by Demet Sahende Dinler

By Stefan Gužvica

Following a failed counterrevolutionary uprising in Budapest in June 1919, the Hungarian Bolsheviks captured a group of young cadets from the Ludovica Military Academy who had participated in the revolt. The young men must have been horrified. They had no idea what fate lay in store for them, but they were sure it would not be good. They had heard stories of the ‘Red Terror’, of ‘Jewish Bolsheviks’ roaming through the streets and summarily executing people like themselves. Their sentence was handed out at the suggestion of Ervin Sinkó, one of the commanders of the revolutionary defence: as punishment for their crimes against the revolution, they would have to read Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.

Ervin Sinkó was a direct participant in the Hungarian Soviet Republic, a founding member of the Party of Communists in Hungary, and the first novelist to describe the rise and fall of the revolutionary state, which lasted for only 133 days. The short-lived Hungarian Commune aroused hopes for revolutionaries across the world, signifying, together with its Bavarian counterpart, that the Russian Bolsheviks would no longer be isolated and that a world-proletarian state was on the horizon. By the summer of 1919, such hopes were dashed, and the Russian Revolution returned to isolation, which would eventually result in a counter-revolution.

The title of the novel, The Optimists, is general and not particularly captivating, but Sinkó insisted it be that way, and it does adequately capture the mindset of the generation that brought the Hungarian Commune into being. When the Orbán regime attempts to reduce the Soviet Republic to a ‘Red Terror’ – epitomised by the reconstruction of a Horthy-era monument to its victims in the centre of Budapest[1] – this book should serve as a counter-monument to what was in fact the brightest moment in Hungarian history.

Sinkó is virtually unknown to English-speaking audiences. The structural bias towards favouring the novelists of Western European languages – which is logistical, financial, and cultural – means that the rich and fascinating body of Hungarian literature is generally foreign to the English-speaking world, and that of the local Marxist authors even more so. So far, the only work by Sinkó translated into English has been his The Novel of a Novel, and even this edition is abridged.[2]

The Novel of a Novel has been (partially) translated because of its importance for the so-called school of Soviet subjectivity: academics who research the self and the individual under the Stalinism of the 1930s. Sinkó lived in the USSR between 1935 and 1937, trying in vain to publish a novel, and kept a diary during this entire period. The diary, a rare document from the Stalin era in its own right, is an extraordinary account of the heroism of the Soviet people and a communist’s disillusionment with the Stalinist system. The novel in question, which Sinkó tried but failed to publish under Stalin, was The Optimists. Finished in Paris in 1934,The Optimists did not reach the public for almost twenty years. They were finally published for the first time in socialist Yugoslavia – in Hungarian in 1953, and then in Serbo-Croatian a year later.

The Optimists is an epic saga of the Hungarian Revolution of 1919, spanning almost eight hundred pages in the Serbo-Croatian edition. The autobiographical novel’s main protagonist is József Báti, who is a stand-in for the author, a poet and a socialist living in the Southern Hungarian provincial town of Szabadka (present-day Subotica in Serbia). He has just returned to town after being demobilised and seeks to leave for Budapest as soon as possible since the revolutionary events are already underway. The first chapter sets the stage not just for the author’s life, but also contemporary Hungary. Szabadka is paradigmatic of the decadence of provincial life in the collapsing Austro-Hungarian Empire. The people that Báti meets are either opportunistic Social Democrats who endorsed the war effort or hedonistic dandies from bourgeois families. While Báti/Sinkó is also of upper-class origins, his interests lead him to Marxism, and the atmosphere of the small town feels more stifling than ever. The opening chapter, symbolically but also logically, ends with a suicide.

The vibrant, modern, and cosmopolitan Budapest introduced in the second chapter stands in clear contrast to the bland province, and it is where the events of most of the rest of the novel take place. For Báti, Budapest is symbolised by Endre Ady, the avant-garde Hungarian poet who was the major influence on his generation, and who is frequently quoted by many of the characters. Nevertheless, the Budapest of November 1918 is not quite what Báti expected. He is struck by urban alienation, symbolised by repetitive advertisements for medication that he sees on the streets. It does not look at all like a revolutionary city.

As the story progresses, the reader learns that what is happening in Budapest is not a mere indifference of the population to broader historical processes. Rather, the Aster (or Chrysanthemum) Revolution of October 1918 put an end to the war and the monarchy, but not to existing property relations. While Báti is evidently disappointed, not everyone is: the Social Democrats are in power, preaching class collaboration alongside empty revolutionary slogans, and most workers support them. Despite feeling somewhat like an outcast, Báti quickly takes up a job as a government propagandist, but he also becomes involved with the Communists (which would significantly shorten his tenure at the Propaganda Committee).

The Communists are the eponymous optimists, of course, but Sinkó does not portray only them. Dénes Eisinger, an ethnic German waiter from Báti’s hometown, is one of the first figures he meets in Budapest, and one of the most stubbornly resistant ones when it comes to grasping the importance of historical events unfolding all around him. All that middle-aged Eisinger cares about is saving enough money to move to the United States, where he imagines he would earn well enough to be able to get married and buy a home. Sometimes, he fantasises about buying an inn in the Hungarian countryside, but his plans are always individualist and he is uninterested in society as a whole. While portrayed sympathetically, his servility and lack of reflection are infuriating. He enjoys his drab, atomised existence and fails to see that his ideological fantasies are structurally impossible for someone like him.

In the optimist camp, Báti becomes one of the founding editors of Communism (calledInternationálé in real life), the first Hungarian Communist newspaper. Through this, we meet his group of close friends and comrades, including Magda and Arnost Lenart (Iren and Aladár Komját), Sándor and Sári Stein (Gyula Hevesi, the future People’s Commissar for Social Production, and his wife Jolán Stern), and Sinkó’s future wife Irma Rothbart (called Erzsi Cinner in the novel).[3] Erzsi Cinner and Jolán Stern are among the strongest characters in The Optimists, both politically and psychologically. Sári/Jolán Stern is a leading working-class militant, respected by proletarians and feared by her enemies. The stoic Rothbart/Cinner, on the other hand, gave up her humanities studies to pursue medicine, her form of protest against the barbarity of the world destroyed by war, in which she thought there was no longer room for art. Cinner, who is uninterested in Báti’s advances throughout most of the novel, at one point tells him he is like a son, and she indeed displays far greater maturity than him, and most of the male characters.

In the histories of the largely disregarded Hungarian Soviet Republic, even the men are under-researched. However, we know far more about them than about the women. The commissar Hevesi lived and took an active role in socialist Hungary after 1945, and even left a colourful memoir[4] on the early generation of revolutionaries. Komját/Lenart remained a significant figure of the Hungarian literary avant-garde until his untimely demise in Paris in 1937. Sinkó, as mentioned, became a reputable Yugoslav writer. Yet it is virtually impossible to find information on their wives, who were at the very least as important as they were. In this sense, too, the novel is not only advanced in its treatment of women, but also significant for the portrayal of unjustly forgotten figures, which historiography has cast aside based on gender alone.

Báti/Sinkó is already close to the top echelons of the party, so, as the novel progresses, we meet the leading figures of the Hungarian Soviet Republic. Certainly, the most interesting topic for ‘Western’ audiences will be the portrayal of György Lukács (Vértes), Báti’s close friend, whom he endearingly calls ‘the communist metaphysician’. Yet The Optimists teaches us that we are doing a disservice to ourselves, and a dishonour to the Hungarian Bolsheviks, if we limit ourselves only to studying the person of Lukács. There are at least a dozen more towering figures of Hungarian Marxism of equal or greater stature, many of whom have been sadly forgotten, both in terms of ideas and political practices.

After the strong female characters of Erzsi Cinner and Sári, we find out that Sári’s partner, Sándor, had spent the pre-revolutionary months drawing up elaborate plans for organising socialist production and the redistribution of property, which he later gets to put into action. We meet, in the editorial offices of Communism Lányi (József Révai), the revolutionary theoretician, and, later on, comrade Kovács, one of the heads of the revolutionary police after the establishment of the Soviet Republic. Kovács is Ottó Korvin, a young Bolshevik who would be brutally murdered in the White Terror, and whom Lukács considered a worthy representative of ‘ascetic revolutionism’.[5] Báti also meets, very early on, ‘Comrade President’, a Social Democrat who is his superior in the Propaganda Committee, and who transforms in the novel from a repentant but still wavering supporter of the Austro-Hungarian war effort into a staunch Communist. Comrade President is none other than Dezső Bokányi, a stonemason by profession and a pioneer of Hungarian Marxism, who first translated the Communist Manifesto, and who would later fall victim to Stalin’s Purges in Moscow.

Perhaps the most touching story of the novel, however, is the story of Báti’s adopted household (or rather, the household that adopted him). It consisted of a sick war veteran György Kozma, his family, and Uncle Janó. Kozma is a proletarian and Uncle Janó a Slovak peasant, and a servant of an aristocrat in whose villa they all live. The aristocrat, while cautiously far from Budapest during revolutionary turmoil, decided, in an act of patriotic kindness, to take in a war veteran and his family. Kozma is quiet and withdrawn, one of the many disillusioned but isolated individuals who see no way out and are furious at the world. Uncle Janó tries to console him with his Christian faith but receives cynicism at best and a wooden bench thrown his way at worst.

Kozma’s life begins gradually to change only upon receiving an agitational letter from Sári, eventually going to meet her and finding that people are actually fighting against the injustices he also sees. Kozma’s adolescent daughter, Rózsi, also becomes involved, and eventually, on the eve of the establishment of the Commune, their ideas gradually begin to leave an impression even on the devout Janó and Kozma’s apolitical wife. Sinkó makes it evident that women, aside from the communists, were almost completely depoliticised, something that their social role imposed on them. Far from being a naïve story of enlightenment, the tale of the Kozma family and Janó is full of ups and downs and develops over a couple of hundred pages, against the backdrop of the historical events that surround them. It shows how the success of the Communist Party depended not merely on the strength of the idea, but on the ability of the communists to respond adequately to people’s lived experiences.

Even before the (all too easy) takeover of power by the Communists, Báti is introduced to Béla Kun. He is portrayed as highly intelligent, but also as crude and impatient. He verbally chastises not only Báti but also pretty much anyone he enters into a minor disagreement with. However, what is striking (and the author notes this many times over) is that, despite his attitude, Kun enjoys immense popularity and respect, not just from those who follow him from afar, but from those who work directly with him. He appears to be a textbook example of Weber’s charismatic authority.

Nonetheless, perhaps the most memorable moment with Kun is at the very end of the Soviet Republic, when he delivers a speech to a group of peasant soldiers outside of Budapest, all of whom are Communists. Báti sees in that speech an amalgam of all the speeches he had heard from various people over the previous few months, all of their energies coming together into this one, crucial moment… and it completely fails. Kun is unable to rouse the soldiers who had become aware that all is lost. Kun is not a cult leader, he is too human, fallible, and unable to seduce the masses when it becomes apparent that what he is saying does not respond to the material reality around them. Despite Sinkó’s concerns, Kun, who read the novel later in Moscow, loved it, including the portrayal of himself. He became one of Sinkó’s main patrons and supporters, though, at a certain point, Kun’s support for the publication of The Optimists actually became yet another obstacle. Kun would also fall victim to the Great Purge,[6] and he was executed in August 1938.

