeing criticism of their work [as being] ‘ethnocentric’, and of being denounced by the ‘indigenous’ publications as agents, conscious or unconscious, of Euro-American imperialism. But these works didn't affect the very milieu in which they were developing. But here suddenly were all the same accusations reprised in English, by a professor of well-known value, familiar with Flaubert and Coleridge, invoking the ideas of Michel Foucault! [34]

Yet, as intellectually beneficial as this ‘trauma’ might have been, Rodinson maintained nothing less than a critical attitude vis-à-vis the central work of Said. The principle problem in Orientalism did not reside, according to Rodinson, so much in Said’s interpretation of Orientalism as such - despite certain limits he pointed to [35] -  than in the use that might be made of the methodology deployed by the book’s author. Rodinson defended, indeed, the idea that ‘taken to the limit certain analyses and, still more, certain formulations of Edward Said fall into a doctrine that is, by all appearances, the Zhdanovian theory of The Two Sciences’. [36]. Rodinson wrote too that ‘pushed to the extreme’, such a theory ‘leads to more Lyssenko’. It's necessary to note that, despite the fact that Rodinson's warning is apparently self-evident, one could say, without risk of being anachronistic, that it anticipated certain contemporary debates between Marxists and proponents of post-colonial studies. Rodinson then not only warned against Said’s book itself, but against the uses it might be put to:

Whatever the importance of the deviations caused by the colonial situation to either reason or data, whatever the necessity to fight them, and however important the entrance onto the scene of the judgement of colonised and ex-colonised experts is, using their usual sensitivity against these deviations, it is indispensable to not slide carelessly towards the doctrine in question, that of the Two Sciences. [37]

Still, in the The Fascination of Islam, Rodinson devoted an entire chapter to the development of Arab and Islamic studies in Europe. He criticised the rejection of certain aspects of the social sciences, too quickly accused of Eurocentrism in his eyes. As we have seen before, despite all the sympathy that Rodinson had with the decolonisation movements, he refused this accusation, and went further:

It’s necessary all the same to keep in mind that, for reasons which have nothing to do with a spurious racial superiority, it is Europe which has most advanced (until now) the application of the refined scientific methods, even if the practice of these methods was previously initiated in the civilizations non-Europeans studied. [38]

If the criticism of Rodinson should however be considered in quite a different way from the flood of criticisms that duly faced Said around the publication of Orientalism, it is since Rodinson entirely agreed with Said’s anti-colonialism, without having drawn at all the same ‘scientific’ conclusions. The critiques of Rodinson concerning the risks of opposing an anti-Orientalist science with an Orientalist left Said unmoved (‘laissé Said de marbre’), as recalled by Gilbert Achcar, who cited an interview of Said with Hassan Arfaoui and Subhi Hadidi’s, dated 1996, in which Said inveighed against Rodinson in these terms: ‘I was hardly surprised by an ex-Stalinist [being] incapable of comprehending the nature of the criticism, and the critical method more generally’ [39].

In Marxism, Orientalism, Cosmopolitanism, Achcar cites an article published in the Autumn of 1985 in the review,Cultural Critique. According to Achcar, Said seemed to appreciate certain warnings formulated by Rodinson, without however explicitly referencing him:

Whether in identifying and working through anti-dominant critiques, subaltern groups – women, blacks, and so on – can resolve the dilemma of autonomous fields of experience and knowledge that are created as a consequence. A double kind of possessive exclusivism could set in: the sense of being an excluding insider by virtue of experience (only women can write for and about women, and only literature that treats women or Orientals well is good literature), and second, being an excluding insider by virtue of method (only Marxists, anti-Orientalists, feminists can write about economics, Orientalism, women’s literature). [40]

If Said had perhaps taken Rodinson’s remarks to heart - at the beginning of the article, he notably made reference to certain ‘hostile and sometimes (...) injurious’ comments towards his book - it’s necessary to not lose sight of his citing in the same article a number of other intellectuals who all held a similarly anti-Orientalist view, but that did not seem to fall into the same trap as Rodinson. It remains nevertheless the case that Said regretted such a splitting of thought, and ended his article in pronouncing the necessity for interdisciplinary intellectual activity. He concluded with these words: ‘I believe that the criticism of Orientalism is only an ephemeral hobby.’ [41]

---

We have not dwelled on the relation of Rodinson to anti-Semitism and Zionism - themes that are too vast, that would merit dedicating an entire article to - and on which Rodinson not only published a number of works, but also was clearly invested politically. The object of the present article was, above all, the concrete discussion of what the appellation ‘independent Marxism’ meant for Rodinson, and focused principally over his analysis of revolutionary processes in Muslim countries.

The stakes are high in (re)-making Rodinson a theoretical reference for new generations of activists - referring to his political debates over the colonial question, and to his magisterial study, Islam and Capitalism. At a time when a militant fervour seems, sometimes, to annihilate all rigorous analyses of problems as they play out, and when the university milieu remains outside the militant arena, the work of Rodinson seems - despite its limits - as one methodological remedy to the false choice dilemma between the perspective of the thinker and the militant.

Translator’s note on quotations and bibliography: When Nadi quotes English-language works, or French-language works with well-known or easily available English versions, I’ve deferred to the original and to the translation respectively; their titles are in English.

[1] Pierre Vidal-Naquet, ‘En guise de préface’, in Maxime Rodinson, Souvenirs d’un marginal, Fayard, 2005, p. 16.

[2] Claude Liauzu, Histoire de l’anticolonialisme en France du XVIe siècle à nos jours, Armand Collin, Paris, 2007.

[3] In a work he dedicated to Robespierre, Georges Labica explained that the view of Robespierre towards religion constituted, for the Roberspierriens, the ‘exquisite point of all pains’.

[4] Maxime Rodinson, De Pythagore à Lénine. Des activismes idéologiques, Fayard, Paris, 1993, p. 22.

[5] Maxime Rodinson, ‘L’Islam et les nouvelles indépendances’, Partisans, n° 10, May-June 1963, p. 112-113

[6] Maxime Rodinson, Islam et capitalisme, Seuil, Paris, 1966, p. 234

[7] See Maxime Rodinson, Souvenirs d’un marginal, Fayard, Paris, 2005, pp. 393–398.

[8] Georges Labica, ‘Une discussion sur Islam et capitalisme de Maxime Rodinson’, La Pensée. Revue du rationalisme moderne, n° 131, February 1967, p. 96

[9] Maxime Rodinson, De Pythagore à Lénine, op. cit., p. 194.

[10] “I am concerned with a religious founder, a man who, during most of his life at least, was profoundly and sincerely religious, with a keen sense of the direct presence of the divine. It may be objected that I, as an atheist, cannot possibly understand such a man. That may be so; after all, what actually constitutes understanding? However, I am convinced that, provided he takes enough trouble, and totally excludes any contempt, pharisaism or sense of superiority, an atheist can in fact understand a religious outlook [...]  certainly as well as an art critic can understand a painter, an adult a child, a man of robust health an invalid (and vice versa) or a scholarly recluse a businessman. Certainly a religious man would understand my subject differently, but better? I am not so sure. [...] Founders of ideologies have given men reasons for living, and personal or social tasks to fulfill. When the ideologies are religious they have declared (and generally believed) that their message came from beyond our world, and that what they themselves represented was something more than merely human. The atheist can only say that this extra-human origin remains unproved. But that gives him no reason for denigrating the message itself; indeed he may even place a higher value on it, as being an admirable effort to surpass the human condition.” Maxime Rodinson, Mohammed, translated by Anne Carter, Penguin, London, 1971, p. xiii

[13] Maxime Rodinson, ‘Communisme et Tiers Monde : sur un précurseur oublié’, in Maxime Rodinson, Marxisme et monde musulman, Seuil, Paris, 1972, p. 382.

[14] Ibid., p. 383.

[15] Jean Suret-Canale was particularly critical towards the critique Rodinson addressed at the PCF, writing: ‘Maxime Rodinson is a former member of the Parti Communiste Français. He accuses it of having been ‘Stalinist’; he explains that he participated in certain oppositional groups where he found the same shackling of his freedom, and that he chose finally to be an homme seul. I do not put in doubt the passion of Maxime Rodinson for the truth. But is this ‘disengagement’ a sure guarantee of objectivity? When Maxime Rodinson devoted an article inLe Monde to discussions of the Asiatic mode of production, he did not mention the C.E.R.M [Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches Marxistes; one of the PCF’s intellectual groups], which was the cadre of that research, and presents it as the work of a group of intellectuals in struggle against the direction of their Party, when this research was pursued with his support, is he true to the intentions that he proclaims? Isn’t it that, under the pretext of rejecting an ideology, he falls into another, about which his former comrades have a right to be severe? There is an ‘anti-Stalinism’ fanaticism which is worth no more that the other fanaticisms and which is often the inverted form of that which it pretends to condemn.

[16] Ibid., p. 383.

[17] Ibid., p. 384.

[18] Maxime Rodinson, Islam and Capitalism, translated by Brian Pearce, 1966/1977, p. vii, Pelican, London.

Translator’s note: Rodinson wrote ‘de n’être pas né dans quelque Congo’, literally, ‘for not being born in some Congo’ - perhaps this is more dismissive than Pearce’s ‘the Congo or somewhere like that’.

[19] Maxime Rodinson, La fascination de l’Islam, La Découverte, Paris, 1993, p. 138.

[20] Gilbert Achcar, ‘Foreword’, Marxism and the Muslim World, Zed Books, London,  2015, p. ix.

[21] Maryam Poya, ‘IRAN 1979. Long live the Révolution! Long live Islam?’, in Colin Barker (ed.), Revolutionary Rehearsals, Haymarket, Chicago, 2002.

[22] Maxime Rodinson, L’Islam politique et croyance, Fayard, Paris, 1993, p. 301.

[23] Ibid., p. 302.

[24] Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution. Gender and the Seductions of Islamism, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and Londres, 2005, p. 135.

[25] Maxime Rodinson, L’Islam politique et croyance, op. cit., p. 305.

[26] ‘If I absolutely had to wear a badge, it would be that of a philosopher - without having, however, all the required philosophical instruction. All things considered, I would prefer that of a sociologist or a general anthropologist, since I have excluded from my studies that which goes beyond the social or human world. I have also some claim to be a qualified historian, since it is the evolutionary, diachronic aspect that has always most interested me. And, what’s more, I have done specific historical studies, limited in time’. Maxime Rodinson, Entre Islam et Occident. Entretiens avec Gérard D. Khourry, Les Belles Lettres, Paris, 1998, pp. 201-202.

[27] Ibid., p. 205.

[28] Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air.The Experience of Modernity, Verso, Londres-New-York, 2010, p. 63.

[29] Maxime Rodinson, ‘Préface’, in Kazem Radjavi, La révolution iranienne et les moudjahédines, op. cit., p. XVI.

[30] Maxime Rodinson, L’Islam politique et croyance, op. cit., pp. 11-12.

[31] Gilbert Achcar, Marxisme, orientalisme, cosmopolitisme, Actes Sud, Paris, 2015, p. 53.

[32] Edward Said, L’Orientalisme. L’Orient crée par l’Occident, Seuil, Paris, 2005, p. 291.

[33] Ibid., p. 352.

[34] Maxime Rodinson, La fascination de l’Islam, suivi de Le seigneur bourguignon et l’esclave sarrasin, pocket, Paris, 1993, p. 13.

[35] « Le mérite de Said est d’avoir contribué à définir mieux l’idéologie de l’orientalisme européen (en fait, surtout anglo-français) au XIXe et au XXe siècle et son enracinement dans les objectifs politiques et économiques européens d’alors. L’analyse qu’il en donne est intelligente, sagace, souvent pertinente. Il me paraît s’égarer quelquefois dans l’interprétation qu’il fait de certains textes d’orientalistes, avoir parfois sa perception troublée par sa naturelle over-sensitiveness aux réactions des autres, des Européo-Américains installés. D’où quelques formulations excessives. Mais une large part de ses critiques à l’orientalisme traditionnel sont valides et l’effet de choc de son livre se révélera très utiles s’il pousse les spécialistes à comprendre qu’ils ne sont pas si innocents qu’ils le disent et même qu’ils le croient, à essayer de détecter les idées générales dont inconsciemment ils s’inspirent, à en prendre conscience et à porter sur elles un regard critique. »

[36] ‘All science [...] has a class character. This class character do not only affect, as the first sociologist came to see, the material-social conditions of research, but, something which is more radical, the concepts and the theories which are the results [...] The science which exists in the 20th century is 99% ‘bourgeois science’: all it’s productions are marked with a seal of it’s class origin; they express the interest of this class in knowing reality in order to transform it to its advantage’ Dominique Lecourt, Lyssenko. Histoire réelle d’une « science prolétarienne , Maspero, Paris, 1976, p. 33.

[37] Maxime Rodinson, La fascination de l’Islam, suivi de Le seigneur bourguignon et l’esclave sarrasin, op. cit., p. 15.

