Sara Salem recently joined the Historical Materialism editorial board and is a Research and Teaching Fellow at the University of Warwick in the UK. Sara’s research looks at questions of political economy, feminist and gender studies, postcolonialism, history, and Marxism in the particular context of the Middle East. She has recently published journal articles in the European Journal of Women’s Studies, Hypatia, the Review of African Political Economy, and Middle East Topics and Arguments. 

Frantz Fanon remains one of the most important writers on postcolonial issues in the world today. Although he died quite young, his many books and essays are a reminder of his immense intelligence, passion, and foresight. He was born in Martinique in 1925, and after studying in France and receiving a doctorate in psychiatry, moved to Algeria. These three geographical locations were to have an immense effect on the way he understood the world and the power structures that define it. His experiences with racism in France in particular left a strong mark, and it was then that he began to develop the ideas that would define Black Skin, White Masks. It was in Algeria, however, that Fanon both developed his most famous text on postcolonialism,The Wretched of the Earth, and where he became involved in the national fight for liberation from French colonialism.

In his excellent biography of Fanon, David Macey wrote:

Fanon was angry. His readers should still be angry too. Angry that the wretched of the earth are still with us. Anger does not in itself produce political programs for change, but it is perhaps the most basic political emotion. Without it, there is no hope (Macey 2000, 503).

In this piece, I want to first discuss the politics around teaching Fanon in today’s postcolonial world, and in particular in a post-Brexit Britain. What is it about Fanon that captures the hearts and minds of so many students, particularly students of colour? I then want to discuss the continuing debate around Fanon’s relationship to Marxism, looking at some of the ways in which Fanon’s work provides a refreshing lens on capitalism in the postcolonial world. 

Teaching Fanon

I started university teaching in the UK just a few months after the outcome of the Brexit vote, which meant that it was something students wanted to discuss often and that was connected to multiple topics in multiple classes. There is little doubt that Brexit brought to the surface many tensions that have undercut discussions around race, class, gender and nation. For many it came as a rude awakening; for others, it was far from surprising. Discussing Brexit in class, over coffee, and in reading groups, it became clear that many students were searching for ways of understanding what was happening. It turns out that, more than anyone else, Frantz Fanon seemed to provide the type of analysis they needed to make sense of the seemingly senseless.

I have been pleasantly surprised at how often Fanon comes up in the classroom. Given how little exposure most British students have to Fanon in general, I wasn’t expecting him to be a recurring presence in classes. Aside from my own inclination to use Fanon extensively, I found many students to be excited discussing his work and inspired by the new horizons it opened up. In particular, his work on double consciousness, liberation and racism in Western societies make him especially relatable to students of colour living in the current post-Brexit moment.

Fanon’s thinking is wide-ranging and touches on many topics, but there is a thread that ties it all together, and that is a focus on the colonial and postcolonial condition. This is precisely where I have found it most useful to teach Fanon: at the intersections of colonial rule, decolonisation, and postcolonial futures. In particular, I have found Fanon’s approach to Marxism an excellent lens through which to teach on the economic and political problems facing newly-independent nations. In a sense, he has been an excellent corrective to Marxist work that can often be Eurocentric and that often does not appeal to students whose everyday lives are very much racialized and tied to the global colour line. Class as an all-encompassing category simply does not grasp the reality of their worlds. Yet at the same time, given the power of the contemporary neoliberal phase of late capitalism, they can very much feel the effects of neoliberal restructuring in the UK. Class matters—but so does race, gender, sexuality, and a host of other categories.

One of the more memorable discussions I had was during a reading group meeting[1] where we discussed the antagonisms between the British ‘white working class’ and the rest of the working class who were Black, Asian and Eastern European. Precisely where one would expect to find solidarity, we instead find the same level of racism and sexism as in the rest of society. Numerous pieces have touched on the problems with romanticising the white working class and excusing their racism by arguing that they have been the most affected by neoliberal policies in the US, UK and Europe.[2]

However, in our discussion we approached the question from a Fanonian perspective, which allowed for a more nuanced understanding of how Eurocentrism has positioned white workers in an antagonistic relationship vis-à-vis non-white workers, and that this was a conscious historical development that ultimately benefitted capital. Understanding it, however, through an economistic class lens would not have revealed the racialisation involved in this divide and rule tactic that ultimately led to the Brexit vote turning out the way it did. Pushing this further, we also discussed how Fanon’s move to see Eurocentrism globally means locating Western workers at the international level, and how workers in Western nations were able to gain significantly in the 1950s and 1960s precisely because workers in the Third World were instead more intensely exploited.

Perhaps what seemed to draw so many students to Fanon was his insistence on always centring power. Power is everywhere; it is not an accident nor a coincidence. Some nations are powerful, others aren’t; some men are powerful, others are not. This happens historically and is far from natural. It is around this subject that the most interesting discussions happen. Discussions about how we got to where we are today—and how others were unable to get here. About what we mean by progress, and why we need to progress at all. About who we blame and who we hold accountable—and who slips out of the picture as a consequence. This focus on power was also extremely multifocal: power was exercised through politics and economics; but also through culture and values as well as through the psyche.

This also spoke to many students, who are trapped today between discussions around identity politics that can sometimes see identity simplistically and not pay enough attention to the structural on the one hand, and debates around structures such as capitalism that do not pay attention to identities such as race, gender and sexuality on the other. Fanon in many ways transcended this so-called divide, and I often wonder if this was because of his training as a psychoanalyst whose work has always traced the effects of colonialism on the psyche of oppressor and oppressed. This is what many students in post-Brexit Britain are dealing with today: double consciousness, daily racial and sexual forms of repression and oppression, and a worsening economic context that sets impossible standards. How this impacts the psyche of people of colour growing up today is an under-studied aspect of the racial impact of Brexit and Britain’s colonial history in general.

This focus on race, consciousness, colonialism, and power is precisely what makes his work on postcolonialism especially attractive to students living in a postcolonial world that seems to be in a constant state of crisis. Fanon’s position on power and the postcolony is neatly encapsulated in a question that he once asked: do African leaders have the right to govern their countries badly? For many students this was a strange question: it was a given that some countries are governed badly and others are governed well and it just so happened that the division between the two was a racial one. This is an assumption that has come out quite clearly in my teaching on both international development as well as Middle East politics: that there continues to be a global divide between countries that know how to run themselves and countries that seem to be in a total shambles, constantly in a state of war or poverty.

It is no surprise to find these assumptions everywhere: we see it day in and day out in the media, and it is often reproduced by both well-meaning, well-intentioned people. But Fanon pushes us to focus less on these differences and more on what caused them. Why is there poverty in some places and not others? Why are regions conflict-prone? Why do some people live well while others don’t? These are, incidentally, some of the same questions Marxists have asked for well over a century.

Fanon’s question about whether African leaders have the right to govern themselves is the question at the heart of postcolonial studies; at the heart of any class on the postcolonial world: who has the power to define, to act, and to simply be. It is by asking Fanon’s question today that we can return to Stuart Hall’s question why now? Because we see a continuity, and that is precisely why Fanon still matters. African leaders did not have that right when Fanon asked the question; they do not have that right today. The ‘post’ in postcolonial has not meant independence in the fullest sense of the word.