The most impressive of the revolutionary leaders that Sinkó describes, however, is Tibor Szamuely. To this day, Szamuely is seen in the eyes of reactionaries and critics of the Hungarian Soviet Republic as ‘the demon of the revolution’.[7] All the misdeeds of the Hungarian communists were blamed on Szamuely. Through Sinkó, we learn that this was something that had started already during the revolution and was initiated by the Social Democrats. Despite the oblivion of early Hungarian Communism, Szamuely’s notoriety continues to this day. In contrast to this image, Sinkó describes a man fully dedicated to the Communist cause, who does not care at all for himself. This is not cheap propaganda in favour of the Hungarian Bolsheviks. There are plenty of examples in the book showing how power corrupted the officials of the Soviet Republic. Dani, the modest and kind young revolutionary that he knew, went on to lead the Lenin Boys, a paramilitary terrorist organisation, and quickly became overwhelmed by his newfound fame and reputation. He began hoarding seized property and indulging in all sorts of vices. But Szamuely was the Incorruptible.

If one expects, based on Sinkó’s deep respect for Szamuely, a simplistic apologia for revolutionary violence, one will not find it in this book. Quite the contrary: the central conflict in the novel is not so much the class struggle, but rather the internal battles of Báti, who tries to reconcile the fact that the proletariat is waging a just war with the inevitability of political violence in such a conflict. In reality, Sinkó renounced Communism for several years after fleeing to Vienna, returning to a kind of Tolstoyan utopian socialism inspired by Christianity. By the time he wrote The Optimists, however, he had returned to Marxism, and what we get from this life experience is a beautifully truthful presentation of both sides of the argument, of an uncompromising struggle for proletarian liberation and the genuine disgust a human must feel about killing, regardless of justification. The paradoxes that Sinkó grapples with remind the reader of some of Brecht’s finest works on the same topic.

A key figure in these discussions with Báti is Vértes (Lukács). When the Communists take power with ease in Hungary, at the insistence of the Social Democrats, Vértes menacingly remarks ‘if only we could do this without bloodshed’, a statement which Báti ponders on for days to come. After contact with proletarians and peasants, Báti finds that he does not only struggle, as an agitator, with explaining why one should kill for the Commune but also why one should die for it as well. Vértes then has a long discussion with Báti on class consciousness and the significance of faith for revolutionary involvement. This faith, Vértes argues, is not the blind faith of a child, but a tortured faith of the Gethsemane Garden, aware of impending doom, inherently tragic, but nonetheless active and heroic. In fact, revolutionary engagement is, in his view, impossible without such faith. Amusingly, Vértes/Lukács ends his dialogue with Báti by advising him to read Kierkegaard.

Báti’s Gethsemane Garden is called Kecskemét. He was sent to this town, some 100km south of Budapest, to put down a revolt of the Whites, who tried to overthrow the local soviet. While we know from the historical record that the crackdown on counter-revolutionaries in Kecskemét was mild precisely because of Sinkó, Báti is deeply disturbed by events there. He wanted to abolish all power, and then found himself becoming a person with power, a position he did not feel comfortable with at all. He is deeply shaken when the Lenin Boys bring him a notebook of a rebel gendarme whom they killed after he tried to flee. He sees the man’s photo of himself posing alongside his wife and son, and the name András Vén. Báti returns to Budapest and tells Erzsi Cinner that he is no longer a Communist.

The return to Budapest, however, shows him the matter that occupies him from a completely different angle. Granted, Báti still tries to minimise bloodshed – the treatment of the cadets at the Ludovica Academy is perhaps the most impressive example – but he also learns that, if he truly believes in human life as an absolute value, he is alone in this belief. There are plenty of people speaking in the name of humanism, against violence: the Social-Democratic former minister who sent the army to fire on striking miners; old aristocrats and industrialists who supported the war until the very end; and the officers who had no qualms about shooting soldiers for anti-war agitation on the front.

When faced with these ‘pacifists’, Báti does not fall into despair. He does not withdraw from politics and the world. Rather, he comes to understand that, to achieve abstract ideals of humanism and non-violence, one must first remove material obstacles for their realisation inherent in the class society. He realises that his comrades are still on the right side, despite everything, or precisely because of everything. He does not cave in to defeatism and pessimism. Throughout the novel, several Communists quote Eugene Leviné’s famous saying that ‘We communists are all dead men on leave.’ This statement is particularly beloved of Kovács/Korvin, who also mentions it when he gets into an argument with Báti over the execution of some counter-revolutionaries, and whose own leave was to expire by the end of the year. Faced with all the suffering, some perpetrated by the revolutionaries themselves, Sinkó juxtaposes the ‘dead men on leave’ to a statement (which he attributes to Vértes/Lukács) that communists are in fact ‘optimists by profession’.

Despite the stereotypes of a horrific ‘Red Terror’ that dominate the contemporary Hungarian public memory of the Soviet Republic, the only conclusion one can draw from Sinkó's novel is that the Hungarian Bolsheviks were not ‘terroristic’ enough. This is not to say that Báti’s attempts to save poor gendarmes and peasants of Kecskemét were unjustified. Rather, the Hungarian Bolshevik terror missed those at the top who most sought to sabotage the Soviet Republic, namely the Social-Democratic leaders, who ruled together with the Communists. Even if the Bolsheviks wanted to get rid of them, their hands were tied due to the Social Democrats’ immense popularity. They had been in control of a capitalist government for a shorter time than, for instance, the Russian Mensheviks and the SRs, and their popularity never plummeted, especially after they agreed to form a coalition with the Communists and declaratively establish the Soviet Republic. In practice, however, there was always a disconnect between their radical proclamations and very practical attempts at class collaboration. Perhaps this helps explain why the Hungarian Communist Party developed into one of the most vehemently anti-Social-Democratic parties in the era of the united front, its leaders being among those scolded by Lenin for their ‘ultra-leftism’.

The demise of the Hungarian Soviet Republic was tragic, and so is the ending of the novel. At one point, the distraught Báti comes to the House of the Soviets in the middle of the evacuation and asks a comrade what will happen to the Ludovica cadets, whom they sent to read Dostoevsky. The comrade, surprised, laughs at him and says that they’ll be the ones perpetrating the White Terror. The main historical figures follow their paths of exile, underground work, or brutal murder by the White forces. In Kecskemét, too, the monarchist troops that Báti had saved ended up killing his comrades. Yet, the people the reader identifies with the most even at the end of the story are the regular proletarians that Sinkó describes so intimately throughout the work: the Kozma family, Uncle Janó, and the waiter Eisinger. None of them are model Communists (and indeed, most communists aren’t either), but they are the intended main recipients of the visions of Kun and Szamuely. The shattering of their dreams, the return to suffering under class society after getting a taste of the new world, is what hurts the most. The professional optimists, if they survived, continued their struggle. But what happened to the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of ordinary people in Hungary who welcomed the revolution, only to be condemned instead to a quarter of a century under Horthy’s antisemitic, autocratic, and ultimately pro-fascist regime?

The fate of Eisinger is particularly tragic. He was the quintessential representative of petit-bourgeois fantasies among the working class, and Erzsi Cinner could not stand him. One reads about all of his insignificant and selfish designs with either ridicule or annoyance. Yet, it is easy to develop a liking for him despite it all, just as Báti does. The stubbornly apolitical Eisinger, in a Kafkaesque scenario, ends up accused by the Whites of being a ‘Jewish Bolshevik’ (despite being German) and is slandered and scapegoated by the very superiors whom he always respected – his boss and his landlord. He is beaten to death in a brutal demonstration of how, even if you do not deal with politics, politics will still deal with you.

The Optimists is both an excellent piece of writing, and a novel with historiographical significance. The book manages to be didactic without being imposing. Sinkó’s writing evokes impressions of Steinbeck, in the love he shows for his characters, and of Brecht, in the way in which he deals with the moral dilemmas of revolution. He beautifully weaves together ordinary life and politics, love and philosophy, heroism and tragedy, proving how inseparable they are. The translation of The Optimists into English would be of great significance to the social-scientific community, to lovers of literature, and to all those among us whose interest in communism is not merely academic. Today, at a time when Hungary is ruled by one of the most reactionary regimes in all of Europe, the most glorious moment in its history – the Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919 – is forgotten at best and openly demonised at worst. Ervin Sinkó’s novel is its finest defence, its most sympathetic testimony, and its most honest memory.

References

Chase, William J. 2008, ‘Microhistory and Mass Repression: Politics, Personalities, and Revenge in the Fall of Béla Kun’, The Russian Review, 67, 3: 454–83.

Hevesi, Gyula 1959, Egy mérnök a forradalomban: négy évtized történelmi időkben, Budapest: Európa Könyvkiadó.

Hungarian Spectrum 2018, ‘In Place of Imre Nagy, a Memorial for the Victims of Red Terror’, 30 December, available at: <https://hungarianspectrum.org/2018/12/30/in-place-of-imre-nagy-a-memori…;.

Lukács, Georg 2022 [1969], ‘Georg Lukács: The Final Interview’, Verso Blog, 24 March, available at: <https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/5309-georg-lukacs-the-final…;.

Sinkó, Ervin 2018, The Novel of a Novel: Abridged Diary Entries from Moscow, 1935–1937, edited and translated by George Deák, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

[1]Hungarian Spectrum 2018.

[2] Sinkó 2018.

[3] See https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/node/2008

[4] Hevesi 1959.

[5] Lukács 2022.

[6] Chase 2008.

[7] This is how the anti-communist historian Dmitrii Volkogonov used to describe Trotsky.

By Mike Haynes

Mike Haynes is a former Professor of International Political Economy who has written widely on the social history of death and disease. Accused by some of being a lockdown sceptic (he supported the first UK lockdown), he would describe himself as an evidence-based covid centrist. He blogs as theJobbing Leftie Historian: https://leftiehistorian.wordpress.com/

*

By any sensible epidemiological measure, the covid pandemic is over. The disease is now endemic. So, did the organised left and its leading radical thinkers have a good pandemic? I think the answer is no. Insofar as history notices us at all, it will not be kind. Nor should it be. Most of the left suspended critical analysis and, collectively, we became largely irrelevant.

One exception was Panagiotis Sotiris,whose autumn 2020 critique of lockdowns in Historical Materialism I still look back on with enormous admiration.[1] There were things in his article that I do not share. Not being a philosopher, I would not have gone with his big framing of the arguments. I have doubts too about the left’s obsession with neoliberalism. I do not think that the writings of people like Mike Davis or Rob Wallace showed any special insight that cannot be found in the many papers about the threat of pandemic disease produced by the thousands of people who work in the huge global disease surveillance networks.

But Sotiris was right that the apocalyptic scenarios were overblown. The precise numbers who died directly of covid remains unknown, but maybe around 10% of the total number who died globally in 2020-2022. Proportionately, the covid pandemic was larger than the influenza pandemics of 1957-58 and 1968-69, but closer to them than the 1918 pandemic. Indeed, it is not even clear that covid was the top global cause of death in 2020-22. The infection fatality rate (which also varies over time and place and not just due to vaccination) was high for the old with comorbidities but low for the under 60s.[2] The excess mortality rate captures both the effects of covid itself and the impact of the measures to deal with it. It is often considered a better guide, but it varied enormously by country and over time. Most obviously in the case of Sweden, it did not fit with the narrative that state-driven lockdowns were the only rational response. Sotiris was right, too, that we needed to embrace complexity rather than simplicity; that lockdown had more to do with ‘security’ rather than ‘public health’. But, above all, in terms of dealing with the pandemic I agreed then, and I agree now, - the choice was never ‘between simply doing nothing … and coercive and authoritarian restrictions and lockdowns.’ The experience of the pandemic clearly showed that lockdown stringency did not mean lower fatality rates.