[38] Ibid., p. 111.

[39]  ‘Entretien avec Edward Said. Propos reueillis par Hassan Arfaoui et Subhi Hadidi’, MARS, n° 4, hiver 1995, p. 18, cited in in Gilbert Achcar,Marxism, Orientalism, Cosmopolitanism, op. cit., p

[40] Cited in Gilbert Achcar, Marxism, Orientalism, Cosmopolitanism, Saki, London, p. 53

[41] Edward Said, ‘Orientalism Reconsidered’, Cultural Critique, n° 1, automne 1985, pp. 89-107.

Today we are launching on our website a whole new special issue on Identity Politics which will appear in print later this year in volume 26:2 of the journal. Big thanks to HM editors Ashok Kumar and Dalia Gebrial, and guest editors Adam Elliott-Cooper and Shruti Iyer for their very hard work putting this issue together. Thanks also to all the contributors and peer-reviewers. Special thanks to artist Natalia Podpora for her illustrations.

From the editors' introduction: 

The papers within the special issue respond to ongoing debates around what has been termed 'identity politics'. It aims to intervene in what are make-or-break questions for the Left today. Specifically, to provoke further interrogative but comradely conversation that works towards breaking-down the wedge between vulgar economism and vulgar culturalism.

ISSUE 26(2): IDENTITY POLITICS CONTENTS PAGE

The deadline for abstracts has been extended a final time, to midnight GMT on 13 June 2018

This text is based on Heide Gerstenberger (2017) Markt und Gewalt. Die Funktionsweise des historischen Kapitalismus (Westfälisches Dampfboot) Münster. An English translation will appear published by Brill asMarket and Violence.

Marx’s analysis of the basic structures of capitalism explains why, once established by ‘blood and dirt’, the capital relation can be reproduced in social forms which appear to confirm the absence of brutal force and sometimes even the existence of mutual interest. If labour contracts have existed before the advent of capitalism, it is only with capitalism that the contract has developed into the ideological centre of capitalist forms of production. Any doubt about its relevance was obliterated by the movement for the abolition of slavery. In making contracts into the defining characteristic of non-slavery, abolitionists gifted capitalism with a powerful vindication of its specific forms of exploitation. Its ongoing relevance is present in all the contracts which, starting in the last decades of the 19^th century and continuing until today, have been falsified in order to prevent legal action against forced labour.

By insisting on the ongoing presence of brute force in capitalist forms of appropriation, I do not want to minimise the sufferings to be experienced in labour conditions which are considered ‘regular’. Instead, I endeavour to explain that the historical realities of capitalism do not adhere to Marx’s conceptions of history. Brute force was not only the midwife of the new society, then to be reduced to an exception “in the ordinary run of things”. If direct violence against persons is, indeed, no longer a necessity for the reproduction of capitalist social forms of production, it has and is nevertheless constantly made use of. Quite a few Marxists endeavoured to reconcile Marx’s statement about the transition from the phase of so-called primitive accumulation to “the ordinary run of things” in capitalism by declaring that primitive accumulation, i.e. the presence of brutal force, was not restricted to a certain phase of capitalism but is one of its ongoing characteristics. If this is certainly correct as far as historical realities are concerned, there is no way around the fact that Marx thought differently. And this is not the only example where his philosophy of history has intruded into his analysis. Instead, it is constantly present in Marx’s explanations of those developments of capitalism which will produce the preconditions for the better future to which mankind is destined. That these explanations have not been validated by the actual course of history, has to be accepted as critique of any theoretical concept which links structural analysis to concepts of historical teleology. It is this linkage which not only provoked my research into the historical constitution of bourgeois capitalist states but also into the historical functioning of capitalism. The result of the latter can be summed up in a nutshell. It runs as follows:

Exceptions apart, owners of capital make use of all the means to achieve profits which are open to them in a certain place and at a certain time. If direct violence is not one of the practices which are being made use of, this is not prevented by economic rationality but only by public critique and state activity.

I will try to explain some of the findings of this research by relating them to its most vexing theoretical problem: If the resumé allows for exceptions, and rightly so, it nevertheless states that capital owners tend to act in certain ways.

At first sight, this makes my account into an extensive illustration of Marx’s concept of 'character masks'. But this concept refers to actors in so far as they exist in theoretically explained relations to other actors, be these relations of competition, of opposites, or of the contradiction which is present in any form of capitalist exploitation. It is one of the great achievements of Marx to have explained exploitation as resulting from the systemic characteristics of capitalism and not from the more or less vicious character of individuals. 

But as soon as we leave structural analysis and turn to historical realities we are no longer confronted with character masks but with real human beings. And these are not one-dimensional but “pluriel”. The term “l’hommepluriel” was coined by Bernard Lahire in order to explain his reservations about Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus (Lahire: 1998). 

While the concept of habitus is not to be mistaken as a modernized version of Marx’s character mask, it is, nevertheless more closely related to the latter than sociologists’ concept of ‘role’. In any case, if the owners of capital have to be considered just as ‘pluriel’ as any other human being, but have, nevertheless, acted most of the time as if they were the character masks of structural analysis, then we have to look for explanations of their behavior which are not sufficiently contained in the structural analysis of capitalism. And, of course, no Marxist worth his or her ilk will have recourse to concepts of the fundamentally egoistic nature of human beings.

If my exposition of historical developments goes back to the 15^th and 16^th century, this is not to recant from insisting that capitalism did not start with the world market and has not been brought about by its gains. Instead, I offer an addition to Marx’s analysis of the so-calledprimitive accumulation which may help to explain the historical foundation of long lasting patterns of legitimating violence. When, starting in the 15^th century, an European-based world market more or less replaced the Asian based world market of the 13^th and 14^th century, this amounted to the replacement of a network of more or less peaceful trade with some occurrences of robbing and killing by a system of regular robbery with some occurrences of peaceful trade connections (Chaudhuri:1985:14).

European armed trade was a threat to everyone, including merchants which held trading privileges from competing European princes. If legitimating violence with the task of Christianization was still present in the early phases of the European based world market– much later to be reformulated as an obligation to civilize – we may detect a legacy from the armed trade of pre-capitalism to capitalism which has nothing to do with any merchant capital that may have been accumulated. In granting trading privileges to merchants, European princes also took on the responsibility for all the bloodshed which was being practiced in order to gain the profits which they themselves expected. 

This direct responsibility of political powers for the practice of violence in the processes of appropriation has been present in each and every non-European colonial state to have been erected by any capitalist colonising power. The most important contribution to these practices was the legal transformation of subjugated men and women into “natives”, to be legally treated as human beings of minor worth.[1] Colonial states were simply that: institutions for forcing natives to help exploit the natural riches of their home countries.

On the other hand, societies on their way to become examples of metropolitan capitalism came to be governed by an apparatus which revolutionaries declared to be the property of nations. In defining the difference between legality and illegality, these governments thereby also outlined the range of practices citizens could feel justified to make use of. Laws entitle citizens to overlook the possible contradiction of their practices with those concepts of natural law, which had encouraged bourgeois revolutionaries. If, according to dominant interpretation, any such contradiction was obliterated by contracts, this justification, nevertheless, excluded slavery. But the founders of the United States managed to include slavery into the political structures of the Union. By counting slaves as three-fifth of an inhabitant of the slave states in order to increase the number of representatives of these states in Congress, they invented a pattern of bourgeois ethical hypocrisy, which denies any bounds to the dominion of private property. If there were, not only internationally, but also in the United States, more and more men and women who criticized slavery, this does not seem to have affected slavers. Instead, their respective neighbourhoods and later on also the respective state legislations even came to prohibit the practice of gifting a slave with his or her freedom at the death of his or her owner. 

I mentioned this development in order to suggest, that in explaining actual behaviour of capital owners, we not only take into consideration economic interests and the existing legal framework, but also the outlooks which are dominant in a historically given neighbourhood. The social force which I tentatively term ‘neighbourhood’ existed and exists in many varieties.[2] If the neighbours of slavers were more or less living nearby, today’s neighbourhoods can also consist of the leading or not so leading employees of a multinational combine. It is in these neighbourhoods that competition has been elevated to the range of an ethical norm. Accordingly, almost anything seems to be accepted amongst these ‘neighbours’ as long as it is practiced for the best of the firm. 

But let us go back to slavery. According to Marx and many Marxists, slavery would have had to be abolished sooner or later because it was preventing further development of capitalism.[3] But nowhere has slavery been abolished because it prevented profitable production. 

The most convincing argument against the assumption that free wage labour is a structural necessity for the development of capitalism, however, was provided by all those capital owners who, immediately after the abolishment of legal slavery, invented and exploited legal forms of surrogate slavery. Amongst these was the extensive trade in labour contracts which bound Asian coolies to their places of work for a number of years and very often for much longer. Once again, this trade was not abolished because of economic irrationality. Instead, it was ended by the governments of sending countries after reports about the slave-like labour conditions to which coolies were subjugated abroad, could no longer be overlooked. While in the USA and in colonies slave-like labour was predominant in agrarian capitalism, it was also present in industrial capitalism. 

Though legal forms of bondage were not as frequent in Europe as elsewhere, they were not absent. Marx knew about the fact, that leaving work without the consent of the capital owner was considered a criminal offence in England[4], thereby limiting contractual freedom even in the most advanced industrialised country. When he refrained from discussing this fact, Marx may have assumed that this criminal law would necessarily be abolished in the course of capitalist development. But when it was, indeed, abolished in 1875, this was not because of any widespread preference for a free labor market, but because the finally achieved extension of suffrage had offered organized laborers the chance to voice political demands during the electoral campaign. That even in the early 1870s many English capitalists profited from the criminalization of the so-called breach of contract, is just one of the countless examples which prove that, exceptions apart, capitalists make use of any possibility to make profits in a certain time and at a certain place. 

It was only after World War II that in all of the metropolitan capitalist societies, contractual freedom for labourers was definitely established. Trade unions were accorded the right to deliberate working conditions, thereby reducing the vagaries of individual labor contracts. In terming these developments the 'domestication of capitalism' I want to stress that if the ferocity of capitalism maybe temporarily subdued, it will not disappear, but threaten to once again come forward as soon as vigilance is neglected. The labor regime of National Socialism which was instituted after capitalism in Germany had already made inroads into its domestication, is a gruesome reminder of this insight into the political economy of capitalism. On the international scale its relevance was proven correct by recent threats to formerly established labor rights.

Capitalism became globalized when, after the breakdown of the international monetary system, governments of metropolitan capitalist societies abolished restrictions to international movements of capital. This not only furthered the developments of financial markets, it also facilitated investment in production in foreign countries, thereby creating internationalised labour markets in heretofore unknown forms. If this has not completely eradicated the power of labour organizations to demand certain state policies, it certainly reduced their influence. In non-metropolitan capitalist societies as well as in the worldwide shipping business the situation is worse because the existence of a potentially unlimited supply of labourers discourages struggles against violent practices of exploitation.

 While my research was mainly focused on violence in the exploitation of labourers, I have also referred to recently expanding practices like the trade in body parts, the dumping of poisonous waste, the grabbing of land, or the trade in military power. There is no question about their disastrous effect on the health and even the life of persons. I, nevertheless suggest that, as with illegality, violence tends to be politically and hence historically defined. 

I term ‘violent’ any form of labour exploitation which prevents labourers to leave their place of work, be this bondage the result of some sort of falsified contract, of threats against the respective labourer or his and her relatives, the practice of imprisoning labourers by employing guards, building fences or barring windows and doors, not to forget the practice of refusing shore-leave to seamen for weeks and even months. One has to add conditions which force laborers to work for very long hours and to endure risks to their health without protection. I describe numerous examples but I also point out that since the founding of the International Labor Organization in 1919 one convention after another has defined what practices are internationally deemed to be unacceptable. In condemning certain practices these conventions also define the range of capitalist exploitation which is deemed acceptable. National sovereignty ensures that neither the ratification of conventions by the nationally responsible political bodies nor their actual implementation can be enforced by international commissions. In the 1990s the ILO adjusted its policies to the conditions of globalization. It now endeavors to at least secure the establishment of basic labour rights.

But the chances to attain these rights are reduced when governments advertise offshore conditions of law on the world market for such conditions in order to attract foreign investors. Just like the offshore spheres for financial transactions and for flags of convenience, offshore spheres of production (Special Economic Zones) are legal spheres which are constituted as exceptions from national law. If all of them offer special tax conditions, many conditions are being deliberated between potential investors and respective governments. Until very recently it was common for investors to demand that trade union membership was prohibited for their employees. Recently, such regulations have become less frequent. But the practice has not. Notwithstanding the fact that in increasing offshore spheres, governments trade with national sovereignty, yet they remain officially responsible for conditions in offshore spheres. This means that capital owners are thereby formally exonerated from the stigma of direct political domination.