Marxists have rightly pointed to capitalism as an answer to the questions of global inequality. Fanon has, in turn, rightly noted that capitalism is never just about economics: it is a fully racialized project and that is why the line between those who have and those who do not have is often a racial line—for Fanon it is race, not class, which divides the zone of being and the zone of non-being. You can be poor and white and remain in the zone of being, where you have the automatic right to life; you can be rich and black and be in the zone of non-being—at the top of it, but in the zone nonetheless. This provocative challenge to economistic Marxism is what I move to next.

Elena Louisa Lange is a Senior Researcher and Lecturer at the University of Zurich, a philosopher and specialist on Japan. She has published in the Historical Materialism journal on 'Failed abstraction – The Problem of Uno Kōzō's Reading of Marx’s Theory of the Value Form' (2014, 22.1, 3-33) and is currently working on her monograph (to be published for the HM Book Series)Value without Fetish - Uno Kōzō's Theory of 'Pure Capitalism' in Light of Marx's Critique of Political Economy. This interview was updated for the HM website but conducted by Vincent Chanson and Frédéric Monferrand and originally published in French inPeriode.

VC & FM: “Japanese” Marxism is not well-known in the French-speaking [or English-speaking] worlds. Except for a study by Jacques Bidet, 'Kozo Uno et son école. Une théorie pure du capitalisme' in Dictionnaire Marx Contemporain, a special issue of Actuel Marx (Le marxisme au Japon, n°2, mai 2000) [see also 'Kôzo Uno and His School : A Pure Theory of Capitalism by Jacques Bidet in Critical Companion to Contemporary Marxism (Edited by Jacques Bidet and Stathis Kouvelakis, 2009, Haymarket) and a few other texts, this tradition is missing in contemporary French Marxist debates. Could you briefly introduce its main currents and protagonists?

EL: Generally speaking, there has hardly been an intellectual in post-war Japan who has not at one point 'flirted' with Marxism. Influence of the re-shaping of the Marxist tradition after the war was so great in Japan that even conservative intellectuals knew they had to namedrop Marx to be taken seriously in public debates. Needless to say, Marx's and Marxist theories were suppressed in the early stages of the Japanese Marxist reception, the Meiji (1868-1912), the Taishō (1912-1926) and, mostly, in the early Shōwa period (1926-1945). When in the early Meiji period, the period of «Westernization » a massive and concentrated reception of Western philosophy took place (which mostly consisted in huge translation projects for which the imperial government installed a special ministry), it was of course, roughly speaking, only 'bourgeois philosophy', that is, German Idealism, British rationalism and empiricism and French philosophy of life (Bergson) that was supported by the government.

Yet, as a matter of fact, The Communist Manifesto was translated into Japanese as early as 1904 by Kōtoku Shūsui who was a political activist. But the early Meiji socialist movement was constantly persecuted. Also the 1920s saw a rise in publications dealing with Marxian theory, especially of the first volume ofCapital which was first translated in 1920, followed by volumes II and III in 1924. But generally a wider response was only possible after Japan was besieged by the US army – who, ironically, at first openly supported Marx studies at schools and universities. But 'Marx' was not an exclusively academic topic. Public debates have contributed to the Marxian impact in post-War Japanese society. Those debates, often roundtable-discussion style and taking place in Japanese newspapers like the Asahi Shinbun, which is probably comparable toLe Monde, have for very long been a lively part of the Japanese intellectual tradition. Generally a heavy and concentrated reception of even methodologically elaborate Marxology, especially in the Critique of Political Economy after the war, took place with the same vigour which had been given to the reception of Hegel and maybe Darwin in the late 19th century.

When talking about Marxist currents in Japan, one would of course have to mention the role of the Japanese Communist Party, its members, the dissidents, and the fights, like the famous debate on Japanese capitalism in the 1930s. But I will leave this out, since as far as I know Jacques Bidet has already introduced the main gist of the debate to the French speaking audience. Instead, I would like to pinpoint « heterodox » Marxist streams, if only to shortly introduce them. The most influential Marxist/Marxian currents were probably literary, philosophical, and cultural Marxism, with political-economic Marxism being the most academic. Well known-figures of the literary stream, especially the proletarian literary movement of the 1920s-1930s, cover writers as Nakano Shigeharu (1902-79), but also Yoshimoto Takaaki (1924-2012) who is the father of the famous writer Banana Yoshimoto, a popular figure of the left-wing student movement in 1968 and a literary Marxist.

As for philosophical Marxism, it is very difficult to pick only one or two names, but probably Hiromatsu Wataru (1933-1994) - Japan's best kept Marxist secret (since no texts are available in Western languages to date) - must be named. He was especially keen on the idea of reification and explored the term in all thinkable epistemological dimensions. Also Umemoto Katsumi (1912-1974) was a philosophical Marxist whose main reference texts were the Theses on Feuerbach andThe German Ideology. He was an important figure in the « Debate on Subjectivity » in 1946-48 that dealt with the question of the individual in historical materialism, often however a very limited discussion, and heavily influenced by Heideggerian-existentialist undertones. It should here be pointed out that often the language in which debates on Marx took place among philosophical Marxists were completely held in an existentialist idiom. Sartre was a superstar in Japan, and even people who were critical of him, talked very often of « being » and « nothingness ».

 In cultural Marxism, Tosaka Jun (1900-1945) must be named. Tosaka is a figure too important to be mentioned only in passing, so forgive my short account. A student of right-wing idealist philosopher Nishida Kitarō, he became very critical of idealism, and very quickly turned to materialism as a philosophical project. He founded the « Research Group on Materialism » (yuibutsu ron kenkyūkai) in 1932 where not only philosophical questions, but mostly problems of high actuality were discussed: the rise of fascism, the role of the media, ideology. He was of course arrested and died in prison in 1945. In my opinion, he was one of the few who took the 11th Thesis on Feuerbach seriously, and he was the only outspoken critic of Japanese society in a time when this was virtually impossible. Other « cultural » critics include the highly influential Maruyama Masao (1914-1996) – who however wasn't a Marxist. But his line of thought, which included psychoanalytical approaches towards a critique of society, is from its language often reminiscent of the Frankfurt School – without, of course, any acquaintance of it.

As for the Critique of Political Economy, the range of Marxist economists spreads from critics of poverty and capital accumulation in a general fashion to experts on Marxian value-form theory in the more specific sense. Needless to say, Uno Kōzō (1897-1977) was primarily a scholar in the last sense with profound knowledge of Marx's economy-theoretical work. During his lifetime, Uno had debates with many leftist contemporaries, and his collected works contain a lot of essays entitled « Answering to Prof. X's criticism », where « Prof. X » often was a rival – like Kuruma Samezō (1893-1932) – but also even his own students and fellow researchers, like, for example, Furihata Setsuo (1930-2009). Today, Uno is still considered a point of reference for many critical economists, and very often critically discussed. Professor Ōtani Teinosuke (born in 1934) who is professor emeritus of economy at Hōsei University in Tōkyō today proceeds the philological criticism that Uno's rival Kuruma Samezō started, and still holds frequent workshops on Marx's Capital or theGrundrisse.

VC & FM: From the early 1920’s, some intellectuals, as Kazuo Fukumoto for example, introduced some aspects of Marxist theory in Japan - more specifically some typical “Western Marxism” problematics like “alienation”, “reification”, etc. Do you consider these notions to be central in the Japanese debate? How would you organise thematically the relationship between Western Marxism, in its most Hegelian forms (Lukàcs, Korsch, the Frankfurt School), and “Japanese” Marxism?