Yet it was at almost exactly at the point when Sotiris published his argument for a different left response that many others on the left were going down the rabbit hole of elimination and the fantasy of zero covid. It was typical that an early response to Sotiris should effectively say there are only two positions - good and evil, that of the lockdown strategy associated with the zero covid campaigns or support for the Koch Foundation and the Great Barrington Declaration.[3] It was easy for such left commentators to admit, in the abstract, that lockdowns might be a problem. The trouble was that, in practice, so much of the left then took the view that there was not a state lockdown measure that should not have been started earlier, applied more widely and pursued longer. To doubt this was to be on the wrong side of history. What are you? Saint or a sinner? And there is no virtue like that of the saint faced with a room full of sinners.

Smallpox is the only human disease that has been completely eradicated. But it was never a model for covid. Smallpox is easily identifiable from afar, it does not mutate its form, there are no animal reservoirs, a vaccination gives lifetime protection (albeit with some slight decline).

Covid endemicity was inevitable. Covid is a respiratory disease. It transmits asymptomatically. It has a high reproduction rate. It constantly mutates. These things are intrinsic to the numerous coronaviruses and many other diseases too. This is why Chris Whitty, the Chief Medical Officer for England and Wales said in April 2020 ‘COVID-19 is a long way from finished and eradication is technically impossible’.[4] It is why Professor Francois Balloux described zero covid as ’epidemiologically idiotic’.[5]

They were right. You say that there is a strategy to supress covid in every country in the world? Then, in 2023, three years later, it is endemic in every country in the world. It is difficult to imagine a more spectacular refutation of an argument. Yet, even now, those on the left who made these arguments are reluctant to think about how they got it so wrong. Nor are they willing to confront the trade-offs that they downplayed or to raise the questions of alternatives which might have allowed a better and more democratic management of the process to endemicity - trying to reduce the costs of covid itself but also dealing with those inevitable trade-offs which the measures used to control covid would involve.

Here, I just want to briefly consider four things – the role of society and politics; the role of science; the transfer of risk and, finally, the need for alternatives. The perspective reflects my position in the UK but most of the points apply more widely.

First, despite a rhetoric of social struggle versus covid, not only was the ‘class struggle’ abandoned but so was so much human interaction. It is difficult to imagine a scale of human estrangement in human history comparable to that of the countries which locked down. ‘People were afraid – of the virus,’ the disaster planner, Lucy Easthope says, ‘but worse - of each other’.[6] While some breezed through lockdown, others were less fortunate. People could not meet beyond their household to sing together. They could not dance, use parks, meet to kiss, to have sex. Children could not play outside together. Mothers had to give birth alone, couples marry alone, people die alone. The abused were locked in with their abusers, the depressed with their depression, the lonely with their loneliness, the vulnerable with their vulnerabilities.

Independent forms of voluntary and collective action all but disappeared in the UK. For two years, strikes were effectively zero. UK strike statistics ceased to be collected. Left demonstrations and street protests were abandoned. The climate change movement also suspended street actions. Instead, the alienation of Zoom meetings and protests were lauded by those working from ‘home’ - wherever that might be. It was as if the left had never had anything to say about how workplace or wider forms of solidarity were forged by people coming together physically. We lived vicariously off a few protests of Black Lives Matter or the women’s movement, in which, organisationally, we played no serious role. We ridiculed anti-lockdown protests from afar and then complained that they were dominated by the right.

Did human rights not matter for us? It seemed not. We even struggled to have an engagement with the inevitably repressive nature of the policing of lockdowns and the way it fell most heavily on the usual suspects. Nor did the left, except at the level of a few individuals, have any real engagement with the very limited networks of social solidarity that survived.[7] It was not the left but more traditional groups that created most of the social support networks that did develop.

And the irony is that, reading the high-level political exchanges that have come out about covid policy in the UK, it would seem that, so far from seeing the left as a threat, the government of the day was happy for people to argue for more rather than less extreme measures.

So, what of science? It is true that politics plays an inescapable role in science. But that does not mean that science can be read off from politics. The left’s understanding of medicine and epidemiology was woeful. Covid suppressors and eliminators claimed, for example, to be vaccine enthusiasts. I am too. But I saw not a single one reflect on the fact that it was impossible to develop vaccines in conditions of suppression and elimination.[8] That is right - you need a significant pool of infection to test your vaccines. Without a minimum number of infections, you cannot do the trials necessary to test effectiveness and safety. You therefore have to shift the risk onto others. How could this elementary point be missed by so many? Who did they expect to do the testing on?

And should not those on the left who demanded vaccine mandates now be ashamed of their inability to make the elementary distinction between a vaccine that reduces the virulence of an infection and one that stops transmission?

More generally, the left showed no understanding of the principles of evidence-based medicine and why all interventions need real world trials of their efficacy. The crassest confounded observational studies were shared. The idea of randomised trials was rarely mentioned and then only perhaps to be rubbished. If any initiative was proposed that might work, then the left too often assumed it would definitely work and any doubts were down to bad politics.

The examples are endless, but I will take test and trace in the UK. Even today, someone like Devi Sridhar can still be found arguing that ‘mass testing was the best early path to avoid lockdown and supress Covid-19…’[9] Since mass testing did not enable any country to suppress Covid, to make this claim in 2023 seems extraordinary. Perhaps it is designed to deflect attention from the way Sridhar also argued for seemingly indefinite external and internal border closures. But let us leave that to one side...

People with infections were told to stay home. All the attempts to finesse a policy beyond this, based on test and trace systems, were failures. The system in the UK was possibly the most expensive failure in the world. It cost some £37 billion and, in some months, made up an astonishing 1% of UK GDP.[10] It was poorly managed, ineffective, and beset by questionable contracts. All this is politically important. But, in terms of the management of the pandemic, a test and trace system could never – even under the best of circumstances – have significantly moderated the pandemic. The reason is that the higher the reproduction rate, the more difficult it is to contain a pandemic by contact tracing. This is why, in the past, test and trace systems were only seen as useful in the very early stages. Once the cases run into a few thousands, test and trace systems quickly become pointless because they necessarily ‘leak’. Let us take the stages.

First, we knew early on that there was likely to be asymptomatic transmission. Second, there was also pre-symptomatic transmission. If a symptomatic person then submitted themselves to a test and trace system, it would not be clear when they had started transmitting and therefore how far back to take their contacts. From the contacts they submitted, a smaller number might then be traced and asked to isolate. But not all the people contacted would choose to isolate and report any symptoms of their own. The left claimed this was because people could not afford to do so. This might be true of some – even many. But what of the others who might not isolate simply because they thought ‘the rules did not apply to them.’ My own left social media links show behaviour which attests to this. The problems that all this created in practice are well explored invarious studies of actual systems.[11] That they could not work was also evident from attempts to model better test and trace systems allowing for different levels of leakage.[12] These studies showed how imperfect a tool contact tracing is in a mass respiratory epidemic (compared, say, with a sexually transmitted disease one). They also showed how the lack of population adherence further undermined the test and trace efforts.

But, as with so much else, the calls for early, better, and more intensive test and trace systems simply played into the politics of distraction preventing the development of more reflective approaches. The critics of the society of the spectacle became the cheerleaders of pandemic policy as spectacle.

So, to risk transfer. One of the most stupid left slogans of the pandemic was that it was it was ‘lives versus the economy’. Insofar as this meant that governments would choose the economy rather than lockdown, what is surely remarkable is that they did not. Lockdowns were extensive in so many countries – even in the poor world where the effects were much more disastrous than in advanced countries. You cannot lock down a slum and trying can only have very bad outcomes.[13]

Beyond this, all our lives are embedded in the economy. Lives versus profits at least makes some sense. But people seemed to prefer the nonsensensical slogan of “lives versus the economy”. Any society will collapse almost immediately if all material production and supply ceases. Ships need unloading, food harvesting, cows milking, power stations operating, machines working, warehouses filling and emptying. The list is endless. The real choice was always some lives versusother lives and perhapssome lives now at the expense ofsome other lives later.

In these terms, lockdown policies can be argued to have involved a huge social transfer of risk. In the advanced world, some had to stay at home because they had been made unemployed or because their jobs had been furloughed. But much of the white-collar workforce (where the left now finds its base) was protected by being encouraged to work from home on full pay. Others, the vast majority across the world and indeed the majority in all countries, save perhaps for a short time in a few rich countries, had to go out to work.

The result was a systematic risk transfer. Some were protected while others were left exposed. Indeed, some others could be argued to have been exposed more. This is evident from the pattern of the covid pandemic itself. To use the technical language of epidemiology, transmission was heterogenous - not homogenous. Transmission was determined by networks rooted in society and work.[14] How ironic that, in the UK (and elsewhere?), one of the groups with the lowest levels of covid-related occupational mortality should be university lecturers! University support staff had a worse time. In schools, too, fewer teachers died on an age standardised basis than support staff. It was those at the bottom, the many essential workers, often with comorbidities and living in poor social conditions, who died most, as they kept the rest of society going.[15]

Now you can, if you want, make an argument that this was necessary, and more lives were saved this way. I doubt this. As Stefan Baral, an epidemiologist and doctor who worked on the frontline with the homeless on Toronto put it, trickle-down epidemiology is just as big a myth as trickle-down economics.[16] But it is an argument. What you cannot do is ignore the risk transfer involved and whose lives were saved and whose lives lost.

But the other inequalities of lockdowns, and those inequalities that are coming after it, go far beyond the disease itself. The evidence for this is everywhere. Where countries and national governments deployed significant programmes of income support income inequalities did diminish. But, onalmost every other measurable indicator, inequality increased – access and treatment of other health conditions, mental health, obesity, education, apprenticeship, employment.[17] The list goes on.

Some aspects of inequality rose because conditions for some worsened. But inequality also rose across other dimensions because those who were protected at home gained absolutely as well as improving their relative position. This is evident in the wealth statistics not just of the billionaires and millionaires but a whole section of the middle class that was protected and able to work from home - including me and most others on the left.[18]

Were there alternatives? Of course there were. There were and are lots of different positions, loads of serious arguments to be had about lockdowns. Why were NO non-pharmaceutical interventions trialled in the rich world, where abundant resources existed to test whether they work. How bizarre is it that the major trial on masks should have been done in Bangladesh? What was its point?

It was perfectly possible to support some lockdowns or aspects of lockdowns and not others. Even if you want to argue that a form of lockdown was the answer, then we need to ask why one form of lockdown rather than other? But who, on the lockdown left, even posed this question?

The most obvious alternative was to explore more or less extensive forms of focused protection of the most vulnerable. Forms of focused protection have been a standard response to infectious disease outbreaks for generations. They were at the core of earlier UK planning. But this planning was marginalised prior to the outbreak. This was partly because the government of the day chose to do this. It was also because new technologies seemed to create new opportunities to try things ‘on the hoof’. What was left of the older plans crumbled in the first days as policies flipped.

It was generalised lockdowns that were the new and untried thing. And what was surely then remarkable is how little they changed. Lockdowns were lifted only to be re-imposed with little evidence of learning between them. Lockdowns became the excuse not to do other things – they were the black box which would mysteriously prove more effective than the better planned and rehearsed measures of the past.

Take care homes. These bring together large numbers of old people for end-of-life care including degenerative conditions like dementia. Privatised care homes are big business, but their underlying economics are weak. But there are other complexities too. The buildings used are often poor for infection control, but maximising infection control at the expense of sociability has serious costs for those isolated and especially people at the end of their lives. The mental toll of isolation is huge for anyone, but especially for those near the end of their lives.

But the bigger issue is staffing and external access of those who came in as part of their daily work. No attempt was made to deal with this. The left seemed to have no sense of the scale of the problem. The adult social care sector in the UK employs over 1.5 million people. But there were many more university students. If you wanted to go down the road of lockdowns, then I often wondered why they were not completely closed. Students and academic staff could have been mobilised as a care army to help out in homes and peoples’ houses. Of course, that was never going to happen because, while some things were thinkable, others, it seems, were not.