By offering capital owners the chance to leave the sphere of law in which their economic units are based, they are also presented with the possibility to flee the eyes of a critical local and national public, instead practicing what Marx has called ‘capitalism sans phrase’. Until now the continuation of this form of capitalism is not in danger because the international market in offshore conditions facilitates changes in the geographical location of investments.[5]

Offshore spheres of production are nationally constituted. At the same time they are integrated elements of the globalized political economy of capitalism. If the class relation exists in any form of capitalism, and if it is present in most social struggles of our time, the classes which Marx assumed would organize and teach themselves, thereby getting ready for revolution, are not present in globalized capitalism. There is then no social force which will induce capital owners to overcome short sighted practices of exploitation by creating labor conditions which, according to Marx, embody the historical progress inherent in capitalist social forms of production because they obliterated the brute force of exploitation characteristic of historically earlier forms of production and also because they bring about the preconditions for social revolution. The continuing presence of direct violence in capitalist social forms of production contradicts Marx’s expectations of the history of capitalism. It thereby also contradicts his theory of revolution.  

This text is based on: Heide Gerstenberger (2017) Markt und Gewalt. Die Funktionsweise des historischen Kapitalismus (Westfälisches Dampfboot) Münster and on:Karl Marx, Capital: Vol. I

Heide Gerstenberger was Professor for the 'theory of state and society' at the University of Bremen in Germany and is now retired. Her research covers a wide range of topics and has been centred on the development of capitalist states. Her work with Ulrich Welke engaged in an empirical analysis of maritime labour. Since 2005, she has been focusing on the history of capitalist societies, and has published in EnglishImpersonal Power: History and Theory of the Bourgeois State(2009, Brill/Haymarket). Her more recent work has been published as Markt und Gewalt(to be translated by Brill soon as Market and Violence). This is an updated version of her HM London 2017 conference paper, initially shared here.

References

Chakrabarty, Dipesh (1989) Rethinking Working Class History, (Princeton Univ. Press) Princeton, New Jersey.

Chaudhuri, Kirti, N. (1985) Trade and Civilization in the Indian Ocean, (Cambridge Univ. Press) Cambridge.

Fragináls, Frank Moya (1985) 'Plantations in the Caribbean: Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic in the Late 19^thCentury'; in: Frank Moya Fráginalset. al, Hg. (1985)Between slavery and free labor: the Spanish speaking Caribbean in the 19^th century(John Hopkins University Press) Baltimore, pp. 3-24.

Lahire, Bernard (1998) L’homme pluriel. Les resorts de l’action (Nathan) Paris.

Scott, Rebecca, J. (1985) Slave Emancipation in Cuba (Princeton Univ. Press) Princeton, N.J.

[1] While English governments long upheld, that ‘the rule of law’ was not only valid in Britain but in British colonies as well, this was not only disregarded in real life but even officially changed after rebellions in the 19^th century. Because colonial states ruled over potentially constantly rebellious people, it was deemed justified to make the law of war into a constant element of colonial domination.

[2] One of them is the neighbourhood to which Dipesh Chakrabarty pointed when criticizing European concepts of class. 

[3] But in Cuba those owners of large plantations which in the second half of the 19^th century industrialized sugar production, used slaves until the government of Spain prohibited slavery in 1888. If they hired engineers in foreign countries, they usually made their own slaves into assistants, thereby passing over the free laborers which already worked along with them. (Scott 1985:27;Fraginals1985:3-24)

[4] This is contained in the 24^th chapter ofCapital I in the part on “legislation against the expropriated”. “The provisions of the labour statutes as to contracts between master and workman, as to giving notice and the like, which only allow of civil action against the contract breaking master, but on the contrary permit a criminal action against the contract-breaking workman, are to this hour (1873) full in force.”

[5] The globalisation of capitalism has not done away with the influence of neighbourhoods on the actual strategies of profit making, the neighbourhood of our days being the critical international public. From their predecessors it is differentiated by the incessant attempts of more or less organized groups to influence public opinion and thereby induce state action. More often than not this endeavor is counteracted by the dependence of internationally voiced critique on international media and thereby on the conjunctures of the trade in news. If media effectively scandalize certain instances of violent exploitation, official promises tend to be readily forgotten when media coverage moves on, the aftermath of the terrible fires in Bangladesh being an example in case. In order to overcome the potentially disastrous effects of offshore spheres on labor conditions international critique has started to demand that in metropolitan capitalist societies legal responsibility of capital owners be established for labor conditions regardless of their geographical place. While it is to be hoped that this political strategy can reduce violent exploitation for many, its scope is limited.

A French version of this interview was originally published in Période:http://revueperiode.net/red-black-a-haiti-entretien-avec-matthew-j-smith/

In the Introduction to your book Red & Black in Haiti. Radicalism, Conflict, and Political Change, 1934–1957 (UNC Press, 2009), you write — citing Sténio Vincent — that the year 1934 marked a second independence for Haiti. Could you explain this point? How did you come to be interested in the political struggles that marked the history of Haiti from 1934 to 1957? Why is this period so often marginalised in the historiography on Haiti ?

The idea that 1934 was a ‘second independence’ for Haiti was promoted frequently by the Haitian state under the leadership of President Sténio Vincent. Vincent likened himself to a liberator of Haiti, a modern-day Toussaint Louverture who had returned the country to the people after two decades of US control. To be sure, this was propaganda intended to bolster Vincent’s standing but it also resonated with a widely held sentiment that the United States had functioned like a colonial power in Haiti. Under the marines, there were severe impositions on the human rights of Haitians including curfews, de facto racial segregation, punishing forced labour schemes, and marginalisation of Haitian state control. By 1934, the occupation had lost its purpose, having never really developed a meaningful and workable plan for Haitian improvement. For these reasons, Haitians symbolically believed that the transition back to full state control of Haitian leaders was a ‘second independence’ and an opportunity to remedy the circumstances that had hindered progress in the country since the nineteenth century.

How did they do that? What ideas did Haiti’s nationalist generation of the 1930s have for reconstructing their country? This question is even more critical when we consider Haiti’s very long history of independence since 1804 which was gained by victorious revolutionary struggle against France.  It was this story of how Haiti’s generation of the 1930s sought to transform their nation after a constraining foreign rule that attracted me to this period. Previous histories had hinted at the drama of these years, particularly David Nicholls’s From Dessalines to Duvalier and Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s,Haiti: State Against Nation. But, with few exceptions, it was dismissed as a moment of lasting consequence because of what it ended with, the Duvalier dictatorship in 1957. My interest was why did it not succeed? What was it about the 1930s-1950s in Haiti that delinked it from the traditions of the past and saw this bold struggle to create a new destiny for the country? Most intriguing from my perspective was to explain how these ideas grew and informed the political direction of the country. Haiti had wrestled with these issues decades before the rest of the Caribbean where radicalism really expanded in the 1960s-1970s. Exploration of these issues drew me deeper than I could have imagined into remarkable stories of redemption, ideological struggle, and political tensions that undergird Haitian history. I had to explain the rise of radicalism and the nature of Haitian politics and society to tell this story.

How can we explain that there were so few changes to the social and economic structures of Haiti with the end of US occupation?

The US occupation began in 1915 with no clear blueprint of how to restructure Haitian politics. The nineteenth century political approaches of regional conflicts and short-term governments were clearly exhausted by the time the marines set foot in Port-au-Prince.  It also began at a time of US imperial dominance in the Caribbean and Latin America and the war in Europe. In the first phase, the marines focused on a destructive campaign to silence the rebel forces in the Haitian countryside that rose up against them. They also began to systematically control Haitian politics. Previously, the United States had dominated the Haitian economy through trade and business interests. With political control facilitated through a transformation of the Haitian Constitution and the signing of a Haitian-American Treaty, they had licence to do as they pleased. It was not long into the occupation that Haitians of various classes came to regard the occupation as detrimental to Haiti’s future. Earlier optimism that the United States would do as they said they would and assist Haiti to establish a functioning democracy faded by the early 1920s, when the occupation began its second phase. This second phase was more focused on consolidation. The marines pushed programmes that were, on the surface, meant to improve social conditions and political order. There was, however, little concern for Haitians. The effect was a greater degree of centralisation in the capital, the setting up of a US-trained gendarmerie, and the elevation of light-skinned politicians to positions of state power. Although some of the measures of the occupiers were done with a view to move Haiti away from the mire of political problems that it faced before, the results were not good for the country. Divisions widened. US racism also influenced treatment and process of the occupation.

When the occupation ended, therefore, this system was much intact. Haitians had returned to full control of their political administration. But it was a control for the few. There were very few democratic institutions. The military was empowered more than it ever had been before and became the arbiter of power. So, this situation was what lay beneath the surface and spurred the activism of the next two decades.

3. Could you say more about Jacques Roumain’s trajectory from nationalism to communism ? More generally, what were the relations between nationalists and communists in Haiti during Vincent’s years in power?
4.  

One of the key features of 1930s Haitian politics was the rupture of the nationalist movement that began in the twenties. Haitian nationalism revolved around a tenuous unity among different classes in Haiti on the question of Haiti’s sovereignty. This cohesiveness was necessary to combat the trauma of the US occupation. The evidence of the occupation catalogued not only its repressiveness but also the psychological impact it had on Haitians. But there was always a class distinction in Haiti, a certain social divisiveness that was difficult to overcome. To a degree, it was reinforced by the privileging of one class of Haitians over another by the occupation, though this was by no means the cause of it.  Nationalism veiled these divisions only temporarily.

Jacques Roumain was one of the leading figures of that era who articulated this paradox. He maintained that nationalism had become exploitative. That the power groups in Haiti, the political stakeholders who desired control of the country after the marines, were willing to abrogate their promises in order to reap personal control. Now the Parti Communiste Haïtien (PCH), which Roumain helped to form, was quite small. It also had little penetration beyond the elite. Still, its class analysis and critique were seen as dangerous. This was especially so given the charged political climate that followed the occupation. State claims of ‘second independence’ could not persuade Roumain, a radical nationalist, that post-occupation Haiti had changed anything. Analyse Schématique, the party’s manifesto, is a powerful document that gets to the heart of Roumain’s disenchantment with the direction of the nationalist movement. 

Communism for Roumain was attractive as a solution for Haiti for at least three principal reasons: a well-travelled young man, Roumain had witnessed discrimination in Europe and how ethnic and racial differences had fuelled conflicts. In Haiti he saw this in a different way when he returned in the 1920s to the abuses of the occupation. He would have read about the events of 1917 and the interpretations of Marxism that had taken hold in Europe in its aftermath. These developments made him committed in his view that a political system based consciously on egalitarianism could be the only chance for twentieth-century independence to be assured.

The second reason was economic. The depression in the United States affected Haiti. Its worst results were joblessness and a clear indication of the Haitian economy’s dependence on a US capital superstructure. Roumain’s correspondence with his peers in this period, his growing interest in ethnology and his literary writings make clear that the indigénisme of the 1920s, a cultural movement that he was a leading member of, had heightened his sensitivity for Haiti’s peasantry. The rigid class differences in Haiti that Roumain, Jean Price-Mars, and other writers subjected to critique in their works, needed a systemic transformation. This was most fundamental to him. And that transformation would have to involve an alternative to the economic system that had entrenched international dependency and local exploitation.

The final point is a historical one. Roumain, whose family had ties with Haitian politics, perceived the 1930s as an opportunity to undo the political practices that had defined Haiti since 1804. These had not safeguarded sovereignty. On the contrary, they had weakened the state’s abilities to be truly useful. Communism promised a meaningful transformation of that in Roumain’s mind.

4.  What role did the Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA) play in the formation of the Haitian Communist Party (PCH) by Beaulieu and Roumain ? What was the reaction of Sténio Vincent in the face of the growing influence of communism in Haiti in the 1930s? What was the PCH ‘s analysis of the question of racism in Haiti?
5.  

The CPUSA had some inspiration on the development of the PCH as did Latin American Communist parties. However, the influence was not significant. The early formation of Haiti’s Communist party was very short. No sooner had it surfaced than Vincent clamped down on the party, putting both Max Hudicourt and Roumain in jail. Vincent was harsh against any challenge to his presidency and the Communist party, though not widespread by any means, was by its very presence seen as a threat to state authority. The fear was with regard to the class analysis of the party, though it also had a strong view on racism.  The party clarion, “colour is nothing, class is everything,” profoundly championed its central ideology: that interpretations of Haiti’s political struggles along colour and racial lines would only repeat systems of exploitation. The most important element to be addressed especially in an impoverished nation is ultimately the class struggle.

How did black consciousness develop in Haiti during the Second World War, under the régime of Élie Lescot? What was the place of the Haitian labour movement during the Lescot years?

