Kevin Murphy reviews Trotsky and the Problem of Soviet Bureaucracy by Thomas Twiss

Dr. Kevin Murphy teaches Russian history at the University of Massachusetts Boston. His book Revolution and Counterrevolution won the 2005 Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize. His current research is on the Petrograd Soviet of 1917.

Academia has never been very kind to Leon Trotsky. As part of its mandate to demonize the entire revolution, the totalitarian school from its inception portrayed Lenin and Trotsky as no better than Stalin. What currently passes as ‘scholarship’ suggests that recent standards still are not very high. Geoffrey Swain asserts that Trotsky, who was surely the foremost contemporary authority on the rise of fascism, ‘had absolutely no understanding of European politics’.[1] At the launch of his Trotsky biography in London, Robert Service declared: “There’s life in the old boy Trotsky yet—but if the ice pick didn’t quite do its job killing him off, I hope I’ve managed it.” Similarly, in his biography of Stalin, Stephen Kotkin laments that “the Bolshevik putsch could have been prevented by a pair of bullets” aimed at Lenin and Trotsky. To cut Trotsky down to size, Kotkin claims that Stalin not only outwitted Trotsky but supposedly found his “calling” as a “people person” in the party apparatus.[2]

Thomas Twiss goes against this anti-Trotsky current in his study of Trotsky and the Problem of Soviet Bureaucracy. This a thoughtful and meticulous work on many levels. Twiss aims “to explain the development of Trotsky’s thinking on the problem of Soviet bureaucracy.” While focusing on the Soviet bureaucracy, Twiss does not isolate it from the political economy of the Stalinist system. This is perhaps the most systematic work yet on Trotsky’s frequently changing and dynamic analysis. And while clearly sympathetic to Trotsky, Twiss often takes issue with his positions and avoids indulging in the latest Russian studies fad of acting as an inept lawyer for his subject. 

Much of Twiss’s analysis is based on a skillful integration of what is now known about various aspects of the Stalinist system. He repeatedly criticizes Trotsky for accepting the veracity of Stalinist propaganda, such as the Shakhty show trial of engineers in 1928 and Menshevik show trial in 1931. While Trotsky provided insights into the Moscow show trials in 1936, Twiss comments that there is no evidence that  “the supporters of repression” viewed the prospect of capitalist restoration more positively than “its victims.” He also challenges Trotsky’s absurd claim that the trials were a response by the bureaucracy to the success of the Fourth International. Indeed, Twiss repeatedly takes Trotsky to task for his exaggerated claims of the strength of the opposition that supposedly pressured the regime into the “Left” course of industrialization and still claimed thousands of supporters as late as 1936.

Twiss’s most important criticisms of Trotsky’s analysis are on Stalin’s forced collectivization and kulaks (supposedly wealthier peasants). He notes that Trotsky accepted Stalinist propaganda about a “kulak strike” in 1928 and that frequently authorities “applied the label of ‘kulak’ or ‘ideological kulak’ to middle or even poor peasants who resisted collectivization.” Significantly, Twiss emphasizes the crucial mistake he made in his support of collectivization, that “Trotsky essentially accepted the leadership’s characterization of the collectivization as a spontaneous movement by the peasantry.” Only in 1935 did Trotsky acknowledge that the “frightened muzhiks” were driven into the collective farms “by the knout” and only in 1939, though not mentioned by Twiss, did Trotsky begin to come to terms with the results of the catastrophic human cost for collectivization in the Ukraine.

In fact, all of Trotsky’s arguments about collectivization and supposed ‘kulaks’ have now been thoroughly refuted by overwhelming archival evidence. Even before the archives opened, Moshe Lewin showed that ‘kulak’ was a propaganda rather than economic term, often applied to middle and even poor peasants, which meant collectivization entailed violent reprisals “against whole sectors of the broad mass of the peasantry.” As the head of the Russian Socialist Federation argued, “if we have no kulaks, we shall have to acquire some by nomination.”[3] A systematic study of OGPU reports to Stalin shows that in early 1924 the secret police were still sympathetic to the plight of the peasantry but the increasingly hostile reports, especially under Yagoda, show that they had lost faith in their own propaganda, that the term “kulaks” became interchangeable with peasants.[4] Village meetings often nominated widows, old people or even drew lots in order to meet absurd OGPU ‘dekulakization’ quotas. Massive resistance to collectivization, particularly by women, often involved entire villages. Even skewed Soviet statistics that attempted to scapegoat ‘kulaks’, acknowledged that the majority of the 2.5 million peasants involved in 13,754 rebellions in 1930 alone were either middle or poor peasants.[5] So overwhelming is the data that standard texts on the history of the Soviet Union now refer to collectivization as Stalin’s “war on the peasants.” The total death toll of this war, including collectivization, dekulakization, famine, and peasants who died either in transit to or in the Gulags is well over six million, including half of the 700,000 political prisoners executed in 1937-8[6]

Although Twiss appears to recognize all this, he fails to draw the only logical conclusion. This is hardly an obscure issue about a minor aspect of Stalinism. Despite his later reservations and revisions, Trotsky’s position at the time of collectivization placed him on the wrong side of the most violent peasant rebellion of the Twentieth Century.

The most fascinating and provocative sections of this study are those detailing Trotsky’s changing definition of the Soviet bureaucracy as a Bonapartist regime. In State and Revolution, Lenin summarised the role of state as an instrument for the exploitation of the oppressed class but he also cited Engels on the “exception”, when “periods occur in which the warring classes balance each other so nearly that the state power as ostensible mediator acquires, for the moment, a certain degree of independence of both.” Such was the case of Bonapartism of the First and Second Empires, Bismarck in Germany and, adds Lenin, Kerensky in 1917. As early as 1928, Trotsky started describing the regime within this theoretical framework, as “Kerenskyism in reverse.” This model clearly framed much of his thinking on Stalinism as Trotsky would reference Soviet Bonapartism in over a hundred articles and interviews over the next dozen years.

Throughout the early 1930s Trotsky repeatedly used the Bonapartist state paradigm in general terms, though, as Twiss describes, sometimes inconsistently, favouring the term “bureaucratic centrism” or referring to Bonapartism in the future tense as a potential force for the restoration of capitalism.  By early 1935 he moved to a more precise definition specifically comparing the regime to the First Empire, arguing the the political conquest of Thermidor had occurred a decade earlier with the defeat of the 1924 Opposition. Yet, just as Napoleon did not  “reestablish the economy of feudalism” argued Trotsky, “the social content of the dictatorship of the bureaucracy is determined by those productive relations that were created by the proletarian revolution.”

Although he references Hal Draper’s masterful discussion on Marx and Engels writings on Bonapartism, Twiss fails to provide a precise definition to assess Trotsky’s analysis. Citing Marx and Engels at length, Draper shows that the state moves towards temporary autonomization during periods of crisis because of a class “statemate”, an “unresolved class struggle balances the power of contending classes against each other.” Comparing Bonapartism to a plaster cast, that emerges because “there is no other alternative to prevent society from shaking itself apart in internecine conflict without issue.” Bonapartism provides the conditions for the necessary “modernization of society” when no existing class is “capable of carrying out this imperative under its own political power.” Yet this transitory arrangement bore the “seeds of its own dissolution”, as modernization meant that the maturing bourgeoisie would begin to recognize its own power and the Bonapartist state “would begin to outlive the value of its services.”[7]

Attempting to apply Trotsky’s analysis to this model poses many problems. While he acknowledges Trotsky’s uncritical acceptance of much of the regime’s self-serving ‘kulak’ propaganda, Twiss underestimates the crucial role  that this phantom counter revolutionary class played in Trotsky’s analysis of Soviet Bonapartism. Trotsky’s fixation and hundreds of references to ‘kulaks’ are inexplicable outside the context the Bonapartist paradigm. As he wrote in April 1929:

“The problem of Thermidor and Bonapartism is at bottom the problem of the kulak. Those who shy away from this problem, those who minimize its importance and distract attention to questions of party regime, to bureaucratism, to unfair polemical methods, and other superficial manifestations and expressions of the pressure of kulak elements upon the dictatorship of the proletariat resemble a physician who chases after symptoms while ignoring functional and organic disturbance.”

Additionally,  Twiss cites Alec Nove’s economic study of the Soviet Union that shows that the First Five-Year Plan resulted in the "mass misery and hunger" of 1933 which was the “culmination of the most precipitous peacetime decline in living standards know in recorded history." Yet Twiss persists in describing this state offensive as a “Left” turn though he never explains why. For Trotsky, the assumption was that the working class benefited from industrialization and was the polar class versus kulaks that Stalinism wavered between. Yet in the factories, Stalinism had converted trade unions into productivity organs, largely silenced dissent, utilised food rations as a means of disciplining the workers and arrested thousands of oppositionists. Rather than providing temporary stability to keep contending classes from ripping Soviet society apart, Stalinism was a brutal, chaotic force pummelling Soviet peasants and workers in an attempt to force both to pay for rapid industrialisation.

Trotsky’s search for contending classes to fit his Bonapartist model would prove to be elusive. In October 1932, almost three years after Stalin initiated “dekulakization” and a month after the first report of the Ukrainian famine appeared in his Biulleten’ Oppozitsii, Trotsky continued to warn the regime about the “kulak danger.” His 1935 refined definition of Bonapartism was driven in part, as Twiss shows, by the regime’s concessions to pauperized peasants on the collective farms. Here Trotsky’s contending class by his own admission did not even exist yet, the very nature of agricultural production would inevitably form this reactionary force at some point in the future. By the late 1930s Trotsky largely dropped the kulak rhetoric and viewed imperialism and a section of the bureaucracy as the right restorationist forces of counterrevolution.

Twiss contends that by 1936 Trotsky believed the bureaucracy had moved away from “relative autonomy” towards “extreme autonomy” and, claims Twiss, that this “suggested a class-like degree of autonomy.” Yet such a transformation to complete autonomy would have negated Bonapartism and represented a class, not a “class-like” formation. Moreover, throughout the 1930s Trotsky asserted dozens of times that the collapse of the Stalinist system was imminent, a prognosis inextricably linked to his Bonapartist model--even if his epigones later ignored it. To be sure, Trotsky never claimed to have redefined the Marxist theory of the state as Twiss implies. Either the bureaucracy was a temporary phenomenon wavering between contending classes or it represented the interests of a particular class, even if that class was the bureaucracy itself. This was the position Trotsky himself was moving toward despite Twiss’s claim that a snapshot from 1936 was his final, frozen verdict. Twiss fails to answer the obvious question. Once contending classes and the temporary nature of Stalinist Bonapartism are jettisoned in favor the “extreme autonomy” of the bureaucracy, what exactly is left of Trotsky’s Bonapartist model?

Overwhelming archival evidence has now demolished the Stalinist myths about the regime’s brutal war on the Soviet peasantry. Marxists who had previously attempted to hold onto the remnants of Trotsky’s analysis are now faced with the conundrum of either choosing to repeat what we now know was Stalinist propaganda or alternatively coming to terms with serious defects in Trotsky’s Bonapartist analysis. Whatever shortcomings in this study, Tom Twiss deserves credit for initiating a more historically accurate and non-sectarian discussion on the nature of the Stalinist system.

Footnotes:

1.Geoffrey Swain, Trotsky, Taylor and Francis, 2006, 195.

2.Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, Penguin 2015, 223, 425.

3.Moshe Lewin, Russian Peasants and Soviet Power: A Study of Collectivization, Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc. 1975, 77,491.

4.Hugh Hudson, The Kulakization of the Peasantry: The OGPU and the End of Faith in Peasant Reconciliation, 1924-27. Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, vol 1, 2012.

5.Lynne Viola, Peasant Rebels Under Stalin, Oxford University Press, 1996, 100-131.

6.Ronald Suny, The Soviet Experiment, Oxford University Press, 2011, 235-250.

7.Hal Draper, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, vol. 1: State and Bureaucracy, Monthly Review Press, 1986, 439-463

On the centenary of the Russian Revolution's victory, Eric Blanc starts off our series of historical articles.

Eric Blanc is an independent researcher in Oakland, California. He is the author of the forthcoming monograph, Anti-Colonial Marxism: Oppression & Revolution in the Tsarist Borderlands (Brill Publishers, Historical Materialism Book Series).

Main photo caption: Petrograd protesters in early 1917

Introduction

Assessing Bolshevik policy before Lenin’s return to Russia in April 1917 has long been one of the most heated historiographic controversies in the socialist movement. As Frederick Corney’s recent documentary collection has illustrated, debates over this issue were a central component of the political struggle waged in the early 1920s by Leon Trotsky and his supporters against the degeneration of the Soviet regime under the leadership of Joseph Stalin.[1]

Seeking to push back against the increasingly bureaucratised party apparatus, Trotsky initiated the polemic in his famous 1924 The Lessons of October. In this pamphlet he argued, among other things, that the Bolshevik party under the leadership of Stalin and Lev Kamenev was mired in de-facto Menshevism before Lenin arrived in April 1917 and re-armed the party with an entirely new political strategy. According to Trotsky, the ‘old Bolshevik’ view that socialist transformation would have to start in the West had led ‘inevitably to Menshevism’ in early 1917.[2] Specifically, he asserted that since the pre-April Bolsheviks thought that Russia was not ripe for socialist revolution, they therefore failed to see the need to seize power and accordingly sought only to pressure the bourgeoisie to meet the people’s demands.[3] ‘The task of conquering power,’ Trotsky affirmed, ‘was put to the party only on 4 April, i.e., after Lenin’s arrival in Petrograd.’[4]

Over the coming years and decades, polemical assessments of early 1917 Bolshevism crystallised into points of principle. Faced with the degeneration of the Soviet state and the Communist International, it is not surprising that anti-Stalinist Marxists upholding internationalism and workers’ democracy generally re-affirmed Trotsky’s analysis of early 1917.[5] This dynamic has continued up to the present. John Marot, for instance, has sought in a recent set of polemics against Lars Lih to defend the traditional case for a ‘sea change’ in Bolshevik strategy in April.[6]

Most academic historians have likewise shared Trotsky’s interpretation. Robert Slusser has claimed that before Lenin’s return to Russia, the Bolshevik leadership agreed with the Menshevik contention that since the revolution was bourgeois-democratic, therefore ‘the proper course of action for the workers’ parties was to aid the bourgeoisie in carrying through its revolution in order to help create the conditions that would ultimately make possible a workers’ revolution leading to the establishment of socialism.’[7]

Unfortunately, Trotsky’s account obscures more than it clarifies. Contrary to his claims, the Bolsheviks did in fact aim to seize power well before Lenin’s return. That this fact has been so widely overlooked testifies to an on-going analytical confusion surrounding the politics of ‘old Bolshevism’ and revolutionary social democracy. Crucially, the Bolsheviks did not believe that setting up a workers’ and peasants’ government in Russia was justified only during a socialist revolution. In their view, such a regime was needed to lead the democratic revolution to victory – to confiscate the landed estates, pass the eight-hour day, establish a democratic republic, etc.

Building off the pioneering work of Lars Lih, I will show in this article – the first in a series on the evolution of Bolshevism in 1917 – how ‘old Bolshevism’ was articulated and implemented in the February Revolution.[8]

Though they did not think that Russia on its own was ripe for overturning capitalism, Bolsheviks called for a proletarian-peasant government to end the war, to meet the people’s demands for land and bread, and to spark the international socialist revolution (which would, in turn, allow Russia to establish socialism). This was the party’s general stance both in the February Revolution and in March, i.e., after the Tsar’s overthrow.

Bolshevik strategy certainly evolved during and following April. But the party’s longstanding orientation – indisputably distinct from Menshevism – constituted the foundation for its militancy throughout 1917.

Given the complexities of the post-Tsarist political situation, it is not surprising that there were sharp tactical debates among Bolsheviks during these early months – and throughout 1917. A certain conception of the driving forces of the revolution did not provide easy answers to the challenging tactical questions posed day-by-day – or even hour-by-hour – in the whirlwind of revolution. Even with the benefit of hindsight it is often far from clear which tactic was best suited for the particular moment.

That said, a strong case can be made that the party’s practice across the empire before Lenin’s return was in fact marked by serious waverings, which Lih has sometimes underestimated. This was mostly the case in March, as will be discussed in the next article in this series.[9] But Bolshevik behaviour in February too was marked by some significant vacillations.

Lenin’s arrival in April played an important role in pushing the party in a more politically resolute direction. But it does not follow that early Bolshevik wavering was primarily caused by flaws in the party’s strategic line of march. Much of this vacillation took place in spite of (rather than because of) the overall orientation of ‘old Bolshevism’.

The reason why it is important to re-examine the February-March debates goes beyond just setting the historical record straight. Understanding the politics of ‘old Bolshevism’ is crucial to overcoming the widespread tendency to conflate Lenin’s politics with those of the party as a whole in 1917.

It is hardly the case that Lenin’s position always prevailed even in Petrograd after April. This dynamic becomes far more evident in the provincial towns and outlying regions of the empire, where the political and organisational attachment of the local committees to Lenin and the Petrograd-based leadership was often tenuous. Historian Hugh Phillips, for example, observes that ‘Tver's archives confirm the absence of a national Bolshevik network in 1917 taking its commands from the leadership in Petrograd. In short, the city's Bolsheviks were largely on their own.’[10] The autonomous perspectives and actions of local Bolshevik leaderships were often decisive well into 1918.[11]

Without understanding the Bolshevik party’s longstanding strategic cohesiveness, it is hard to make sense of how and why it came to become the leading socialist current in so many regions of imperial Russia by October. One hundred years after the revolution, it is well past time for Marxists to take a fresh look at what Bolsheviks said and did on the ground in 1917.

The February Revolution

Before delving into the theory and practice of Bolshevism, it may be helpful to briefly sketch out the basic sequence of the February upheaval. Revolution erupted in the heart of imperial Russia on International Women’s Day (23 February in the old calendar). Working-class women in Petrograd struck, took to the streets to demand bread, and called upon workers in their neighbouring workplaces to join in. Hundreds of thousands of workers took to the streets the following day and by 25 February the capital was paralysed by a general strike. On 26 February, the state ordered troops to fire upon the protestors: some units complied, killing hundreds. Soldiers’ mutinies spread that evening and the following morning, culminating in the implosion of the city’s military apparatus on 27 February.

 Up until this point liberal leaders in the State Duma had limited their actions to calling on the Tsar to reform his government. Only on 27 February did the liberals finally side with the revolution, though they simultaneously sought to preserve the monarchy. The Tsar abdicated on 2 March and called upon his younger brother to take the throne – yet protests from workers and socialists against the preservation of the monarchy obliged the latter to step down as well. After a reign of more than three hundred years, the much-hated Romanov regime had been toppled by working people.

What should replace Tsarism? Moderate and radical socialists gave very different answers to this question during the February Revolution. Indeed, the course of events in Petrograd was inseparable from conflicts between different socialist currents over the fundamental strategic choice of 1917: whether to promote the hegemony of the proletariat or an alliance with the bourgeoisie. Whereas moderates sought to channel the upsurge into a bloc with the liberal State Duma, radicals upheld the tradition of 1905 and called for the establishment of a provisional revolutionary government of working people, with no participation of the propertied classes.

The ability of the moderate socialists to impose their vision was decisive for the particular shape of the power that replaced Tsarism. By 27 February, Tsarist authority had collapsed, and the liberal Duma was left floating in mid-air with little support on the ground. Since the insurgent workers and soldiers looked to the new Petrograd Soviet as the legitimate authority, it easily could have taken full power had it been so inclined.

During the first days of insurrection, the radicals – Bolsheviks, ‘Interdistrict’ Marxists, and left Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) – had held the initiative. But their call on workers to gather at the Finland Station to form a soviet and their own provisional revolutionary government fell flat. Instead, the insurgent crowds responded to the moderate socialists’ rival proposal to form a soviet at the Tauride Palace (where the liberal State Duma was based). The Menshevik leaders of the new Soviet were intent on a bloc with the liberals: only such an alliance, they argued, could prevent a successful counter-revolution – conditions in Russia, moreover, were unripe for a working-class regime. At the first session of the Soviet, on 27 February, the moderates thus proposed the establishment of a purely bourgeois government through negotiations with the liberal leaders.

At the same time, however, the Soviet leadership distrusted the liberals and worried about losing its hold over the radicalised workers and soldiers. Thus it sought to maintain a significant amount of power in its own hands, so as to pressure the bourgeoisie to implement the people’s wishes. Crucially, the Soviet’s famous 1 March ‘Order Number 1’ declared that soldiers must only follow governmental political instructions that were also approved by the Soviet. The fruit of this approach was the ambiguous structure of ‘dual power’.

Menshevik and liberal leaders met on the evening of 1 March. The latter were obliged to accept the Soviet leadership’s terms for its conditional support, the most important of which were that the Provisional Government grant political freedom and legal equality for all, abolish the police and establish a people’s militia, release all political prisoners, refrain from reprisals against mutinous soldiers, and convoke a Constituent Assembly as soon as possible. (Significantly, the crucial questions of war and land reform were absent from the agreement.) On 2 March, the Soviet overwhelmingly accepted the leadership’s resolution to support the government in so far as it implemented the demands of the people.

Bolshevik Theory and Practice

The Bolsheviks upheld a militant orientation throughout the February uprising. In sharp contrast with the Mensheviks, their strategy opposed any blocs with the bourgeoisie. Bolshevik leaflets declared that a regime of workers and soldiers was needed to bring peace, bread, agrarian reform, the eight-hour day, and a democratically elected Constituent Assembly. By taking power, they argued, Russia’s working people would be able to push for an end to the war and unleash a world socialist revolution. The Russian Bureau of the Central Committee wrote a proclamation on February 27 declaring:

The immediate urgent task of the Provisional Revolutionary Government is to establish relations with the proletariat of the belligerent countries with a view to the struggle of the proletariat of all countries against their oppressors and their slave masters, against the Governments of Tsarist type and the Capitalist cliques, and with a view to the immediate cessation of the bloody slaughter inflicted on the enslaved people. The workers of the factories and plants as well as the insurgent troops must choose, without delay, their representatives to the Provisional Revolutionary Government which must be established by the Revolutionary Insurgent people and the Army. … Forward! There is no turning back! Fight without mercy! Follow the Red Flag of the Revolution! Long live the Democratic Republic! Long live the Revolutionary working class![12]

That same day, another leaflet issued by the Bolshevik Vyborg Committee (probably in conjunction with other radicals) explicitly called on workers to establish a soviet regime at the Finland Station:

Comrades, the long-awaited hour has arrived! The people are taking power into their own hands, the revolution has begun; do not lose a single moment, create a Provisional Revolutionary Government today. Only organisation can strengthen our forces. First of all, elect deputies, have them make contact with one another and create, under the protection of the armed forces, a Soviet of Deputies. Bring over to our side all soldiers still lagging behind, go to the barracks themselves and summon them. Let Finland Station be the centre where the revolutionary headquarters will gather. Seize all buildings that can serve as strongholds for our struggle. Comrade soldiers and workers! Elect deputies, forge them into an organisation for the victory over autocracy![13]

Socialist revolution, a major theme in Bolshevik agitation, was always framed from an international perspective. The Bolsheviks’ Kiev Committee spelled out the party’s longstanding view that Russia should be the detonator of world revolution:

The Russian Revolution – taking place in the midst of the world conflict [WWI] and in the era of a colossal intensification of class contradictions in the West – will give a new push to the upsurge in proletarian struggle in the countries of finance capital for the full expropriation of the capitalist class. The Russian Social Democracy must strive to ensure that the democratic revolution in Russia serves as the signal for the proletarian revolution in the West and it must call on all internationalists in the warring countries to coordinate their actions to fight capitalism.[14]

As reflected above, the outbreak of world war in 1914 had significantly increased the Bolsheviks’ stress on the interdependence and immanence of the worldwide socialist revolution. On the eve of February, the Ekaterinoslav Committee distributed a typical party leaflet:

Who besides workers can stop the production of cannon and shells and end the carnage? Who else can raise high the glorious banner of the Russian Revolution? The final denouement is near, as is the final judgment on the perpetrators of the greatest crime in history against mankind. … There have been enough victims for the glory of Capital. Our common enemy is behind our backs.[15]

Sukhanov similarly observed that the Bolsheviks and left SRs in the Petrograd Soviet in February ‘believed that the World War would result in an absolutely inevitable worldwide socialist revolution and that the national revolt in Russia would lay its foundations, blazing a trail not only towards the liquidation of the Tsarist autocracy, but also towards the annihilation of the power of capital.’[16]

The Bolsheviks’ orientation, in short, was very radical. That they did not project the perspective of overthrowing capitalism in Russia prior to the Western workers’ revolution did not stop them from calling for a proletarian-peasant government to end the war, meet the people’s social demands, and spark the international overthrow of capitalism.

Bolshevik tactics regarding the creation of a revolutionary regime, in contrast, were generally cautious during late February and early March. From 27 February onwards, the party did not in practice fight for power. Though the district Bolshevik Vyborg Committee advocated a more offensive tactic, the top Petrograd party leadership – the Russian Bureau of the Central Committee led by Alexander Shlyapnikov – felt that conditions were not yet ripe for such an approach.[17]

Initially, in the first days of the insurrection, all wings of Bolsheviks had sought for the party committees to directly lead the overthrow of the autocracy and to take the initiative in establishing a broader revolutionary provisional government. Shlyapnikov recalls that on 25 February ‘we decided that the time for diplomatic negotiations and agreements [with the moderate socialists] had already passed’; instead, the mass movement should be led by ‘our battle-proven, disciplined, and centralised party groups’.[18] The 27 February proclamations by the Russian Bureau and the Vyborg Committee reflected this desire to assert Bolshevik (and/or radical) political hegemony, against the attempts of the moderate socialists to do the same. But, as we have seen, the radicals lost the battle on 27 February when the moderates succeeded in leading the masses to the Tauride Palace.

