For those interested in engaging with the history of the Russian Revolution in the hope of more effectively challenging capitalism, a tension between the universal and the particular looms large. The difficulty that inevitably arises is how to disentangle what was historically specific about Russia 1917 and Bolshevism from what might reflect a more generalised tendency. To quote award-winning author China Miéville’s recent October: The Story of the Russian Revolution (Verso): ‘This was Russia’s revolution, certainly, but it belonged and belongs to others, too. It could be ours. If its sentences are still unfinished, it is up to us to finish them.’

In this spirit, Miéville recently sat down to discuss the Russian Revolution and its relevance for today with Eric Blanc, a historical sociologist and author of the forthcoming monograph Anti-Colonial Marxism: Oppression and Revolution in the Tsarist Borderlands (Brill Publishers, Historical Materialism Book Series).

Blanc: One of the key aspects of 1917 was the abrupt way history and mass consciousness changed course – the metaphor that I’ve come across most in the memoir literature is revolution as a whirlwind. In October you argue that one of Lenin’s most important characteristics was an ability to orient to these rapid changes and political contingencies. How do you see different actors in 1917 confronting these whirlwind conditions? And what from these approaches might still be relevant? I was struck for instance by the recent editorial in Salvage,a journal in which you are an editor, which stated after the recent surge of Corbyn: ‘what we had not allowed for was how fast things can change.'

Miéville: Formally, I’ve always known well that things can change giddyingly quickly, on a dime, which is one of the reasons I’ve never been tempted to surrender to any sort of ‘New Times’ lugubriousness according to which fundamental change can never happen. But, as you note, on a certain level I clearly haven’t always metabolised that formal awareness.

For me, Corbyn wasn’t a complete bolt from the void: I thought he was going to do better than a lot of people said. But I’m not going to bullshit: the scale of it stunned me. I’ve never been so delighted to be wrong. We’re now, roughly, in what I thought my best case scenario would be in four years or so, if Corbyn played it well. It’s not that I believed this impossible, but we got there much more quickly than I’d thought.

It is a good, humbling reminder of what formally we all know. And – I don’t think it is tendentious to make the connection – if there’s one lesson that keeps coming up about 1917 it is this, of how quickly things can change. It’s delightful to be reminded of that – it is more pleasant and useful, to nearly quote The State and Revolution, to go through the experience of abrupt change than to read or write about it.

In terms of 1917 itself, with exceptions, I do often get the impression that one of the things that distinguished the Menshevik intellectuals, including very brilliant people, was a tendency to treat their theoretical models somewhat as procrustean beds into which to wrestle what was in front of them, rather than starting analysis from the complexity of reality.

At his best, I think this was one of things that distinguished Trotsky and, in a perhaps less theoretically succulent kind of way, but with incredible speed, was quite remarkable about Lenin. Everybody commented on Lenin’s antenna for these minute shifts. This didn’t mean he was never wrong – he was wrong many times: in July, on Kornilov, arguably about aspects of October. But not just his sense of these shifts, but his willingness to completely change his line was, I think, highly unusual. You could say that, in a certain admirable way, he was totally unsentimental about his own positions.

Blanc: I really liked the vignettes in the book in which you feel almost sympathetic for the Bolsheviks who have to deal with having a leader like that in their organisation.

Miéville: It’s remarkable: while Lenin is in hiding in the Fall of 1917 his comrades are invoking his almost Biblical wrath for the utter sin of printing what he had written two weeks earlier. There’s not too many of us who, if you did that, you could be wildly misrepresenting us. But in his case, it was hugely misleading.

Blanc: It is also worth thinking about the extent to which this was made possible by the existence of a Bolshevik Party. Lenin is not just reading newspapers, but is in a position as an organiser in which he’s able to get the reports from the ground from his comrades, who themselves are independently intervening and trying to come to an assessment of what’s going on. That usually gets missed – otherwise it’s just Lenin the Genius. And, in some ways, you could say that is what breaks down later, after 1917, when that dynamic between the middle cadre and top leadership falls apart, including with Lenin.

Miéville: You certainly get the sense in 1917 that Lenin is paying very, very close attention to the reports and positions of the middle layer, even when he doesn’t like what he’s hearing. This was one of the things that was so useful about the memoir of Eduard Dune, Notes of a Red Guard, where you get a sense of that layer of committed cadre who are intervening politically, in very sensitive ways, debating, learning, and so on. I think you’re right about that being a key source of these antennae. All of which said, there was still something quite remarkable about Lenin himself. Others who also had access to these networks didn’t respond in the same ways, for example.

Blanc: One of the most promising developments in the last few years has been the resurgence of socialist politics among young people, which has largely taken the form of a growth in left social democracy as expressed (in different ways) by the rise of Corbyn in the U.K. and Bernie Sanders in the U.S. On the one hand, it is exciting, inspiring, and poses huge openings for radical politics. At the same time, it also means that a sober balance sheet of the historical role of social democrats may be more critical than ever.

In Russia 1917, the real debate throughout the year is between radicals and (for lack of a better term) moderate socialists – Mensheviks and SRs in central Russia. Many of the latter end up joining the government in May and rapidly abandon much of their own programme and goals; people today often forget how militant the platform of these parties was early in the year. You particularly highlight in October the historic default of the left Mensheviks led by Martov, above all when they walk out of the Second Soviet Congress in October. Do you think moderate socialists could have played a different role in 1917? And might we expect social democrats today to act differently than their counterparts a century ago?

Miéville: As you say, the adjective ‘moderate’ is actually quite misleading and unhelpful here, in some ways, as it lumps together a wide range of different tendencies, many of whom were quite radical. So I think the term always has to be put in scare quotes.

On the simple question of 'could it have been other?', it feels to me not hugely controversial that the answer is Yes. Not least because many of those involved regretted very much that it wasn’t. Left Menshevik Sukhanov, to his dying day, I think, regretted the walkout at the Second Soviet Congress. He called it his ‘greatest and most indelible crime’ that he didn’t break with Martov and stay in the hall.

And it sometimes doesn’t get stressed enough that a few hours earlier that evening it had been agreed upon (including by Trotsky) that there should be a general socialist government, a non-Bolshevik-exclusive socialist government. This is amazing, a huge deal. The eyewitness reporters were aware of that. That to me is an anguishing moment because it could have been a very different dynamic. Even if the right socialists were going to walk out anyway, there were plenty of non-rightist non-Bolsheviks the presence of whom could have substantially changed the inflection and methodology of the Soviet government.

Blanc: Along these lines, it’s worth noting that things played out differently in other parts of the Russian empire. In Finland, for example, most of the socialist leaders who had been waffling throughout 1917 end up siding with the revolution in January 1918 when the moment comes. I just found a really poignant letter of a middle-of-the-road Finnish socialist leader writing to his daughter right after Finland’s January insurrection, explaining that even though he had been opposed to a violent revolution, he felt it was his duty not to abandon the party and the workers after the uprising was decided on.

Miéville: Absolutely. It brings out the extent to which it could have been different. I think it would be completely utopian and ridiculous to say that therefore everything would have been okay, but I do think it could have potentially had a real impact. Having a comradely, but critical and rigorous, alternative voice within the revolution.

As far the current moment, I do think there’s an unhelpful tendency among some on the far left to by default describe anybody with whom you disagree as a renegade orcapitulator or whatever. And some of them may be, sure, but not all. If you’re a social democrat because you believe that any attempt to overthrow capitalism in a revolutionary form is to be fundamentally opposed, then I’m never going to be your close comrade. If you are a social democrat, because much as you love the idea of overthrowing capitalism you don’t really see it as on the agenda for the moment, that’s a different story, and you may very well be a more serious activist than a lot of putative revolutionaries. And what about when the sense of the possible changes, and something more radicalis abruptly on your agenda?

So I think it’s misleading to generalise about social democrats or left social democrats (and even liberals – I always quote Richard’s Seymour’s observation that, politically, there’s a stark opposition between a liberalism of fidelity to liberal ideals versus that which is faithful to the liberal state). You’re not going to know who your friends, comrades, and enemies are until the horizon of radical change draws closer, is more visible.

Blanc: I agree with what you’ve laid out, but the flip side of this is the incredible pressure that bears down on all socialists from above by the ruling class. For example, in April 1917, precisely because the Provisional Government would not have survived without socialists coming in, there was a structural imperative to integrate certain moderate socialists. So, it’s not just the politics of an individual, but also the necessity to bring in and lean on forces with some credibility in the working class in the hopes of propping up the system. And we see this also in other parts of the empire and throughout the post-war revolutionary wave in Europe.

Miéville: You’re right: I’m using ideas (always protean and elastic) here and ‘belief’ as somewhat of a shorthand. We’re really talking about people as political functions. I suppose if you’re an activist willing under certain circumstances to enter a bureaucratic state apparatus under capitalism, then the issue becomes: What is your relationship to rupture? There’s no question that there is a very strong tendential logic within social democracy, including its left wing, towards the battening down of any such rupture. But I don’t think it is inevitable in all cases. Once the horizons of possibility open, even some inside that machine may discover (possibly even to their own and our surprise) fidelity to a project of emancipation.

There is a rather showboating alternative to such an approach, a kind of swaggering strategy of tension. If you think about a crude opposition between such an ultra-left strategy of tension, and a reformist social-democratic strategy of amelioration within the system, I wonder sometimes if the dream of some ‘dialectical sublation’ of the two is not actually possible. Maybe the best you can do is superpositionally oscillate between them, to various degrees at various times.

Blanc: Maybe the point is to keep that tension in mind…

Miéville: Right. And that a healthy movement for rupture has to include representatives of both these trends.

Blanc: In Salvage, you have grappled quite a bit with themes of hope and despair. The journal has advocated 'austere revolutionary pessimism’; one of its taglines is 'hope is precious; it must be rationed.' This raises many questions for me, perhaps because most of my research is on revolutionaries in the Second International. And a lot of their political success – and political message – was arguably rooted in an extremely hopeful approach. Often these currents today get dismissed as believing fatalistically in progress or being overly-optimistic in the final victory of socialism. But I think the rational core of what they were doing was projecting hope as a political intervention into the class struggle, to give workers confidence in themselves and their ability to win. In that sense, hope becomes to a certain extent a self-fulfilling prophecy – if workers think they can win, they’re more likely to fight, thereby making victory more likely.

Within Russia one of the major differences between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks was precisely this question: the Mensheviks constantly accused Lenin and his comrades of having an overly-hopeful confidence in the working class. So how do you look at the politics of hope and despair in 1917? And what aspects of these distinct approaches might be relevant for today, precisely when there’s a semi-resurgence in hope regarding Corbyn in particular?

Miéville: Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya – ‘Teffi’ – teased Lenin by saying that if Lenin met Zinoviev and Kamenev and five horses were present, he’d say ‘There were eight of us.’ Anyone who reads that who’s been politically active and seen the Left’s constant tendency to big everything up will smile. Plus ça change.

There is a simple and obvious level at which hope is necessary: If you don’t believe there is any possibility of fundamental change, there’s no point in struggling for it. That’s one way hope is key to a transformational project.

But there is a banalised version of hope, which is very often (this is a point Terry Eagleton makes in his recent book) indistinguishable from optimism. Optimism is a very different thing. If you start from a default position of optimism, there’s no logic to that. It is essentially a faith position (and, I’d add, an unconvincing one, evincing for me a disavowed despair, more often than not). If optimism and pessimism are to mean anything, they need to be results of analysis of concrete conditions. One might be pessimistic in one situation, optimistic in another.

You brought up the political use of hope: and not just that baseline Grundnorm hope, in the sense in which I’ve said I’ve of course no problem. But a kind of necessary performativity of hope, let alone as a starting point, is another story: the idea that we have to performoptimism, what’s more (and often rather frantically), because that’s how to inspire the working class and stoke its agency, and so on. My difficulties with this approach are several. One being that it is, at least potentially, intellectually and politically dishonest, because the injunction outweighs your actual, concrete analysis. (This, of course, happens all the time: we can all think of hacks swearing blind that some tactic will succeed, leaving us convinced not only that this is untrue, but that they know it.) In addition, for an approach intending to keeping people active, I don’t think we’ve thought nearly enough about its costs. Anecdotally, in my own political experience I have seen more people lost to what I think of as vacuous optimism than to pessimism: people who get burnt out after being told one time too many that one more big push will change things, that there’s everything to play for, that there are immense opportunities in any and all, as opposed tosome, situations, and who get made, what’s more, to feel guilty, who are politically shamed, for feeling that the situation is, in fact, very difficult. Not to mention the shame when thingsdon’t go well, after having been told that if they just keep at it they will. Because what can it be but their failure?

Good things happen, of course, but when they do it doesn’t vindicate that kind of banalised optimism. To repeat, I am, for example, utterly delighted about the speed of the Corbyn phenomenon. There were a few people who did concretely sense something of what was happening, and all respect to them. But this political turn doesn’t vindicate the others who’ve been moralising with their rah-rah for the last thirty years. That’s just a stopped clock being occasionally right.

For such reasons, I haven’t tended to use the word ‘hope’ much recently: not because I don’t feel it in that deep, honourable sense that we talked about – Eagleton’s invaluable ‘hope without optimism’ – but because by default, certainly on the British Left, ‘hope’ had been so hegemonised by the other kind that I found it almost impossible to hear it. I am very glad to say that post-Corbyn, I find that shifting, in society and in myself. I am now, concretely, considerably more hopeful – even optimistic – than I recently have been. Which isn’t to say that I don’t think realism about the scale of what faces us, even now, even after Corbyn – perhaps especially – isn’t absolutely crucial. Not least because I think it is going to cost us fewer activists, and, for many people, it will be just as motivating as any banal optimism.

Blanc: The Bolsheviks, and revolutionaries in the Second International generally, were genuinely hopeful and optimistic, they really believed it.

Miéville: I have no issue, of course, when particular analysis leads to the sense that a particular situation is positive – with good-faith, concrete optimism, you might say. I may or may not agree, but that’s a reasonable debate among comrades. But regarding the ‘hopefulness’ of the Bolsheviks and their political success, I’m courteously sceptical of any implication that this is necessarily causation, rather than a particular correlation. Perhaps the success was is so much a function of wider politics and tendencies that the relative weight of Bolshevik ‘optimism or pessimism’ is infinitesimal in compared within the sweep of history. (There were of course Bolshevik pessimists, and that did not necessarily mean opponents of taking power. There’s nothing particularly unusual about people fighting for what they believe to be right, necessary and possible, but not strongly confident that they’ll succeed.) Perhaps this a question for further good faith discussion.

Blanc: A major legacy of the Russian Revolution was that it sparked a new international orientation around Marxist party building, an approach that came to be known as Leninism. Ever since, there has been an ongoing debate over the nature of the historic Bolshevik Party and what from its experience is generalisable. One of the things that I really appreciated about your book is that you describe the complications, tensions, and mistakes of the Bolshevik Party, as well as its political strengths and its importance in making October possible. What do you think the relevance of this party building legacy is for today?

Miéville: Assuming the important caveat that it would be absurd to simply replicate particular old structures because they seemed to have worked for the Bolsheviks (which kitsch has been a problem on the Left), I don’t have a problem with the party as a form for a political project; I’m not a horizontalist. One of the fundamental things about Leninism that I still find very powerful is considering it as a theory of consciousness, the way consciousness works in people, and the way it changes.

Blanc: And the unevenness of consciousness in particular…

Miéville: Including within the party, and including within the leadership, to be clear. Sometimes there are anarchist (or spuriously democratic right-wing) attacks that notions of the party form – let alone of some ‘vanguard’– are elitist, scornful of working-class people.

Many of these are bad faith attacks, but for the more serious my response is: I believe that people change their minds. I myself have done it many times, including while I was in a political party. So, the question is: How does political subjectivity change? The unevenness you talked about shifts over time. It seems to me that the party – as long as it’s not a shibboleth, hypostatised – is a not-bad-at-all way of relating, with a political project, to those simple facts that consciousness exists, that it changes, and that it is uneven.

Blanc: In Trotsky’s history of the revolution he says that despite all of its serious weaknesses, the Bolshevik Party was a 'quite adequate instrument of revolution’.

Miéville: Right, the party is a tool and I try not to be sentimental about it. It’s also important to stress the party not as a top-down issuer of instructions, but, oftentimes, as a brake, a restraint. I find it very striking and moving the extent to which key moments during high political dramas (not just the Russian Revolution) are not some ‘vanguard’ telling people what to do, but are often about saying 'stop', urging restraint, trying to control a completely understandable but violent class rage, class revenge.

Attacks from the right have been unending. But it is also the case that the Left has not always been its own best friend on this issue, because its relationship to the party as a project can be hypostatised, sentimental, kitsch.

Blanc: In that sense, one of things that really comes across when you seriously delve into the history is the degree to which the Bolsheviks changed over many years, the extent to which they made mistakes, and relatedly the number of open political questions that remain today for socialists. Marxists don’t generally deny these points, yet the actual histories we write tend to be somewhat uncritical and so the lessons we draw from this experience can sometimes be a bit cookie-cutter…

Miéville: I get frustrated with the inability of many on the Left, including the Bolsheviks, to acknowledge an error. That’s why I tease Lenin in the book a bit about his response to the Kornilov events, because that is as close as I’ve ever seen him get to acknowledging a mistake. And even then, when he describes the ‘downright unbelievably sharp turn’ in events, it’s almost as if it’s reality that’s made the mistake. I think we have to get over this allergy for admitting when we make mistakes, in activity, analysis or both. It’s still really common.

Blanc: Reading October, I was really impressed by the amount of research that went into this and the seriousness with which you took up the historiographical side of the project. My guess is that a lot of readers newer to this history might overlook this dimension of the book. In researching for and writing October, were there ways in which you came to look at the Russian Revolution differently than when you began?

Miéville: I’m grateful to you for saying that: a lot of it is down to you and the other specialist scholars who were so generous working with me on the first draft. Though a new reader was always foremost in my head, it was also really important to me that specialists would at least nod approvingly and say, ‘Whether or not I agree with him, he’s done his homework.'

Before I started doing my reading, I wasn’t new to the topic, but I didn’t have a detailed knowledge. On a grand-sweep level I don’t think there was anything that radically altered my position. What the research did was strengthen certain intuitions or passing awarenesses that I had, bringing out the extent of them. For example, it is one of these things that one says on the Left: ‘there was a lot of internal dissent in the Bolsheviks’. We say it almost in passing as a way to prove it was not a monolithic party.

Blanc: Marxists tend to say that – and then often go on to argue that Lenin was right on almost everything.

Miéville: Exactly, we want it both ways. For me, the sheer scale of that internal debate was really striking, the way it was kind of a constant pulse in the party. Similarly, I was swept up with the sense that while October itself was not historically inevitable, no, but everyone was clear that something was going to happen. The country was chaotically, rushing pell-mell towards something – a sense, almost, of apocalypse. And the extent of that ineluctability was very strong. These were fleshings out, extrapolations of vague awarenesses on my part.

At a granular level, by contrast, there were some real revelations for me. For example, I don’t always take a full ‘Lih-ean’ line on everything, I think there’s more of a break between Old Bolshevism and new Leninism than he sometimes implies. That said, Lars Lih’s work is quite indispensable, and regarding his position on Lenin’s ‘Letters from Afar’, before he returned to Russia, I was just completely convinced. The line that one often reads (including, for example, from Trotsky) that the ‘Letters from Afar’ were so shocking that his comrades censored them, aghast at his radical political positions, Lih simply disproves, as far as I’m concerned.

One last issue I came away with was not exactly a change in opinion, but a revelation of quite what an extraordinary group the Mezhraionka was. Like a lot of people I had earlier come across them as a small radical group associated with Trotsky. But reading about them in more depth I grasped something of their astonishing independence of thought, their politics, their disproportionate number of truly fascinating, scintillating intellects.

Blanc: And they play a major role in both the February and October revolutions.

Miéville: I find them utterly fascinating. I think there is a great book to be written – not by me, sadly – on the Mezhraionka.

Blanc: By way of conclusion, could you talk a bit about how you envisioned the political contribution of the book? What have the responses to it been so far and what might this indicate about the current state of engagement with the Russian Revolution?

Miéville: I’m increasingly pulled by the idea that globally, we’re in a moment of sclerotic decadence of capitalism, with all the associated excrescences. I feel that it may not be mere epiphenomenon to have a sense that we are particularly surrounded by a sea of bullshit and bad faith, right now. An interesting effect for me is thatgood faith becomes increasingly important; I set a lot of store by the ability to have an honourable debate with those I disagree with. And I don’t mean just on the left. I really welcomeserious liberal and even right-wing discussions of these topics: what I can’t bear are the kind of waffly liberal nostrums about 'revolutions eating their children', or ‘lovely idea but it could never work.' Analysis by aphorism.

Mostly reviews have been positive, including those beyond the left. That’s meant a lot. I was particularly glad of and grateful for the review by historian Sheila Fitzpatrick, who comes from a very different political place from me and views the revolution in a different way. She did a literature round-up, and she was very serious, thoughtful, scholarly and generous about October. Not least because hers was the first book I ever read about the revolution, decades ago, I found that affecting. The older I get, the more I try to read with a heuristic of generosity, to see what I can get from books – I was grateful to haveOctober read in such a way.

There’ve been other surprises. Among the outré, the book made the business magazineForbes Summer Reading List of 2017, which described it as a story of when ‘a group of disrupters changed a centuries-old institution’ – you know, Tsarist Russia.

The first purpose of the book is to tell the story for readers who don’t necessarily know anything about the Russian Revolution, who want to know what happened when, the stakes, the rhythms, the events. This is not a history of the Russian Revolution for leftists, but for everyone; it is, though, a history of the Russian Revolution for everyone by a leftist.

So one political contribution it might make, if any, is simply to interest people in the story. To say: We need to talk about the Russian Revolution. It’s a thing. Honestly I’m a little blue about the extent to which it isn’t yet a thing, on the whole. I’ve been happy about the responses to this book, but I think there’s less conversation about 1917 than I’d hoped, in the centenary year.

There was a moment when the way to undermine 1917 was to denounce it. Now I suspect we’re at a point when the best way to undermine it is to just not talk about it. If the book provokes a bit more of a discussion about this world-historical, epochal year that inflects liberty, and dignity, and all of those other things, then I’m very glad.

Blanc: This might just be optimism speaking, but my hope is that the current radicalisation of young people might relatively soon lead to a more widespread re-engagement with 1917. Maybe the centenary just came a year or two early?

Miéville: The good news is that there is certainly some curiosity – as, in part, evidenced by some of those unlikely reviews, by the fact that the book seems to have piqued interest more widely than I’d expected. The best news is that there is an un-defensiveness on the Left now. I think people who’ve been thinking and writing about this for many years have moved beyond that understandable default position of mere defence attorney. More people with fidelity to the revolution are thoughtfully, and in a more open way than I’ve seen at other times, talking about some of the problems, for example, internal to the Bolshevik Party rather than just the external problems, crucial as those were. That’s healthy.

So perhaps overall there is not quite as much discussion as I would have hoped about the revolution, but what discussion there is on the left and beyond seems on the whole less rote, less poisonous, even, than I might have feared.

[Miéville and Blanc would like to thank Tithi Bhattacharya for having set this discussion into motion.]

Mario Kessler

This text first appeared in a supplemental issue of Sozialismusdedicated to Theodor Bergmann, and was translated for Historical Materialism by Loren Balhorn

The older he grew, the harder it was to believe that death would ever catch up with him. Theodor ‘Theo’ Bergmann, an accomplished agronomist and historian of the German labour movement later in life, continued to write books and give lectures across the country well after his 100^th birthday. He remained vital and filled with ideas until the very end, laughing off anyone who inquired about his physical condition. His most recent book,Der chinesische Weg. Versuch, eine ferne Entwicklung zu verstehen, was published by the Hamburg-based publishing house VSA only several months ago. It would be his last: Theodor Bergmann died in his home in Stuttgart, Germany on 12 June 2017 at 101 years of age, following a brief illness. With his death, we have lost the last participant and eyewitness to the German labour movement of the Weimar era.

His was a 20^th century life in every sense: born in Berlin on 7 March 1916 to the rather large family of Reform rabbi Julius Jehuda Bergmann and his wife Hedwig née Rosenzweig, Theodor Bergmann entered the Communist movement in 1927 at the age of 11. He first joined the Communist Party, or KPD’s youth organisation, the Jungspartakusbund, but declined to join the party itself, instead decamping to the anti-Stalinist KPD-Opposition (KPO) around Heinrich Brandler and August Thalheimer together with his brothers Alfred and Josef. His other siblings Arthur, Ernst, Felix, Rose, and Lotte remained loyal to the Social Democratic Party (SPD). Theodor worked with a young Richard Löwenthal, eight years his senior, in the KPO youth organisation – the two would remain trusted discussion partners, despite disagreeing on many questions, for decades.

Bergmann collected valuable experiences during his time in the proletarian sports organisations, the KPO youth organisation, and by volunteering in the Junius-Verlag publishing company, which sympathised with the small party. Here, he discussed with much older comrades like Brandler, Thalheimer, Paul Frölich, Jacob Walcher, Heinz (Moses) Grzyb, Franz Černý, Robert Siewert, Eugen Podrabsky, as well as M. N. Roy, Eduard Fuchs and Felix Weil (who discretely funded the KPO) about the growing Nazi threat, as well as the consolidation of Stalin’s rule in the Soviet Union – two novel problems confronting socialists at the time.

Theodor remained true to this political commitment for his entire life. He strove for a world in which freedom and social justice coexisted. To him, this was socialism – the simplest of ideas that nevertheless proved so incredibly difficult to realise, as he knew all too well.

He felt the consequences of his political activity early on: by 1929, he was expelled from his school, the Mommsen-Gymnasium, for a critical article in a left-wing student paper called the Schulkampf. Luckily, he was accepted to the Köllnische Gymnasium in the same year, where he encountered many working-class classmates, and skipped twoforms. His teachers Siegfried Kawerau, Fritz Ausländer, Hermann Borchardt and Arthur Rosenberg also made an early impression on him. Arthur Rosenberg was particularly influential, and would remain a model historian in Theodor’s eyes for the rest of his life. These teachers taught him that the fight to defend Weimar democracy and the struggle against social injustice must be brought together. He developed a keen sense for anti-Semitic and other racist prejudices early on, regardless of how cleverly disguised they might be. This red thread motivated both his involvement in anti-Nazi demonstrations in the 1930s as well as his participation, often as a speaker, in mobilising against the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in 2017. As recently as April of this year, he spoke at the inauguration of a so-calledStolperstein for anti-fascist resistance fighter Julius Vohl. On 29 April 2017, he addressed a group of students at the Friedrich-Spree-Gesamtschule in Paderbon, reporting on his life between political persecution and self-determination. He began this public appearance, which would ultimately be his last, with the words: ‘The struggle for a better world is more relevant than ever.’

Theodor Bergmann knew the meaning of persecution – as well as solidarity – from his own life. He was driven into exile on 7 March 1933, his 17^th birthday, five days after graduating as the best in his class. His dream to study biology would prove unfulfillable. Instead, he spent more than a decade in exile – first in Palestine, then Czechoslovakia, and finally Sweden. Upon reaching Palestine, Bergmann enjoyed one advantage: as the son of a Rabbi, he already spoke modern Hebrew quite well. He spent two years working on the Geva kibbutz in the Jezreel Valley, where he first discovered his interest in agriculture and agronomy. Nevertheless, he left Palestine in early 1936, citing the Arab-Jewish conflict that increasingly dominated the country. He refused to shoot at Arabs in the emerging civil war and, more than anything, saw his duties in Europe. Convinced that Hitler could not last forever, he wanted to do his part to bring about the Nazi leader’s fall.

He went to Czechoslovakia to what was then known as Tetschen-Liebward, on the German border, home of the Agricultural Department of the German Technical University where he studied agronomy in the evenings, while working in agriculture during the day. Most importantly, he managed to establish contact in the border region with his comrades from the KPO who were conducting underground work in Germany under conditions of extreme illegality.

Hitler’s annexation of the Sudetenland placed Theodor Bergmann’s life in grave danger, and he narrowly avoided the Nazis’ claws twice. An attempt to continue his studies in Norway failed, and he ultimately went to Sweden, although he was unable to continue his academic career here either. He found employment on a farm west of Stockholm, where he learned to milk cows and operate farming equipment.

His brother Alfred would prove less fortunate, deported to Germany (and thus condemned to death) by the Swiss authorities in 1940. Countless other relatives would also fall victim to the Nazi killing machine. This wound remained unhealed for the rest of Theodor’s life and that of his family. He resolved that Jews should never again be left defenceless against such murderous barbarity – incidentally, the same conviction that would later motivate his brother Ernst to help develop the first Israeli atomic bomb.

Together with his brother Josef, who had also fled to Sweden, Theodor published a hectographed newspaper, the KPO-Briefe, later known asRevolutionäre/Politische Briefe, together with his brother Josef who had also fled. Additionally, he worked in a local committee of German trade unionists. At war’s end, he attempted to return to Germany, although he knew he would be returning to a country which had just undergone the planned execution of millions of Jews and non-Jews. He always said and wrote, however, that German fascism first had to destroy the labour movement before it began its horrendous ‘work’ of eliminating the Jews.

After working in the Swedish mining industry for six months, Bergmann returned to West Germany in April 1946. British authorities had delay his re-entry, and he was only permitted back into the country after his friend Wolf Nelki and Labour politician Fenner Brockway intervened. Stalinist East Germany was not an alternative to Theodor. Instead (and even more astoundingly), he illegally met with many of his former KPO comrades in the Soviet occupation zone, which soon earned him a warrant for his arrest he was keen to avoid. In political life, he found his home in the Gruppe Arbeiterpolitik; in private, in fellow KPO member Gretel Steinhilber (1908–1994).

The Gruppe Arbeiterpolitik drew on both on the traditions of the ‘old’ KPO, as well as other Weimar-era dissident Communist groups. This mission would prove impossible over the long term. The task was daunting from the beginning: lacking any conceivable financial support, Theodor Bergmann began publishing the Arbeiterpolitik in 1948 with his brother Josef, and remained its editor until 1952, when internal conflicts led him to quit the organisation. Initially, his wife Gretel sustained the childless couple financially through her work as a stenotypist and secretary. Important political support came from his Danish comrades Morgens and Ester Boserup.

Gretel and Theodor Bergmann first travelled to Yugoslavia in 1949, viewing its form of independent socialism as a hopeful development that could perhaps offer a path towards overcoming Stalinism internationally. Nevertheless, he rejected Wolfgang Leonhard’s offer to join his independent workers’ party, the ‘Titoist’ Unabhängige ArbeiterparteiDeutschlands (UAPD), in 1951. Theo was not interested in subjecting his political work to the whims of other Communist Parties, anti-Stalinist or not. Nor did his sympathy for Yugoslavia’s path stop him from supporting Milovan Djilas’s criticisms of Tito or protesting his harsh treatment at the hands of the Yugoslav authorities.

The Bergmanns would remain friends with Wolfgang’s mother Susanne for decades, standing by her together with Hedwig Eichner (Gretel’s sister), Fritz Lamm, and Hermann and Gerda Weber, especially as she began to feel the negative health effects of her years in Soviet internment in old age.

In his autobiography, Im Jahrhundert der Katastrophen. Autobiographie eines kritischen Kommunisten, first published in 2000 and expanded to mark his 100th birthday, Bergmann describes in short, dispassionate sentences his difficult transition from an agricultural labourer in exile to a Professor of Comparative International Agricultural Policy at the University of Stuttgart-Hohenheim. West German post-war society had little room for independent Marxists of his type.