Haitian black consciousness was perhaps at its sharpest during the years of the Second World War. The cultural movement of the 1920s remained the basis on which black members of Haiti’s middle class who were politically conscious defined their cause. One must bear in mind that Haiti’s social classes were visibly distinguished by colour. A light-skinned elite tended to control the economic wealth of the country and this dominance was also reflected in the political administration. It was not a total division as scholars used to claim. There was some fluidity though class, education, family and regional ties could reinforce the walls between social groups. This is why colour referents (“noir” “mulatre” etc) cannot perfectly reflect Haitian social realities. The war years were marked by a coming of age of the politically conscious members of the black middle class. Professional men for the most part, they resented the losses of Haiti’s ‘second independence’ which could have been an opportunity for a more equitable distribution of political and economic power and prestige.

The Lescot presidency was deeply flawed, but its greatest weakness, to my mind, was its miscalculations about how best to deal with the local and international context. By tightening the status quo, Lescot and his supporters possibly expected Haiti would build on US interest and become modernised. The fatal flaw in his vision was that he marginalised a population that was more attuned to global discussions about equality, democracy, and anti-totalitarianism. Black consciousness naturally shifted in this context from principally cultural aims to political ones. And so young intellectuals like François Duvalier and his colleagues, especially the contributors to the journal Les Griots, began to advocate an end to light-skinned elite rule, believing their class origins and colour made them better suited to govern. Not all of those who held this view were intellectuals. Black consciousness was a mixture of professionals, politicians and students in the main who rallied around this idea that came to be called “noirisme.” They were generally politically right of centre. They did not consider Marxism a viable solution for Haiti. They were even less interested in vigorous transformations in the social order. What they desired was more control of the state. Their agenda often blurred lines between class and colour struggles when it came to the labour movement. The key figure in Haitian labour history is Daniel Fignolé. He did not start the push to have a voice. There were others before him and among his contemporaries who had been working to build a labour movement in the 1930s and 1940s. This was relatively late for a union movement to start in the hemisphere but it grew quickly. Fignolé gave it a certain focus and presence. He was incredibly charismatic and fervently radical in his outlook. He sympathized greatly with the ideas of thenoiristes but fused the insistence on black rule with class struggle. In his public pronouncements, he criticised light-skinned rule and demanded a greater share of Haiti’s wealth among the classes. He was not Marxist. He believed mostly that the reformation of the machinery of the state could be achieved organically if the true representatives of the majority population were in command.

All of these swirling ideas, each impacting and crossing through the other can only be appreciated within the context of the Second World War and the currency of ideologies at the time which made their way into the Haitian political space and were interpreted through the lenses of local conflict. There was clearly a naïve reading of these currents in several instances. But the fascinating aspect of all of this was not whether they got Marxism, liberal democracy, or socialism correct; it was that they weaved elements from each into their understanding of their past and present. The energy that came from this period was powerful and ignited the movement that toppled Lescot in January 1946.

6. Could you talk about the emergence of the movement that overturned the Lescot régime in 194? What was the relationship of political forces within this movement and how did it develop (formation of the Front Révolutionnaire Haïtien, etc.) ?
7.  

The movement that led to the collapse of the Lescot regime was born in the struggles I just mentioned. It matured among university students. The best-known names of that cohort were René  Depestre, Jacques-Stéphen Alexis, Gérald Bloncourt, and Gérard Chenet. Many of these students, such as those just mentioned, were also artists. So, the connections between cultural expression and radical politics that was clearly a part of the world of the generation of Price-Mars and Roumain (who died in 1944) continued. They were inspired by a range of sources all part of their milieu: the victory of the Allies, the French resistance, the Spanish Civil War, Marxism, Négritude, the Haitian arts movement, Jacques Roumain, ethnology, the embryonic labour movement and the local resistance to Lescot’s rule. More immediately, the students were electrified by André Breton and the Surrealist movement. In the January 1946 issue of the student paper La Ruche, they wrote a tribute to Breton after his visit to Haiti the month before. In that issue, the camouflaged critique of the state (they often used pseudonyms) was read by the authorities as an attack on the presidency. Lescot retaliated harshly by banning the paper. This act against democratic voice amongst militant Haitian youth fomented their action. They organised a march against the government that tapped into the varied political forces in Haiti and led to a widespread strike and Lescot’s removal from office.

So there existed not only noiriste factions, but both a Socialist Party (Parti Socialiste Populaire) and reimagined PCH which emphasised colour as much as class in its programme. Because the movements were so diverse, there was often collision among agendas. Two other points are important to mention here. First, the Haitian military had been strengthened by far-reaching changes in its organization and structure under the US marines. It was the military that had sent Lescot packing and it was the military that retained ultimate control of the country. What was possible could only be so within the context of what the military could allow. And they weren’t above engineering events to suit the needs of the ruling classes. The second point is that Haitian radicals had been more or less out of direct reach with the external sources of their radicalism as a result of the authoritarianism of Vincent and Lescot. This is not to say that news did not reach them. But they had not been in regular discourse with counterparts outside in a way that would shape their conceptions of what could be possible after Lescot. So, the FRN (Front Révolutionnaire Haïtien) was an early attempt to forge a common goal and to harmonise the various agendas. However, the differences were too strong to contain. So was the desire for state control. This led to the fraying of the various movements and weakened the possibility for unity among radical groups.

7. What was “noirisme”? In what sense did the Estimé years reorient radical Haitian thought?
8.  

Noirisme, in its simplest definition in the Haitian context, means political rule by dark-skinned Haitians. It is not a concept peculiar to the twentieth century. It originated in fact in the nineteenth century though not precisely in the same way. Its applicability in the presidential years of Dumarsais Estimé was to rationalise the administration’s legitimacy to power. Contemporaries did not frequently use the term even though they drew heavily on the rhetoric of “les noirs en pouvoir”. But it meant different things to different people. For radicals outside of the state, it was very much class-bound. Some state actors were idealistic about noirisme, believing that it would reverse the country’s predicament. This is partly what Duvalier meant when he called 1804 an “evolution” and 1946 a “revolution.” Truthfully, it was a revolutionary moment but it did not necessarily achieve its bloated goals. Other state actors viewednoirisme as an opportunity for access to political benefits once unattainable. The corruptive nature of Haitian politics could not be conquered with the change in faces of the leaders. It was far too powerful a monster. Estimé tried to make some changes and live up to his expectations. For this reason, he was regarded well among his peers. But he too could not escape this predicament and the desire to extend his mandate.

8. In the fifth chapter of your book, you write that the presidential campaign of 1956-1957 marked the end of the promises of post-occupation political renewals. Could you expand on this? Did forms of resistance and radical thought persist throughout Duvalier years?
9.  
10. The 1956-57 presidential campaign was disappointing not only for its outcome, the installation of the Duvalier presidency and later dictatorship, but also because its greatly undermined the achievements of the previous decade. It is true that much of the unravelling of the political promises of 1946 had started that same year when the internecine struggle among radical groups became manifest. But the prospect of a more progressive government was always on the horizon. It was kept alive by a diminished yet fervent progressive movement that operated clandestinely. What happened in 1956-57 was that that arbiters of political control, the elite and especially the army, wielded greatest influence on the course of events. On the surface, it was a democratic process. There was universal suffrage for the first time and there were parties, candidates, debates, campaigns. But, in reality, the transition was engineered by the powerbrokers. And the rivals and their supporters resorted to more drastic measures to gain control. Haiti became consumed with violent confrontations. Out of the ashes of this struggle rose the horrors of the Duvalier dynasty. Radical thought remained prominent in Haiti during the sixties. There was an underground communist party and several rebel attempts to overthrow Duvalier. Some of these included the same people who had been instrumental in the events in 1946 such as Jacques Stéphen Alexis who was assassinated on Duvalier’s orders. These movements could not surface given the brutality of Duvalierism which instituted state terror.  Most notable was the Parti unifié des communistes haïtien (PUCH), formed in 1968 and associated with Gérald Brisson who was tortured and killed by Duvalier along with several other members of the party.

A version of this article was originally published at https://kritisch-lesen.de/interview/solidaritat-ist-das-ergebnis-politischer-arbeit

The topic of our issue is Marx’s 200^th birthday. On a most general level and after 150 years since the first volume of Capital was first published: Why should one still read Marx today?

Marx’s writing remains the most formidable effort to weld the drive to understand our world to the practical imperative of its negation. In other words, it is the project, both vital and paradoxical, of creating a partisan and revolutionary science. (In the ‘Confession’ that he penned as a family parlour game in 1865, Marx listed his heroes as Spartacus and Kepler…) Across a variety of genres (journalism, political speeches, philosophical tracts, political-economic treatises, correspondence, polemic, historical narrative, etc.), the corpus of Marx’s writings (very much including those of his partnership with Engels) excels in problematizing that which we experience as our sensory and intellectual ecosystem, namely what he once termed capitalism’s “religion of everyday life”. The image of our social life as a problem, whose lines of solution are to be conjured and cajoled out of its conflicts and blind-spots, its lacunae and contradictions, but also by reading against the grain the stories our society tells about itself, remains indispensable. We need to reactivate the networks of concepts Marx forged to elucidate the capitalism of his age, but we also need – in these stupefying and grotesque times – his capacity for satire, polemic, for the painstaking labour of division that makes a true politics of association possible.

Since the publication of Capital there have been countless ways to read Marx, some of which operated in frustratingly narrow confines and tended to reduce Marx’s work to an objective science of “pure economics”. Do you see chances for more open and heterodox readings of Marx in the reception of his work over the last years and decades? And if so, which are the ideas and general positions that distinguish them?

To streamline and homogenise Marx’s work so that it can be compared (however favourably) to other economic doctrines or integrated into economics is no doubt to strip of its scandalous singularity (that of a reflexively partisan science) as well as to petrify and thus defuse it. A Marxian theoretical practice should instead cleave to the Eighteenth Brumaire’s description of proletarian revolutions, as ones that “criticise themselves constantly, interrupt themselves continually in their own course, come back to the apparently accomplished in order to begin it afresh, deride with unmerciful thoroughness the inadequacies, weaknesses and paltrinesses of their first attempts”. Since Marx’s death, and periodised by the multiple crises of Marxism, readings of his work have gone through several phases or conjunctures of opening and closing, heresy and orthodoxy, deterritorialisation and territorialisation (see Fredric Jameson’s interesting remarks on the nexus of capitalist crisis and post-Marxisms in ‘Five Theses on Actually Existing Marxism’). Many of these were ‘grafting’ operations, which always involved a salutary interrogation of Marx or Marxisms’s self-sufficiency: Kantian Marxism (to correct an ethical deficit), Freudo-Marxism (to offset a libidinal deficit), Third Worldist Marxism (to counter a Eurocentric bias), Marxist feminism (to integrate the gendered specificity of exploitation and social reproduction), and so on. I think that theoretically speaking (the political outlook can only be much gloomier right now) the present moment has greater potential for a revitalisation of a Marxist research open to the unpostponable demands of the present, to the imperative of a problematizing practice that cannot presuppose it already has all the analytical tools at its disposal, as though Marx’s restless, multifarious and unfinished writings provided some kind of secure and comforting canon. The lesson that Stuart Hall drew from Gramsci in the 1980s remains relevant: ‘Gramsci … came face to face with the revolutionary character of history itself. When a conjuncture unrolls, there is no “going back”. History shifts gears. The terrain changes. You are in a new moment. You have to attend, “violently”, with all the “pessimism of the intellect” at your command, to the “discipline of the conjuncture”.’ What we have to ask then is not whether readings of Marx are open, heterodox or heretical – as though these were values in themselves – but whether they subject themselves to the ‘discipline of the conjuncture’, and if that means jettisoning, mutating or demoting certain aspects of Marx’s work, so be it (let’s not forget Marx wasn’t so precious about his own concepts as to cherish them for their own sake). Shining the flickering light of the present onto the corpus of Marx’s writings has brought into relief aspects of his thought that might in other moments have seemed secondary. Or, to try another metaphor, Marx’s texts contain a whole host of chemical reagents that can trigger a kind of theoretical reaction when those texts are introduced into our present. These encounters between Marx (and Marxism) and our moment have given rise to all kinds of vital areas of inquiry, to name a few: the plural temporality of capitalist time and history (in the writings of Massimiliano Tomba, Harry Harootunian and others, in dialogue with material as varied as Benjamin and Bloch’s philosophies of history, Charkrabarty’sProvincializing Europe, and Trotskyist theories of uneven and combined development); ‘real abstraction’ as the distinguishing feature of capitalist domination (building and departing from the insights of Sohn-Rethel, Adorno and others); the revitalisation of Marxist feminist theory (including Black and Third World feminisms, theories of social reproduction, queer perspectives, etc.); an intensified attention to the racialized character of exploitation and to ‘racial capitalism’ more broadly (in thelongue durée of slavery and settler-colonialism); political and philosophical debates on the contemporary figures of communism, communisation, and the “commons”, etc.

How would you evaluate the role of various “postmodern theories” (poststructuralism, postcolonial theory, queer and feminist theories) vis-à-vis the reception of Marx in the last few decades and, in particular, since that crucial “moment” of 1968? Has Marxism gone beyond poststructuralism?