EL: Generally, the fetish and value- problem along with an analysis of its reified forms have not been spectacularly featured in Japanese Marxism in general. To be sure, Georg Lukàcs' History and Class Consciousness had been partly translated as early as 1927. It just had not left such a terrible impact on the reception of the problem of reification. However, there are exceptions. As mentioned earlier, Hiromatsu Wataru has excessively dealt with the notion of reification. For him, there is a radical break between the early “Hegelian” term of alienation in Marx's early works, and the mature works with its notion of reification as treated in the theorem of theFetish Character of the Commodities in Capital vol. 1. But the latter one was incomplete in Hiromatsu's view, since the intra-subjective position was not entirely explored. Next to “Verdinglichung” (“reification”), he problematized “Versachlichung” (“objectification”), a more complete and thoroughgoing process in the act of exchange of commodities, and also between people.

Hiromatsu was however one of the few who clearly problematised value as fetish, and the forms in which social relations are consolidated as relations between things. You see, if the problem had been taken up, it was only considered in philosophical Marxism, not in economic-theoretical Marxism. But even with the philosophers, a materialist conception was often marred by the phenomenologist and existentialist – and often even idealist-Fichtean – idiom. This development may however change with the newly awakened broad interest in value theory, which as a matter of fact, cannot be silent about the fetish problem.

A newly published substantial work by the young researcher Sasaki Ryūji on Marx's Theory of Reification. Thinking Material as the Critique of Capitalism (2011) is hopefully a step in the direction of changing the neglected discussion in Japan. But it must be admitted that the discussion would have to recapitulate the long tradition that had already taken place in the West, for example in the Frankfurt School. Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse have not been taken too seriously as Marxist critics who intensely theorised the fetish problem. In Japan their texts were at best read as cultural hermeneutics (Benjamin) or sociology (Adorno, Marcuse). The reception of the Frankfurt school and its critical impact had accordingly not been overwhelming. For example, Alfred Sohn-Rethel's idea of “real abstraction”, however central to recent approaches in value-form theory, has to my knowledge not been discussed at all in Japan.

One could open a whole new chapter in the Marxian tradition if one were to theorize it in the Japanese context. This is all the stranger since, as mentioned above, Hegel was the main character taught in Japanese philosophy departments since the 19^th century. It however occurred only to very few Japanese intellectuals that there may be a “Hegelian Marxism”, the philosophers Mita Sekisuke (1906-1975) and Funayama Shin'ichi (1907-1994) with his emphasis on “anthropological materialism” being exceptions. But the rule of thumb is that Marxist economists in Japan shied away from theorising reification. It is interesting to see in this context that Mita Sekisuke was also a radical critic of Uno Kōzō. 

VC & FM: Uno Kōzō is one of the best-known “Japanese” Marxism figures in France. Could you give us a synthetic presentation of his theoretical work? One of the specificities of the Uno School is the elaboration of a “pure” theory of Capital. This “transcendental” goal seems quite counter-intuitive and speculative. Could you state its epistemological stakes?

EL: Uno's idea behind developing a “pure theory” of economy, as elaborated on in his seminal work Keizai genron (1950-2/ 1964), is much simpler than it would seem: to understand the structure of a “commodity society”, one would need to abstain from empirical and historical reflections in order to form a theory that can be valid beyond its application to capitalist society alone. It was Uno's goal to understand capitalism, but understanding bourgeois society in his view would provide the key to understanding pre- and post-bourgeois societies. To be a working theory of capitalism, however, Uno was determined to leave historical data, as well as data, tables, questionnaires, etc. out. In my view, the most strikingdifference betweenKeizai Genron and Marx'sCapital, apart from its method, that I would like briefly to refer to later on, is that Marx'sCapital is, first and foremost, A CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL ECONOMY.

But Uno did not write a Critique of Political Economy. Uno instead took Marx's criticism of Smith, of Ricardo, of Say, of Quesnay, and so on, for established facts. This is why Uno managed to re-write all three volumes ofCapital within a slim 227 pages (at least in the 1964 edition). This is quite a remarkable achievement. But Uno also heavily intervened into the architecture ofCapital. The Commodity, Money, and Capital that form the first three sections ofKeizai Genron, are regarded as “circulation-forms”. TheDoctrine of Circulation (ryūtsūron) therefore is posited at the beginning of Uno's investigation. Needless to say that Marx starts withThe Production Process of Capital. It is within theProduction Process of Capital that Marx analyses the commodity and money that seems to be a pure means of circulation. Marx's purpose was to show what wasnot obvious, namely, that money is a social relation grounded in the organisation of (abstract-human) labour in capitalist societies. Uno, in contrast, has a rather 'functional' understanding of money, money as a means of circulation. All in all, it must be said that Uno's analysis of the commodity, money and capitalin abstraction from the labour process is peculiar.

In my opinion, the least interesting, but probably best known fact about Uno Kōzō is his three-stages- approach (sandankairon) to political economy: where the first stage would be pure theory, the second an analysis of historical stages of capitalism (merchant, industrial and finance capital), and the third stage would have to explore the actual and “real” political events. I don't think this approach is particularly significant for Uno, because he had neither developed stage two nor three, although he had often conceptualised these methodically. Uno had, in my opinion, wisely abstained from the stages theory, which was so characteristic of traditional Marxists like Lenin or Luxemburg, and a certain fashion in 1950s Japan for the conceptualisation of Japanese capitalism.

Instead, Uno had fully concentrated his endeavours to understand capitalist socialisation within the framework of “pure theory” alone. He stripped down political economy to three fundamental laws: the law of value, the law of population, and the law of the equalisation of the profit rate. Undeterred by questions of fetishism, real abstraction, “objective forms of thought” and other concepts that have a great fascination for more recent Marxologists (including myself), he went the way of the rigid economist and explored capitalism as a process where rather everything happens for a reason. He was not interested in trying to find out why in capitalist societies, “alles mit rechten Dingen zugeht und doch nicht mit rechten Dingen” (Adorno) - everything happens properly, and therefore improperly.[1]

VC & FM: What are, according to you, the limits of Uno Kōzō approach? Do you consider Value-Form Theory-oriented readings of Marx to be a possible alternative to Uno's approach on a methodological, critical and political level?

EL: The limits of Uno's approach, I would see precisely in his dismissal of the “impure” elements of capitalism as a historical form. This not only refers to “primitive accumulation” - in fact, Uno speaks very much about primitive accumulation - but rather questions of the autonomisation of the law of value, of the value form as a historically conditioned fetish, and the complex of real abstraction. In other words, what is missing in Uno is an extended discussion of thequalitative dimension of value. The law of value cannot be explained on the ground of economic data. That would beg the question. The task of political economy would be to explainwhy labour in capitalist societiesnecessarily takes on the form of value. Reflections of this kind are in my view indispensable for understanding capitalist economy. Analysing the capitalist mode of production therefore cannot and should not be “pure”.

For example, in my research project, among other things, I am trying to find out if Uno's view of money and value – you can say, neither a monetary, nor a pre-monetary theory of value, but rather a 'functional-relational' theory – owes to Uno's disregard for the problem of fetishisation and reification. The dismissal of the labour theory of value – or rather, its misunderstanding in the Japanese reception – is very telling here. Uno criticized Marx for developing the labour theory of value within the “sphere of circulation” - in the chapter on The Commodity in vol. 1 of Capital, when it should have been in the sphere of production. This misunderstanding of Marx in my view perpetuated an ever more growing suspicion against Marx's fundamental theorem, so that we have the peculiar case in Japan that even Marxist economists disavow the labour theory of value as “substantialist”, completely ignoring its critical impetus. It is no wonder that marginal utility theory has again become popular, and along with it, purely quantitative economic research that has given up on criticising theform which labour takes (as, for example, can be seen in the ex-Marxian economist Michio Morishima and his “Theory of Economic Growth”). Wages are again seen as an equivalent for a certain amount of labour, so that, at best, pay increases are discussed, not the wage system as such. Of course, this is a phenomenon to be found in almost all late-industrialist countries.