Theo Bergmann completed his interrupted studies of agricultural sciences in 1947 in Bonn. While working as an unskilled worker in a metal factory, then in the Hanover Chamber of Agriculture, and later as a project leader in Turkey, he completed his doctoral degree in 1955 and, in 1968, his Habilitation practically ‘in passing’ in 1968. His dissertation addressedWandlungen der landwirtschaftlichen Betriebsstruktur in Schweden, while hisHabilitation thesis, begun in 1965, addressedFunktionen und Wirkungsgrenzen von Produktionsgenossenschaften in Entwicklungsländern. Both before and after hisHabilitation, he published a series of books on topics like trade union work in the countryside and, most notably, agricultural policies in South Asia and comparative studies of various development models. He wrote his most important book on the topic,The Development Models of India, the Soviet Union, and China, in English.

His countless agricultural and sociological studies on Israel, particularly the Kibbutzim, demonstrated his connection to the country that provided Jews with state protection, developed democratic structures, and yet still adhered to policies that Theo often criticised harshly, while also analysing them at a level of sophistication rarely encountered in Germany. He wrote an essay for the Gewerkschaftlichen Monatshefte in 1967 immediately after the Six Days War defending Israel’s right to self-defence, including a preventative first strike if necessary. Chairperson of the West German trade union federation (DGB) Ludwig Rosenberg distributed 2,000 copies of the article in pamphlet form. This position brought Theodor into conflict with many other contemporary leftists, including Wolfgang Abendroth. He was and would remain, however, an opponent of every form of nationalism (including Israeli), and would recognise the devastating consequences of violent land-grabbing in the West Bank by militant settlers early on.

Theodor’s incredible work ethic, strictly observed discipline, and irrepressible optimism that accompanied him to the very end allowed him to outmanoeuvre his reactionary ‘colleagues’ who sought to prevent this Marxist from enjoying a successful academic career. His over sixty books as author and editor and hundreds of articles (not to mention the hundreds more which appeared in Arbeiterpolitik) speak to his boundless creativity and imaginativeness. He shared his wealth of knowledge with others modestly, never arrogantly. He was also a veritable socialist global citizen: writing and translating in five languages, reading half a dozen more. He travelled to China at his own expense 14 times, most recently at age 97. He visited Israel even more often, celebrating his 100^th birthday there. Oftentimes conducting projects for the United Nations’ Food and Agricultural Organisation, he visited Indian, Pakistan and many other countries several times in order to ‘understand developments’. Theodor Bergmann was a visiting professor at the University of New England in Armidale (Victoria, Australia) in 1971–2, and later held guest lectures in Göttingen for years. Some of the contacts he developed here would last a lifetime. On the whole, Bergmann was a loyal correspondent, who regularly expressed concern for the wellbeing of his many friends around the world, and often helped out in times of need.

He would not become a Professor of Comparative International Agricultural Policy at Stuttgart-Hohenheim until 1973. He selflessly helped students during the so-called ‘Berufsverbot’ period, even when he disagreed with their political views. His loyal students included Helmut Arnold, Joachim Herbeld, and Karl Burgmaier, who stood by his side until the end.

Even today, students and doctoral candidates report of his willingness to help others, his vast expert knowledge, his almost unbelievably extensive humanist education (which he hardly ever mentioned), but also the demanding expectations he placed on them – although he demanded even more from himself. He accrued further international prominence through his editorship of the European Society for Agricultural Sociology’s publication, Sociologia ruralis. He held one of the main keynotes at the 1976 World Congress of Agricultural Sociology in Torun, Poland.

Following retirement, the history and politics of the labour movement would increasingly become his main field of research. His history of the KPO, Gegen den Strom, was first published in 1987 and has been reprinted in various updated editions since. Today, it is regarded as one of, if not the definitive history of that organisation, and an English translation is planned for the Historical Materialism Book Series. He neglected to limit himself to this topic, however, and also published scientific works on the history of the Comintern, the Spanish Civil War, and the Arab-Israeli conflict to name just a few, and continued to conduct archival research both domestically and abroad almost up to his 100^th birthday. Together with his colleague and friend Gert Schäfer, Bergmann initiated multiple international conferences on the history and current problems of the labour and trade union movement. It began with meetings on Karl Marx and August Thalheimer in 1983 and 1984 in and around Stuttgart, and ended in 2004 with a conference of the Rosa Luxemburg Society in Guangzhou, China. Between these were various prominently attended conferences on Trotsky, Bukharin, Lenin, the Russian Revolution, Friedrich Engels, and more. All of these conferences were documented in collected volumes which Bergmann edited anonymously behind the scenes. He was also a co-editor of the magazineSozialismus for many years, and wrote his last essay for them as a 100-year old man.

As far as politics and trade union work in particular was concerned, Theodor was no mere observer. He participated in the DGB’s 1949 founding congress as an interpreter, and was a member of the union Gartenbau, Land- und Forstwirtschaft as well as, most recently, the Initiative Gewerkschaftslinke. In 1967, he wrote the ‘Aktionsprogramm der sozialistischen Opposition’ together with Wolfgang Abendroth, Gerhard Gleissberg, and Frank Deppe. This document called for launching an independent left-socialist party, and sought to challenge the SPD ‘after Godesberg’ but also positioned itself as a clear alternative to the Communist parties of Soviet or Chinese coinage. The initiative also pushed the leaders of the East German state to establish their own, acceptable counterpart in West Germany, the German Communist Party or DKP. Bergmann later served as a liaison lecture for the Social Democratic Friedrich Ebert Foundation in Hohenheim, but never joined the party itself. His particular, radical socialist critique of Stalinism combined with cautious hope for internal reforms of Soviet Communism placed him on the same side as figures like Wolfgang Abendroth and Ossip Flechtheim, although he was equally supportive of Western European dissident Communists like Franz Marek, Ralph Miliband, or Rossana Rossanda, who he viewed as his intellectual co-thinkers.

His internationalist convictions also pushed him to get involved in trade union solidarity with Cuba. One of his biggest engagements, however, was his push to invite visiting Chinese scholars to Hohenheim, even though he had retired in 1981. His view of the Chinese state, often viewed as overly optimistic by friends and comrades, cannot be separated from his harsh criticisms of the repression of protesters at Tiananmen Square in 1989. He maintained countless contacts in that country, as well: one of his most important relationships was with the political writer who had come to China early in life, (and had, according to Theo, ‘the beautiful Chinese name’) Israel Epstein.

In doing so, Bergmann sought to continue that which began in 1968: the selfless, but never uncritical support for Communist as well as non-Communist dissidents, who had left the so-called socialist camp and found themselves in the West – sometimes against their own will. These ties led to solid friendships with individuals like Eduard Goldstücker and Zdeněk Mlynář. Theodor was also friends with members of the Khrushchev and Bukharin families in Moscow. Another noteworthy friend was the painter Robert Liebknecht, son of Karl Liebknecht, to whom he owed much of his extensive artistic knowledge. Theodor spoke at his funeral in January 1995.

Theodor lost his wife Gretel, whom he had cared for in their home until the end, to a long, difficult illness on 17 February 1994. This was the greatest loss of his life. He remained in close contact with his siblings in Israel and their families in Israel, as well as with his relatives in the Czech Republic and Gretel’s relatives, who were an important part of his own family as well.

Theodor Bergmann saw himself as a critical Communist. It is thus little surprise that his books were declared contraband in East Germany. However, this never stopped him from supporting many ‘liquidated’ East German scholars who had once denounced him as a ‘revisionist’ and a ‘renegade’ after the end of the Eastern Bloc. He joined the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), even led its Baden-Württemberg state chapter for a period, and remained active in the party’s educational work until the end of his life.

He stayed in touch with old KPO comrades and other left-wing socialists throughout his life. Theodor learned just as much from politically astute workers like Paul Böttcher, Waldemar Bolze, Eugen Ochs, Eugen Podrabsky, Robert Siewert and Alfred Schmidt – persecuted by both Nazism and Stalinism – as he did from his more academically inclined comrades. He was also tied through friendship to former KPO politician and later victim of Stalin, Kurt Müller. That said, young people also sought his advice. One particular student who picked Bergmann’s brain for every last detail of the Weimar labour movement was Rudi Dutschke, whose funeral Theodor and Gretel attended in 1980.

His apartment was always open to knowledge-hungry visitors. His favourite audience, however, were schoolchildren. He was often invited to speak at schools, and his incredibly dangerous life, as well as important learning experiences, proved deeply compelling to the younger generations. I can remember my students’ jaws dropping when a 100-years old Theodor, after holding a lecture without more than several notes, said to the audience: ‘I hope I didn’t exhaust anyone.’ On 23 June 2016, he spoke at Potsdam’s Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung about the Gruppe Arbeiterpolitik in post-war Germany: ‘Independent paths for the independent Marxist left were blocked, and they lacked the strength to remove these obstacles.’ Nevertheless, he always remained committed to swimming ‘against the current’. He himself was that which he often praised other critical Marxists for: a ‘Communist heretic’. A documentary film about his life appeared on his 90^th birthday. Its title,Dann fangen wir von vorne an [‘Then we start from the beginning’], referenced a quote by Friedrich Engels in which he encourages socialists to never resign in the face of defeat.

Multiple commemorative volumes, most recently on the occasion of his 100^th birthday, have been published to honour Theodor Bergmann’s life and accomplishments. Shortly before his centenary, the University of Stuttgart-Hohenheim established a colloquium in honour of their oldest faculty member. A special experience was his opening speech before the German premier of Raoul Peck’s film,Der junge Karl Marx, which he held on 2 March 2017 in the Kamino cinema in Reutlingen.

Twenty years ago, Theodor’s friend Nathan Steinberger remarked: ‘Theo won’t live to 90. Theo will live to 100.’ And so he did, and even had one more productive year after that.

As unbelievable as it may seem, his last years witnessed further qualitative and quantitative growth in Bergmann’s publishing career. Since 2009, he published: Internationalisten an den antifaschistischen Fronten: Spanien–China–Vietnam (2009);Internationalismus im 21.Jahrhundert (2009);Weggefährten. Gesprächspartner–Lehrer–Freunde–Helfer eines kritischen Kommunisten (2010);Der einhundertjährige Krieg um Israel. Eine internationalistische Position zum Nahostkonflikt (2011);Strukturprobleme der kommunistischen Bewegung (2012);Kritische Kommunisten im Widerstand (2013);Sozialisten–Zionisten–Kommunisten. Die Familie Bergmann-Rosenzweig – eine kämpferische Generation im 20. Jahrhundert (2014);Der chinesische Weg. Versuch, eine ferne Entwicklung zu verstehen (2017). It is the duty of younger generations to tap into and make use of this rich legacy.

Theodor Bergmann never believed in life after death. Nevertheless, as theologian Helmut Gollwizer once said, this atheist and his faith in a humane, socialist society brought him much closer to this belief than many who call themselves Christians. In the spirit of Isaac Deutscher, a figure Bergmann deeply respected, Theo saw himself as a ‘non-Jewish Jew’. Nevertheless, he continued to follow secular Jewish and Israeli culture in particular throughout his life.

His exceptional diligence, prudence and the systematic way in which he organised his life motivated some, while intimidating others. When he reached 90 years of age, I asked him: ‘Theo, you’ve already accomplished enough to fill ten lifetimes. What will you do when you get old?’ He responded: ‘There’s always enough to do. I don’t have time to get old.’ He would maintain this attitude for the rest of his life.

I visited him on 10 June at his home in Stuttgart, where he lay terminally ill, accompanied by his family and close friends, including his assistant Margerete Weiler and Ms. Mila, his outstanding nurse. Theo gathered his last ounces of strength in order to spend one last hour with me. When bidding each other goodbye, we both raised our fists in the traditional salute of the International Brigades and said, almost simultaneously, ‘La lutte continue’. I would be his last visitor. He lost consciousness the next morning and only came back sporadically, falling asleep peacefully in his own home.

Despite sometimes appearing outwardly stern, Theodor Bergmann was a warm, loving personality, to whom every shred of vanity or pettiness was absolutely foreign. He was fundamentally and deeply honest, consistent and decisive in both thought and action, while still expressing sympathy and understanding for human weakness. Not everyone can, nor must struggle all the time, and the weak are not always deserving of criticism – but always of solidarity. Here, Bergmann followed the words of Bertolt Brecht:

'The weak do not fight. The stronger fight for perhaps an hour. Those who are stronger fight for many years. But the strongest fight their entire lives. These are indispensable.'

Theodor Bergmann never saw himself as indispensable. But, in fact, that is what he was.

This piece was originally written for the special issue 150 of the Spanish journal Viento Sur, "1917-2017 Rethinking Revolution" dedicated to political strategy and anti-capitalist alternatives.

Josep Maria Antentas teaches Sociology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB). He has published in English and Spanish several articles on the Spanish regime crisis, 15M movement, Podemos and political strategy. He has also worked on Daniel Bensaïd's oeuvre and was a contributor to the special symposium on Bensaïd in Historical Materialism 24.4.

1. Movement-party. After decades of crisis of left-wing political forces and of activist refuge in social movements, the current rebirth of the political-electoral combat and the building of new political tools is happening together with the need to rethink and renew the very notion of party. As a result of a long decline of the political left since the late 1970s, the (uneven) crisis of the parties has been a crisis of content (programme), form (organisation), and practice. In short, a crisis of project, sense and strategy. Indeed, the resurgence of the eternal "party question" conceals a broader discussion of political strategy, the nature of political struggle itself, and the relationship between the political and the social.

The notion of movement-party sums up well the vocation to undertake a movement-inspired renewal of the party, as a certain analogy of the concept of social movement unionism. Used in academic circles by Kitschelt^[1] to refer to the anti-authoritarian and green parties that emerged in the 1980s in several European countries, the term can be reformulated in a broader sense. Applied to the debate in Podemos, it shows a pretension of political-symbolic continuity between 15M and Podemos in a scenario of crisis of legitimation of the whole political system of the Spanish State that puts forward the need to develop, in Gramscian terms, a counter-hegemonic project and not merely an alternative political voice.

In this context, a movement-party takes on several simultaneous meanings: party as a movement (movement features),in movement (action-oriented and in continuous transformation),part of the movement (part of social struggles), anddebtor of the movement (that is inspired by a foundational political-social event, 15M).Movement debtocracy means a party indebted to the movement (and the event), fidelity to which implies thinking beyond the same and its own limits to reveal all of its possibilities - excluding both its sanctification and its crude instrumentation for electoral purposes.

Although social movements (in fact, social organisations) reproduce many of the problems that are commonly associated with parties, the call for a movement-party is an attempt to go beyond conventional party politics and, at the same time, to follow in the tracks of a political tradition of, if we adapt Draper’s classic formula, change from below.^[2]

2.Strategist-party. A party oriented towards a policy of emancipation must be conceived as astrategist-party, using Daniel Bensaïd’s term.^[3] A movement-strategist-party. Addressing reality strategically is a precondition for victory, although there is no guarantee of it. Planning a strategy does not mean that it is correct. Or that it is useful for advancing the cause of emancipation. Or that its implementation is tactically correct. Or having a correlation of forces that leads to victory. But thinking strategically is the first step. "There is no victory without strategy," notes Bensaïd.^[4]

A strategic view of the world is, therefore, a helpful starting point, even though it does not ensure the destination will be reached. This is done on the basis of working hypotheses, as provisional road-maps for political action that will need to be contrasted and to pass the test of a never conclusive practice. In the era of the GPS (Global Positioning System), we therefore need to recognise that when it comes to political strategy, we are still navigating with an astrolabe. The politics of the astrolabe assumes that a political struggle does not work with imaginary certainties or inconsistent improvisations. It is based on rigorous and flexible approaches to a changing reality that is too complex to be understood perfectly. The uncertainty of the result of the action itself is an intrinsic part of any strategic approach. "In the revolutionary struggle there are no guarantees in advance" Trotsky warned in 1934 discussing the situation worldwide.^[5]

The culmination of all strategic thinking is to develop what I have called strategic imagination, echoing Wright Mills’ well-known concept of ‘sociological imagination’.^[6] Defined as ‘the vivid awareness of the relationship between experience and the wider society’, sociological imagination requires open-mindedness with regard to society. Strategic imagination needs a similar mentality. It means thinking strategically from a self-reflective and permanently innovative point of view, and having an indomitable and insatiable will to search for new possibilities to transform the world. In that sense, all strategy for revolution also has to be a revolution in strategy. The space-time perspective, that is to say, having both the historical and geographical scope to draw lessons from failed and successful past and contemporary experiences, is always a fundamental basis for strategic learning – a basis for the expansion of the imagination's frontiers. Therefore, short and long term, and concrete experience and comparative knowledge, are all intertwined.

3. Integral strategy. A political force must operate in all dimensions of social life. Changing the world needs ‘daily work in all fields’ to borrow an expression from Lenin.^[7] It works its way into every last nook and cranny. No aspect can be neglected. Neither political, nor economic, nor ideological. All the details matter. All flanks are important in order to avoid strategic blind spots that may conceal unforeseen vulnerabilities and hinder the capacity to react.

Phil Hedges on Linebaugh's May Day Essays and the UCL rent strikes

Phil Hedges is a trade union organiser and an alumnus of the International Labour and Trade Union Studies Masters (MA ILTUS) at Ruskin College, Oxford. This essay is dedicated to the 2014-16 MA ILTUS cohort.

In March 2016, the Marxist historian Peter Linebaugh released an anthology of essays highlighting the history and importance of May Day. The Incomplete, True, Authentic and Wonderful History of May Day compiled work from 1986 to 2015 and coincided with the 130^th anniversary of the Haymarket bombing.

These essays “most[ly] written the night or week before” 1^st May[1] cover a broad range of topics and eras. Although Haymarket and Merry Mount are pivotal to many,[2] May Day is not constrained by these two events. Linebaugh’s May Day is an anti-capitalist festival[3]  that incorporates but transcends these narratives.

Linebaugh’s biography and work suggests that piecing together theory is appropriate when attempting to understand this anthology. The historian was an early member of the Midnight Notes collective founded in 1979. Influenced by E.P. Thompson, Italian Operaist Marxists and Wages for House Work theorists, Midnight Notes was conceived as a “bridge between the workers movements of the past ... and the new social movements”.[4] Linebaugh described Midnight Notes as “an anti-capitalist collective that was also struggling to express itself during those leaden times;”[5] so leaden that the collectives fluid membership sometimes remained anonymous to avoid repression.[6]

As his doctoral student, Linebaugh was sufficiently close to E.P. Thompson to introduce the reprint of William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary, in which he mentions living with his mentor.[7] The elder historian was comfortable explicitly presenting his thoughts on the theory of class determination[8] and Linebaugh himself presents political theory – for example, inStop Thief! The Commons, Enclosures and Resistance regarding the nature of commoning.[9] Whilst Midnight Notes and Linebaugh’s bibliography is beyond the scope of this paper, this contextualises a vision of Linebaugh as a historian comfortable with theory.

This paper seeks to outline the boundaries of Linebaugh’s May Day, and in doing so, assemble a “theory of May Day”. This paper then concludes with a brief examination of a May Day essay. In doing so, this paper begins to explore two questions:

• - Can a “theory of May Day”, as understood by Linebaugh and demonstrated by his essays, be outlined?
• - Can his May Day essays be replicated?
•  

After examining several of the key essays in the anthology, section 2 outlines what May Day means to Linebaugh, attempting to define the characteristics of a May Day essay and what the historian is attempting to achieve. Section 3 draws two key themes from the anthology and attempts to outline them as coherent theories. Section 4 is an examination of the essay May Day with Heart, attempting to understand and draw stylistic guidelines from this complex text. The conclusion – section 5 – examines an attempt to write a May Day essay themed around housing struggles and rent strikes based on the framework outlined in this paper.[10]

While an exploration of the role of radical festivals is beyond the scope of this paper, my own experience underpins interest in this project. Labour Day in Queensland, Australia is the 1^st Monday in May and celebrates the 8 Hour Day[11] - a goal shared by the murdered McCormick strikers in Chicago, May Day 1886.[12] This was a key demand of the strikes that formed the Great Upheaval[13] of that “revolutionary year”[14] and embodied:

an assertion that the worker was a human being whose life should not be consumed in toil and an attack on the deliberate policy of keeping hours long and unemployment high to get the most work for the least wages.[15]

This demand went global; whilst fallacy to assume present-day Queenslanders are aware of Haymarket, there is a historic link.

In 2011, I took part in the parade through Brisbane; thousands participated in this show of strength and celebration of trade unionism and it was a social occasion that led to friendships with young activists. Returning to the UK, an attempt to celebrate May Day whilst organising with a union was largely abortive. Whilst historical festivals such as the Durham Miners Gala are successful in increasing attendance and inspiring a form of “emotional regeneration”[16] for mining communities, May Day appears in decline.

Yet where it is celebrated, it remains a powerful celebration of radicalism – which is perhaps in part why the Liberal National Party government in Queensland moved Labour Day to October. “The Newman government had no regard for Labour Day’s special place in Queensland’s history” breaking the link with the first march that took place during the Shearers strike of 1891.[17] To prove the point, the triumphant Labour state government reversed the decision, and Queensland saw record turn outs for the 2016 parade which Queensland Council of Unions General Secretary Ros McLennan labelled a warning to a right wing federal government .[18] In 2017, such warnings, the solidarity shared and the friendships made will be needed more than ever, and the researcher is sympathetic to the notion that scholarship developing interest in May Day provides soil to help them grow.

Methodology

The Incomplete, True, Authentic and Wonderful History of May Day collates 11 essays written as self-contained texts across 19 years. As such, there are inconsistencies between them; arguably they were not planned as a coherent body of work and the topics covered are vast. Linebaugh himself appears to acknowledge this in interviews and discussions. The title essay is typically discussed as a proxy for the larger anthology, which is impossible to sound bite.[19] In doing so, other key elements are weaved to the narrative such as the role of Mexican immigrants in bringing May Day back to America[20] and Linebaugh touches on other theories such as X² when directly asked.[21] This dynamic is also apparent in some reviews of the anthology[22] and the anthology blurb.

This paper principally examines 5 essays from the collection, selected because they cover material that appear in these discussions – the introduction essay The May Day Punch That Wasn’t, the titular essay, X²: May Day in Light of Waco and LA, May Day with Heart,and Ypsilanti Vampire May Day. A reading of these essays is accompanied by insights gleamed from a range of videos and podcasts recorded of Linebaugh in 2016. Where these contradict the texts, the text is prioritised, given the tendency to abridge the anthology’s contents and the greater care undertaken in crafting a written argument.

Since it was not possible to interview Linebaugh, this paper presents an interpretative approach[23] to understanding the May Day essays rather than a definitive reading. Linebaugh himself may contest the findings or offer insight that is missing from the sources accessed, whilst another researcher may draw different conclusions, stressing different elements of the texts and bridging contradictions in other ways.

Defining May Day

Linebaugh describes the May Day essays as “occasional”,[24] meaning that they relate directly to a specific occasion. But while the Haymarket bombing and its aftermath form the foundational events for the modern international holiday, Haymarket does not appear in every essay in the anthology (for example, it is absent fromSwan Honk May Day). If an “occasional” May Day essay is not automatically the origin story of the modern festival, what are its characteristics? Linebaugh’s definition is articulated inThe May Day Punch That Wasn’t:

May Day is about affirmation, the love of life, and the start of spring, so it has to be about the beginning of the end of the capitalist system of exploitation, oppression, misery, toil, and moil. Besides full affirmation May Day requires denunciation: the denunciation of capitalism, of patriarchy, of white supremacy, of war.[25]

In interviews, a fuller description is provided, with the book’s title structuring the discussions. This format is replicated below to highlight some key characteristics of a May Day essay. The history of May Day is incomplete in that it there are many more May Day stories to tell and the revolutionary promise is yet to be fulfilled; it is authentic because the essays are written to help activism; it is true because, although based on secondary sources, the essays present historical fact; and it is wonderful history because May Day has promises to provide romantic fulfilment and social justice. 

The incomplete history of May Day

May Day is doubly incomplete; the anthology can not include every May Day story, and the anti-capitalist promise of May Day is not yet fulfilled. This provides the rationale for activist-scholars to produce further May Day essays; it is their role to widen the scope of the events covered and to agitate and educate for social change.

Addressing Historical Materialism Toronto, Linebaugh acknowledges that the Canadian experiences of May Day are missing from the volume,[26] an admission followed by an audience member highlighting Turkey’s “Bloody May Day” of 1977.[27] The historian’s confession that there are narratives untold within the anthology thus directly prompts the retelling of another May Day story.

Linebaugh repeatedly asserts that May Day is incomplete “because we haven’t finished our work”.[28] Whilst the motivation for each essay is linked to contemporary events, by 2016, the historian is inspired by the Sanders campaign; although the Democrat candidate is deemed insufficiently radical, his suggestions on regulating Wall Street have created possibilities for further discussions. May Day becomes a day to debate what socialism, anarchism and communism might look like and to redesign government institutions (and the USA in general) outside of capitalism.[29]

The authentic history of May Day

The Haymarket story is authentic because it is sustained outside of the academy - “It’s not part of institutions, of universities”.[30] Instead it was Spanish speaking (ibid) and working class radical communities that nurtured the historical memory of May 1886.[31]

Authenticity also stems from activism - the essays are written as part of a larger campaign, however lose, to revive May Day. Linebaugh’s engagement with activism is clear from his views regarding E.P. Thompson. Thompson’s “history was always about the present,” and TheMaking of the English Working Class was written because Thompson wanted a revolutionary working class to be made in the 1960’s. Given that Thompsonnever articulated this to the best of Linebaugh’s knowledge, this assertion is more revealing about his vision of radical history than that of Thompson’s. Having helped raise concerns about attacks on civil liberties inThe Magna Carta Manifesto, perhaps  Linebaugh’s ultimate goal is to write history that helps to build a revolutionary global class.[32]

Linebaugh’s personal May Day activism included a tumultuous picnic at Rochester[33] and a pilgrimage to Quincy,[34] the sight of the Merry Mount May Pole. Some of the essays “lived” as pamphlets passed out on the street, and the historian is clear that while the job of the author is over with publishing the pamphlet, the job of the activist is not, declaring that “you readers must make it live.”[35] This is authenticity as a pseudo-evangelical calling to remind the public of its history,[36] and there is legitimacy implied by the sacrifices in doing so. These early May Day parties cost Linebaugh a job and resulted in the expulsion of the anarchist grad student “Freight train”.[37]

Attendees at the April 2016 Gathering recorded for PM Press provide anecdotes of May Day activism. Echoing an earlier action from the mid-1980s,[38] Linebaugh was involved in taking a May pole to the bank of Boston. This was assembled at lunchtime in small plaza, and activists danced around it and put on pro-Zapatista skit in front of a bank in order to disrupt work. In Jamaica Plains, Boston, residents celebrate a spring festival which often coincides with May Day. Anonymous activists displayed sheets of plywood for attendees to read that displayed most of the text of the original May Day essay. The following year panels appeared that included stories from other cultures.[39]

The true history of May Day

For Linebaugh, that the stories contained in the essays are historical fact[40] constitutes thetrue May Day. The author is not primarily a historian of Haymarket and the essays were often quickly drafted in the run up to May Day.[41] Therefore the material used to compile them is drawn from secondary sources such as the work of James Green.

Regarding the controversy surrounding the identity of the Haymarket bomber, Linebaugh admits to not studying the original German sources, resulting in disagreements with Timothy Messer-Kruse who believes him to be “ignorant” in his assertion the bomb was thrown by a police provocateur.[42] Whilst a discussion of radical historiography is beyond the scope of this paper, it is notable the May Day essay exists outside of the historian’s academic speciality and arguably a fulfilment of Howard Zinn’s assertion that radical scholarship should transcend these narrow boundaries.[43] This raises questions of how “amateur” radical historians relate to those who are recognised as being more academically specialist in a subject, particularly regarding politically polarised controversies.

The wonderful May Day

The wonderful May Day is the celebration of fertility and class resistance. Linebaugh notes that “wonderful” relates to “... tremendous things [that] happen when we act as a class in a righteous cause,”[44] referring to the capacity for social change that comes from working people combining to realise their power. The fertility aspect is hinted at when the historian professes that something wonderful will result from dancing around the May pole.[45] This refers of course to finding a romantic partner.

Critically reading the outline sketched by Linebaugh raises questions that are beyond the scope of this paper – for example, is reviving May Day an appropriate tactic to help develop radicalism? Focusing momentarily on Haymarket, a radical politics of mourning could motivate those remembering the original Martyrs but to the question “What complex historical valences transformed the deaths of Michael Brown, or Emmett Till, or Mohamed Bouazizi into catalysts of ruptural mourning when countless other deaths were not?”[46] can now be added the question – “Can these same feelings of ruptural mourning be revived over a century later?” Regardless, this is one critical interpretation of the task that Linebaugh has set.

The theory of May Day

This section outlines two theories articulated in Linebaugh’s anthology. Three essays are examined: the green and red May Day are articulated in the titular essay (1986) and Ypsilanti Vampire May Day (2012), whilst the theory of X² is proposed in 1993’sX²: May Day in Light of Waco and LA and returned to inYpsilanti... The two earlier essays were printed as pamphlets, the first by the Midnight Notes Collective as a revised version ofThe Silent Speak pamphlet (1985); the second was given out randomly “on street corners and at sporting events”.[47]Ypsilanti... was published by Jeff Clark as part of Occupy Ypsi Press[48] and appeared on the Counterpunch website.[49]

These theories are vaguely sketched by Linebaugh; moreover, both have changed in key ways between their initial publication and their revisiting in Ypsilanti... two decades later. Regardless, they arguably retain potential as frameworks for making illuminating comparisons between seemingly disparate events. The green and red May Day allows the activist-scholar to understand the relationship between the pagan festival and modern workers demonstrations in a broad sense that allows for the interjection of topical events. X² seeks to make explicit the hidden relationship between expropriation and exploitation, which are key to capitalism and oppositional to May Day. This section concludes by sketching a model linking both theories together.

Green and red May Day

May Day can be divided into green and red elements.[50] This section seeks to understand what each element represents. It begins by outlining the green May Day as part of an ancient egalitarian celebration of spring before moving to examine the red May Day, whose meaning shifts in the decades between the two essays from remembering the victims of capital to celebrating those who would oppose it in the social sphere.

The green.

The green element refers to the ancient custom of celebrating May Day as the onset of spring:

Green is a relationship to the earth and what grows there... Green designates life with only necessary labour ... Green is natural appropriation ... husbandry and nurturance ... useful activity [and] ... creation of desire ... [51]

Linebaugh provides a brief international overview of the festival, acknowledging that “the origin of May Day is to be found in the Woodland Epoch of history ... [where] people honoured the woods in many ways.”[52] The origin of May as the namesake of the mother of Greek Gods is outlined and highlighting celebrations of fertility, Linebaugh reminds the reader of the rhyme (also reproduced on the reverse cover of the pamphlet):[53] “Hooray! Hooray! The First of May! Outdoor fucking begins today!”[54] On 1^st May, “many maids went into the woods and came back different than they went out.”[55]

Merry Mount is used to contrast the utopian, “paradise” of Thomas Morton’s North America[56] with that of the Puritans, for whom Morton’s abundance offended a life of scarcity.[57] Morton[58] and his detractors are quoted,[59] highlighting the celebration of ample natural resources and the free abandon of the May Day festivities. This, coupled with Merry Mount’s egalitarian notions, led to its destruction.[60] For Linebaugh, like Hawthorne, Merry Mount is a key event in American history – a “road not taken”[61] - and like Haymarket, one returned to throughout the anthology.