For reasons that will be discussed below, the Bolsheviks did not put forward their proposal to establish a working people’s regime during the decisive first sessions of the Soviet on 27 February, 28 February, and 1 March.[19] Nor did they generally agitate in the streets for this demand. In his celebrated memoir of the revolution, left socialist and Petrograd Soviet leader Nikolai Sukhanov notes that the Bolsheviks and other radicals who favoured ‘the immediate dictatorship of the Soviet’ did

not even think of engaging in any real struggle for their principles, either in the [Soviet] Ex.[ecutive] Com.[mittee] or the Soviet, or amongst the masses. When the question was debated these people were almost unnoticeable; they never came forward with an independent formulation of their position, and when it came to voting they constituted a single majority with the representatives of the third tendency [in favour of ‘dual power’ and the recognition of the Provisional Government].[20]

On 1 March, the radical Vyborg Committee proposed that the Bolsheviks push for the Soviet to establish itself as the government, but Shlyapnikov and the city’s other top Bolsheviks felt that this initiative was premature.[21]

Assessing whether this cautiousness was a tactical mistake hinges on one’s analysis of the objective situation. Sukhanov, Melancon and Tsuyoshi Hasegawa have argued that in Petrograd’s volatile revolutionary climate, it was conceivable that had they taken the initiative, Bolsheviks and other radicals could have taken power in Petrograd in late February or early March.[22] According to Hasegawa, ‘it was possible that if such a cry had been made, the masses might have been swayed to support it.’[23] A Bolshevik Vyborg leader, Fedor Dingelshtedt, later argued that ‘not one political rally or workers meeting would have rejected this [Vyborg] resolution of ours if someone had only proposed it.’[24]

Other sources, however, have painted a different picture. Historian Ziva Galili, for example, concludes that in late February ‘apart from a small group in Vyborg – the most militant of the working-class districts – workers did not appear ready to take responsibility for the country as a whole.’[25] For further evidence of relatively moderate mass sentiment, we could point to two more salient facts: workers flocked to the Tauride Palace rather than the Finland station on 27 February and radicals subsequently found themselves outnumbered in the early Soviet sessions. Moreover, it is far from evident that a revolutionary government in Petrograd would have found sufficient support among workers and soldiers outside the capital, where political polarisation at this moment was much less developed.

On 2 March, as the process of setting up a liberal Provisional Government was underway, various Bolshevik delegates in the Soviet raised the need for a revolutionary provisional government and criticised the decision to pass over power to the bourgeoisie. Zalutskii decried the fact that central demands of the revolution (land, peace, the eight-hour day) were not addressed in the Soviet-liberal agreement: ‘A revolutionary provisional government has not been formed in the name of the people.’ Similarly, Molotov exclaimed: ‘The Provisional Government is not revolutionary. Guchkov, factory owners, Rodzianko, and Konovalov would make a mockery out of the people. Instead of land they will throw rocks at the peasants.’[26] I. Uliantsev affirmed the call for a ‘provisional revolutionary government [to] be formed from the soviet of workers’ deputies.’[27]

The resolution put forward by the Bolsheviks, probably in conjunction with other radicals, was intransigent against the bourgeoisie and raised the perspective of the need to eventually establish a revolutionary regime:

In view of the fact that the Provisional Government is organized by antipeople circles and landlords of Guchkov’s type, whom the revolutionary workers and soldiers cannot trust, we protest against every attempt at agreement [with them]. We express no confidence in Kerenskii. Also we recognize that only the Provisional Revolutionary Government can fulfil the popular demands.[28]

Yet many Bolsheviks failed to support the line of their own party. Various Bolshevik leaders limited their interventions to calling on the Provisional Government to implement the people’s demands for a republic, elections in the army, and the eight-hour day.[29] In the end, only 14 delegates voted for the radicals’ resolution, despite the fact that there were at least 40 Bolsheviks present.[30] Moreover, a majority of Bolshevik delegates voted in favour of the Soviet leadership’s proposal to recognise the Provisional Government.[31]

In the party leadership meetings that evening and the following day, a minority of the most radical Bolsheviks demanded immediate mass agitation for an armed uprising against the Provisional Government.[32] But this perspective was defeated, as the majority of local Bolshevik heads now believed that establishing a revolutionary provisional government had become a mid-range, rather than immediate, objective. Sharp debates over how and when to replace the Provisional Government – as well as divergences concerning how much it (and the moderate socialists) could be pressured from below – continued in all levels and regions of the Bolshevik party throughout the rest of March.

Explaining Bolshevik Actions

An assessment of Bolshevik policy and practice in February must answer two distinct questions. First, since the Bolsheviks advocated a workers’ and peasants’ government, why did they not fight for this in practice after the victory of the 27 February insurrection? Second, why did so many Bolsheviks hesitate to defend their own party’s political line during the crucial debates in the Soviet?

Readers should note that the Bolsheviks’ explanations for their approach rarely related to ideological concerns – instead, questions of tactics, organisation, and assessments of the conjuncture were generally seen to be paramount.

After February, various Bolsheviks explained that seizing power in Petrograd would have been a mistake since the revolutionary mood in rest of the empire lagged behind the capital. One party militant in April explained:

When the Soviet of deputies was formed – then state power was proposed, but the workers did not consider it possible to take power into their hands ... Did the Soviet of Workers' Deputies act correctly in refusing power? I consider that it did. To take power into our hands would have been an unsuccessful policy, since Petrograd is not all of Russia. There, in Russia, is a different correlation of forces.[33]

Others stressed Bolshevik organisational weakness. Having just emerged from underground conditions, their committees were fragile and atomised, making it more difficult to push back against the prevailing current and fight for power. A Latvian Bolshevik later argued that given the party’s organisational limitations in February,

there could be no question of leading the masses to the final battle. The party had been decimated in the recent period by countless arrests of its members ... Especially in the first days of the movement, the disorganisation was terrible, a circumstance that the various opportunistic leaderships took advantage of.[34]

Along the same lines, Bolshevik worker S. Skalov posited that ‘we could not go against the Duma on 27 February 1917, nor was there any reason to. We were too weak organisationally, our leading comrades were in jails, exile and emigration.’[35] Shlyapnikov’s memoir also consistently stressed the Bolsheviks’ ‘weakness’ and the ‘hostility’ directed at them inside the mass struggle and the Soviet, which made asserting their politics ‘a daunting job’.[36]

If the Bolsheviks were indeed this weak and politically isolated, then the Vyborg Committee’s desire to push for a soviet government (including through immediate armed struggle) should probably be seen as an expression of ultra-left Blanquism. Over the coming months, Bolshevik leaders, including Lenin, would have to frequently push back against the tendency of the Vyborg Committee and other Bolshevik radicals to fight for power before a majority of the Soviet was won to this position.

Another possible explanation for Bolshevik cautiousness in February is that various party members felt that the danger of immanent counter-revolution obliged limited cooperation with the liberal elite. During the upheaval, a fear that right-wing generals would march on Petrograd to depose a new revolutionary government was one of the central factors pushing the Soviet leadership into seeking a legitimising bloc with the propertied classes. As Hasegawa notes, this fear was not misplaced; the perceived threat was in fact a very real one.[37] Alistair Dickins’ recent work on the Siberian town of Krasnoiarsk has shown that even in this soon-to-become bastion of radicalism, the Bolsheviks in early March collaborated with the liberals due to their ‘fears … of a possible counter offensive by regime loyalists.’[38] According to one secondary source, this may also have been a factor shaping Shlyapnikov’s behaviour in the February Revolution.[39]

Finally, we should take note of one factor that was tied to deeper ideological-strategic questions: how to relate to moderate socialists in the fight to establish a new power. Potential tensions in ‘old Bolshevik’ strategy – which stressed both the hegemony of the proletariat and the need for a governmental bloc with the ‘revolutionary democracy’ – revealed themselves in late February when the Mensheviks and SRs won the leadership of the insurgency away from the radicals and then sought to hand power to the liberals.

Traditionally the Bolsheviks had envisioned that the Marxist proletarian party would lead the seizure of power and establish a democratic dictatorship of the workers and peasantry. This was often portrayed as a coalition between the Russian Social Democracy and the ‘revolutionary democratic’ parties of the peasantry and petty-bourgeoisie (the SRs, etc.). Which social class and party, if any, should be the dominant current in the revolutionary government was left open-ended.

Shlyapnikov explains that in February he initially envisioned that the revolutionary government would be established ‘on the basis of an agreement between the country’s three main existing revolutionary and socialist parties [the Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, and SRs] … We thought that it would be possible to create a revolutionary government of the socialist parties that comprised the majority in the Soviet’.[40] Accordingly, he engaged in personal discussions with Menshevik and SR leaders in the first days following the triumph of the 27 February insurrection, hoping to convince them to support this plan.[41] But eventually, Shlyapnikov notes, ‘our “good ideas” scattered like dust under the impact of harsh reality. Neither the Menshevik Social Democrats nor the Socialist Revolutionaries wanted to take power, they were afraid of it.’[42]

In such an unforeseen context, venturing down the intransigent political path desired by the Vyborg Committee had the benefit of clearly upholding proletarian hegemony, but it dangerously risked breaking ties with the ‘petty-bourgeois’ parties and their class constituencies.

The question of whether the SRs and Mensheviks could be convinced (or cajoled) to break with the bourgeoisie had major practical implications and it remained an on-going debate in the Bolshevik party throughout 1917. But it is important to note that the radical Vyborg Bolsheviks were no less committed to the strategy and perspective of ‘old Bolshevism’ than more cautious leaders like Shlyapnikov.

The algebraic character of the ‘democratic dictatorship’ strategy (with its dual stress on proletarian leadership and ‘democratic’ alliances) could be developed and concretised in distinct directions. A strong tradition of sharply criticising moderate socialists and asserting Bolshevik political hegemony was no less important to the party’s theory and practice than its search for unity – under working-class leadership – with the non-proletarian masses and their representatives. In February, as in subsequent months, Bolsheviks could and did lean on different elements of their party’s strategic heritage to navigate the stormy revolutionary seas. And when it became clear to Bolshevik militants such as Shlyapnikov that the moderate socialists would not break from the bourgeoisie, most promptly adjusted their tactics accordingly.

The aforementioned factors explain why the Bolsheviks did not immediately fight in practice for soviet power in February. But what explains the reticence of so many of their militants to affirm their party’s call to reject the new liberal regime and eventually establish a provisional revolutionary government?

It would appear that the main factor here was a straightforward adaptation to the mood of the majority of workers and their moderate socialist representatives. Shlyapnikov noted that on 2 March ‘many of our party members in the Soviet succumbed to the hostility created by speeches of our enemies against us and not only did they not vote for our proposal … but they even voted against us.’[43] Michael Melancon similarly writes that the Petrograd radicals were perhaps ‘cowed by the right socialist intellectuals’ success in summoning the soviet under their control.’[44]

This was a significant political adaptation. As would be the case in March, wings of the Bolshevik party hesitated to publicly defend the stance of ‘old Bolshevism’ – as Sukhanov put it, the Bolsheviks failed to engage in a ‘real struggle for their principles’. Ambiguities in the strategy of ‘old Bolshevism’ itself may also have contributed to these hesitations. It was understandable that Bolshevik militants who envisioned the establishment of a revolutionary government through an agreement with the Mensheviks and SRs might be wary of engaging in a sharp political battle that could lead to a rupture with these necessary allies.

Conclusion

By way of conclusion, three points should be underscored in relation to Bolshevik theory and practice in the February Revolution.

First, the party’s strategic perspective was unquestionably militant well before Lenin’s return. Bolsheviks rejected blocs with liberals, denounced the war, demanded land to the peasants, and called for a revolutionary government based on the Soviet. The overthrow of the Tsar had not accomplished these fundamental objectives – the democratic revolution, in Bolshevik eyes, had not yet been completed. As such, even after the downfall of the autocracy, the top party leadership in March continued to uphold the general strategic orientation raised in February.

Adherence to the tenets outlined above constituted the ‘red thread’ of political continuity for Bolshevism throughout 1917. So too did the party’s stress on immanent world socialist revolution. Though Lenin in April raised the relatively modest perspective of ‘steps to socialism’ (which crucially did not include the expropriation of capitalist industry) in Russia, all wings of the party well after April continued to believe that the survival and development of the Russian Revolution – both in the immediate and long term – absolutely depended on the success of the revolution abroad. Ironically, Trotskyist accounts stressing that the party was ‘re-armed’ by Lenin in April discount the centrality of international revolution in ‘old Bolshevik’ strategy and exaggerate the extent to which the post-April Bolsheviks in 1917 believed that Russia on its own could move to socialism. The real rupture in Bolshevik strategy, in my view, was the innovation of ‘socialism in one country’.

 In light of the radical thrust of ‘old Bolshevism’ it should come as no surprise that Bolsheviks overwhelmingly supported the general line of Lenin’s April Theses.[45] As self-described ‘old Bolshevik’ leader Kalinin argued at the late April conference:

Read our first document during the Revolution, the [27 February] manifesto of our party, and you will see that our picture of the revolution and our tactics did not diverge from the theses of comrade Lenin. Of course, the picture sketched out by comrade Lenin is whole, complete, but its method of thinking is that of an Old Bolshevik, which can cope with the originalities of this revolution. As a ‘conservative’ I confirm that our old Bolshevik method is quite suitable for the present time and I do not see any significant differences between us and comrade Lenin.[46]

Bolshevism’s relative political cohesion during 1917 cannot be plausibly explained by the personal influence of Lenin, nor by the party’s organisational structure, which hardly resembled the hyper-centralised and disciplined monolith depicted in both Cold War and Stalinist historiography. ‘Insubordination was the rule of the day whenever lower-party bodies thought questions of importance were at stake,’ notes Robert Service.[47] Indeed, Lenin’s stance on national liberation was more often than not openly rejected by borderland Bolshevik organisations as late as 1918. Some aspects of hisApril Theses (e.g., framing soviet power as a ‘step towards socialism’ or the highest form of democratic rule) were also ignored on the ground by many Bolshevik committees during 1917. Yet on the most important political questions – proletarian hegemony, opposition to the war, soviet power, land to the peasants – a fundamental continuity marked the politics of Bolshevism before and after Lenin’s return.

 Lenin’s interventions from April onwards were certainly important in pushing the party as a whole to more aggressively fight against the Provisional Government and to more consistently steer towards a revolutionary regime in which the proletariat and the Bolsheviks would be the dominant force. In practice, this helped orient the Bolsheviks to independently vie for political power and to more antagonistically approach the moderate socialists. Debates over armed insurrection and revolutionary government in October would show just how decisive these questions could be for Marxist practice. But, in sharp contrast with the Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, Bolshevism did not suffer a major split over the fundamental questions of internationalism and power in 1917. This dynamic can only be understood if we acknowledge the actual politics of ‘old Bolshevism’.

Second, despite their shared political radicalism, the Bolsheviks in February were often quite divided on the best tactics to pursue regarding the fight for a revolutionary regime. Whereas the Vyborg Committee wanted to push directly for a soviet government, the tactics of the Bolshevik city leadership in February were generally cautious.

It is not self-evident even in hindsight if this caution reflected an ‘opportunist’ political adaptation or whether it was an appropriate approach for the prevailing political conditions (majority support for the moderate socialists, weak Bolshevik party organisation, the isolation of Petrograd, etc.) Precisely assessing this is impossible since the potentialities and limits of popular militancy in February could only have been tested and revealed by a pro-active initiative by the radicals to fight for power.

My impression is that while the radicals probably could have seized state power in Petrograd, such a step would have been a tactical blunder since they likely lacked the strength to hold onto it. As such, Shlyapnikov and co.’s cautious tactics were probably the best suited for the existing context.

At the same time, however, a strong case can be made that the Bolsheviks did in fact needlessly bend to outside political forces, not least of which was the moderate Soviet leadership. Particularly if the mood from below was as radical as Sukhanov, Hasegawa, and Melancon have described, then it would seem that the Bolsheviks missed a major opportunity to openly advocate for their position. Even if they believed that a soviet regime was not on the immediate agenda, the Bolsheviks still could have argued earlier and harder for a revolutionary soviet government as a medium-term goal. Doing so, at the very least, would have more clearly differentiated themselves from the moderate leadership and would have begun the process of cohering around them the most militant revolutionary workers and soldiers. The fact that so many Bolsheviks voted against their own resolution on 2 March underscores the extent to which party members were swept along with the prevailing political tide.

Last but not least, the sharp internal Bolshevik debates over tactics in February illustrates that there was no automatic, one-to-one relation between theory and practice. Despite their party’s shared strategy, Bolshevik leaders frequently advocated a range of distinct tactics at a given moment.

All too often, writers have depicted the actions of socialists in 1917 as determined solely by ideology – according to this logic, if Bolshevik tactics were wrong before Lenin’s return it must have been primarily because the party adhered to a flawed revolutionary theory. Along similar lines, the actions of the moderate socialists in February have frequently been explained as if they were solely determined by a particular theory of ‘bourgeois-democratic’ revolution. Detailed histories of 1917, however, have revealed the extent to which more immediate concerns shaped socialist behaviour.[48] SR leader Victor Chernov was only slightly exaggerating when he argued that ‘neither theory nor doctrine triumphed in the ranks of the Soviet democracy’ in February.[49]

Concrete assessments of the immediate circumstances and demands of the moment often weighed just as much as ideological considerations. How to steer the best possible political course in the midst of a fluid and unpredictable popular upheaval was always a challenge – here the role of party leaderships, and individual leaders, was crucial.[50]

All political currents were subjected to tremendous centrifugal pressures throughout 1917, and socialists in the heat of the moment frequently reversed their longstanding political stances or quietly refrained from fighting for them in practice. The extent to which this dynamic helps explain Bolshevik behaviour in March 1917 will be examined in our subsequent article.

I would like to thank John Riddell, Lars Lih, Charlie Post, Todd Chretien, and David Walters for their comments on this article.

Bibliography

Burdzhalov, E. N. 1987 [1967], Russia's Second Revolution: the February 1917 Uprising in Petrograd, translated by Donald J Raleigh, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Corney, Frederick C. (ed.) 2016, Trotsky's Challenge: the “Literary Discussion” of 1924 and the Fight for the Bolshevik Revolution, Leiden, Boston: Brill.

Dickins, Alistair 2017, ‘A Revolution in March: the Overthrow of Tsarism in Krasnoiarsk’, Historical Research, 90, 247: 11-31.

Elwood, Ralph Carter (ed.) 1974, Resolutions and Decisions of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Volume 1, The Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, 1898–October 1917, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Ferro, Marc 1972, The Russian Revolution of February 1917, translated by J. L. Richards, Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall.

Galili y Garcia, Ziva 1989, The Menshevik Leaders in the Russian Revolution: Social Realities and Political Strategies, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Gērmanis, Uldis 1974, Oberst Vācietis und die lettischen Schützen im Weltkrieg und in der Oktoberrevolution, Stockholm: Almqvist och Wiksell.

Hasegawa, Tsuyoshi 1981, The February Revolution, Petrograd, 1917, Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Lih, Lars T. 2014, ‘Fully Armed: Kamenev and Pravda in March 1917’, The NEP Era: Soviet Russia 1921-1928, 8: 55-68.

Mandel, David 1983, The Petrograd Workers and the Fall of the Old Regime: from the February Revolution to the July Days, 1917, New York: St. Martin's Press.

Манилова, В. 1928, 1917 год на Киевщине: хроника событий, Киев: Гос. изд-во Украины.

Marot, John 2014, ‘Lenin, Bolshevism, and Social-Democratic Political Theory: The 1905 and 1917 Soviets’, Historical Materialism, 22, 3–4: 129–171.

Marot, John 2016, ‘The Real Vladimir Lenin’, Jacobin. Accessed athttps://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/11/the-real-vladimir-lenin/

Melancon, Michael S. 2009, ‘From the Head of Zeus: the Petrograd Soviet's Rise and First days, 27 February – 2 March 1917’, The Carl Beck Papers in Russian & East European Studies, Number 2004, Pittsburgh: Center for Russian and East European Studies, University Centre for International Studies, University of Pittsburgh.

Phillips, Hugh 2001, ‘The Heartland Turns Red: The Bolshevik Seizure of Power in Tver’, Revolutionary Russia, 14, 1: 1-21.

РСДРП (большевиков) 1958 [1917], Седьмая (апрельская) Всероссийская конференция РСДРП (большевиков); Петроградская общегородская конференция РСДРП (большевиков). Апрель 1917 года. Протоколы, Москва: Госполитиздат.

Service, Robert 1979, The Bolshevik Party in Revolution: a Study in Organisational Change, 1917-1923, New York: Barnes Noble Books.

 Шляпников, А. Г. 1992 [1923], Семнадцатый год, Москва: Республика.

Slusser, Robert M. 1987, Stalin in October: the Man who Missed the Revolution, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Sukhanov, N.N. 1955 [1922], The Russian Revolution, 1917: a Personal Record, edited and translated by Joel Carmichael, London, New York: Oxford University Press.

Trotsky, Leon 2016 [1924], ‘The Lessons of October’ in Trotsky's Challenge: the “Literary Discussion” of 1924 and the Fight for the Bolshevik Revolution, edited by Frederick C. Corney, Leiden, Boston: Brill.

[1] Corney 2016.

[2] Trotsky 2016 [1924], p. 92.

[3] Trotsky 2016 [1924], pp. 92, 95.

[4] Trotsky 2016 [1924], p. 96.

[5] Challenging Trotsky’s interpretation of early 1917 neither requires rejecting the strategy of permanent revolution, nor accepting Stalinist accounts of 1917. In subsequent articles, I will show that despite the limitations in his interpretation of pre-Lenin Bolshevism, on the whole the politics of the party in 1917, and the course of the revolution, confirm the fundamental political tenets of permanent revolution.

[6] Marot 2014; Marot 2016. For a good introduction to Lih’s argument, see Lih 2014. A large collection of Lih’s articles can be found on John Riddell’s website:https://johnriddell.wordpress.com/2014/06/12/a-lars-lih-bibliography/

[7] Slusser 1987, p. 54.

[8] InThe Lessons of October Trotsky skips over the politics of the Bolsheviks in the February Revolution, limiting his discussion of pre-Lenin Bolshevism to March. Though his assertions cited above specifically pertain to the period directly following the downfall of the Tsar (and thus will be directly addressed in our next article), the ideas and actions of Bolsheviks in February are a necessary starting point for understanding the ensuing developments.

[9] Subsequent articles will then address Bolshevik conceptions of socialist revolution and their views on the state (Soviet power, a Constituent Assembly, etc.) in 1917.

[10] Phillips 2001, p. 7.

[11] The role of the Bolsheviks empirewide in 1917 is covered in my forthcoming monograph,Anti-Colonial Marxism: Oppression & Revolution in the Tsarist Borderlands (Brill–Historical Materialism Book Series).

[12] ‘The Bolshevik Manifesto of February 1917’ [27 February, 1917], in Ferro 1972, p. 345.

[13] Cited in Melancon 1988, p. 489. Hasegawa and most historians attribute the leaflet to the Bolshevik Vyborg Committee. (Hasegawa 1981, p. 333.) Melancon has countered that it was most likely issued jointly by the ‘Interdistrict’ group of the RSDRP, the Bolsheviks, and the anarchists. (Melancon 1988, p. 489.) This controversy matters little for our discussion, since all sources agree that the Vyborg Committee of the Bolsheviks openly argued in favour of the creation of a soviet government from 25 February onwards.

[14] ‘Резолюция о текущем моменте’ [8 March, 1917] in Манилова 1928, pp. 167-68.

[15] Cited in Burdzhalov 1987 [1967], p. 82.

[16] Sukhanov, N.N. 1955 [1922], p. 103. Emphasis in the original.

[17] On the conflicts between the Vyborg Committee and the Russian Bureau, see, for example, Hasegawa 1981, pp. 258, 536–37.

[18] Шляпников 1992 [1923], pp. 90, 102.

[19] Sukhanov 1955 [1922], pp. 59, 103–04, 107-8; Hasegawa 1981, p. 412-13; Melancon 2009, p. 44. Melancon notes some of the lacunae in the sources concerning what exactly was raised at the 1 March meeting.

[20] Sukhanov 1955 [1922], pp. 59, 103–04.

[21] Hasegawa 1981, pp. 536–37.

[22] Sukhanov 1955 [1922], pp. 137-38; Melancon 2009.

[23] Hasegawa 1981, p. 537.

[24] Cited in Burdzhalov 1987 [1967], p. 242.

[25] Galili y Garcia 1989, p. 66.

[26] Cited in Hasegawa 1981, p. 541.

[27] Cited in Melancon 2009, p. 46.

[28] Cited in Hasegawa 1981, p. 543.

[29] Ibid. On the factual inaccuracies of Soviet historiographic accounts of the 2 March meeting (many of which have subsequently found their way into the non-Russian literature), see Melancon 2009, p. 73.