In May 2017, I gave a talk in Tôkyô at the University of Economics - in front of a lot of Unoists, as well as former students of Uno, all self-proclaimed ‘Marxists’. Yet I was stunned how in fact their line of thought is much closer to mainstream economics than Marx. If I were cynical, I’d say, “with Marxists like that, you don’t need marginalists.” But, thankfully, not all Japanese Marxists are secret supporters of Menger.

The “new readings” of value form theory have thankfully helped to reintroduce the theoretical relation between value, money, capital, and labour. They often go beyond Marx, which I think is needed and welcome. At the same time, I feel they sometimes undercut Marx's critical impetus, often losing sight of the political and concrete everyday struggle. However important I think it is to go beyond Marx, one should keep in mind the maximal gesture that is intrinsic to his project: abolishing the capitalist mode of production and its “objective thought-forms”. Start at your work place.

[1] Theodor W. Adorno, « Introduction », inDe Vienne à Francfort, Bruxelles, Éditions Complexes, 1979, p.26

George Souvlis interviewed Sara Farris, a longstanding contributor and member of the Historical Materialism editorial board, and of itsMarxist Feminist stream. Sara Farris is Senior Lecturer at Goldsmiths College, University of London and the author of In the Name of Women’s Rights. The Rise of Femonationalism (2017, Duke University Press), as well as many journal articles on Marxism, political theory, migration. The interview was originally published on 13 July 2017 in Salvage. 

George Souvlis: Would you like to introduce yourself by describing the formative experiences (academic and political) that strongly influenced you?

Sara Farris: I grew up in a little town of 12,000 people in Sardinia (Italy). I was politicized there and it was definitely in this period – between age 12 and 18 – that I had some of the most formative political and academic experiences of my life. I come from a working class family; like many of their generation, my parents invested strongly in education in order to secure the social mobility of their daughters. I also grew up in a family in which discussions about politics – or I should rather say – my father’s monologues about political events both national and international, were routine at the dinner table. My father was some kind of a socialist, who strongly believed in social justice though he was very skeptical about the possibility that the workers, as he knew them, would be able to bring about any type of social change.

In any case, I guess I am trying to say that my family’s environment certainly exposed me to the importance of education and the ideas of the left. I then attended a classical lyceum in my home town. It is here that I was first politicized and that I also discovered my interest for sociology. When I was 14 I was approached by a friend –a sort of Marxist-friendly anarchist – who asked me to join a political group he and some other people were forming in order to shake up the tedious cultural life of our town and to demand more investment in culture by the mayor. It was a very weird group made up mostly of Trotskyists and anarchists (of course, we had lots of fights over Kronstadt!), as well as young people who did not identify with any particular political tradition but were attracted by the discourse of the far-left. The Trotskyists of the group belonged to the 4th International at that time; they organized the most theoretical discussions on the political conjuncture inviting especially the youngest of us to read Marx and Lenin. I was fascinated particularly by them, as they seemed to me to provide the most coherent answers to the issues we were discussing; but I was also somehow allergic to what I perceived as a certain communitarianism and sectarianism on their part.

A few years later, when I enrolled at the University La Sapienza in Rome, I became a member of Communist Refoundation first (Rifondazione Comunista) and the section of the 4th International afterwards. I found the Trotskyist comrades in Rome to be much more open than those in my hometown and I agreed with their politics, particularly with their strong emphasis on the importance of feminism. During these years in Rome I was also fascinated by the multiculturalism of the city and I became very interested in migrants’ struggles and migrant women’s specific position in the so-called destination countries. I think this combination of factors shaped the type of Marxist anti-racist feminism that probably best describes my approach.

GS: Let’s discuss Max Weber, whose work is the topic of your first monograph, Max Weber’s Theory of Personality. Weber is one of the first observers to recognize that the structural change of modern mass politics threatened the basic tenets of nineteenth-century liberal parliamentarianism. The emergence of mass parties in the first two decades of 20th century challenged radically notions and practices of the political status quo of the period. One of Weber’s risky intellectual answers to this ongoing crisis was the theory of charismatic-plebiscitary democracy. Do you think that we could draw elective or direct affinities between this conceptualization and Carl Schmitt’s theory of plebiscitary legitimacy of the President of the Reich? Could we say that Weber prepared – along with other disillusioned liberals – the intellectual background for the rise of authoritarian theories like that of Carl Schmitt?

SF: The question of the affinity between Weber and Schmitt on charismatic-plebiscitary democracy is one of the most debated ones, from Mommsen (who was among the first to propose it) to Habermas and others. Mommsen did not argue that the two thinkers’ political and theoretical positions were compatible in general – as they were in fact very different on most accounts – but rather that their ideas converged in one particular case: that is, Weber’s idea regarding the necessity for a plebiscitary-charismatic democracy in the wake of the German Revolution, and Schmitt’s opposition to parliamentary democracy in the last years of the Weimar Republic.

To be sure, Weber’s political thought and positions consistently oscillated between liberalism and more authoritarian tendencies. On the one hand, he advocated for an “agreement” between the liberal forces of Germany and the labour aristocracy within the Social Democratic party in order to consolidate the country’s transition to capitalism and “modernization”. On the other hand, Weber was a strong admirer of Bismarck and believed that politics needs strong charismatic leaders. And we should remember that for Weber, the charismatic leader is not someone who uses their appeal to seek consensus, but rather someone whose power is already legitimate in itself because of the charismatic gift he (because it is a man Weber implicitly think about) possesses.

There is something very aristocratic about Weber’s notion of charismatic power. The suggestion that there is an affinity between Weber and Schmitt, between the champion of German liberal democracy at the turn of the Twentieth century (that is, Weber) and the enemy of liberalism on the eve of Nazism (that is, Schmitt) is thus I think still very interesting and insightful not least because it reminds us fundamentally of the historical/theoretical links liberalism and authoritarianism.

GS: In one of your articles you use the debate between Marx and Bauer on the Jewish Question in order to shed light on the French law on conspicuous religious symbols. How can this past discussion help us to grasp better our current reality? Do you see any analogies between the two debates? In this article, you also criticise the universal values of Enlightenment that inform to a certain extent the French legal system. How you do you think we can demonstrate – in this context and regarding this debate – the antinomies of modernity without resorting to a postmodern cultural relativism?

SF: The point I try to make in that article is that the debate on whether Jews should be accorded full political rights in 1840s Prussia presents some striking similarities with the debate on Muslims’ integration into French society today. More precisely, my point is that the French state’s demand that religious minorities (and let’s be frank, Muslims in particular) respect the principle of secularism in the public space is reminiscent of Bruno Bauer’s position on the Jewish Question. Bruno Bauer believed that the Jews deserved to be granted political rights only if they stopped being Jews and embraced Enlightenment thought. In other words, he conceived of political emancipation as a kind of award that individuals receive only if they renounce their own religious identity and embrace the identity that the secular state deems as appropriate. Likewise, the French state demands that Muslims get rid of their religious/cultural practices if they want to show willingness to integrate into French society.