A crucial thread of the Green May Day is a rejection of work. Linebaugh highlights that the Native Americans encountered by Smith in 1606 worked a 4 hour week;[62] shifting to the persecution of pagans, May Day’s saints are highlighted. Adopted as part of the Roman Empire’s strategy of syncretism, the unproductive James and Philip are celebrated as “unwilling slaves to empire.” May Day “was not a time to work”,[63] setting it at odds with early capitalists and the sanctity of labour.[64] This led to oppression – which in turn spawned resistance to the “regimen of monotonous work”.[65]

The green thread of May Day is demonstrated as “a celebration of all that is free, green and life giving”[66] - themes not extinguished by the onset of capitalism, despite Linebaugh’s self-contradictory assertion.[67] As well as festivities extending in to the industrial revolution,[68] a poem written in 1980, demands “for land that’s green and life that’s saved, and less and less of the earth that’s paved.”[69] In the same year, workers in Mozambique “lamented the absence of beer” and witches rampaged across Hamburg.[70] Moreover, since the earth is being destroyed and it is capital that is responsible for “desertification” and “treating the Pacific Ocean as if it were a sewer,”[71] May Day has to be a green festival.

Since drafting The Incomplete...., Linebaugh likely collated contemporary case studies. For example, although James Matthews saw the defacing of the Winston Churchill statue on May Day in 2000 as a chance to “express a challenge to an icon of the British establishment”[72] in the name of free speech and human rights, this impulsive, passionate act was carried out in the heat of the moment[73] – perhaps “being spring time, there were sexual and generational as well as political energies coursing wildly about”[74]

Photos of the defacement show a Mohawk - made of green grass.  

The red

The statue “was made to look as though blood was dripping from its mouth[75]”. The red May Day is “the relationship to other people and the blood spilt there among,”[76] and Churchill was not opposed to spilling blood. Alongside a chequered war record, he sent troops against strikers in Tonypandy in 1910 and the docks in 1911 and did not censure police violence against suffragettes.[77] This is the red thread:

death with surplus labour ... social appropriation ... proletarianization and prostitution ... useless toil [and] ... class struggle.[78]

If May Day is theorised as a duality, its nature here is contradictory. In the titular essay, it is an antagonistic relationship. This red is not aspirational but oppositional; it is the denial of the green, which represents radical values. It is a reminder of the barbarism of the current social relation and in memory of those who have fallen victim to it. These red flags of May Day are carried in memorial in keeping with the origin of May Day celebrations to remember the Haymarket Martyrs. 

However, returning to theme 26 years later, it is clear that:

Red demonstrations sought to turn May Day into a revolution that had the abolition of the class system as its aim.[79]

By Ypsilanti... the red and green work in tandem 'in opposition to avarice and privatization.” Here Green represents largely similar territory, with Red representing the “public sphere ... formed in relation to the institutions of the state”[80] The same red flags are now flown to demand class justice. The red ofThe Incomplete... is pessimistic, highlighting the brutality of capital and the suppression of the Commons. The red ofYpsilanti... is optimistic, a vision of egalitarian social relationships and those who strive for it. In interviews, the red May Day is a story of class struggle,[81] with a focus on the 8 Hour Day and Haymarket.[82]

Interpretation

The difference in interpretation can be demonstrated by the story of Merry Mount. In the titular essay, Merry Mount is part of the green thread; by Ypsilanti..., it is part of the red, with the behaviour of humans most prominent over natural abundance (although Linebaugh cannot help but return to his earlier metaphor, noting that “America’s first Red May Day [came] to a bloody end”).[83] The red Merry Mount does not cover new territory; it comfortably fits within the broader green interpretation outlined above, but latterly becomes a distinct red strand within it. By 2016, Merry Mount again becomes the representation of the green May Day,[84] suggesting that it is thefocus given to the event within the narrative that enables it to move between both elements.

Linking the green and the red

Aware that he is addressing an anarchist academic of Haymarket – and of his own short comings as a historian of the events – while addressing Historical Materialism, Linebaugh attempts to outline his own contribution to the Haymarket story via the anthology’s cover art.[85] This shows five women in cutting corn using sickles that ensured the labourer cut higher up the stalk, leaving some of the crop for gleaners as welfare demanded. This is the green theme, stressing sustainability.

This can be linked to the red theme through the destructive industrialisation of agriculture. It was the McCormick iron workers of Chicago who built the mechanical reapers that replaced the manual work depicted in the painting. The same iron workers were pivotal in the events of May 1886.Therefore the painting offers a connection between the green and red of May Day, linking the demise of ecologically aware farming to class struggle.  

Coevality

Linebaugh returns to the green and the red when discussing Bastille Day 2016, demonstrating the adaptability of the framework to events beyond the anthology. This discussion also provides further theoretical detail. The green is expanded to include human lungs; the steam engine leads to reliance on fossil fuels with the associated breathing problems. The red includes strikes, food riots, soldiering and development of alternatives to capitalism.[86]

Linebaugh describes a “coevality between 1790 and present”.[87] Coeval is a geological term meaning ‘of the same age or origin; contemporary’, which is why in Toronto, Linebaugh makes the same argument but uses the term “comptemporanity”.[88] Regardless, Linebaugh asserts that the strategies of the counter-revolution of 1790’s are apparent in 2016. These include incarceration, “commercial warfare” and racism (embodied by the prison, the factory and the plantation),[89] as well as fossil fuels, the privatisation of land, the rise of nation-states and the birth of what he dubs the “terrorist states” of the UK and USA.[90]

The red struggle is equally coeval;[91] as the factory survives in modified and diversified forms, so does worker resistance. Whilst problematic in that it obscures crucial differences, this concept reveals some structural commonalities between say, a sit down striker in 1934 and an absentee call centre worker in 2016.

X²

Linebaugh introduces the theory of X² in the 1993 essayX²: May Day in Light of Waco and LA and reprises it in Ypsilanti... although the themes outlined are referenced throughout the anthology. X stands for three things – the unknown, expropriation and exploitation.

Unknown

X is the unknown quantity in algebra and the unknown quality in politics. It is the X in Malcolm X, for whom it was a reminder of “the theft of land and identity”. There was a “secret” to accumulation of wealth, which Linebaugh claims, to Marx was something unknown - unknown in this context meaning obscured.[92] More prosaically, inspiration for the X² also came from fashion - from “kids [who] were wearing caps that had an X on them.”[93]

Linebaugh speaks of American’s “living in a fog of manufactured ignorance”.[94] Although never explicitly linked to X², interviews highlight attempts to hide the meaning of May Day by presidents Cleveland and Eisenhower.[95] Until revealed to him by a student, May Day was reduced to a militaristic holiday celebrated by Communist states,[96] its American origins another unknown obscuring acts of expropriation and exploitation.

Expropriation

This is “the taking away of what’s ours, such as the rain forest, or the land”.[97] It is the process of “taking you away from your means of subsistence,”[98] “away from the means of life, taken away from the earth”.[99] For Linebaugh, expropriation means “The theft of our commons and common goods.”[100] Returning momentarily to the green May Day ofYpsilanti..., expropriation is the theft of the Commons that 'tend to be invisible until taken away.”[101] It is an unknown because the act of theft is hidden – “the ruling class pretends it doesn’t happen”[102] in order to minimise resistance.

The archetypal expropriation was the Enclosure Acts; these took away the right to the English commons and were part of “that series of concrete universals ... that [have] defined the crime of modernism.” This dynamic is always “imminent with the possibility of reoccurrence”[103] reappearing as foreclosures during the 2008 financial crisis.[104] For E.P. Thompson, enclosure was “class robbery,”[105] achieved according to Marx by “letters of blood and fire” - or their late modern equivalents:

drones, structural adjustment programs, invasions, civil wars, sectarian violence, “ethnic” violence, and school-closings, factory-closings, foreclosures and enclosures – and the subsequent cuts to our social wages and institutions[106]

Exploitation

This is coercion by capital into unpaid or under-paid work. For Linebaugh, exploitation is “the source of profit, interest, and rent” which is why the capitalist pretends it does not exist. It is an unknown, often even to those being exploited.[107]

This concept is ill-defined; after its introduction, it is rarely defined again outside of being one half of the equation. In interviews, exploitation is described as “oppression by making others work without giving them the value of their product”[108] and “being forced to labour by those who have the means and materials of work.”[109] In reference to Henry VIII breaking the London Guilds, exploitation is presented as jobs being “dissed (sic) as the monarchy imported capital”;[110] Lombard bankers and French merchants were used to “under-cut wages, lengthen hours and break the guilds”.[111] Referring to students inYpsilanti..., Linebaugh notes that “higher education fees and the massive student debt they incur constitute exploitation”,[112] where debt can be understood as a promise of labour power owed. A fuller explanation is absent and inYpsilanti..., Linebaugh provides no definition at all.

X²

In X²expropriation and exploitation are required to grasp the meaning of May Day which stands in opposition to both – to be understood, they need to become known and cease being an X of unknown quantities. It is up to the activist-scholar to reveal it.  Here, X² is X as an inseparable pair.[113] Writing two decades later, X² is X squared: “expropriation compoundsexploitation”, explicitly mirroring David Harvey’s “exploitation by dispossession”.[114] Harvey’s term is a rebranding of Marx’s primitive/original accumulation to take in to account that these processes are ongoing. Special attention is paid to the credit system and finance capital “as major levers of preditation, fraud and thievery” legitimised by the state’s “monopoly on violence and definitions of legality”.[115] This dynamic mirrors the traditional English verse:

The law locks up the man or woman, who steals the goose from off the common, but lets the greater villain loose, who steals the common from the goose.[116]

Harvey expands on the list of strategies for late-capitalist primitive accumulation, for example via intellectual property rights.[117] The X² relationship is demonstrated by the Evil May Day of 1517. Expropriation of the commons through enclosure led to judicial terror and dislocation. For those who fled to London, the welfare system run by Guilds was undermined by Henry VIII through his support of Italian bankers and French merchants. Having already lost the safety net of traditional rights to the commons, workers suffered exploitation in terms of support and the quality of employment. This led to May Day riots and further repression: “the dreaded thanatocracy”.[118]

Mapping the Theories

Fig. 1 – Mapping both theories

Although both theories appear in Ypsilanti..., Linebaugh does not directly link the green and red May Day with X². Despite this, there is sufficient overlap to map simplified versions of both May Day theories as a single body (Fig. 1). In this model, the green story is one of life before and including expropriation: the abundance of Merry Mount cut short by the Puritans, of life up to the enclosure of the natural commons. This green story reveals the unknown X of expropriation. The red story is of life after expropriation, of exploitation and attempts to resist it, and reveals the unknown X of exploitation. It is the story of Haymarket and strikes for the 8 hour day where coeval institutions can be seen as competing against coeval tactics of resistance.

May Day with heart

Having defined Linebaugh’s May Day and outlined a theoretical framework, this section focuses on the May Day with Heart essay published by Counterpunch.[119] It is a hallucinogenic rendition of the Haymarket story, which in keeping with theIncomplete May Day that seeks to promote radical social change, was drafted in solidarity with 1.5 million “immigrant worker[s]”[120] protesting repressive legislation on 1^st May 2006.[121]

May Day... is also a response to the publication of James Green’sDeath in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labour Movement and the Bombing That Divided Gilded Age America[122] - an event arguably more significant in shaping the text. Green is referenced reverently and the essay climaxes with a call to “... take heart with Death in the Haymarket in hand!”[123] Perhaps its oblique form is inspired by a desire to do more than abridge Green’s work, given the text also shows similarities withThe Globalization Of Memory: The Enduring Memory Of Chicago's Haymarket Martyrs Around The World.[124] Green guides the “amateur” historian of the True May Day.

By 2016, Linebaugh’s interpretation of the immigrant marches of 10 years earlier reverses this significance. Latino communities mobilised in spring 2006[125] in response to proposed legislation designed to convert living undocumented within the USA from a civil to criminal offense[126] with May Day a day of action across 40 states.[127] The “Day Without an Immigrant” – which was yet to take place at the time of writingMay Day... – is a redemptive event, reflecting theAuthentic May Day: “May Day is brought back to the United States by those who have remembered it.”[128] In North America, it was Mexico alone who celebrated May Day; 1^st May is the Day of the Martyrs of Chicago.[129] The yearly immigrant rights demonstrations that take place in many US cities are for Linebaugh a reminder of this May Day tradition[130] that he would no doubt consider Wonderful and it is telling that in the era of Trump, these marches are referenced in a call for a May Day 2017 General Strike.[131]

May Day... contains the same themes of exploitation and expropriation that run throughout the anthology, but whilst most texts in the collection feature a broad cast and shifting geography,May Day... is, subjectively, particularly dream-like. Because of this extremity, this essay foregrounds techniques that may be absent or muted elsewhere. Because of this - the later significance of May Day 2006 for Linebaugh  - and because the events of Chicago in 1886 signify the birth of the modern May Day, this section examines this essay in detail. It begins by asking what a retelling of the May Day story “with heart” means (an obscure term when compared, for example, with the methodology and aims expressed in 2010’sObama May Day[132]) before discussing some of the stylistic elements of the paper – the deliberately confusing mix of actors and geography; the use of the historian as a tool to bring the reader back to the present; the inclusion of supernatural imagery; the deliberate use of anachronistic similes and juxtapositions; and the use of contemporary verse. This section concludes with a suggested list of guidelines for writing a May Day essay in this mould.         

History with heart

Linebaugh provides a typically succinct definition of radical history: “Until the lions have their own historians, histories of the hunt will glorify the hunter.”[133] His history is that of the lions but beyond this, what it means to write a history “with heart” is never explicit.

It is UEL professor[134] and Midnight Notes associate[135] Massimo De Angelis, who likes the mushroom because “it may cause dreams,” that suggests that writing “with heart” is crucial.[136] Consulting the Oxford English Dictionary, a tool Linebaugh would approve of,[137] reveals:

With heart: with great sincerity, earnestness or devotion.[138]

May Day... does not seemingly lack sincerity. More enlightening is the “heart” as “the seat of courage”[139] which can be contrasted to the “loss of heart” that afflicted the labour movement after May 1886.[140] Perhaps revisiting the story of the Haymarket martyrs is a cure for its disappearance.

Equally instructive is the reminder that the heart is “halfway between the gut and the head”[141] This heart is “the seat of emotions generally; the emotional nature, as distinguished from the intellectual nature placed in thehead ”;[142] this is “heart” articulated as Jose Marti’s “political principle”,[143] the capacity to feel a unifying emotional pain. As “the seat of love or affection”[144] Linebaugh asks if this same “heart” can be big enough for class solidarity.[145] Alongside courage, history “with heart” is therefore the history of collective suffering and attempts at collective compassion.

Linebaugh demands the reader “study the record” of May Day, acknowledging the etymology of the word ‘record’ is to pass again through the heart; thus history must “pass through our heart again”. Assuming the historian has not been sampling De Angellis’ mushrooms, this then is a story of Haymarket written by this emotional heart, more dream-like than the traditional narrative of the rational brain but not overcome by the “grief we feel in the gut”.[146]

Actors

Counterpunch are the self-styled “fearless voice of the American left since 1993” that “tells the facts [and] names the names.”[147] Linebaugh’s visible involvement dates from 2001.[148] Arguably his audience are those engaged on the left, perhaps with an academic or activist history enabling them to understand many of the references within the essay.

This does not explain the obtuse presentation of actors within the essay who rarely appear often, are described with little context, and often disappear again quickly. In an essay about Haymarket, defendants Louis Lingg, Michael Schwab and Oscar Neebe appear in just one paragraph.[149] August Spies appears the most on only 5 occasions. George Engell does not appear at all. The reader is bombarded with names, some of which are wilfully obscured. Albert – or is it Lucy? - Parsons is introduced by family name.[150] James Green is also referred to as Jim Green.[151] Oscar Neebe is never granted his full name.

The reader is not meant to be able to follow actors through the narrative; rather, they flash as brief dream-like images. For the researcher, this effect subjectively recalls Marquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude,[152] where the reader is disorientated by many of the characters sharing names and personalities across generations; only for Linebaugh the effect is achieved not through recycling names until the reader can no longer maintain focus, but by overwhelming the reader with different ones. His actors are given minimal background and are almost interchangeable, flashing past in an instant as “our head spins and spins in the dizzy search for cause and effect”[153] The narrative is carried by outside contemporary commentators such as William Morris and Jose Marti, and the historian James Green.

Geography

Geography is employed in a similar fashion, bombarding the reader with places as well as names. This is clearest near the start and end of May Day... Page 71 includes overt and implied references to 6 distinct locations within a single paragraph, linking Witwatersrand in South Africa with race riots in Seattle against labour imported from China; the Paris Commune appears alongside an Africa divided by imperialists and Jose Marti, who, as outlined on the previous page, resides in New York. Samuel Gompers has no location and founded the AFL everywhere and nowhere in the USA, which is where Geronimo resides. Where Gottlieb Daimler perfected his engine andDas Kapital was published in English, the reader is none the wiser. Page 80 takes the reader to Abu Ghraib, Iraq; Argentina; Columbia; Cuba; France; Germany; Italy; Mexico; Milan, Italy; Petrograd, Russia; Spain; USA in general and Chicago, New York and Washington, DC in particular. Many locations are referenced only once or intermittently. Those that reappear are home to key actors: Chicago, William Morris’ England, Jose Marti’s New York, the undefined USA of the multitude of actors paraded before the reader. The result is, again, dream-like disorientation, particularly in the introduction and conclusion to the historical narrative.

Historian Voices

Authors referenced in the text are used to bring the narrative back to the present or as figures in an undefined past. James Green is principally used to bridge the past and the present. Green is always referred to in the present tense, in contrast to the historical narrative, which is largely written in the past tense. Linebaugh introduces Green in a paragraph where in order to start the exploration of May Day, he suggests “we take down the classics from the shelf”;[154] of the historians listed, it is only Green that appears throughout.

Green is a reminder the historian is writing history, bringing the reader back into the present by interjecting a deliberately artificial break within the narrative. In doing so, the reader’s focus is both on the present and on the past. When Linebaugh suggests that “Green tells the story with verse and drama,”[155] the reader jumps from 1886 to 2006 and back in the same paragraph, contracting 120 years twice in an instant.

Nelson Algren, by comparison, is mentioned in the past tense but has no defined time of his own. At this point in the narrative, the year is 1887 but Algren sits outside of this. Referring to “fifty years of industrial violence” Linebaugh notes that “these [years] laid the ‘bone deep grudges’ that Nelson Algren wrote about.” But he fails to outline when he wrote about them. The tense puts his writing in the past, but it cannot have been in 1887 if he was writing of events that occurred fifty years later. Algren instead floats in a vague past, some when between 1937 and 2006; because the quote could come from any point in this period, he exists and does not exist at every point between those years.  Linebaugh underlines this by directly following with a quote from Green, firmly anchored in the present.[156]

The Uruguayan historian Eduardo Galeano is similarly utilised. After appearing initially in the present tense,[157] Galeano appears in the past tense throughout the rest of the text and like Algren, is never given a time period of his own. Through direct juxtaposition, he is implied as a contemporary of Jose Marti, writing in 1887;[158] Linebaugh pairs a quote from each with no explanation despite Galeano being born in 1940.[159] Likewise no context is given regarding his trip to Chicago. When did Galeano explore Haymarket? The same paragraph records dates from 1889 to 1970.[160]

The past tense places Galeano in history; the lack of an anchoring date places him every when and no when. This is deliberate. While it is possible to argue that the tenses stem from Green being alive[161] and Algren dead,[162] Galeano, spoken of primarily in the past tense, did not die until 2015.[163] Linebaugh’s use of Galeano and Algren purposely renders them as supernatural figures, floating undefined and outside of the narrative.

Supernatural elements

There are further overt supernatural images within the essay. Biblical references throughout the text accentuate the martyrdom of those executed and actors are predictably ascribed these metaphorical roles – as Linebaugh does Lucy Parsons, who was “the Mary Magdalene... of the suffering proletariat.”[164] Albert Parsons is quoted as reciting a verse from James, who Linebaugh teasingly suggests is Jesus’ brother. In doing so, Parsons is aping the role of an apostle, one step removed from the son of God.[165] That these roles are allotted due to family name is obvious; that Emma Lazarus is quoted – Lazarus being raised from the dead in the Gospel of John  – is also not coincidental.[166]

De Angelis is transfigured into a hobgoblin[167] due to his preference for an alternative translation of the Communist Manifesto where it is a hobgoblin rather than a spectre haunting Europe. This then becomes his nickname. This strange and playful image transforms from a moniker into a more literal, supernatural being by the end of the essay, where the hobgoblin reappears without a reminder of whom it represents.

More innovative is the reference to a 1938 May Day march:

In May Day of that year a march on the South Side of Chicago was led by a float featuring a hooded man. In one direction of time, August Spies; in another direction of time, Abu Ghraib.[168]

 A prophetic power is ascribed to the image, although a conscious foreshadowing by parade goers is not suggested. Rather juxtaposition prompts it in the readers mind. Linebaugh is careful to place a historian’s observation within history by not bringing the reader back to the present through an overt use of the present tense.

Condensing time and space

Alongside the historian’s voice, Linebaugh condenses time and space through two techniques – deliberate anachronisms and the juxtaposition of events that occur in separate temporalities. Anachronistic references bridge the period depicted in the historical narrative and the period of the reference. The May Day march in 1938[169]  is an example of this; as well as ascribing prophetic powers, the use of a contemporary reference alongside two historical images with little explanation condenses the geographical and temporal distance for the reader; within two lines the reader is in Chicago in 1938 watching the parade, the same city in 1887 watching Spies execution and Iraq in the (then) present.

Likewise the comparison between Haymarket and Guernica:

Haymarket in Chicago in May 1886 was like Guernica in Spain in 1937 when the Condor Legion wiped it out by bombing: this is to say it was a busy, crowded market, ideal for terrorism.[170]

The reader is in both times and locations simultaneously, with perhaps a mental image of Haymarket as rendered by Picasso. This comparison is loaded with meaning; the Condor Legion were Nazis and although the death toll is disputed, 250 is the generally accepted figure[171]  – outstripping that of Haymarket. Although arguably accurate in the terms referenced, the level of carnage invoked by this simile is disproportionate and ahistorically links the police terror – who "provoked the violence to stop the strike movement for the eight hour day” – with fascism.[172]

A third example of deliberate anachronism is the use of contemporary activists, who inherit the ambitions of the past:   

Spies said, “The day will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you are throttling today”. We are finding voice. Cindy Sheehan gives us voice. “Si se puede” gives us voice[173]

Sheehan is a contemporary anti-war activist;[174] “si se puede” is closely linked with the United Farm Workers[175] and by extension, the immigrant rights movement. Through juxtaposition and tenses, within two lines the reader is brought from 1886 to the present. Through the voice motif inheritance is implied, placing anti-war activists and the Latino/a workers within the Haymarket lineage. One voice is extinguished, but others appear to carry on to inspire the historian and the reader who, as the undefined “we”, “are finding voice”.

The juxtapositioning that is used throughout to join events that occurred in different times and locations, on occasion reaches the extremes:

Paublo Neruda, Josie Marti, even Walt Whitman had a big, hemispheric conception of America ... united by the German geographer Humboldt’s Afro-America[176]

Presenting this in one sentence with little supporting information hides that they did not do so together. Neruda died in 1973, perhaps murdered by Pinochet.[177] Jose Marti died in 1895[178] fighting for Cuban independence; arguably a contemporary of Whitman, who died in 1892,[179] both were dead before Neruda was born and likely knew Alexander Von Humboldt[180] only by his writing. The historian does not lie here; rather to collapse time and space, his sentence construction omits the facts that prevent the image of the four men in dialogue.

Poetry

E.P. Thompson maintained a life-long interest in poetry and often framed his studies with contemporary verse, such as The Making of the English Working Class which is framed by Blake.[181] Underscoring Thompson’s influence on Linebaugh,May Day... includes three sections of verse, the clearest in demonstrating this influence being from William Morris.[182] Morris was the subject of a biography by Thompson; Linebaugh in turn wrote the foreword for the PM Press reissue.[183]

This overview suggests a framework for writing an essay in the model of May Day... Given the subjective assessment that the text represents a stylistic extremity within the anthology, it is unlikely that future essays should employ all of these techniques.

• - The essay must be sincere. It must be a story of bravery, collective suffering and solidarity. Its dream-like format should be the voice of the emotional heart, not the rational head or the sorrow-filled gut.
•  
• - The essay should be wide ranging in terms of actors and geographical references, and these should be deliberately under-developed in order to cause disorientation. Contemporary and historical observers should carry the narrative forward.
•  
• - The voices of select authors should condense time; the use of tenses when employing these voices should bridge the present and the historical period to cause disorientation.
•  
• - Supernatural elements should interject in minor ways – such as through actors’ adoption of biblical roles; the use of tenses to place select authors “outside time”; through simile/metaphorical descriptions; the juxtaposition of anachronistic observations with historical events in order to suggest clairvoyance.
•  
• - Anachronism should be employed throughout – to disorientate through the condensation of time; to provide emotive and powerful comparators; to imply inheritance of the historical actor’s struggle.
•  
• - Juxtaposition of actors who were not contemporaries should be employed to collapse time and geography and cause disorientation.
•  
• - Contemporary verse should be quoted in line with the influence of E.P. Thompson. 

Conclusion

Having examined a selection of Linebaugh’s May Day essays, this paper concludes by asking “can this May Day essay be replicated?” To do so, and in-line with the rationale of seeking to write an accessible paper that linked disparate events, a Rent Strike May Day (RSMD) essay has been written using the findings of this paper as a framework. This is available at http://ruskin.academia.edu/PhilHedges. This section refers directly to this text and these notes should be read in conjunction with it. It mirrors the structure of the paper by applying the insights uncovered to the RSMD essay. It begins by sketching how the essay reflects the model of May Day asincomplete, authentic, true andwonderful before moving on to look at how the politics of Linebaugh’s May Day is incorporated. It concludes by providing examples of the implementation of the techniques uncovered inMay Day With Heart. In doing so, it successfully demonstrates that the model of a May Day essay uncovered herein can be replicated.

Defining May Day

The incomplete May Day: RSMD embodies this by moving away from the two foundational narratives to tell other May Day stories, highlighting the incompleteness of Linebaugh’s anthology and also partly mitigating this. The unfulfilled promise of the anti-capitalist May Day is also acknowledged:

That’s partly why his May Day book is incomplete – the other reason of course being that although Neoliberalism has been looking a little creaky of late, it’s not yet had that final shove.

The authentic May Day: The authenticity of the essay is underpinned by the author’s positionality of being engaged in housing activism via a co-operative. Through circulating RSMD there is a goal to aid housing activism through contributing to the awareness of the current wave of rent strikes. In some small way, the RSMD will be a tool to support these actions.

The true May Day: The narratives are based on historical research. These stories are written from outside of my academic discipline (Labour Studies) and based on a limited number of secondary sources, which (breaking from Linebaugh’s model), have been referenced throughout RSMD to evidence this. The UCL rent strike material reworks research prepared for a previous paper into an accessible format and is consistent with this approach.

The wonderful May Day: The themes of fertility – although acknowledged with a call to “... sneak off hand-in-hand into the woods ...” - are absent from the narrative. The promise is fulfilled instead by demonstrating what can be achieved through organising for change. The positive conclusion to the UCL narrative – e.g. the win at Campbell House West Halls of residence - further underpins this.

The theory of May Day

Red: The red May Day dovetails with the essays focus on housing given its link to exploitation. Whilst the X² model is explicitly absent from RSMD, high rents are framed as exploitation in both red narratives:

They knew that cuts to rates and increases to rent meant that they were being exploited - they were subsidising the firms in the Borough whilst rewarding financiers who had outlaid for long mortgages to build council houses. 

[Poor conditions and high rent] ...was exploitation - and on May Day, we follow Peter Linebaugh’s lead and mark it.

Both red narratives are positive interpretations of the red May Day in that they focus on resistance to exploitation rather than the crushing of radicalism.

Green: The green May Day is more problematic. Expropriation of land in the UK that forces renting or the purchase of houses is classically thought of in terms of the Enclosure Acts. A decision was made in RSMD to avoid a more distant historical comparator. Instead the act of expropriation is a Compulsory Purchase Order, which:

meant forced relocation, what David Harvey called “accumulation by dispossession” – a rebranding of Marx’s Primitive Accumulation to reflect that the dynamic of theft, violence and enclosure are inherent to capitalist profit making and not simply a phase in its early development. These acts of expropriation are the opposite of the green May Day, and we remember Dotty - the last of the former residents to leave – and her courage and resistance.

This meant that the narrative moved away from rent strikes into squatting, diluting the overall theme of the essay but facilitating a contemporary narrative based around housing. The green theme was additionally referenced more subtly throughout, such as “some tradesmen laboured to build barricades for free rather than engage in alienating employment,” echoing where the “Green designates life with only necessary labour ... [and] useful activity.”[184] Of course, the attempt to stop the M11 was motivated by ecological concerns and forms a green theme in itself.

Coveality: This is deliberately underplayed within RSMD because coveality between all three narratives is absent. Despite this, it can be understood that there are coeval intuitions and resistance between paired narratives. The institution of landlordism links the two red narratives as does the tactic of withholding rent, despite over 5 decades between them. The St Pancras rent strike and Claremont Road are both linked by the institutions of the police (and bailiffs), who work to suppress acts of resistance thirty years apart.

May Day with heart

Actors: The actors within the narratives are given little back story and are deliberately fleetingly referenced. Focusing on the St Pancras strike narrative, key actors such as Counsellor Prior, Don Cook are referenced only 3 and 4 times respectively despite their key roles. In doing so they become archetypes – the stubborn Conservative Counsellor and the principled rent striker.

Geography: The deliberately bewildering global overviews offered by Linebaugh are replicated in the UCL narrative:

tens of thousands protested in support of Aboriginal communities; Nimpagaritse fled rather than rubber-stamp an unconstitutional candidacy for president and tenants at the Hawkridge Halls of residence had been withholding rent payment for 23 days.

This refers to protests in Australia and New Zealand against funding cuts to remote communities[185], a judge fleeing from Burundi[186] and rent strikes in London.[187] In one sentence, the reader is simultaneously witnessing events in three continents - an effect amplified by the deliberate withholding of key information outlining that the events took place in different locations, condensing the physical distance between events thousands of miles apart. Beyond this, the geographical spread demonstrated inA May Day With Heart is largely downplayed in RSMD, which focuses on North and East London.

Voices: In RSMD, Peter Linebaugh takes on the role assigned to James Green. Linebaugh is referred to in the present tense, and occasionally as “Pete” as Green is “Jim”. Linebaugh exists in the “now” whilst the other key historians within the essay - such as Dave Burns - exist in the past tense, their era unspecified within the text. Burns exists in an unspecified past, some when between the events he describes in the 1960’s and the near present.

Supernatural elements: The hydra is borrowed as a metaphor from Linebaugh and Rediker’sThe Many Headed Hydra[188] and used in a similar way as the vampire/blood sucker in Ypsilanti Vampire May Day to frame the arguments within the essay. The many heads of the hydra dovetails with theincomplete May Day and the many untold May Day stories.

Condensing time: Juxtaposing historical events from different temporalities whilst withholding the dates events took place enabled the 1913 funeral of Emily Wilding Davidson[189]  to seemingly occur during the protests at UCL open days in 2015:

Reports focused on 3rd July, when 300 protesters gathered on Mallet Street, ten minutes walk away from St Georges Church where suffragettes held a funeral for Emily Wilding Davidson.