[30] Ibid.

[31] Elwood 1974, p. 197.

[32] Шляпников 1992 [1923], pp. 217-18, 230.

[33] Cited in Mandel 1983, p. 83.

[34] Cited in Gērmanis, 1974. p. 143.

[35] Cited in Mandel 1983, p. 83.

[36] Шляпников 1992 [1923], pp. 161, 181, 216.

[37] Hasegawa 1981, pp. 426-27.

[38] Dickins 2017, p. 30.

[39] Hasegawa 1981, pp. 537-38.

[40] Шляпников 1992 [1923], pp. 66, 165.

[41] Шляпников 1992 [1923], pp. 196.

[42] Шляпников 1992 [1923], pp. 66, 165.

[43] Шляпников 1992 [1923], p. 216.

[44] Melancon 2009, p. 33.

[45] This development is detailed in Lars Lih’s important forthcoming publication on Bolshevik discussions in April.

[46] РСДРП (большевиков) 1958 [1917], p. 18.

[47] Service 1979, p. 52.

[48] This is a major theme, for example, of Galili y Garcia 1989. The author notes that ideological language ‘was often used by the Mensheviks to rationalize political choices affected more immediately by other, less abstract and more personal factors.’ (Galili y Garcia 1989, p. 9.)

[49] Cited in Hasegawa 1981, p. 424.

[50] Sukhanov, for instance, argues that the Petrograd Bolsheviks’ hesitant performance in February was in large part due to Shlyapnikov’s limitations as a political leader: ‘An experienced conspirator, a first-rate technical organizer, and a practical trade-unionist, as a politician he was quite incapable of grasping and generalizing the essence of the conjuncture that had been created. If he had any political ideas they were the clichés of ancient party resolutions of a general nature, but this responsible leader of the most influential workers' organization lacked all independence of thought and all ability or desire to appraise the concrete reality of the moment.’ (Sukhanov 1955 [1922], p. 43.)

Karl Liebknecht in 1907. A timely archive.

Courtesy of Daniel Gaido originally published here.

Karl Liebknecht’s Speech at the SPD party congress held at Essen in September 1907

"The resolution of the Congress of Stuttgart also determines our position on the question of deportation. That is emphasized here. It contains, under point 3 of the minimum programme, the abolition of all restrictions excluding certain nationalities or races from residence in the country and from the social, political and economic rights of the natives. For this purpose, an additional motion was submitted by the delegates from Hungary, according to which expulsions should be subject to the guarantees of judicial decision. This request was withdrawn after agreement was reached that the above-mentioned paragraph 3 required the removal of the entire right of the state to deport people. The congress resolution therefore calls for the complete equality of foreigners with the nationals also with regard to the right to stay in the country. Away with the Damocles sword of deportation! That is the first prerequisite for foreigners to cease to be the pre-eminent reducers of wages and strike-breakers. The work on the question of migration is a glorious chapter of the International Congress. The problem, however, has not yet been decided; the Stuttgart resolution is only a first step in this field."

(A reference to the resolution of the Stuttgart Congress of the Second International in 1907 on immigration and emigration, which described immigration and emigration as a manifestation of capitalism, called for a far-reaching reorganization of the transport system, and proposed to the organized workers concrete measures to ensure the equality of immigrants, to fight the reduction of the workers' standard of living and to prevent the import and export of strike-breakers. Liebknecht made this speech at the SPD party congress held at Essen in September 1907.)

Source: Protokoll über die Verhandlungen des Parteitages der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands. Abgehalten zu Essen vom 15. bis 21. September 1907, Berlin 1907, S. 284.

A poster from Calais Migrant Solidarity.

Resolution on immigration and emigration adopted by the Stuttgart Congress of the Second International on August 23, 1907

The congress declares:

The immigration and emigration of workers are phenomena that are just as inseparable from the essence of capitalism as unemployment, overproduction and workers’ underconsumption. They are often a way of reducing the workers’ participation in the production process and on occasion assume abnormal proportions as a result of political, religious and national persecution.

The congress does not seek a remedy to the potentially impending consequences for the workers from immigration and emigration in any economic or political exclusionary rules, because these are fruitless and reactionary by nature. This is particularly true of a restriction on the movement and the exclusion of foreign nationalities or races.

Instead, the congress declares it to be the duty of organised labour to resist the depression of its living standards that often occurs in the wake of the mass import of unorganised labour. In addition the congress declares it to be the duty of organised labour to prevent the import and export of strike-breakers. The congress recognises the difficulties which in many cases fall upon the proletariat in a country that is at a higher stage of capitalist development, as a result of the mass immigration of unorganised workers accustomed to lower living standards and from countries with a predominantly agrarian and agricultural culture, as well as the dangers that arise for it as a result of a specific form of immigration. However, congress does not believe that preventing particular nations or races from immigrating - something that is also reprehensible from the point of view of proletarian solidarity - is a suitable means of fighting these problems. It therefore recommends the following measures:

I. For the country of immigration

1. A ban on the export and import of those workers who have agreed on a contract that deprives them of the free disposal over their labour-power and wages.

2. Statutory protection of workers by shortening the working day, introducing a minimum wage rate, abolishing the sweat system and regulating home working

3. Abolition of all restrictions which prevent certain nationalities or races from staying in a country or which exclude them from the social, political and economic rights of the natives or impede them in exercising those rights. Extensive measures to facilitate naturalisation.

4. In so doing, the following principles should generally apply in the trade unions of all countries:

(a) unrestricted access of immigrant workers to the trade unions of all countries

(b) facilitating access by setting reasonable admission fees

(c) the ability to change from the trade union of one country to another for free, upon the fulfilment of all liabilities in the previous union

(d) striving to establish an international trade union cartel, which will make it possible to implement these principles and needs internationally.

5. Support for trade union organisations in those countries from which immigration primarily stems.

II. For the country of origin

1. The liveliest trade union agitation.

2. Education of the workers and the public on the true state of the working conditions in the country of origin.

3. An active agreement of the trade unions with the unions in the country of immigration for the purpose of a common approach towards the matter of immigration and emigration.

4. Since the emigration of labour is often artificially stimulated by railway and steamship companies, by land speculators and other bogus outfits, and by issuing false and scurrilous promises to the workers, the congress demands:

l) The monitoring of the shipping agencies, the emigration bureaus, and potentially legal or administrative measures against them to prevent emigration being abused in the interests of such capitalist enterprises.

III) Reorganisation of the transport sector, especially ships; the appointment of inspectors with disciplinary powers, recruited from the ranks of unionised workers in the country of origin and the country of immigration, to oversee regulations; welfare for newly arrived immigrants, so that they do not fall prey to exploitation by the parasites of capital from the outset.

Since the transport of migrants can only be statutorily regulated on an international level, the congress commissions the International Socialist Bureau to develop proposals to reorganise these matters, in which the furnishings and the equipment of ships must be standardised, as well as the minimum amount of airspace for every migrant. Particular emphasis should be placed on individual migrants arranging their passage directly with the company, without the intervention of any intermediate contractor.

These proposals shall be passed on to the party leaderships for the purposes of legislative application and for propaganda.

Source: Internationaler Sozialisten-Kongress, Berlin 1907, pp. 57-59.

Jairus Banaji discusses fascism and its three best thinkers of the left, Rosenberg, Reich, and Sartre.

This text is the transcript of a lecture given to the students and teachers of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi, on 11^th March 2016 as part of the JNU Nationalism Lectures series. Jairus Banaji is Research Professor in the Department of Development Studies, SOAS, University of London. In 2016 he publishedExploring the Economy of Late Antiquity: Selected Essays (Cambridge) and is currently writing a book called A Brief History of Commercial Capitalism.

What I want to do is talk about fascism in a strictly historical context, I will leave you to draw the kinds of analogies, connections and overlaps that what I’m going to say suggests to you in terms of whether it resonates with our situation in India today, okay? I am going to leave that to you. The three themes I want to talk to you about, which I think are key elements of the political culture of fascism, are as follows.

The first is about the constructed nature of nationalism, you can also call this general theme ‘fascism and the myth of the nation’. The second theme is associated with Wilhelm Reich, who was a psychoanalyst who worked in Berlin and had a considerable influence on sectors of post-war feminism. Reich’s thesis was that patriarchy and the authoritarian family are the mainstay of the state’s power in a capitalist society. This formulation enables us to integrate feminism and revolutionary Marxism in a way in which they are not often seen as being integrated with each other. I’ll repeat that, because it’s such an important formulation: Reich’s thesis is that the authoritarian family is a veritable ‘factory’ of reactionary ideology and structure and as such it is the mainstay of the state’s power in a capitalist society. But particularly so under fascism, where this relationship between the two becomes overtly posited. And the third thesis I want to present to you by way of describing a third element of the culture of fascism is Sartre’s conception of manipulated seriality. I will explain later what I mean by that. At the heart of fascist politics is what he calls manipulated seriality. We need to understand this term “seriality” to understand the dynamics of politics in any capitalist state.

So these are the three broad planks or strands of argument I want to briefly speak about. The first one, the constructed nature of nationalism or what I’ve called ‘fascism and the myth of the nation’ is something that emerges very clearly in a short book that the German Marxist Arthur Rosenberg published in 1934, barely a year after he fled from Germany. Rosenberg was a Reichstag deputy for the Communist Party, that is to say, in Indian terms, he was a member of their Lok Sabha, because Germany had a similar political structure to ours, federal as well as central. He was not just a communist, he was on the left wing of the German Communist Party or the KPD, one of the leading figures of what was called the ‘Berlin Left’, along with the philosopher Karl Korsch. He resigned from the KPD in 1927 because he resented the excessive Russian interference in the affairs of the German party.

Now, the very title of Rosenberg’s essay shows you how original his contribution was to the left-wing understanding of fascism, because it was called Fascism as a Mass Movement. The Comintern didn’t really believe that fascism would last long. It didn’t believe it had deep roots. The Comintern saw fascism as a conspiracy hatched by finance capital, as if a collection of German bankers could sit somewhere and make fascism happen; as if Hitler was simply a puppet of finance capital; and as if the kind of mass appeal that the Nazi party generated in the late 1920s and early 1930s had no roots deeper than finance capital, which is a ridiculous view because it so reductive, it completely misses what is so unique to these kinds of right-wing movements. SoFascism as a Mass Movement was a direct challenge to the Comintern’s understanding of fascism, in other words, to the official Soviet line on fascism, i.e. that it doesn’t have deep roots and that it has nothing to do with culture and with mass mobilisation. What did Rosenberg argue? There are interesting overlaps between the three theses that I’m talking about, between Rosenberg, Reich, and Sartre, the three best thinkers of the left on the issue of fascism, there are interesting connections between the way they argued about fascism which I’ll try and draw out a bit later.

In Rosenberg, the argument is essentially as follows: fascism only succeeds as a mass movement; it might exist in a society politically, within the political spectrum, but it will remain marginal as long as it has not mobilized a mass base. (I said I wouldn’t talk about India but look at the watershed of the 1980s in India to see this. The state-sanctioned pogroms of 1984 gave renewed legitimacy to mass violence and for the first time fuelled the expansion of communal forces further to the right.) So fascism only succeeds as a mass movement, that was the central argument of Rosenberg’s essay. But then the question becomes – how does fascism, how do right-wing movements, construct a mass base? That is the vital question we have to try and understand in our context here in India. His answer, it’s a very interesting answer, was that the ideology which people call “fascist” was already widespread in Europe by 1914. Now remember that the Nazi party wasn’t formed till the 1920s, and Hitler and the Nazi party didn’t become important until the very end of the 1920s, when the economic crisis hit Germany full blast.

So what is Rosenberg saying when he says that the ideology we call ‘fascist’ was already widespread in European society by 1914? He is reversing the relationship between politics and ideology, he is saying the ideology is not a creation of the political party, the political party or movement is a creation of the ideology. So he is pointing to some slow-moving process within European politics and society which can be traced back to the 1870s and 1880s, and what is that? As and when parliamentary democracy began to spread in Europe, the traditional elites of European society were faced with a dilemma, namely, how do they win elections? I mean, these traditional elites have absolutely no appeal to the masses, absolutely none. They represent the interests of big business and big landed property, why on earth would they have any appeal to the masses, because they are in fact the oppressors of the working people. But this is in fact where the oppressor’s ideology becomes important, because the kind of politics that emerged in Europe in the 1870s and 1880s is what Rosenberg called a ‘new authoritarian conservatism’. A conservatism of this type became widespread in Europe. The ‘new authoritarian conservatism’ was the nineteenth-century precursor of fascist ideology, of the fascisms that became more dominant later on.

Now fascist ideology is actually only a pastiche of motifs, it is a pastiche of different ideological currents, it has very little coherence on its own. It’s important to say this because it means you have to try and look at the individual components of a fascist ideology, and these should be obvious to us by today, for example, anti-semitism and other forms of racism; support for a strong state that can act externally, they wanted German capital to become German imperialism so that it could compete effectively on the world market, hence support for imperialism, for an aggressive external thrust; hostility to labour, incredible hostility to labour and to the organised working class; authoritarianism and connected with that patriarchy; and the last and most important of these components, of the kind of ideological pastiche that makes up fascism, is nationalism. The key to the success of the Right wing in European politics from the 1870s onwards lies in the emergence of a new kind of nationalism, which European politics hadn’t known before the 1870s. That kind of aggressive, xenophobic nationalism was not there on the European scene in 1848, it wasn’t really there even in the 1860s when Marx was writing Capital, it became dominant and much more aggressive, overtly aggressive, from the 1870s onwards. And that’s partly linked to the rush for colonies, the whole frantic rush to divide up Africa, to grab pieces of territory and so on. But it’s not only linked to that. I don’t want to have a kind of economic-reductive explanation of nationalism itself.

So what do I mean by the constructed nature of nationalism, why call it fascism and the myth of the nation? Do nations exist? Simple question, do nations exist the way that classes exist? Let me ask you that. I know what a class is when I see it. I know what the middle class is in a city like Bombay and I know what kind of culture is epitomized by the middle class in India today. So I can see the middle class, I see its culture, I see its politics, and if I were living somewhere else, for example in rural India, I would confront other classes. I know what the working class looks like, I know where the working class is employed and there are other working classes who are not employed in large-scale units of production, they are employed in the home and so on and so forth. But the point about class is that these are real communities, these are real existing entities, even when they have no sense of themselves as such. Who on earth would want to argue that a nation has the same ontology as a class, that a nation exists in the same sense that classes exist?

Since nationalism is one of the main themes in these lectures, let me just sum up my own position vis-à-vis the two dominant interpretations or models of nationalism accepted currently. The first is associated with Ernst Gellner. Gellner’s position was totally supported by Hobsbawm. The other position, which in some ways became more popular from the 1980s is the one Benedict Anderson argued in Imagined Communities. Benedict Anderson describes the nation as an imagined community, but he wants to give a sort of positive spin to the word “imagined”, which is very, very different from the way Gellner understood nations and nationalism. Hobsbawm has this to say on the constructed nature of nationalism: ‘With Gellner, I would stress the element of artefact, invention and social engineering which enters into the making of nations’, then he quotes Gellner, quote, ‘Nations as a natural, God-given way of classifying people, as an inherent political destiny is a myth,’ that’s why I said fascism and the myth of the nation. ‘Nationalism, which sometimes takes pre-existing cultures and turns them into nations, sometimes invents them and often obliterates pre-existing cultures, that is a reality,’ and that’s the dissymmetry here, nations are a myth, nationalism is a reality, and then Hobsbawm, by way of agreeing with this, says, ‘In short, for the purposes of analysis, nationalism comes before nations. Nations do not make states and nationalisms but the other way around,’ that’s the argument made by Gellner and Hobsbawm, which I completely agree with.

Now in contrast to that, Anderson says, ‘Gellner makes a comparable point when he rules that nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness…’ (why not? because nations don’t pre-exist nationalism) ‘He [Gellner] invents nations where they do not exist. The drawback to this formulation,’ says Anderson, ‘is that Gellner is so anxious to show that nationalism masquerades under false pretences, that he assimilates invention to fabrication and to falsity rather than to imagining and creation.’ Now look at the dividing-line here: one of them is saying – nations are fabricated, nations are fabrications; the other guy is saying – No, no, not quite, they are imaginings. So Anderson prefers to put it like that, imaginings and creations. In this way Anderson is implying that for Gellner true communities exist which can be juxtaposed to nations. What does Anderson have in mind? Very clearly, class. It’s very clear that he has class in mind, for him class is as imagined a community as the nation is. What does he mean by imagining? The nation is imagined as a community, because it is always conceived as a ‘deep horizontal comradeship’. Amazing! The obvious question, the big elephant in the room facing Anderson here is, Who does the imagining? Even if you suppose that nations are imagined communities, who on earth is doing the imagining? As far as I’m concerned he hasn’t answered that. And what sense does ‘comradeship’ have with the kind of profoundly unequal divisions that make up any country? What sense does it make to talk about a nation as a ‘deep horizontal comradeship’? I can understand class being conceived and discussed in those terms, but not the nation.

There’s one more thinker I want to bring into the picture, her name is Liah Greenfeld. She wrote a book called Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity in which she examines nationalism in the context of France, Russia, Germany, etc. Now, she makes an interesting point which has a direct bearing on India. ‘Much more often a nation is defined not as a composite entity’, that means as something made up of individuals, ‘but as a collective individual (This is creepy! It reminds me of Arnab Goswami…) endowed with a will and interest of its own, which are independent of and take priority over the wills and interests of human individuals within the nation.’ Those human individuals are you and I, real people, real existential entities, we meet with each other, we talk to each other and so on. But no, Arnab will have none of this, for him the supreme individual, the only one that matters is “the nation”: ‘the nation demands to know!’ Arnab keeps screeching at us every evening. So what does Greenfeld say about this conception of nationalism? ‘Such a definition of the nation results in collectivistic nationalism.’ Collectivistic nationalism is a good term for what we are up against in India today. ‘Collectivistic nationalisms tend to be authoritarian and imply a fundamental inequality between a small group of self-appointed interpreters of the will of the nation– the leaders – and the masses, who have to adapt to the elite’s interpretations.’ Self-appointed interpreters of the will of the nation is precisely what we are up against in India today! As Greenfeld says, this nationalism is intrinsically authoritarian. In India a collectivistic, authoritarian nationalism is exactly what is being pushed down our throats today and used against the students in JNU.

That’s one part of Rosenberg’s argument, the argument about the constructed or mythical character of the nation. There is another part which is worth drawing attention to. Remember he said that the ideology which is called fascist was already widespread by 1914, so in a sense, Nazism was a product of that ideology, not the other way around. But Rosenberg went on to make another important point. He said, what was peculiar to modern fascism was the ‘stormtrooper tactic’, as he called it. What’s peculiar to modern fascism are the stormtroopers. Now, we’ve had a lot of experience with stormtroopers here in India recently, but I had promised I’d not talk about India, so I’ll leave it to you to make the connection.

‘Stormtroopers’, the term basically comes from warfare. These are those elite squads that storm the trenches of the enemy. In trench warfare, which was the dominant method of warfare in the First World War. If you’ve seen this brilliant film called War Horse, it’s all about trench warfare, which is one of the bloodiest, most manual forms of warfare imaginable. True, they had already started having aircraft and so on but the bulk of the killing took place in the fields, and it took place across trenches and between trenches, and trench warfare was essentially about storming the trenches.

Now transposed to politics, this is what the stormtrooper does. The Left did not invent the concept of the political stormtrooper, it was the Right that invented it. The stormtroopers were those squads, in Italy they were called squadristi, that helped the Italian landowners in the south break strikes by sharecroppers, break those strikes, eliminate, murder the leaders of their unions in southern Italy. When the industrialists in the north saw what the stormtroopers were doing in the south, they invited them to the north, because they were confronted by working-class insurgency, so they invited the stormtroopers to the north.

Now the important point about the stormtroopers is what Rosenberg says – and I want to quote from this book because it so accurately captures the political scenario of the last six weeks. This is what he says about the stormtroopers:

‘The activities of the stormtroopers of the fascist type are in complete violation of the laws. Legally, the stormtroopers should be tried and sentenced to prison, but in fact nothing of the sort happens. Their conviction in the courts is pure show, either they do not serve their sentence or they are soon pardoned. In this way the ruling class shows its stormtrooper heroes how grateful and sympathetic it is.’

Basically, the argument here is that fascism begins to flourish in a bourgeois democracy only with the active complicity and the connivance of the state. We’ve experienced this recently in the last six weeks, we’ve seen how entities of the state have reacted, how events have unfolded. The complicity, the connivance of the state in allowing a free hand to the stormtroopers is a crucial part of the story of why fascist organisations do not simply disappear from the scene, they are covertly patronized by the existing state even when that state, formally speaking, represents a constitutional democracy such as, for example, the Weimar Republic in Germany or our own democracy in India. So much for Rosenberg. I think those two or three insights are quite valuable.

Now, I want to move on to Wilhelm Reich, to an entirely different level of mediation from Rosenberg’s picture of the kind of aggressive xenophobic nationalism that emerged in Europe in the late nineteenth century. Reich’s key thesis is that patriarchy and the authoritarian family are the mainstay of the state’s power. And in a sense Reich is not moving away from the theme of nationalism, he is addressing the same theme, what he is suggesting is a mechanism for the inculcation of nationalism from a young age.

Reich published The Mass Psychology of Fascism in 1933, a year before Rosenberg’s booklet. He had started drafting the book in 1931, and the problem he confronted was, why do the working masses allow themselves to be mobilized into movements that are manifestly opposed to their economic interest? This is a riddle. Why do the working people allow themselves to be galvanized behind right-wing chariots. Why? It’s a real riddle, because those movements have nothing to offer to the working masses. This riddle, Reich argues, cannot be solved economically, he rejected reductionism of any sort, there was no economic solution to the riddle, there was no economic explanation for it. On the other hand, if the solution to the riddle lay in ideology, we would have to explain what it means to say this, and that is what Reich sets out to do by making the family central to the kind of subjectivity pre-supposed in fascism.

The word ‘subjectivity’ now comes into the picture. There is a fascist subjectivity. There is a subjectivity presupposed in fascism and in the way it works, and the great themes that Reich develops in The Mass Psychology of Fascism can be summed up in the three vectors that run through the first two chapters of his book (there’s an excellent translation ofTheMass Psychology by Theodore Wolfe availablehere). The crucial part of Reich’s book is his conception of ideology as a material force. In other words, ideology has nothing to do with ideas in some abstract sense, it is not a mental phenomenon, it is very much rooted, bio-psychologically grounded, in structures that are moulded by the family, by ‘tradition’, and by a repressed and often brutalized sexuality. In other words, ideology is a material force, it is grounded in the family.

The second vector that runs though Reich’s argument is his conception of patriarchy as the mainstay of the state’s power. I mentioned this earlier. And thirdly, Reich claims, there is a resonance between the authoritarian character-structures that are moulded inside the patriarchal family and the Führer ideology which is characteristic of all right-wing mass movements. Now this Führer ideology revolves around a mass leader, someone with a strong, commanding will and ability to dominate the masses. Was Indira Gandhi a Führer in this sense? Not quite, she was an authoritarian leader, a strong-willed authoritarian political figure. She was quite capable of imposing a state of emergency on the whole country, but what political figure can you think of in India’s recent political experience that strikes you as coming close to the figure of a Führer? A mass leader with a commanding will, a massive chest and so on?  But who is it that creates the Führer? The people who support the Führer, the Führer would be nothing without those people. So that’s what Reich is driving at, that to explain this dialectic between leader and mass we have to invoke character-structures of a certain type, the authoritarian, repressed character-structure and the resonance this finds in the structure of the Führer; one creates or at least allows for the other.

Again, there is a reversal of causality, a reversal of the direction in which the influence moves. Again it is the ‘mass’ that comes first, the mass culture that comes first, and the politics that comes second. Politics in some sense is a reflection of that mass-culture. So I won’t say anything more about Reich, I think the whole idea of the family as a ‘factory’ of reactionary ideologies, not all families, but traditional, authoritarian families, patriarchal families as factories of reactionary ideology, is fundamental. And the family as a battle-ground where the child will either survive as an independent individual later on in life, or be permanently scarred by childhood, defeated on the battlefield of childhood, defeated in the family. There’s a brilliant movie by Theodor Kotulla called Aus einem deutschen Leben (Death Is My Trade, 1977), it’s about a concentration-camp commander, and it traces the biography of this individual. The man ends up on an assembly line processing death in the concentration camps in the 1940s, so the director is effectively asking, how could such an individual be formed? What is the process that allows for such an individual to emerge? Biographically, existentially, how can someone end up manning concentration camps, working on assembly lines of death? So the film starts with childhood and it’s a violent childhood, in a typically lower-middle class, rural Prussian family, with a violent authority figure in the family, namely, the father. Now this is the first sense in which the child confronts the state.

In childhood, if you cannot stand up for your mother against your father, if you cannot resist the violence of your father, there is a definite sense in which you have already lost the battle. When you grow up, become an adult, you are not going to be able to survive the battles of authority, you will go on to be submissive to your employer, worship the state, you will worship state authorities and cringe before the power they embody. The mechanism involved here is identification, it’s a kind of compensation mechanism, you lost in childhood, now as a grown-up you identify with authority, there you are, you have won. Now, carry this one step further into the realm of fascist politics and you’ll see where the Führer figure is coming from.