The notion of secularism that is put forward by both Bauer and the French state is one that individualizes secularism, that conceives of it almost as a trait of one’s personality rather than as an institutional issue. In other words, while I do agree that public spaces should not privilege one religion over another – so for instance, class-rooms should not have crucifixes hanging on walls, as happens in Italy – I disagree that individuals should not be allowed to express their religious beliefs in public spaces. This is only one very narrow and problematic version of secularism. But above all, the position according to which the people who belong to a religious and stigmatized minority should deny their religion in order to demonstrate that they deserve the status of citizens is profoundly racist. Just like Bauer was fundamentally an anti-Semite hiding behind the idea of secular Enlightenments, so the French state is reinforcing Islamophobia in the name of laïcité.

By pointing to some analogies between the discussion on Jews’ emancipation in Germany in the first half of the nineteenth century and the discussion on Muslims’ integration in France today I also want to argue that Muslims play the role of todays’ Jews. After the Holocaust we have been accustomed to the idea that the atrocities committed against the Jews have no comparison. But what we should remember is that there is a long history of anti-Jewish racism in Europe which has taken different forms and which has preceded the tragedy of the Holocaust. We should be aware of that history precisely in order to avoid repeating it, not only against the Jews but against any other group of people. My second point in that article is that Marx’s position on the Jewish Question was much more aware than some contemporary Marxists of the dangers of questioning religious minorities’ right to their freedom of expression, and here I think specifically of some French Marxists or Left-wing representatives. During the discussions that led to the ban of the veil in public schools, some of them agreed that Muslim women should not wear it in public spaces and invoked notions of secularism, atheism and women’s rights to justify their position. There is absolutely nothing Marxist in that. When Bruno Bauer blamed the Jews for remaining Jews and thus being undeserving of political rights, Marx told him that political rights can very well co-exist with religious identities. The problem for Marx instead was the bourgeois state itself and its claim of representing a space of universal inclusion while in reality it was only the expression of the exclusion and inequalities of civil society.

GS: Considering the recent developments with the bomb attacks in France, Brussels and the UK, and the emergence of the panic/racist rhetoric and state of emergency policies in these and other countries, what do you think should be the basic rhetorical axes of a counter-hegemonic critique towards their ideological appropriation by the far-right? 

SF: I think it is essential to make very, very clear that these attacks have nothing to do with Islam. The young terrorists who committed these atrocities were born and raised in France or Belgium, or the UK, some of them apparently smoked and drank and did not even attend the Mosque. Most of them were known to the police for petty crimes and some of them apparently found meaning in ISIS ideas while in jail, where they met already radicalized Islamists who introduced them to the abhorrent Daesh dystopia. This reminds me of the French movie A Prophet, in which a young man of Algerian descent, illiterate and with no religious beliefs, is sent to prison for a petty crime. It is in prison that he learns how to kill people and the ‘art’ of drug-dealing. The movie of course is about the violence and ineffectiveness of the so-called correction and punitive system, and also about its racism, given that the large majority of prisoners we see portrayed are of immigrant descent.

But I think the prison in the movie can also be understood as a metaphor for a French or Belgian banlieu, where the second and third generations of migrants from the ex-French colonies have being ghettoized, made to feel different, unwelcome, or jobless and constantly targeted by the racism and Islamophobia of the state and the police – as plenty of studies demonstrate. Within these environments, these social prisons, young people particularly if they are unemployed and without a clear prospect for the future, can develop a great sense of alienation and some of them may feel attracted by the easy Manichaeism of extremist Islamism and its promise of revenge.

The second thing to remember time and time again is that Muslims are the first victims of so-called Islamist terrorism. More than one-third of the people killed by the truck driver in Nice in July 2016 were Muslims, without mentioning the fact that the large majority of victims of ISIS in Syria and Iraq are Muslims. The Left needs to recall this simple and atrocious fact each time the right instrumentalises terrorism to instigate Islamophobia.

But the French Left in particular should also be confronted very seriously with its responsibilities in exacerbating the Islamophobic climate that in France is already intolerable. And here I think of Mélenchon, for instance, who criticized the NPA’s veiled candidate in 2010, Ilham Moussaid, for not taking her headscarf off; more recently, in the case of the outrageous behavior of the police who forced a Muslim woman to undress on a beach in Nice, he took the side of the police. He claims to take these positions in the name of women’s rights and in the name of laïcité. But the reality is that these positions do in fact deny the right Muslim women have to put on whatever clothes they want. They interpret secularism through the lenses of a form of republican rigorism that is fundamentally intolerant of difference and exclusionary towards those who do not embody the French (i.e., white, Christian, etc.,) ideal of the citizen. This republican consensus against the headscarf in France, from right to left, is shameful and irresponsible vis-à-vis the multiplication of terrorist attacks involving young French men and women self-identifing as Muslims.

Of course we need to condemn in the strongest possible terms any form of terrorism, there is no question about it, and in fact I feel there shouldn’t even be the need to say it, if it weren’t for the fact that we live in very crazy times hegemonized by the racist discourse of the right. But above all, we need to say that our politics against terrorism is diametrically opposed to that of the right-wing and is, in fact, more effective because the right has nothing to say about how to solve the problem. The only thing it proposes is to close the borders, stop immigration and intensify Islamophobic measures. But how stupid is that when terrorists are in fact not migrants but French or Belgian, or British citizens? And how irresponsible is that when it is precisely Islamophobia that is creating a climate in which terrorism thrives?

I do think that the fight against Islamophobia and racism is the defining political issue of the future for the Left. We have seen how the capitulation of the European social democracy before anti-immigration discourses in the last fifteen years has not brought more votes to the Left. On the contrary, it has helped the far-right to grow and consolidate its powerbase, at least until recently.

GS:In one volume that you edited along with others you wrote a piece focusing on the theoretical insights of Althusser and Tronti regarding the Marxist question of the relationship between politics and economy. During the last year the global financial crisis gave the opportunity to left-wing forces to come close to winning elections or even – in the case of Syriza – to take office – though withοut really managing to produce any serious cracks in the system. Do you think that a possible explanation of these defeats might be an implicit “politicism” that have been adopted by the parties of the European Left? 

SF: In that article I define ‘politicism’ as the idea that the state is autonomous from economic determinants and that the party is autonomous from its class basis. On the one hand, it is the idea that the state follows its own logic and its own rhythm, and is not simply the “committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie” – as Marx famously wrote in the Manifesto of the Communist Party. This conception of the state and politics as autonomous from the economic level led Tronti to argue that the party representing the working classes needs to take state power into its hands in order to change the system of economic exploitation itself. On the other hand, Tronti explicitly argued that the party of workers (and clearly he meant the PCI) had to be autonomous from its class basis at the moments in which the political logic of state power demanded that. Here lies an important paradox: on the one hand, by declaring politics and economics as autonomous one from the other, you are claiming that one cannot determine the other; but on the other hand, you are proposing a determinist argument – and therefore denying the autonomy of the political itself – the moment in which you argue that a change in the political realm will automatically determine a change in the social-economic realm. In this sense ‘politicism’ is the mirror image of economic determinism. And both of these perspective are unable to grasp the complexities of the relationships between the state and capitalist interests, or the economic sphere more generally.