Quotes: Reflecting the reduced importance of poetry during the eras that the narratives took place, RSMD quotes song lyrics rather than contemporary poetry. Quotes were chosen to reflect the themes of the narrative, even when to do so is to run counter to the theme of the song. Cathy’s Clown is about rejection but juxtaposed with the St Pancras narrative, lyrics about self respect in a romantic context are repurposed to explore self respect in a social justice context.

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[1] Linebaugh 2016, p.9.

[2] For example Linebaugh 2016, pp.15-17; Linebaugh 2016, pp.19-21.

[3] Linebaugh 2016, pp.8-9

[4] Caffentzis, 2013, pp.2-3.

[5] Linebaugh 2016, p.9.

[6] Lindeschmit, 2015.

[7] Linebaugh, 2014, pp.126-127.

[8] Kaye, 1995, pp.165-220.

[9] For example Linebaugh 2014, pp.13-16.

[10] The rationale underpinning this paper is two-fold; the model of the May Day essay offers the activist-scholar a technique to insightfully link together historical events. It also dovetails with a personal experience of May Day that suggests that the festival is of value in itself. This paper is the second in a year-long project to examine rent strikes, aiming to compare the rent strikes that took place in 2015/16 at London universities with historical strikes. Theoretically key to this undertaking is implementing a framework that enables the study of temporally and spatially disparate events. In his May Day anthology, Linebaugh appears to provide such a framework. Additionally these May Day essays were written to support on-going activism and are presented in a format that encourages engagement. “This is a scholarly historian who wants to be read, and who makes himself available to readers, at home in the academy and on the barricades;” (Cahill 2016) this mirrors my own commitment to engaged research.

[11] Queensland Unions 2015.

[12] Linebaugh 2016, p.74.

[13] Green 2006, p.145.

[14] Brecher 2014, p.40.

[15] Brecher 2014, p.58.

[16] Stephenson & Wray, 2005.

[17] Queensland Unions, 2015.

[18] McKinnell 2016; AAP, 2016.

[19] For example Flanders 2016.

[20] For example PM Press, 2016.

[21] For example Democracy Now!, 2016.

[22] For example Doyle, 2016; Wildermuth, 2016.

[23]  Bryman 2012, p.28.

[24] Linebaugh, 2016, pp.9.

[25] Linebaugh 2016, pp.8-9.

[26] Taghbon 2016b.

[27] Taghbon,2016d

[28] Taghbon 2016d.

[29] Lamberton 2016.

[30] Democracy Now! 2016.

[31] Taghbon 2016b.

[32] Taghbon 2016b.

[33] Linebaugh 2016, p.3.

[34] Linebaugh 2016, p.8.

[35] PM Press 2016.

[36] Lamberson 2016.

[37] Linebaugh 2016, p.5-6; Taghbon 2016c.

[38] Linebaugh 1986.

[39] PM Press 2016.

[40] PM Press 2016; Taghbon 2016b; Democracy Now! 2016.

[41] Linebaugh 2016, p.9; Taghbon, 2016c.

[42] Taghbon 2016b.

[43] Zinn 1997, p.504.

[44] PM Press 2016.

[45] Democracy Now! 2016.

[46] Langstaff 2016, p.352.

[47] Linebaugh 2016, p.9.

[48] Maynard 2012.

[49] Linebaugh 2012.

[50]  Linesbaugh 2016, p.11.

[51] Linebaugh 2016, p.11.

[52] Linebaugh 2016, p.12.

[53] May Day Rooms 2014.

[54] Linebaugh 2016, p.137.

[55] Flanders 2016.

[56] Linebaugh 2016, p.15.

[57] Linebaugh 2016, p.139.

[58] Linebaugh 2016, p.15.

[59] Linebaugh 2016, p.139.

[60] Linebaugh 2016, pp.16-17; Linebaugh 2016, p.139.

[61] Linebaugh 2016, p.86.

[62] Linebaugh 2016,p.12.

[63] Linebaugh 2016, p.14; Linebaugh 2016, p.139.

[64] Linebaugh 2016, p.17.

[65] Linebaugh 2016, pp.14-15.

[66] Linebaugh 2016, pp.138-139.

[67] Democracy Now! 2016.

[68] Linebaugh 2016, p.18.

[69] Linebaugh 2016, p.25.

[70] Linebaugh 2016, p.24.

[71] Flanders 2016.

[72] BBC 2000.

[73] Gillian 2000.

[74] (Linebaugh 2016, p.3.

[75] BBC 2000; Gillian 2000.

[76] Linebaugh 2016, p.11.

[77] Heffer 2015.

[78] Linebaugh 2016, p.11.

[79]  Linebaugh 2016, p.141.

[80]  Linebaugh 2016, p.141.

[81] PM Press 2016; Taghbon 2016c.

[82] Lamerson 2016; Taghbon 2016c; Democracy Now! 2016.

[83] Linebaugh 2016, p.139.

[84] Democracy Now! 2016; Flanders 2016; Taghbon 2016c; Lamberson 2016; PM Press 2016.

[85] Taghbon 2016c.

[86] Lindenschmit, 2016.

[87] Lindenschmit, 2016.

[88] Taghbon 2016b.

[89] Lindenschmit 2016,

[90] Taghbon 2016b.

[91] Lindenschmit 2016.

[92] Linebaugh 2016, p29.

[93] Democracy Now! 2016.

[94] Al Jazeera 2016.

[95] Taghbon 2016c.

[96] Lamberson 2016.

[97] Linebaugh 2016, p.29.

[98] Lamberson 2016.

[99] Democracy Now! 2016.

[100] Linebaugh 2016, p.152.

[101] Linebaugh 2016, p.141.

[102] Linebaugh 2016, p.29.

[103] Linebaugh 2014, p.142.

[104] Linebaugh 2016, p.152.

[105] Linebaugh 2014, p.145.

[106] Linebaugh 2016, p.151.

[107] (Linebaugh, 2016, p.29)

[108] (Lamberson, 2016)

[109] (Democracy Now, 2016)

[110] (Linebaugh, 2016, p.33)

[111] (ibid, p.32)

[112] (ibid, p.152)

[113] Linebaugh 2016, p.30.

[114] Linebaugh 2016, p.151.

[115] Harvey, 2004, p.74.

[116] Linebaugh 2014, p.1.

[117] Harvey 2004, pp.74-76.

[118] Linebaugh 2016, pp.32-33.

[119] Counterpunch 2006.

[120] Linebaugh 2016, p.68.

[121] Democracy Now! 2006.

[122] Linebaugh 2016, p.69.

[123] Linebaugh 2016, p.81.

[124] Green, 2005.

[125] Brecher 2014, pp.330-335.

[126] Brecher 2014, p.330.

[127] Brecher 2014, p.333.

[128] Lamberson 2016.

[129] Linebaugh 2016, p.18.

[130] PM Press 2016.

[131] Sawant 2017.

[132] Linebaugh 2016, pp.84-85.

[133] Linebaugh 2016, p81.

[134] UEL 2015.

[135] Lindenschmit 2015.

[136] Linebaugh 2016, p68.

[137] Linebaugh 2016, p.157.

[138] Simpson & Weiner 1989, p.62.

[139] Simpson & Weiner 1989, p.61.

[140] Linesbaugh 2016, p.69.

[141] Linebaugh 2016, p.81.

[142] Simpson & Weiner 1989, p.61.

[143] (Linebaugh, 2016, p.70)

[144] (Simpson & Weiner,1989, p.61)

[145] (2016, p.80)

[146] (ibid, p.69)

[147] (Counterpunch, 2016a)

[148] (Counterpunch, 2016b)

[149] Linebaugh 2016, p.75.

[150] Linebaugh 2016, p.73.

[151] Linebaugh 2016, p.72.

[152] Marquez 1978, p.7.

[153] Linebaugh 2016, p81.

[154] Linebaugh 2016, p.69.

[155] Linebaugh 2016, p75.

[156] Linebaugh 2016, p76.

[157] Linebaugh 2016, p.69.

[158] Linebaugh 2016, p.79.

[159] Gott 2015.

[160] Linebaugh 2016, p.81.

[161] Marquard 2016.

[162] New York Times 1981.

[163] Gott 2015.

[164] Linebaugh 2016, p.76.

[165] Linebaugh 2016, p.73.

[166] Linebaugh 2016, p.76.

[167] Linebaugh 2016, p.68.

[168] Linebaugh 2016, p.81.

[169] Linebaugh 2016, p.81.

[170] Linebaugh 2016, p.74.

[171] Briggs 2007.

[172] Linebaugh 2016, p.74.

[173] Linebaugh 2016, p.75.

[174] Norton, 2016.

[175] United Farm Workers unknown.

[176] Linebaugh 2016, p.79.

[177] Associated Press 2015.

[178] Editors The 2016.

[179] New York Times 1892.

[180] Kellner 2007.

[181] Haye 1995, p.171.

[182] Linebaugh 2016, pp.77-78.

[183] Linebaugh 2012, pp108-134.

[184] (Linebaugh, 2016, p.11)

[185] Davidson 2015.

[186] France-Presse 2015.

[187] Marshall 2015a.

[188] Linebaugh & Rediker 2000.

[189] Rosenberg 2015, p.135.

by Jim Kincaid

This piece was originally published at https://readingsofcapital.com/.

In the eco-socialist movement there have been frequent complaints that Marx’s value theory, with its central emphasis on labour-time, is fatally flawed and irrelevant. It seems to discount the exploitation of nature in the pursuit of profit. Students of Marx have responded by tracing the close attention which Marx and Engels gave to ecological research and debate in their period.  Crucially, it has been argued that it is precisely its central focus on labour productivity which enables Marx’s value theory to generate a unique and powerful account of the environmental destructiveness of capital.

Here, two writers associated with the New York journal Monthly Review have produced an outstanding body of work. John Bellamy Foster’s brilliant book,Marx’s Ecology (2000) is now an established classic, and Paul Burkett’sMarx and Nature (1999) not far behind as a standard reference. Since then, both writers have produced further influential work in eco-Marxism, most recently the jointly authoredMarx and the Earth, which has just come out in paperback. What they have emphasised above all is Marx’s thesis that capitalism tends to use natural resources without concern for sustainability.  He uses the termStoffwechsel ­ for the metabolic exchange of matter and energy between humans and nature, and notes, for example, how capitalist industrialisation,

produces conditions that provoke an irreparable rift [Riss] in the interdependent process of social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself. The result of this is a squandering of the vitality of the soil. (Capital Vol. 3, p.949).

Recently however, the Monthly Review account of the ecological dimension in Marx has been challenged by a new kid on the block.  Jason Moore’sCapitalism and the Web of Life (2015), [Web] accuses theMonthly Review team of failing to develop a properly dialectical account of Marx’s ecology.  They remain mired in Cartesian dualism. They counterpose two separate and opposed entities: Society vs. Nature. Thus their focus is too confined to a one-way account of the damage which capitalism is currently inflicting on the environment.

Moore is not denying that we are currently heading towards environmental disaster and epochal change.  But he argues that the stark Monthly Review conclusion – abolition of capitalism or planetary destruction – can lead to fatalism rather than creative political responses. Moore writes that:A dual systems approach to metabolism gives us only one flavor of crisis —the apocalypse (Web p.8o). But the combination of economic and environmental crisis which we face may take many forms in the coming period, and all sorts of technological and political action will be needed in response.

Much of Moore’s book is an exploration of the historical background to the present situation.  From its inception in the long 16th century, capitalism has been hit by successive waves of crisis as it came up against limits in the availability of necessary means of production such as raw materials, energy, and land.  Moore traces major turning points over the past 500 years as capitalism has reacted to resource limits by expanding geographically and technically to absorb new and cheap supplies of necessary means of production and labour. What is distinctive in this approach is Moore’s enormous stress on appropriation as opposed toexploitation.  In discussing the historical evolution of capitalism, he talks, for example, about islands of exploitation in oceans of appropriation.

As originators and guardians of the reigning paradigm in eco-Marxism, the Monthly Review writers have responded aggressively to Moore’s accusation that their work is not dialectical. According to Foster, for example, Jason Moore,

abandons value theory … andhas joined the long line of scholars who have set out to update or deepen Marxism in various ways, but have ended up by abandoning Marxism’s revolutionary essence and adapting to capitalist ideologies’.  Seeinterview.

My own view is that, despite many criticisms which can be made of Moore’s work, he has identified some dimensions of Marx’s value theory, which have not had the attention they deserve, not just by eco-Marxists, but more generally across the spectrum of mainstream Marxist political economy. He is asking us to look again at a fundamental question: the relationship between use-value and value in the productive process – and how they intersect when labour productivity rises.  His thinking, for example, has implications for current debates about trends in profitability.

What is striking in the dispute between Moore and the Monthly Review writers is that both sides start out from the same reading of Marx’s value theory. They both strongly defend its central emphasis on socially necessary labour, against the view, widely shared among radical critics, that Marxist doctrine is complicit in a devaluation of nature.

Competition forces capitalists to reduce prices by increasing labour productivity.  This is achieved mainly by mechanisation and by advances in the organization of production.  As Marx pointed out, an increase in productivity will generally require an input of larger quantities of means of production, such as e.g. raw materials and energy.  To sustain the rate of profit these should be obtained as cheaply as possible.

From this starting point, Moore develops a less orthodox line of argument: that the advance of labour productivity can take place without a hit to profits if capital can tap into what he calls a rising “ecological surplus” of Cheap Nature – especially in the form of low cost energy, land, and raw materials.  Also labour-power, kept cheap because its reproduction is not paid for by capital – but secured, for example, by enslavement or domestic labour.

But where capital appropriates means of production cheaply and without paying the full costs of their reproduction, it tends to exhaust its own social-ecological conditions. Moore thus posits a general tendency for the ecological surplus to fall, and for cheap nature to become less cheap. Hence recurrent crises as capital runs up against limits in available resources. If the ecological surplus falls – as Moore argues is happening in the current period – then inputs into production rise in price. Capital must absorb an increasing share of the costs of reproduction.  As costs rise, productivity and profits are threatened with stagnation. Thus Moore traces linkages between environmental devastation and the current economic crisis.

Let’s look more closely at the theoretical underpinning of these conclusions. Central to value theory is that the pressures of competition require firms to lower prices – and the major way in which this is done is by increasing productivity.  At the centre of Marx’s law of value is labour productivity.

Marx’s basic propositions about productivity are formulated as follows:

• a working day of a given length always creates the same amount of value, no matter how the productivity of labour may vary ­(Capital 1, p.656). If productivity rises, more commodities are produced in a given time period, but the average value of each commodity – and therefore its selling price – will fall correspondingly.
• However, as productivity rises there tends to be an increase in the rate of surplus-value. As Marx puts it,

an increase in the productivity of labour causes a fall in the value of labour-power and a consequent rise in surplus-value…the value of labour-power is determined  by the value of the means of subsistence habitually required of the average worker (Capital Vol. 1, pp.655-7).

There are some complications here: Marx accepts that more value can be produced in a given time period if there is an intensification of labour (working harder) or an increase in the skill level of workers. But these qualifications can be initially set aside in order to clarify the fundamental issue.  The source of surplus-value is unpaid labour-time.  An increase in productivity does not increase the total value produced in a given time, but it does increase the rate of surplus-value.

But does it also increase the rate of profit?  Here the key issue is that a rise in productivity, for example via mechanisation, tends to increase the amount of constant capital which capitalists need to use in order to stay competitive.  A rise in the ratio of constant capital to labour will tend to reduce the rate of profit. More capital has been advanced relative to the unpaid labour which is the basis of profit.

As productivity advances there is likely to be a rise in the mass of means of production (machinery, raw materials, energy etc.) required in production.  As Marx notes,

the consequence of …the  application of machinery is that more raw material is worked up in the same time, and therefore a greater mass of raw material and auxiliary substances enters into the labour process…  [An increase in]the mass of machinery, beasts of burden, mineral manures, drain-pipes, etc. is a condition of the increasing productivity of labour… [For example]the mass of raw material, instruments of labour, etc. that a certain quantity of spinning labour consumes productively today is many hundred times greater than at the beginning of the 18th century. (Capital Vol. 1, p.774).

A rise in the ratio of constant to variable capital threatens to lower the rate of profit. A given rate of surplus-value has then to be divided by a larger amount of capital advanced when calculating the rate of profit.

But there is a counteracting tendency.  If the advance in productivity is general, then it will apply in the sector of the economy which produces means of production.  The value of a given unit of constant capital will be reduced. This fall in the cost of producing the means of production required will thus limit, or even reverse, the decline in the rate of profit as more constant capital is used.

Thus Marx emphases that as labour productivity rises, this also lowers the value and therefore the price of the constant capital required for production.  The result is what Marx calls a cheapening of the elements of constant capital.  The value of means of production rises, as productivity advances, but at a lower rate than the mass of means of production being used.

For example, the quantity of cotton that a single European spinning operative works up in a modern factory has grown to a most colossal extent in comparison with that which a European spinner used to process with the spinning wheel. But the value of the cotton processed has not grown in the same proportion as its mass.

 It is the same with machines and other fixed capital. In other words, the same development that raises the mass of constant capital in comparison with variable reduces the value of its elements, as a result of the higher productivity of labour, and hence prevents the value of the constant capital, even though this grows steadily, from growing in the same degree as its material volume, i.e. the material volume of the means of production that are set in motion by the same amount of labour-power… In certain cases, the mass of the constant capital elements may increase while their total value remains the same or even falls. (Capital Vol. 3, p.342).

Thus, in summary, as productivity rises, there is likely to be an increase in the mass of means of production in use.  But the value – and thus the price – of those means of production will tend not to rise to a corresponding extent. A general rise in productivity will also reduce thecost of means of production and so slow down the fall in the rate of profit.

In clarifying this analysis, Marx introduces an important distinction: between the technical composition of capital and the organic composition of capital.

There are two ways of looking at the capital / labour ratio.  As a relation between two values – constant and variable capital. Or as a ratio between a mass of physical means of production and a mass of labour-power.

The organic composition of capital is determined by the ratio of the value of the means of production, as compared with wages. I.e. the value ratio between constant capital and variable capital

 Thetechnical composition of capital refers to material use-values- here capital is divided into means of production and living labour-power. Marx writes that:

the technical composition is determined by the relation between the mass of the means of production employed on the one hand, and the mass of labour necessary for their employment on the other. (Capital Vol. 1, p.762) [i]

It is here that Moore’s account moves in a distinctive direction.  Mechanisation and improved organization of production are not the only ways in which cheaper means of production may be secured.  If means of production can be appropriated – at low cost, or, better still, at zero cost – then the hit to profits because of rising organic composition of capital can be reduced or nullified.  This is Moore’s central argument, one which is directly founded on Marx’s value theory.  By seeking geographical or technological frontiers where the four Cheaps (raw materials, food, land and labour) can be appropriated, capital can raise productivity while protecting the rate of profit.  Recurrently in the history of capital, the appropriation of new forms of cheap inputs has,

allowed capital to advance labour productivity while reducing (or checking) the tendentially rising value composition of production. The technical composition of production—the mass of machinery and raw materials relative to labour-power— could rise without undermining the rate of profit. Capitalism, we have seen, is a frontier process (Web, p.107).

Cheap Nature, as an accumulation strategy, works by reducing the value composition—but increasing the technical composition—of capital as a whole; by opening new opportunities for the investment; and, in its qualitative dimension, by allowing technologies and new kinds of nature to transform extant structures of capital accumulation and world power.In all this, commodity frontiers– frontiers of appropriation – are central. (Web, p.53).

Here Moore is challenging the analysis in Burkett’s Marx and Nature. Although Burkett – like Moore – starts out from the basics of value theory, his treatment of the mass and value of constant capital employed in production remains at a rather elementary level. I can find no reference to the organic composition of capital in either of Burkett two ecological books.  There are many general comments on profit as driving the system. But no discussion of the counter-tendencies which operate to limit or reverse the downward pressure on the rate of profit as productivity rises. No attention is given to the increase in the capital/labour ratio, which Marx callsthe technical composition of capital.

The monopoly capitalist tradition of Monthly Review is flawed precisely in its relative lack of interest in competition and price movements, and in Marx’s account of the determinants of rates of profit.  The monopoly capitalist thesis is that, because of the concentration of capital, companies are now able to evade competition by cartels, and determine prices by fiat.

There is one moment in Burkett’s Nature book where he does discuss one of the examples of appropriation which preoccupy Moore.  Burkett has a section discussing ‘child rearing labour’ and the ‘natural force of household labour power’. He writes that,

The exploitable [sic] labour power associated with domestic activities is freely appropriated by capital. It is a use value, not a value.

Burkett then notes that the appropriation by capital of this use value has implications for surplus-value.

Capital’s free appropriation of the domestic enhancement of labour power increases the rate of surplus value in so far as domestic activities lower the value of labour power (by raising the productivity of wage-labour or reducing workers’ commodified causation requirements).  (Marx and Nature, p.105).

So appropriation of unpaid domestic labour by capital does not increase the total value produced, but does increase the rate of surplus-value.  Capital gets its labour cheaper, and retains more of the value produced.

What Moore is proposing is a generalisation of this account of domestic labour – extending it to capital’s appropriation of natural resources.

But is it right to assimilate domestic labour, as Moore does, into a wider category of work/energy?  This leads him to talk, for example, about how natural resources are kept cheap because they ‘do unpaid work for capital’. However, Moore is clear that this kind of ‘work’ has nothing in common with the abstract labour which creates value.  ‘Work’ here is a use-value concept – but one which follows capital in treating use-value abstractly.  The objective here is to trace capital’s abstractification of nature and its consequences.

Meticulous research by Burkett and Foster has clarified the engagement of Marx and Engels with the thermodynamic and energetics debates of their period. In their Marx and the Earth book, they trace how Marx used energy concepts to think through the use-value dimension of the labour process.  There is, of course, no suggestion that the creation of value and surplus-value in the labour process is in any way determined by concrete labour. But the creation of value is also a physical metabolic process which can be studied in terms of amounts and transfers of abstract energy.  In words which resonate with Moore’s work/energy concept, Burkett and Foster summarise Marx’s thinking about this as follows:

In energy terms, ‘What the free worker sells is always nothing more than a specific, particular measure of force-expenditure’; but ‘labour capacity as a totality is greater than every particular expenditure’ (Grundrisse p.464). ‘In this exchange, then, the worker … sells himself as an effect’,and ‘is absorbed into the body of capital as a cause, as activity’ (Grundrisse p.674). The result is an energy subsidy for the capitalist who appropriates and sells the commodities produced during the portion of the workday over and above that required to produce the means of subsistence represented by the wage (Marx and the Earth, p.145).

There certainly are some major criticisms to be made of Moore’s work and I’ll look at these in a future post. Some valuable commentaries on Moore’s work have already been published. [ii].  Some valid objections have come from theMonthly Review camp. For example, Foster is right to say (in theClimate and Capitalism blog cited above) that Moore neglects the question of rent.  There is too little in hisWeb book about how private property control gets established over raw material and energy sources. The theme of enclosure, so strongly emphasised in Marx’s account of primitive accumulation, is under-weight in Moore.  Often industrial capitals find that the so-called Cheap inputs are not actually so cheap  – after rent is extracted by the monopoly owners of oil wells and mineral resources.

The strength of Moore’s book is the way it traces, from the long 16th century onwards, how the abstract logics of labour productivity are implemented and play outconcretely – as crises of resource limits are encountered and overcome by the violence of capital, science, and state power. His focus on appropriation may at time be over-pitched, but Moore consistently directs much needed attention onthe necessary conditions for the operation of the law of value.  How the economic and technical requirements that make possible exploitation and value creation are established and maintained.

An addendum on profit.

Marx used the term circulating capital to refer to raw material and energy inputs.  Moore’s  focus on these highlights the neglect of circulating capital in current Marxist debates about trends in profits. For example, profit rates are generally calculated solely on a denominator offixed capital (machinery etc.).  This fact is rarely even mentioned in current work using National Accounts data.  An exception is Andrew Kliman who mentions casually in hisFailure of Capitalist Production book (pp.80-82) that:  ‘My rate of profit measures … exclude circulating capital … expenditures for inventories of raw materials and the like – because information on the turnover of circulating capital is not available’.  One of many instances in which the easily available National Accounts data are used and their limitations ignored.  Company account based data is more difficult to obtain and use, but can be a more accurate corrective to national account based data.

[i] For a lucid  account of the TCC/OCC distinction, see: Ben Fine and Alfredo Saad-Filho 2010,Marx’s Capital, Ch. 8.

[ii] See, for example, an excellentcritique of Moore by the radical geographer Sara Nelson, on theAntipode website February 2016.  Benjamin Kunkel has produced an outstanding account of debates around the anthropocene / capitalocene concepts – and the disagreements between Moore and theMonthly Review team.  SeeLondon Review of Books 2 March 2017.

Daniel Hartley interviews Richard Seymour, author, journalist, online editor forSalvage, and member of Historical Materialism's Corresponding Editorial Board. The interview was first published in French on 3 May 2017 inPeriode.

Often, when intellectuals are interviewed – I am thinking especially of the recent series of interviews carried out by George Souvlis (e.g., Davis 2016; Eley 2016) – it’s the task of the interviewer to invite the interviewee to connect her academic research more directly to immediate strategic political concerns. In your case, it’s the reverse. If there is one thing that defines your intellectual activity, it is your ability to respond immediately to constantly shifting political and historical events. Consequently, the aim of this interview is to invite you to expand upon the more theoretical aspects of your work (albeit with the obvious caveat that your immediate political responses are themselves theoretically informed). Perhaps you might begin by telling us about your theoretical and political formation. How did you become involved in Marxist politics and who were the intellectual figures that most influenced you?

My early, formative influences as a Marxist all come from the International Socialist tradition. It is difficult not to speak ill of this tradition given where its major legatee, the British Socialist Workers’ Party, ended up. And I’ve always been hugely unconvinced by the sentimentality with which some of its apostles today recount its past triumphs. Still, it is a tradition that was able to produce Marxists, and that isn’t a small thing.

I joined the SWP at the inception of New Labour rule in 1998, and was immediately immersed in its theoretical traditions. Mike Kidron and Chris Harman for economics, Alex Callinicos for political philosophy, and Tony Cliff for the weltanschauung (which was strangely both sober and excitable). There is a type of Trotskyist orthodoxy that used to call itself ‘Third Camp’, identifying the workers’ movement as a potentially autonomous source of socialist democracy as against Stalinism and US-led capitalism. SWP orthodoxy, you might say, was ‘No Camp’. The USSR was a state-capitalist dictatorship whose implosion was almost a given, the ‘Free World’ was perpetually heading toward its worst crisis, social-democracy had become an agent of the capitalist system, trade union leaders were part of the system’s successful functioning, and the only plausible alternative was in the ‘rank and file’ of the working class — except the rank and file didn’t really exist any more. It is hardly surprising that the most damning thing anyone in this tradition could say about someone was that they were ‘pessimistic’, since the entire edifice was constructed over a repressed knowledge of the most comprehensive destruction of the possibilities for revolutionary politics.

The second layer of influence comes from the ‘political Marxists’, Ellen Wood and Robert Brenner. I read Wood’s The Origin of Capitalism and was struck by the fact that as well as being persuasive in its own right, it entirely lacked any appeal to teleology and was happy to accentuate the contingent in a way that Marxists generally do not. The appeal of this was both political and theoretical. In the context of the ‘war on terror’ with its revived, Whiggish empire myths, there was a premium on dissecting and confounding progressivist views of history. Theoretically, I liked the aleatory element of political Marxism. I think it was Freud who argued that to think contingency is unworthy of determining our fates is to lapse into a kind of spiritualism. And you could argue that there’s a displaced spiritualism in some forms of Marxism. The thrust of political Marxism is to attack certain connotative associations that more Hegelian variants of Marxism insist upon — say, between urban development and capitalism, or between capitalism and democracy. The idea of ‘bourgeois democracy’ in particular raises the ‘political Marxist’ eyebrow, since they don’t think the bourgeoisie had a great deal to do with democracy. There was also an hysterical function of identifying with the ‘political Marxists’, which was to begin to challenge (in a relatively safe way) the orthodoxies of the SWP.

The third layer of influences comes from a series of Marxist theorists who each, in their different way, emphasised the conjuncture, and particularly the formative role of ideology in determining the placement of class actors and the outcomes of their struggles: Althusser, Gramsci, Poulantzas, Stuart Hall and the Birmingham School. This made a certain sense since I was increasingly writing about racist ideology, and I was particularly interested in understanding how ideas of race and nationality were so powerful in Britain that the major beneficiaries of the disappointments of New Labour were not the radical left or anticapitalists, but the far right. It was the BNP who ended up with close to a million votes, while no radical left vehicle really got off the ground. It was then UKIP which took off after the credit crunch, while the far left got nowhere. Obviously, there had been a lot wrong with our thinking if we got it that badly wrong. One of the things I thought we had got wrong was our relative inattention to ideology, and there discovering Gramsci and Hall were a useful corrective. Another was that we had totally misunderstood the nature of modern states and their neoliberal constitution, and in that case Althusser and especially Poulantzas had something to say. In particular, since Poulantzas did not reify the state like most Marxist theorists, he made it possible to understand it as a condensation of a balance of forces — that is, as a social outcome, a product of struggles. Not one that might be pushed determined in any direction, willy-nilly, since the format of a capitalist state selects in favour of capitalist-reproductive outcomes. But, for example, the struggles for democracy, welfare, social security, comprehensive education, trade union rights, public sector jobs, and so on, are all struggles by the left within as well as against the capitalist state.

Your Ph.D. thesis, entitled “Cold War Anticommunism and the Defence of White Supremacy in the Southern United States” (2016), argues that anticommunism was a “hegemonic project” whose exclusionary form of Americanism “cemented the role of the Jim Crow South within American nationhood.” Could you expand upon the main lines of argument? How did the intersecting scales of the Cold War conjuncture – the international, the national and the regional – overdetermine the hegemonic project of anticommunism in the US South from 1945 to 1965?

The “intersecting scales” could be taken as a reminder that the term anticommunism doesn’t correspond to a single process or practice. At each level — international, national and regional — anticommunism meant something quite different. But what they each have in common is that anticommunism emerges as a way of managing a transitional period, a period in which traditional authority, political relations and forms of production are breaking down.

In the international sphere, broadly speaking, the colonial form of white-world supremacy is breaking down, and anticommunism organises US-led interventions to defeat its opponents, while both conserving and reforming it. At the national level, it was part of a process that brought to a conclusion the period of liberal reform initiated in the 1930s, formalising its accomplishments while disorganising the popular CPUSA-led coalitions, including incipient forms of civil rights organising in which communists played an important role, not reducible to the ‘long arm of Moscow’. The role played by Southern politicians, usually drawn from the class of planters and textile-capitalists, in both the House UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC), and Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS), is hugely important. It becomes more important after the decline of McCarthy himself, and the haut anticommunism of the period before 1956.

The thawing after 1956, coupled with the Supreme Court’s decision to gradually desegregate education in Brown vs the Board of Education (coterminous with the reversal of a series of anticommunist legal rulings by the Court), made the role of the South in anticommunism even more important. First of all, the emphasis of federal investigative apparatuses shifted from harassing the CPUSA and toward investigating civil rights activists, because a new generation of activists was discovering new repertoires of tactics. The breakdown of the old Southern geoeconomy predicated on rural authority relations, the urbanisation and industrialisation of the South, drew millions of black people into new forms of collective subjectivity, created a layer of new black churches who were more radical, and expanded a black middle class with the resources and a degree of state access, able to support ongoing forms of moderately successful activism, and incremental legal action - which was too much for the segregationists.