The result was that, while families were prevented from entering homes to see their relatives even to the point of death, those in the homes faced a constant turnover of ‘staff’. The bitterness this created for those excluded is well captured in this interview with a daughter - ‘when I Skype my mum … I’ve counted 20 different carers sitting with her and you think well I can do that if 20 carers can sit there but me, who doesn’t go anywhere or doesn’t do anything … I’m not allowed to go in to see my own mother and the same thing, it just doesn’t make any sense’.[19]

This is but one example of things never confronted. Maybe lockdown supporters could have made a plea for a focussed programme additional to general lockdown, but general lockdown was presented as a sufficient solution or the only available solution when it was no solution at all for those in care homes and their relatives outside.

Wherever you look the picture then is not pretty. How many supporters of the left descended into epidemiological Stalinism? Zero covid in one country; lock out the world; with the right politics anything could be achieved! There were, it seemed, no covid fortresses that could not be stormed! But who suffered least? Certainly, the super-rich, but the left academic readers of HM in the rich countries didn’t do badly either. That is why I am writing this and you are reading it.

But there are things that cannot be done by will. We should have understood this. We should have been willing to learn. We should have argued for alternatives built on good foundations. We should have recognised that science and policy is built both on uncertainty and complexity. We should not have been so arrogant as to believe that reading the Communist Manifesto and theGuardian or theFinancial Times gives us a deeper understanding of science than people who spend their lives doing the real science. We should have been prepared to listen more and learn more.

And we should have reflected, too, a little more on our own position and how some of us were more protected than others. But, even now, as the pandemic fades, we are not doing that. We have moved on – it seems - to other things. But, if we do not evaluate how the left reacted, we can be sure that we will make as big a hash of the problems today and tomorrow as we did those of 2020-22.

[1]Panagiotis Sotiris, “Thinking Beyond the Lockdown: On the Possibility of a Democratic Biopolitics,” Historical Materialism, vol 28, no.3, pp. 3–38. Available at:https://brill.com/view/journals/hima/28/3/article-p3_1.xml?rskey=9aRcGy&result=3. See also Alberto Toscano, “Beyond the Plague State”, https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/blog/beyond-plague-state

[2]Angelo Pezzullo et al. "Age-stratified infection fatality rate of COVID-19 in the non-elderly population." Environmental Research216 (2023): 114655. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001393512201982X

[3]Gareth Dale, “Lockdown Politics: A Response to Panagiotis Sotiris,” Historical Materialism Blog,3rd Dec, 2020 https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/blog/lockdown-politics-response-to-panagiotis-sotiris and https://brill.com/view/journals/hima/29/1/article-p247_14.xml?rskey=9aR…

[4]Dr. Chris Whitty, “Covid 19”, Gresham College Lecture, 30 April 2020. https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/covid-19

[5]https://twitter.com/BallouxFrancois/status/1639076857973800963

[6]Lucy Easthope, When the Dust Settles, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2022.

[7]https://leftiehistorian.wordpress.com/2022/11/13/the-myth-of-mutual-aid-and-covid-the-uk-experience-5-minute-read/

[8]George S Heriot and Euzebiusz Jamrozik. "Not in my backyard: COVID-19 vaccine development requires someone to be infected somewhere." Medical Journal of Australia 214.4 (2021): 150-152.

[9]Devi Sridar, ‘What do Matt Hancock’s WhatsApp messages show?’, Guardian 1 March 2023https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/mar/01/matt-hancock-whatsapp-messages-telegraph-covid-pandemic

[10]National Audit Office, The government’s approach to test and trace in England – interim report, December 2020.

[11]E.L.Davis, T.C.D. Lucas, A. Borlase et al. “Contact tracing is an imperfect tool

 for controlling COVID-19 transmission and relies on population

 adherence” Nature Communications, 12, 5412 (2021).

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-25531-5

[12]M. Fyles et al., “Using a household-structured branching process to analyse contact tracing in the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic,” Phil. Trans. R. Soc. May 2021, B3762020026720200267

[13]Alex Broadbent and Pieter Streicher, "Can you lock down in a slum? And

 who would benefit if you tried? Difficult questions about epidemiology's

 commitment to global health inequalities during Covid-19." Global

 Epidemiology4 (2022): 100074.

[14]Muge Cevik and Stefan D. Baral. "Networks of SARS-Cov-2 transmission." Science373.6551 (2021): 162-163.

[15]ONS, Coronavirus (COVID-19) related deaths by occupation, England and Wales, 25 January 2021. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/causesofdeath/datasets/coronaviruscovid19relateddeathsbyoccupationenglandandwales

[16]https://twitter.com/sdbaral/status/1345497598208004096?s=20

[17]Richard Blundell, et al. "Inequality and the COVID-19 Crisis in the United Kingdom." Annual Review of Economics14 (2022): 607-636.

[18]ONS, ‘Economic modelling of forced saving during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic’, 6 June 2022. https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/nationalaccounts/uksectoraccounts/articles/economicmodellingofforcedsavingduringthecoronaviruscovid19pandemic/2022-06-06

[19]Clarissa, Giebel et al. "Guilt, tears and burnout—Impact of UK care home restrictions on the mental well‐being of staff, families and residents." Journal of Advanced Nursing78.7 (2022): 2191-2202.

By Daniel Gaido

Matías J. Rubio, a historian from the National University of Luján, Argentina, as well as a Trotskyist militant, has recently published a book entitled ¡Abrir los cuarteles! Una historia de la Tendencia Revolucionaria de las Fuerzas Armadas – Vivo Rojo (Bolivia – 1980–2001).[1] This work analyses the history of the Revolutionary Tendency of the Armed Forces of Bolivia, linked to the Partido Obrero Revolucionario – Masas (POR-Masas), a Trotskyist organisation led by Guillermo Lora that edited, between 1980 and 2001, a clandestine bulletin entitledVivo Rojo with the aim of creating an organisation of officers and soldiers with revolutionary tendencies within the Bolivian army.

Rubio’s book is divided into three parts. The first part is a review of the history of Bolivia in the twentieth century based on classic works such as those of Dunkerley[2] and Klein,[3] while also incorporating new contributions such as those of Field[4] and Hernández and Salcito.[5] The second part is a review of the history of the POR-Masas between 1963 and 1991, including an analysis of its programme, its strategy, and its policy towards the Bolivian Armed Forces. This part is based on classic militant works such as the histories of the 1952 revolution written by Justo[6] and Lora,[7] as well as on Lora’s enormous literary production and on more recent academic works, in particular the history of Bolivian Trotskyism written by Steven Sándor John, a historian belonging to one of the splits of the Spartacist League called the Internationalist Group.[8] The third and last part of the book analyses the experience of the Revolutionary Tendency of the Armed Forces led by the POR-Masas from 1980 until the publication of the final issue of Vivo Rojo in December 2001.

The Creation of the Partido Obrero Revolucionario (POR), the Bolivian Revolution of 1952, and the POR Split

Rubio begins by pointing out that the Bolivian POR emerged ‘in 1935, as a result of the confluence of two trends opposed to the Chaco War’.[9] The five issues of the founding magazine of Bolivian Trotskyism, entitled América Libre and published by Bolivian exiles in the city of Córdoba, Argentina, have been scanned and are available online at the Cedinci digital library.[10] Rubio also mentions the weakness of the POR a decade later, specifying that ‘by 1945 it had only seventeen militants in the strict sense of the term throughout the country’.[11]

The Pulacayo Theses adopted on 8 November 1946, by the congress of the Union Federation of Bolivian Mine Workers (Federación Sindical de Trabajadores Mineros de Bolivia, FSTMB), which had approximately 60,000 members, were drafted by the young Trotskyist militant Guillermo Lora. Together with a series of immediate and transitional demands, they laid out a political perspective of permanent revolution for the Bolivian proletariat, arguing that the bourgeois-democratic revolution could only succeed on condition that it became the first phase of a proletarian revolution culminating in a workers’ government.[12]

From this congress, the ‘Miners’ Bloc’ (Bloque Minero) POR-FSTMB was formed, which won three seats in the general elections held in Bolivia on 3 January 1947, including Lora andJuan Lechín Oquendo, the general secretary of the Union Federation of Bolivian Mine Workers from 1944 to 1987 and of the Bolivian Workers’ Central (Central Obrera Boliviana, COB) from 1952 to 1987. Rubio points out that since 1945 Lora ‘established a personal relationship with Lechín’, that both ‘even shared a pension for about six months’, and that in the years before the outbreak of the 1952 revolution Lora ‘wrote his speeches and worked with him in the Mining Federation’.[13]

On 6 May 1951, a presidential election was held in Bolivia that yielded a comfortable victory to the candidate of the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement (Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario, MNR) Víctor Paz Estenssoro, but on 16 May 1951 a coup was carried out to prevent the formation of an MNR government. The following year, on 9 April 1952, a revolution broke out, whose fate was decided two days later when contingents of miners descended on the city of La Paz armed with dynamite, disbanding the army and replacing it with workers’ militias. On 15 April 1952, Paz Estenssoro was appointed president of Bolivia, a position he held until 6 August 1956, with Hernán Siles Zuazo as vice president. On 17 April 1952, the Bolivian Workers’ Central (Central Obrera Boliviana, COB) was created. Juan Lechín was elected general secretary of the union federation, and at the same time, along with other union leaders, he joined the government of Paz Estenssoro as Minister of Mines and Petroleum, starting the MNR-COB coalition government.

Rubio notes that the 1952 revolution ‘surprised the POR, which was strongly disaggregated’, and that, consequently, ‘the POR could not position itself as the leader of the process and, in practice, supported the workers’ wing of the MNR headed by Lechín’.[14] This assessment is confirmed by the statements of Lora himself, who was in Paris at that time. In an interview entitled ‘Declaration of Guillermo Lora, Bolivian deputy, Trotskyist leader: The coup d’état has become a revolutionary insurrection’, published in the French Trotskyist organ La Vérité, Lora stated:

The spinning workers began to deliberate and then to impose their conditions on the right wing of the M.N.R.; that is how they forced it to accept in the new cabinet workers’ elements which constitute its left fraction. […]

Q. – Our party is in the vanguard of this struggle?

A. – Yes, and it supports the left fraction of the new cabinet [i.e., Juan Lechín].[15]

By Daniel Gaido

This monumental collection gathers the main documents of the Workers’ Opposition, a tendency within the Bolshevik Party that emerged in December 1920 against the background of the crisis in War Communism, i.e., the economic collapse resulting from grain requisitions and the prohibition of trade between the city and the countryside, which became unbearable to large strata of the population towards the end of 1920, after the end of the civil war and the armistice in the Polish–Soviet War. The book reproduces numerous documents from the main leader of the tendency, Alexander Shliapnikov (the chairman of the metalworkers’ union), as well as its platform, the interventions of its leaders in trade-union and party conferences and congresses, articles in party journals, diary entries, etc. It does not include, however, the most famous document of the tendency, Alexandra Kollontai’s pamphlet The Workers’ Opposition, because it is already widely available online and also because, according to Allen, ‘other leaders of the Workers’ Opposition refused to take responsibility’ for it, considering its language too inflammatory.[1] But the collection includes Kollontai’s diary entries from 23 March to 1 April 1921, which show her disappointment after having been disavowed by her comrades at the tenth congress of the Russian Communist Party – including Shliapnikov, who was elected to the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party.[2]

The book is divided into four sections. The first one deals with the trade-union debate (in which there was a three-way split between the Workers’ Opposition, the supporters of Trotsky’s proposal for the militarisation of the economy and the supporters of Lenin’s middle-of-the-road position) and the formation of the Workers’ Opposition, from March 1919 to the Autumn of 1920. The second section deals with the Workers’ Opposition as a fully-formed legal faction in the Russian Communist Party, from December 1920 to March 1921, when it was condemned as a ‘syndicalist deviation’ by the Tenth Congress of the Russian Communist Party – which coincided with the outbreak of the Kronstadt revolt and adopted the disastrous ban on factions as well as the transition from War Communism to the New Economic Policy (NEP). The third section covers the period from the ban on factions through the eleventh party congress of March–April 1922, which appointed Joseph Stalin as the Russian Communist Party’s first General Secretary (i.e., as the leader of the only legal faction within the Bolshevik Party). The fourth and final section deals with the former Worker Oppositionists in the debates of the NEP era and during the first five-year plan, from 1922 to 1930.