The ‘politicist’ perspective was put forward by Tronti in the 1970s during the years of the historical compromise (compromesso storico) in order to support the participation of the Italian Communist Party in government. Tronti criticized the Marxist tradition for lacking a coherent and systematic theory of the state, but what he proposes instead is the old social-democratic trope. That is, the idea that the party representing the interests of the workers needs to take state power to promote the implementation of socialist policies, before communism can finally take over.

The contemporary cases you cite are certainly examples of ‘politicism’ in the sense that these are parties, or political formations that, in various and different ways put forward a social-democratic agenda and overall approach to politics and their working class bases. None of them aims to smash the state, as it were.

However, I don’t think we can talk about defeats pure and simple here. Syriza won the elections, even though it completely betrayed the hopes to end austerity. More recently La France Insoumise obtained 20% of the vote in the first round of the French presidential elections, and in Britain Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour has increased Labour’s number of seats and share of vote in unprecedented ways. Of course, these parties and the contexts in which they operate are very different and we cannot abstract from those national differences. What I am trying to say is that the social-democratic Left running for state power in order to change the rules of the economy from above, seems to be actually registering significant advances in electoral terms when it runs on an explicit socialist, anti-austerity programme. The retreat to ‘politicism’, or the idea that the party can forget its working class basis in the name of ‘electability’ and for the sake of staying in government, on the other hand, as in the case of Syriza, will most likely lead to electoral defeat – beside producing demobilization and demoralization.

GS: You edited along with others an issue of the Historical Materialism journal (24.2, 2016) that is focused on recent theoretical developments within the Marxist-Feminist tradition. In theintroduction that you wrote you endorse Social-Reproduction feminism. Would you be able to explain the origins of this theoretical trend and what it implies? In what ways can it help us to understand the complexity of gender oppression in this historical conjuncture?

SF: Social-reproduction feminism refers to that strand of theories developed by Marxist-feminists in the 1960s and 1970s seeking to understand the role of domestic labour and reproductive tasks within the household for capital accumulation. Social Reproduction Feminism asks: how is the reproduction of labour power and life that usually takes place within households connected to capital accumulation? And why is it women who are mostly the ones performing social reproduction? Is there a link between the feminization of social reproduction and gender oppression under capitalism? By focusing on the largely gendered nature of social-reproductive labour Social Reproduction Feminism also aims to analyse one of the weaknesses of Marxist feminism, that is, its tendency to frame class exploitation and gendered oppression as separate one from the other. The challenge for Social Reproduction Feminism instead is to understand gendered oppression neither in isolation from class exploitation, nor from race, sexuality and other constitutive social relations. This is not an easy task, as our very modes of thinking about the social are fragmented, or intersectional, as it were. That is why, I think, intersectionality has become such an important paradigm for feminism. It is because it conceives of different experiences of oppression and exploitation as coming from different and separate systems and tries to recombine the fragments of oppression without denying their singularity. I think Social Reproduction Feminism seeks to include and to go beyond intersectionality by saying both that we need to understand capitalism as the very specific socio-economic system in which those forms of oppression are generated and nourished, and that there are not ‘separate’ systems of oppression or exploitation under capitalism that can be understood in isolation one from the other.

Social Reproduction Feminism also represents a critique of those Marxist positions that maintain that capitalism is indifferent to the gender or race of those it exploits as long as profit and accumulation are guaranteed. This is a very limited and problematic way of looking at how capitalism functions, but also at what capitalism is. As we write in our introduction, exploitation and dispossession exist concretely “only in and through generalised, systematic and differentiated control and degradation of human life itself. And control and degradation are secured concretely in and through the negotiation of race, gender, sexuality, and other interwoven social relations.” These are the relations that ensure that labour arrives at capital’s doorstep ready to be further dehumanized and exploited.

GS: In your latest book you analyze the instrumentalisation of feminist ideas by the contemporary far-right and mainstream “liberal” parties by means of the term of “femonationalism”. Could you explain what this means and how a critical examination of this phenomenon can be useful?

SF: Femonationalism is the term I have introduced to describe both the exploitation of feminist ideas by nationalist right-wing parties within Islamophobic campaigns, and the endorsement by some feminists and femocrats of anti-Islam agendas in the name of women’s rights. In the book I analyse how and why parties such as the Northern League in Italy, the National Front in France and the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands have shown “concern” for Muslim women by describing them as “victims to be rescued”, all the while stigmatising Muslim and other non-western male immigrants as women’s worst enemies. I wrote this book mostly because I wanted to introduce a political-economic perspective into the scholarly and activists’ debate on the new faces of Islamophobia. The convergence between some feminists and nationalists on anti-Islam agendas of course has been noticed and analysed by several scholars, but I think most of them – at least in the European context – have not paid sufficient attention to the broad material interests and economic calculations behind such a convergence.

What I note in the book is that we should pay attention to the gendered double-standard that is applied to migrant men and women (Muslim and non-Muslim alike) in the mainstream media and that we need to decipher its economic rationality alongside its ‘culturalist’ expressions. Muslim men as well as immigrant men from the Global South are usually described not only as potential rapists and women’s oppressors, but also as “jobs’ stealers”. They are the unredeemable bad guys in all senses. On the other hand Muslim and non-western migrant women are portrayed as victims of patriarchal and backward cultures, but also as those who can be assimilated to western values (because, qua women, they don’t really have a mind of their own) and who can positively contribute to western economies by working in the understaffed social reproductive sector (i.e, social care and childcare primarily) for very low wages. They are the redeemable others.

I think this dichotomous gendered representation, or gendered double-standard, which the mainstream media as well as right-wingers use to refer to migrant populations, is central for revealing the political economic rationality of femonationalism. In other words, one of the claims of my book is that the “rescue” offers, which right wing-nationalists send to Muslim women (but also to non-western migrant women more generally), are linked to the hugely important role these women play in the social reproductive economy. But they are also linked to these political parties’ desire to keep the social care and childcare sectors exactly as they are: that is, as racialised, feminized, super-exploitative, low-status and low-paid sectors of the labour market.

On the other hand, the book looks closely at the feminists and femocrats who support anti-Islam politics in the name of women’s rights, and what they propose to Muslim women in particular in their race to rescue them from the “bad” Muslim guys.

What I notice here is that, first, these feminists cover the whole political spectrum; it is not just right-wing feminists (or self-proclaimed feminists like Ayan Hirsi Ali in the Netherlands or Souad Sbai in Italy) who have endorsed anti-Islam discourses and policies such as veil bans, but also left-leaning feminists like Giuliana Sgrena in Italy, or Najat Vallaud-Belkacem in France. Second, I emphasise the deep contradictions of this anti-Islam feminist front. On the one hand, these feminists and femocrats call Islam a misogynist religion and treat Muslim women who wear the veil as sort of self-enslaved individuals who do not understand what freedom and emancipation really are about. On the other hand, these same feminists fail to mention that many Muslim migrant women today in Europe are obliged to undergo integration programmes – sometimes implemented by femocrats themselves – that push them towards the social reproductive sectors to become cleaners, social carers and childminders. But in what sense is this emancipation for women? Weren’t these exactly the activities and jobs against which the feminist movement fought in its battle to denounce gender roles and the lack of economic recognition of social reproduction?

Already published in "Materialismo Storico. Rivista di filosofia, storia e scienze umane", Nr. 1/2017, L'egemonia dopo Gramsci: una riconsiderazione, edited by Fabio Frosini, pp. 115-163, licence Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0.