So, anticommunism became the basis for urgent counterinsurgency in the South. Senator James Eastland, a wealthy planter from Mississippi linked to White Citizens Councils and other forms of segregationist activism, used his position in SISS to ritually terrorise black civil rights activists, hoping to elicit from them confessions of communist enticement and agitation. Carl and Anne Braden were dragged before HUAC. But more importantly, Southern states underwent a drastic shift to the Right in this era, often setting up their own localised variants of HUAC called State Sovereignty Commissions. They were if anything more secretive, more terrifying, and more dubiously linked to civil society organisations like the Citizens Councils. They organised purges of the NAACP and, linked to the activity of attorney generals, hounded and harassed left-wing teachers and trade unionists. That worked roughly until 1960, by which time the federal authorities had effectively demonstrated that local states did not have the capacity to resist them.

After that, the international vector comes in, in a new way: the very success of decolonisation disrupted the already thawing Cold War binary freeze, and opened up a new political imaginary. It also put new pressure on federal authorities, aligned to big Fordist monopoly capital, to somehow contain and deal with the crisis in the South. Civil rights actors were able to exploit the emergent schism between the Southern ruling class fractions, and the national power bloc, as well as the emerging tension between domestic forms of hegemony and international forms of hegemony. Even from this thumbnail sketch, you can see how the ‘political opportunity-structure’ that civil rights actors were ultimately able to exploit was produced and structured by transitional crises happening on several scales of production, representation and politics.

You write that the “master-concept” of your thesis is the Gramscian one of “hegemony”. Why does hegemony specifically lend itself to an analysis of the complex intersection of anti-communism and white supremacy in the Cold War US South? What distinguishes this approach from others? Inversely, how do your findings alter or nuance our understanding of the concept of hegemony itself?

If hegemony ever came close to being an accomplished state-of-affairs, as opposed to a process, a set of practices oriented toward that state-of-affairs as a goal, it was in the post-war United States. There, the ruling class did not merely rule, but led. It articulated an historic mission, a moral cause - fighting communism, defending ‘the Free World’ - which assembled broad popular consent, excluding only a truculent but easily dispersed and controlled minority.

The Southern ruling classes, of course, gained from this, even though they were always subordinate in relation to the national power bloc. But in what way? One of the ways we can think about this is to ask why they opted for red-hunting at all. Why wasn’t white-supremacy enough? Most historians seem to agree that anticommunism was a necessary element in assembling the consent of Southerners for a programme of Massive Resistance, and for dragging the whole organisation of Southern states and culture to the Right. Leaving aside whether Massive Resistance was ultimately a good idea — I think it was less effective than the strategy of ‘pragmatic segregation’ which ascended to dominance after 1960 — it is terribly interesting that the publicity said things like “Race-Mixing Is Communism” rather than “Defend the Supremacy and Integrity of the White Race”.

The idea of hegemony allows one to grasp the strategic dimension of this, and it also allows one to think that such slogans may be psychologically meaningful if they are able to summon loyalty and support. It permits one to understand how such ideologies are materialised in rituals of terror and violence (be it the ritualised interrogations of state apparatuses, scurrilous media attacks, Citizens Council terror, or Klan murder, or something else). In the past, the category of hegemony was misleadingly reduced to the problematic of ‘consent’. In fact, as I think Peter Thomas has shown us, hegemony is about specific combinations of symbolic and physical force, specific embodiments — violent or otherwise — of the moral and political ideologies of rule.

When you look at anticommunist terror, what is striking is how its popular basis allows it to be dispersed through the institutions of civil society, how it percolates through workplaces, unions, the cultural fabric, and so on. It would not have been anywhere near as effective if people didn’t rat on, betray and ostracise leftists. When you look at white-supremacist terror in the South, something similar applies. It only took the tiniest infraction of the immensely cumbersome and complex codes of racial civility, to produce crazy outbursts of popular violence, lynchings, usually backed up by state power. In each case, consent was achieved through violence, and vice versa, so that it was not just a question of the power bloc defending its interests through the organisation of state power, but ‘society’ as such defending itself against what were experienced as existential threats. That is far closer to capitalist hegemony in its actual operation than purely consensual, persuasive incorporation.

Of course, there’s something which the category of hegemony cannot do, and that is go beyond situating the subjective aspect of this. To apprehend the subjective meaning of white-supremacist anticommunism, I turned to Lacan, and the symptomatic reading.

From Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields’ work on “racecraft” in the US to Sadri Khiari and Houria Bouteldja’s work on races sociales in France, to Satnam Virdee’s reconceptualisation of the history of the “English” working class from the perspective of the “racialized outsider” in Britain, the contemporary theoretical conjuncture is characterised by a series of attempts to rediscover, reconceptualise or to (re)invent Marxist understandings of race and racism. How would you position your own work within this field, and what sets contemporary racism apart from its historical predecessors?

I came of age, politically, in an era in which there was a lot of empire nostalgia — fantasies of global omnipotence being a major cultural response to the 9/11 attacks. Coupled with that was a revival of Spenglerian and Pearsonian ideas about ‘the West’, its moral and civilizational superiority, and its existential crisis — and, of course, its Islamic Other. Underwriting all this was a racial metaphysics which, because it didn’t have reference to race as an organic entity, was able to disavow its racism.

The novelty here was therefore the energetic disavowal of the category of race. Contemporary racism is the stupidity that dare not speak its name. “Islam isn’t a race,” its arbiters said. That was true, of course, but made little difference to those who suffered surveillance, harassment, internment, shooting and extraordinary rendition as if they were a race. So, there was a need to understand, if Islam supposedly wasn’t a race, what a race actually is. Said’s Orientalism thesis helped, allowing us to think that the ‘Islam’ that was being talked about, the ‘Islam’ that had become an object of knowledge — internally cohesive, monolithic, etc — had nothing to do with what Muslims were actually practising.

But, of course, the axis of colonialism and empire was nowhere near adequate in understanding race; one had to comprehend the ‘domestic’ dynamics, the aspects of everyday capitalist society that were being organised by race, and which lent themselves to racist symbolisation. This was particularly important to understanding the direction of British politics in particular after the credit crunch. The ‘Islamic Question’ became reconfigured as part of a wider story about the losses incurred by white Britons. Class trajectories, regional forms of decline, crises in gender relations and family structures, changing patterns of socialisation, were all refracted through race. As you would expect, I have tended to be most interested in works that grasp the interconnections between race and other levels of social reality in a Gramscian register — not just Hall and the Birmingham School, but also Omi & Winant’s ‘Racial Formation’ thesis, despite the latter’s political limitations.

The concept of hegemony, as both your own sociological work and Peter D. Thomas’s (2009) recent philological elaborations make clear, entails an expanded conception of the state – what Gramsci calls the “integral state.” Among the most significant critical inheritors of this theory are, in different ways, Louis Althusser and Nicos Poulantzas. Of Althusser you have written that “there is a real sense in which the ‘aleatory materialism’ which I think is characteristic of his work, and particularly the concepts of ‘overdetermination’ and ‘contradiction,’ has a formative role in guiding my interpretation of situations” (Seymour 2016: 26); likewise, of Poulantzas, you have said that you “consider [his] work on the state to be unsurpassed within the Marxist tradition” (25). Could you tell us more about the importance of these two theorists for your work?

Well, readers of Althusser’s On The Reproduction of Capitalism will notice, I think, that he is less of an Althusserian reader of the state than Poulantzas is. It’s actually surprisingly close to Pashukanis in its reading of the law, inasmuch as he ultimately locates the basis of the legal form in the commodity form (although I understand that he was more interested in the Kantian legal theorist Hans Kelsen). Poulantzas’s approach inState, Power, Socialism seems to me really does offer an account of law’s overdetermination and relative autonomy.  

This, taken in conjunction with the fact that Althusser continues to use an idiom associated with the ‘repressive hypothesis’ - and this does not appear to be ‘mere coquetry’ - suggests to me that on this subject he was in the position he ascribed to Marx, that of trying to develop his ‘scientific’ discoveries within borrowed ‘ideological’ language. I also wonder to what extent his writing on the state and law is symptomatic of a displacement, viz. the attempt to analyse the class nature of the USSR.

So, I think what Poulantzas did was to take Althusserian terms of analysis, increasingly in a productive dialogue with Gramsci (as well as Foucault, the ‘capital logic’ school and so on), and develop them in the solving of concrete problems of strategy.

Incidentally, do you notice Poulantzas’s profound ambivalence about the state? He wants, on the one hand, to demystify it, to treat it as a product of human labour like any other social phenomenon, to argue for the left to stop worshipping it (or, which is the obverse, adopting a noli me tangere attitude of incorruptibility toward it — as if we are not all already inside the state). On the other hand, he finds the state idea both enthralling and horrifying, the real “Kafkaesque castle”, embodying the logic of “Kafka’s penal colony,” the grundnorm of ‘totalitarianism’, and so on.

I don’t think this is just a poetic heuristic. Poulantzas describes well the “mechanisms of fear,” the rituals and theatrics of state power, without which it is difficult to understand rather a lot of what capitalist states do — obviously, HUAC and SISS are prominent in my thinking. But implicated here, there is a dimension of state action, law, and so on — its erotics — which he is not really able to account for in theoretical terms, hence he quite properly reaches for a starting point in literature.

With the growing success of a new authoritarian, statist Right, predicated on spectacles of sadism and punishment (spectacles which were prepared by neoliberalism — Trump was a reality television star before he was president-elect), I’m increasingly inclined to think we also need to account for the mystique of the state idea in psychoanalytic terms.

What, in your view, are the key components of a Marxist theory of social movements? What distinguishes your own understanding of social movements from the general “social movement studies” literature? Could you exemplify your response by way of reference to your work on the white supremacist “Massive Resistance” movement in the Cold War US South, and – in a very different conjuncture – recent calls to transform Corbyn’s Labour Party into a “social movement”?

In my thesis, I try to identify some starting points for a Marxist theory of social movements, largely because there isn’t a theory of social movements. Almost all of the ‘theory’ is descriptive, and predicated on a reification — that is, treating the social movement as an accomplished fact to be explained. I was influenced by Peter Bratsis’s re-reading of Poulantzian state theory through an exegesis of Gaston Bachelard’s work on fire, which struck me as a very smart reading not only of the state but of reification as such. It occurred to me that this was as central an epistemological obstacle to understanding movements as states.

One of the problems with social movement theory is that it spends its time trying to identify a number of uniform characteristics of social movements which can form the basis of a theory. What you actually end up with is quite nebulous: it has to be sustained (though no one knows for how long), it has to involve some noninstitutional action (though how much is unclear), it has to be aimed at transforming or conserving something (which basically describes all political action), and so on. It’s not clear where a campaign becomes a social movement, or what differentiates a movement from a mobilised interest, if anything. What kind of theory can you derive from this?

Following Bratsis’s cues, I thought: what if we start from the fact that a movement is not a coherent substance or subject in itself, but an outcome of other processes? Rather than trying to identify a number of characteristics and seeing if they can be functionally related to one another, it makes more sense to start with the inputs. I think a Marxist method would start with the social relationship as the fundamental unit of analysis. It would start with the way in which social relationships are organised within a particular mode of production along axes of exploitation and oppression, and thus are overdetermined by antagonism and struggle. It would look for the ways in which these relationships have to be reproduced on an extended and open-ended basis over time, in part through struggle.

On the basis of a relational and processual perspective like that, we can identify the conditions under which a social movement might emerge. We can say that the reproduction of a given social relationship will have been put into question, and that classes and social groups in antagonism will have come into open (though overdetermined) conflict, activating their own relationally endowed capacities while drawing others in alongside them. We can say that since reproduction is a political issue, they will have some reference to state power (the idea of being totally ‘noninstitutional’ is a liberal myth that even liberals don’t believe in), and that since it is necessarily organised in spatial contexts, it will have a geography a type of setting (Civil Rights being a movement of big cities, Massive Resistance being a movement of the rural Delta). These are just coordinates, investigating principles, to help guide the concrete analysis of concrete situations.

But one fall-out of this way of looking at things is that you have to wonder about those who say they want to ‘build’ a social movement, or ‘create’ one, or turn a party into a movement. It has nice resonances, because movements seem (even if they are not) innocent of the evils and trappings of state power, unlike parties. But you can’t summon a social movement into existence any more than you can engineer a secular crisis in the rate of profit. It makes more sense to talk about we can do, whether we are in a party or a campaign, or something else, and that is organise the class — or ‘the 99%’ if you prefer the populist interpellation.

One of the hallmarks of the work of Stuart Hall, as well as many of his colleagues and contemporaries at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, was an ability to combine solid empirical analysis with extremely nuanced and sophisticated theory. Arguably, these analyses reached their apotheosis in Hall’s analyses of Thatcherism and authoritarian populism. In one of your recent analyses of the politics of “austerity,” you wrote that “[i]f you want to begin to understand what happened, you have to go back and read Stuart Hall. You have to read Policing the Crisis, and ‘The Great Moving Right Show’. Hall, whatever you think of his practical politics, grasped the breadth of the transformative project being undertaken by the neoliberals, the fact that it was a comprehensive attempt at constructing a new hegemony which operated as much on the level of culture, and ideology, and the techniques of governmentality, as on the level of industrial class struggles, and privatizations” (Seymour 2013). Could you speak about the importance of Hall’s work – or that of the “Birmingham School” more generally – to your own? What are the specific features of this theoretical approach, and what are its strengths and limitations?

It is impossible to do justice to the Birmingham School, because it revolutionised the analysis of race and culture in Britain, practically invented the discipline of cultural studies (and thus rendered a whole lot visible that hadn’t been before), and forced these issues up the agenda of all Marxists bar the knuckle-draggers. Even today, if you teach race analysis, you find it hard to move far outside the orbit of these thinkers, so that is crucial. Whoever cannot talk about race sacrifices their probity on class.

What struck me, however, was that Policing the Crisis, and the essays of that era, were all extremely urgent investigations of concrete situations, of the conjuncture. They were, perhaps for that reason, theoretically rather opulent. The Gramscian motifs were dominant, but the School continually replenished its theoretical armoury through engagements with feminism, Foucault, Derrida, screen theory, and anything else that could be made ready-to-hand in analysis. The result was the most extraordinarily acute representation of power, crisis and the insurgent Right that was on the brink of taking hold of the situation. They described, with great prescience, an emerging mode of dominance that — by the time I began reading their work — had entered into its own crisis.

On a personal note, I had also been alarmed by the unavailing dogmas of the far left in response to the capitalist crisis, noted the failure of our predictions, registered the economistic assumptions underpinning our fruitless strategies, and was delighted to come across ‘The Great Moving Right Show’ and its merciless head-on assault on what were then hard left catechisms. It was a leap forward in light years.

Of course, it is easy and conventional to dismiss all that on the basis of where it ended up — in the case of Hall and his allies in the Marxism Today magazine, it passed through Kinnockism toward incipient Blairism, and then concluded with crashing disappointment once Blair took power. My feeling about Hall is that perhaps in his particular reading of Gramsci, notwithstanding the theoretical breakthroughs he was able to make with it, he participated in that tendency to reduce hegemonic practices to their consensual, discursive side, being far less attentive to the side of outright force. I think his underestimation of the importance of the Miners’ Strike of 1984-5, and his overestimation of Kinnockite soft-leftism, was implicated in this. He over-valued Thatcherism’s persuasive appeal, and as such invested too much importance in trying to negotiate with and sympathise with the forward-moving elements in its cultural sources. This resulted in self-inflicted defeat of a kind, in that it meant ceding ideological terrain that did not have to be ceded, while paying insufficient attention to the war of movement taking place in key industries.

But after years of right-ward-moving social democracy, the evisceration of left-wing cultures and organisation, the secular decline of unions, the mediation of more and more social relations through markets and market-like mechanisms, and the transformation of popular culture by the competitive ethos, the situation was very different. Confronting the age of austerity, we needed a language for addressing political situations where the conflict wasn’t primarily structured around industries and workplaces, and where there were indeed large and puzzling wells of consent for some of the nastiest and most perverse legislation. On top of this, the growing articulation of neoliberalism with nationalist racism in recent years has finally produced a genuine, though germinal, fascist reflux — with elements of it present in the Trump campaign, some of it in the basis of Farageism, and plenty of it slathered across Europe. We need to know how this political and ideological terrain was formed. We need to engage in the analysis of the conjuncture, and its relationship to structure. And that’s where the Birmingham School is invaluable.

It seems to me that many of your writings are informed by a dual impulse: to render multiple, contradictory and complex that which gives itself to thought as homogeneous and simplistic (be it race, the state, gender, or entire conjunctures), and to think this contradiction and complexity from the perspective of the multiple – and equally contradictory – subjectivations that they enable or compel. Your more recent writings especially seem to tend towards a more sustained engagement with psychoanalysis and the work of Jacques Lacan. What is the political and theoretical importance of psychoanalysis for Marxism, and how has it informed your work?

I’ve hinted at some of the issues driving me to psychoanalysis in my previous answers. But I can add that part of what I wanted was to resist the ‘rational kernel’ style of analysis, and spend some time with the ‘irrational kernel’. There is a rationalising tendency in all theory, Marxism included: a drive to ‘make sense’ of things. One of the virtues of psychoanalysis at its best is that it is comfortable making do with nonsense for a while — it doesn’t move too quickly to sense-making. And when you have people beating up Mexicans, or Poles, or behaving politically in ways that seem profoundly injurious even to themselves, there is a temptation to try to rationalise and move quickly to solutions. To say, “ah, they’re doing this because of economic insecurity” or “they’re doing this because the media have misinformed them about the real causes of their situation”. It might be worth spending time with the nonsense before moving to problem-solving.

In my work, I was looking for a way to understand why, beyond instrumentality, white-supremacists were using the language of anticommunism. I thought that it would be flattening the subject in an unwarranted way to neglect the extent to which it was psychologically meaningful. For example, if I just said, “they used anticommunism because that was more popular than explicit and unmediated white-supremacism, and thus a better mobilising tool,” I would be telling a very impoverished story that was only partially true.

But the methodological problem for me was, how am I supposed to understand the subjectivity of people I can’t even speak to, because most of them are now dead? Even if I could speak to them, what would I be able to tell? According to the Weberian concept of Verstehen, we know enough about one another to be able to imaginatively sympathise with others and grasp the meanings attached to their behaviour. But is this precisely the problem with ‘understanding’, in Lacanian terms — often, when we ‘understand’ others, we find only ourselves. This is discourse in the Imaginary register, discourse in its capacity as a mirror. That is, we find only the meanings that make sense to us, that are commensurable with our existing sense of reality. We are thus apt to ignore and overlook that which we can’t make sense of. The same critique applies to all psychologisms.

Lacanian psychoanalysis usefully resists this tendency. Lacan’s advice to analysts, do not try to understand too soon, was based on the insight that ‘understanding’ could just be a countertransference — that is, a resistance on the part of the analyst to the analysis. And social theorists are not less susceptible to this resistance, not less likely to want to avoid difficult truths, not less charmed by the lure of intelligibility.  But that leaves us with the question of what we should be doing if not trying to understand. In the analytic context, the analyst is supposed to exercise a free-floating attention, listening out for the holes in meaning, the places where the ego doesn’t successfully cover its tracks and there is a cut into a subterranean current of meaning — the slip, the slurred statement, the joke, the gaffe, the compromise formation, and so on. At these points of what Lacan calls “full speech”, discourse is something other than a mirror: the Imaginary register gives away to the Symbolic register. Here, the analyst pays attention to the formal, material properties of language: what you actually said, not what you ‘meant’.

Well, this approach has a number of advantages. It is a hermeneutics of suspicion, but it means taking people fully at their word. It is interpretive, but its interpretation is based on the logical properties of statements, rather than attempting to infer what they might mean from extraneous evidence. It is concerned with subjective meaning, but at the same time language is a collective, public property, and so the iron wall between the ‘individual’ and society, between ‘interior’ and ‘exterior’, is problematised. So, it was possible to extract certain principles or guidelines of interpretation from the strictly clinical context in which Lacan’s theory was developed — and that is what became Lacanian discourse analysis.

Marxists have struggled to adequately explain and theorise the subject, because it is a theory of the relations between different levels and structures of social reality, not a theory of subjectivity. And all I would say is that psychoanalysis has made unparalleled, groundbreaking and tendentially subversive advances on this terrain, so it is incumbent on Marxists to take this seriously.

Finally, I would like to ask you about the art of writing itself. There exists among a certain type of Marxist thinker an insistence, which occasionally (though not always) goes hand in hand with a residual philistinism, upon the urgent political necessity of a “plain style”. The irony of this, of course, is that plain prose is ideologically highly ambiguous – with a certain Protestant-tending, empiricist heritage that runs from Francis Bacon and Thomas Pratt to George Orwell. One remarks in your own work, however, a clear sense of the joys and jouissances of writing. How do you understand the relation between style and politics?

Oscar Wilde has one of his characters say, “Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose I know.”

I can afford a little more sympathy to naturalism, provided it is aware of its -ism, of its artifice. People who write in a “plain style” can sometimes be extraordinarily effective with it, if they know that it is just another literary form with — to use your phrase — its own “joys and jouissances”.

Even the business of simply telling a story, from beginning to end, is an artifice. Stories never really happen that way, there are no natural beginnings and the ‘finished’ work is an ideological form. Even explaining things purely and simply, is a lie. As Wilde again said, the truth is rarely pure and never simple. Most of the time, it barely makes sense.

Writing is an artifice in its essence; it is an art of embodiment, giving physical form to being. “Putting it into words” means giving form to existence, and there is no omnipotent father, Big Other, or whomever, to guarantee that superiority of one form over another.

The metaphysic of writing that is implied by “plain style” zealots, however, is that wherein writing is a ‘window on reality’, with the subject neatly extruded — and that is, lamentably, how many people are taught to write. Nancy Welsh in her very fine book on writing, Getting Restless, is scathing about the advice given to students to suppress their own role in the writing of knowledge — “this isn’t about you, don’t talk about yourself”.

On the left, this has to do with a half-digested puritanism, and a degree of ‘workerist’ (patronisingly anti-working class) anti-intellectualism. There’s almost a sense of shame at the intrinsic excess of writing, at the fact that it is never reducible to communication, that it always produces effects other than knowledge-effects. Words are aesthetic objects, erotic objects, and that produces a certain phobia in parts of the left. And, I suspect, there’s a degree of aggression toward the reader among leftists who write in this ‘plain’ style, a desire to bore and bully readers as much as possible — I’ve suffered for my vulgar exhortation, now it’s your turn.

This approach is giving us the worst of both worlds. People, to the extent that they go along with the idea that they can take themselves out of their writing, become bad writers, and bullshitters. They become bad writers because writing becomes yet another means of repression, rather than sublimation; it also becomes a guilt function, since having turned it into a joyless process, people can’t understand why they’re so bad at writing. They become bullshitters to the extent that they present a version of reality as if from a god’s-eye-view, as if told by a non-desiring, Buddha-like being.

Radical politics must be, if nothing else, radically de-naturalising. It must stress the art in living, the extent to which we produce and design the world we live in, even if not under circumstances and not with materials of our choosing.

References

Davis, Mike 2016. “‘Fight with hope, fight without hope, but fight absolutely’: An interview with Mike Davis,” LSE Department of Sociology Blog. URL: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/researchingsociology/2016/03/01/fight-with-hope-fight-without-hope-but-fight-absolutely-an-interview-with-mike-davis/ [Date last accessed: 11/10/16]

Eley, Geoff 2016. “Europe, Democracy and the Left: An interview with Geoff Eley,” Salvage. URL:http://salvage.zone/online-exclusive/europe-democracy-and-the-left-an-interview-with-geoff-eley/ [Date last accessed: 11/10/16]

Seymour, Richard 2013. “Where Next for the Left?” The North Star. URL:http://www.thenorthstar.info/?p=8949 [Date last accessed: 11/10/16]

–––– 2016. “Cold War Anticommunism and the Defence of White Supremacy in the Southern United States” (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, LSE).

Thomas, Peter D. 2009. The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism (Leiden: Brill).

Michael Roberts is a private researcher who has worked as an economist in the City of London for over 30 years. He is the author of The Great Recession - a Marxist View (2009, Lulu Press) and The Long Depression (2016, Haymarket Publications). He has presented papers to the American Economics Association annual conferences, Historical Materialism conferences and to those of the International Initiative for the Promotion of Political Economy (IIPPE) and the Association of Heterodox Economists (AHE). He writes a blog on Marxist economics at thenextrecession.wordpress.com.

According to Jim Kincaid, 'Michael Roberts has emerged as one of the leading Marxist analysts of current economic developments.  For many of us, his blog, The Next Recession, has become an indispensable and challenging resource.'  

After a panel at the HM London 2016 Conference, we publish the following discussions of Michael's book The Long Depression:

Jim Kincaid Michael Roberts on US Profit Rates: A Critique and an Alternative View

Michael Roberts responds Debating the rate of profit

Pete Green Marxist Theory and the Long Depression

In conversation with Christoph Jünke, on the legacy of German Marxist theorist Leo Kofler and why we need a Marxist understanding of anthropology today.

At the beginning of the 1980s, leftists, socialists, and Marxists still talked quite a bit about “humanity” (den Menschen) as such, while authors like Erich Fromm with his humanism were very popular. Today these discussions are comparatively rare, and the debate on Marxist anthropology is largely over. Where does that come from?

That naturally has to do with, above all, the socialist and Marxist left being shattered, shrunk, and marginalised since the 1980s. The discussion of the concept of man ended in tandem with a specific historical moment as the socialist left largely fell apart at the end of the 1970s and early 1980s – or rather was occupied from the right, by conservatives and liberals and, above all, by the emerging neoliberals and postmodernists. The debate on socialist humanism and a Marxist anthropology was also by no means hegemonic on the left, but in fact quite controversial to begin with.

And how is that all connected in your opinion?

I think that we have a bundle of causes here. For one, there is a historic cause: in bourgeois thought there is a very strong tradition of citing or conceptualising the human as such – and, moreover, of doing so in a horrifying way. All of the biologism and racism of the bourgeois tradition of thought, down to fascism, is naturally something with which the left has always had abundant problems, while questions from that tradition are only begrudgingly posed by the left. Socialists and Marxists would rather avoid these bourgeois anthropological waters.

There are also, however, theoretical reasons internal to Marxism itself. Marxist theory seeks to engage with historical and concrete temporal conditions and emphasize the changeable in history, linking it with an imperative to push said history in another direction. Marxism therefore cultivates a strong tradition of not engaging with allegedly abstract insights into the human essence, but rather concerns itself with what can concretely be changed. One seeks to analyse above all the forms of motion of hegemonic capitalism and what is changeable within it – while anthropology is always insight into essences, the consideration of the unchangeable.

The non-discussion of this topic enjoys a long tradition. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, it was generally regarded as an inheritance of classical bourgeois humanism, but not as a special topic in itself. That Marxists began to preoccupy themselves more explicitly with questions of anthropology in the 20th century is due, more than anything else, to the experiences of fascism as well as Stalinism, but also due to the Social Democratic movement’s growing integration into welfare state capitalism. The experience of defeat on the part of leftist emancipatory movements plays a particularly central role here, as the question of in what form and with what substance one can and should criticise these no-longer emancipatory movements quickly raises the question of the socialist notion of humanity or of “the human” as such (Menschenbild): can one hold fast to the socialist idea? Can people be taught to be good, or must they teach themselves? Can they do so at all – and if yes, how?

The experience of historical collapse brought many socialists and Marxists, particularly in the 1950s and 1960s, to grapple with concepts of the human. Erich Fromm is surely one of the most well-known and important of these thinkers, but we also find comparable work in the writings of Ernst Bloch and Jean-Paul Sartre, Herbert Marcuse and Henri Lefebvre, Che Guevara or Isaac Deutscher, the East European reform Communists, or the Lukács disciples Agnes Heller and Györgi Markus. We find in the middle of the century an attempt to begin anew, where anthropological questions and considerations in fact play an important role.

You have addressed this problematique following the example of German Marxist Leo Kofler.

Yes, and I consider Kofler’s work to be one of the most systematic and convincing attempts at such a reworking of anthropological themes. Kofler began addressing the topic systematically in the 1950s, and came to the conclusion that a specific Marxist anthropology does indeed exist – something that others who have studied the topic often deny.

Kofler attempted to conceive anthropology as, and I quote, the “science of the unchangeable preconditions of human changes”. In Marxist tradition, he also stressed that labour as a whole, as human activity, is what makes humans human. However, Kofler emphasised more strongly than most other Marxists that one could not separate this labour or activity from human consciousness, that human activity has always been indissolubly (unaufhebbar) paired with consciousness. In addition, he emphasises that human activity has always had a playful character, that humans strive to engage in their activity as playfully as possible, because in the end labour serves to satisfy human needs, and these needs do not exhaust themselves in the purely material, but rather have an erotic purpose in the broadest sense of the word. Humans consist not only of Reason, but are also irrational, instinct-driven beings (Triebwesen) that, through reasoning, attempt to realise their ultimately irrational human drives.

For Kofler, however – and this is seldom understood – Marxist anthropology was no direct guide to action, although indispensable in the critique of the actually existing and in discussions of necessary and possible alternatives. Kofler sees the human as a holistic being and argues for the full development of its personality as a species-being. Herein lies a critique of capitalist class society, which does not do justice to this human being, and is, for example, always founded upon a repressive, ascetic labour discipline.

Kofler’s teaching of the unchangeable preconditions of human change is thus a type of meta-theory, an auxiliary science in the humanistic changing of bourgeois capitalist social relations. It connects past, present, and future, and exhibits a utopian component in the best sense of the word.

Traditionally, Marxists have argued against this point of view, saying that in the struggle for liberation, questions of the economy, of the material interests of real people, are more important, which means class interests and class struggles.

That is also not incorrect, although it is a bit one-sided. Since the end of the 19th century, there has been a long tradition of Marxist thought that must be characterised as dogmatic and mechanistic, which reduced everything to questions of the economy. That was born out of a certain historical situation, but was nevertheless false in its one-sidedness. Their heterogeneity notwithstanding, the later thinkers of anti-dogmatic Marxism were united in the conviction that this kind of Marxism represented a false interpretation. The human is an active, acting being, and the stakes are higher than the mere economy for them – for them, it’s about human relationships and self-realisation. To paraphrase Brecht: “Man does not live by bread alone, and doesn’t even have this without culture.”

Kofler himself always spoke about this, that one must be clear about what one wants, what one actually understands by socialism. Is it already socialism if we have two or three more sausages on our plate? Or isn’t socialism something that frees humans from the alienation they have historically manoeuvred themselves into? Is socialism not something that understands the individual human as an integral part of the human species-being, without requiring this human to give up their individuality in its uniqueness? Such a point of view addresses the economy only contingently, for the economy and labour are indeed only means to an end. However, it does address the end – the goals of human existence – as well as the relationship between means and ends.

Why exactly did Kofler emphasise this?

That can naturally be traced back to his practical experiences with the socialism of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), where he lived and worked from 1947 to the end of 1950. There it became clear to him in practice that one cannot criticise the social relations under actually existing socialism appropriately without a concept of the purpose for which socialism ought to exist in the first place, what the goal of human emancipation is. However, one cannot have such a concept of emancipation if one does not also have a concept of human existence, of what purpose humans serve and what not, what they may and can do and what not. Critical thinking requires a criterion of critique, and Kofler finds this ethical criterion, so to speak, in anthropological considerations. One cannot bring people to socialism through bureaucratic means, nor through force; this Stalinist technocratism has not only revealed itself to be false and disastrous in both history and practice, but is also incompatible with Marxist theory and humanity as such.