This is probably a reflection of having personally come to serious study of Marx and Marxism after immersion in so-called “post-structuralism” (a term I confess finding of rather limited use), or more precisely la pensée soixante-huit in its more speculative variants (above all in Gilles Deleuze, who was never able to bring to completion his planned bookLa Grandeur de Marx), but I find the slackening of a certain defensiveness among Marxists to be a positive phenomenon overall. While I recognise that the theoretical tendencies you mention were often caught up in a marginalisation of both ‘classical’ and ‘Western’ Marxism that was experienced as a reactive and reactionary process by an earlier generation of scholars and activists, I think the vantage of the present allows for a different attitude, one that maintains a commitment to an ongoing ‘totalisation’ of diverse theoretical perspectives while not imagining that Marxism is some kind of self-sufficient theoretical canon, dead set on either subsuming or fending off rivals. While not going as far as subscribing to Alain Badiou’s nominalist dictum “Marxism does not exist”, I would also dispute that “Marxism” and “post-structuralism” are unified theoretical domains that could be usefully compared to one another. When we speak of them in their unity, I think these are not theories but ideologies (or cognitive maps, perhaps), and as such objects of polemical affirmation or negation (it is in this respect that the ill-conceived debate over post-colonialism triggered by Vivek Chibber’s book strikes me as a mostly sterile ideological quarrel and not a real theoretical dispute, which would of necessity involve “critique” in its more Marxian form). I think much ‘progressive’ academic theoretical production will today include conceptual elements drawn from Marxist and post-structuralist works alike, but will feel less compelled than it might have 10, 20, or 30 years ago to engage in an ideological demarcation (in this respect, I find the Chibber debate politically anachronistic too).

The Marxist concept of “class” is, even within the left, often associated with the white male industrial worker of 19^th and 20^th century Europe. On that basis some have argued that “class” and class politics doesn’t exist anymore. How would you respond to such claims?

It is one of the tragic outcomes of actually-existing class politics across the twentieth century in Europe and North America in particular, with its constitutive internal demarcations by race, ethnicity, gender, and other markers of difference, that the profound practical and theoretical critiques of the “whitening” of the working class still goes largely unheeded. The finest revolutionary minds of the twentieth century, from Lenin to CLR James, DuBois to Fanon, Rosa Luxemburg to Angela Davis, all variously dismantled that conceit, in the response to the mass movements of women and people of colour who were at the forefront of real challenges to the rule of capital, and yet the trade unions and political parties that marched under the banner of Marxism (or social-democracy) largely reproduced themselves by consolidating that toxic identification – from the exclusion of African-Americans proletarians from many of the gains of the New Deal to the disastrous nationalism of the French Communist Party, from ‘hate strikes’ against the racial integration of trade-unions to the phantasmagorical rebirth of a pseudo-class subject in idiotic slogans like ‘British jobs for British workers’. To rub against the grain of the doxa on class, we could say that it is precisely to the extent that the class came to be laminated onto particular ethno-national and racial identities and cultures, and specifically on varieties of whiteness, that class discourse and politics were neutralised, and that class has been speciously reborn in the contemporary imagination as the most reactive form of ‘identity politics’ (witness Trump, Brexit, the rhetoric of the Front National, etc.). The working class that had nothing to lose but its chains is now replaced by its simulacrum, the one that believes it has everything to lose along with those chains. It’s a dismal sight to see self-described classical Marxists turn to a class ‘analysis’ based on dubious marketing and income methodologies (where the working class is reduced to ‘category C2 and D voters’, for instance) to shore up the claim that contemporary reactionary politics are a symptom of working-class revolt, while at the same time ignoring the most basic of orthodox Marxist lessons, namely the centrality of relations of production to the definition of class – which would at the very least lead one to note that a Romanian fruit-picker in England is far ‘more’ working-class than a real-estate agent or pensioner whose father once worked in a steel mill… If we zoom out from the Euro-American provinces to the rest of the world, and pay attention to the enormous numbers of human beings whose livelihoods (and absence thereof) depend on waged labour – who are proletarianised in the sense of ‘without reserves’ – as well as to the exacerbation of inequality and exploitation across multiple axes, the farewell to class as an analytical and political category appears as a massive case of disavowal, in a quasi-Freudian sense.

5. Similarly, the left seems to be locked into the unfortunate dichotomy of “class politics” (associated with the figure of the white male worker) on the one hand and so called “identity politics” (issues of gender, race, sexuality etc.) on the other. What, in your opinion, are the more promising avenues that the (radical) left should follow, if it wants to overcome this hindering juxtaposition?
6.  

The first step should perhaps be a ruthless (self-)criticism of the degeneration of Marxisant notions of class into identity politics in the first place – abandoning the culturalist fetishizing of geographically and historically minoritarian experiences of industrial labour as the only context for the recognition of class. Conversely, it is important to learn how to discern the classed and anti-capitalist dimensions of what is sometimes misconceived reductively as ‘identity politics’. After all, how could the political movements and militant theorising of those whose labour and lives have been confiscated, devalued and ‘primitively’ accumulated through gendered and racialized exploitation not concern class understood in its most crucial, which is to say its relational dimension? If start from class as a relation rather than class as an identity (an identity that would allow us to demarcate, as too many Marxists beginning  with Marx have done, a good working class from bad lumpen, free from forced labourers, etc.) then we can begin to attend to the invisible ‘iceberg’ of exploitation (to borrow Maria Mies’s characterisation of the role of ‘women, nature and colonies’ in capitalist accumulation, recently revisited and revitalised by Jason W. Moore) which lends class determination its full weight. Ironically, as I already suggested, beginning with a more orthodox, even dogmatic definition of class (relation to the means of production, etc.) would today perforce lead one to recognise how the working class, globally conceived, but also in the so-called ‘North’, is anything but a white, male redoubt. None of this is to ignore that a focus on identity (including in a narcissistic-individual sense) to the detriment of collective experiences of exploitation and antagonism remains an ideological problem, that liberal (or even reactionary) reflexes inhabit us all to varying degrees. But I think that to reproduce this dichotomy – class politics versus identity politics – is not only to freeze the necessary internal debates in the left into the sterile terrain of 1980s skirmishes around postmodernism, but to conceal all the ways in which political and theoretical work across the twentieth century had already dismantled it. Stuart Hall et al.’s turn to the language of experience and mediation in their landmarkPolicing the Crisis is very instructive in this regard, when, in speaking of the Black British proletariat they write: “racial oppression wasthe specific mediation through which this class experienced its material and cultural conditions of life, and hence race formed the central mode through which the self-consciousness of the class stratum could be constructed”. Analogous if not identical arguments could be made in terms of gender or sexuality.

6. With the current resurgence of right-wing populism in many western countries, there has been much talk about the “forgotten” white male working class that is taking its revenge on a supposed urban and elitist “cultural left”. What do these developments tell us about the uses – or maybe rather abuses – of the Marxist concept of “class” and how can and should an antifascist left react to it?
7.  

The problem with these formulations, as is so often the case with ideological phenomena, is that they are at one and the same time phantasmagorias – incoherent congeries of fantasies, nostalgias and wish-fulfilments – and terribly, performatively real. I think it is useful here to remind ourselves of Marx’s famous 1852 letter to Weydemeyer (put to illuminating use in Andrea Cavalletti’s acute essay on class, which I’m currently editing), where he clearly states that it was not he who invented the concept of class, but rather bourgeois historians – and that his contribution was rather tohistoricize class, to envisage thedictatorship of the proletariat, and to posit therevolutionary abolition of class. In other words, there is nothing particularly Marxian or Marxist about reference to class, nor indeed about the idea of class politics, and thus nothing contradictory or unusual about a reactionary politics that uses class as one of its chief signifiers (the history of fascisms and related political and ideological formations teaches as much). With this proviso in mind, there are a multiplicity of non-exclusive responses to this predicament: one can engage in the work of sociological demystification and undermine this inconsistent entity (i.e. ‘the forgotten white working class’); one can explore the historical and material grounds that lead particular sections of workers to develop passionate attachments to their ethno-racialised class identities; one can agitate among the targets of these reactionary discourses; above all perhaps one can foreground the fact that exploitation and exclusion (or indeed social ‘forgetting’) disproportionately affect thenon-white working class. All of this without underestimating the depressing allure of the ‘psychological wages’ of whiteness that DuBois wrote about inBlack Reconstruction, which remind one that any kind of ‘class unity’ or ‘solidarity’ is a very precarious product of political work and not some underlying and secure ground which is merely obfuscated by capitalist brainwashing, liberal ideology or, indeed, ‘identity politics’.

In this article Alberto Toscano considers three texts that allow us to explore the place that a recovery and reinterpretation of Lenin's 'Materialism and Empirio-Criticism' played in setting the agenda of European Marxist philosophy after the crisis of ’56.

Introduction: An ‘Eastern’ Materialism?

By way of contrast to the texts I’ll be considering in the body of this article, I’d like to begin by briefly recalling the role of negative references to Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (MEC) for the self-definition of a ‘Western Marxist’ philosophy. In its famous combination of polemical partisanship and unequivocal objectivism, MEC served as a paradigm of ‘Eastern Marxism’ conceived as the abandonment of the dialectic for a philosophy of state communism, in both Adorno’sNegative Dialectics and Merleau-Ponty’sAdventures of the Dialectic, the text which popularized the expression ‘Western Marxism’ (with the negative note by Simone Weil inLa Critique Sociale, November 1933 as a precursor). This is a position tidily summarised in Herbert Marcuse’s quip, fromSoviet Marxism: ‘Lenin'sMaterialism and Empirio-criticism replaced the dialectical notion of truth by a primitive naturalistic realism, which has become canonical in Soviet Marxism’ (149). To get a flavor of these positions, and to prepare a contrast with the texts I’ll be concerned with today, let me begin by quoting two key passages from Merleau-Ponty and Adorno.

His adversaries were not wrong to criticize Lenin's philosophical ideas for being incompatible with what they themselves called, as Korsch says, 'Western Marxism." Lenin had written his book in order to reaffirm that dialectical materialism is a materialism, that it supposes a materialistic diagram of knowledge ... in taking up again the old allegory of ideas-images, Lenin thought he was going to establish the dialectic solidly in things. He forgot that an effect does not resemble its cause and that knowledge, being an effect of things, is located in principle outside its object and attains only its internal counterpart. This was to annul all that has been said about knowledge since Epicurus ... Hegel had indeed been able to show that, in a philosophy of history, the problem of knowledge is surmounted, because there no longer can be a question of timeless relations between being and thought, but only of relations between man and his history, or even between the present and the future, and the present and the past. ... This new dogmatism, which puts the knowing subject outside the fabric of history and gives it access to absolute being, releases it from the duty of self-criticism, exempts Marxism from applying its own principles to itself, and settles dialectical thought, which by its own movement rejected it, in a massive positivity. (Adventures of the Dialectic, pp. 59-60)

The image theory denies the spontaneity of the subject, a movens of the objective dialectics of productive forces and conditions. If the subject is bound to mulishly mirror the object—necessarily missing the object, which only opens itself to the subjective surplus in the thought—the result is the unpeaceful spiritual silence of integral administration.

Nothing but an indefatigably reified consciousness will believe, or will persuade others to believe, that it possesses photographs of objectivity. The illusions of such a consciousness turn into dogmatic immediacies. When Lenin, rather than go in for epistemology, opposed it in compulsively reiterated avowals of the noumenality of cognitive objects, he meant to demonstrate that subjective positivism is conspiring with the powers that be. His political requirements turned him against the goal of theoretical cognition. A transcendent argumentation disposes of things on the basis of its claim to power, and with disastrous results: the unpenetrated target of the criticism remains undisturbed as it is, and not being hit at all, it can be resurrected at will in changed constellations of power. (Negative Dialectics, 205-6)

But did MEC also play a different function in the development of so-called ‘Western Marxism’ in the postwar period, ones that perhaps broke with the schema, common to Adorno and Merleau-Ponty of a true dialectics against dialectical materialism, and with the very distinction of Eastern and Western Marxism in its Cold War modalities?

            In this article I want to consider three texts that allow us to explore the place that a recovery and reinterpretation of MEC played in setting the agenda of European Marxist philosophy after the crisis of ’56. All three have not been translated into English, notwithstanding the translation of several other works by the authors in question. They are Henri Lefebvre’s 1957 Pour connaître la pensée de Lénine (PCPL), Lucio Colletti’s 1958 Introduction to Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks, published in a revised version as Part I ofIl marxismo e Hegel (1969; the English textMarxism and Hegel is a translation of Part II alone), and finally Dominique Lecourt’s 1973Une crise et son enjeu (Essai sur la position de Lénine en philosophie) [A Crisis and its Stakes: Essay on Lenin’s Position in Philosophy], published in Louis Althusser’s Théorie series for François Maspero, as a critical complement of sorts to Althusser’s ownLenin and Philosophy.