Anti-imperialism has a history that has been in large part repressed, if not buried, amongst many currents of criticial thought and much of the radical Left. The struggles for decolonisation after the Second World War are, of course, remembered, but, too often, it is forgotten that the international communist movement created anti-colonial and anti-imperialist organisations on a transnational scale. Such was the case of the League Against Imperialism. In this interview by Selim Nadi, first published in French in the online journal Périodehttp://revueperiode.net/willi-munzenberg-la-ligue-contre-limperialisme-et-le-comintern-entretien-avec-fredrik-petersson/, Fredrik Petersson discusses the foundation of the LAI by the Comintern. He depicts a colonial question that was resolutely understood as a transversal question by communists. He highlights also the necessity for a mediation between the headquarters of world communism (Moscow) and the nationalist forces in each country that were its allies, all of which is helpful in developing the concept, which is still neglected, of the ‘anti-imperialist united front’.

In your academic work, you are mainly interested in the League Against Imperialism (LAI) – founded in 1928 in Brussels. Why focus on anti-imperialism during the inter-war period (and not only during the decolonisation process after World War II)?

First of all, the founding congress of the League against Imperialism took place 10-14 February 1927. Now, with that sorted out, yes, one of my central items of research has been on the history and transnational networks of the LAI. I did my doctoral thesis on the LAI from the perspective that wanted to examine the twofold purpose: first, why the LAI was established in 1927; and second, the internal aspect of the organisation, something that required doing extensive empirical research in several archives in Moscow, Berlin, Amsterdam, London, and Stockholm, if I wanted to put the pieces together in a proper way. However, and after I got the thesis published the same year in 2013 as two volumes, I think the question of interwar anti-imperialism involves so many aspects that tells us about how the world was reconstituted after the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919. It is commonly accepted that the world was decolonised after the Second World War, yet my argument is that, in order for us to understand how this even was possible, we have to take into consideration the development of anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements as politically conscious entities between the wars. It was in the purest sense a time of learning, a time of accumulating experiences, and a time of creating relations and connections that either lasted or changed in the interwar years. Hence, it is about reading the history of decolonisation backwards, dating from, for example the “Afro-Asian conference” in Bandung 1955, and of connecting it to an organisation such as the LAI.

30 years after the founding of the LAI, during the Bandung Conference (1955), Sukarno said that if the founding congress of the LAI was held in Belgium in was not “by choice, but by necessity”, could you please explain this point?

Well, this is kind of a political statement on behalf of Achmed Sukarno where he more or less defined the historical progression of twentieth century anti-colonialism, and how the movement both relied on and was dependent on establishing connections and relations. But what Sukarno even more wanted to show with his observation was probably the following: in the interwar period, it was next-to-impossible to convene a similar congress or conference as the one held in Bandung 1955. Thus, by holding the “First International Congress against Colonialism and Imperialism” in Brussels, it was not only held there “by necessity”, but it was intended to function as a demonstration against colonialism and imperialism in one of the “hearts of imperialism”, and it could also gain attention amongst colonial emigrants living in Western Europe. However, what comes across as rather evident by reading the sources is that the formal organisers of the congress (the LAI’s forerunner: the League against Colonial Oppression, established in Berlin 10 February 1926) and its secretary, the Hungarian communist Laszlo Dobos, had promised the Foreign Secretary in Belgium, the well-renowned socialist Emile Vandervelde, that under no circumstances was the congress to deliver any critique of Belgian colonialism and the atrocities taking place in Congo. Even more, Dobos had to provide Vandervelde with extensive list of names of individuals planning to attend the congress. Hence, this pretty much outlines the historical experience of the Brussels Congress of not having been “by choice, but by necessity” as Sukarno later stated in his opening address. 

Could you develop the main differences between the founding Congress of the LAI in Brussels in 1928, and the Baku Congress (1920)?

The central difference is how it was organised and under what kind of auspices and with what intentions. If we think about the Baku congress in 1920, it had been preceded by intense discussions between Lenin and the Indian nationalist revolutionary Manabendra Nath Roy on the colonial question at the Second International Comintern Congress in Moscow. Even more, the Baku congress was held for the primary reason of getting Far Eastern anti-colonial activists to support the recently established Bolshevik regime in Soviet Russia, or as the then Comintern chairman, the Russian communist Grigori Zinoviev, explained it: it was to win them fully over to communism. However, there is another dimension to the Baku congress, and it is that it offered Asian activists with an opportunity to meet and discuss with each other the situations in their home countries. While some, so to speak, drifted towards communism as a source that would support their struggle, other continued to forge the nationalist struggle along other principles shaped by socialism and liberalism. Thus, if we can compare Baku with Brussels, the later essentially continued the agenda of the former by highlighting how colonialism and imperialism continued to shape the world after 1919. One important difference between these two events was the more international scope of the Brussels congress, meaning, while Baku focused primarily on Asia and the Far East, the Brussels congress had an international outlook that tried to depict a global system of colonialism and imperialism. What unites the two of them is that they were both organised and sanctioned by the Communist International and its headquarters in Moscow.  

To what extent was the LAI a response to Woodrow Wilson’s principle of national self-determination?

I think this is a central question that pretty much outlines and explains how the LAI came into fruition, at least, in the initial phase of 1927. As Woodrow Wilson introduced the famous Fourteen Points in January 1918, which included the relevance and importance of paying attention to the principle of national self-determination, in fact, this was replaced by the liberal internationalism on display at Versailles, and as consequence of this, this somewhat downgraded the capacity of the colonial world to become independent once the war was over. If we look again at the Brussels congress, its official credo and public slogan was to advocate “National Freedom – Social Equality”, and a majority of the speeches delivered at the congress addressed the call for national independence and the right to self-determination. In general, the propaganda of the LAI frequently called for a critical scrutiny of the fallacy of the League of Nations of putting into practice what it once had set out to do, that is, the equal treatment of all peoples and races through the principle of national self-determination. I think this was one of most potent and viable political messages of the LAI, and therefore, it can be seen as adversary and subversive contingent to the League of Nations. 

Who was Willy Münzenberg (1889 – 1940)? What role did he play in the LAI?

Willi Münzenberg was pivotal for the LAI. Being a German communist and member of the German Reichstag, Münzenberg has been recognised as the leading entrepreneurial force in the development of communist propaganda in Europe and beyond between the wars. What has to be emphasised is that Münzenberg came from a pacifist and socialist background; however, after meeting Lenin in Zimmerwald in 1915, this was the beginning of his journey to communism. After having been an organisational force in coordinating the work among socialist and communist youth during the Great War, in 1919, Münzenberg was central in the establishment of the Youth Communist International (KIM). Later in 1921, Lenin appointed Münzenberg to establish the embryo of International Workers’ Aid, an international proletarian mass organisation that lasted until 1935 when it was quietly dissolved on the direct instructions of Comintern headquarters in Moscow. While this is a general description of Münzenberg’s political career, I consider Arthur Koestler’s foreword in Babette Gross book Willi Münzenberg. A politische Biographie (1967) still as one of the most accurate descriptions of the man: he was “a political realist” that should be seen as a propagandist and activist, neither as a politician nor theoretician. Then we have his so-called mysterious death in 1940, where his body was found in the outskirts of the French town Montaigne. There has been debate as to whether it was suicide or murder that caused Münzenberg’s death. Yet this discussion will continue without any real or credible empirical evidence. If we return then to his pivotal role in the establishment of the LAI, by this I mean that, without his energy and vision to organise “an international congress against colonialism and imperialism”, as he declared in a personal letter to Zinoviev in August 1925, there would not have been a project of trying to mobilise the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movement in Europe and the USA like that of the LAI. Second - and I keep returning to the Brussels congress, but still, it represents a central moment for interwar anti-colonialism - it was an idea that Münzenberg developed after being introduced to it by a couple of Chinese trade unionists in Berlin in connection with the “Hands off China” campaign in 1925. Yet what Münzenberg managed to do was to transform the idea into something viable and concrete. This did not, however, come without a price tag. Münzenberg had to either negotiate or rely on the consent of the Comintern before being able to proceed with the political project of the Brussels congress. And, indeed, the idea of establishing the LAI was not Münzenberg’s; it was on the recommendation of Manabendra Nath Roy in 1926. However, without the success of the Brussels congress, there would have never been any need for the establishment of the LAI. But both Münzenberg and the Comintern seemed unprepared as to how to approach and build on the success of the Brussels congress, which in the longer perspective implied that the idea of the LAI and its practical outcome started from the wrong foot from the beginning.  Actually, together with some colleagues, I ma planning to write a personal biography of Münzenberg, with emphasis not on his political persona but rather trying to going beyond this perspective, and instead, try to discuss Münzenberg as a person and how different spatialities, opportunities and moments shaped his life. I mean, he still continues to haunt me in a funny way, and you just have to take into account the traces the man has left in numerous archives across the world. The story of Münzenberg has for sure not been fully told yet, I argue.   