There is a brilliant passage in Mass Psychology where Reich talks about the individuals who support and worship the Führer as people who felt completely helpless in childhood. He stresses this helplessness, because when such children grow up, they seek compensation in this particular form. They lack any kind of independence of their own. They cannot think critically, they have been dominated emotionally, been scarred by childhood, and so on. So think about this. Think about the importance of character-structures, the kind of structures that are being moulded in the ‘traditional’ family in India and elsewhere. And again feminism has a major role to play, here is one of those bridges between feminism and Left politics. To talk about the family as the site of the first class struggle, the first battle, the first battle with authority.

Now, to Sartre, finally Sartre and his conception of manipulated seriality as the heart of fascist politics. There are classes in society, Sartre doesn’t dispute that, but he divides society into those who are organised (that is, groups) and those who are not (series). It’s a straightforward sociology; if you are organized you can do things, you have some degree of power; if you’re not, you can’t do a thing and you can have everything done to you. Take this away as the main lesson of this particular lecture, the division between organised groups and the unorganised mass which he calls ‘seriality’. When you wait at a bus stop for a bus, you have no intrinsic connection with the other people who are waiting for the bus except the bus itself. The bus is what unifies you, the bus is your external kind of unity, but otherwise you have no internal relationship with the people you’re waiting for the bus with. So he takes the example of the bus queue and develops it further and further. The type of ensemble we are talking about here is the series, and seriality is the condition of being part of the series.

Groups dominate series because they are organised and have the capacity to act collectively. The vast mass of any modern society forms part of the inert structures that Sartre calls the series. Here ‘inert’ simply means unable to act, powerless. The state for Sartre is an ensemble of organised groups most of which have long ago evolved into institutions. We talk about the bureaucracy, the army, the media, political parties and so on, but have you wondered about the kind of dense institutional realities these entities represent? They are profoundly institutionalised and have become part of automatically functioning machines. The important point is that these ‘machines’ would be literally unintelligible to us unless we assumed that they all emerged out of organised groups, just as the groups themselves emerged out of series/seriality, as every group does. The ruling class can rule because at its heart lies an ensemble of organised groups that have the capacity to control and dominate the masses. That’s why trade unions are so important for workers. The union is their first experience of collective strength and solidarity. As an organised group it has the capacity to confront other organised groups. Employers are of course extremely well organised. So are the media. The organised groups that form the backbone of the media and of employers as a class are part of the vast ensemble of groups that make up the power of the state.   

So what does ‘manipulated seriality’ mean? Well, this is Sartre’s argument: organised groups are constantly working serialities. He says working serialities, meaning working on serialities or working on series, by a process which he calls ‘extero-conditioning’. He takes that term from an American sociologist called Riesman in The Lonely Crowd. For example, the millions of news consumers who watch the same TV channels with no connection between themselves except the anchor and the news they watch, believing what the others believe, as if there really are ‘others’ who believe all this, are a perfect example of manipulated seriality. As long as ‘social media’ is organised differently, this danger is much less there. The process of domination of organised groups over series is the essential process by which rule occurs. How does the ruling class rule? It rules in this particular way, as the domination of groups over series. Under the pressure of extero-conditioning, series become ‘worked matter’.  As serial behaviour (pogroms, lynchings, ‘riots’, etc.) violence is worked matter, the product of organised groups acting on series in particular ways.

When Sartre says that manipulated seriality is the heart of fascist politics, it is this group/series relation he has in mind. The pogrom is the sovereign group (the state) or a non-state organised group directing serialities in such a way that it is actually extracting actions from series. There is nothing spontaneous about pogroms. The series is manipulated from the outside to act as if this was the organic action of a group and not the passive activity of a series. (A criminal jurisdiction that prosecutes only those who engaged in acts of violence and discounts the responsibility of the real commanders behind the scenes reflects a primitive judicial culture, out of line with international best practice.) The climate of violence that has been created in India today with black-coated stormtroopers attacking student leaders with the full complicity of the state is driven by a ‘patriotic rage’ that has been ‘manufactured’ (Rosenberg’s expression). Nationalism is mobilised to intensify the climate of violence with slogans like ‘You have insulted my country’, ‘you are anti-national’, and so on. I wanted to go on to talk about other things, but I think I’ll leave it at that.

Jairus Banaji, ‘Nationalism is the bedrock upon which all fascist movements have built themselves’, 20 March 2016, https://www.sabrangindia.in/article/nationalism-bedrock-upon-which-all-fascist-movements-have-built-themselves

Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, Second edn (Cornell University Press, 2009)

Des Raj Goyal, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (Delhi, 1979)

Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Harvard University Press, 1993)

Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780, Second edn (Cambridge, 2012)

Arthur Rosenberg, ‘Fascism as a Mass Movement’, Historical Materialism 20/1 (2012), pp. 133–89; reprinted in J. Banaji (ed.), Fascism: Essays on Europe and India, Second edn (Three Essays Collective, 2016)

Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, translated Theodore Wolfe (1946), accessible here:http://www.whale.to/b/reich.pdf

Arthur Duhé replies to Frédéric Lordon at London HM 2016 on Spinoza, Marx and indignation.

Arthur Duhé is a D.Phil Candidate in International Relations at the University of Oxford. His PhD thesis on Spinoza's theory of international relations both aims to understand Spinoza in his own historical context and to link his philosophy to our contemporary issues. This talk was given on 13 November 2016 at a panel entitled 'The Spinoza/Marx Relationship' with Frédéric Lordon and Panagiotis Sotiris, chaired by Sebastian Budgen. A French version of this talk can be found here.

Frédéric Lordon’s book, Willing Slaves of Capital – Spinoza and Marx on Desire[1] belongs to an on-going intellectual trend  coined as Spinozist Marxism. Although this trend has been extremely fertile and thought-provoking, I will focus here on the tensions that the fundamental differences between Spinoza and Marx’s philosophies produce. To do so, I will first analyse the notion of indignation, which reveals an irreconcilable opposition between a Marxist pole and a Spinozist one. I will argue that these tensions can be perceived in both Frédéric Lordon’s Willing Slaves of Capital and Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri’sCommonwealth[2] and I will compare how each of them deals with this issue. These two books therefore constitute precious laboratories to bring out the philosophical assumptions and consequences that are linked to the definition of indignation.

What is Spinozist Marxism?

As stated above, these two books enter a longer tradition and I would like first to present shortly Spinozist Marxism. This movement starts with Louis Althusser, who declared in his ‘Elements of Autocritics’ (1974): ‘We were not Structuralists … But now, we can confess why: we were guilty of a passion much more powerful and compromising: we were Spinozists’.[3] Althusser is undoubtedly the figure that most prominently supported the renewal of Spinozist studies with the aim of combining Spinoza and Marx and challenging the more traditional couple Hegel and Marx. To do so, he created in 1967 the Spinoza group at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, and invited other intellectual figures to join them, such as Gilles Deleuze or Alexandre Matheron. However, even though Spinozist Marxism originated in Paris in 1967, it has since then crossed the Alps, the Atlantic Ocean and, to a lesser extent, the Channel.

Cesare Casarino in his article ‘Marx before Spinoza’[4] offers the most exhaustive description of Spinozist Marxism, the latter being divided into several categories:

•   1 - Thinkers who have written about Marx and Spinoza in separate yet closely related works. For example, Negri and Balibar.
•  2 - Thinkers who refer implicitly or in passing to the relation between Spinoza and Marx, such as Althusser.
•  3 - Thinkers whose entire thought is imbued thoroughly with Spinozian and Marxian problematics, see Deleuze’s thought and Negri and Hardt’s collaborative works.
• 4  - Thinkers who confront the Spinoza-Marx relation indirectly yet significantly via the examination of a third and related thinker, the best example being Macherey’s book entitled Hegel or Spinoza.
•  5 - Thinkers who directly refer to both Spinoza and Marx, and Frédéric Lordon is one of them.
•  

In sum, ‘the body of Spinozist Marxism is abundant, yet the literature on Spinoza and Marx is thin’.[4bis] I would add that this literature explicitly focused on Marx and Spinoza is particularly useful for us as it highlights the fertility of this rapprochement, but also, in a more critical manner, since it reveals some unsurpassable tensions. One of these tensions, I believe, is to be found in indignation.

A definition of indignation

Indignation, in Spinoza’s philosophy, is a form of affective imitation described in the Ethics as such: ‘if we imagine [someone toward whom we have had no affect] to affect [a thing like us], we shall be affected with hate toward him’.[5] One of the most interesting features of indignation is that it tends to spread, thanks to the affective mechanisms described in theEthics. Because it is contagious, indignation is at the root of any revolution or revolt. Indeed, when the ruler changes ‘to indignation the common fear of most of the citizens, by this very fact the commonwealth is dissolved, and the contract comes to an end; and therefore such contract is vindicated not by the civil law, but by the law of war’.[6]

In sum, indignation highlights why the multitude sometimes refuses to see its power captured by the authority of institutions. En passant, I think that the mechanisms of indignation appeared very clearly in the recent social movements against police violence in Morocco, following the death of a fisherman crushed by a garbage truck. The same scheme could also be found at the origins of the Arab Spring in Tunisia in 2010.

In other terms, Negri and Hardt are right to state that: ‘Indignation, as Spinoza notes, is the ground zero, the basic material from which movements of revolt and rebellion develop’.[7]

Indignation and dialectic

In both Willing Slaves of Capital andCommonwealth, the notion of indignation is presented not only as a key to understand how revolutions work, but also as ‘the affective historical force that is capable of bifurcating the course of events’.[8] Were indignation the affect that could lead to the end of capitalism, it would be a fair reason to pay attention to it. But, ‘can indignation lead to a process of self-determination?’[9]

In order to respond to this question, I will have first to make a digression. In a famous passage of the second Postface of the German edition of the Capital, Marx enhances the differences between Hegel’s dialectic and his own materialist dialectic. The latter implies that the concrete relations of production within the capitalist society necessarily lead to a ‘general crisis’, whose climax is the revolution of the proletariat against capitalist society itself. In other words, ‘the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself’,[10] which is characteristic of the dialectic movement. At the risk of caricaturing his philosophy, Marx depicts three historical steps that are necessarily enchained together: first, an age of Capitalism in which the Bourgeoisie is led to extend as much as it can the process of industrialization and the accumulation of capital; then, the revolution of the Proletariat; and, finally, the establishment of a communist society.

In Commonwealth, Hardt and Negri use indignation to broaden the Marxist and communist revolutionary traditions that ‘understand the revolutionary process as taking place primarily within the field of economic production’.[11] With this notion of indignation, Hardt and Negri can include in their analysis cases of revolts such as the riots in suburbs, that are not directly targeting factories or the economic system more broadly speaking. For instance, it is unclear that the riots in Morocco or during the Arab Spring were based on anti-capitalist aims or were trying to undermine the socio-economic system at all. Thanks to this Spinozist addendum, these authors can keep the core of the Marxist dialectic process that, otherwise, would be difficult to apply to some phenomena of the contemporary world. If Hardt and Negri were the first to explicitly ask whether indignation could lead to emancipation, they do not tackle this issue very clearly. I assume that this absence of response has yet to be interpreted as a positive answer: for them indignation is the affect that will produce the revolution, which will end capitalism to settle a more emancipated society.

But by doing so, Hardt and Negri separate indignation from the whole Spinozist system in which it first appeared. Two distinct critiques can be made here. First, Hardt and Negri tend to change the nature of Spinozist affects. This critique has been made in ‘The Indignant Multitude: Spinozist Marxism after Empire’ by Sean Grattan.[12] Considering Negri’s article ‘Value and Affect’, Grattan notices that affect is first defined as ‘a power of transformation, a force of self-valorisation,’ then as ‘a power of appropriation,’ and finally as ‘an expansive power’. But Spinoza’s definition is much more ambivalent: ‘by affect, I understand affections of the body by which the body’s power of acting is increased or diminished, aided or restrained’ (Ethics III, d3). Given this definition, we understand why, in Spinoza’sEthics, most of the affects are dual, such as joy/sadness; hate/love, and so on. As it has been stated above, indignation is a sad affect and thus leads to a diminution of power. Even though Grattan is wrong to assume that indignation therefore ‘weakens our ability to act in the world’ since Spinoza argues that ‘we strive to deny whatever we imagine affects with sadness ourselves or what we love’ (Ethics III, proposition 25),[13] it is however true that indignation is a sad affect. Spinoza is as ambivalent concerning indignation as he is vis-à-vis the notion of multitude itself: surely, indignation can overthrow despotism; but it can also transform people into theultimi barbarorum (the last barbarians) that lynched the brothers De Witt in 1672.[14] In William Godwin’s words, there is a risk that ‘revolution is engendered by an indignation with a tyranny yet is itself pregnant with tyranny’.[15]

The second critique concerns the teleological aspect which is linked to the notion of dialectic. Even though Hardt and Negri do not argue that indignation will dialectically lead to the negation of the negation, they do enhance the optimistic assumption that it could work, without even mentioning that it may as well lead to an impasse. Again, there is no value of negativity in Spinoza’s philosophy. The Spinozist immanence is plain positivity, without any rest. Even a sad affect, such as indignation, is only to be understood as a lower degree of power so as something that is inherently positive. Althusser here confessed that ‘Spinoza will always miss what Hegel gave to Marx, namely contradiction’ and by contradiction, Althusser understood the dialectic contradiction. Because Spinoza refuses the very notion of negativity, the dialectic process is not understandable in Spinozist terms. Even though Spinoza’s materialism is radically deterministic, it is not teleological as Spinoza’s God is deprived of any form of will or desire (as it clear from the Appendix of Ethics I). In other words, history, for Spinoza, is a chain of causes and consequences that goes infinitely without any aim.

Indignation of the Willing Slaves

I would like now to compare the understanding of indignation in Commonwealth, with Frédéric Lordon’s one. As he stated explicitly, Frédéric Lordon wants to complete Marx’s structuralism with Spinoza’s anthropology of passions. Here again, the analysis of passions is for Frédéric Lordon a way to go beyond an opposition between social classes - the Proletariat and the Bourgeoisie - that has been undermined by the emergence of the executive workers. Indeed, the latter embodied the paradox of joyful workers, or, to echo the English title of Frédéric Lordon’s book, 'willing slaves'. Consequently, affects are both the notions that help to understand our modernity by shedding light on our relations of production, and the starting point to think about the change that could occur. And here, Frédéric Lordon is crystal clear: indignation is the motor of historical processes.

Nevertheless, echoing Althusser for whom materialism was an imperative to stop telling ourselves stories, Frédéric Lordon refuses the necessity of the dialectic process and states that ‘true communism does not come about immediately just because capitalism has been (hypothetically) defeated: can indignation lead to a process of self-determination? Frédéric Lordon’s response seems to be that indignation is necessary but insufficient. However, he affirms that indignation is as such a desire to live ex suo ingenio, following one’s nature:

‘indignation sometimes spreads like syphilis. It overturns the affective equilibria that have until then determined the subjects to submit to institutional relations, and leads them to desire to live, not according to their free will, but as it pleases them – ex suo ingenio – which implies, not some miraculous leap into the unconditioned, but a step into a life determined in another way.’[16]

I would disagree with the following point. First, because the fact that the multitude wants to suppress an order that they hate does not necessarily imply that it positively seeks its own emancipation. It is not because you consider that this order should be condemned that you have a clear idea of what you want instead. Second, the affective agreement on which indignation is based cannot be an agreement in nature because ‘insofar as men are subject to passions, they cannot be said to agree in nature’, [17] so indignation is already another order that shapes individuals’ natures (ingenia).

But this consideration is secondary, what is much more important is the fact that Frédéric Lordon clearly shows that indignation is not a dialectical process as he argues that ‘it is still possible to set history on the march again, or more accurately, to set in motion a possible history of transcending capitalism – but an open-ended history, not yet written and without any teleological guarantees’.[18] The difference between Frédéric Lordon and the authors ofCommonwealth becomes obvious here: by refusing any form of blind optimism, Frédéric Lordon adopts another philosophy of history.

Frédéric Lordon claims here Spinozist realism: ‘It is perhaps on this precise point that the Spinozist realism of the passions is most useful to the Marxian utopia: as a sobering-up. The extinction of politics by the final dissolution of classes and the conflict between them, transcending all antagonisms by the victory of the working class, that non-class without any class interest, are post-political phantasmagoria, perhaps Marx’s deepest anthropological error’.[19] So not only he stands here in favour of a Spinozist stance, but he denounces what he perceives as the limits of Marxism. Furthermore, it is probably not innocent that Marx, who distinguished his thought from what he called utopian forms of socialism, is here associated by Frédéric Lordon with utopia. Being aware of the tensions between Spinoza and Marx, Frédéric Lordon favours a more rigorous Spinozist approach of indignation.

To conclude, there are tensions produced by the dialectical movement of history as depicted by Marx and the mechanisms of indignation. Commonwealth andWilling Slaves of Capital apparently offer us a dilemma: either, we decide to follow Marx by considering that the affective mechanisms of indignation are part and parcel of the dialectical process; or we decide to convert Marxism to Spinozism by giving up the teleological perspective on history. As I understand it, there is novia media possible here.

Does it mean that Spinozist Marxism is based on weak foundations and that it is therefore fallacious to maintain this philosophical relationship? As a response, I will quote here Cesare Casarino for whom: ‘Their meeting, thus, is not unlike the infinitely repeated yet always impossible rendezvous between the man and the woman in Alain Resnais’ L’Année dernière à Marienbad’.[20] This impossible rendez-vous is nevertheless fertile as it opens several theoretical options and it avoids the establishment of a dogmatic school of thought.

In the last decade, several books have been published about the use of Spinoza to think about our world. Chantal Jaquet used Spinozist concepts within the field of sociology,[21] Antonio Damasio based his works in neurology on Spinoza’s materialism.[22] And Frédéric Lordon published several books on the use of affects in economics, sociology and political sciences.[23] This recent emulation may be the sign of a new configuration of the relation between Spinoza and Marx: it may be the first step of a shift from Spinozist Marxism to Marxist Spinozism, the first exploration of a philosophy that would try to go beyond Marx with Spinoza.

References

Althusser, L. (1974) ‘Eléments d’autocritique’, in Solitude de Machiavel. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France

Casarino, C. (2011) ‘Marx before Spinoza: Notes toward an Investigation’ in Spinoza Now (edited by Vardoulakis, D.). University of Minnesota Press

Citton, Y., Lordon, F. (2008) Spinoza et les sciences sociales : De la puissance de la multitude à l’économie des affects. Paris: Editions d’Amsterdam

Damasio, A. (2013) Looking for Spinoza. London: William Heinemann.

Delruelle, E. (2013) ‘Nous avons été spinozistes. Spinoza et le marxisme en France’, paper given in ‘L’actualité du Tractatus de Spinoza et la question théologico-politique’ organized by l’Université Libre de Bruxelles.

Godwin, W. (1793) Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and its Influence on Morals and Happiness, vol. 2, book 4, chap. 2

Grattan, S. (2011) ‘The Indignant Multitude: Spinozist Marxism after Empire’ in Mediations, vol. 25, n°2.

Hardt, M., Negri, A. (2011) Commonwealth. Harvard University Press

Jaquet, C. (2014) Les Transclasses ou la Non-Reproduction. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France

Lordon, F. (2006) L'Intérêt souverain : essai d'anthropologie économique spinoziste. Paris: La Fabrique

Lordon, F. (2013) La Société des affects : pour un structuralisme des passions. Paris: Editions d’Amsterdam

Lordon, F. (2014) Willing Slaves of Capital – Spinoza and Marx on Desire. Verso Books

Lordon, F. (2015) Imperium : structures et affects des corps politiques. Paris: La Fabrique

Lordon, F. (2016) Les affects de la politique. Paris: Editions du Seuil

Marx, K. (2015) The Communist Manifesto. Penguin Classics.

Montag, W. (2005) ‘Who is afraid of the multitude?’ in South Atlantic Quarterly, 104:4

[1] Lordon, F. (2014)Willing Slaves of Capital – Spinoza and Marx on Desire. Verso Books

[2] Hardt, M., Negri, A. (2011)Commonwealth. Harvard University Press

[3] My translation, Althusser, L. (1974) ‘Eléments d’autocritique’, inSolitude de Machiavel. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, p.181, quoted in Delruelle, E. (2013) ‘Nous avons été spinozistes. Spinoza et le marxisme en France’, paper given in ‘L’actualité du Tractatus de Spinoza et la question théologico-politique’ organized by l’Université Libre de Bruxelles.

[4] Casarino, C. (2011) ‘Marx before Spinoza: Notes toward an Investigation’ inSpinoza Now (edited by Vardoulakis, D.). University of Minnesota Press.

[4bis] Casarino, C. (2011) ‘Marx before Spinoza: Notes toward an Investigation’, op. cit., note 3

[5]Ethics, III, prop. 27, cor. 1(traduction E. Curley)

[6]Political Treatise, chap. 4 §6

[7]Commonwealth, op. cit., p. 235

[8]Willing Slaves of Capital, op. cit. p. 103

[9]Commonwealth, op. cit., p. 236

[10] Marx, K. (2015)The Communist Manifesto. Penguin Classics.

[11]Commonwealth, op. cit., p. 239

[12] Grattan, S. (2011) ‘The Indignant Multitude: Spinozist Marxism after Empire’ inMediations, vol. 25, n°2.

[13] This convincing argument can be read inWilling Slaves of Capital.

[14] Montag, W. (2005) ‘Who is afraid of the multitude?’ inSouth Atlantic Quarterly, 104:4

[15] Godwin, W. (1793)Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and its Influence on Morals and Happiness, vol. 2, book 4, chap. 2

[16]Willing Slaves of Capital, op. cit. p. 98

[17]Ethics IV, prop. 32

[18]Willing Slaves of Capital, op. cit., p. 103

[19]Ibid., p. 109

[20] ‘Marx before Spinoza: Notes toward an Investigation’, op. cit.

[21] Jaquet, C. (2014)Les Transclasses ou la Non-Reproduction. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France

[22] Damasio, A. (2013) Looking for Spinoza. London: William Heinemann.

[23] Lordon, F. (2006)L'Intérêt souverain : essai d'anthropologie économique spinoziste. Paris: La Fabrique; Citton, Y., Lordon, F. (2008)Spinoza et les sciences sociales : De la puissance de la multitude à l’économie des affects. Paris: Editions d’Amsterdam; Lordon, F. (2013) La Société des affects : pour un structuralisme des passions. Paris: Editions d’Amsterdam; Lordon, F. (2015) Imperium : structures et affects des corps politiques. Paris: La Fabrique; Lordon, F. (2016) Les affects de la politique. Paris: Editions du Seuil.

In memory of Mark Fisher (1968-2017), we republish from his blog k-punk the following text he presented at the 2009 London Historical Materialism Conference and posted on 29 November 2009. Mark Fisher contributed in many ways to the journal. His groundbreaking work will continue to influence us, as editors and contributors to developing Marxism worldwide and across various disciplines and political spaces. Acollection page has been set up to help his family with his tragic and sudden death. We recommend the following obituaries byJuliet Jacques,David Stubbs,Alex Niven,Simon Reynolds,Craig Gent, andOwen Hatherley.

Thanks to Alberto Toscano, Ben Noys andEvan Calder Williams for making today's panel on Apocalypse Marxism at the Historical Materialism conference such a success. Parts of the text I used today have appeared here before, but I have pasted below the new bits, the product of some just-in-time theoretical production this morning.

Prof. Costas Lapavitsas and Dr. Geoffrey Ingham discuss 'Thinking about Money' on 18 January 2017 at the SOAS, London.

https://soundcloud.com/soaseconomics/thinking-about-money-part-i

The recording is part of the symposium and launch of Marxist Monetary Theory,a collection of papers by Costas Lapavitsas part of the HM book series published by Brill. 

Money and finance are pre-eminent, even dominant, features of contemporary capitalism. Costas Lapavitsas was among the first political economists to notice their ascendancy and devote his research to it. The collected volume ranges far and wide, including papers on markets and money, finance and the enterprise, power and money, the financialisation of capitalism, finance and profit, even money as art.

Richard Seymour on Enzo Traverso and Daniel Bensaïd

Richard Seymour is an author, broadcaster and a founding editor of Salvage. Most recently he is the author ofCorbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics (Verso, 2016). This review was originally posted on hisblog Lenin's Tomb on 28 December 2016, and is a helpful introduction to Historical Materialism's symposium on Daniel Bensaïd in our journal's issue24.4.

This began as a review of Enzo Traverso's Left-Wing Melancholy: Marxism, History and Memory. But a review is usually a conclusion, the verdict on a closed book. This is, in fact, the beginning of something else.

I.

Our defeat is their redemption. The most raging, downwardly mobile, insecure, isolated, almost eclipsed social forces turn out to have a trump, after all.

The axis of global reaction encompasses Modi, Erdogan, Putin, and now the president-elect of the United States. The Brexit Right is victorious in Britain, and Marine Le Pen’s fascists are on the brink of another breakthrough in France. The revanchists of ‘white nationalism’ are energised, already racking up a body count, acutely aware that they have only a few years to “make America,” or its nearest equivalent, “great again”. Meanwhile, the Left is momentarily stunned, feeling almost a physical annihilation.