The Formation of the Workers’ Opposition

The main leader of the Workers’ Opposition in the Russian Communist Party, Alexander Shliapnikov raised the slogan ‘unionise the government’ (alternatively ‘unionise the state’) and advocated ‘the necessary purge even of the CC’.[3] The ‘Theses of the Workers’ Opposition’ adopted on 18 January 1921 envisioned this slogan in the following way: ‘Organisation of management of the entire economy will belong to an All-Russian Congress of Producers, who are united in professional production unions, which will elect a central body to manage the entire economy of the republic’.[4] Since this vaguely sounds like the realisation of the Industrial Workers of the World’s ‘One Big Union’ idea, it is not surprising that their opponents accused them of syndicalism, though the Workers’ Opposition rejected this denomination as a slur and argued that its proposal was based on the economic section of the programme of the Russian Communist Party adopted at the Eighth Congress held in March 1919, particularly its point 5, which stated that ‘Trade unions should further concentrate in their hands all management of the economy, as a single economic unit’ and that ‘The participation of trade unions and through them the masses in directing the economy is the chief means for struggle against bureaucratisation of Soviet power’s economic system’.[5]

Most party leaders, of course, saw matters in a completely different light: for them the Workers’ Opposition reduced the role of the party to the seizure of political power (and the eventual conduct of a civil war to secure that power), after which it would hand over the management of the economy to the trade unions. It is not surprising, therefore, that in the tenth congress of the Russian Communist Party the Workers’ Opposition had only a small minority of delegates: 45 out of 694 voting delegates, i.e., 6.5 percent.[6] More perplexing is the fact that they had the support of only a slight majority in the leadership of Shliapnikov’s own union, and that they remained a minority in the All-Russian Central Council of Trade Unions and at the Russian Communist Party’s conference in the Moscow gubernia, their stronghold.[7] While this was partly due to the heavy-handed intervention of the party in the internal affairs of the unions, it cannot be explained away so easily. An additional reason for the numerical weakness of the Workers’ Opposition was its programmatic weaknesses.

The Workers’ Opposition’s platform suffered from a series of shortcomings, the most glaring of which was the scant attention it paid to the peasant question in a country where, according to the population census of 1926, the peasantry amounted to 82.1 per cent of the population (the specialist on the peasantry, V.P. Danilov, claimed that the percentage of the peasants was actually higher: 84 per cent).[8] The compulsory requisition of grain not only estranged the peasantry – i.e., the vast majority of the population – from the government, but the peasants began to till only enough land to meet their own direct needs, ‘so that by the end of 1920 the amount of sown acreage in European Russia was only three-fifths of the figure for 1913, the last normal year before the onset of war and revolution’.[9] Any attempt to revive agriculture and husbandry required the abolition of grain requisition and its replacement by a tax, as well as the restauration of private exchange between cities and countryside, which in turn required the stabilisation of the rouble to rein in inflation. In other words: the only way out of the economic collapse in the short term was a transition from War Communism to the NEP, a measure adopted by the Tenth Congress of the Russian Communist Party only under pressure from the Kronstadt uprising. But the Workers’ Opposition never advanced such proposals, and, indeed, their demands envisioned a continuation of payments in kind to the workers through ‘the systematic implementation of naturalisation of wages’ as well as ‘basic and bonus payments in kind’.[10]

Another weakness of the Workers’ Opposition’s platform was that it was by no means obvious what it meant to transfer the management of the economy to the unions in late 1920 and early 1921, when the major cities were virtually depopulated:

Between May 1917 and April 1918, the city of Moscow lost 300,000 of its 2 million inhabitants. From 1918 to 1920, the city lost another 700,000 people. Moscow’s population toward the end of the civil war was thus half of what it had been in the midst of the 1917 revolution. An even more catastrophic fall occurred in Petrograd: its population plummeted from 2.5 million in 1917 to 700,000 in 1920.[11]

By David Schwartzman

The emphasis in Matt Huber’s Climate Change is Class War on the critical role of the working class for achieving climate security and just future, both in the US and globally is very welcome. But I am compelled to respond to what I disagree with in his book, recognizing its valuable contribution to defeating fossil capital.

First I will address Matt’s support for nuclear fission power, which is made clear again in his second polemic responding to Levien.[1] Huber makes this case, pointing to the present role of the organized working class in this industry, indeed utilities in general.[2] Public utilities are now common in the US, and organising to municipalise them is ongoing and the role of this sector of the organised working class is important.

But I submit that the only nuclear power we need is found in the Sun’s core, its fusion reactor, supplying abundant energy to Earth. Building more nuclear fission reactors and the huge investment into on-site nuclear fusion are unwelcome diversions from accelerating the creation of global wind/solar energy supplies.[3] Further, significant expansion of nuclear fission power will add incremental heat to the Earth’s surface which could contribute to exceeding the 1.5 deg C warming target.

The fossil fuel/nuclear industry highlights the obstacle of intermittency/baseload challenge for a wind/solar energy transition, but energy storage technology is already available, with its need greatly reduced in a 100% renewable energy transition driven by the complementarity of wind/photovoltaics/Concentrated Solar Power.[4]

The role of this unionised sector in the big near future challenge in decommissioning a large number of US and global reactors should be considered[5] in a just transition to 100 percent wind/solar. This could be a way to win their support for this transition which is imperative with the rapidly fading chances for keeping warming below 1.5 deg C. Industrial/energy workers will get a lot a work in an unfolding Green New Deal by creating a 100% renewable energy infrastructure, modernising the grid, creating energy storage backup, retrofitting buildings, repairing infrastructure and decommissioning nuclear reactors now past their “safe” lifetime, instead of building new reactors, an unwelcome alternative on many grounds. For example, wind/solar power goes up much faster and cheaper than nuclear reactors for the same power delivery, as climate science tells us the faster the better coupled with rapid termination of fossil fuels. I disagree with Matt’s boosting the Princeton University report on the alleged big land requirement for renewables. Their land area requirements for wind/solar are highly exaggerated, since wind farms on land (they should mainly be offshore) allow coexisting agriculture and photovoltaics can be sited mainly on rooftops and floating platforms. And, rather than simply substituting electric for gasoline cars, I hope Matt would support electrified public transit as the main alternative.

Levien is right to point to the importance of the climate justice struggles of indigenous people. A key potential ally of the global working class are indigenous communities which are disproportionately impacted by extractivism, driven increasingly by green capital generating metals for the renewable energy transition. While Matt recognises “extractive capital’ referring to fossil fuels, the extractivism challenge is not adequately discussed in Matt’s book and must be confronted by ecosocialists, in particular since this challenge is pointed to by degrowthers as a barrier to the renewable energy transition.

In addition to the very relevant deconstruction of the degrowth movement provided in Matt’s book, my long-standing critique from a thermodynamic perspective can add a needed foundation.[6] I speculate that Matt omitted this critique because he is not convinced a global 100 percent renewable energy is possible, given his continued support for nuclear fission power development.

The degrowthers have commonly invoked the misleading spectre of entropy, in particular, Georgescu-Roegen’s thermodynamics as foundational to their discourse. But should Georgescu- Roegen’s thermodynamics be our guide? His interpretation of the entropy law is still widely cited by degrowthers (e.g., Latouche, Bonaiuti, Kallis, and most recently Vansintjan et al.[7]

Georgescu-Roegen claimed to have discovered a fourth law of thermodynamics: "A. Unavailable matter cannot be recycled. B. A closed system (i.e., a system that cannot exchange matter with the environment) cannot perform work indefinitely at a constant rate".[8] Georgescu-Roegen's fallacy is his conflation of isolated and closed systems. The biosphere is essentially closed to transfer of matter, but not isolated with respect to energy flux, particularly solar energy.

The Earth’s surface is open to energy transfer to and from space but is effectively closed to mass transfer. Hence the use of fossil fuels and nuclear fission power to drive the economy can be transcended in our open Earth system by sufficient creation of a high-efficiency collection of the solar flux to Earth. Global solar power will then pay its ‘‘entropic debt’’ to space as non-incremental waste heat, without driving us to tipping points towards catastrophic climate change, while facilitating recycling and industrial ecologies phasing out extractivism.[9]

His fallacious 4th law is at the root of Georgescu-Roegen’s pessimism regarding solar energy replacing fossil fuels:

Georgescu-Roegen viewed the technology of the direct collection of solar radiation as "feasible" but not "viable"- possible to construct and operate, but only by continuing to rely on fossil fuel energy inputs: "All solar recipes known at are of the current and present parasites technologies therefore will cease to be applicable when their host is no longer alive (1981, 70-71)”[10]

Degrowthers’ prescription for global reduction in energy and material throughput is that:

The global material and energy “throughput” has to degrow, starting with those nations that are ecologically indebted to the rest. Energy and material throughput have to degrow because the materials extracted from the earth cause huge damage to ecosystems and to the people that depend on them.[11]

With respect to material throughput, we argue that it should increase globally with the complete phasing out of the military-industrial complex, thereby liberating vast quantities of materials, especially metals, for the creation of a global wind and solar power infrastructure powering a circular economy.[12] Likewise, a global renewable energy supply with greater capacity than now will be needed to confront the threat of dangerous climate change, as well as to eliminate the energy poverty now afflicting most of humanity.

To summarise, what should grow and what should degrow?

The history of discussing growth from a socio-ecological point of view goes back at least 30 years. Walter Hollitscher, an Austrian materialist philosopher maintained, in discussions occurring in the late 1970s, that the only thing which should definitely grow is the satisfaction of needs. Basically, from a socio-ecological point of view the question of growth or de-growth is simple: there cannot be a yes or no answer. Some flows, stock, and activities should grow; others should not grow but decrease, for example, the production of weapons. It does not seem useful to use “de-growth” without indicating what should decrease, because the general use of the notion “de-growth” easily can easily also be understood as an undifferentiated attack on the standard of living and livelihood of many groups of people, especially broad low-income sectors of society.[13]

Hence Matt’s critique of degrowth should be taken very seriously by the left given their recent enthusiasm for this brand, with the “Planned Degrowth” July/August issue of Monthly Review and Kohei Saito’s degrowth communism an example.[14]

[1]Huber, Matthew T. 2023, “Climate Politics is Not Fossil Fuels vs. Renewables – a reply to Michael Levien”, https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/blog/climate-politics-not-fossil-….

[2]See as well: Huber, Matt T. and Fred Stafford, 2023, “Socialist Politics and the Electricity Grid”, Catalyst 6 (4): 59-89.

[3]Schwartzman, David. 2019. Monbiot’s Muddle, Capitalism Nature Socialism, DOI: 10.1080/10455752.2019.1670905; Mosko, S. 2021. ‘More Nuclear Is No Solution to Climate Crisis’,E magazine, August 19,https://emagazine.com/more-nuclear-is-no-solution-to-climate-crisis; Jaczko, Gregory, Wolfgang Renneberg, Bernard Laponche, Paul Dorfman 2022. Nuclear Consulting Group, Communiqué – Statement – January 6,https://www.nuclearconsult.com/blog/former-heads-of-us-german-french-nu….