This Stalinist technocratism, of which you speak, exhibits interesting similarities with today’s postmodern thought. Nothing is impossible, as it is said, everything is changeable, including the human itself, even the sex (Geschlecht)of the person. Even many leftists today emphasise that there is absolutely no human sexual essence (sexuelles Wesen).

The fact that some people are born into a sex (Geschlecht) that does not fit them does not mean there is no human sexual essence.

In the philosophical tradition, there are two great currents: the so-called Naturalists, who trace everything back to the nature of the world, and the Culturalists, who recognise everything in culture. Postmodernism, one could argue, stands markedly in the tradition of Culturalism, despite its considerable heterogeneity. Pointedly stated, the human for them is exclusively culture. That naturally has a kernel of truth, but is also not really correct. For me, that seems to be exactly what is exciting about a thinker like Kofler: he tends to overcome the dichotomy between Naturalism and Culturalism.

Discussions today go in this direction as well – particularly in English-language Marxism, which has played a vanguard role in international Marxist theory since the 1980s, and where we find reinvigorated engagement with anthropological questions. Norman Geras was a particularly noteworthy pioneer in the first half of the 1980s. As the decade drew to a close, the critique of postmodern thought emanating from figures like Alex Callinicos and Terry Eagleton helped to sharpen anthropological perspectives. Eagleton has been particularly prolific on the topic of Marxist anthropology for over a decade. Despite coming from an entirely different tradition and flirting with the anti-humanist structuralism of a Louis Althusser, today he not only emphasises the existence of a human essence but also that the left suffers by not taking this question more seriously. We humans, as Eagleton trenchantly puts it, are “cultural beings by virtue of our nature, which is to say by virtue of the sorts of bodies we have and the kind of world to which they belong”.

That, to me, seems to be the central idea of Marxism, which overcomes both one-sided culturalism and one-sided naturalism. The human is both: natural being as well as cultural being. This is the point Leo Kofler made fifty years earlier. Yes, our nature is that we are cultural beings, but we can only change ourselves to a certain point without ceasing to be humans. This arc of suspense appears to me to be Marxism’s exciting and original contribution to anthropology.

And can the currently dominant regime of neoliberalism sharpen this perspective?

Where humans appear to be wolves to other humans; where the human is understood as the individuated individual, as I, Inc., as a lone warrior who throws their individual resources into the competition of commodification – there, leftist, emancipatory considerations on another concept of humanity are more needed than ever.

The Marxist tradition stands and falls with the assertion that, irrespective of all individuality, the human is part of a collective, it is a species-being – and not the individuated individual as conceived today. The human, as Leo Kofler’s anthropological dictum puts it, can only individuate itself in the context of community. What we lack is a consciousness of this collectivity, a consciousness of this solidarity – what can the human do, what can’t the human do?

Can one then, for example, discuss cloning or eugenics without agreeing on one’s concept of the human? That so few Marxists engage in these sorts of discussions shows how much we’ve lost over the last three decades. Naturally, there were and are exceptions. I’ve already mentioned Terry Eagleton. Let’s take as further examples Pierre Bourdieu and Naomi Klein, who were decidedly popular at the end of the 1990s because they convincingly questioned the neoliberal concept of the human, writing popular texts against the kind of capitalist commodification that closes off the human from its inherent possibilities.

If, as I think Terry Eagleton so aptly writes in his impressive work on the meaning of life, the meaning of life lies in the free unfolding of human possibilities and capabilities, then this can be understood in both an individual as well as a collective sense, and requires a conception of humanity that one can only acquire and understand by reflecting on the anthropological foundations of human existence.

Yet how does one approach such a humanism in practice? Erich Fromm, for example, speaks rather often of the human, but barely addresses collective protest or strike movements. We are dealing, generally, with the human as an abstract individual. In Leo Kofler’s view, humanity is formed above all through consciousness and education. Yet how do theory and practice come together in a practical sense?

There are two great sources on which the classical socialist movement builds. On one side, we have the radical tradition of the Enlightenment, which rested above all on education and upbringing; on the other, the working classes’ struggle for their own emancipation. Both elements were increasingly unified in the classical socialist movement, but taken by themselves have little to do with each other. With the end of the classical socialist movement in the mid-20th century, this growing unity of theory and practice slackened noticeably, and also affected the work of a Fromm, Marcuse, or Kofler. It is important to take critical note of this development in retrospect, although it was ultimately largely historically determined.

I think that the times are over when one could have believed that people will become socialists through upbringing (Erziehung) alone. The experience of the old labour movement makes the limits of pure education quite evident. These organisations failed when those limits were reached politically, because they did not understand in what form and to what degree the consciousness of broad sections of the population was created and sharpened by social practice – by demonstrations, actions, and strike movements, by day-to-day class- and mass struggles.

However, this does not mean that the practical movement is everything. Not at all. It should be understood to mean that without practical movement, theory not only does not come to fruition, but cannot even be developed properly. One becomes a socialist in that one has practical experiences and then develops these experiences theoretically. Both, however, cannot really come together without the presence of mass social movements. One must rediscover a way to connect consciousness work, theoretical work, and educational work in everyday life with oppositional struggles in the broader sense, and labour struggles in the narrower sense – although the working class of today is of course different in many ways. That strikes me as the main task confronting Marxists today: finding a way to reunite both of these strands.

That this undertaking went so poorly last time around is just a sign that, despite some positive indications, in general the outlook for socialists and Marxists remains fairly grim. The practical discussion of a new form of socialism for the 21 century is just beginning to develop, and it requires larger mass movements in which new thinkers can develop themselves, to which they can contribute as much intellectually as they themselves are intellectually invigorated and enriched by these movements. If intellectuals shut themselves away at their desk and maintain a distance from the movements, they also change their own way of thinking – although it’s of course also impossible for intellectuals to be practically involved in everything.

In this context, is it an advantage for you that, as a general rule, today’s working class is better educated and skilled than it was in previous eras?

One would hope it’s an advantage. The average wage-labourer today is not only more feminine and ethnically diverse, they also appear more enlightened and educated than 50 or 100 years ago. On the other hand, this advantage encounters phenomena that can twist and partially dissolve enlightened consciousness. It is no coincidence that leftists and socialists have grappled so intensively with the culture industry and media policy over recent decades. Today’s education system or television broadcasts are more often than not really just systems of dumbing down the population. One is “enlightened” here in a way that is not practical.

For example, today’s secondary school students are forced to cram the intricacies of mathematics into their heads, but hardly anyone can say why they would need these skills later in life. Students don’t learn why they need these skills and, correspondingly, the interest of most is lacking in how to appropriately acquire this knowledge. In school today, one can learn how a computer is built, but not how to appropriately and responsibly interact with it. School conveys theoretical media knowledge, but rarely media competence. The entire recreational and media industry today after all continues to exist largely to shut off the consciousness of the consumer. It still only meets needs of relaxation and distraction. Thus, the average European today is certainly more enlightened but, for the aforementioned reasons, doesn’t necessarily take to the streets to fight for their needs and wants. We can’t afford to be naïve on this point: we can hope that processes of becoming conscious will take place much more rapidly once masses of people start getting active and defending themselves, but we have to get to that point first – and the few swallows we see today don’t quite make a summer, so to speak.

In general, a form of everyday cynicism is dominant today that barely existed in this form a few decades ago. The contemporary bourgeois concept of the human is certainly a largely pessimistic one, a negative one, and people resign themselves cynically to this state of affairs: “That’s just how humans are…”, etc. Interestingly, Leo Kofler already broached this issue in 1960 in his book on State, Society, and the Elite between Humanism and Nihilism,although certain parts of society, like the Catholic labour movement of the 1950s, were indeed of a bourgeois character, but were certainly not cynical.

You’re right: this phenomenon of an all-pervasive everyday cynicism in this form is historically novel, and Kofler perceived it and theorised it very early on. In fact, the work you mentioned reads more convincingly today than it did then, as this everyday nihilism so prevalent today only affected a small layer of society at the time of his writing. Today, it affects the majority of society. Back then, however, Kofler’s book was not noticed or absorbed – it was regarded as stale. In the 1980s, I still occasionally heard claims that Kofler’s discussions of, as he wrote, “occurrences of decadence, of cynicism and nihilism in the postmodern manner” were considered antiquated and out of proportion. That doesn’t seem so convincing anymore. Of course, we can’t apply what Kofler wrote a half-century ago to today on a one-to-one basis, but the basic thoughts seem even more relevant to me today than they were back then.

Revolutions Against Capital, Capital Against Revolutions?

Central London, 9-12 November 2017

http://conference.historicalmaterialism.org/

***EXTENDED Deadline for abstracts: 15 May 2017. Participants from previous conferences will need to create a new login for this year's conference website. ***

***UPDATE: The streams are now listed at the end of this post.***

One hundred years ago, hailing the Russian Revolution, Antonio Gramsci characterised the Bolsheviks’ success as a "revolution against Capital." As against the interpretations of mechanical "Marxism," the Russian Revolution was the "crucial proof" that revolution need not be postponed until the "proper" historical developments had occurred.

2017 will witness both the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution and the 150th anniversary of the first publication of Marx’s Capital. Fittingly, the journalHistorical Materialism will celebrate its own twentieth anniversary.

In his time, Gramsci qualified his title by arguing that his criticism was directed at those who use "the Master’s works to draw up a superficial interpretation, dictatorial statements which cannot be disputed," by contrast, he argues, the Bolsheviks "live out Marxist thought." From its inception, Historical Materialism has been committed to a project of collective research in critical Marxist theory which actively counters any mechanical application of Marxism qua doctrine. How the Russian Revolution was eventually lived out — with all of its aftershocks, reversals, counter-revolutions, and ultimate defeat — also calls not just for a work of memory but for one of theorisation.

We might view the alignment of these anniversaries, then, as disclosing the changing fates of the Marxist tradition and its continued attempt to analyse and transform the world. Especially once it is read against the grain of the mechanical and determinist image affixed to it by many of the official Marxisms of the 20th Century, and animated by the liberation movements that followed in its wake, the work-in-progress that was Capital seems vitally relevant to an understanding of the forces at work in our crisis-ridden present. The Russian Revolution, on the contrary, risks appearing as a museum-piece or lifeless talisman. By retrieving Gramsci’s provocation, we wish to unsettle the facile gesture that would praise Marxian theory all the better to bury Marxist politics.

Gramsci also remarks that Marx "predicted the predictable" but could not predict the particular leaps and bounds human society would take. Surveying today’s political landscape that seems especially true. Since 2008, we have witnessed a continuing crisis of capitalism, contradictory revolutionary upsurges — and brutal counterrevolutions — across the Middle East and North Africa and a resurgent ‘populist’ right represented by Trump, the right-wing elements of the Brexit campaign, the authoritarian turn in central Europe and populist right wing politics in France; the power of Putin's Russia and authoritarian state power in Turkey, Israel, Egypt and India. Even the "pink tide" of Latin America appears to be turning. Disturbingly, we seem to face a wave of reaction, and in some domains a recrudescence of fascism, much greater in scope and intensity than the revolutionary impetus that preceded and sometimes occasioned it. There is a new virulence to the politics of revanchist nationalism, ethno-racial supremacy, and aggressive patriarchy, but its articulation to the imperatives of capital accumulation or the politics of class remains a matter of much (necessary) debate.

This year’s Historical Materialism Conference seeks to use the "three anniversaries" as an opportunity to reflect on the history of the Marxist tradition and its continued relevance to our historical moment. We welcome papers which unpack the complex and under-appreciated legacies of Marx’s Capital and the Russian Revolution, exploring their global scope, their impact on the racial and gendered histories of capitalism and anti-capitalism, investigating their limits and sounding out their yet-untapped potentialities. We also wish to apply the lessons of these anniversaries to our current perilous state affairs: dissecting its political and economic dynamics and tracing its possible revolutionary potentials.

Abstracts should be between 250 and 350 words. Panels should include abstracts for all individual presentations.

First important notice: while we are very open to preconstituted panels, we insist that all papers in such panels must have their own abstract and speaker details. Do NOT simply send us a list of names please. We also reserve the right to reject certain abstracts in such panels and to reconstitute them with other speakers.

Second important announcement: all participants are expected to make every reasonable effort to participate in THE ENTIRETY of the conference and be able to have their paper at any slot therein. Any absolutely imperative reasons why you cannot speak on day X or Y or at time X or Y MUST BE COMMUNICATED TO US WHEN THE ABSTRACT IS SUBMITTED as we WILL NOT be making last minute changes to the timetable as in previous years. Participants are also expected to beactually able to participate in the conference when they submit their abstracts. Of course, medical emergencies or visa denials cannot be predicted, but all other cases of last minute withdrawals cause us unnecessary stress and create chaotic conditions for a final timetable, so all teaching arrangements or other possible impediments must be checked when submitting, not when the timetable is already established.

The Great War, the Russian Revolution and Mass Rebellions 1916-1923 - Stream at the Historical Materialism Annual Conference

Mass rebellions against Capital and Empire shook the globe in the wake of World War One and the Russian Revolution. To friend and foe alike, the seizure of power by insurgent workers and organised socialists in October 1917 constituted the advanced outpost of an international offensive against the capitalist order. From the 1916 insurrections in Ireland and Central Asia, to the revolutionary proletarian insurgencies in Western and Central Europe, to the countless anti-colonial rebellions of dominated peoples in the Americas, Africa, and Asia, it seemed for a brief historical moment that imperial capitalism was on the verge of defeat.

Few people today would deny the enormous social, political, and cultural impact of these popular rebellions. Yet a major question mark hangs over their current relevancy, as well as the various radical traditions they expressed and engendered. The rise and collapse of Stalinism, the defaults and defeats of revolutionary nationalism, and the triumphant neoliberal onslaught have cast a pall over the promise of the 1916-23 upsurge and the anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist project(s) it came to represent. 

Capital, with all its crises and contingencies, remains. As the political centre collapses, space is opening for new forces to fill the void. But, one century later, it remains to be seen whether the Russian Revolution and the international insurgencies of the era can recapture the imaginations of those seeking to radically overhaul existing social relations. 

It is in this open and uncertain context that the Annual Historical Materialism Conference will mark the centennial anniversary of 1917 by hosting the stream 'The Great War, the Russian Revolution and Mass Rebellions 1916-1923'.

We invite submissions for papers that take a fresh look at look at the 1916-1923 insurgencies; the impact of these events throughout the Twentieth Century; and their reverberations on (or relevancy for) the world today. 

A vast uncharted intellectual and historiographic territory lies beyond the lifeless established paradigms of so much academic and activist literature. Much of the story of these multifarious popular upheavals remains to be told. Many questions long thought settled – from classical Marxist analysis and strategy, to the early dynamics of class, nationality, gender, and sexuality in mass struggle and state power, to the divergent trajectories of revolutionary and counter-revolutionary social transformations – merit serious re-examination. Uncovering how these legacies can speak to our current realities is no less vital a task.

It is our hope that this stream can mark a major moment for a collective reinvigoration of Marxist and radical engagement with the experiences of the highest point in the Twentieth century's revolutionary tide.

Marxism, Sexuality and Political Economy: Looking Forwards, Looking Backwards - Stream at the Historical Materialism Annual Conference

The Sexuality and Political Economy network (HMSPEN), affiliated to Historical Materialism (HM), invite paper/panel proposals for a stream of panels at HM London 2017 on the theme of Marxism, Sexuality and Political Economy: Looking Forwards, Looking Backwards

After an initial launch last year with 6 successful panels, HMSPEN once again seeks to run a themed panel through HM London 2017, to be held on the 9th-12th November 2017.

Whilst we welcome any papers and panels that illuminate, debate and develop the relationmship between Marxism, sexuality and political economy, whether theoretical, analytical or empirical, from any disciplines or trans-disciplinary, we are particularly seeking paper and panel proposals on the theme of 'looking forwards, looking backwards'.

The 100th Anniversary of the Russian Revolution reminds us that there is a rich corpus of insight and vision from past Marxist scholarship and politics to complement the more recent explosion of high quality scholarship and political synergies between Marxism and the radical critiques and politics of sexuality. We want to celebrate this moment by seeking papers clustered around the following questions:

• What can we useful retrieve from the past in respect of sexuality and gender scholarship that will add to present debates? Have we adequately used the insights of Engels, Kollontai, Reich, D'Emilio and Marcuse amongst others? Are there other thinkers we have neglected to our cost - Armand, Zetkin. Mieli, Reiche, and Brown?

• Have we learned the lessons of history in respect of the radical politics of sexuality? Are there still lessons to be learned from Soviet Communism and the politics of sexuality or the radicalism of the late 1960's from Stonewall to the Gay left Collective?

• With a recent wave of critical scholarship intersecting Marxism and sexuality (Drucker, Lewis, Sears, Hennessy, Floyd amongst others), where does that leave us in developing a critical theory and politics that retains a Marxist approach but adequately incorporates and learns from radical critiques of sexuality, whether LGBTQI or queer theory or sexual worker critiques?

• How do we translate recent developments on critical theoretical intersections between Marxism and sexuality into a distinctive strategic approach to sexual politics today?

• How should we understand and theorise the continuities/discontinuities, both historical and theoretical, between social and sexual revolutions

Papers are sought that explore those themes and enrich our understanding of the political economy of sexuality from a Marxist perspective. At the same time, this does not preclude submissions along a range of additional and complementary themes:

• Commodification, Consumption and Sexual Space

• Commodification, Consumption and Homonormativity in neo-Liberal Contexts

• The Market, Capitalism and Sexual Rights and Justice

• Queer Labour, Queer Capital

• Marxism, sexuality studies, feminism and political economy

• Queer Intersections and political economy

• Sexual political economy in global contexts

• The political economy of trans and intersex

• Capitalism, class and the terms of queer resistance

• Sexual dimensions of gendered capitalism as a mode of social production and reproduction

• Imperialist and Colonial interventions, Islamophobia, homonationalism and pinkwashing

• the sexual dynamics of capitalist restoration in China

• Globalising the dialogues between Sexuality, political economy and Marxism

Green Revolutions? - Stream at the Historical Materialism Annual Conference

At the height of the Russian civil war, Bolsheviks from the besieged town of Astrakhan reached Moscow and appealed to Lenin to approve their plans for a nature reserve in the delta of the Volga, which he did, explaining that 'conservation of nature is of importance to the entire Republic; I attach urgent significance to it. Let it be declared a national necessity and appreciated by the scale of nation-wide importance.' One century later, the significance of conserving nature is no less urgent. The centenary of the Russian Revolution should prompt renewed, closer reflections on the relation between the revolutionary Marxist legacy and ecological struggles, including its historical parameters. How green were the Bolsheviks? Still only assembled in fragments, what lessons can be learned from the efflorescence of environmental science and politics between October and the onset of Stalinist industrialisation? Was adoration of modern technology and Promethean domination of nature inherent in the Soviet Union from the start, or were there other paths not taken? How did the fate of the revolution determine the trajectory of ecological thought within the working-class movement?

Ecological Marxism is by now a well-established current of research, but it sometimes falls into the trap of academic theorising, with little connection to Marxist politics. Can there be an ecological Leninism (or Luxemburgism, or autonomism, or Maoism...)? What are the most promising tendencies in environmental movements around the world today? Does Marxist thought have anything to offer activists on the frontlines, from Standing Rock via the divestment campaigns to the struggle against new coal-power plants in Bangladesh? The ecological emergencies of the twenty-first century seem to call for extraordinary measures to maintain a habitable biosphere. What would they look like? In the increasingly dangerous climate of 2017, however, neither red nor green forces dominate the political agenda – instead, the centenary comes with a worldwide surge in brown-tinged reactionary nationalism. From the United States via Poland to India, this ascendant right is waging a general onslaught on what remains of wild nature, denying climate change, speeding up the production of fossil fuels and, apparently, synthesising aggression against the environment with attacks on undesirable others. This conjuncture has yet to be met with a consistent analysis – and response – from the radical left.

The ecology stream at the HM annual conference of 2017 in London invites papers and panels on the above and related themes, in the entire field of environmental theory and politics as practiced through the lens of Marxism.

Marxist-Feminist Stream - Stream at the Historical Materialism Annual Conference

The contribution of women in mass/popular/class/revolutionary uprisings has often been overlooked, even in cases where women played a leading role. Following the Call for Papers of the 14th HM London conference in commemorating the Marxist legacy in revolutions of the past at the centenary of the October Revolution while thinking about present struggles, this is then also an opportune time to highlight and reflect on the role of women and feminist ideas in revolutionary situations.

Processes of excision, of silencing, of sidelining help explain the sway of a (neo)liberal feminism in the so-called West that places feminism as an emancipatory possibility engendered by capitalism rather than socialism or communism. This suppression of women's revolutionary histories has been successful in establishing neoliberal feminism as the mainstream. Marxist-feminists need to revisit and reclaim their histories, not only to set the record straight but to move beyond them by critically engaging with other anti-racist, anti-colonialist, revolutionary feminisms. A new generation of feminist activists and theorists is challenging neoliberal feminism and placing feminist struggles again squarely within anti-capitalist and anti-racist agendas. All across the globe, 2016 and 2017 have been years of struggle for abortion rights (as in Poland's Black Monday) and women's self-determination as well as years of resurgence of significant feminist movements (as in the case of the Women's March in the USA and the Women's Strike in many parts of the world).

In 2017, the HM London conference's Marxist feminist stream invites critical Marxist feminist thinking on the processes and strategies of excision and silencing as described above, but also on elaborating on the ways in which the important struggles of the past years can lead to the emergence and consolidation of revolutionary feminist movements worldwide. We invite papers that re-work Alexandra Kollontai's question 'what has the October Revolution done for women in the West?' (1927) to which we add the question 'what has the October Revolution done for Women in the East?' as well as a series of other questions:

• How has Marxist feminism approached the legacy of revolutions so far?

• Are there Marxist feminist theorisations of the revolution today that can operate against the neo-fascist offensive in its alliance with contemporary capitalism?

• What are the sites of Marxist feminist revolutionary pedagogy today?

• What is the connection of social movements against racism to the Marxist feminist critique of revolutions?

• What has the November Revolution, and Rosa Luxemburg's murder, achieved in terms of burying the issue of female revolutionary leaders for most of the 20^th century?

• What is the experience of women as participants in, or leaders of, revolutions beyond Europe? What feminist politics have informed those experiences? How can we expand a transnational, even global dialogue as a shared space for negotiating a possibly collective experience?

• What are the positions of Marxist feminism on the questions of revolution, violence, and self-defense?

• What counts as revolutionary praxis today from the perspectives of Marxist feminism? Does the strike, for instance, allow for a successful imbrication of women's demands concerning production and reproduction, a distinction forced by capitalist economy and economics?

• What is the impact of the wage relation (and dependency) on keeping women 'in their place' (in factories, the service industry, the home), ensuring therefore their suppression as a revolutionary force? Or should we have other readings of the wage relation as the ground of economic independence within the actuality of capitalism?

What is the role (and revival) of religion as politics in suppressing or enabling women as a revolutionary force?

• Is the abolition or the multiplication of genders a revolutionary utopia that we should strive for in opposing the concrete exploitations of capitalism?

• Has the notion of 'passive revolution' been of use to Marxist feminist struggles, or has it been twisted to negate the possibility of 'active revolution'?

• What is the relationship of sexual relations to class struggle today as opposed to 1921, when Kollontai wrote a text under this heading?

We hope that contributors to the Marxist feminist stream will bring their own critical questions, of relevance to research and to everyday struggle, to be added to the above provisional list of questions – not least in relation to what and who the social category 'woman' may encompass today as a revolutionary subject beyond a normative biologism. We invite panels, papers, and platforms where such questions can be openly debated with the sense of urgency our times command.

Race and Capital - Stream at the Historical Materialism Annual Conference

The 2008 crisis has not led to a reckoning with capital, instead we have seen a resurgence in the forces of the right: in both its 'radical' and 'moderate' varieties. Capital's primary response to the crisis is the language of racism. From the 'migrant crisis', to the racialised policing authority deployed to enforce austerity, to continued racialised military intervention; the connection between race and capital seems clear. The attempt to grapple with these issues has given rise to heated debates on the left about race and racism, and the relationship between the interpersonal the structural. Above all, these debates have related to the question of solidarity and the possibility of united political action in the face of this rising tide of racism. How we analyse and respond to these issues are thus of decisive political importance.

Of course, these questions are not entirely new. In Capital, Marx linked the dawning of capitalist production to a racialised 'primitive accumulation' in Africa. More importantly, in the Russian Revolution the Bolsheviks put anti-imperialism at the core of their international political programme. In the process they exerted a decisive influence on the emerging anti-colonial movement: inaugurating the connection between that movement and the Marxist tradition. In the intervening period, writers in the Marxist tradition – for example CLR James, Frantz Fanon, Stuart Hall – have attempted to map the fraught relationship between racism, capitalist accumulation and other forms of oppression.

It is into this situation that Historical Materialism's Race and Capital stream seeks to intervene. In particular, we seek to use the resources of the Marxist tradition to illuminate questions of race and racism, and – at the same time – use these questions to reformulate key aspects of the Marxist tradition. Understanding this in a broad sense to include issues of race, racism, indigeneity, colonialism, imperialism and migration, we would be especially interested in panels or papers concerning:

• Attempts to rethink Marxist theories on the relationship between capitalism and racism

• Anti-racist engagements with the 'classics' of the Marxist tradition

• Recovering the anti-racist legacy of the Marxist tradition 

• Marxist engagement with anti-racist work outside of the Marxist tradition

• Intersectionality

• Afro-Pessimism and anti-black racism theory

• Cultural appropriation

• Black and Third World feminisms

• Anti-racist accounts of the Russian Revolution: particularly its relationship to anti-colonial uprisings in 'the East'

• Historical analyses of anti-racist (and anti-imperialist) movements and their relationship to the Marxist tradition

• Marxist analyses of indigeneity and indigenous movements

• Analyses of contemporary and historical racist practices

Ludmila Costhek Abílio on transformations of labour in Brazil.

Ludmila Costhek Abílio is a visiting researcher at the CESIT (Centre for Trade Union and Labour Studies) - Institute of Economics – UNICAMP – Brazil. This article was originally published in Portuguese at Passapalavra and atBlog da Boitempo.

Between beauty salons and apps

In October 2016, Michel Temer’s government sanctioned the Salão parceiro - profissional parceiro ('Beauty salon partner – professional partner') law. In the turbulent Brazilian context of the return of austerity packages, which include forthcoming state pension reform, labour reform, as well as the already sanctioned PEC241 - a constitutional reform limiting the expenditures in health, education, social welfare and public services for the next two decades - the law was conveniently unnoticed. Approved five months before the legal liberalisation of outsourcing in a variety of economic activities, including those of the public sector, it determines that beauty salon owners are no longer obliged to recognise their employment relationship with their manicurists, hairdressers, barbers and beauticians. The law determines that an establishment is responsible for providing the necessary infrastructure - the other workers continue to be recognised as employees - so that their “partners”, who are now legally self-employed, can carry out their work. Thus, the manicurist who works eight or more hours per day, six days a week, for the same salon, will probably become a service provider.

Most likely because it applies to a job typically carried out by women, apparently of little relevance or social visibility, the law has been received more as a mere deregulation than as a legal move towards the uberisation of work in Brazil. Uberisation, as understood here, refers to a new stage of labour exploitation, which results in qualitative changes to the worker’s categorisation and recognition, the structure of companies, in addition to means of control, management and expropriation of labour. This is a new step towards outsourcing that, while complementing the previous model of subcontracting networks made up of a wide range of firms, can also compete with it. Uberisation consolidates the passage of the worker to a nanoentrepreneur who is permanently available to work; it appropriates, in a productive and administered way, the progressive erosion of the public realm as the fundamental field of work regulation; furthermore, minimum guarantees are taken away while the worker remains subordinated.

This subordination, however, can operate under new logics. Uberisation can be understood as a possible future for companies in general, that become responsible for providing the infrastructure to allow their “partners” to carry out their work. It is not hard to imagine hospitals, universities and companies from a wide range of areas adopting this model, using the work of their “just-in-time partners” according to their demands.[i] However, looking at the present reality of the digital economy and its Uber drivers, Deliveroo motorcycle couriers, Amazon Mechanical Turk workers, it is possible to see the model in action, and understand that it is not only based on eliminating or disguising the employment relationship. Uber has made visible a new level of real subsumption of labour, extending globally and currently comprising millions of workers around the world, with the potential to become generalised in multiple sectors.

Uberisation has not suddenly arisen from the digital economy. It has been developing for decades and has more recently materialised in this new field. Companies that promote uberisation  in the digital economy field – from now on known as app-companies – develop mechanisms to transfer risk and costs not to other subordinated companies, but to a multitude of available and engaged independent self-employed contractors. In practice, such a transfer is managed by software and online platforms owned by these companies, which match worker-users with consumer-users, dictating and managing the rules (including the determinations of costs and gains) of this connection.

The fact is that app-companies lack the traditional material aspects of a company, but have high visibility. The sheer importance of Uber around the world allows the use of the term in question. The source of the fetishised “brand strength” in this case are the multitude of workers as well as the consumers that the company mobilises around the world - in the city of São Paulo alone there are more uber drivers than taxi drivers, with numbers exceeding 50,000; the company however does not disclose this data.[ii]

The way in which Uber was organised brought to light fundamental issues of capitalist development, such as urban mobility and the legislations surrounding the digital economy. Uber has become the subject of electoral campaigns and debates, moving through the conflictive quick sands of the permeable area between companies and state, that involves the interests of consumer-voters, workers conflicts and the disputes of titans over the so called “free” market. However, beyond this, Uber shed light on world labour market tendencies, that involve not only the transformation of the worker into a microentrepreneur, but also of the worker into a productive amateur worker[iii], a definition that will be presented throughout the analysis.

App-companies establish themselves on the market as mediators between consumers and workers-microentrepreneurs, providing the necessary infrastructure - albeit virtual – so that this meeting can take place. Just as in the case of the beauty salon owner that receives a commission for the manicurist’s work, Uber receives a percentage (25%) for acting as the mediator between thrifty consumers and the extensive number of amateur drivers, appearing as a virtual infrastructure provider for this relation to take place. Its role, however, is clearly much more complex than this. Thus, as with the manicurist “partner” - who, in her relationship with the owner of the beauty salon, is not in a position of equality to define her financial gains, work load and the length of her workday - the work of the uberised worker is also subsumed. The means of control, management, surveillance and expropriation of his work are simultaneously evident and barely tangible: after all, the status of the driver is self-employed, thus not an employee, but a registered worker (or “partner”) who works according to his own purpose. At the same time, the worker is managed by a software installed on his smartphone; despite the company defining the rules, it appears more as a brand than as a company as such. However, the market ideology of a “partnership” between workers and theapp-company quickly becomes fragile when uberised workers take charge of their power as a multitude and establish collective forms of resistance and negotiation. Means of control, expropriation and oppression thus become more explicit while the company becomes more concrete.