However, defeat should not be disabling. The history of the Left is a history of defeats. It is the history of the vanquished, necessarily. Marxism, Enzo Traverso reminds us, is a science of defeat. “The whole road of socialism,” said Rosa Luxemburg, “is paved with nothing but thunderous defeats”. In the traditions of the left, defeat is recognised as a vital pedagogical process, even as its tragic dimension overwhelms us.

The novelist Jules Valles dedicated The Insurrectionist, on the Paris Commune, “to the dead of 1871” and all who “formed, under the flag of the Commune, the great federation of sorrows”. But from the crushing of the Paris Commune came, thirty years later, an age of mass socialist parties all over Europe. From the demolition of the internationalist left in 1914, came the electrifying revolution of 1917.

Even the brutal murder of left leaders from Che Guevara to Victor Jara summon mass funerals, not as a symbol of “the end of a communist hope” but as “one of its expressions”. Defeat formed part of a texture of collective memory, a strategic factor in struggle.

Robert Motherwell - Plato's Cave.

II.

But to fight is also to mourn, since the Left “cannot refurbish its intellectual armoury without identifying empathetically with the vanquished of history”. And there is a work of mourning that has yet to be done. The sudden outbreaks of collective grief over dead celebrities are not in this sense fraudulent or mawkish. These deaths remind us of something that we're already feeling. A mourning that is thwarted.

For what collapsed with the disintegration of the USSR was not just an appalling dictatorship, but an “entire representation of the twentieth century” filled with revolutionary hopes. The Velvet Revolutions, unlike their forebears, did not arouse new utopias, but confirmed a regression to minimal liberal ideas of freedom and representation, already underway since the late Seventies.

Given the drastic contraction of historical possibilities disclosed by this process, the momentous defeat of left-wing struggles and working class movements unveiled, the absence of mourning is striking. Former communist parties, instead of working through their loss, chose to repress their past, opting to rename themselves ‘Democratic Left’ or similar substitutions. If Trotskyist currents did not collapse in the same way, they were left similarly adrift, where they did not simply enter into denial. The spectre of communism, Traverso argues, no longer haunts the bourgeoisie, announcing a “presence to come” – it haunts and taunts its former adherents, pricking their bad conscience.

For some reason, this was not a sinless defeat. A sin can, in secular terms, be seen as a special kind of defeat, a capitulation which attracts guilt. And the internalised stigma and guilt arising from the reduction of communism to its “totalitarian dimension” became, even in dissident, anti-Stalinist strains of socialism which had never invested their hopes in the Kafka’s Castle of the East, a resistance to working through this defeat. This “impossible mourning” is one way to understand the pervasiveness of left melancholia. Even the spurious ‘optimism’ of some of the remaining shards of the Left after 1989 was a result of disavowed melancholia, the refusal to mourn, the refusal to accept a loss.

Traverso’s work is therefore, firstly, a work of mourning. It aims to come to terms with left-wing melancholy, as a necessary condition for redemption. It offers us the image of what the psychoanalyst Jean Allouch calls a “dry loss”. According to Freud, mourning ends when we finally alight upon a new object, a new love. Allouch rejects this metonymy of objects. We don’t substitute one for the other, gaining something to compensate our loss. We have to make do with a loss with no compensation whatsoever. We have to go on having a relationship with someone who is no longer there. This is the working through that Traverso doesn’t so much propose as perform.

Historical Materialism's London Annual Conference 10-13 November 2016 

Please find here the audio recording of the conference's closing plenary session that took place Sunday 13 November, 17.15-19.00.

With Ashok Kumar, Tithi Bhattacharya, Susan Ferguson and David McNally.

Chair: Ashok Kumar

Tithi Bhattacharya – The Ontology of Labour Power: Producing and Social Reproducing Capital

Susan Ferguson – The Child, the Market, and Capitalism: a Social Reproduction Perspective on Children’s Subjectivities

David McNally – Dialectics and Intersectionality: Critical Reconstructions in Marxism and Social Reproduction Theory

Tony Norfield reviews François Chesnais's Finance Capital Today: Corporations and Banks in the Lasting Global Slump, Brill, Leiden, 2016.

Tony Norfield worked for nearly 20 years in the dealing rooms of banks in the City of London, completing his role as Executive Director and Global Head of FX Strategy for ABN AMRO. He has a wide experience of international financial markets, having travelled extensively on business. In 2014, he was awarded a PhD in Economics at SOAS, University of London, on the thesis topic of 'British imperialism and finance'. His book, The City: London and the Global Power of Finance, was published by Verso in April 2016. This review was originally postedhere on Tony's blogThe Economics of Imperialism on 24 November 2016.

This book is well worth reading. It is written in a clear and accessible style and discusses key points about the limitations of capitalism and the role of contemporary finance. Perhaps its most important point is how the financial system has accumulated vast claims on the current and future output of the world economy – in the form of interest payments on loans and bonds, dividend payments on equities, etc. These claims have outgrown the ability of the capitalist system to meet them, but government policy has so far managed to prevent a collapse of financial markets with zero interest rate policies, quantitative easing, huge deficits in government spending over taxation, and so forth. The result is an unresolved crisis, a ‘lasting global slump’, in which economic growth remains very weak and vast debts remain in place.

There are two related points in his approach to the world economy and finance that distinguish Chesnais from many other writers, and for which he deserves to be commended. Firstly, he states clearly that we are in a crisis of capitalism tout court (pp1-2), not a crisis of ‘financialised’ capitalism – the latter being one that could presumably be fixed if only the evil financiers were dealt with by a (capitalist) reforming government. Secondly, he takes ‘the world economy as the point of departure’ for his analysis, although that is ‘easier said than done’ (p11). While he shows the central role of the US, he avoids the wholly US-centred analysis common to radical critics of contemporary capitalism, and instead highlights how the other powers also play a key part in the imperial machine.

Finance Capital Today helps the reader’s understanding of the realities of contemporary global capitalism by providing a wealth of material evidence. It also helps one to clarify views about what is going on by discussing the theoretical context. In this review I will highlight the key points raised in the book and also discuss where I have a number of differences with Chesnais. These differences are sometimes merely of emphasis, or what may look like simply an alternative definition of a commonly used term. However, poor formulation of an argument can also lead to theoretical problems.

Chesnais begins by outlining the origins of the 2008 crisis, arguing that this had been postponed since 1998 by the growth of debt in the US and elsewhere, and by the surge of growth in China. In 2008, ‘the brutality of financial crisis was accounted for by the amount of fictitious capital accumulated and the degree of vulnerability of the credit system following securitisation’. The backdrop to the latest phase of crisis was also one that has made this crisis a global one to a degree unknown to previous crises (p25). It involved a far more integrated world economy, following the break up of the USSR and the incorporation of many more countries into the world trade and financial system. The crisis is one characterised by ‘over-accumulation of capital in the double form of productive capacity leading to overproduction and of a “plethora of capital” in the form of aspiring interest-bearing and fictitious capital’. But major governments tried to prevent the crisis from running its course in the way that occurred in the 1930s (p35).

Within the global set up, Chesnais has an interesting view of China, which he characterises as not suffering national domination by the major powers (p43). He notes its subordinate position in the world division of labour, having offered its cheap labour workforce up to the world market, but includes this as part of the development of the world market rather than being a sign of its oppression in the Leninist sense. This reflects the mixed dimensions of China’s economic and political status, and one that I would also characterise as being in transition to the premier league of major powers (China is actually number three in my ranking of countries by global power).[1]

Chapter 3 is titled ‘The Notion of Interest-Bearing Capital in the Setting of the Present Centralisation and Concentration of Capital’. This is an important topic, but one in which Chesnais’s commendable approach is let down by his exposition. He starts by arguing that ‘the channelling of surplus value in contemporary capitalism, through both the holding of government loans and the possession of stock, by a single small group of highly concentrated financial and non-financial corporations and private high-income-bracket asset holders, requires that several features of interest-bearing capital that were treated partly separately by Marx now be approached in toto’ (p67). I would certainly agree with this, especially since the relevant section in Capital, Volume 3, is a complete mess, one that Engels found extremely difficult to edit and to try and salvage. However, Chesnais does little to develop the argument at this point, and he tends to keep it focused on banks. Only later in the book does he explain better how interest-bearing capital is a more universal phenomenon for modern capitalism. Even then, I would argue that the forms it takes, especially in proprietary trading, are not fully or well explained by taking interest to be the source of revenue, or, as he notes from Hilferding, by taking one speculator’s gain as a loss to another speculator.[2]

This chapter also contains a discussion of two issues of Marxist theory on finance. One is the difference of opinion between myself (and others) and Costas Lapavitsas on the question of banks ‘exploiting’ workers through the charging of interest on loans, etc (pp76-77). He correctly notes that this interest is, in any event, only a small portion of bank profits, not the big event claimed by the ‘exploiting’ school. However, citing Rosa Luxemburg, he comes down on the side of the view that these deductions are a reduction of the value of labour-power. I disagree, and not only because Luxemburg’s judgements in matters of economic theory, let alone political strategy, leave very much to be desired. My argument, which Chesnais cites, is that the charging of interest does not by itself suggest a lowering of the value of labour-power. If this interest deduction became a significant part of workers’ incomes, then wages would tend to rise to offset this, making it effectively a deduction from corporate profits. This is not to exclude that the value of labour-power can be forced down, but it is in the febrile imagination of the anti-finance populists that this process results from banks charging workers interest on loans.

A second issue of theory raised in Chapter 3 is on the question of bank lending. In contrast to many other Marxists, Chesnais recognises that banks can themselves create new deposit assets. However, he confusingly calls these ‘fictitious capital’ (p84). This is a relatively common perspective, as seen also in David Harvey’s The Limits to Capital, but it is not consistent with Marx’s definition. A bank loan can be created out of thin air by a bank, and is not dependent upon a ‘real’ deposit of cash, so in that sense it is indeed fictitious. But it should then simply be called a ‘fictitious’ deposit or asset of the bank. Fictitious capital, by contrast, can most easily be described as a financial security that is traded in the market and which has a price that is a function of interest rates and future expectations of returns to the buyer of that security.[3] That is not true of bank deposit or loan assets, which remain on the bank’s books. Only if the loan assets later became securitised – that is, when the loans are the basis for payments made to owners of a tradeable security – would they become fictitious capital This was the gist of Marx’s definition of fictitious capital, although one that was not clearly spelled out in Capital (and neither was his view of bank loans/deposits). To call bank loans or deposits ‘fictitious capital’ can only lead to confusion when analysing developments in contemporary financial markets.

Chapter 4 is my favourite of the whole book. Titled ‘The Organisational Embodiments of Finance Capital and the Intra-Corporate Division of Surplus Value’, it does not bend to media demands for a snappy one-liner, but it does provide the reader with valuable information and analysis. Chesnais discusses the different forms of the evolution of capitalism in today’s major powers, focusing on Germany, the US, the UK and France. He examines the relations between the state, private corporations, banks and imperial power. While noting the importance of pension funds from the 1990s as major equity owners of big corporations, he argues that ‘rather than bankers, it is industrialists with financial connections that form the core of the European corporate community’ (p108). Despite some views that there is an ‘international’ capitalist class, his view, with which I agree, is that the main groups of ‘finance capitalists’ are domiciled within single countries.

One important point he makes, and one that he could have developed more, is how in contemporary capitalism, by contrast to the views of Marx and Hilferding, merchant capital (essentially commercial capital and finance) is not subordinate to industry, although it is dependent upon industrial profit, (p113). However, he does discuss the role of large commodity traders and retailers. In my view, this reflects the way in which the major powers have used the financial/commercial system to consolidate their economic privileges, something that was true for the UK even from the mid-late nineteenth century. Today, as most people should be aware, it is the poorer, subordinated countries that do most of the producing, at least in the non-monopolised fields of production.

In Chapters 5 and 6, Chesnais covers global oligopolies and the operations of international companies. He reviews theories of monopolisation and how the development of the European single market was favourable both for European and for US corporations. There is some overlap in this material with that covered by John Smith’s book, Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century (Monthly Review, 2016), with a predatory appropriation of value by the ‘buyer-driven global commodity chains’ of the major corporations (p161). However, Chesnais disagrees with Smith’s earlier work on a number of points, and argues that China, India and Brazil are not in the classical position of being oppressed countries, having a different, and higher, status in the world market. On a separate, important point regarding data on the global economy, Chesnais notes UNCTAD’s estimate that about 80% of global trade is linked to the international production networks of international companies, and that it would be wrong to focus on foreign direct investment data as giving a complete picture of international investment. This is due both to the blurring of lines between FDI and portfolio investment and to the importance of offshore centres as the apparent location of the headquarters of many companies.

Chapter 7 discusses the globalisation of financial markets and new forms of fictitious capital. This is a useful review of the growth of financial markets, although it relies very much on secondary sources, so the data is already several years out of date, and his coverage of financial derivatives misleadingly characterises them as being ‘claims on claims’, when derivatives are better described as difference contracts based on the price of the underlying security to which they refer. The fundamental point he makes is nevertheless that the apparent diversion of investment to financial markets has been prompted by the decline in profitable investment opportunities (p174). The chapter concludes with a review of financial and (foreign) debt developments in Ecuador, Brazil, Argentina and South Africa, including the role of ‘vulture funds’ dealing in Argentina’s defaulted debt.

Chapters 8 and 9 discuss contemporary developments in financial markets, focusing on banking and credit. This is well-covered ground, but is useful for those who are less familiar with recent history, and especially so in explaining the development of mortgage-backed securities, ‘universal banks’ in Europe, the monopolisation of banking, shadow banking, etc. There is also a discussion of how ‘leverage’ – ie borrowing to fund the growth of assets – rose to extreme levels due to the decline in profitability among financial companies (pp221-). I would note, however, the publisher’s poor proofreading: ‘over-the-counter’ (OTC) securities dealing is described as ‘off the counter’ in Chapter 7 and here has the designation ‘ODT’.[4]

Chapter 10 highlights ‘global endemic financial instability’ and points out that there is a ‘plethora of capital in the form of money capital centralised in mutual funds and hedge funds, bent on valorisation through the holding and trading of fictitious capital in the form of assets more and more distant from the processes of surplus value production. Financial profits are harder and harder to earn’ (p245). I would go further and also note how asset managers, pension funds and insurance companies – far more important investors in financial markets than hedge funds or mutual funds – are now finding their mountain of assets unable to generate the returns they have, implicitly or explicitly, promised, although Chesnais does mention this later in the chapter.

The ‘plethora of capital in the form of money capital’ is related to the declining profitability of capitalist investment. Chesnais notes how official reports, from the Bank for International Settlements, for example, allude to this problem, but also how they also mix in a description of low productivity growth and low economic growth in general. He correctly makes the point that the fall in interest rates long preceded the ‘quantitative easing’ policies that occurred after 2008.[5]

It is difficult to spell out these relationships empirically, given the available data, and Chesnais does not try to do this. It is also important to distinguish the rate of interest from the rate of profit on capital investment, which are two different things. However, I would suggest a measurement of how much global financial assets have accumulated – meaning principally equities, bonds and bank loans – against some measure of absolute global profitability over time. This would measure how far the financial claims on social resources have grown, in the form of interest and dividend payments, compared to the surplus revenues available to pay off these claims. My initial work on this suggests a decline in the rate of return from 2007 to 2014, whatever the more distorted profitability figures available for the US alone might say, data that are often used by people wanting a ready calculation of the ‘rate of profit’. The rate of return I suggest is not a ‘Marxist rate of profit’, as traditionally understood, but it would better reflect the malaise of the global capitalist system, especially from the perspective of the major claimants upon its resources, the ones based in the rich powers!

Chesnais finishes his book with two themes. One is a lament on the lack of Marxist study in universities and the lack of journals in which Marxist studies of capitalism can be published. This is true enough, and I am glad not to have been an undergraduate university student in the past few decades! Even apparently radical journals such as the UK’s Cambridge Journal of Economics are basically rather conservative in outlook, and are dominated by a facile Keynesian approach that dismisses a Marxist perspective out of hand if it upsets their advocacy of ‘progressive’ policies for the capitalist state to consider. Repeating radical consensus nonsense will get a pass; revealing the imperial mechanism of power has to jump a hundred hurdles to be an acceptable journal article. Such is the almost universal climate in academia today, despite the evidently destructive outcomes from the system they claim to be analysing.[6] Ironically, this is why the most trenchant and incisive critiques of capitalism today – at least from a descriptive point of view – often come from analysts working in the financial markets. They have to tell their clients what is really going on!

Friends have suggested to me that the situation for critical academics is even worse in the US, something I find easy to believe. I have some knowledge of, and better hope for, the development of a more critical intellectual climate coming from outside the Anglosphere. This should not be too difficult to achieve.

The second concluding remark by Chesnais is the question of how a new phase of capital accumulation might emerge. There is the plethora of (fictitious) capital with its claims on social revenue that cannot be met, but which, on the other hand, has not been devalued in a crisis collapse, because the major governments have done their best to prevent it, fearing the consequences. Chesnais discusses technical innovation to some extent, but sees this as being overshadowed by capital’s degradation of the environment. One is left with the ‘notion of barbarism, associated with the two World Wars and the Holocaust’ (p267). That is a downbeat but telling point about the progress of opposition to imperialism today. In the main imperial countries, the answer to the question of ‘Socialism or Barbarism’ is biased in favour of the latter.

Finishing on a more general comment, my own preference is to avoid the term ‘finance capital’ completely, whereas the book is titled Finance Capital Today. The term is associated with Hilferding and used by Lenin, but the definition is too bound up with Hilferding’s notion that banks control industry. This was not a good description of the situation in the early 20th century, and is far less true today. Chesnais would accept this and instead defines ‘finance capital’ as the ‘simultaneous and intertwined concentration and centralisation of money capital, industrial capital and merchant or commercial capital as an outcome of domestic and transnational concentration through mergers and acquisitions’ (p5). He explains how the different forms of finance capital evolved in different countries, making an important distinction between the privileges of the major powers and the subordinate position of others. I would go along with this definition, but I would argue for putting fictitious capital at the centre of attention, not ‘finance capital’. This would show more clearly that what Marx called the ‘law of value’ is today mainly expressed, or at least expressed more directly, via the markets for financial securities, rather than in the markets for commodities, although the latter are of course important. A company’s ability to access funds and at what cost, via the equity market or bond market, or a government’s ability to borrow and spend, is each signalled by the markets for their securities. These markets show what is good, bad and acceptable in the imperialist world economy today.

[1] See my book, The City: London and the Global Power of Finance, Verso, 2016, p111.

[2] The City, pp144-147.

[3] For an explanation, see The City, pp83-92.

[4] The book is expensively priced, so order it for your library! The book will be cheaper when later published in paperback, however.

[5] See the note on this blog from a Bank of England report here.

[6] It works like this. Academic journals are graded according to their supposed value, and getting an article published in a highly ranked journal is the objective of all academics. Think what you like about the journal’s real worth, these grades are important for the scores achieved by contributors in the assessment they get from their universities, and, most importantly, in the assessment of their universities for government funding purposes. Over recent decades, this has led to a small group of mainstream, conservative, uncritical journals becoming the favoured destination for research articles, which in turn means that academics orient their work to what these journals will accept. It is a machine for generating very little worth reading, and also a system for maintaining a conservative status quo. That system is further maintained by a journal editorial board and a group of ‘peer reviewers’ with the same general outlook. A similar mechanism also leads academics to have absurdly long bibliographies and excessive citations in their articles, since citing their friends will encourage the return favour, and citations are another means by which academic value is assessed.

HM London 2016 conference: Panagiotis Sotiris on Rethinking Popular Sovereignty: From the Nation to the People of a Potential New Historical Bloc

Abstract[1]

During the past decades traditional notions of sovereignty have been challenged in Europe. First, we have the erosion of sovereignty induced by the process of European Integration. Secondly, the new waves of migrants and refugees arriving in Europe and the anti-immigrant and anti-refugee policies of ‘Fortress Europe’ and ‘closed borders’ along with the intensification of racism and islamophobia, both as ideological climate but also as official state policy, have opened up the debate regarding the relation between sovereignty and ethnicity. On the one hand, any attempt towards a rupture with the embedded and constitutionalised neoliberalism of the EU in order to initiate processes of social transformation and emancipation, should necessarily take the form of a reclaiming of popular sovereignty and democratic control over crucial aspects of economic and social policy. On the other hand, we must deal with the association of sovereignty with nationalism, racism and colonialism, tragically exemplified in the way the Far Right links the question of sovereignty to its own authoritarian racist agenda. To deal with these challenges I take a critical position to both neo-Kantian conceptions of cosmopolitan rights and ‘neo-republican’ defences of the nation-state and the people as common history and shared values. In contrast I suggest that we rethink the people in a ‘post-nationalist’ and de-colonial way as the emerging community of all the persons that work, struggle and hope on a particular territory, as the reflection of the emergence of a potential historical bloc.

Keywords: People; Nationalism; EU; Racism; Gramsci; Historical Bloc; Popular Sovereignty.

The very notion of sovereignty and all the political notions associated with it have been facing a series of important challenges, especially in Europe. On the one hand we have, all the recent developments in the construction of the European Project and the entrance to the era of the ‘Memoranda of Understanding’ that represent an even more aggressive version of the reduced sovereignty that has been, one way or the other, at the centre of European Integration from the beginning. The very notion that a country, such as Greece and to a lesser degree Ireland or Portugal, can be put under supervision and surveillance, with all major policy decisions be referred to the endless negotiations with the ‘Institutions’ (EU-IFM-ECF-ESM), exemplify this tendency. From the euro as a form of ceding of national monetary sovereignty to the Treaties that give priority to European Institutions and the new mechanisms of disciplinary supervision of member-states’ economies, exemplified in the Greek experience, the European Integration process has been a process of imposition of a condition of reduced and limited sovereignty, affecting not only ‘peripheral countries’ but also countries of the EU core. Moreover, these developments make sovereignty a particular exigency, in the sense that any break with austerity and neoliberalism has to take the form of the exercise of a sovereign collective will over other institutional constraints, such as the terms of the EU treaties, the role of the ECB or the financial, monetary and institutional architecture of the Eurozone.

On the other hand, the new waves of migrants and refugees arriving in Europe and the anti-immigrant and anti-refugee policies of ‘Fortress Europe’ and ‘closed borders’ along with the intensification of racism and islamophobia, both as ideological climate but also as official state policy, have opened up the debate regarding the relation between sovereignty and ethnicity.

The reaction to the current wave of refugees and migrants from the entire systemic political spectrum along with the new versions of the ‘clash of civilizations’ associated with an antiterrorist policy that is based even more upon islamophobia, stress the fact that questions of identity and ethnicity remain a highly contested terrain and that we are facing a return to nationalist and racist discourses and practices. The same goes for the recurring insistence of the Far Right on a form of sovereignty strongly associated with the nation, defined in an almost racist way.

Recent developments, such as the British vote in favour of recuperating the aspects of sovereignty that were ceded as part of the participation in the European Union and the political and ideological confrontations surrounding the British debate, before and after the referendum, also brought forward this challenge. Without underestimating all the ugly aspects of xenophobia and racism expressed in parts of the Brexit campaign, it is obvious that important segments of the working class and other subaltern classes saw in the reclaiming of sovereignty a way out of austerity, lack of democracy, lack of control over their lives.[2]

At the same time, in contemporary debates in the Left one can see the tension between different positions but also the tension inside each position. For example, the supporters of the position that any attempt to establish social and political rights for those that fall outside the limits of the nation necessarily implies some form of transnational polity, have to face the fact that contemporary transnational institutions such as the EU in fact not only are instrumental in establishing new forms of exclusion (such as increased barriers on refugees and migrants and in general non ‘EU-nationals’), but also play an important part in the erosion of any possibility of democratically opting for policies representing the collective interests of the subaltern classes.[3] At the same time, those that support some form of reclaiming sovereignty as part of an attempt to re-establish democracy in opposition to neoliberalism, have to face the fact that any return to a traditional ‘national’ definition of the collective political body of democracy will lead to various forms of exclusion.

So the question I will try to deal with in this presentation, albeit in a rather schematic way, is whether it is possible to articulate the demand to reclaim sovereignty as part of a democratic and emancipative project from the part of the subaltern classes, that will take account of the fact of mass migration and mass refugee movements and avoid falling into the pitfalls of varieties of nationalism, exclusion and even state-sanctioned racism. But first we must see the answers that have been offered so far.

                                                                                         *

One is what we might call the Neo-Kantian answer. Kant formulated his conception of cosmopolitan rights in his text on perpetual peace[4] when he suggested three interconnected principles in order to attain peace in the new international landscape that was formed by the emergence of the nation-state. A) that the civil constitution of every state must be republican, b) that the rights of nations shall be based on a federation of free states, and c) and that the cosmopolitan right shall be limited to conditions of universal hospitality. As many commentators have already noted,[5] one can already see here the expression of tensions that we also see today, such as the tension between the nation-state and a universal form of rights, leading to Kant substituting the fully cosmopolitan right, namely a global form of full political rights, with a right of hospitality. We also know, both from historical experience and from writings such as Hannah Arendt’s, how the contemporary international law on migrants and refugees was formed after the experience of big masses of stateless populations in the first half of the 20^th century and the emergence as a political and juridical question of the ‘right to have rights’.