[4]Schwartzman, Peter, and David Schwartzman. 2019. The Earth is Not for Sale: A Path Out of Fossil Capitalism to the Other World That is Still Possible. Singapore: World Scientific.

[5]Marino, G. 2021. ‘The world's nuclear fleet is aging — how do you recycle a nuclear power plant?’Green Biz, May 13, https://www.greenbiz.com/article/worlds-nuclear-fleet-aging-how-do-you-….

[6]Schwartzman, David. 1996. Solar Communism. Science & Society 60 (3): 307–331; Schwartzman, David. 2008. The Limits to Entropy: Continuing Misuse of Thermodynamics in Environmental and Marxist Theory.Science & Society 72 (1): 43–62.

[7]Vansintjan, A., Vetter, A., and M. Schmelzer (2022) The Future is Degrowth: A Guide to a World Beyond Capitalism, London: Verso.

[8]p. 304, Georgescu-Roegen, Nicholas. 1989. ‘Afterword’, in Rifkin, J., Entropy. Revised edition Bantam Books, New York, pp. 261–269.

[9]Schwartzman, David. 2022. ‘A critique of degrowth’, Climate & Capitalism, January 5,https://climateandcapitalism.com/2022/01/05/a-critique-of-degrowth/.

[10]p. 320, Schwartzman, David. 1996. Solar Communism. Science & Society 60 (3): 307–331; Schwartzman, David. 2008. The Limits to Entropy: Continuing Misuse of Thermodynamics in Environmental and Marxist Theory.Science & Society 72 (1): 43–62.


[11]p. 192, Kallis, G. 2019. Socialism Without Growth. Capitalism Nature Socialism 30 (2): 188–206.

[12]Schwartzman, David and Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro. 2019. A Response to Giorgios Kallis’ Notions of Socialism and Growth. Capitalism Nature Socialism, 30 (3): 40-51.

[13]p.33-34, Baum, Josef. 2011. In Search for a (New) Compass – How to Measure Social Progress, Wealth and Sustainability? In: The Left Between Growth and De-Growth Discussion Papers, Edited and introduced by Teppo Eskelinen, pp. 33-45,transform! European journal for alternative thinking and political dialogue, Hamburg. I developed a critique of degrowth from a similar position: Schwartzman, David. 2012. A Critique of Degrowth and Its Politics,Capitalism Nature Socialism, 23, 1: 119–25.

[14]Saito, Kohei. 2023. Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards a theory of degrowth communism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.See my critique at https://climateandcapitalism.com/2023/06/25/critical-comments-on-kohei-….

By Markar Melkonian

It was with high hopes that I opened this big book, despite its too-ambitious title. David Graeber, after all, was the author of the wonderful book, Debt: The First 5000 Years. I am neither an anthropologist nor an archaeologist, and I came toThe Dawn of Everything with many questions. I wondered if there might be new evidence of resistance to class domination during the millennia separating the Upper Palaeolithic from V. Gordon Childe’s Urban Revolution; I wanted to know what had happened during the long centuries between the adoption of domesticated grains and livestock, on the one hand, and the large-scale ‘domestication’ of humans by humans, on the other, and I wanted to be convinced that there had existed, here or there in the distant past or more recently, large ‘complex’ human settlements without ruling classes and the repressive institutions of states. According to the book’s subtitle, after all,The Dawn was supposed to be anew history of humanity.

It got off to a shaky start on page one, with an epigraph from the Woo-Woo Meister himself, C.G. Jung. But I pressed on, and, in the pages that followed, Graeber and Wengrow (henceforth ‘the authors’) would indeed deliver on some of my hopes. The Dawn of Everything is a long rejoinder to the whiggish prehistories inscribed in high-school textbooks and academic journals alike; it is a challenge to the technological determinism that saturates our conversations, and it is an original alternative to the grand narratives that some (but not all) proponents of evolutionary psychology have been telling for decades. Not all the contentions are new, of course – and, in any case, new is not always true – but the range of scholarship is astonishing, and it is a whirlwind of a read.

There are many reviews of The Dawn of Everything accessible online,[1] and there is no need to repeat what has already been said, pro and con. This discussion will focus on two formulations that deserve special scrutiny, because they have to do with the book’s emphasis on collective decision-making as a hallmark of humanity, and they are central to the authors’ stated mission. They are: (i) the authors’ advice to abandon mode of production as an analytical concept, and (ii) their definition of the state in terms of three ‘principles of domination’. These formulations, I will suggest, as well as the prominent role that the authors ascribe to collective decision-making over the long sweep of prehistory, elevateHomo sapiens, in a familiar but dubious way, above all other terrestrial species.

But, first, a note about the scope of the New History of Humanity. As we will see, this has a bearing on the authors’ philosophical anthropology, and thus on much of their subsequent discussion.

I. Off to a Late Start

The authors begin with a commitment to optimism of the intellect: ‘This book’, they write, ‘is an attempt to begin to tell another, more hopeful and more interesting story; one which, at the same time, takes better account of what the last few decades of research have taught us.’ (p. 3.) Later, they write that, ‘Since this book is mainly about freedom, it seems appropriate to set the dial a bit further to the left than usual and to explore the possibility that human beings have more collective say over their own destiny than we ordinarily assume’ (p. 206).

The authors deny that humans have ever permanently lived in small hunter-gatherer bands.[2] Some reviewers have been surprised that self-identified anarchists would hold such a view, and others have reported this claim uncritically, as a new insight.[3] The claim is less surprising, though, in view of the authors’ contention that Upper Palaeolithic humans should be conceived not as isolated nomads, but as groups interacting over large geographical areas, along the lines of aboriginal Australians and North American peoples at the time of contact with Europeans (pp. 122–3). The argument relies on an analogy with what ethnographers have described as ‘culture areas’. In Chapter 4, the authors argue that the shift away from large-scale culture areas to smaller and higher-density societies took place in the Neolithic, when ‘most people live their lives on an ever-smaller scale as populations get larger’ (p. 121).

It is not true, of course, that Homo sapiens have never permanently lived in small hunter-gatherer bands; however, as we will see, our species has not long been ‘human’, in the sense of the word that the authors require.(The authors also play down the suggestion that humans have much in common with non-Homo sapiens hominids – much less with‘simians’, ‘apes’ and ‘monkeys’, as our evolution-averse authors put it, with what looks like deliberate artlessness.) It would be helpful, then, to gain a clearer view of the historical scope of The Dawn, by asking when – roughly, always roughly –Homo sapiens became ‘human’. And that question hinges on what counts as human.

***

At times, the authors claim that their new history applies to the last 30–40,000 years of the career of our species,[4] and so this is where they take up their history of humanity. In a brief discussion of our Palaeolithic ancestors in Chapter 3, they note that (‘anatomically modern’?) humans coexisted for millennia with other populations of the genus Homo; however,‘only after those other populations became extinct can we really begin talking about a single, human “us” inhabiting the planet’ (p. 82). This, presumably, was when we had become definitively human and ‘started doing human things’ (p. 82).[5]

It is never entirely clear how it came to pass that we started doing human things. One hypothesis, which Yuval Harari highlights in his bestseller Sapiens (2011), is that our ‘modern brain’ is the result of a relatively abrupt change thatoccurred sometime between 70,000 to 30,000 years ago, perhaps as the result of a genetic mutation. This is the Human (or Cognitive) Revolution hypothesis. According to the hypothesis, this transformed brain accounts for the appearance of handier tools, elaborate burials, and complex symbolic behaviour, and it set our ancestors off to tell stories, to talk about things they had never seen before, to imagine lion-men, and the like.

The Human Revolution hypothesis is supposed to resolve what has come to be called the ‘sapient paradox’, by answering the question: ‘why do so many tens of thousands of years stand between the biological origins of humanity and the widespread appearance of typically human forms of behavior; between when we became capable of creating culture and when we finally got round to doing it?’ (p. 84). Graeber and Wengrow explicitly reject the Human Revolution hypothesis, as well as the sapient paradox. But they also reject the suggestion ‘that for countless millennia we had modern brains, but for some reason decided to live like monkeys anyway; or that we had the ability to overcome our simian instincts and organise ourselves in an endless variety of ways, but for some equally obscure reason only ever chose one way to organise ourselves’ (p. 84). The hundreds of centuries that separate the ticking of our genetic clock from the ticking of our cultural clock, they argue, is an illusion born of the skewed and scanty character of our archaeological record so far (pp. 83–5).

Thus, the authors seem to be saying that we started doing human things – presumably, including the invention and enactment of diverse social arrangements – tens of thousands of years before the advent of the Upper Palaeolithic (say, 50,000 years ago), and before the extinction of non-sapiens populations of the genusHomo. Leaving it to our archaeologist colleagues to judge the plausibility of that scenario, let us only note that the discussion (in Chapter 3) of human societies during the last glaciation period mostly precedes Graeber and Wengrow’s new history of humanity.

For the most part, the authors focus on a broad variety of cases from the last twelve millennia. The earliest human groups the authors discuss at any length, namely Upper Palaeolithic mammoth hunters, appeared 12–10,000 years ago, and most of the cases of seasonal or permanent settlements that the authors discuss existed at most ten millennia ago. The authors, then, have left out at least 188,000 years of the career of our species,[6] but without thereby denying the possibility that humans were collectively debating social arrangements, and deliberately refashioning them even before the Upper Palaeolithic (pp. 83–4). Even if we accept the 40,000 years claim, however – and even if we take the authors’ examples of neolithic settlements to be the rule and not the exception (as seems unlikely, in view of the still-accumulating evidence to the contrary)[7] – then Graeber and Wengrow’s claim would amount to conceding that ‘anatomically modern’ humans spent at least 80% of their career in hunter-gatherer bands. This is a far cry from the claim that ‘humans’ did not, in fact, spend most of their history in tiny bands. Moreover, the fact that this or that Upper Palaeolithic or early Neolithic settlement might have been in place in Çatalhöyük, or the Trippillya megasites north of the Black Sea, or elsewhere, does not controvert the claim that the vast majority of human groups might well have continued living in hunter-gatherer groups for millennia thereafter.

Even if it could be said that we have little archaeological evidence so far in favour of the claim that humans have been organised in hunter-gatherer bands for the vast majority of their career, there is also little evidence against it.[8] Moreover, there are strong evidence-based arguments from ethnology and the study of non-sapiens species in favour of this claim. Graeber and Wengrow’s confident pronouncements notwithstanding, then, the claim that our species, like other hominids, spent most of its existence in hunter-gather groups is not open to much dispute these days.

‘The only thing we can reasonably infer about social organisation among our earliest ancestors’, the authors write, ‘is that it’s likely to have been extraordinarily diverse’ (p. 82). Indeed, further evidence might well indicate that social organisation among the earliest Homo sapiens was even more diverse than we believe at present, and perhaps in more ways than we imagine today. But the diversity of social organisation before the advent of the Holocene is, so far at least, consistent with the consensus among anthropologists that the mode of subsistence of our earliest ancestors was hunting and gathering. Moreover, to anticipate an implication in the next section below, the diversity occurred within the wide range of social relations of the great variety of ‘primitive’ communal societies.

So why have the authors advanced such a sweeping and unsupportable claim? The answer, perhaps, has to do with their philosophical anthropology, their starting assumptions about ‘what makes us human in the first place’.