In your forthcoming book in the Historical Materialism Book Series, you write that the Brussels Congress and, later, the establishment of the LAI, had been the results of meticulous planning and construction rather than “by necessity”, in a “cleverly-disguised interplay between Münzenberg, the IAH [Internationale Arbeiterhilfe] and the Comintern”. Could you please develop the role played by the IAH and by the Comintern? What were the relations between the LAI and the Comintern?

Yes, that is correct; I am working on my book at the moment, which will focus more on the transnational character of the LAI, but also, the transnationalism of anti-colonialism between the wars. This November, I will return to Moscow and do additional research in the Russian State Archive for Social and Political History, which houses the papers of the Communist International. And this leads me again to the intertwined relationship between the LAI and the Comintern, or to be more precise, the constant and regular contacts that flowed between the LAI’s international headquarters in Berlin – the International Secretariat – and Comintern headquarters in Moscow. I mean, from the very onset, and even prior to the establishment of the LAI in 1927, various institutions and individuals at Comintern headquarters stipulated during the preparations for the Brussels congress in 1926, that the sole reason for establishing an international organisation against colonialism and imperialism was “to act as an intermediary between the Comintern and nationalist organisations in the colonies”. Further, the LAI’s International Secretariat in Berlin functioned as a hub for the organisation, meaning that it received instructions from Comintern headquarters, which in return were dispatched to the LAI’s national sections or affiliated members. In return, when the International Secretariat received information or intelligence from the sections, it was dutifully dispatched back to Moscow. In conclusion, every important decision pertaining to budget or personnel questions was taken in Moscow. This also involved the writing of political material such as congress resolutions, manifestos, pamphlets or material for the official publications of the LAI.    

What where the kind of contacts the LAI had with European radical left movements?

In 1927, the contacts were strong and many. However, this depends on how you define “radical left movements” in Europe”. If we exclude the communist aspect here, I would say that contacts with radical trade unions, pacifist circles, socialists or anarchists were large from a quantitative perspective. However, once talk of the LAI as a new actor on the political stage began to emerge in 1927, and particularly as the organisation raised the question of being an ardent opponent against colonialism and imperialism, various circles in the European socialist movement approached the LAI with suspicion. For example, the leader of the Labour and Socialist International, the Swiss socialist Friedrich Adler, instigated a thorough investigation on the historical and political ties of the LAI, which in October 1927, drew the conclusion that the LAI had intimate ties to the Comintern and the international communist movement. As a consequence of this, any party affiliated to the Labour and Socialist International was prohibited of becoming member to the LAI. In a longer-term perspective, the communist connotations of the LAI severely restricted access to radical leftist movements that were not communist in nature and scope. What I am really talking about here is a kind of historical narrative that began with success but ended in seclusion and isolation the longer we stretch out the history of the LAI. 

Did the LAI lead to any theoretical innovations concerning colonialism and/or racism?

No, I do not believe that. Yet what the LAI amounted to do was to function as nostalgic point of reference for the decolonisation movements that emerged in the postwar period. I have stated that the LAI should be seen as “a concerted source of inspiration” in the context of postwar decolonisation of the world, something that reached its culmination at the “Afro-Asian Conference” in Bandung in 1955. Moreover, what the LAI accomplished to do was in raising awareness in the so-called “imperialist centres” on the situation in the colonies. This was done through various campaigns, letter writing campaigns and so forth. Hence, what we are addressing here is the transnational scope of anti-colonialism between the wars, and how this was further developed after the Second World War in the postwar period.

In an article published in 1960 in Les Temps Modernes on Sultan Galiev, Maxime Rodinson wrote that the “Afro-Asian bloc” that followed the Bandung Conference was a kind of “Colonial International”, would you agree with this?

No, I would not agree with that. I think that you should rather see the LAI as an effort that tried to coordinate a range of nationalist organisations and movements that all were seeking to highlight their own political and cultural agenda. In fact, the Comintern feared the idea of the LAI becoming an anti-imperialist “International” capable of standing on its own. It was all about control over an agenda and political idea that had managed to create a buzz, and therefore, once the LAI was dissolved in 1937, several individuals that previously had held some role in the organisation, for example the British socialist and pacifist Reginald Orlando Bridgeman (who acted as International Secretary of the LAI from 1933 to 1937), quickly acted and formed new anti-colonial organisations or associations. In Bridgeman’s case, he formed the “Colonial Information Bureau” in 1937, which cooperated closely with the British “Centre against Imperialism”, where the former should be seen as more “socialist” while the later was “communist”. Hence, we are talking of transformations and transferences of ideas and practices here. 

How would you describe the legacy of the LAI?

I think I have summed up that answer already, however, I would like to add that the LAI introduced a new form of activism in a world that had faced the horrors of global war (the Great War, 1914-18), and it aided in making anti-colonialism into a politically conscious movement from the perspective that it provided with contacts, relations and networks for anti-colonial activists that travelled the world between the wars. Later, a person such as India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, who had been active in the first years of the LAI, could draw on this experience. In conclusion, I think that the LAI broke new political ground for anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism, however, due to the intimate relation to the Comintern and how the organisation developed itself in the 1930s, much of its history was seen as a failure, and therefore reduced to the dustbin of history. Yet, and which I hoped to do with my research, is in showing that there exists so many dynamic perspectives and relations that up until now have been forgotten and hidden.

Fredrik Petersson is Lecturer in General History at Åbo Akademi University since 2014. He received his PhD from Åbo Akademi University in 2013; his dissertation was titled‘We Are Neither Visionaries Nor Utopian Dreamers’. Willi Münzenberg, the League Against Imperialism, and the Comintern, 1925-1933 (published as vol. I-II, Lewiston: Queenston Press, 2013). Petersson is currently working on two projects: “The Elephant and the Porcelain Shop”. Transnational Anti-Colonialism and the League against Imperialism, 1927 - 1937 (forthcoming 2017) ; and the research project “Hidden Narratives and Forgotten Stories. The Colonial World in the Nordic World”. He has published several articles on anti-imperialism, international communism and radicalism.

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