Man of the twentieth century has become just as emancipated from nature as eighteenth-century man was from history. History and nature have become equally alien to us, namely, in the sense that the essence of man can no longer be comprehended in terms of either category. On the other hand, humanity, which for the eighteenth century, in Kantian terminology, was no more than a regulative idea, has today become an inescapable fact. This new situation, in which “humanity” has in effect assumed the role formerly ascribed to nature or history, would mean in this context that the right to have rights, or the right of every individual to belong to humanity, should be guaranteed by humanity itself. It is by no means certain whether this is possible. For, contrary to the best-intentioned humanitarian attempts to obtain new declarations of human rights from international organizations, it should be understood that this idea transcends the present sphere of international law which still operates in terms of reciprocal agreements and treaties between sovereign states; and, for the time being, a sphere that is above the nations does not exist.[6]

Today, the neo-Kantian perspective mainly takes the form of an increased emphasis on the emergence of institutional forms of transnational political cooperation and the potential creation of elements of a global political cooperative and even federative form that would guarantee the universal character of basic human rights and exactly guarantee the ‘right to have rights’.

Jürgen Habermas’ propositions regarding the emergence of a postnational configuration presents exactly this tendency. Naturally, Habermas is well aware of the neoliberal and undemocratic character of the actual construction of European Union, yet he sees it as the only way to actually create a postnational political form that would guarantee rights, reinstate the welfare state and create conditions, provided that there are is an enhancement of democratic procedures and forms of postnational political education. Habermas’ suggestion that it is possible as part of the process of European Integration to see the emergence of democratic forms at the European level that could foster the development of a cosmopolitan consciousness and forms of truly global citizenship is based upon his particular conception of democracy itself. Democracy is not the exercise of a collective popular will, but rather a complex series of deliberative processes as communicative practices that enhance the emergence of more rational forms,

Today, the public sovereignty of the people has withdrawn into legally institutionalized procedures and the informal, more or less discursive opinion- and will-formation made possible by basic rights. I am assuming here a network of different communicative forms, which, however, must be organized in such a way that one can presume they bind public administration to rational premises. In so doing, they also impose social and ecological limits on the economic system, yet without impinging on its inner logic. This provides a model of deliberative politics. This model no longer starts with the macrosubject of a communal whole but with anonymously intermeshing discourses.[7]

Then democracy at the European level does not imply the emergence of a European people or demos (as collective will and identity) but rather the intensification of these processes of deliberation in all their complexity.

The European market will set in motion a greater horizontal mobility and multiply the contacts among members of different nationalities. In addition to this, immigration from Eastern Europe and the poverty-stricken regions of the Third World will heighten the multicultural diversity of society. This will no doubt give rise to social tensions. But if those tensions are dealt with productively, they can foster a political mobilization that will give additional impetus to the new endogenous social movements already emergent within nation-states – I am thinking of the peace, environmental, and women's movements. These tendencies would strengthen the relevance that public issues have for the lifeworld. At the same time, there is a growing pressure of problems that can be solved only at a coordinated European level. Under these conditions, communication complexes could develop in Europe-wide public spheres. These publics would provide a favorable context both for new parliamentary bodies of regions that are now in the process of merging and for a European Parliament furnished with greater authority.[8]

Habermas is fully aware that at the international level there are difficulties even for this communicative and argumentative form of deliberation that he offers as an alternative to popular sovereignty with the boundaries of the nation-state.

In a politically constituted community organized via a state, this compromise formation is more closely meshed with procedures of deliberative politics, so that agreements are not simply produced by an equalization of interests in terms of power politics. Within the framework of a common political culture, negotiation partners also have recourse to common value orientations and shared conceptions of justice, which make an understanding beyond instrumental-rational agreements possible. But on the international level this “thick” communicative embeddedness is missing.[9]

Habermas thinks that we can find new forms of postnational unifying identity in exactly this attachment to these democratic procedures, at the national and transnational level, which he defines as a form of ‘constitutional patriotism’.

As the examples of multicultural societies like Switzerland and the United States demonstrate, a political culture in which constitutional principles can take root need by no means depend on all citizens' sharing the same language or the same ethnic and cultural origins. A liberal political culture is only the common denominator for a constitutional patriotism (Verfassungspatriotismus) that heightens an awareness of both the diversity and the integrity of the different forms of life coexisting in a multicultural society. In a future Federal Republic of European States, the same legal principles would also have to be interpreted from the perspectives of different national traditions and histories.[10]

However, it is exactly here that the problem with Habermas position lies: in his conception of democratic politics. His communicative conception of the ‘categorical imperative’, ever since Theory of Communicative Action, means that both at the national and the international level he moves away from politics as confrontation or struggle between antagonistic class strategies (even if they are articulated as competing versions of what is the ‘collective will’ of society), towards a normative and procedural conception of politics as attempt towards creating optimal conditions of communication and argumentation.

Such a discourse-theoretical understanding of democracy changes the theoretical demands placed on the legitimacy conditions for democratic politics. A functioning public sphere, the quality of discussion, accessibility, and the discursive structure of opinion- and will-formation: all of these could never entirely replace conventional procedures for decision-making and political representation. But they do tip the balance, from the concrete embodiments of sovereign will in persons, votes, and collectives to the procedural demands of communicative and decision-making processes. And this loosens the conceptual ties between democratic legitimacy and the familiar forms of state organization.[11]

That is why Habermas tends towards rather modest proposals for increased participation of NGOs and social movements in negotiation processes, as part of this procedural and communicative conception of collective practice.

[T]he institutionalized participation of non-governmental organizations in the deliberations of international negotiating systems would strengthen the legitimacy of the procedure insofar as mid-level transnational decision-making processes could then be rendered transparent for national public spheres, and thus be reconnected with decision-making procedures at the grassroots level.[12]

However, the experience of all recent negotiations of international agreements and treaties along with the everyday functioning of the EU has shown that such deliberations do not fundamentally alter the course of things or affect the actual decision processes. In certain cases, they are simply attempts to offer legitimization to processes that are fundamentally authoritarian and undemocratic.

From her part, Seyla Benhabib has offered a problematized version of the Kantian conceptualization of cosmopolitan rights, by means of a reading of Arendt’s critical approach to both the nation-state and world government. She is aware of what she defines as the ‘paradox of democratic legitimacy’, namely the fact that the rights of the subaltern have to be negotiated upon a terrain ‘flanked by human rights on the hand and sovereignty assertions on the other’.[13] Consequently, what she suggests is a form of cosmopolitan federalism, based upon porous not open borders based upon a combination between the rights of refugees and migrants and the acceptance of the continuous existence of nation-states.

In the spirit of Kant, therefore, I have pleaded for moral universalism and cosmopolitan federalism. I have not advocated open but ratherporous borders. I have pleaded for first-admittance rights for refugees and asylum-seekers, but have accepted the right of democracies to regulate the transition from full membership.[14]

The main problem with this neo-Kantian approach is, in my opinion, two-fold. Based with the contradiction between the abstract universalism of a normative conception of cosmopolitan rights, itself based upon the projection of a universal community of human beings as subjects, which is obviously unattainable, they easily opt for a more realistic approach of trying to guarantee some aspects of these rights as part of actual national or supranational configuration, leading to all forms of compromises with current policies, policies that in the end run counter to exactly this conception of universal rights.

In this sense, it is exactly the European Union and its evolution that up to now offers a very material counterargument to the neo-Kantian position. The emerging constitutionalism without democracy, in the form of a guarantee of basic rights (for ‘EU nationals’) that goes hand and in hand with an authoritarian erosion of democratic process without precedent and with the dismantling of social rights and the welfare state, offers the absolute limit of any attempt to think of European Integration as the materialization of Kant’s vision.[15]

Moreover, the new forms of exclusion and the new barriers to migration and the right to safe passage of refugees make it evident that the EU is far from enforcing any kind of cosmopolitan rights. Finally, the new forms of anti-terrorist preventive practices such as attempts at detecting early signs of ‘radicalisation’ along with officially treating the Muslim segments of the European working classes as potentially ‘dangerous classes’, imply the continuity of elements of a colonial ideology and practice, this time turned towards the interior of European Union.[16]

                                                                                           *

Some, exemplified by Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Nielson’s conceptualization of a radical politics of border struggles as productions of new commons, have attempted to go beyond the normative universalism of this Kantian conception of cosmopolitan rights. However, in the end they cannot avoid the oscillation between a radical emphasis on the singularity of struggles that create, in their multitudinous plurality, the new translations of the common, and an acceptance of the framework of European Integration or other institutional forms of ‘globalization’ as given. This is based upon the premise that many struggles can no longer be waged at the level of the national-state:

While the exclusionary dimension of the nation-state, symbolized and implemented by the border, is still very much present in the contemporary world, there still are “defensive” struggles, for instance, for social commons, that are fought at the level of the state. This is probably rightly so. But independently of what we have written about the structural antinomy between the public and the common, the political production of space historically associated with the state no longer offers an effective shield against capital. This means it is a matter of realism for the political project of the common to refuse the idea of positioning itself within existing bounded institutional spaces and to look for the necessary production of new political spaces.[17]

This leads to a position that while it is oriented toward radical forms of emancipation that transcend the capitalist horizon, at the same time it is ready to accept the possibility of more ‘realist’ positions within the framework even of European Integration.

It would be too easy, but no less true, to maintain that the current crisis of European integration makes the huge intellectual investments since the early 1990s in the postnational citizenship emerging in its frame at least overproportioned. This is not to say that we do not see a chance for the political project of the common in the gaps of official institutional structures, which are themselves in-the-making, multilevel, and crisscrossed by multiple crises in Europe and elsewhere in the world. We are convinced that social struggles can nurture a new political imagination capable of working through current processes of regional integration and of opening them toward a reinvention of internationalism.[18]

In a similar manner we see in Saskia Sassen’s work an attempt to re-think the possibility of a ‘global civil society’ not in terms of a normative conception but of an articulation of struggles at the global level that also has the problem of taking as somewhat given the current forms of ‘globalization’, even if the emphasis is on struggles rather than institutional forms.

The category of global civil society is, in a way, too general to capture the specific transboundary networks and formations connecting or articulating multiple places and actors. A focus on these specifics brings “global civil society” down to the spaces and practices of daily life, furthered by today’s powerful imaginaries around the idea that others around the world are engaged in the same struggles. This begins to constitute a sense of global civil society that is rooted in the daily spaces of people rather than on some global stage. It also means that the poor, those who cannot travel, can be part of global civil society. I include here cross-border networks of activists engaged in specific localized struggles with an explicit or implicit global agenda and non cosmopolitan forms of global politics and imaginaries attached to local issues and struggles.[19]

                                                                                              *

In light of the above, Étienne Balibar’s attempts to rethink questions of citizenship are of great interest. Balibar underlines the fact that the exclusionary aspect of nationalism and even racism were one pole of the contradiction of the emergence of contemporary political forms associated with the nation-state, the other being the demand for equality and liberty, what he defines with the neologism ‘equaliberty’.

Here is the extraordinary novelty and at the same time the root of all the difficulties, the nub of the contradiction. If one really wants to read it literally, the Declaration in fact says that equality is identical to freedom, is equal to freedom, and vice versa. Each is the exact measure of the other. This is what I propose to call, with a deliberately baroque phrase, the proposition of equalibertym – a portmanteau term, impossible and yet possible only as a play on words, that alone expresses the central proposition.[20]

The key point is a new form of citizenship based upon the contradictory identification of rights of citizen and rights of man. This new form of citizenship opens up a way for the expansion of the very sphere of politics in ways that also enable the political participation and demands of the subaltern classes.

[T]he signification of the equation Man = Citizen is not so much the definition of a political right as the affirmation of a universal right to politics. Formally, at least-but this is the very type of a form that can become a material weapon-the Declaration opens an indefinite sphere for the politicization of rights claims, each of which reiterates in its own way the demand for citizenship or for an institutional, public inscription of freedom and equality. The rights claims of workers or of dependents as well as those of women or slaves, and later those of the colonized, is inscribed within this indefinite opening, as we see in attempts beginning in the revolutionary period.[21]

Moreover, this emerging new conception of citizenship is also accompanied by a new conception of sovereignty based upon this new conception of politics, this new politicisation of society, this new opening up of the political space.

As far as sovereignty is concerned, as I have tried to show elsewhere, the revolutionary innovation consists precisely in subverting the traditional concept by posing the highly paradoxical thesis of an egalitarian sovereignty-practically a contradiction in terms, but the only way to radically get rid of all transcendence and inscribe the political and social order in the element of immanence, of the self-constitution of the people. From there, however, begins the immediate development of a whole series of contradictions that proceed from the fact that so-called civil society and especially the state are entirely structured by hierarchies or dependencies that are both indifferent to political sovereignty and essential to its institutionalization, even though society or the modern city no longer has at its disposal the means of the ancient city for neutralizing these contradictions and pushing them out of the public sphere, namely, the rigorous compartmentalization of the oikos and the polis.[22]

However, this new formulation of politics is from the beginning traversed by an important contradiction between a politics of insurrection, the revolutionary aspect of the emergence of democratic politics, and a politics of constitution, the politics associated with the State and the established order.

[T]his affirmation introduces an individual oscillation, induces a structural equivocation between two obviously antinomic politics: a politics of insurrection and a politics of constitution-or, if you prefer, a politics of permanent, uninterrupted revolution and a politics of the state as institutional order.[23]

It is here that we find the problem with the emergence of the Nation as the political and ideological form of the new collective subject of democratic politics. Balibar insists that we can witness this tension even at the moment of the French Revolution:

The system of Fraternity tends to be doubled into a national fraternity and, before long, a statist, revolutionary, social fraternity wherein extreme egalitarianism finds expression in communism. The meaning of the Nation changes: it no longer means all the citizens in opposition to the monarch and the privileged, but the idea of a historical belonging centered on the state. At the extreme, through the mythification of language, culture, and national traditions, it will become the French version of nationalism, the idea of a moral and cultural community founded on institutional traditions. Opposed to it, on the contrary, the notion of the people drifts toward the general idea of the proletariat as the people’s people.[24]

For Balibar this tension points to the fact that ‘political modernity comprises two antithetical movements with respect to “anthropological differences”’. On the one hand, we have the universalism that ‘promoted or invented a notion of the citizen that implies not only that an individual belongs to a community but also that he has access to a system of rights from which no human being can be legitimately excluded.’[25] On the other hand, ‘modernity enlarges as never before the project ofclassifying human beings precisely in terms of their differences’.[26] This can explain the violence and brutality of modern forms of exclusion and racism.

Because the human and the political (the “rights of man” and the “rights of the citizen”)are coextensive “by right,” the human being cannot be denied access to citizenship unless, contradictorily, he is also excised from humanity. Therefore— and I apologize for the brutality of a formulation that is nonetheless all- too- relevant in reality because of past and present exclusions based on race, sex, deviance, pathologies, to mention only a few— the human being can be denied such access only by being reduced to subhumanity or defective humanity.[27]

Consequently, Balibar’s proposition for a ‘transnational citizenship’[28] is an attempt to answer the problems associated with racism and exclusion and the grand movements of migrants and refugees, at the same time acknowledging the persistence of the nation-state and the new challenges posed by the emergence of forms like the European Union. This is also evident in his attempt to discuss ways to ‘democratize democracy’ in ways that incorporate contemporary struggles, treating insurrection as the ‘active modality of citizenship: the modality that it brings intoaction.’[29] The problem, is that although Balibar is in no way a naive partisan of European Integration, something exemplified in his insistence that ‘along with the development of a formal “European Citizenship”, a real “European Apartheid” has emerged’,[30] in the end he attempts to take it for granted as the terrain for such a strategy.

                                                                                             *

A certain opposition to the above discussed positions comes in the form of what we can define as a neo-republican defence of the nation-state and of national identities. Here the line of reasoning is the following. Despite the rhetoric of globalization nation-states remain indispensable nodes for the reproduction of capitalism. Emerging supranational forms, such as the European Union and the entire drive towards European Integration tend to undermine nation-states in favour of the forces of globalized capital and also to erode democracy by sharply reducing the terrain and scope of popular sovereignty. Capitalist elites accept this condition of limited or eroded sovereignty because they want to be part of globalized reproduction of capitalist accumulation. This erosion of democracy undermines democracy, because democracy can only be an active political condition when there are a demos and a popular will that can be exercised in a particular territory. There can be no supranational demos and consequently no cosmopolitan democracy.

Up until this point, this neo-republican argument indeed points to actual problems with contemporary forms of reduced sovereignty and the absence of real democratic process at the level of supranational institutional arrangements such as the European Union. However, there is another aspect to this argument: the association of demos with the nation. According to this argument the political body, in order to be a democratic political body it requires an element of common culture, history and community, a necessary commitment to a common identity. Consequently, the argument goes, contemporary ‘multiculturalism’, in the sense of mass migration but also in the sense of emergence of a globalized mass culture undermined the necessary common identity and common commitment that is the backbone of the emergence of the modern forms of popular sovereignty. Some versions of this argument have been used by the Far-Right in order to defend their own version of neoracist politics, especially in relation to closed borders and discriminations against migrants and refugees in the name of a return to the necessary supposed ‘purity of the nation’ or of the purity of the ‘national culture’.

In other instances, this discourse distances itself from any openly racist arguments, but it does centre upon the need for some common elements of political culture that supposedly enable this re-emergence of the demos-people of the nation-state. The French version of ‘Republicanism’ offers such a case.[31] And it is interesting to see the positions of some of the left-wing proponents of neo-republicanism.

Perhaps the most telling case is that of Régis Debray. The former guerrillero already in 1978 insisted on the importance of the national aspects of any revolutionary sequence:

The reason is that if the masses do make history, and if they are not an abstraction roaming around above existing frontiers and languages—if they exist only within circumscribed cultural and natural communities—then they make history as and where they are, from below and not above, piece-meal and not globally. There is no one single history for everybody; the time of history is not the same in Tokyo, Paris, Peking and Venezuela. When a world revolutionary programme attempts to gather multiplicity into unity and rationalize the whole movement, it goes against the historical process itself, for the latter proceeds from unity to multiplicity. Things always happen from below, multiplicity is always victorious.[32]

It is obvious that we are still dealing here with an attempt to see the national aspects of any potential revolutionary sequence, echoing in a certain manner the relation of national and social struggles in the revolutionary movements in the Third World. However, from the 1980s onwards Debray’s positions moved from the question of revolution to the question of what constitutes the reclaiming of the French republican tradition. As Emile Chabel has stressed for Debray the Republic as ‘a repository of national memory, cultural heritage and enlightenment values [...] is the only possible bulwark against the decadence of Democracy and the warped ethics of financial capitalism’.[33] More recently, he has offered an impressive defence of frontiers in which he attacks all those that call for a world without borders as being defenders of the economism of the ‘global marketplace’, of ‘technicism’, of ‘absolutism’ and of imperialism, against which he calls for ‘a right to the frontier’.[34]

Another example is the work of Jacques Sapir, a former student of Charles Bettelheim, a specialist in the transition from USSR to Russia and one of the fiercest critics of globalization but also of European Integration. However interesting many of his observations regarding globalization, the problems with the Eurozone and his critique of the EU are, at the same time, his positions encapsulate the problem with a certain version of the neo-republican argument. Sapir is careful to avoid any identification of the Nation to race or even common origin. What he insists upon is the centrality of the people, defined as political body sharing common values and not common ancestry. This unity of the political body is threatened, according to Sapir by new forms of communitarianism, especially those related to religion. For Sapir the attack on sovereignty opens up the way for its dissolution. The unity of the people requires secularism, because it is secularism that relegates these religious and communitarian elements to the private sphere. ‘We cannot have a people, the base of the political construction of popular sovereignty, without secularism which confines to the private sphere the divergences upon which no discussion can be held.’[35] Sapir refuses any conceptualization of ethnicity in biological terms, yet he insists on the need of anyone participating in the nation to share the history and the language of any society he participates in. Consequently, in a certain way he isa posteriori making a certain reference to national identity a prerequisite for the participation of the political process.

Ethnicity [l’ethnie] is a social construction and not a biological reality and sometimes it has to do with a discursive myth used to separate one population from another. But after we have repeated these truths, we will, nevertheless, be confronted with the acquisition of the necessary rules for a life in society by those that newly arrive to become part of a population. And it is here that we find the frontier between the mythical discourse of a “big replacement” and the fact, equally real, of the failure of integration of a part of the immigrant populations, because these do not have the references that they could assimilate. Integration is a process of assimilation of rules and customs which is in part conscious– we make an effort to learn the language and history into which we want to integrate into –but it is equally unconscious. For this unconscious mechanism to be put into motion there is also need of a reference point. Disappearing or effacing this reference point in the name of a multiculturalism that only means the tolerance to practices that are very different is a real obstacle to this integration.[36]

It is here that we see the crucial semantic shift of this neo-republican defence of the nation. The very notion of common culture brings us very close to classical nationalism and it is a well documented fact that most versions of racism in Europe in the past decades do not focus on origin but upon sharing of a common culture. Sapir is very clear that the formation of a people requires common values: ‘it is clear that without “common value”, a human community cannot constitute a political community’.[37] And here is the problem with this position: How can we define these common values? How we deal with the fact that in class societies these values represent hegemonic strategies? What about the challenge posed by colonialism, both in its past but also in its present in the form of discrimination against former colonial subjects now living in the metropolis.

Moreover, Sapir is very clear that he considers that there is a problem with certain immigrant communities and that he believes that they can’t integrate. He thinks that there is a certain segment of the immigrant youth that shows elements of anomie and their opting of identity reveals the kind of narcissism that Sapir associates with fundamentalism. It is in these terms that he designates multiculturalism as the enemy, in the sense that he thinks that a multiculturalist embracing of heterogeneity undermines the convergence in terms of culture of values that is necessary for the political construction of the people.

There is here a dialectic that we cannot surpass and with which we are condemned to live. If heterogeneity is a state of the political community, its constitution in ‘people for itself’, can only be made by means of a convergence of aspirations and views on the future. This convergence implies a common political culture and this is contradictory with the multiculturalism.[38]

However, despite Sapir’s attempts to offer a conceptualization of the political construction of the people of popular sovereignty in the end he opts for a rather classical conception of the Nation, along with the State, as the basis of popular sovereignty, a position that brings us back to all the classical problems associated with a national conception of contemporary societies.

Therefore, the idea of separating the people from the nation and from the State, even if it is necessary from an analytical point of view, it is impossible from the point of view of practical result. The people, conceived as political community, have no concrete existence outside the State and the nation, even if it can consciously, but also unconsciously, transform both. There are complex relations between the people, the nation and the State and these relations defy simplifications. The constitution of a people unite in its will to live together and to create in common, even if this will can partly be the fruit of institutions that have constructed necessary affects, is well the point of obligatory passage without which the constitution of a nation will fail. This is one of the lessons that we must retain from the centrality of the concept of sovereignty. When a population, whatever it is, desires to make something in common, there is sovereignty. But from the moment that this population is heterogeneous, it helps to move out of the public space certain questions. That is why, since many centuries, sovereignty and secularism have forged a pact of necessary alliance.[39]

Therefore in the case of Sapir from the question of the political construction of the people, we move back to the nation as common culture, history, and language and as need to exclude from the political (and cultural) space of the people certain cultural or religious reference points, however important they might be for large segments of the subaltern classes of immigrant origin. And in the case of Sapir, this can lead to dangerous political associations, such as his recent insistence to treat the Far Right Front National as a potential part of a broader front in favour of sovereignty.

In general, it would be unfair to say that this conception of the secular and democratic nation as the community of the demos is based upon strictly national or racial elements. One might say that most supporters of a neo-republican conception of the nation-state opt for some form of a performative conception of nationhood. For them it is not a question of race, ethnicity or colour, but of the performance of certain cultural and discursive elements that guarantee the unity of the demos: rationalism, secularism, tolerance, multiculturalism and a certain form of feminism. Especially the feminist aspect was particularly important in France, in the support given by mainstream feminism to repressive measures such as the ban on the scarf in the name of liberation of women, despite the opposition from exactly the subjects supposed to be liberated.[40] However, the end result is the same as with typical racism: a multiplication of forms of exclusion and an increasing tendency towards treating collective practices, cultures, discourses as inappropriate for democratic participation, as reasons to forbid the participation in the collective political body of the people.

                                                                                               *

Moreover, in the debates on secularism, especially in France with all the political confrontations around the notion of laïcité we can see the reproduction of elements of a certain Islamophobia and a certain reluctance to deal with the colonial past and its continuous effectivity in order to understand the forms of contemporary racism. The 2003 debate around the question of the scarf brought forward the unease of certain segments of the Left, including some from the anticapitalist Left, with the reality of the cultural referents of subaltern strata of immigrant origin, and the danger that a certain kind of neo-republican defence of secularism andlaïcité can lead to alliances with systemic political forces. Laurent Lévy has offered a very powerful account of these debates.[41] It is also important to note that there have also been other important contributions recently to these debates that highlight that the ‘divergences’ in French society that Sapir stressed are not the result of the supposed narcissistic attachment of immigrant youth to fundamentalism but of the actual continuation of colonialisminside French society, not only in the form of ideological prejudice but also of real exclusion. Sadri Khiari offers an important account of the history of racism and discrimination in France and how racism was in fact a class political strategy from the part of the dominant classes.[42] Moreover, recent developments and anti-racist and anti-colonial struggles have shown that integration is not an attempt towards creating a more open political community but in reality a way to enhance exclusion and separation. It is obvious that we are also dealing here with the fact that from the very beginning colonialism was the dark side of the construction of the modern nation-state, especially in Europe, exemplified in the way both the war and the liberation of Algeria was perceived in France. In a similar manner, contemporary interventions from the part of radical antiracism especially in France, such as the collective effort of the current associated with theParti des Indigènes de la République,[43] offer an important reminder of the persistence of a neo-colonial form of state-induced racism still active at the heart of the European Project. Moreover, they make it evident that contemporary forms of attacks against the Muslim segments of the working classes of Europe, supposedly in the name of containing ‘radical Islam’, in fact represent class strategies in order to keep them in a very particular condition of subalternity. However, what is most worrying is the tendency by certain segments of the radical Left, including the anticapitalist left, to accept some of the basic tenets of such positions, exemplified in the support of the Left of certain forms of ‘forced emancipation’ in the name of the secular state.