***

The authors discuss an assortment of societies, culled from across the continents and the millennia, that they describe as exceptions to ‘the conventional story’ of human prehistory that we are all supposed to have learned in school, and these cases are taken to show that there are no natural laws that impose marching orders on the ways we have arranged our collective lives. Throughout The Dawn, the authors emphasise collective debate and decision-making, as well as theatricality and make-believe, as in such formulations as‘cities begin in the mind’ (p. 276), and ‘to farm or not to farm: it’s all in your head’ (p. 242). ‘Human beings’, they write, ‘may be (indeed, we’ve argued they are) fundamentally imaginative creatures …’ (p. 121). At the same time, the authors ‘set the dial a bit further to the left’ by downplaying ‘given circumstances transmitted from the past’,[9] notably ecological constraints and the non-intentional, impersonal forces at work in the prehistory and early history of our species (p. 118). The impersonal forces include the constraints that the level of productivity of labour imposes on social relations of production, as well as class conflict, and (as we will see in section III below) state power.

What emerges in The Dawn is a story of the prehistory of humanity (or perhaps just the last 50 to 30 millennia, after humans presumably had become ‘really human’) as a consciously debating species with the capacity to imagine –and to enact – new social arrangements. This is a mind-over-matter conception of our prehistory and early history, which begins with certain mental faculties of folk psychology, notably the imagination and volition, and then imbues these faculties with causal efficacy.When it comes to the hoary choice between freedom or solidarity, the authors write that, ‘what really makes us human in the first place […] is our capacity – as moral and social beings – to negotiate between such alternatives’ (p. 118). To exercise this capacity is to practise ‘the freedom that makes us human in the first place’ (p. 8).[10]

This, then, is what counts as human for Graeber and Wengrow, and it is all too redolent of the idea that free will sets humans above nature. It is an idea closer in time to the first chapters of the book of Genesis than to the myths of Hobbes or Rousseau, and, when connected to the authors’ hypothesis of a post-neolithic failure of our original imagination, it is closer in theme to the expulsion from Eden.[11]

II. The Problem with the Problem with Modes of Production

To make room for the freedom that makes us human in the first place, the authors want to haul away the ‘conventional story’ of human history, which they identify with a theory of stages in history. In a theory of stages, as the authors would have us understand it, the sequence of development mounts up in discrete steps, ineluctably and irreversibly, from lower to higher, according to a criterion such as moral or intellectual progress, efficiency, or complexity. Adam Smith is said to have presented such a theory when he divided human history into the Age of Hunters, the Age of Shepherds, the Age of Agriculture, and the Age of Commerce; and, similarly, in the case of the American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan, who identified the three stages of savagery, barbarism, and civilisation. It is not entirely clear that Morgan (or Smith, for that matter) held that these stages were ineluctable and irreversible; Morgan presented them as empirical generalisations drawn from ethnological observations.

Graeber and Wengrow rally evidence from a wide range of sources, to challenge the idea of an irreversible progression of stages.[12] The authors’ objection, however, is not limited to theories of stages, but extends to all depictions of humans as a species caught in an ‘evolutionary straitjacket, their place in history defined by their mode of subsistence, and their role blindly to enact some abstract law of development which we understand but they do not’ (p. 96). Here, we encounter pernicious ‘evolutionism’ (pp. 446 ff.). The authors include Marx’s concept of mode of production[13] among the versions of evolutionism that ‘were basically unworkable, and eventually had to be thrown out’ (p. 446).

As we know, Marx and Engels posited at least four modes of production – ‘primitive’ communalism, slavery, feudalism, and capitalism – plus one hoped-for possibility, the ‘higher stage’ of communism. The first four modes are presented as empirical generalisations, not as a marching order on history.[14] The ‘higher stage’ of communism, by contrast, is a programmatic goal, an aspiration based on what the authors of the Communist Manifesto argued was achievable, thanks to what capitalism has wrought.

In the authors’ view, mode of production is an unhelpful category because it indiscriminately lumps together very different ‘culture areas’. The point can be illustrated by considering two cases that the authors discuss separately: the culture area comprised of fourth-millennium BCE ‘low-density urban settlements’ north of the Black Sea, like Taljanky and Nebelivka, seems to fall into the same ‘primitive’ communal category as ninth-millennium BCE Mesolithic hunter-foragers of the Fertile Crescent.[15] In view of how different these two culture areas are in time, place, and character, however, it might seem pointless to toss them into the same categorial pot, as instances of the same mode of production.

But pointless for what purpose? The concept of mode of production emphasises close causal connections between social relations and productive forces, and it highlights the constraints on social organisation that these interactions pose. This contravenes the authors’ disposition, in the service of ‘freedom’, to disconnect production, distribution, and exchange of the means of subsistence, on the one hand, from considerations of property, custom, lineage, law, language, the gods, and philosophy, on the other hand.

In Chapter 5, Graeber and Wengrow suggest that one reason why humans have got stuck in certain social arrangements to the exclusion of others has to do with why we expend so much effort trying to demonstrate that we are different from our neighbours (p. 166). They illustrate the point by describing the many ways that the linguistically diverse native gatherers of acorns and pine nuts in California distinguished themselves from their ‘complex forager’ neighbours of the Northwest Coast. The striking differences between these two ‘culture areas’ include, of course, the institution of slavery in the Northwest but hardly at all in California. The areas also differed dramatically when it came to the design of lodging, canoes, masks, baskets, clothing, and other artefacts, and to the respective values placed on work and displays of status (p. 166). ‘Environmental determinists’ have explained the differences between these neighbours by emphasising the greater ecological efficiency, in both California and the Northwest coast, of gathering nuts and fishing, respectively, compared to cultivating maize, which prevailed elsewhere in North America. Graeber and Wengrow, by contrast, suggest that these distinctions are largely the result of conscious collective choices that swing clear, pretty much, from considerations of production of the means of subsistence. Proximity to rich sources of salmon, or the profusion of oak and buckeye groves might have defined social production in the respective regions; nevertheless, decisions taken and enacted collectively fashioned their social life. ‘Framed in this way’, the authors write,

the question of how ‘culture areas’ formed is necessarily a political one. It raises the possibility that decisions such as whether or not to adopt agriculture weren’t just calculations of caloric advantage or matters of random cultural taste, but also reflected questions about values, about what humans really are (and consider themselves to be), and how they should properly relate to one another. (p. 175.)

By Matthew T. Huber.

I’ll try and make this response brief.[1] This exchange is difficult because Levien clearly does not understand what decarbonisation entails (sadly, a common trait among the climate Left). Despite my efforts to explain in the last response, he still sees it as a narrow transition from fossil fuels to “renewable energy.” What I am saying is that it would have to be a much broader transformation – a “green industrial revolution” – that completely restructures broad systems of production (steel, chemicals, cement, etc.) and infrastructure (electricity, transportation, housing, etc.). I have argued elsewhere why renewable energy can by no means do this alone, and why unions support a much broader decarbonisation strategy that includes nuclear, hydrogen, and, yes, carbon capture.[2]

Levien accuses me of offering “pious assurances” to displaced workers of “jobs” awaiting them in the green economy, but the real false assurances come from liberals who claim such jobs would exist in renewable energy – a sector hostile to unions and based in temporary, precarious construction jobs.[3] Levien is right to point to the scepticism and distrust coming from workers about these assurances, but my argument is that, if we actually embarked on the large scale re-industrialisation programme (led by the public sector not capital, as Levien claims) such scepticism would dissipate through actual jobs and development. Despite much Inflation Reduction Act boosterism, the problem remains that capital prevents this from occurring! My argument is that, if we want it to happen, we need a much more powerful movement. 

Because Levien sees climate politics simplistically in terms of a battle between fossil fuels versus renewables, he’s naturally fixated on his own bogeyman of fossil fuel workers. It’s true that I think these workers have very specific skills that could translate to a post-carbon economy, but I’ve never argued that “energy workers in the fossil fuel sector have a direct material interest in leading a transition from fossil fuels.”[4]

More importantly, Levien overstates the importance of these fossil fuel workers (perhaps overgeneralising from his research in West Virginia). Fossil fuel workers make up a miniscule portion of the workforce and by no means constitute the broad set of workers that stand to gain from the massive industrialisation program decarbonisation entails. The only true “fossil fuel workers” are, of course, the ones who dig up the stuff. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are around 41,000 working in the coal mining industry[5] and 118,000 working in oil and gas extraction (this includes supervisory and other professionals).[6] Rounding up, this constitutes 0.1% of the workforce.

My argument in the book is that electricity workers (a much more distinct category than “energy workers”) could lead the transition that, after all, centres on electricity. Of course, many of these workers work in fossil fuel burning power plants. But how many? According to the latest U.S. Energy and Employment report, 193,768 workers.[7] But this constitutes only 22.5% of workers in electricity generation itself, and 9% of workers in the broader electricity sector. In other words, 91% of electricity workers are not fossil fuel workers.

As my thinking has developed since the book came out, I think it is not just electricity workers but a broader category of industrial workers and building trades unions that stand to gain from large scale re-industrialisation (not “organised labour more generally” as Levien claims).[8] This would include many workers imagined as fossil fuel-adjacent like those that construct pipelines or work in a steel plants, but the former could carry carbon destined for underground removal and the latter could work in a plant making “green steel.” If we’re going to win over these workers, we should stop telling them the future is only about “renewable energy.”

Levien is right to emphasise uneven development and that some workers and regions would experience job loss in a decarbonised economy. But he is wrong that I reject the “just transition” framework. I criticise the liberal justice framework that shapes much of it in academic and NGO discourse, but I strongly advocate for union leader Tony Mazzocchi’s original just transition vision he called a “Superfund for Workers.”[9] He proposed modelling it off the GI bill which helped millions of workers “transition” from the war to civilian economy through guaranteed income supports and free education. Thus, a real “just transition” must offer wholescale material support to these workers rather than vague offers of “retraining.” But the main obstacle to such a massive state program is (once again) capital. 

A final note: a commitment to traditional Marxist principles of proletarian agency[10] deemed “reductive” by elite academics, need not be blind to issues of racialisation under capitalism. I am indeed aware of how the chemical industry on the Gulf Coast emerged from the plantation economy. In fact, for another article, I interviewed a family member of the plantation owner who sold his land to chemical capital.[11]

[1] For Michael Levien’s original review, see: https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/book-review/white-energy-workers-north-unite-review-hubers-climate-change-class-war; for Huber’s response, see https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/blog/professional-class-vanguard-climate-justice-response-to-michael-leviens-review-climate-change; for Levien’s rebuttal, see https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/blog/climate-change-class-compromise-limitations-hubers-marxism-and-climate-politics

[2] Matt Huber and Fred Stafford, “Socialist Politics and the Electricity Grid” Catalyst Vol. 6, no. 4 (2023): 59-92.

[3] Lee Harris, “Workers on the Solar Front Lines” American Prospect, December 7, 2022.

[4] Michael Levien “Climate Change as Class Compromise? On the Limitations of Huber’s Marxism and Climate Politics”, https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/blog/climate-change-class-compromise-limitations-hubers-marxism-and-climate-politics.

[5]https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/naics4_212100.htm#:~:text=NAICS%20212100%20%2D%20Coal%20Mining

[6]https://www.bls.gov/iag/tgs/iag211.htm

[7] U.S. Department of Energy, U.S Energy and Employment Report 2022 Available online:https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2022-06/USEER%202022%20National%20Report_1.pdf

[8] See also, Leigh Phillips, “Blue Collars, Green Jobs?” The Breakthrough Institute, November 30, 2021.

[9] Tony Mazzocchi, “A Superfund for Workers?” Earth Island Journal Vol. 9, no. 1 (Winter 1993/94): 40–41.

[10] This phrase is from Mike Davis, Old Gods, New Enigmas: Marx’s Lost Theory (London: Verso, 2020).