New forms of political organisation that involve the creation of trade unions of independent workers, strikes and demonstrations carried out by uberised workers are already taking place around the world. Uber drivers in the US (currently more than 400,000) joined nurses, hospitality workers, among others, in the “Fight for US$15” campaign, that fought for a minimum wage of US$15 per hour of work.[iv] In California, Uber opted to pay US$100 million in an agreement with tens of millions of workers (there are no precise data available on this number) that took part in a collective action requiring legal recognition of the employment relationship with the company. The agreement prevented the process going to court.[v] At the end of the year, the English justice system determined that Uber recognise its drivers as staff employees; this process is on-going.[vi]

The motorcycle couriers that work for the Brazilian app Loggi also organised demonstrations under the coordination of SindimotoSP (a São Paulo based trade union) by blocking lanes on two major roads in the city. These demonstrations were the result of a new rule of remuneration per delivery implemented by the company, which in reality increased its percentage gains over the work of the drivers. Cycle couriers from the company Foodora organised the first strikes of this kind against an app-company in Italy, which also made explicit new forms of repression (such as suspending the use of the app by movement leaders), in addition to new forms of solidarity (when user-consumers started to boycott the app).[vii] After seven days of strike, motorcycle couriers from the app Deliveroo prevented changes from being implemented that would have reduced their hourly rate.[viii] In 2016, the App Drivers Trade Union was created in São Paulo, and the Association of Autonomous App Drivers and the Trade Union for Private Individual Passenger Drivers was set up in the state of Pernambuco. At the beginning of 2017, Uber attempted to prevent the formation of trade unions by taking legal action in Seattle.[ix]

The worker-profile and the consumer-supervisor

Basically speaking, Uber matches the multitude of amateur paid drivers with a multitude of users looking for lower prices compared to taxis. In some cities, Uber is an economically accessible option, of higher quality and faster than public transport. Entering the market in an extremely predatory way, acting in a regulatory vacuum, the company has quickly reconfigured the private market of urban mobility. Uber deploys an aggressive strategy to dominate local markets; in many cities it is illegal yet continues to operate normally. To achieve this, they count on a multitude of users and recruit - or more accurately, count on the permanent adhesion of - a multitude of amateur drivers, who see this profession as a method of income generation.

Uber, like other companies that operate with the same logic, establishes rules, evaluation criteria, ways to manage the workers and their work, while at the same time being exempt from responsibilities and requirements that would lead to the legal recognition of the employment relationship. Consumption, evaluation, data collection and surveillance are inseparable elements. In reality, the control over the work is transferred to the multitude of consumers, who evaluate the professionals on each service provided. This evaluation of the worker is visible to all the other users. The work is now certified in the realm of consumption, via a type of collective manager that provides continual control over the worker. Confidence - a key element to the consumer putting their goods and documents into the hands of a motorbike courier, to get into the car of an unknown person that will be your driver (and unlike a taxi driver, did not go through a certification process ruled by the state), - is therefore guaranteed by the activity of this supervisory multitude that engages and trusts in its role as certifier. Thus, the uberised worker is aware that he is being continually watched and evaluated. This new form of control has shown to be effective in guaranteeing productivity and standard procedures – although informally defined – that determines patterns of quality and efficiency for the drivers. When the workers comply, they work for themselves and for the company, for their  own means and for the cultivation of the brand, which in reality depends entirely on the dispersed actions of this army of drivers.

The realisation of the work depends on the disposition of the worker to accept the task at hand i.e. constant management of his own productivity. But it also means beating the competition. The consumers’ evaluation supplies the elements in order to rank the workers. This operates as a criterion to determine – in a programmed and automatised way - which workers, among the large numbers of drivers available, have more access to specific rides.

Workers and consumers become virtual profiles, effectively registration numbers. Their activity is material and tangible, at the same time as it is mediated and ruled by software and their algorithms. A worker-profile in a database of a multitude signifies, in practice, a self-employed worker, that assumes the risks and costs of his work, defines his own working day and level of dedication and, in addition, creates strategies to deal with the extensive number of competitors that permanently hangs over his head.[x]

Uberisation, therefore, consolidates the worker as a microentrepreneur. This consolidation involves new logics that depend, on the one hand, on outsourcing the control of the companies to consumers; and, on the other hand, on the engagement of the multitude of workers with their own productivity, in addition to the transfer of costs and risks from the company to their “partners”.

An additional step towards the flexibilisation of work

The term “flexibilisation” has explanatory force when it is understood as a reference to the contemporary changes taking place in labour processes regarding the relationship between the state, capital and labour, in addition to the relationship between technological innovations, the rise in unemployment and national state policies that break down the barriers to financial and investment flows. In other words, it refers to the relationship between capital and labour mobility at a global level. Flexibilisation can also be understood more simply as the contemporary means to eliminate workers’ rights and, in addition to this, the transferral of risk, costs and unpaid work to the workers. This transferral involves the extension of labour time and the intensification of labour to the extent that they become difficult to recognise as such.

In the last decades, it became clear that even labour management could be transferred to the worker – clearly a management of a subordinated nature, woven by the threats of competition and unemployment. The fact is that the change from time clock to personal wrist watch proved to be extremely efficient in extending labour time and intensifying labour. Currently, an eight-hour workday is a distant memory for workers of many different qualification levels and remunerations.[xi]

Therefore, at the heart of flexibilisation is the transferral of management, costs and risks of the labour to the worker, while maintaining control over his productivity. Both David Harvey - in his definition of organisation through dispersal - and João Bernardo - on how outsourcing production does not mean loss of control - emphasise that the dispersion of work does not mean capital’s loss of control, or any type of democratisation in the work process.[xii] On the contrary, what has been seen in recent decades is the major centralisation of capital accompanied by new forms of work intensification, extension of labour time and transferral of risks and costs to the workers, in forms that are increasingly difficult to map.

Uberisation complements “the classical” outsourcing while also competing with it. It is complementary in that it is an additional step towards transferring the costs and responsibility of production. It is also, however, a way to eliminate outsourced companies that do not have the means to compete with app-companies. This is noted in the motorcycle courier segment. In the 1980s, the motoboy was directly hired by a company, and the motorbike was even owned by the contractor and not the worker. From the 1990s, outsourced courier companies took over the market. There are currently 900,000 motorcycle couriers in Brazil, with around 200,000 of these in the city of São Paulo alone. This immense army of motorbike drivers - who risk their lives and bodies on a daily basis to guarantee the circulation of goods and documents - has expanded together with the level of outsourcing of their job. The lower classes now have access to credit that makes it possible to finance the purchase of a motorbike; the use of the mobile phone has become a popular work tool, which completely reconfigures the logistics and pace of the work of these professionals; the possibility of earning a higher remuneration than other low skilled jobs are elements that contribute to the consolidation and spread of outsourced companies and an ample job on offer for motorcycle drivers. At the same time, the growth in the contingency of workers and contracting companies is also related to the development of the city of São Paulo as a collapsed metropolis in relation to urban mobility, while at the same time being a global financial centre.

Motorcycle courier app-companies have entered this well-consolidated universe of outsourced companies and its immense army of workers. These apps have been on the market for less than five years - though there are no precise data -, but it is certain that they count on thousands of motorcycle couriers in São Paulo.[xiii] To deliver for Loggi, the courier becomes a microentrepreneur (MEI in Brazil) and must be regulated as a motorcycle courier.[xiv] The founders of Loggi entered onto the market creating a niche that previously did not exist. Like Uber, Loggi app connects consumers and motorcycle couriers; it defines the price of the delivery, keeping a 20% commission for this mediation; it has automatised the logistics, developing software that geolocalises the couriers available and the consumers. The consumer makes a request, the online platform makes the request visible to the closest motorcycle couriers, and whoever accepts first, takes the delivery. Motorcycle couriers are mapped before and during the delivery, and the consumer can follow his location online. This surveillance operates as a mechanism that is fundamental to the consumer’s confidence in the service. For the courier, the app is a way to free him from the exploitation of the outsourced company (which in general takes 40% of the cost of the delivery) and turn into a self-employed worker, which, at least for now, provides him with a higher income. Being self-employed means having to give up certain rights (for themotoboys that are formal workers) in addition to facing the permanently difficult relationship between competitors and income level; the higher the number of workers that adhere to the apps, the smaller the possibility of earning, and most likely, the more one will have to work.[xv]

In addition, uberisation and traditional outsourcing can complement each other. For many, the app and outsourced companies are complementary. The motoboy may establish his own strategies to work for both of them at the same time, promoting new informal ways of labour intensification, matching his precarious formal job with the work offer from the apps. In this way, the motorcycle courier fills up the pores of his workday with the tasks offered by the apps - a strategy that requires knowledge of his own logistics.

The brave new world of the e-marketplace

To understand uberisation, we must use the terms already familiar to the market, but not so much to critical social thought. The digital economy today is a new field of work flexibilisation, being a virtual space that connects the activities of consumers, workers and companies, in less recognisable and locatable forms.

At present, regarding Brazil, many professionals such as drivers, motorcycle couriers, lorry drivers, beauticians, builders, cleaners, nannies, as well as lawyers, doctors, teachers, can count on apps that enable the uberisation of their work. The labour market is penetrated by a virtual space of buying and selling work, known as the e-marketplace. This virtual universe is extremely favourable to the transformation of workers into microentrepreneurs, as well as workers into amateur workers. As one director of a motorcycle courier app-company in São Paulo explained, the “e-marketplace is a place where people meet. We are a place where people that are looking for a courier motorcycle service can find motorcycle couriers.”

The e-marketplace has become a useful and profitable universe, boosted by new company models known as startups. Loggi, Uber, Google and Facebook are examples of startups that succeeded. Startup is the name for the contemporary combination of innovation, entrepreneurship and a substantial participation of investment funds. They are small companies with major potential in terms of profits; innovation here refers to technological development, but also the possibility to create new business models. Startups materialise the entrepreneur spirit of contemporary capitalism and a new form of future corporations. Uber is good example of a successful startup - as given on its site, it was founded in 2008 when two enlightened friends, while walking around Paris, realised that the difficulty in finding a taxi was in fact a perfect niche market. Launched onto the market in 2010, the company can currently be found in 540 cities around the world. In 2016, its market value was more than US$64 billion. The company gets rid of labour costs yet maintaining productivity gains and control over production. The startups that establish themselves as app-companies - as understood in this study - reached the pinnacle of the lean company, with very few employees and millions of connected entrepreneurs – amateur workers – and engaged consumers. These companies are fundamental in consolidating the e-marketplace, but appear as simple mediators between supply and demand (as with Amazon; the mobile apps for taxis, such as Easytaxi; online clothes shops, such as Boohoo). In reality, some of these companies dramatically reorganise the world of work, establishing new niches in diverse occupations, new forms of control over work and new consumer experiences.

Crowdsourcing: the productive multitude of amateur workers

In 2008, the journalist Jeff Howe coined the term crowdsourcing.[xvi] Outsourcing had reached a new stage, feeding now from thecrowd. Navigating in the celebration of the sharing economy, the author in fact reveals an ongoing massive transfer of work traditionally carried out by companies to the users of cyberspace. Uberisation and crowdsourcing are deeply connected when we look at the multitude of amateur workers, which are explicitly working. But their work does not count on labour rights or state regulations, nor does it give them a stable professional identity. Sometimes, it is not even defined as work. From the side of the companies, the amateur work of the crowd functions as unpaid or low paid work. At present, the transferal of work in the form of work can be recognised in several sites that count on the adhesion of a multitude of users-workers. At the beginning of the 2000s, NASA created the Clickworkers project and with it discovered that it was not necessary to hire workers to identify elements such as craters in photos from Mars: after testing the multitude, it proved that this was as efficient and a much faster way to carry out the task, in an unpaid form of “collaboration for the future”. The site Innocentive currently congregates uberised scientists with corporations such as Procter & Gamble and Johnson’s & Johnson’s. These companies realised that their Research and Development departments could be extended to improvised laboratories of professionals looking to complement their income or merely motivated by the “challenges” offered on the site. The solutions proposed by the users can be patented by the companies, while the selected/winner user receives a financial prize.

Crowdsourcing is only possible if the worker is an amateur worker. What we come across is a significant loss – that can be profitably appropriated - of stable socially established elements that structured professional identity, recognition of work and of the worker. The multitude of workers carry out work without its socially defined form, in activities that can move between leisure, creativity, consumption and ways of income generation. The Uber driver is not a professional driver, as in the case of a taxi driver. The problem solver at Innocentive may even be an employee from a Research and Development department, but as a user, he is an amateur scientist. There is no defined workplace, no employment relationship, no dedication required, no selection process, contract or dismissal (although, as has been shown, the competition is permanent, in a diffused and non-localisable form). It can be said that, in contemporaneity, every worker is a potential amateur worker. As with the motorcycle courier combining his work from the outsourced company with that from the app, and the self-employed engineer who spends his days between the computer and at the wheel of the Uber car, workers with the most diverse socioeconomic profiles engage in activities that do not have a definable professional status, but are a source of income, cost reduction, or even a way to exercise their creativity.

From “getting by” to Gig Economy

Returning to the beauty salons, with typically female workers it is possible to identify the roots of flexible work that crosses the market from top to bottom. The blurred lines between what is and what is not labour time, the fusion between professional and private spheres, the absence of the public realm as the main field for labour regulations, as well as the uncertainty over what is and what is not work are some of the elements that weave women’s lives. In the most precarious jobs as sewing homework, domestic employment, the work of housewives, one can identify elements that weave contemporary forms of labour exploitation. Investigating a typically female occupation, it was possible to identify tendencies in progress on the labour market, that today visibly merge with uberisation. Cosmetic resellers, for the Brazilian company Natura alone, comprise more than 1.5 million women in Brazil. From diverse socioeconomic profiles such as cleaners, secretaries, teachers and housewives, they combine their profession, or the lack of, with resales. Resales are largely permeable with the resellers private life and other occupations. Selling throughout the workday in schools, offices, at family gatherings, advertising makeup workshops during holidays, distributing products while working in public institutions: what was found in the research was a total adhesion to work with no actual labour form; and it is precisely this lack of form that makes its permeability with other activities possible.

The company transfers a series of risks and costs to the multitude of workers, and counts on non-accountable and unpaid work performed by these women. The home, the workplace, the investment in products for personal use as a means to sell, as well as personal relationships work as vectors for the sales and also to promote the brand. But what is of greater interest here is the recognition of the adhesion of 1.5 million women (in Brazil alone), to amateur work. Labour without defined labour forms, with fragile regulation, that operates as a means to complement income, as an exercise of an undefined professional identity and to facilitate consumption. From the company’s point of view, the informal amateur work is well appropriated, and tied by the transformation of informality into information, in a factory in which its just-in-time production is driven by the pace of this gigantic army.

The relationship that the Uber driver has with his work is very similar to that of the Natura reseller: a supplement to their income from an activity that does not confer a professional status; it is a contingent work, amateur work, for which they use their own car, driving skills, personal strategies and availability for the work.

Looking at these workers, the notion of “getting by” stands out. This is a definition that is both up to date and historically structural to Brazilian labour. The notion of getting by[xvii] is not significantly addressed in Brazilian labour studies, including in the production and analysis of data on employment/unemployment; however, it is a fundamental part of the life and survival of low qualified and poorly paid workers. The concept of “living on the edge” for the majority of Brazilian population means constantly grabbing opportunities, which technically speaking translates into a high turnover on the Brazilian labour market, the constant movement between formal and informal work (Cardoso, 2013), on combining contingent jobs, social programs of income generation, illegal activities and formal work (see research on living in the periphery, in particular those coordinated by Gabriel Feltran, Vera Telles, Cibele Rizek, Robert Cabanes and Isabel Georges[xviii]). The professional trajectory of themotoboys interviewed makes this evident. Today a formal motorcycle courier and informal pizza delivery boy, tomorrow a self employed app motorcycle courier; yesterday shoe factory worker, car-parking attendant, pizza maker, street market seller, car wash worker. Today amotogirl, before this a cleaner, kitchen assistant and coordinator at a clinic for drug addicts. Motorcycle courier, locksmith, salesman in a construction materials shop; confectioner and builder. Owner of a small beverage shop, low-paid farmer, bank worker, and today self-employed motorcycle courier. Todaymotoboy, previously cleaner, doorman and bus fare collector. This is the movement with which a large percentage of Brazilians weave the world of work.

The notion of “getting by”, however, now seems to go beyond typical structural element of peripheral countries’ labour markets. It has always been in the core of labour markets of these countries, although it has been commonly taken as an unimportant or irrelevant aspect, understood more as a sign of their late development than as an important element of capitalist accumulation. It seems now to become more recognisable and finally more politically relevant under the western definition of gig economy, which nominates the market moved by this multitude of workers that adhere to unstable work, that has no defined identity, and move between being contingent work or activities for which there is not even a defined name. The online platform of the company Airbnb, for example, counts on the adhesion of millions of users that make their homes available for instant and momentary rental. Acting as amateur microentrepreneurs, they become a kind of manager/ administrator of their own homes. Gig economy is composed of remunerated services, that barely have a concrete labour form, that count on the engagement of the worker-user, on his self-management and his own definition of personal strategies. Gig economy gives name to the multitude of just-in-time workers (as highlighted by Francisco de Oliveira at the beginning of the 2000s and Naomi Klein in mapping the path from brands to workers) [xix], that adhere in an unstable and permanently transitory form to diverse occupations and activities as a means of survival and other subjective motivations that must be better understood. These activities are however subsumed, under forms of control and exploitation, at the same time evident but hardly localisable. The so-calledsocial disposability is also productive. At least for now.

[i] The zero-hours contract already covers 3% of the workforce in the UK, more than 900,000 workers, and has grown exponentially since 2012. This contract regulates the conditions of thejust-in-time worker, allowing companies to employ workers according to their needs, with lower costs and fees involved.

[ii]http://sao-paulo.estadao.com.br/noticias/geral,total-de-carros-da-uber-e-outros-aplicativos-supera-numero-de-taxistas-em-sp-diz-doria,70001653256

[iii] For a discussion on the work of the amateur worker, see: Dujarier, M.Le travail du consommateur. Paris, La Découverte, 2009;  Abílio, L.C.Sem maquiagem: o trabalho de um milhão de revendedoras de cosméticos. São Paulo : Boitempo, 2014;  Abilio, L. C. Labour make up: A case study of 800,000 cosmetics resellers. Work Organisation, Labour & Globalisation (Print). , v.5, p.96 - 110, 2011.

[iv]https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/dr-gridlock/wp/2016/11/29/uber-driv…

[v]http://observer.com/2016/05/ubers-quasi-union-could-be-a-faustian-barga… ;https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/21/uber-driver-settleme…

[vi]https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/oct/28/uber-uk-tribunal-sel…

[vii]https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/01/foodora-strike-turin-gig-economy-sta…

[viii]https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/aug/15/deliveroo-workers-stri…

[ix]https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/05/uber-drivers-union-s…

[x] Evaluating the cost-benefit, hundreds of Uber drivers concluded that the costs of using the car, among others, are greater than carrying out short rides. One of the ways the drivers found to overcome this was to get longer journeys from Guarulhos, the international airport. This decision translated into the formation of parking areas, in which massive queues form while drivers wait for the next job. The driver can spend hours (12 hours, according to the news) waiting for a job from the airport - which he must accept, even though the destination and pay are unknown to him. Drivers spend the day playing cards and dominos, while around them there is a network of informal workers supplying food, beverages and portable toilets.http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/cotidiano/2017/02/1857136-por-corrida-cara-motorista-do-uber-acampa-por-12-h-perto-de-aeroporto.shtml

[xi] In the research carried out with the motorycle couriers, it was clear that the majority of interviewees have a workday of 14 hours or more, amidst the São Paulo traffic.

[xii] HARVEY, D.The condition of postmodernity: an enquiry into the origins of cultural change. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989.  Bernardo, J.Democracia totalitária: teoria e prática da empresa soberana. São Paulo: Cortez, 2004.

[xiii]http://valor-ri.com.br/empresas/4539699/motofretistas-tem-nova-concorre…

[xiv] In 2009, under Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s government, regulation on the motorcycle courier and motorcycle taxi professions was introduced. The municipal governments took charge of local regulations. In São Paulo, the regulation was the subject of diverse demonstrations in which hundreds of motorcycle couriers blocked main roads/routes in the city with their motorbikes. The regulation involves a series of costs for themotoboys. Up until now, despite being implemented in the city of São Paulo, it is not subject to fiscal control, thus remains optional for the worker. Motorcycle courierapp-companies only register professionally registered professionals. For these companies, the regulation is extremely propitious, as it certifies the self-employed worker, and operates as a type of bureaucratisation in relation to trust which is imperative for the consumer to contract the service. Thus,motoboys that work with apps are MEI-motorcycle couriers.

[xv]http://exame.abril.com.br/negocios/com-aporte-de-us-2-1-bi-uber-ja-vale-mais-que-ford-ou-gm/

[xvi] Howe, Jeff.Crowdsourcing: How the power of the crowd is driving the future of business. Nova York, Rondon House, 2008.

[xvii] Telles, V. Mutações do trabalho e experiência urbana.Tempo social, n.18, v.1, 2006, p. 173-95.

[xviii] CABANES, R.; GEORGES, I.; RIZEK, C. & TELLES, V (orgs.).Saídas de emergência: Ganhar/perder a vida na periferia de São Paulo. São Paulo: Boitempo, 2011; FELTRAN, G. O valor dos pobres.Cadernos CRH, Salvador, v.27, n.72, p. 495-512, Dez. 2014; TELLES, V. S.; CABANES, R. (Orgs.).Nas Tramas da Cidade - trajetórias urbanas e seus territórios. São Paulo: Associação Editorial Humanitas, 2006.

[xix] Oliveira, F. Passagem na neblina.In: Stédile, J. , Genoíno, J. (orgs.)Classes sociais em mudança e luta pelo socialismo. São Paulo: Perseu Abramo, 2000..KLEIN, N.No logo: taking aim at the brand bullies. Vintage Canada, 2000.

Alberto Toscano on Fascism

This paper was first delivered as a seminar in February 2017 at Simon Fraser University. The author thanks Clint Burnham for the comradely hospitality and the participants for their critical engagement. A Greek translation can be found here.

Alberto Toscano is Reader in Critical Theory and co-director of the Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is the author of Cartographies of the Absolute (2015), The Theatre of Production: Philosophy and Individuation Between Kant and Deleuze (Palgrave, 2006) and Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea (Verso, 2010) as well as the translator, most recently, of Alain Badiou’s Logics of Worlds(Continuum, 2009) and The Century(Polity, 2007). He also edits the Italian List for Seagull Books and is a longstanding member of the HM editorial board.

Image: Philip Guston, The Studio, 1969

Those who find themselves living in times of crisis and disorientation often seek guidance in analogical thinking. The likeness of one conjuncture with another promises the preparedness necessary not to be found wanting again, to avert the culpable errors of precursors unarmed with foresight. As a striking example of this recourse to analogy, among countless ones that have circulated before and after Trump’s grotesque coronation, consider this diagnosis by Franco Berardi ‘Bifo’, from a post on Yannis Varoufakis et al.’s DiEM25 page, entitled ‘National-Workerism and Racial Warfare’, published on November 10, 2016, and reprised in his intervention at a conference in Vienna this December under the title ‘A New Fascism?’, also featuring interventions by Chantal Mouffe and the Hungarian dissident and communist philosopher Gáspár Tamás:[1]

As they did in 1933, the workers have revenged against those who have long been duping them: the politicians of the “democratic” reformist left. … This ‘left’ should be thrown in the dustbin: they have opened the way to Fascism by choosing to serve financial capitalism and by implementing neoliberal “reforms”. … Because of their cynicism and their cowardice they have delivered people into the hands of the corporations and the governments of our lives. In so doing, they have opened the door to the fascism that is now spreading and to the global civil war that now seems unstoppable. … The white worker [sic] class, humiliated over the last thirty years, deceived by endless reformist promises, impoverished by financial aggression, has now elected the Ku Klux Klan to the White House. As the left has taken away from the hands of the workers the democratic weapons of self-defence, here comes the racist version of the class warfare.[2]

The analogy of fascism – itself inextricably entangled with its infrastructural pair, the analogy of economic crisis – is my starting point here. I don’t wish directly to explore the cognitive or strategic power of such an analogy, either in the present moment or in earlier iterations, gauging how it may allow us to see and act, but to use it as an occasion to reflect on what some philosophically-oriented theories of fascism advanced in the twentieth century may indicate about the contemporary nexus of politics and history, often by way of determinate dis-analogies. So, my aim will not be to adjudicate the question ‘Is this fascism?’, but rather to discern some of the effects of projecting theories of fascism onto the present, perhaps learning something from their refraction.

Very provisionally, I think they allow us to confront the peculiarity of a fascism without movement, without utopia; a fascism shorn of what Bloch called non-contemporaneity, and Bataille termedhetereogeneity; a fascism that is not reacting to the threat of revolutionary politics, but which retains the racial fantasy of national rebirth and the frantic circulation of a pseudo-class discourse. I also want to suggest that the latter is best met not by abetting the sociologically spectral figure of the “forgotten” white working class, but by confronting what collective politics means today, in the understanding that accepting this racialized simulacrum of a proletariat is not a stepping stone towards class politics but rather its obstacle, its malevolent ersatz form. The aim then is to sketch out, for collective debate and dispute, something like the elementary aspects of a pseudo-insurgency – with the caveat that a pseudo-insurgency was in many ways what the murderous fascism of Europe’s interwar period embodied.

For all of their disputes over the proper theoretical approach to the surge of fascism after the cataclysm of World War 1, most Marxist theorists at the time approached the phenomenon at the interface of the political and the economic, seeking to adjudicate the functionality of the fascist abrogation of liberal parliamentary democracy to the intensified reproduction of the conditions for capitalist accumulation.[3] This entailed identifying fascism as a ruling-class solution to the organic crisis of a regime of accumulation confronted by the threat of organised class struggle amid the vacillations of an imperialist order, but also recognising, at times, the contradictions between the autonomy or primacy of the political brutally asserted by fascist movements and the possibility of a reproduction of the capitalist mode of production – whence the debates of the 1930s and 1940s, especially instigated by the work of Frankfurt School theorists like Friedrich Pollock and Franz Neumann, over the viability ofstate capitalism, debates which contemporary historical work, such as Adam Tooze’s impressiveWages of Destruction, continues to illuminate. Without discounting the tactical alliances that sundry sectors of the US capitalist class may make with the Trump administration (from cement to private security, oil to cars), there is little at present,especially in what concerns any organised challenge to capitalist hegemony, which to my mind warrants the analogy of fascism in this respect – not least in light of widespread corporate protestations, the comparative attraction for capital of Hillary Clinton-style socially-conscious neoliberalism for the maintenance of social peace and profitability, the enigma of protectionism and so on.

The intensely superstructural character of our present’s fascistic traits seems instead to warrant looking elsewhere. Many have already noted the insights that may be mined from the psycho-social inroads that the Frankfurt School (again) made into the phenomenon of fascism, from the writings of Fromm, Marcuse and Horkheimer on petty-bourgeois sadomasochisms in theirStudies on Authority and the Family to the postwar Studies on Prejudice series, with its compendious empirical inquiries into the authoritarian personality. I’ll return to these later, to reflect on some of Adorno’s insights on mass psychology and narcissism, but I want first to try and think with one of the most heterodox entries in the interwar philosophical debate on fascism, Ernst Bloch’sThe Heritage of Our Times. This protean, fascinating and unsettling work – which Walter Benjamin once likened with pejorative intent to spreading wonderfully brocaded Persian carpets on a field of ruins[4] – contains a central, and justly famous, reflection on ‘Non-Contemporaneity and the Obligation to its Dialectic’. Like Bataille, if in a very different register, it was not at the level of political instrument or psychic pathology but at that of perverted utopian promise that Bloch approached fascism. Notwithstanding the crucial elements this occluded from his view,[5] this angle of vision allowed Bloch to identify its popular energising features, ones which, in his view, its Marxist and communist counterpart had failed effectively to mobilise. Underlying Bloch’s argument is the idea that thesocius is criss-crossed by plural temporalities; the class structure of modern society is shadowed by multiple cultural and historical times that do not exist synchronously. The racist, conspiratorial occultism of the Nazis taps this lived experience of uneven development:

The infringement of ‘interest slavery’ (Zinsknechtschaft) is believed in, as if this were the economy of 1500; superstructures that seemed long overturned right themselves again and stand still in today’s world as whole medieval city scenes. Here is the Tavern of the Nordic Blood, there the castle of the Hitler duke, yonder the Church of the German Reich, an earth church, in which even the city people can feel themselves to be fruits of the German earth and honor the earth as something holy, as theconfessio of German heroes and German history …  Peasants sometimes still believe in witches and exorcists, but not nearly as frequently and as strongly as a large class of urbanites believe in ghostly Jews and the new Baldur. The peasants sometimes still read the so-called Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses, a sensational tract about diseases of animals and the forces and secrets of nature; but half the middle class believes in the Elders of Zion, in Jewish snares and the omnipresence of Freemason symbols and in the galvanic powers of German blood and the German land.[6]

Where the class struggle between capitalist bourgeoisie and proletariat is a struggle over modernisation, the synchronous or the contemporary, both socially and psychically many (indeed most) Germans in the interwar period lived through social forms and psychic fantasies embedded in different rhythms and histories. Mindful that it would be wrong to view any of these as merely primitive, in a country where social relations of production were never actually outside capitalism, Bloch wants to detect the ways in which, when it comes to their fears (of social demotion or anomie) and desires (for order or well-being), these groups are somehow out of sync with the rationalizing present of capitalism – the enlightened space occupied by the mainstream socialist and labour movements. For Bloch, the Germany of the 1930s is a country inhabited not just by disenchanted citizens, workers and exploiters. Crisis has brought ‘nonsynchronous people’ to the fore: declining remnants of pasts whose hopes remain unquenched, easily recruited into the ranks of reaction.

In a sense at once social and psychic, the political conjuncture is torn between the antagonistic and unfulfilled Now of capitalist conflict and the incomplete pasts that teem in its interstices. The collective emotional effect is a ‘pent-up anger’, which the Nazis and their capitalist boosters are able to mine and to exacerbate, while it remains off-limits to a communism whose enlightenmental rationalism risks becoming practically irrational. So it is that the ‘monopoly capitalist upper class . . . utilizes gothic dreams against proletarian realities’. The question of how to relate, intellectually and politically, to the nonsynchronous becomes central, since it is useless to console oneself with the evolutionist just-so story according to which the archaic will gradually be eroded by social and economic progress. ‘[N]ot the theory of the national socialists is serious, but its energy is, the fanatic-religious impact, which does not just come from despair and ignorance, but rather from the uniquely stirring power of belief’, writes Bloch.[7] Though the political strategy of the proletariat must perforce be synchronous if it is to confront the capitalist Now, it is also required to recover and shape the kind of nonsynchronicity from where immemorial and invariant demands of justice stem. Bloch articulates this unfulfilled and ‘unclaimed’ task in terms of the relation between two forms of contradiction: on the one hand, the synchronous and determinate negativity of the organized proletariat; on the other, those ‘subversively utopian’ positivities that have ‘never received fulfilment in any age’. In this regard, Bloch was trying to supplement a thinking of the ‘synchronous’ contradiction between capital and labour and the ‘nonsychronous contradictions’ that implicated classesout of step with the rhythms and sites of capital accumulation (peasants, petty-bourgeoisie, aristocracy, lumpen proletariat, etc.).