However, the same trauma at the heart of the modern nation-State could also be observed elsewhere. Hannah Arendt, a critical witness to one of the most important recent conscious attempts at nation-building, namely the formation of modern Israel, offered in the 1940s important warnings about the association of popular sovereignty and nationalism, especially in cases where the political establishment of the nation was based also on a founding moment of exclusion and oppression of other people already there.[44]

                                                                                                *

So the question remains: is it possible to conceive of some form of recuperation of popular sovereignty, without having to fall back into some form of nationalism or any variety of the political and ideological constructions that tend to reproduce exclusion or neo-colonial exclusion?

One way to deal with this is by a detour through Gramsci. Gramsci's preoccupation with the emergence of what he defined the national-popular will is well known.[45] For Gramsci the ‘national-popular’ collective will, represents a form of modern statehood associated with the revolutionary ‘Jacobin’ tradition of the bourgeoisie, an element missing from the emergence of the Italian State, in many instances.

One of the first sections must precisely be devoted to the "collective will", posing the question in the following terms: "When can the conditions for awakening and developing a national-popular collective will be said to exist?" Hence an historical (economic) analysis of the social structure of the given country and a "dramatic" representation of the attempts made in the course of the centuries to awaken this will, together with the reasons for the successive failures. Why was there no absolute monarchy in Italy in Machiavelli's time? One has to go back to the Roman Empire (the language question, problem of the intellectuals, etc.), and understand the function of the mediaeval Communes, the significance of Catholicism etc. In short, one has to make an outline of the whole history of Italy-in synthesis, but accurate.

The reason for the failures of the successive attempts to create a national-popular collective will is to be sought in the existence of certain specific social groups which were formed at the dissolution of the Communal bourgeoisie; in the particular character of other groups which reflect the international function of Italy as seat of the Church and depositary of the Holy Roman Empire; and so on. This function and the position which results from it have brought about an internal situation which may be called "economic-corporate" –politically, the worst of all forms of feudal society, the least progressive and the most stagnant. An effective Jacobin force was always missing, and could not be constituted; and it was precisely such a Jacobin force which in other nations awakened and organised the national-popular collective will, and founded the modem States.[46]

However, Gramsci stresses the fact that this kind of formation of the national-popular will represents only a particular ‘revolutionary’ phase of the bourgeoisie and that ‘[a]ll history from 1815 onwards shows the efforts of the traditional classes to prevent the formation of a collective will of this kind, and to maintain "economic-corporate" power in an international system of passive equilibrium.’[47]

Gramsci uses the French example and the particular importance of the role of the subaltern classes in the formation of the national-popular will in order to emphasize the absence of such an element in the Italian case. However schematic his conceptualization of the French case might be, the important point lies in his attempt to emphasize the possibilities of alternative forms of formation of the national-popular element, depending upon different national histories.

The works of French historians and French culture in general have been able to develop and become ‘national-popular’ because of the very complexity and variety of French political history in the last 150 years. [...] A unilinear national ‘hagiography’ is impossible: any attempt of this sort appears immediately sectarian, false, utopian, and anti-national because one is forced to cut out or undervalue unforgettable pages of national history (see Maurras’ current line and Bainville’s miserable history of France). That is why the permanent element of these political variations, the people-nation, has become the protagonist of French history. Hence a type of political and cultural nationalism that goes beyond the bounds of the strictly nationalist parties and impregnates the whole culture. Hence also a close and dependent relationship between people-nation and intellectuals.

There is nothing of the sort in Italy, where one must search the past by torchlight to discover national feeling, and move with the aid of distinctions, interpretations, and discreet silences. [...] Consequently, in the history of the nineteenth century, there could not have been national unity, since the permanent element, the people-nation, was missing. On the one hand, the dynastic element had to prevail given the support it received from the state apparatus, and the divergent political currents could not have had a shared minimum objective. [...] Due to this position of theirs, the intellectuals had to distinguish themselves from the people, place themselves outside, create or reinforce among themselves a spirit of caste and have a deep distrust of the people, feeling them to be foreign, fearing them, because, in reality, the people were something unknown, a mysterious hydra with innumerable heads.

[...] But one must not deny that many steps forward have been taken in every sense: to do so would be to fall into an opposite rhetoric. On the contrary, many intellectual movements, especially before the war, attempted to renew the culture, strip away its rhetoric and bring it nearer to the people, in other words nationalize it. (The two tendencies could be called nation-people and nation-rhetoric.)[48]

It is interesting the distinction that Gramsci makes between nation- people (popolo-nazione) and nation-rhetoric, that marks exactly the negative version of nationalism that does not incorporate the popular, the subaltern element. The same goes for Gramsci’s critique of any conception of the eternity of the nation (an important point taking into consideration the element of a perceived historical continuity in the Italian peninsula). ‘The preconception that Italy has always been a nation complicates its entire history and requires anti-historical intellectual acrobatics’.[49] Hence, we have Gramsci’s denouncement of easy nationalist rhetorical constructions.

This fact is the most peremptory confirmation that in Italy writers are separated from the public and that the public seeks ‘its’ literature abroad because it feels that this literature is more ‘its own’ than the so-called national literature. In this fact lies an essential problem of national life. If it is true that each century or fraction of a century has its own literature, it is not always true that this literature is produced in the same national community. Every people has its own literature, but this can come to it from another people, in other words the people in question can be subordinated to the intellectual and moral hegemony of other peoples. This is often the most strident paradox for many monopolistic tendencies of a nationalistic and repressive character: while they make magnificent hegemonic plans, they fail to realize that they are the object of foreign hegemonies, just as while they make imperialistic plans, they are in fact the object of other imperialisms.[50]

For Gramsci the national element cannot be identified to the nationalistic element. The national element, regarding culture and ideological production, refers to a particular relation with a national history and a historical / cultural environment not with loyalty to a national group. One might say that it is an analytic not a prescriptive term:

National, in other words, is different from nationalist. Goethe was a German ‘national’, Stendhal a French ‘national’, but neither of them was a nationalist. An idea is not effective if it is not expressed in some way, artistically, that is, particularly. But is a spirit particular in as much as it is national? Nationality is a primary particularity, but the great writer is further particularized among his fellow countrymen and this second ‘particularity’ is not the extension of the first. Renan, as Renan, is by no means a necessary consequence of the French spirit. Through his relation to it he is an original event, arbitrary and (as Bergson says)unpredictable. And yet, Renan remains French, just as man, while being man, remains animal. But his value, as is true of man, lies precisely in his difference from the group from which he was born.

 It is precisely this that the nationalists do not want. For them the value of the masters (great intellectuals) consists in their likeness to the spirit of their group, in their loyalty, in their punctual expression of this spirit (which is, moreover, defined as the spirit of the masters (great intellectuals) so one always ends up being right).[51]

For Gramsci the national element refers not to some ideal or some form of social essence but rather to the different and specific histories of each social formation, and the different historicities expressed in the particular relations of force that determine the context of each society. Moreover, this is something that has to be taken into account in any attempt to formulate a revolutionary strategy that has to be national, in the sense that the point of departure of any revolutionary project is national, any hegemonic project must take into account these national peculiarities.

In reality, the internal relations of any nation are the result of a combination which is "original" and (in a certain sense) unique: these relations must be understood and conceived in their originality and uniqueness if one wishes to dominate them and direct them. To be sure, the line of development is towards internationalism, but the point of departure is "national"-and it is from this point of departure that one must begin. Yet the perspective is international and cannot be otherwise. Consequently, it is necessary to study accurately the combination of national forces which the international class [the proletariat] will have to lead and develop, in accordance with the international perspective and directives [i.e. those of the Comintern]. The leading class is in fact only such if it accurately interprets this combination--of which it is itself a component and precisely as such is able to give the movement a certain direction, within certain perspectives.[52]

Despite the fact that the working class is the only class truly internationalist in scope and in a sense the bearer of a new type of universalism, any strategy for working class hegemony passes through this attention to the national element, this need to ‘nationalize’ itself to a certain extent:

It is in the concept of hegemony that those exigencies which are national in character are knotted together; one can well understand how certain tendencies either do not mention such a concept, or merely skim over it. A class that is international in character has in as much as it guides social strata which are narrowly national (intellectuals), and indeed frequently even less than national: particularistic and municipalistic (the peasants)-to "nationalise" itself in a certain sense.[53]

It is also interesting that Gramsci insisted on the different qualities that a proletarian or popular version of collective will might have, insisting on the ‘cosmopolitan’ and internationalist elements in the proletarian collective will. In contrast to the attempt by Enrico Corradini to justify nationalism and imperialist expansion on the basis of the character of Italy as ‘proletarian nation’ and Giovanni Pascoli’s hybrid ‘proletarian nationalism’,[54] Gramsci insists on the emancipatory and transformative elements in a potential Italian working class ‘cosmopolitanism’, enhanced by the experience of migration and based not upon some abstract universalism but upon the very particular universality of the working class condition, the universality of subalternity. It is this that makes it part of a broader project of social transformation and emancipation.

At present in Italy the element ‘man’ is either ‘man-capital’ or ‘man-labour’. Italian expansion can only be that of ‘man-labour’ and the intellectual who represents man-labour’ is not the traditional intellectual, swollen with rhetoric and literary memories of the past. Traditional Italian cosmopolitanism should become a modern type of cosmopolitanism, one that can assure the best conditions for the development of Italian ‘man-labour’ in whatever part of the world he happens to be. Not the citizen of the world as civis romanus or as Catholic, but as producer of civilization. One can therefore maintain that the Italian tradition is continued dialectically in the working people and their intellectuals, not in the traditional citizen and the traditional intellectual. The Italian people are the people with the greatest ‘national’ interest in a modern form of cosmopolitanism. Not only the worker but also the peasant, especially the southern peasant. It is in the tradition of the Italian people and Italian history to collaborate in rebuilding the world in an economically unified way not in order to dominate it hegemonically and appropriate the fruit of others’ labour but to exist and develop precisely as the Italian people. It can be shown that Caesar is at the source of this tradition. Nationalism of the French stamp is an anachronistic excrescence in Italian history, proper to people who have their heads turned backwards like the damned in Dante. The ‘mission’ of the Italian people lies in the recovery of Roman and medieval cosmopolitanism, but in its most modern and advanced form. Even indeed a proletarian nation, as Pascoli wanted; proletarian as a nation because it has been the reserve army of foreign capitalism, because together with the Slavic peoples it has given skilled workers to the entire world. For this very reason, it must join the modern front struggling to reorganize also the non-Italian world, which it has helped to create with its labour.[55]

Gramsci had this conception of the proletariat as the only truly ‘national’ class – in the sense of achieving a higher form of unity of a society but also with an internationalist scope – already in 1919. In an article in October 1919 in Ordine Nuovo, Gramsci insists that:

Today, the ‘national’ class is the proletariat, and the multitude of the workers and peasants, of Italian working people, who cannot allow the break-up of the nation, because the unity of the State is the form of the organization of production and of exchange constructed by Italian labour, is the patrimony of social wealth that the proletarians want to bring to the Communist International. Only the proletarian State, the proletarian dictatorship, can today stop the process of dissolution of the national unity. [56]

It is on the basis of this assumption regarding the inability of the bourgeoisie to actually lead the project for the formation of such a national-popular will, that Gramsci assigns this task to the ‘Modern Prince’ the political form of a potential working class hegemony. Here the emergence and formation of national-popular will is linked both to a process of socialist transformation at the economic sphere, but also to ‘intellectual and moral reform’

The modern Prince must be and cannot but be the proclaimer and organiser of an intellectual and moral reform, which also means creating the terrain for a subsequent development of the national-popular collective will towards the realisation of a superior, total form of modern civilisation.

These two basic points-the formation of a national-popular collective will, of which the modern Prince is at one and the same time the organiser and the active, operative expression; and intellectual and moral reform-should structure the entire work. The concrete, programmatic points must be incorporated in the first part, that is they should result from the line of discussion "dramatically", and not be a cold and pedantic exposition of arguments.

Can there be cultural reform, and can the position of the depressed strata of society be improved culturally, without a previous economic reform and a change in their position in the social and economic fields? Intellectual and moral reform has to be linked with a programme of economic reform-indeed the programme of economic reform is precisely the concrete form in which every intellectual and moral reform presents itself. The modern Prince, as it develops, revolutionises the whole system of intellectual and moral relations, in that its development means precisely that any given act is seen as useful or harmful, as virtuous or as wicked, only in so far as it has as its point of reference the modern Prince itself, and helps to strengthen or to oppose it. In men's consciences, the Prince takes the place of the divinity or the categorical imperative, and becomes the basis for a modern laicism and for a complete laicisation of all aspects of life and of all customary relationships.[57]

It is important to note that the notion of ‘moral and intellectual reform’, which Gramsci borrows from but uses beyond its original coinage by Ernest Renan and its reading by Sorel, not only forms an important part of Gramsci’s critique of Croce, but also can be associated with Lenin’s notion of the ‘cultural revolution’, referring to the extent and depth of the intellectual, ideological and cultural transformation that any hegemonic project requires.[58] Leonardo Rapone, in his detailed study of Gramsci’s formative years (1914-1919) has shown that Gramsci from the beginning, faced with various forms of Italian nationalism had this conception of socialism not only as a transformation of the economic structure but also as a profound ‘intellectual renovation and moral transformation’[59] of Italian life. It is obvious that here Gramsci refers to the national popular will being the result of a process of profound economic, social and ideological transformation as part of a socialist strategy and not just the articulation of existing national elements. It is also significant that in the first version of this passage in Q4, §33 instead of people-nation the reference is to people-masses, something that emphasizes that for Gramsci the emergence of the contemporary nation is inextricably linked to the collective practices of the popular masses. Moreover, it stresses the fact that for Gramsci the ‘nation’ in fact refers, to a great extent, to the subaltern classes and in particular the working class.

Now, can we find in Gramsci’s writings a way to deal with the challenges associated with questions of popular sovereignty and the potential collective body that would express and implement it? I understand that a possible objection would be that Gramsci dealt with a period when the question was still about recognizing subalternity as part of nationhood, that is of actually unifying the nation and dealing with forms of internal exclusion, exemplified in the Italian case with all the contradictions of the vicissitudes and complexities of the Southern Question [questione meridionale]. However, a closer reading of Gramsci’s various references to the Southern Question even in his pre-prison writings suggests that his conception of new process of unification under proletarian leadership was not just about ‘unity’ but also overcoming forms of exclusion that resemble contemporary questions about decolonial struggles.[60] Already in January 1920 Gramsci insisted that

The Northern bourgeoisie has subjugated the South of Italy and the Islands, and reduced them to exploitable colonies; by emancipating itself from capitalist slavery, the Northern proletariat will emancipate the Southern peasant masses enslaved to the banks and the parasitic industry of the North. The economic and political regeneration of the peasants should not be sought in a division of uncultivated or poorly cultivated lands, but in the solidarity of the industrial proletariat. This in turn needs the solidarity of the peasantry and has an "interest" in ensuring that capitalism is not re-born economically from landed property; that Southern Italy and the Islands do not become a military base for capitalist counter-revolution.[61]

Gramsci elaborates these questions more in his 1926 Some Aspects of the Southern Question[62], which deals more with the complexities and difficulties in the creation of this new form of national-popular unity, the role of intellectuals and the questions that would late drive a great part of his elaborations around the concept of hegemony.

At the same time, it is obvious that Gramsci’s writings dealt with another conjuncture which to a certain extent justifies Stefan Kipfer and Gillian Hart’s assessment that Gramsci is ‘both vital and insufficient to approach anti- and post-colonial nationalisms’.[63] I would also agree with Kipfer and Hart on the need to ‘stretch’ Gramsci beyond whatever ‘Eurocentric’ limitations his view had, into questions of ‘“race” and ethnicity, as well as sexuality and gender’[64] and into a dialogue with the work of Fanon, since ‘[l]ike Gramcsi, Fanon saw organic intellectuals as organizers whose leadership grows out of and constantly returns to the common and good sense of subaltern life’.[65]

Yet I would like to insist, that despite certain blind spots in his thinking Gramsci remains more pertinent in these contemporary debates, exactly because he suggested a redefinition of the popolo-nazione based upon the determining inclusion and influence of the subaltern classes, of the popular masses. In a certain manner, this remains the case today.

                                                                                           *

Therefore, I would suggest that the only way to rethink the possibility of reclaiming popular sovereignty in a manner that does avoid the pitfalls of both cosmopolitan universalism and exclusionist nationalism is by means of a redefinition of the people based upon the contemporary condition of subalternity in the context of contemporary capitalist accumulation, which in fact has expanded the linkages between subalternity and the subjection to capitalist accumulation, in both direct and indirect ways. This implies a redefinition of the people that delinks it from ethnicity, origin or common history and instead links it to common condition, present and struggle. It is a rather scissionist conception of the people because it also includes an oppositional approach to the ‘enemies of the people’, many of them nominally ‘members of the nation’. Frédéric Lordon has offered a sufficiently provocative description of this transformative and emancipatory conception of the people, in terms of what he defines as the new landscape of the nation, one which includes also this conception that not everyone can belong to the people...

Here is the new landscape of nationality: Bernard Arnault ? Not French. Cahuzac? Not French. Johnny and Depardieu who wander around the world like a self-service shop for passports? Not French. The Mamadous and the Mohammeds that toil in sweatshops, that do the work that no one else wants to do and pay their taxes are a thousand times more French than this race of masters. The blue-bloods of tax evasion, out! Passport and welcome to all the dark-coloured people are dwelling on this territory, those that have contributed twice, by their labour and their taxes to collective life, a double contribution that gives its own unique criterion to the belonging to what, yes, continues to be called a nation![66]

It is obvious that we need a conception of the people that is post-national and de-colonial. I would like to insist that we can have a political conception or more exactly a politically performative conception of the people and of – to use Gramscian terminology – the people-nation. We are no longer dealing with the ‘imaginary community’ of ‘common blood’; it is the unity in struggle of the subaltern classes, the unity of those that share the same problems, the same misery, the same hope, the same struggles. The people are not a common origin; they represent a common condition and perspective. It is an antagonistic conception of the nation that also demands a ‘decolonialisation’ of the nation, as recognition of the consequences of colonialism and state racism, the struggle against all forms of racism within a potential alliance of the subaltern classes.

Institutionally, it is based upon the offering of full political rights and not just ‘rights of hospitality’, to everyone that is living and working in a given territory. Culturally it answers the dangers of predefined cultural norms and values with a conception of democratic political culture as constant reconstruction and constant ‘work in progress’.

I have stressed the element of the struggle against racism in all its form as an important aspect of this (re)construction of people. In contemporary societies, where racial divisions inside the working class are becoming more important, the challenge of overcoming racism is not just about unity of the working and popular masses. As Jacques Rancière has suggested the crucial aspect is the identification with the cause of the other as a constituent moment of the production of the people. Writing about the importance of the movement against the French’s State war in Algeria as a crucial aspect of political subjectification, he insists that the crucial step was the dis-identification with the French State that was responsible for repression, including the infamous 17 October 1961 police murders of more than 100 Algerian protesters in Paris. This process of dis-identification with the State and the identification with the cause of the other is ‘the production of a people that is different of the people that is seen, talked, counted by the State, a people defined by the manifestation of a harm made to the constitution of a common, which constructs by itself another space of community’.[67]

In this sense, following Deleuze we are talking about a people that is missing, a people that has to be produced, a people-to-come, ‘[n]ot the myth of a past people, but the story-telling of the people to come. The speech-act must create itself as a foreign language in a dominant language, precisely in order to express an impossibility of living under domination.’[68]

                                                                                            *

Consequently, we must return to Gramsci and his strategic and transformative conception that links the popolo-nazione and a potential historical bloc.

If the relationship between intellectuals and people-nation, between the leaders and the led, the rulers and the ruled, is provided by an organic cohesion in which feeling-passion becomes understanding and thence knowledge (not mechanically but in a way that is alive), then and only then is the relationship one of representation. Only then can there take place an exchange of individual elements between the rulers and ruled, leaders [dirigenti] and led, and can the shared life be realised which alone is a social force with the creation of the "historical bloc".[69]

Now this conception of the historical bloc points to something more complex than the formation of the people by means of a process of signification that creates both a common identity and an opposition to a common ‘enemy’, however important such aspects are for this re-emergence of the people as the collective agent of transformation and emancipation. When dealing with the particular problems posed by the need to create new forms of popular unity between the different segments of the subaltern classes and groups divided as they are by ethnic or religious lines, but also by the institutional division between citizens and migrants as well as undocumented migrants, more important than the common ‘cultural referents’ are the collective practices, demands, strategies, re-writings of histories, understandings of each other, and –above all – common aspirations, that can indeed induce the common identification as people. This process also requires concrete struggles for the institutional forms that enable this convergence, especially full social and political rights, but also the forms of political organizing and mass political intellectuality that link this common condition to common hegemonic projects of transformation and emancipation and help the articulation of common struggles and alliances. In sum, it is what Gramsci tried to define as the ‘Modern Prince’, the political form of a modern United Front.

Moreover, the people are not just a ‘discursive’ construction, in the sense of an arbitrary articulation of disparate elements into a temporary form of coherence. Our conception of the people in based upon class analysis and the potential for alliances of the subaltern classes. Following Poulantzas we can say the people is a ‘concept for strategy’,[70] that today point to the direction of an actual social alliance, formed as a result of the evolution of the contemporary forms of capitalist accumulation that create ‘objective’ material conditions that bring together working class strata with new petty bourgeois strata (in the Poulantzian sense), state employees and even segments of the traditional petty-bourgeois strata, as a result of the inability of contemporary neoliberal policies to enhance a lasting historical bloc around finance and multinational capitals, and the new forms of precariousness, flexibility and over-exploitation that have been intensified against both manual and intellectual labour. This indeed creates common demands and interests, based upon the common condition of labour, precariousness, unemployment, exploitation, increased difficulty in dealing with basic needs that, that in a certain manner unite the undocumented migrant with the young degree holder that moves from unemployment into precarious part-time work and back into unemployment. Moreover, all these segments share the same contradiction running through contemporary capitalism: the fact that contemporary labour force is at the same time more precarious, more insecure, more subject to forms of systemic violence, more fragmented, but also more in possession of those intellectual and communicative skills to realize its role as producer of social wealth and also to articulate demands and grievances (a comparison between the communication strategies of modern grass-root movements and certain aspects of the ingenuity of collective resistances by refugees and undocumented migrants can be really illuminating on this subject). Moreover, all these have also taken actual collective forms of ‘encounters’ between the different segments of a potential ‘people’ in contemporary movements.

Such a perspective poses important challenges regarding the hegemonic aspects of such a strategy. They pose the need to rethink the question of re-creating the collective subject of emancipation to look directly at the traumas linked to oppression and colonialism and to reconfigure, as Houria Bouteldja has suggested, the ‘we’ of a new political identity to be collectively invented.[71] They require a certain encounter between different currents, not only in the sense of political differences but also of the differences created by the reproduction of the colonial condition, inside European States. Sadrik Khiari posits this exigency when he calls for the construction of a ‘decolonial majority, which will be constituted by an alliance between indigenous political forces and non indigenous decolonial political forces’ or when he calls for a ‘politics of hegemony inside the French white population, a cultural, moral, ideological politics in order to be, one day, conceivable that there are inside the white political forces decolonial composing elements that will be based upon a broad consensus inside the population’.[72] In a similar manner it is interesting to note his suggestions on how the movements of what he defines as ‘indigenous’ (namely the former colonial subjects living as citizens or migrants in European states) can contribute to the broader redefinition of movements of emancipation.

[T]he French Indigenous but also non indigenous population suffers a degradation not only of its economic conditions of life but also of its entire life environment, a destruction of cultures, of popular knowledges, of traditions, of citizenship, of many social links, problems that cannot be resolved simply by the nationalisation of the means of production and by planification, either statist or self-managed. To these questions, which are complicated questions, I think that the indigenous are maybe more in position than the left or the far left to find answers, to the extent that these are questions that are being directly posed to them because they are the fundamental forms of racialisation.[73]

And it is here that we find the importance of solidarity and solidarity movements to refugees, especially forms that attempt to create common spaces and practices of solidarity, such as self-managed forms of hospitality that combine an immediate answer to a humanitarian crisis with struggles that treat refugees as collective subjects and not simply ‘victims’. The example of the self-managed Plaza Hotel in Athens and other self-managed centres that offer forms of hospitality to refugees is one such example. The same goes for all forms of common struggle across Europe, all attempts to create new alliances based upon a common condition of subalternity. From struggles for the rights of migrant labour to initiatives such as the ‘March for Dignity’ in France, these are all aspects of an attempt to ‘create people’.