            My approach to these texts, which if replaced within their theoretical, political and biographical contexts would demand very extended commentary, will be quite schematic, presenting a symptomatic permutation of positions around MEC that address three broad concerns:

            a. How does MEC relate to Lenin’s notebooks on Hegel logic? This question turns out to resonate with two related questions: Is a realist or objectivist materialist epistemology compatible or not with a truly dialectical Marxism? And: Is MEC a model for a break with the Hegelian legacies in Marxism, and if so is this to be welcomed or abhorred?

            b. What is the proper articulation between Marxism (and Marxist politics), philosophy and science?

            c. What concept of matter (if any) is demanded by a Marxist materialism? And how is this concept of matter to be related to scientific concepts of matter?

            I will also want to reflect on a corollary (d), regarding the theories of abstraction at work in these interpretations of the MEC.

            Especially in what concerns (a) as we will see the three texts provide the three possible permutations, as follows:

            Lefebvre: The notebooks on Hegel’s Logic (and other philosophical texts) overcomes the limits of MEC by embracing a properly dialectical conception of reality.

            Colletti: The notebooks manifest a dangerous backsliding from the polemical advances of MEC, a restoration of an idealism of matter which is an epistemological and materialist retreat from the MEC’s affirmation of the heterogeneity between thought and objective reality, and the primacy of the latter (as well as MEC’s greater appreciation of the importance of Kant for a modern materialism).

            Lecourt: There is no ultimate incompatibility between MEC and Lenin’s wartime notebooks on Hegel in terms of their fundamental philosophical infrastructure, a continuity identified by Lecourt in terms of the notion of a reflection without a mirror.

1. Lefebvre, or, Complex Reflection

Lefebvre frames his discussion of Lenin’s philosophy, in Part III, of PCPL, by noting the importance of Engels’s called to transform and verify materialism in response to the novelties emerging from the natural sciences. He reproduces Lenin’s statement which identifies the changing stakes of materialism in terms of the powerful emergence of epistemology within bourgeois ideology (and various Marxist revisionisms), noting that while that Marx and Engels rightly stresseddialectics andhistory overmaterialism, the epoch threw up a radically different theoretical conjuncture, in which bourgeois philosophy has absorbed in a deformed guise a number of the tenets of the dialectic but with relativist and revisionist ends, as summarized in the epochal affirmation thatmatter has vanished. Notwithstanding Lefebvre’s association with some of the main features of Western Marxism, in PCPL he strongly notes Lenin’s warning that Marxist orthodoxy has retreated to the terrain of philosophy and the philosophy of history, and in its abandonment of natural, scientificmaterialism had left the way open for relativist solutions. It is significant here that Lefebvre sees parallels between the debates of 50 years before and the controversies in French Marxism, not least Merleau-Ponty’sAdventures, in which the attempt, in Lefebvre’s words (129n1) to construct anidealism from below goes hand in hand with a stigmatization of MEC as the paragon of an ‘Eastern’ vulgar dogmatic Marxism. Contrariwise, we can see Lenin’s operation in MEC for Lefebvre as a model of the need to reframe and revitalize Marxist philosophy within the mutable conjunctures of conflict and critique of bourgeois philosophy. Put back in its historical context, Lenin’s operation cannot be taken as one of mere affirmation or defense of dogmatism. On the contrary, for Lefebvre: ‘With Lenin, we cannot repeat this enough, Marxist thought detached itself both from orthodox immobilism and from a revisionism that brought principles into question’ (130). MEC belongs to the necessary double movement of returning to principles and applying them to thenew problems of the present, thus restoring while renewing the basic tenets of Marxism.

            But how much of a guide can Lenin be to the renewal of a Marxist philosophy, 50 years after his only explicitly philosophical work? This question guides Lefebvre, who also makes the parallel with the paucity of systematic philosophical reflection in Marx and Engels themselves. He identifies the key nexus of Lenin’s intervention in a gap left in the work of Marx and Engels, namely the ‘hiatus’ between their theory of ideological reflection (in the German Ideology,Capital’s account of fetishism or Marx’s political writings) and ‘the theory of knowledge, the theory of thetrue reflection of the real’ (132). But this shift to epistemology requires confronting the question ofabstraction. Lefebvre puts the problem very lucidly in the following passage, which as a note indicates, is also a critique of both Lukács and Plekhanov:

Lenin saw the problem perfectly well. If you don’t want Marxist theory to fracture, and to meet its stumbling block in science – if you do not want all the sectors of knowledge to progressively escape it – you need to show that the history of ideologies is intimately (dialectically) linked to the process whereby human beings move from ignorance to knowledge. It is therefore necessary for reflection [lereflet (ou laréflexion)] not just to be social reflection (ideological superstructure) but also, and at the same time, and contradictorily, reflection of the real and of the external world. It is necessary thatabstraction be considered not just as the production of the division of labour, but as the instrument of knowledge. It is therefore necessary philosophically to reprise and restore the principles of Marxism, which are interpreted in such a way that the ‘orthodox’ passed from economic categories (those of the division of labour) to ideologies by neglecting specifically philosophical categories and notions (133).

            It is this predicament that requires the development of a theory of reflection – a term which Lefebvre notes is in no way univocal. Here Lefebvre quotes Lenin’s famous formula on sensations copying, photographing, reflecting objective reality, but immediately qualifies it by noting how it is difficult to square with what he takes to be a key dimension of Lenin’s sketch of a materialist epistemology, which builds on Engels to argue the relativity without relativism of human knowledge. In Lefebvre’s words, ‘Every knowledge is approximative, provisional, revisable, momentary – and yet it envelops something absolute; not only an infinitely distant absolute, but an already presentcontent; agrain of truth, which the ensuing development with extract and deploy. Nothing is absolute, everything is relative. But there is a dialectical relation between the absolute and the relative: a unity between these contradictory terms.’ (134) And later: ‘The absolute is at the very heart, if we can put it like this, of the relative, in its bosom’ (197). Such a dialectic both embraces and surpasses relativism, it is a dialectical unity of the absolute and the relative, or rather the overcoming of the raw distinction between the absolute and the relative is a definition of the dialectic itself. This is why the photographic metaphor is so problematic, since as Lefebvre notes it ‘is difficult to see how a relative knowledge can emerge from sensations that reflect the real object like a photograph or a copy’ (134). For dialectical relativity to obtain sensation it can’t be a reified unit, it must be a phenomenon, namely something that includes contradiction within itself, and whose contradiction can only be resolved by a passage to ‘abstract thought’, a thinking that doesn’t reflect the apparent but the essential, that engages not in a sensory but in aconceptual reflection. Here Lefebvre reads back into the MEC a very important note from Lenin’s philosophical notebooks, on Aristotle’s metaphysics, where he talks about human cognition as something that isnot ‘a reflection in a mirror, but a complex, doubled, zigzagging act – an act that includes the possibility of an imaginative flight beyond life’, where we might even, as Lefebvre comments, be able to distinguish a fertile dream from an empty revelry.

            In the Notebooks, Lenin clearly recognizes that penetrating the real also involves an activity of abstraction, of distancing oneself from it and that this necessary doubling is also what opens up the space for ideological distortion. In Lefebvre’s gloss: ‘Ideology therefore reflects social and historical conditions, the separation between intellectual and manual labour, class positions; butat the same time it finds its condition in the process of knowledge.’ While immediate sensation and spontaneous consciousness are in a sense beneath the truth/falsity distinction: ‘everything depends on whatreflection [réflexion], which attains the truereflection [reflet] (the concept), draws through a series of reflexive approaches (of mediations) from immediate phenomena and appearances.’ (136)

            With these dialectical preliminaries under his belt (which already articulate Lenin’s philosophical polemic in Hegelian terms, contra Colletti), Lefebvre approaches MEC, laying great stress on the articulation in that text of a theoretical-political crisis of Marxism with an ideological-epistemological crisis of the natural sciences, a crisis which (and one imagines here Lefebvre to be speaking very much to his present) is also very much the occasion of a renewal of Marxism, as well as a restatement of its guiding principles, which in this case obviously concerns the very meaning to be accorded to materialism. The bond between the natural-scientific questioning of materialism and Marxist revisionism is obviously what is at stake. To diagnose this crisis involves thinking the link between the crisis of (non-dialectical) mechanistic materialism and the crisis of bourgeois ideology (in view of their Marxist issue). With our mind partly on the Althusserian analysis of this predicament in Lecourt, it is interesting to note that Lefebvre will see Lenin’s text as a corrosive analysis of the way in which the bourgeois scientist (savant) tries ‘to “think his science” in function of the ideas of his class: idealism, mysticism, subjectivism, etc. Spontaneously, he judges he has a certain object of study before him: material reality. But this naïve, spontaneous materialism of scientists does not suffice […].’ (150) The spontaneous materialism stumbles when faced with the mutations in scientific theory and in bourgeois ideology. As Lefebvre observes: ‘Bourgeois ideology in contradiction with science (idealism denying the very object of science: material nature, movement becoming inconceivable without a material support) ends up in a “crisis” of science. This crisis is only in appearance […] an internal “crisis” of science: it is due, in one of its important aspects, to the inevitable interaction in the thinking of scientists between the ideological superstructures of bourgeois society and new knowledge about matter’. (150) Here is where Lenin’s lucidity is at its greatest, as he cuts through the Gordian knot of science and ideology around the issue of materialism, by doubling the very notion of matter (we’ll return to how Colletti and Lecourt diagnose this move, to which they also lend crucial importance).

            We have a philosophical category of matter andscientific conceptions of matter,specific to natural sciences. Matter in philosophy is eminently simple (and we could say eminently polemical), its sole property to be, as Lenin argues, an objective reality existing outside of our consciousness. The absolute and categorical recognition of this externality is a veritable axiom of dialectical materialism, separating it from agnosticism and relativist idealism. As Lefebvre comments, this notion of matter is equivalent to the ancient philosophical notion ofbeing as what lies before and beyond consciousness. It does not tell uswhat matter is, butthat it is. As he observes: ‘The philosophical notion of matter is both the emptiest and most abstract of all notions, because it has no determinate content – and the richest, the fullest of notions, because it designates infinite nature, infinitely profound and multiple in its unity’. (151) It is a notion that in Lenin’s terms can neither age nor vanish – it is entirely untouched by the train of scientific revolutions. This absolute philosophical concept of matter can then be seen as the asymptote or attractor for the relative-absolute conceptions of matter thrown up by the specific sciences. It is also a non-demonstrable tenet (hence its irreducible polemicity, as noted especially by Althusser, which makes partisanship in philosophy inescapable, and over-determined by the revolutionary and reactionary orientations of materialism and idealism – orientations which Lefebvre does not really clarify here). Since idealism cannot be logically refuted, it can only be fought against, as a politically-laden philosophical postulate, which as such is indestructible, ever reborn in new guises. Likewise ‘one cannot demonstrate, one cannot prove materialism. The materialist fights for his position, for his party. […] The philosophical position is a political position’. (154) But this opposition between materialism and idealism is only absolute in terms of fundamental philosophical categories. Outside of this domain, Lefebvre notes, it is only relative (or else materialism would never need to be… dialectical). It is as though absolute polemic were a feature of philosophy and politics, but not of the broader swathe of knowledges and practices that come to compose historical and dialectical materialism. This also requires a concept of reflection that cannot be unilateral or absolute, since Marxism ‘defines consciousness asreflection [reflet ouréflexion] of the natural and social being of man, as the reflection of his practical and social activity, and therefore as a complex reflection, rising from sensation and perception to knowledge and ideas. Therefore as a reflection that is itself active’. And further: ‘Dialectical materialism implies the theory of knowledge, active reflection [réflexion orreflet actifs] penetrating through practice and knowledge into an infinitely, inexhaustibly vast reality. Dominating it little by little, transforming blind necessity into freedom’ (159).

            It is only by distinguishing the different levels at which materialism operates (as the polemical dilemma of materialism versus idealism, in the historical formation of philosophical concepts and their concrete polemics, and in epistemology proper, according to Lefebvre) that we can also see how – as is patently obvious in the case of Hegel – idealism could turn out to be more important for materialism than certain strains of materialism.

            For Lefebvre, Lenin’s central idea is that of the objectivity of the dialectic. In what sense do the Notebooks ‘sublate’ MEC? Above all in the sense that they introduce a theory of abstraction, of an abstraction of the concept, of a full concept, rich in content.