As Rabinbach notes, quoting from Heritage:

The contradiction between these temporal dimensions demands what Bloch calls "the obligation to its dialectic," a recognition of complexity which not only focuses on the synchronous, but on the non-synchronous, the multi- temporal and multi-layered contradictions within a single present. For Bloch it is precisely this sedimentation of social experience that creates the intense desire for a resurrection of the past among those groups most susceptible to fascist propaganda. For Marxism the problem is that fascist ideology is not simply an instrument of deception but "a fragment of an old and romantic antagonism to capitalism, derived from deprivations in contemporary life, with a longing for a vague 'other.'”[8]

For Bloch, the point is to identify fascism as a ‘swindle of fulfilment’ – in his wonderful phrase – while taking that urge for fulfilment, and the manner in which it reactivates unfulfilled pasts and unrealised futures, seriously. But is the complex dialectic of ‘salvage’ invoked by Bloch – for whom, it is not just phases of emancipatory élan but also derived “periods of decline when the multiplicity of contents are released in its disintegration” from which one may revitalise a revolutionary heritage – one that we can turn to today? Severe doubt is cast on this possibility by all those critical theories which have emphasised, from the immediate post-war period onwards, the evanescence or obliteration of cultural and temporal difference from the lived experience of advanced capitalist economies.

A ‘postmodern’, ‘one-dimensional’ or ‘administered’ society is defined perhaps above all by this waning of historicity – which may of course be accompanied by the proliferation of its instrumentalised simulacra. An interesting testament to this might be sought in the controversial newspaper articles of the mid-1970s in which Pier Paolo Pasolini, shortly before his murder, sought to articulate the difference between an old and a new fascism. The latter, which for Pasolini was coterminous with a repressively hedonistic neo-capitalism, with its overt and covert mechanisms for utter conformity, was marked by the obliteration of the past, in the form of what he called (in supposed if rather mystifying reference to The Communist Manifesto) an “anthropological genocide”, namely the death of the experiences linked to peasant and ‘popular’ times and forms of life, a “genocide” he would even register in the transformation of bodies, gestures and postures themselves.[9] For Pasolini, the old fascism (and here the reference is strictly to its Italian variant) was incapable of really undoing or transforming – we could say ‘synchronising’ – those deeply embedded lifeways. This was evident in how they re-emerged seemingly unscathed after the death of Mussolini. Contrariwise the total power of contemporary capitalism, to intensively shape and homogenise desires and forms of life, especially under the appearance of difference, choice and freedom, meant the destruction of all the signs of historical unevenness, with all their utopian potentials. In the profoundly pessimistic view of Pasolini, and contra Bloch, there were no pasts left to salvage.

Now, how might we revisit this question of fascism and (non-)contemporaneity in our moment? Perhaps we can begin with an enormous dialectical irony: the fascistic tendencies finding expression in the election of Trump, but also in coeval revanchist nationalist projects across the ‘West’, are seemingly driven by a nostalgia for synchronicity. No archaic pasts, or invented traditions here, but the nostalgia for the image of a moment, that of the post-war affluence of thetrente glorieuses, for a racialized and gendered image of the socially-recognised patriotic industrial worker (Bifo’s national-workerism could also be called anational or racial Fordism, which curiously represses the state-regulatory conditions of its fantasy). To employ Bloch’s terms this isa nostalgia for the synchronous, for the contemporary. The authorised emblem of a post-utopian depoliticised post-war industrial modernity, the industrial worker-citizen, now reappears – more in fantasy than in fact, no doubt, or in the galling mise-en-scène of ‘coal workers’ surrounding the US President as he abolishes environmental regulations – in the guise of the “forgotten men”, the “non-synchronous people” of the political present. If this is a utopia, it is a utopia without transcendence, without any “fanatic-religious” element, without an unconscious or unspoken surplus of popular energies.

Accordingly, just as the non-synchronous dialectic has been transmuted today into the paradoxical non-synchronicity of the synchronous (or the nostalgia for Fordist modernity, the utopia of a post-utopian age), so Bataille’s parallel identification of the dynamic appeal of fascism with its manipulation of heterogeneity (that which is incommensurable with the orderly self-reproduction of capitalist order, whether from below as mass excess or from above as unaccountable sovereignty) requires present correction. The fascistic tendencies of the present contain little if any relationship to such a libidinal surplus, except in the degraded vestigial form of what we could call, by analogy with the psychoanalytic notion of the ‘obscene father’, the ‘obscene leader’. And this too is linked to the absence of one of the key historical features of fascism, namely the revolutionary threat to capitalist order, demanding that homogeneity inoculate itself with excess (or with its simulacrum) in order to survive. As Bataille noted in his essay on ‘The Psychological Structure of Fascism’:

As a rule, social homogeneity is a precarious form, at the mercy of violence and even of internal dissent. It forms spontaneously in the play of productive organization but must constantly be protected from the various unruly elements that do not benefit from production, or not enough to suit them, or simply, that cannot tolerate the checks that homogeneity imposes on unrest. In such conditions, the protection of homogeneity lies in its recourse to imperative elements [the fundamentally excessive character of monarchical sovereignty] which are capable of obliterating the various unruly forces or bringing them under the control of order.[10] (p. 66)

The signal absence of anything like a mass movement from contemporary manifestations of fascism – which is only further underlined by the fact that today’s racial-nationalist right advertises its movement-character at every opportunity – could also be seen as a sign of this lack ofheterogeneity andnon-synchronicity, the palpable absence of theutopian and theanti-systemic from today’s germs of fascism.

To develop this intuition further it is worth exploring in some detail the relevance of the debates over the mass psychology of fascism to the contemporary debate. It was not only Bataille in his intervention, but many members of the Frankfurt School, who saw Freud’s 1922 essay ‘Mass Psychology and the Analysis of the “I”’ as a watershed in the study of the nexus of collective politics and individual desire, not least in its analysis of leadership. The influence of Freud’s text was vast and variegated (see for an interesting contemporary reflection Stefan Jonsson’s work) but I want to consider it via a postwar text of Adorno’s, ‘Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda’ (1951), which may also be taken as a kind of corrective to the salvage-readings of fascism provided by Bloch and Bataille. The interest of Adorno’s text is only increased by the fact that it relates to research, namely his own participation in the collective research project on The Authoritarian Personality and the book by Löwenthal and Guterman on American fascist agitators,Prophets of Deceit, which have been justly alluded to as illuminating of the Trump phenomenon.[11]

In The Prophets of Deceit, Löwenthal and Guterman draw the following composite  theoretical portrait of the American fascist agitator:

The agitator does not confront his audience from the outside; he seems rather like someone arising from its midst to express its innermost thoughts. He works, so to speak, from inside the audience, stirring up what lies dormant there. The themes are presented with a frivolous air. The agitator's statements are often ambiguous and unserious. It is difficult to pin him down to anything and he gives the impression that he is deliberately playacting. He seems to be trying to leave himself a margin of uncertainty, a possibility of retreat in case any of his improvisations fall flat. He does not commit himself for he is willing, temporarily at least, to juggle his notions and test his powers. Moving in a twilight zone between the respectable and the forbidden, he is ready to use any device, from jokes to doubletalk to wild extravagances. … He refers vaguely to the inadequacies and iniquities of the existing social structure, but he does not hold it ultimately responsible for social ills, as does the revolutionary. … The reformer and revolutionary generalize the audience's rudimentary attitudes into a heightened awareness of its predicament. The original complaints become sublimated and socialized. The direction and psychological effects of the agitator's activity are radically different. The energy spent by the reformer and revolutionary to lift the audience's ideas and emotions to a higher plane of awareness is used by the agitator to exaggerate and intensify the irrational elements in the original complaint. … In contradistinction to all other programs of social change, the explicit content of agitational material is in the last analysis incidental—it is like the manifest content of dreams. The primary function of the agitator's words is to release reactions of gratification or frustration whose total effect is to make the audience subservient to his personal leadership. …  He neglects to distinguish between the insignificant and the significant; no complaint, no resentment is too small for the agitator's attention. What he generalizes is not an intellectual perception; what he produces is not the intellectual awareness of the predicament, but an aggravation of the emotion itself. Instead of building an objective correlate of his audience's dissatisfaction, the agitator tends to present it through a fantastic and extraordinary image, which is an enlargement of the audience's own projections. The agitator's solutions may seem incongruous and morally shocking, but they are always facile, simple, and final, like daydreams. Instead of the specific effort the reformer and revolutionary demand, the agitator seems to require only the willingness to relinquish inhibitions. And instead of helping his followers to sublimate the original emotion, the agitator gives them permission to indulge in anticipatory fantasies in which they violently discharge those emotions against alleged enemies. … Through the exploitation of the fear of impending chaos the agitator succeeds in appearing as a radical who will have no truck with mere fragmentary reforms, while he simultaneously steers his adherents wide of any suggestion of a basic social reorganization.[12]

How does Adorno seek to theorise this ‘microfascist’ and antagonistic, but ultimately conservative, intensification of a ‘malaise’ that joins the sense of agential impotence to the disorientation of the humiliated individual before the enigmatic totality, here transmuted into conspiracy? He undertakes a detour via Freud’s ‘Mass Psychology and the Analysis of the “I”’. What he finds, especially since it relates to the forms of fascism in a post-war, i.e. post-fascist, context is perhaps more instructive for the present than the interwar philosophical reflection on fascism as a revolutionary phenomenon.

Adorno wishes to move from the agitational devices singled out by Löwenthal and Guterman, ones that have as their ‘indispensable ingredients … constant reiteration and scarcity of ideas’,[13] to the psychological structure underlying them. As Peter E. Gordon has noted, in his very rich review of Adorno’s contributions to reflecting on the Trump phenomenon,[14] Adorno’s reflections are oriented by his understanding of fascism as a phenomenon linked to the crisis of bourgeois individuality, as both psychic experience and social form. Or, in Adorno’s dialectical quip: “[We] may at least venture the hypothesis that the psychology of the contemporary anti-semite in a way presupposes the end of psychology itself”.[15] As for Freud, Adorno observes that he “developed within the monadological confines of the individual the traces of its profound crisis and willingness to yield unquestioningly to powerful outside, collective agencies”.[16] Adorno homes in on the problem of the libidinalbond that fascism requires, both vertically towards the leader (especially in the guise of a kind of play of narcissisms, the follower finding himself reflected in the leader’s own self-absorption) and horizontally, towards the racialized kin or comrade, identifying this as a technical, or psycho-technical, problem for fascism itself. Commenting on the Nazis obsession with the adjective “fanatical” (already the object of a brilliant entry by Victor Klemperer in hisThe Language of the Third Reich) and with Hitler’s avoidance of the role of the loving father, Adorno remarks: “It is one of the basic tenets of fascist leadership to keep primary libidinal energy on an unconscious level so as to divert its manifestations in a way suitable to political ends”.[17] This libidinal energy is of necessitypersonalized as an ‘erotic tie’ (in Freud’s terms), and operates through the psychoanalytic mechanism ofidentification (again, both horizontally and vertically).

At the psychoanalytic level, fascism preys on the contradiction between the self-preserving conatus of the ego and his constantly frustrated desires. This is a conflict that “results in strong narcissistic impulses which can be absorbed and satisfied only through idealization as the partial transfer of the narcissistic libido to the object [i.e. the leader] … by making the leader his ideal he loves himself, as it were, but gets rid of the stains of frustration and discontent which mar his picture of his own empirical self”.[18] What’s more, “in order to allow narcissistic identification, the leader has to appear himself as absolutely narcissistic … the leader can be loved only if he himself does not love”.[19] Even in his language, the leader depends on his psychological resemblance to his followers, a resemblance revealed in the mode of disinhibition, and more specifically in “uninhibited but largely associative speech”.[20] “The narcissisticgain provided by fascist propaganda is obvious. It suggests continuously and sometimes in rather devious ways, that the follower, simply through belonging to the in-group, is better, higher and purer than those who are excluded. At the same time, any kind of critique or self-awareness is resented as a narcissistic loss and elicits rage”.[21]

Yet the factor that more often than not the fascist leader appears as a “ham actor” and “asocial psychopath” is a clue to the fact that rather than sovereign sublimity, he has to convey some of the sense of inferiority of the follower, he has to be a “great little man”. Adorno’s comment is here instructive:

Psychological ambivalence helps to work a social miracle. The leader image gratifies the follower’s twofold wish to submit to authority and to be authority himself. This fits into a world in which irrational control is exercised though it has lost its inner conviction through universal enlightenment. The people who obey the dictators also sense that the latter are superfluous. They reconcile this contradiction through the assumption that they are themselves the ruthless oppressor.[22]

This loss of ‘inner conviction’ in authority is to my mind the true insight of Adorno’s reflections on fascist propaganda, and where it moves beyond Freud, still hamstrung by his reliance on the reactionary psychological energetics of Le Bon’s Psychology of the Crowd. This relates once again to the “end of psychology”, which is to say the crisis of a certain social form of individuality, which Adorno regards as the epochal context of fascism’s emergence. The leader-agitator can exploit his own psychology to affect that of his followers – “to make rational use of his irrationality”, in Adorno’s turn of phrase – because he too is a product of a mass culture that drains autonomy and spontaneity of their meaning.Contra Bataille and Bloch’s focus on the fascism’s perversion of revolution, for Adorno its psycho-social mechanism depends on its refusal of anything that would require the social or psychic transcendence of thestatus quo.

Fascism is here depicted as a kind of conservative politics of antagonistic reproduction, the reproduction of some against others, and at the limit a reproduction premised on their non-reproduction or elimination. Rather than an emancipatory concern with equality, fascism promotes a “repressive egalitarianism”, based on an identity of subjection and a brotherhood of hatred: “The undercurrent of malicious egalitarianism, of the brotherhood of all-encompassing humiliation, is a component of fascist propaganda and fascism itself” – it is its “unity trick”.[23] In a self-criticism of the psychological individualism that governedThe Authoritarian Personality, Adorno now argues that fascism does not have psychological causes but defines a “psychological area”, an area shared with non-fascist phenomena and one which can be exploited for sheer self-interest, in what is an “appropriation of mass psychology”, “the expropriation of the unconscious by social control instead of making the subjects conscious of their unconscious”. This is “the turning point where psychology abdicates”. Why? Because what we are faced with is not a dialectic of expression or repression between individual and group, mass or class, but with the “postpsychological de-individualized atoms which form fascist collectivities”.[24] And while these collectivities may appear “fanatical” their conviction is hollow, if not at all the less dangerous for that. Here lies the “phoniness” of fascist fanaticism, which for Adorno wasalready at work in Nazism, for all of its broadcasting of its own fanaticism:

The category of “phoniness” applies to the leaders well as to the act of identification on the part of the masses and their supposed frenzy and hysteria.  Just as little as people believe in the depth of their hearts that the Jews are the devil, do they completely believe in the leader.  They do not really identify themselves with him but act this identification, perform their own enthusiasm, and thus participate in their leader’s performance.  It is through this performance that they strike a balance between their continuously mobilized instinctual urges and the historical stage of enlightenment they have reached, and which cannot be revoked arbitrarily. It is probably the suspicion of this fictitiousness of their own “group psychology” which makes fascist crowds so merciless and unapproachable. If they would stop for a second, the whole performance would go to pieces, and they would be left to panic.[25]

This potentially murderous “phony fanaticism” differs from that of the “true believer” (and we could reflect on the problem that revolutionary fascists, from National-Bolsheviks to futurists, often posed to their own regimes) in a way that hints towards the crucial reliance of fascistic phenomena on varieties of the “unity trick”, on various forms of fictitious unity. Here Jairus Banaji’s reflections on fascism in India include a key insight, namely the contemporary uses to which Sartre’s reflections on “manipulated seriality” can be put for analysing fascist violence. The fascist “sovereign group” acts by transforming the serial existence of individuals in social life (Adorno’s “postpsychological deindividualised atoms”) into a false totality – be it nation, party or race (and often all three). “Manipulated seriality is the heart of fascist politics”, as Banaji asserts, because it is not justany mass that fascism conjures up (in fact, the fear of the masses was among its originating psycho-political factors, as Klaus Theweleit’s so brilliantly showed in its analysis of the writings of theFreikorps inMale Fantasies), but an other-directed mass that never “fuses” into a group, a mass which must produce macro-effects at the bidding of the group “other-directing” it, while all the while remaining dispersed. This is the problem of fascism (in a different but not unconnected guise to the problem of a depoliticising liberal democracy): how can the many act without gaining a collective agency, and above all without undoing the directing agency of the few (the group)? Banaji insightfully enlists Sartre’s categorial apparatus from theCritique of Dialectical Reason to think through the fascist ‘pogrom’:

The pogrom then is a special case of this ‘systematic other-direction’, one in which the group ‘intends to act on the series so as to extract a total action from it in alterity itself’. The directing group is careful ‘not to occasion what might be called organised action within inert gatherings’. ‘The real problem at this level is to extract organic actions from the masses’ without disrupting their status as a dispersed molecular mass, as seriality. So Sartre describes the pogrom as ‘the passive activity of a directed seriality’, an analysis where the term ‘passive’ only underscores the point that command responsibility is the crucial factor in mass communal violence, since the individuals involved in dispersive acts of violence are the inert instruments of a sovereign or directing group. Thus for Sartre the passive complicity that sustains the mass base of fascism is a serial complicity, a ‘serial responsibility’, as he calls it, and it makes no difference, in principle, whether the individuals of the series have engaged in atrocities as part of an orchestrated wave of pogroms or simply approved that violence ‘in a serial dimension’, as he puts it.[26]

That Sartre saw seriality as crucial to the very constitution of the modern state and its practices of sovereignty, also suggests that the borders between fascist and non-fascist other-direction may be more porous than liberal common sense suggests. Yet we could also say that fascism excels in the systematic manipulation of the serialities generated by capitalist social life, moulding them into pseudo-unities, false totalities.

If we accept the nexus of fascism and seriality, of a politics which is both other-directed and in which ‘horizontal relations’ are ones of pseudo-collectivity and pseudo-unity, in which I interiorise the direction of the Other as my sameness with certain others (Sartre’s analogy in Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. 1 between everyday racism and the phenomenon of the Top Ten comes to mind here), then we should be wary of analysing it with categories whichpresume the existence of actual totalities. This is why I think it is incumbent on a critical, or indeed anti-fascist, Left to stop indulging in the ambient rhetoric of the white working class voter as the subject-supposed-to-have-voted for the fascist-populist option. This is not only because of the sociological dubiousness of the electoral argument, or the enormous pass it gives to the middle and upper classes, or even because of the tawdry forms of self-satisfied condescension it allows a certain academic or journalistic commentator or reader, or the way it allows a certain left to indulge in fantasies for which ‘if only we could mobilise them…’. More fundamentally, it is because, politically speaking, the working class as a collective, rather than as a manipulated seriality, does not (yet) exist. Endowing it with the spectre of emancipation is thus profoundly misleading, irrespective of statistical studies on those quintessentially serial phenomena, elections.

To impute the subjectivity of a historical agency to a false political totality is not only unwittingly to repeat the “unity trick” of fascistic propaganda, it is to suppose that emancipatory political forms and energies lie latent in social life. By way of provocation we could adapt Adorno’s statement, quoted earlier, to read: “[We] may at least venture the hypothesis that the class identity of the contemporary Trump voter in a way presupposes the end of class itself”. A sign of this is of course the stickiness of the racial qualifierwhite working class. Alain Badiou once noted about the phraseology ofIslamic terrorism that “when a predicate is attributed to a formal substance … it has no other consistency than that of giving an ostensible content to that form. In 'Islamic terrorism', the predicate 'Islamic' has no other function except that of supplying an apparent content to the word 'terrorism' which is itself devoid of all content (in this instance, political).”[27] Whiteness is here, not just at the level of discourse, but I would argue at that of political experience, the supplement to a politically void or spectral notion of the working class; it is what allows a pseudo-collective agency to be imbued with a (toxic) psycho-social content. This is all the more patent if we note how incessantly in both public discourse and statistical pseudo-reflection in order to belong to this “working class” whiteness is indispensable, while any specific relation to the means of production, so to speak, is optional at best. The racialized experience of class is not an autonomous factor in the emergence of fascistic tendencies within the capitalist state; it is the projection of that state, amanipulated seriality, and thus an experiencedifferent in kind from political class consciousness, and likely intransitive to it. In a brilliant and still vital analysis, Étienne Balibar once defined racism as a supplement of nationalism:

racism is not an 'expression' of nationalism, but a supplement of nationalism or more precisely a supplement internal to nationalism, always in excess of it, but always indispensable to its constitution and yet always still insufficient to achieve its project, just as nationalism is both indispensable and always insufficient to achieve the formation of the nation or the project of a 'nationalization' of society. ... As a supplement of particularity, racism first presents itself as a super-nationalism. Mere political nationalism is perceived as weak, as a conciliatory position in a universe of competition or pitiless warfare (the language of international 'economic warfare' is more widespread today than it has ever been). Racism sees itself as an 'integral' nationalism, which only has meaning (and chances of success) if it is based on the integrity of the nation, integrity both towards the outside and on the inside. What theoretical racism calls 'race' or 'culture' (or both together) / is therefore a continued origin of the nation, a concentrate of the qualities which belong to the nationals 'as their own' ; it is in the 'race of its children' that the nation could contemplate its own identity in the pure state. Consequently, it is around race that it must unite, with race - an 'inheritance' to be preserved from any kind of degradation - that it must identify both 'spiritually' and 'physically' or 'in its bones' (the same goes for culture as the substitute or inward expression of race).[28]

Class, in contemporary attempts both to promote and to analyse fascistic fantasies and policies of ‘national rebirth’, risks becoming in its turn a supplement (of both racism and nationalism), stuck in the echo chambers of serialising propaganda. There is no path from the false totality of an other-directed racialized class to a renaissance of class politics, no way to turn electoral statistics and ill-designed investigations into the ‘populist subject’, the ‘forgotten men and women’, into a locus for rethinking a challenge to capital, or to analyse and challenge the very foundations of fascist discourse. Any such practice will need to take its distance from the pseudo-class subject which has reared its head across the political scene. This false rebirth of class discourse is itself part of the con, and another reminder that not the least of fascism’s dangers is the fascination and confusion its boundless opportunism sows in the ranks of its opponents. Rather than thinking that an existing working class needs to be won away from the lures of fascism, we may fare better by turning away from that false totality, and rethinking the making orcomposition of a class that could refuse becoming the bearer of a racial, or national predicate, as one of the antibodies to fascism.

*           *           *

Preliminary Theses on Late Fascism

Thesis 1 (after Bloch): late fascism is bereft of non-contemporaneity or non-synchronousness – except for the non-synchronousness of the synchronous, the nostalgia for a post-utopian industrial modernity;

T1 Cor. 1 (after Bataille): fascism today is very weak on the heterogeneous surplus necessary to reproduce capitalist homogeneity, both as the “sovereign” (or imperative) level, and that of the “base” (whether lumpen excess or unconscious drives);

T1 Cor. 2 (after Pasolini): the new fascism is a fascism of homogenisation masquerading as the jouissance of difference;

T2 (after Freud and Adorno): the psychic structure of fascism operates through a form of mass narcissism;

T3 (after Adorno): late fascism operates through a performance of fanaticism devoid of inner conviction, though its “phoniness” does nothing to lessen its violence;

T4 (after Adorno): (late) fascism is a conservative politics of antagonistic reproduction;

T5 (after Banaji-Sartre): (late) fascism is not the politics of a class, a group or a mass, but of a manipulated series;

T6: the racialized signifier of class functions in the production and reception of late fascism as a spectre, a screen and a supplement – of the racism which is in turn a necessary supplement of nationalism (a minimal definition of fascism being the affirmation of the supplement, and its more or less open transmutation into a key ingredient of the nation-state);

T7: late fascism is driven by a desire for the state and a hatred of government;

T8: late fascism reacts against what is already a liberal reaction, it is not primarily counter-revolutionary;

T9: late fascism is not consolidated by a ruling class effort to use the autonomy of the political to deal with an external limit of capital but one of the offshoots of an endogenous protracted crisis of legitimacy of capital, in which the political is autonomous more at the level of fantasy than function;

T10: late fascism is a symptom of the toxic obsolescence of the modern figure of the political, namely a “national and social state” in which citizenship is organised across axes of ethno-racial and gender identity, and articulated to labour.

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QHj7fE2I1o

[2]https://diem25.org/national-workerism-and-racial-warfare/

[3] For a lucid and nuanced introduction to the Marxist debate, from the standpoint of the 1970s, see Anson Rabinbach, ‘Toward a Marxist Theory of Fascism and National Socialism: A Report on Developments in West Germany’,New German Critique, 3 (Autumn, 1974), pp. 127-153.

[4] ‘The serious objection which I have of this book (if not of its author as well) is that it in absolutely no way corresponds to the conditions in which it appears, but rather takes its place inappropriately, like a great lord, who arriving at the scene of an area devastated by an earthquake can find nothing more urgent to do than to spread out the Persian carpets – which by the way are already somewhat moth-eaten-and to display the somewhat tarnished golden and silver vessels, and the already faded brocade and damask garments which his servants had brought.’ Walter Benjamin, Letter to Alfred Cohn of 6 February 1935, cited in Anson Rabinbach, ‘Unclaimed Heritage: Ernst Bloch's Heritage of Our Times and the Theory of Fascism’,New German Critique, 11 (Spring, 1977), p. 5.

[5] As Rabinbach notes, highlighting the significance of Benjamin’s reflections on capitalism, technology and modern spectacle: ‘Bloch emphasizes the continuity between fascism and the tradition embodied in its ideas, but he neglects those elements of discontinuity with the past-elements which give fascism its unique power as a form of social organization-so that its actual links to modern capitalism remain obscure.’ Ibid., p. 14.

[6] Ernst Bloch, ‘Nonsynchronism and the Obligation to Its Dialectics’, trans. M. Ritter,New German Critique, 11 (1977), 26. This text is an excerpt fromThe Heritage of Our Times.

[7]  Bloch,The Heritage of Our Times, quoted in Rabinbach, ‘Unclaimed Heritage’, pp. 13–14.

[8] ‘Unclaimed Heritage’, p. 7.

[9] Pier Paolo Pasolini, ‘Il vuoto di potere in Italia’,Il Corriere della Sera, 10 February 1975. The article would later be reprinted inScritti Corsari, a collection of Pasolini’s journalistic interventions published shortly after his death.

[10] Georges Bataille, ‘The Psychological Structure of Fascism’, trans. Carl L. Lovitt,New German Critique, 16 (1979), p. 66.

[11] Perusing the list of ‘themes’ of American fascistic agitation gives an inkling of such illumination: ‘The Eternal Dupes’; ‘Conspiracy’; ‘Forbidden Fruit’ (on the jouissance of the wealthy); ‘Disaffection’; ‘The Charade of Doom’; ‘The Reds’; ‘The Plutocrats’; ‘The Corrupt Government’; ‘The Foreigner’ (with its sub-section ‘The Refugee’).

[12] Leo Lowenthal and Norbert Guterman,Prophets of Deceit: A Study of the Techniques of the American Agitator (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1949), pp. 5-9, 34.

[13] Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda’, inThe Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (New York: Continuum, 1982), p. 119.

[14]https://www.boundary2.org/2016/06/peter-gordon-the-authoritarian-person…

[15] Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Remarks on the Authoritarian Personality’ (1958), cited in:https://www.boundary2.org/2016/06/peter-gordon-the-authoritarian-person…

[16] Adorno, ‘Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda’, p. 120.

[17] Adorno, ‘Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda’, p. 123.

[18] Adorno, ‘Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda’, p. 126.

[19] Adorno, ‘Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda’, pp. 126-7.

[20] Adorno, ‘Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda’, p. 132.

[21] Adorno, ‘Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda’, p. 130.

[22] Adorno, ‘Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda’, pp. 127-8.

[23] Adorno, ‘Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda’, p. 131.

[24] Adorno, ‘Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda’, p. 136.

[25] Adorno, ‘Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda’, pp. 136-7.

[26]http://eprints.soas.ac.uk/16825/1/Jamia%20lecture%20%28fascism%29.pdf

[27] Alain Badiou,Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return of Philosophy (London: Continuum, 2003), p. 153.

[28] Étienne Balibar, ‘Racism and Nationalism’, in E. Balibar and I. Wallerstein,Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London: Verso, 1988), pp. 54 and 59.

A review of Alex Anievas and Kerem Nişancıoğlu's How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism (Pluto, 2015)

For an alternative review, see our previous post by Jairus Banaji. Watch out for the symposium on the book forthcoming in theHistorical Materialism journal. 

Spencer Dimmock is a historian of late medieval and early modern England working in the Political Marxist tradition. He recently published The Origin of Capitalism in England (Brill, 2014), He has published numerous papers on late medieval and early modern English and Welsh society and economy. He is currently undertaking research for a forthcoming book provisionally entitled England's Second Domesday: The Expropriation of the English Peasantry and the Inquisition of 1517(Brill) which seeks to draw close attention to the uniqueness of the experience of the English peasantry and the political context of that experience c. 1450-1550.

Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nişancıoğlu have produced a remarkably ambitious book on the dynamics of pre-modern global socio-political and economic change which aims to account for how western Europe and North America (‘the West’) came to dominate the globe politically and economically.[1] At the heart of this transformation, they argue, was the emergence and development of capitalism in north-western Europe, notably in England, in the early modern period. Having said this, their main motivation has been to combat what they view as an unwarranted and pervasive Eurocentric bias by historians and historical sociologists in their analyses of the history of ‘modernity’. By treating the history of modern capitalist society as a linear development, internal to Europe, the technological, intellectual and economic contribution of the rest of the world to this achievement, notably that of the Middle-East and Asia (‘the East’), has been left out. They argue that this is not only flawed history, but it leads to an orientalist perspective which reinforces a stereotype of the East as perennially backward, incapable of change, and requiring the civilising touch of the West to bring it up to the latter’s universal standard of ‘modernity’. So the book’s main purpose is to ‘decentre’ or ‘provincialise’ Europe in analyses of the development of modernity (read capitalism), and to provide a ‘counter history’ to the conception of modernity as developed in the confines of Europe, subsequently spreading through its colonies and through military and commercial pressures to the rest of the world. The authors wish to highlight the fact that much of the East was more advanced economically, politically and culturally than the West before the emergence of capitalism and, moreover, to argue that the emergence of capitalism in north-western Europe was decisively dependent upon these progressive developments elsewhere.

The authors address a range of theoretical perspectives – World Systems Theory, Political Marxism and Post-Colonialism – and conclude that each in their own way are Eurocentric by centring on Europe as either the harbinger or core of capitalist modernity. Their preferred method-cum-theory, which they argue goes beyond those they have addressed, and genuinely incorporates the pre-capitalist East in the origin of capitalist modernity, is Uneven and Combined Development, ultimately derived from Leon Trotsky’s explanation for the Russian Revolution of 1917. Applying this theory they view the origins of capitalism in north-western Europe (England and the Netherlands) in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries primarily from a geopolitical or internationalist, intersocietal, perspective. For them, these origins were a value-added process generated by many societies interacting within and between different parts of the globe. All of these societies exhibited different or ‘uneven’ levels of socio-political and economic development, and as a result of their interaction they ‘combined’ to produce new social formations. It is this geopolitical interaction which provides the dialectic for change. As a result of the interaction less developed societies can benefit from ‘privileges of backwardness’ which enable them to skip centuries of development by drawing on or assimilating the best aspects of more advanced societies which then drives them forward. More advanced societies face the ‘penalties of progressiveness’, a result of their entrenched obligations and impulses etc., which holds them back. So, by applying this theory, the authors aim to demonstrate

...how the asynchronic simultaneity of a plurality of existing societies (unevenness) came to interact in ways that generated further substantive sociological differences (geopolitical combinations), in turn leading to sharp divergences in their developmental trajectories. This is in fact a hallmark of any inter-societal system: they are generatively differentiating through the very interactive plurality of their units.[2]