It is also important to note that this conception of the people in terms of a potential new ‘historical bloc’ in sharp contrast to both a certain version of ‘multiculturalism’,[74] that treats societies as simple aggregations of individuals and differences but also from the neo-republican version of the people as common history and shared values. It points to a people to be created, it accepts all the referents of subaltern classes as necessarily contradictory elements of a people to come, of a ‘national-popular’ element that has yet to be constructed, in a constant process of reconstruction / reproduction / renewal. Above all, it is a conception of the construction of the people that does not put class antagonism into brackets; rather it takes it as a starting point.

 All this suggests that simply thinking about the rights of those not included in the nation, however important this might be, is not enough, because it does not challenge the current erosion of both democracy and popular sovereignty as part of very specific social and political strategies that enhance developments such as European Integration. Moreover, an emphasis upon rights, without a challenge of European Integration can lead either to fruitless pursuit of inscribing those rights within the institutional framework of ‘Fortress-Europe’, at a phase when the opposite is more probable, or to various forms of compromises, such the current distinctions between ‘refugees’ and ‘migrants’. And the answer to this impasse cannot be the invocation of a utopian ‘global’ right to nomadic movement – however important it is to guarantee full social and political rights to anyone living and working in a country – exactly because as in the former case it does not point to the actual political forms than can account both for the defence of these rights but also for the possibility to really struggle against racism by creating the kind of antagonistic political body that would re-signify both democracy and social transformation. In contrast, the choice of reclaiming popular sovereignty, in the form of ruptures with international institutional forms that undermine democracy, such as the EU and the Eurozone, along with the demand for full rights and citizenship for anyone living and working in a country (and in general contributing to its collective social life), indeed offers an alternative creating conditions for broader process of transformation. It is exactly the prospect of social transformation, a common future instead of a common history or origin that creates a different antagonistic (and agonistic) form of ‘popular unity’.[75] In this sense, a renewed socialist perspective, along the lines of such an emergence of a new historical bloc, is both a potential outcome and a necessary condition of dealing with the new forms of exclusion that emerge. And it is here that we can find the basis of a new internationalism, new forms of cooperation and solidarity. Solidarity inside a country is the condition for solidarity abroad; a different social and political configuration is the condition for a different ‘foreign policy’.

Consequently, it is exactly the emergence of a new historical bloc than can actually give a different meaning to sovereignty, linking it to social transformation and emancipation, basing it upon a strategy to actually fight racism and neocolonialism and transforming into a form of a potentially revolutionary ‘general will’, representing the democratic instance that is at the heart of communism as a material tendency.

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[1] Panagiotis Sotiris (b. 1970) has a PhD from Panteion University and has taught philosophy and social and political theory at various Greek universities, as an adjunct lecturer. He has published widely on Marxist theory and on social and political developments in Greece. His bookA Philosophy for Communism. Rethinking Althusser is forthcoming in the Brill/Historical Materialism Book series. He currently works as a journalist and independent researcher in Athens.panagiotis.sotiris@gmail.com. The presentation of this paper also included Frédéric Lordon as discussant. This version of the text benefited from Lordon’s observations, but also by comments and suggestions made by Stella Magliani-Belkacem, Félix Boggio Éwanjé-Épée, Stefan Kipfer, and Maïa Pal for which I am grateful.

[2] For a detailed analysis of the different dynamics inside the Leave vote in the British Referendum see Watkins 2016.

[3] This was exemplified in Jean Claude-Juncker’s statement that ‘there can be no choice against European treaties’ (Sudais 2015).

[4] Kant 1795.

[5] See for example Benhabib 2004.

[6] Arendt 1958, p. 298.

[7] Habermas 1996, p. 505.

[8] Habermas 1996, pp. 506-507.

[9] Habermas 2001, p. 109

[10] Habermas 1996, p. 500.

[11] Habermas 2001, pp. 110-111.

[12] Habermas 2001, p. 111.

[13] Benhabib 2004, p. 47

[14] Benhabib 2004, p. 220-221.

[15] On the evolution of the EU see Anderson 2009; Lapavitsaset al. 2012; Durand (ed.) 2013.

[16] On Islamophobia as an alarming global trend see Kumar 2012; Kundnani 2014; Todd 2015.

[17] Mezzandra and Nilson 2013, p. 303.

[18] Mezzandra and Nilson 2013, p. 305.

[19] Sassen 2006, p. 318.

[20] Balibar 2014, p. 46.

[21] Balibar 2014, p. 50.

[22] Balibar 2014, p. 42.

[23] Balibar 2014, p.p. 52-53.

[24] Balibar 2014, p. 55.

[25] Balibar 2017, p. 275.

[26] Balibar 2017, p. 276.

[27] Ibid.

[28] Balibar 2003.

[29] Balibar 2015, p. 131

[30] Balibar 2003, p. 121

[31] For a definition and critique of current neo-republicanism in the French context, see Todd 2015.

[32] Debray 1978, p. 37.

[33] Chabel 2015, p. 41

[34] Debray 2010.

[35] Sapir 2016, Kindle locations 308-314.

[36] Sapir 2016, Kindle location 1058-1067

[37] Sapir 2016, Kindle locations 1542-1544

[38] Sapir 2016, Kindle locations 873-879.

[39] Sapir 2016, Kindle locations 2829-2838.

[40] Levy 2010; Boggio Éwanjé-Épée and Magliani-Belkacem 2012.

[41] Lévy 2010.

[42] Khiari 2009.

[43] Houria Bouteldja and Sadri Khiari 2012.

[44] Arendt 2007.

[45] On the broader notion of the ‘national-popular’ in Gramsci, from literature to politics see Durante 2009.

[46] Q13 §1;SPN, pp. 130-131.

[47] Q13§1;SPN, p. 132.

[48] Q3, §82;CW, pp. 255-7

[49] Ibid

[50] Q23, §57;CW 255.

[51] Q2, §2;CW, pp. 260-1

[52] Q14, §17;SPN, p. 240.

[53] Q14, §17;SPN, p. 241.

[54] On Gramsci’s interest on this attempt towards the construction of a ‘proletarian nationalism’, which coincided with Italian imperial ambitions at the beginning of the 20^th century (leading to the invasion and occupation of Libya in 1911) see the references in the text on the ‘Southern Question’ (Gramsci 1978, p. 450) and in the Prison Notebooks: Q2, §51 and 52 (PN1, p. 295-300).

[55] Q19 §5 ;CW, pp. 246-247.

[56] Gramsci 2008, p. 19. On Gramsci’s thinking on the ‘national question’ see Santoro 2009.

[57] Q13§1;SPN, p. 132.

[58] Frosini 2009; Thomas 2009, p. 420; Rapone 2011, p. 113.

[59] Rapone 2011, p. 109.

[60] And of course there are many references in his writings for his clear support of decolonial struggles. See the following extract from a 1919Ordine Nuovo article: ‘For several years we Europeans have lived at the expense of the death of the coloured peoples: unconscious vampires that we are, we have fed off their innocent blood. [...]But today flames of revolt are being fanned throughout the colonial world. This is the class struggle of the coloured peoples against their white exploiters and murderers. It is the vast irresistible drive towards autonomy and independence of a whole world, with all its

spiritual riches’ (Gramsci 1977, p.p. 59-60). See also the following passage, again from a 1920 Ordine Nuovo article: ‘In this way the colonial populations become the foundation on which the whole edifice of capitalist exploitation is erected. These populations are required to donate the whole of their lives to the development of industrial civilization. For this they can expect no benefit in return; indeed, they see their own countries systematically despoiled of their natural resources, i.e. of the necessary conditions for their own autonomous development.’ (Gramsci  1977 p. 302).

[61] Gramsci 1977, p. 148.

[62] In Gramsci 1978.

[63] Kipfer and Hart 2013, p. 335.

[64] Kipfer and Hart 2013, p. 332

[65] Kipfer and Hart 2013, p. 333. In a similar tone Ato Sekyi-Otu has suggested that ‘I am tempted to call Gramsci a precocious Fanonist. A Fanonist reading of Gramsci would indeed locate the historical conditions of possibility of the "popular-national" as project of the modern prince in his portrait of the arrested development of the Italian bourgeoisie, the poverty of what he calls (again prefiguring Fanon) its "national consciousness," its twin cultural vices of cosmopolitanism and narcissism, its historical inability to summon the oppressed of the countryside onto the stage of national regeneration. [...]Without a doubt, the conceptual supports of Fanon's vision of the national, the social and the revolutionary as cognate terms of a new political practice, have an elective affinity with Gramsci's philosophy of praxis and its political implications.’ (Sekyi-Otu 1996, pp. 118-119).

[66]Lordon 2013.

[67] Rancière 1997, p. 43

[68] Deleuze 1989, p. 223.

[69] Q11, §67;SPN, p. 418.

[70] ‘The articulation of the structural determination of classes and of class positions within a social formation, the locus of existence of conjunctures, requires particular concepts. I shall call theseconcepts of strategy, embracing in particular such phenomena as class polarization and class alliance. Among these, on the side of the dominant classes, is the concept of the 'power bloc', designating a specific alliance of dominant classes and fractions; also, on the side of the dominated classes, the concept of the 'people', designating a specific alliance of these classes and fractions.’ Poulantzas 1975, p. 24.

[71] ‘We are the some of our acts of cowardice and of our resistances. We will be what we will be worthy to be. That’s all. This is true for all of us, whites or blacks. It is there that the question of the big WE will be posed. The We of our encounter, the We of the surpassing of race and its abolition, the We of a new political identity that we must invent together, the We of the decolonial majority. [...] This will be the We of a revolutionary love’. Bouteldja 2016, pp. 139-140.

[72] Bouteldja and Khiari (eds.) 2012, p. 394.

[73] Bouteldja and Khiari (eds.) 2012, 396-397.

[74] Especially since, as Himani Bannerji (2000) has suggested, a certain version of multiculturalism can be fully compatible with neoliberalism.

[75] ‘Our politics must sidestep the paradigm of "unity" based on "fragmentation or integration" and instead engage in struggles based on the genuine contradictions of our society.’ (Bannerji 2000, p. 120).

HM London 2016 conference: Pete Green on Michael Roberts's The Long Depression.

Pete Green is an independent researcher, retired Further Education lecturer and UCU activist in the UK.

The panel discussion of The Long Depression, therecent book by Michael Roberts, was one of the highlights of this year’s 2016 Historical Materialism conference in London. Michael himself opened the session with a summary of the core arguments of the book, focusing on what he describes as the third great depression in the history of capitalism, triggered but not fundamentally caused by, the financial crisis of 2007-8. Jim Kincaid responded with some of the questions he hasalready raised on this blog about Michael’s use of data. Al Campbell, the final speaker on the panel, provided some alternative charts, based on his work with Erdogan Bakir, suggesting that the rate of profit in the US economy had been on a rising curve in the period before the financial crisis exploded in 2007. For Al this was a crisis of the neo-liberal  regime which emerged in response to the crisis of profitability of the 1970s and early 1980s, but it could not be a function of a recent fall in the US rate of profit as that is not supported by the evidence.

In this ‘guest blog’ I am not going to engage with the data, not least because I share Jim Kincaid’s skepticism about the reliance on US national income accounts as a source for corporate profitability – whilst acknowledging that there is no adequate alternative available for those engaged in empirical investigation.  Instead I want to step back a little from the immediacies of that argument and consider the theoretical framework of Roberts’ book. Critically, I want to question the assumption that reliance on Marx’s analysis of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, and the counter-tendencies to that process over the long-term, is sufficient for an explanation of the cyclical fluctuations which have characterised capitalism since the early 19th century.  Please note that I am not denying the logical coherence or the relevance of Marx’s Volume 3 analysis of tendency and counter-tendency to analyzing the whole period since the 1960s.  I am challenging what I consider to be over-reductionist and two-dimensional applications of Marxist theory to the latest phase of global crises.

In my own paper for the HM conference which Michael Roberts mentions in passing in his recent blog “Transformation and Realisation – No Problem”, I began by recommending Richard B. Day’s bookThe Crisis and the Crash (published by Verso back in 1981) which surveys the debates in the USSR in the 1920s and 30s over Marxist analysis of Western capitalism in that epoch. Two debates are highlighted. The first focused on Kondratiev’s theory of long-waves and featured Trotsky’s critical response of 1923. The second on Day’s account derived from the respective legacies of Hilferding and Rosa Luxemburg and came to a head in the late 1920s as a cyclical upturn in Western capitalism reached its limit with the Wall Street crash.  On the one side were those, such as Maksakovsky (who died at an early age in 1928) and Preobrazhensky, for whom imbalances  between departments of reproduction (of which more below) were critical to explaining cyclical fluctuations and who are now categorized as ‘disproportionality’ theorists. On the other side, which eventually prevailed as Stalinist orthodoxy, were those led by Varga, who emphasized the limited consumption of the masses and can be labelled as ‘underconsumptionist’.

One significant difference was that the former school consistently located crises as only one phase in a cyclical process which could change in character and amplitude (as Preobazhensky emphasized in his 1931 book The Decline of Capitalism, translated into English by Richard B. Day himself) but would not disappear as long as capitalism survived. The Varga school by comparison, especially in the 1930s, was stagnationist, denying the very  possibility of any sustained recovery of capitalism.    Marx’s tendency for the rate of profit to fall,as a function of a rising organic composition of capital, plays no role at all in these debates. The rate of profit features as a variable, especially for Maksakovsky, but the determinants of fluctuations in profitability over the cycle are rather different. The disproportionality theorists focused on Volume 2 of Marx’sCapital and in the Russian debates this emphasis derived from Lenin’s debates with the Narodniks (who denied the possibility of capitalist development in Russia) in the 1890s. They certainly did not rely, as Michael Roberts mistakenly suggests in hisblog comment, on another Russian theorist, who also criticized the Narodniks for underconsumptionism, the  notorious ‘harmonist’ Tugan-Baranovsky.

What’s curious about contemporary Marxist debates, stretching back to the first serious crisis of the postwar period in the mid 1970s, is that we have a comparable polarization but now its the ‘disproportionality’ theories that have disappeared from view. Although this is to oversimplify a many-sided debate, the dominant currents evident in Marxist writing on the crisis of 2007-8 are both two-dimensional. On the one hand, there are those such as Michael Roberts, and Robert Brenner, who despite certain differences, emphasise a long-term decline in the rate of profit since the late 1960s combined with a financial system characterized by excessive debt levels. On the other there are those such as the Monthly Reviewcurrent of Foster and Magdoff, and for the 2007-8 crisis at least, Dumenil and Levy, who emphasise growing inequality, with underconsumption accompanied by excessive levels of debt. Michael Roberts is quite correct to note the similarities of the latter position with that of certain left Keynesians such as Joseph Stiglitz. He is incorrect in his frequent suggestion that his own approach is the only other viable Marxist theoretical framework available.

What we  need, as an alternative to both, is a more complex multi-dimensional theory of crisis as I suggested in my paper at the HM conference and which I will seek to develop at more length in an article to be submitted to the HM journal. Here, I  will focus on what I think is missing from  Michael’s theoretical framework, at least in his latest book  and recent blogs.  One way of doing that is to consider the flow-chart which appears on page 15 of the book,  borrowed  from a San Francisco Marxist study group and described by Michael as ‘clever’:   [you may need to click on the chart to enlarge it]

I’ve omitted some of the options on the right hand side of the original chart (indicated by the …) in order to highlight the critical binaries from a Marxist perspective. Michael obviously wants readers to follow him down the left hand side of the chart with a YES, YES, YES, YES . But I’ve added in three question-marks to register my objection to the choices as presented in the chart. The first (?) arises in response to the second question and its reference to a kernel of crisis. What this fails to register is that capitalism as a system is a contradictory unity of both production and circulation. Production of value and surplus-value is primary but the process of circulation is still necessary to the ‘realisation’ of value, with the sale of commodities in the market. Volume 1 of Capital comes first with its detailed exploration of the capitalist production/labour process which, Michael correctly observes, is ignored  in the Keynesian/Kaleckian tradition. But the widely neglected, comparatively arid, Volume 2 ofCapital which focuses on the  circuit of capital through its different phases (M…C…P…C…M´) is essential to understanding Marx’s analysis of the cyclical fluctuations of the system. All the participants in the Soviet debates summarized by Richard B Day understood that. In recent debates, by contrast, David Harvey and Ernest Mandel  (not least in his introductions to the Penguin volumes ofCapital ) are exceptional in their attention to Volume 2.

For Michael Roberts, David Harvey can be dismissed  as just another underconsumptionist. My second smaller (?) on the chart puts in question that labelling of both Harvey and Rosa Luxemburg. Leaving Luxemburg to one side, I simply recommend Harvey’s A Companion to Marx’s Capital Volume 2 as a corrective to that oversimplistic reading and as a more innovative text than the title might suggest. I disagree with Harvey’s critique  of Marx’s ordering of the texts ofCapital and his interpretation of Marx’s dialectical method. Harvey is certainly wrong, for example, to suggest that Marx assumed ‘perfect competition’ ( a theoretical construction of neoclassical economics which postdates Marx) in Volume 1, and would benefit from reading up on the theory of ‘real competition’ in Anwar Shaikh’s recent magnum opusCapitalism. But that raises another set of issues I cannot address here. What matters in this context is Harvey’s vital emphasis on capital as always in motion, across time and space. But this process through the phases of the circuit can be blocked at any point and even a slowdown in the process of circulation can precipitate a crisis. This in turn enables Harvey to locate the centrality of the credit system and banking to overcoming these blockages – and justifies his inclusion of a lengthy section on credit and the banking system in Volume 3 ofCapital in a commentary on Volume 2.

My third (?) on the chart refers to “Marx’ law of profitability” as a response to the question “Are crises integral to the accumulation process?”. For any Marxist the question obviously demands an affirmative response. But there are at least three further questions that need to be posed. Firstly, the accumulation process as I’ve just suggested embraces the whole circuit of capital. It requires the concentration of money capital and the availability for purchase of the necessary means of production and labour-power. Nor, rather obviously, does investment in production guarantee success in the market-place. Secondly the so-called law is actually a law of a ‘tendency’ subject to counter-tendencies, and I would argue that these unfold over a longer time-period, and thus have a different temporality, to the regular business cycle which lasts from 7 to 10 years and is sometimes known as the Juglar cycle. Thirdly, the actual rate of profit received by individual capitals is subject to a variety of determinants, including the level of effective demand, and these can fluctuate over the cycle as a result of factors which are not directly a result of changes on the organic composition of capital but will influence expectations of future profitability.

Michael Roberts will respond as he does in his recent blog that “the so-called realization problem is the result of the production problem. Falling profitability and falling mass of profits lead to collapsing investment, wages and employment and then swathes of companies cannot sell their goods or services at existing prices and workers cannot buy them. This is a crisis of overproduction and underconsumption”. Indeed he seems to have his own version of Say’ law (supply creates its own demand), which Marx dismissed as nonsense, when he claims that “…investment creates its own demand”. It is certainly true that Marx at one point in Volume 2 (p486 of the Penguin edition) states, in a sentence that Michael frequently invokes,

“It is a pure tautology to say that crises are provoked by a lack of effective demand or effective consumption”.

But for Marx this sentence is prefatory to a critique of the ‘underconsumptionists’ of his time who argued that raising wages would somehow “avert the crisis”. Marx’s objective at this point is to show how  a balance of demand between Departments 1 and 2 is possible and the system can therefore reproduce itself. But as he goes on to indicate the conditions for equilibrium between the two departments are such that systemic disproportionalities will inevitably arise which may only be rectified by “ a major crash” (p596).

Michael is of course right to say that changes in aggregate levels of investment and employment are critical factors  determining changes in levels of aggregate demand. Keynes himself would have agreed. However, there appears to be one error here and a significant omission. The error lies in the conflation of overproduction and underconsumption as ‘two sides of the same coin’, when underconsumption is equated with a lack of consumer spending by workers. For Marx overproduction normally arises, in the first instance, in what he calls Department 1, producing means of production, including both machinery and raw materials.  The problem is a relative lack of ‘productive consumption’ as Marx sometimes describes it. The fall in demand, or more commonly a slowdown in expansion of demand relative to an expansion of  capacity in Department 1,  stems from other capitals in both Departments whose capacity has also grown too fast relative to demand. The omission relates to the relationship between the lifetime of fixed capital and the temporality of the cycle, which is curious because Michael Roberts does mention this at one point in his book on page 220 in the chapter on cycles. Yet it fails to play any role in the earlier analysis.

This is where a careful reading of Pavel Maksakovsky’s The Capitalist Cycle (originally published posthumously in 1928, translated into English by Richard Day and  published in the HM book series by Brill in 2004) would be helpful. This book reveals someone with a sophisticated grasp of Marx’s method and there are some fascinating passages in the opening chapter on the process of abstraction in Marx’s work. But the core of the book concerns, as the title suggests, the regular business or Juglar cycle and Maksakovsky offers only a cursory dismissal of Kondratiev’s long waves, which is regrettable. That said, the author proceeds from Marx’s emphasis on fixed capital formation as critical to explaining the cycle.

Maksakovsky moves beyond Marx, however, by dropping the assumption which Marx retains in his analysis of the relationship between Departments 1 and 2, namely that market prices always correspond to values (or indeed to the prices of production introduced in Volume 3). As Maksakovsky shows, starting from the ‘depression phase’ of the cycle, demand for investment goods will revive with the need for replacement of existing fixed capital which is worn out or has become obsolescent with technical change. If the available capacity in Department 1 has been reduced during the previous crisis with the shutdown of mines, oil wells or steel plants etc., the revival in demand will tend to raise prices above values in those sectors. Whilst the supply of such products takes time to come on stream, employment increases immediately generating an expansion of demand for consumer products. Profits will tend to rise with rising prices encouraging even more expansion in both Departments.

But towards the peak of the expansion phase the new investment begins to result in extra supply being thrown into the circulation process. Now just a slowdown in demand for additional machinery from Department 2 will generate excess capacity in Department 1 (here Maksakovsky anticipates the accelerator  of Keynesian business-cycle theory without the rigid formalism). Prices and profits will fall and the process goes into reverse. The law of value begins to prevail (i.e. relative prices fall to the new lower values set by socially-necessary labour-time) but only after a “prolonged interval of time”. The cyclical fluctuations Maksakovsky suggests will occur independently of what happens in the world of finance and are driven by changes in investment, as the evidence stressed by Michael Roberts confirms and which is not in dispute. But only when the overaccumulation of capital is fuelled by an overextension of the credit mechanism and fictitious capital does the turning-point from boom to depression take the form of a crisis or a financial crash.

The previous two paragraphs provide only a brief sketch of a sophisticated but  highly abstract analysis of the cyclical pattern which has characterized capitalism since the early 19th century when fixed capital became a significant component of the production process. Preobrazhensky in his Decline of Capitalism of 1931 develops this type of analysis more concretely in the context of the post-crash depression.  He stresses the impact of monopolization and international cartels and the creation of excess reserves of fixed capital in the 1920s, making the recovery from the crisis after 1929 much slower than in the classic cycle of earlier periods. Comparable work is needed on the changing cyclical patterns of recent decades. But it is not difficult to extend the analysis to, for example, the patterns of overinvestment in the telecommunications/IT sector in the late 1990s, or in the oil and mining sectors globally in the second half of the 2000s. That last example should also remind us of the need to consider the uneven and combined development of the system globally and the  global imbalances emphasized by astute mainstream commentators such as Martin Wolf. A fully-developed multi-dimensional theory of crisis also needs to take into account the uneven capacities of nation-states for intervention and the impact of class struggle, including the sustained drive of international capital to raise rates of exploitation through outsourcing and global restructuring.

But what of the longer-term tendency of the rate of profit to fall as a function of the rise in the organic composition of capital (the ratio of dead to living labour in the system)? Unlike some critics  I am not rejecting the relevance of this or the equally significant role of counter-tendencies raising profitability over the long-term. Indeed I would endorse to a degree Michael’s emphasis on longer waves in profitability (pp225-6 of his book) but link them more closely to Kondratiev waves (which is how I interpret Shaikh’s sketchy remarks on this question at the end of his book). But these longer waves, which underlie the 7 to 10 year Juglar business cycle, lack the regularity imputed to them by Michael. What can be shown in my view is that when the underlying rate of profit is falling the business cycle fluctuations are more severe as is evident from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, and when the underlying rate is rising, the amplitude or the severity of recessions is reduced as in the 1990s and early 2000s. What’s new in the 2000s however is the unprecedented rise in the share of financial profits in total corporate profits as Lapavitsas and Mendieta-Munoz explore in a recent article in Monthly Review (July-August 2016). But that is yet another story.

One final point.  Michael is fond of suggesting that to say crises are a result of a lack of effective demand is like saying the weather is wet because it’s raining. What I’m suggesting here is that to claim crises like those of 2007-8 are a result of a long-term tendency of the rate of profit to fall is like saying storms and hurricanes are simply a result of global warming – there are a lot of mediations or causal links missing from the analysis, even if the data on the underlying trend confirm the thesis, which on the plane of global capitalism is much more questionable than for climate change.