2. Colletti, or, Against Hypostasis

Colletti is well-known in the Anglophone world principally due to the intercession of the New Left Review and Perry Anderson who raised him, along with Sebastiano Timpanaro, to the status of key Italian philosopher of a Marxist New Left, namely through the publication of hisMarxism and Hegel andFrom Rousseau to Lenin.New Left Review was also the venue in which Colletti first clarified his break with Marxism, in a long politico-philosophical interview with Anderson that would only subsequently be published in Italian. Rather singularly among Western Marxists, Colletti found in the polemical anti-idealism of Lenin’s 1908 text, and perhaps above all in that text’s valuation of Kant over Hegel on the terrain of epistemology, his initial theoretical inspiration for a rallying to the Italian Communist Party and to Marxist theory. MEC would even remain as a point of referenceafter Colletti’s break with Marxist theory and politics, as his position switched – on grounds which contain considerable continuity, especially in their juxtaposition of a realist materialist epistemology against the dialectics of real contradictions and historicism – from a far left to a right critique of Marxism. In the pages ofSocietà, beginning in 1952, Colletti reviewed MEC but also used its anti-idealist polemics as a starting point for critiques of the Croce-Gramscian historicism of the PCI and the attraction on the Left of figures like John Dewey. The priority of matter/nature/objectivity over thought, and the necessity for an epistemology of reflection or correspondence remained paramount in countering those positions that could be seen to volatilize matter in spirit, even if the latter’s name came to be praxis or practice – positions which, following Lenin, could be seen as the proposals of so many ‘third ways’ blurring the distinctions, the camps, of materialism and idealism. This initial work remained very much under the aegis of Galvano Della Volpe, and his drawing from Marx, depicted as the inventor of a moral Galileanism, of a method of determinate abstraction. The texts published inSocietà would be revised and combined to compose Colletti’s long essay introducing the 1958 Feltrinelli edition of Lenin’s philosophical notebooks, ‘Marxism and Hegel’, included as part I of the eponymous book in 1969.

            Colletti’s chapter on ‘Lenin and Hegel’, resonating with Lefebvre, relates Lenin’s critique of idealism, of an ideological misprision of reality founded on a process of hypostasis, to his critique of the division of labour, such that the separation betweenmaterial relations andspiritual relations correlates to that between production and distribution. Bourgeois sociology is already founded on the epistemological distortions produced by bourgeois society. Colletti notes the following about Lenin’s early writings, from ‘Who are the Friends of the People’ toThe Development of Capitalism in Russia:

[The] theoretical passion animating these writings is such that Lenin does not limit himself to referring back – or worse flattening - the ideological fact onto its social base, but he reconstructs it, developing all of its implications, including at the level of method. He sees, in other words, that just like the dualism that man projectson the object is the expression of a real dualismbetween subjects, between men, likewise the latter must also involve adualistic separation of subject and object in the praxis of knowledge. In fact, if in the structure of theobject ‘society’ I do not see as essentialmaterial relations it is because in this society the world of work and production has an inessential recognition, therefore because there is a separation between practice and theory, because theory in the end standson its own. (152)

The critique of hypostasis is a critique of the process of abstraction that makes metaphysical thinking possible. Metaphysics – in Colletti’s interpretation of Lenin – turns its back on the multiplicity of facts to substitute it with a self-referential generic idea. MEC can thus be seen also in the context of an epistemological reflection on the means to neutralize hypostasis. This critique of hypostasis cannot rest on materialism as another conception of the world, for instance as a Democritean supplement to a Hegelian method, but has to be understood as ‘a materialism that exhausts itself without mythological residues in concrete scientific inquiry’ (156). Only holding form to the ‘exteriority of the empirico-material datum’ guarantees that the idea’s hypostasis-substitution of the real object is averted. Following the lesson of Della Volpe, hypostasis is to be countered by a determinate abstraction, in which attention to the individuating and discriminating of the material permits a work of generalization, as encountered, exemplarily, in Marx’s analysis of the bourgeois socio-economic formation. Generalisation depends on material factors such that ‘scientific generalisations and the real object of analysis inCapital are in a twofold relation of unity-distinction’.Determinate abstractions,empirical concepts, which allow for regularity, iterability, typicality, this is the kind of scientific simplification that in this Della Volpean reading of Lenin is proposed by Colletti.

            Once we grasp, as Lenin did, that Marx’s analysis grasps the economic formation of a society as a natural-historical process, then the passage to MEC is not a passage between two discontinuous orders of physical and historical being.

            Colletti stresses that MEC is a more nuanced, more complex text than might at first appear. It pivots around the principle of Marxist epistemology, the unity-distinction of thought and being, where unity stands for the knowability of the world, distinction to the extent that the very notion of science depends on the ineradicable externality of material reality to a thinking that can never exhaust it, replace it, or absolutise it. On the basis of this principle, MEC is anchored in two theses: (1) the objectivity of the world; (2) the approximate character of knowledge, which requires the test of practice and experimentation (162). Materialism, or ‘the hypothesis of matter’ is a premise and condition of scientific inquiry, but is not itself a product of it. For Colletti the impossibility of doing without matter, or even of affirming its vanishing, is attainedvia negativa, by anatomizing the twists and turnabouts, the contradictions and aporias of thoseimmaterialisms that find in Ernst Mach their patron saint. As in Lefebvre the distinction betweenphilosophical andscientific concepts of matter is crucial to the whole reflection on the relation between Marxism and the sciences of nature. Colletti stresses, in a way that Lefebvre does not, the fact that philosophical materialism thus construed puts no constraints on the experimental scientist. Against any Engelsian or Stalinist transformation of Marxism into a philosophy of nature Lenin’s materialism, according to Colletti, ‘has nothing to say about the structure or properties of the external world, it lets it be exclusively the task of the sciences to investigate and discover them’ (163). Colletti takes thisphilosophical conception of materialism as the basis to denounce as fundamentally anti-Leninist all the Stalinist variants of a Marxist science, from Lyssenkoism on down. ‘You cannot deduce from Marx either a serious biology nor a falsified and fabricated one’ (164). MEC itself is not a generalization of scientific results, but a necessary point of passage for contemporary Marxism seeking a materialist theory of knowledge – though Colletti finds the treatment ofreason and of the specific articulations of a theory of knowledge wanting, in contrast to the polemical postulate of matter. What MEC lacks, for Colletti, is ‘a veritable theory of the concept and of scientific laws’, limiting the scope of the polemic, and of the materialism – which at the level of the postulate itself can remain at the level of Feuerbach or Dietzgen and not attain the level of Marx and Engels. What is insufficient in Lenin, according to Colletti, is the social determination or social form of knowledge, so to speak. As he writes:

[P]recisely to the extent that Lenin does not see (or does not see fully) the reciprocal functionality of reason and matter, neither does he manage fully to grasp the mediation between science andsociety; he does not succeed that is in grasping that, just as my knowledge cannot beuniversally valid, such as to open me to communication with others and introduce me into associated life, for theobjectivity of its contents alone, so, inversely, the objectivity of my knowledge can be verified only for and in society, that is only in relations with other men.  (165)

            For Colletti this shows an insufficient attention not just to the role of practice in determining truth, but in the way that thesocial relation is the principle of theory, an insufficient attention to the historicity and sociality of science – a point on which Colletti rescues the thinking of Gramsci from its association with Crocean idealism. Lenin’s work, for all its merits, is also a product of the reduction or fragmentation of Marxist thought into compartmentalized components: metaphysical materialism on the one hand, Hegelian dialectic on the other. Colletti is adamant that dialectical materialism in its official acceptation, which combines Hegelian teleology with the principles of Enlightenment materialism, is not a modern, scientific materialism, since it implies a pre-Newtonian or Aristotelian conception of movement as qualitative change (rather than accepting that both movement and rest are states, as evident in the principle of inertia), and because it depends on a notion of real contradiction (rather than real opposition), which is at odds with scientific realism.

            Contrary to Lefebvre’s estimation, where it is the integration of the Hegelian dialectic that allows Lenin to overcome the limitations of his polemic against Machians and Bogdanovites, for Colletti the turn back to Hegel only serves to blunt the force of the materialist postulate while not allowing for a realist take on the sociality of knowledge. Like Engels, according to Colletti, Lenin misreads the passage from Hegel to Marx, as though it were merely a rectification, meaning that for him too (in the Notebooks) ‘matter ends up adding itself to the dialectic as an extrinsic element, without it being clear how it concretely enters into the constitution and formation of the new method’ (166), leading Lenin to mistake the hypostases of the Hegelian concept for anticipations of objectivity, and even more problematically to ascribe to the Hegelian critique of Kant – not realizing that repudiating the thing in itself is in Hegel the other side of an acritical identification of the real with the idea, a loss of that unity-distinction which lay behind, in MEC, the judgment that recognizes Kant’s contribution to a critical materialism. What is missed in the denunciation of the agnostic Kant of the noumenon is his ‘positive conception of the sensible, of a real and not formal distinction between being and thought’ (167). The attention of a Hegelian dialectic to the fluidity and mobility of the concept, to real contradictions that make it so that one and the same thing is and is not have a serious price: matter and real determinations are abandoned for the sake of a dialectic out of space and out of time (167). This opens the way for a Heraclitean interpretation of Marx as a philosopher of change and contradiction, losing sight of his method of determinate abstraction which permits, following Della Volpe, a circuit moving from concrete to abstract and back again. Between MEC and the Notebooks we have to choose.

3. Lecourt, or, The Broken Mirror

Dominique Lecourt’s Une crise et son enjeu is a rare monograph within European Marxism on MEC, coming after hisFor a Critique of Epistemology (Bachelard, Canguilhem, Foucault) and coming in the wake of Althusser’sLenin and Philosophy, with its elaboration of the Leninist theme of partisanship in philosophy. The great originality of Lecourt’s work, which features a patient reconstruction of the ‘crisis of the physical sciences’ that provides the context for Lenin’s intervention (including appendices reproducing some key texts in the debate referred to by Lenin himself), is to explore the hypothesis that materialist epistemology of MEC and the rediscovery of the Hegelian dialectic in the Notebooks should not be grasped through the prism of discontinuity. As Lecourt notes at the start of his inquiry, close perusal of MEC in its context throws up three seemingly paradoxical conclusions:

1. the reflection at stake in the so-called theory of reflection is a reflection without a mirror;

2. contrary to appearances, Lenin does not in any way support a sensualist theory of knowledge;

3. there is no contradiction between MEC and the Hegel notebooks of 1914-15, the thesis of reflection (without a mirror) finding its relay in that ofprocess (without a subject). (16)

            Rather than producing an alternative theory of the production of knowledge, for Lecourt the aim of MEC is to prevent the creation in empirio-criticism of the kind of scientific ideology that would illusorily ‘resolve’ scientific problems in a manner that thwarts proper experimental research. ‘The advantage of a consistent materialism’, Lecourt observes, is ‘to clarify with a question the formulation of a problem which it is the task of the sciences to resolve’ (26). Like Colletti, Lecourt stresses that for Lenin philosophical materialism has no direct contribution to make to scientific specifications of matter. Rather, he shows that empirio-criticism falsely presents itself as the philosophical consequence of psychophysiological sciences, while, unlike a dialectical materialism, it is actually incompatible with them. The mistaken reading of Lenin depends on taking the illustrations of reflection through psychophysiological studies of perception as the philosophical content of the thesis. In the end, Lecourt observes, Lenin shows that there is simply no common terrain between idealist and materialist argument, rather than a confrontation between two comparable epistemologies.

            Lecourt argues that to grasp the nature of Lenin’s challenge we need to note the importance in his work of the order of questions. It is this order that distinguishes the two philosophical camps. The materialist position is that the primacy of being over thought takes thefirst place, while that of how knowledge of the external world is reached issecondary. The trick of empirio-criticism is to reverse the order. ‘This philosophy’, Lecourt comments, ‘subordinates theposition of the fundamental question to thesolution of the secondary question’ (33). The question of the acquisition of knowledge is here ultimately a scientific one (thus obviating Colletti’s critique of MEC’s limits), and in the end ‘knowledge of the mechanisms of the acquisition of knowledge is not a philosophical question’ (35), while thehistory of the production of knowledge remains merely sketched out. In the end Lenin’s materialist epistemology could be regarded as a kind of minimal, polemical or negative epistemology. Its grounding thesis of reflection is in effect adouble thesis comprisingthe primacy of being over thought andthe objectivity of knowledges. The moment that the second thesis is treated as the first the affirmation of materialism is subordinated to the access to the experience of matter. If the objectivity of knowledge is treated as the foundation of truth we are within one problematic that can take two forms: either putting the content of knowledge inside the object, and asking the subject to discover it; or inverting this and putting the content in the subject for whom the object is an occasion. This theory of knowledge is aclosed system in which subject and objectmirror one another. Knowledge is envisaged as thepassive inscription of a thought-content.

            Contrariwise, according to Lecourt’s reading of MEC, if the objectivity of knowledge is posited on the basis of the primacy of the real over thought, then we have an open system in which the scientific problem of the acquisition of knowledge is an experimentally available problem, and the task of philosophy is not the foundation of truth. Hence the conclusion that the theory of reflection (reflet) breaks with the philosophies of reflexivity (réflexion), while idealist theories require the primacy of the objectivity of knowledge over the primacy of being. Lecourt shows how given this idealist reversal of primacy one can also have three versions of the question of primacy itself: a consequent idealism which states the primacy of thought, a hesitant or masked idealism (otherwise known as agnosticism) which claims the identity of thought and being, and a contradictory idealism which treats the epistemological foundation of objectivity as primary but still claims a primacy of being or matter over thought. Lecourt also shows how Leninist partisanship involves a complex strategy, in this case that of occupying one adversary position (sensualist idealism) in order to destroy the enemy from within. What is more important for our purposes is Lecourt’s very interpretation of what a materialist epistemology could be. The polemical orientation of Lenin is clarified when we realise that MEC is not trying to produce a theory of knowledge, in the sense of a philosophical foundation of scientific objectivity. Once the primacy of being over thought is the primary thesis, the objectivity of knowledge is a thesisfor knowledge,for experimental studies of knowledge acquisition.

            Diametrically opposed to Merleau-Ponty and Adorno alike, for Lecourt the right positioning of thesis 2 (the objectivity of knowledge), means that the whole of Lenin’s theory of reflection ‘can be read as the systematic decomposition of the phantasm of the mirror which haunts theories of knowledge’ (43). Reflection is not a passive inscription in a closed system of subject-object but an active reflection, a notion at odds with the metaphor of mirroring. Moreover, as Lefebvre himself had noted, the approximative or relative nature of knowledge, means that reflection cannot be ‘specular’. Not only is reflection active and approximative, but the centrality of practice to knowledge means that in the final analysis the basis of knowledge is social (here we can see how Lecourt posits in MEC what both Colletti and Lefebvre see as missing, with the latter looking for it in Hegel). It is practice that breaks the closure of idealist theories of knowledge. As Lecourt sums up:

What Lenin calls ‘materialist theory of knowledge’ is the set of theses induced by thesis 2 (the thesis of objectivity) posed in the materialist order that subordinates it to that of the primacy of being over thought (thesis of materiality). The set of these theses has as its function toopen the field to scientificproblems – coming under the sciences of nature and ‘historical materialism’ – posed by knowledge to the processes of the acquisition of knowledge. In this regard, the ‘theory’ they constitute differs radically from that which is traditionally designated by the theory of knowledge in the history of idealist philosophy: aclosed system of philosophicalresponses to the problem of the foundation of the truth of knowledges. (47)

            A reflection without a mirror is thus ‘a reflection that takes place in a historical process of the acquisition of knowledges’ (47). This notion of process, which emerges from the cracking open of the mirroring of subject-object, is what links MEC to the Notebooks, notwithstanding the radically different materials they are operating with. It is important to note that for Lecourt the inability to grasp this continuity is a product of the quintessentially French mistake of thinking that Hegel is a thinker of the cogito, of thesubject, while it is precisely subjectivism which Hegel’s logic brings into question. In doing so, Lecourt also provides a nuanced defense of Lenin’s use of Hegel’s critique of Kant, contra Colletti, identifying Lenin’s capacity to occupy those Hegelian positions which affirm the superiority of the absolute, or process, over subject – with the twist that Lenin’s take on the Hegelian dialectic involves stopping the absolute from once again becoming subject, as it does in Hegel. Both texts embody the same principle of partisanship in philosophy: always being able to discern the new stakes of the battle against idealism, of creatively occupying enemy positions (in a sense, there are no others), finally, in Lecourt’s words ‘to break with a purely speculative practice of philosophy to discern instead,in social practice, what, at each moment, determines the form of the combat’ (112).

Works cited

Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics (London: Routledge, 1990)

Lucio Colletti, Il marxismo e Hegel (Bari: Laterza, 1969)

Dominique Lecourt’s, Une crise et son enjeu (Essai sur la position de Lénine en philosophie) (Paris: F. Maspéro, 1973)

Henri Lefebvre, Pour connaître la pensée de Lénine (Paris: Bordas, 1957

V.I. Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (Moscow: International Publishers, 1970)

Herbert Marcuse, Soviet Marxism: A Critical Analysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958)

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Adventures of the Dialectic (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973)

Simone Weil, ‘Sur le livre de Lénine «Matérialisme et empiriocriticisme»’ (1933), in Oppression et liberté (Paris: Gallimard, 1955)

Moishe Postone (1942-2018) died in Chicago, Monday, March 19, 2018, after a battle with cancer.  A member of the Historical Materialism Advisory Board, he delivered one of the plenary talks at theHistorical Materialism conference in London last November (2017).  He became seriously ill some weeks after returning to Vienna.  He was working there this academic year at the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen (Institute for Human Sciences).

 A native of Canada, Moishe lived and worked in Frankfurt for over a decade in the 1970s and 1980s, completing a dissertation in 1983 under the direction of Iring Fetscher at the Goethe Universität in Frankfurt.  He returned to Chicago, where he had studied at the University of Chicago.  He worked first as a researcher at the University of Chicago Center for Psychosocial Studies before taking several academic positions at the University of Chicago, ultimately becoming the Thomas E. Donnelley Professor of Modern History at the University and the College, as well as a member of the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Chicago.  He was co-director of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory and a founding editor of Critical Historical Studies, the journal sponsored by the center.

This year, 2018, marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Postone’s most influential work, Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).  It was the subject of a symposium inHistorical Materialism and has been translated into many languages.  It was preceded by a widely discussed essay “Anti-Semitism and National Socialism,” which appeared inGermans and Jews Since the Holocaust, Anson Rabinbach and Jack Zipes (eds.), New York: Holmes and Meier, 1986.  Moishe collaborated with Craig Calhoun and Edward LiPuma in co-editing Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives, Chicago and Cambridge: University of Chicago Press and Polity Press, 1993).

Remembering my friend Moishe Postone:

Moishe Postone introduced himself in the lobby of the philosophy building, Dantestrasse 4-6, next to the Institut für Sozialforschung, in Frankfurt in the fall of 1975.  He spotted me carrying an issue of Telos and came over.  That chance meeting changed my life.  It began an enduring and special friendship, as decades of conversations—some beginning after midnight in the Anatevka, an afterhours Frankfurt bar—followed about Marx, critical theory, and the world formed by capital and resistance to it.

Moishe was a deliberate but not scholastic reader of texts; he thought conceptually and historically in equal measure.  He took the time he needed: his dissertation was ten years in the making, followed by another decade of work before Time, Labor, and Social Domination appeared in 1993.  It was my privilege to be involved in those processes.  Moishe’s intellect was piercing, his mind large.  The horrors of twentieth-century history, colonization and anti-colonial struggles, world wars, hyperinflation and depression, and the genocidal devastation of the Holocaust were never out of mind, but he sought to understand this history’s movements and discover what grounds for hope could be found in them.  Thinking, for Moishe, was taking responsibility for the world.

Moishe was a thinker of the New Left.  He felt anguish over what Herbert Marcuse called “surplus repression.”  We sense it in Moishe’s most recent essay: “this gap between what is and what could be, allows for a future possibility that, increasingly, has become real historically.  It is this gap that constitutes the basis for a historical critique of what is.”[1]  Moishe was a graduate student at the University of Chicago during the height of the student and anti-war movements.  In the summer of 1969, SDS, the foremost New Left group in the US, splintered at its convention in Chicago.  By the time that Moishe left Chicago in the early 1970s to teach briefly at Ramapo College in New Jersey before moving to Frankfurt, the New Left was dissolving, with some factions turning toward extralegal actions, others toward Maoism or Old Left communism, and others fading away.  At the same time, feminism was resurgent and other social movements were rising.  Several journals, including Telos andNew German Critique, offered a space for New Left thinkers to develop and to engage currents of critical theory imported largely from Europe.  Reading theGrundrisse when it came out in a full English translation in 1973 was, I believe, a defining moment for Moishe.  The idea that capital is its own barrier stuck with him.  Moishe’s 1974-5 essay inTelos with Helmut Reinicke, “On Nicolaus,” gave a first look into his reading of theGrundrisse.[2]

As the birthplace of Frankfurt School critical theory, Frankfurt was a home to the New Left.  Exiled from France after May 68, Daniel Cohn-Bendit set up the Karl Marx Bookstore on the edge of Goethe Universität in Frankfurt.  From Frankfurt, it was easier to recognize the New Left as an international phenomenon—always an important point for Moishe.  The Frankfurt SDS had been led by the brilliant activist and thinker Hans Jürgen Krahl, one of several students of Theodor Adorno who were developing “die neue Marx Lektüre.”  On this new reading, Marx was a critic of political economy, not a critical political economist.  Marx’s theory of value was not a radicalized version of the classical, Ricardian one; it was a theory of the social form of labor in capitalism.  Marx’s revolutionary aim was not to redistribute value but to overthrow value as the measure of wealth and surplus-value as the aim of production. 

For Moishe, the important question of the distribution of wealth in capitalism was preceded by the question of the social form and purpose constitutive of wealth and labor in capitalism.  He criticized traditional Marxism for its transhistorical (Ricardian) conception of value as embodied “labor.”  No.  Value is a socially specific form of wealth that gives capitalism its double character and “heteronomous” historical dynamic.  The centerpiece of Moishe’s reinterpretation of Marx lies in what he calls the value treadmill.  Because abstract labor forms the substance of value whereas productive power is a concrete feature of labor, increases in the productive power of labor yield more use-values (useful things) per hour but not more value.  In the short run, increasing the productive power of one’s workers gives one a competitive advantage that results in extra surplus value but only until one’s competitors adopt the more productive methods.  If the productive power of labor keeps increasing, value (whose magnitude is labor time) as the measure of wealth becomes increasingly anachronistic and what Moishe called shearing pressures mount.  In “The Current Crisis and the Anachronism of Value: A Marxian Reading” (2017), Moishe focuses on climate change and the “crisis of work” as two manifestations of the shearing pressures created as value (not the theory of value) becomes anachronistic, while the value forms constituting capitalist production keep being reproduced.

Moishe took in earnest Marx’s statement in the Grundrisse that“the exact development of the concept of capital [is] necessary, since it [is] the fundamental concept of modern economics, just as capital itself … [is] the foundation of bourgeois society”.[3]  In thinking about class in capitalist society, Moishe was guided by Marx’s observation that “classes are an empty word if I do not know the elements on which they are based.  For example, wage-labor, capital etc.”[4]  That led him to identify “the ‘essential relations’ of capitalism” as “the forms of social mediation expressed by the categories such as commodity, value, capital, and surplus value.”[5]  Classes in capitalism exist and are to be understood in that context.

Moishe was wary of forms of anti-capitalism that did not first come to grips with capital.  That gave urgency to his own efforts to plumb capital’s depths.  Political efforts to overthrow capitalism rooted in traditional Marxist or Ricardian socialist ideas could not bring about the revolutionary transformation away from capital’s domination aimed at by Marx’s critical theory.  Moishe’s essay “Anti-Semitism and National Socialism,” from 1986, revealed how destructive a perverse strain of anti-capitalism could be.  

For Moishe, capital gave history a direction that it does not have on its own: capital was the truth of what Hegel called spirit, Geist, in hisPhenomenology of Spirit.  Moishe saw idealism as the “rational core” of Hegel’s dialectic in its gesturing to capitalism’s “domination by abstractions.”  History may not be on our side, but, because of its dynamic, contradictory double character, constantly constraining the new by the increasingly anachronistic social forms of value and surplus-value, capital generates precarious possibilities for an end to exploitation and domination.

Though I took Time, Labor, and Social Domination, with its forceful criticisms of Friedrich Pollock, Max Horkheimer, and Jürgen Habermas, to be offering a reinterpretation of Marx’s critical theory as an alternative to the Frankfurt School, recent scholarship suggests that a reading of Marx as a critic of political economy such as Moishe’s counts as a branch of Frankfurt School critical theory with roots in Adorno, and more particularly, Adorno’s students Alfred Schmidt, Hans-Georg Backhaus, Helmut Reichelt, Hans Jürgen Krahl, Helmut Reinicke, and more.[6]

Moishe lived and thought with style, grace, and large purpose.  A visit with Moishe, whether over the phone or in person, was always a special occasion.  It is hard to think now of never picking up the phone to say, “Hello, Moishe, it’s Patrick.”

Patrick Murray

jpm AT creighton.edu

[1]“The Current Crisis and the Anachronism of Value: A Marxian Reading.” Continental Thought & Theory, Volume 1, Issue 4: 150 years ofCapital, 53.

[2]Moishe Postone and Helmut Reinicke, “On Nicolaus’s ‘Introduction’ to the Grundrisse,Telos 22 (Winter 1974-75), 130-48.

[3]Karl Marx, Grundrisse, 331.

[4]Introduction to the Grundrisse, inTexts on Method, edited by Terrell Carver, 72.

[5]“The Current Crisis and the Anachronism of Value,” 48.

[6]See contributions from Dirk Braunstein, Christian Lotz, Werner Bonefeld, and Chris O’Kane.

Lea Kuhar is a young research fellow at the Philosophical institute, Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Science and Arts (ZRC SAZU) and a PhD candidate in philosophy at the Postgraduate School ZRC SAZU where she is researching the topic of the Marxian Critique of political economy and modern political philosophy. She is also a co-worker and a member of the program committee of the Institute of Labor studies.  Email: lkuhar@zrc-sazu.si

Der Einzelne hat zwei Augen