[11] Matthew T. Huber “Hidden Abodes: Industrializing Political Ecology” Annals of the American Association of Geographers Vol. 107, no. 1 (2017): 151-166; 157.

Socialism and Colonialism

By Gilbert Achcar.

[This article is translated from the entry “Colonialism / Imperialism / Orientalism” in Histoire globale des socialismes XIX-XXIe siècle, edited by Jean-Numa Ducange, Razmig Keucheyan and Stéphanie Roza, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2021, pp. 109–122.]

The ideas of the social sharing of wealth, as well as its historical practice on various scales, long predate the appearance of the term “socialism” at the beginning of the 19th century. The Global East, particularly, experienced them several centuries earlier, notably in the religious guise that was the globally dominant form of social utopias until the 18th century. Jesus of Galilee, Mazdak of Persia, or the Qarmatians of Arabia are important moments in the global history of socialisms since the dawn of humanity. Born in the Orient, Christianity has moreover played a decisive role in the history of European socialism, whether in the form of religious collectivist experiences prior to the Enlightenment, like that of Thomas Müntzer, or directly or indirectly in the genesis of the various socialisms of the 19th century.

Though, the main figure under which the East showed through in 19th century European socialist doctrines was that of its phantasmic representatives within the West, the Jews, whose stereotypical image linked them to the world of finance, which socialists abhor by definition. From Fourier to Blanqui and then to Bakunin, we know to what extent 19th century socialists – especially the French among them – participated in anti-Jewish prejudices inherited from a medieval Christian tradition. The Jews – about whom Proudhon, in a moment of abjection, wrote in his Notebooks in 1847 that it was necessary “to send this race back to Asia, or to exterminate it” – were often designated by the appellations of Hebrews and Israelites which referred them back to the Orient from which they were reputed to have originated. The notion of anti-Semitism, which began to spread towards the end of the 19th century inspired by the rantings of Ernest Renan, ratified their assimilation to the Oriental domain of Semitic dialects from which the three main Abrahamic religions originated.

The deplorable record on the “Jewish question” of most 19th century socialist doctrines is proof, if any were needed, that opposition to “plutocracy” in no way implies a break with the whole of the dominant épistémè. This is especially true when it comes to commonplaces about differences that do not coincide with the distribution of wealth, such as racial and gender prejudices – or Orientalism, as a manifestation of Western ethnocentrism in the contemporary meaning of the term popularised by Edward Said and adopted in what follows. The hatred manifested towards the Jews was generally part of a contempt for the Orient, the “other” of the West par excellence.

However, one can find a more generous approach to the Muslim Orient in Henri de Saint-Simon, the “utopian socialist” whose posterity was the most important. Against the typical Orientalist Volney, he argued in 1808 that the Arabs had been in “the vanguard of humanity” regarding politics and science from the 7th to the 12th century. Since then, of course, the Muslim Orient had fallen into decadence and had been replaced by Europe in the vanguard role, but Saint-Simon remained convinced that non-European societies could progress on the path traced by Europe provided that the latter guided them in their transition from the “theological stage” to the “positive stage”. His Catéchisme des industriels (1824) reiterates the view that “all the peoples of the earth, under the protection of France and England united, will rise successively in the industrial regime, as quickly as the state of their civilization will allow”.

Saint-Simon’s main disciple, Prosper Enfantin, known as “the Father”, fell in love with the Orient where he hoped to find “the Mother” (who would belong to “the Jewish race”, he believed), thus subscribing to an eroticisation of the Occident/Orient relationship that was widespread in the 19th century. The favourite terrain of the Saint-Simonians’ grand design was Egypt: after having tried in vain to win over its Ottoman Wali Mehmet Ali to their cause, they ended up recommending direct Franco-British seizure of the country. Their pet project was the drilling of a canal in the Isthmus of Suez, a project whose paternity Ferdinand de Lesseps would later claim for himself exclusively, to their great displeasure. The failure of the Egyptian ambition pushed the Saint-Simonians to turn to Algeria: a fervent supporter of the country’s colonisation by France, Enfantin nevertheless condemned the massacres perpetrated there by French troops. Faithful to Saint-Simon’s belief in the possibility of changing the world through persuasion, he had dreamed in 1840 of winning over the whole of the Ottoman-dominated Muslim Orient to the virtues of the French “positive” spirit. Notwithstanding its eccentricities though, the Saint-Simonian philosophy of history is paradigmatic of left-wing colonial thought: a paternalistic and self-righteous advocate of Europe’s “civilising mission” towards the “barbarian” populations of the Global South.

Elevated to the rank of philosophical reflection, Orientalism – this essentialist interpretation of the Orient as being determined by cultures purported to be perennial, nay immutable – is basically but an avatar of the idealist interpretation of history. We thus find a textbook expression of it in the pinnacle of the idealist philosophy of history embodied by Hegel: his Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1821-1831) are a compendium of culturalist stereotypes, about the Orient and the Occident alike for that matter. Consequently, the first condition to overcome Orientalism, like all essentialisms, is to break epistemologically with the interpretation of history through the prism of culture. Before completing his intellectual dissociation from left Hegelianism, the young Marx himself, despite his Jewish ancestry, had flirted with the essentialist anti-Jewish clichés of Bruno Bauer in his critique of the latter.

Since his discovery, along with Engels, of the heuristic effectiveness of the materialist interpretation of history, which they both deepened in writing The German Ideology in 1846, it is to material factors, and primarily to economic factors, that the two friends would attribute the differences in development between countries. They nonetheless remained prisoners of the Eurocentricépistémè of their time, assigning a progressive historical role to the European colonial enterprise. It remained a “civilising mission” in their minds, but no longer in the sense of educating the barbarians, rather in the sense of the universal expansion of the capitalist mode of production. Seen from this angle,The Communist Manifesto (1848) is a hymn to the civilising wonders deemed to have been accomplished by the bourgeoisie, which “draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation [and] compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst” – this bourgeoisie which, just as it had subordinated “the country to the rule of the towns”, was making “barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilised ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West”.

Civilization and barbarism are no longer cultural attributes here: what distinguishes the West from the East in Marx’s and Engels’s understanding is not a superior intellectual aptitude, but a difference of position on the historical scale of bourgeois development. Just as for Saint-Simon, Europe had only succeeded the Arabs by placing itself in “the vanguard of humanity” regarding the scientific spirit, it had placed itself, in the eyes of Marx and Engels, at the forefront of economic development as the area within which the modern capitalist mode of production had taken off. This assigned to the European bourgeoisie the task of spreading industrial civilisation to the rest of the world.

Like the subordination of the countryside to the cities in Europe itself, the subordination of the barbarian nations to the civilised nations and of the East to the West could not be done without brutality. Good materialists as they were, Marx and Engels knew that violence is the “midwife” of the potential for progress that any society contains, as Marx would later describe it in his Das Kapital (1867). They therefore thought that in the eyes of history, the brutality of Europe’s imperial expansion in the Orient and in Africa, like that of its offspring on the other side of the Atlantic, was the price to pay for the accomplishment of its mission of progress. In short, the civilising end of European expansion justified the barbaric means to which it had recourse.

This eschatological perspective was expressed about the Orient by Marx and Engels in a very characteristic way at the beginning of their common intellectual journey. The article on Algeria that Engels published in The Northern Star in 1848 is a striking illustration of this. “[T]hough the manner in which brutal soldiers, like Bugeaud, have carried on the war is highly blameable, the conquest of Algeria is an important and fortunate fact for the progress of civilisation”, believed the young Engels. The same perspective is found in Marx in his famous 1853 article on India. While feeling sorry for the fate of the indigenous victims of British colonial domination, he warned the readers against any romantic temptation to idealise precolonial India, calling on them to “not forget that these idyllic village-communities, inoffensive though they may appear, had always been the solid foundation of Oriental despotism”. His conclusion was in keeping with that of Engels on Algeria: “whatever may have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history” in revolutionising Indian society.

Having broken epistemologically with Hegelian idealism, Marx and Engels had also broken with Orientalism as a culturalist explanation of history. But this break could not suffice to rid them of the Orientalist stereotypes that were dominant in the European gnoseological and media field in which they partook. Such stereotypes abound in the commentaries that the two friends made during their first decade of collaboration, in particular about Ottoman Turkey and India. In order to get rid of these stereotypes, it is not enough indeed to attribute their genesis to material factors. After all, “Oriental despotism” was determined by climatic and geographical conditions in the reckoning of Montesquieu himself. As long as Marx and Engels remained dependent on the European épistémè of their time, limited by their access exclusively to sources that belonged to it, they continued to adhere in part to the Orientalist perspective. Although their Eurocentrism took the form of an acknowledgment of the progressive historical role of capitalism, they nonetheless subscribed to the myth of the “civilising mission” of European domination.

That was because they still had to complete their epistemological break with historical idealism with a break with the épistémè of European domination. Having espoused the point of view of the proletariat in its relation to capital, they still had to depart from the ethnocentric prejudices that were dominant in their geopolitical environment in order to adopt the point of view of the oppressed of non-European humankind in their relation to Europe and its offspring. In this respect, Ireland would play a central role in the evolution of the ideas of Marx and Engels, beginning with the latter. His change of perspective on the Irish is striking: whereas, inThe Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), he had echoed the ethnic prejudices aroused among English workers by the miserable condition of Irish migrants, Engels would become, a few years later, a passionate supporter of the Irish cause, and would remain so until his last breath.

The worker Mary Burns, Engels’s first Irish companion, played a key role in his education. The visit to Ireland that they made together in 1856 fundamentally changed his interpretation of the Irish question. Recounting his journey in a letter to Marx, dated 23 May 1856, in which he described Ireland as England’s first colony, Engels told his friend how centuries of wars of conquest had “utterly ruined the country”. Years later, in a letter dated 19 January 1870 in which he informed Marx of the progress of his research on Irish history, Engels would confirm: “The more I study the subject, the clearer it becomes to me that, as a result of the English invasion, Ireland was cheated of its whole development, and thrown back centuries.”

Away then with the idea of colonialism as a factor of economic progress! This reversal of perspective was to place Marx and Engels resolutely in the camp of the staunch opponents of colonialism. As early as 1857, Engels changed radically his judgment about Algeria in the article he wrote on this country for The New American Cyclopaedia. The Algerians were no longer “a nation of robbers whose principal means of living consisted of making excursions … upon each other” and to which French colonialism, despite its brutality, had brought “civilisation” and industry, as he had written in his 1848 article. On the contrary, it was the French who had devastated the country in the manner of the barbarian invasions: “The Arab and Kabyle tribes […] have been crushed and broken by the terrible razzias in which dwellings and property are burnt and destroyed, standing crops cut down, and the miserable wretches who remain massacred, or subjected to all the horrors of lust and brutality.”

Similarly, in the articles he wrote in 1857–58 for the New York Daily Tribune on the Sepoy Mutiny, India’s first great anticolonial outburst, Marx was to advocate the insurgents’ cause against the British Empire, denouncing the cruelty of its troops and its exploitation of the natives. Likewise, Engels defended the Chinese against the Europeans in his 1857 commentary on the Second Opium War. A thousand miles away from Marx’s yesteryear’s illusions about the civilising role of colonialism, the chapter that deals with the “Genesis of the industrial capitalist”, in the first volume of hisDas Kapital (1867), describes the role played by colonial expansion in the “primitive accumulation” of capital in the metropolises at the expense of the colonised lands and their natural resources.

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation. … The colonial system ripened, like a hothouse, trade and navigation. [Monopolies] were powerful levers for concentration of capital. The colonies secured a market for the budding manufactures, and, through the monopoly of the market, an increased accumulation. The treasures captured outside Europe by undisguised looting, enslavement, and murder, floated back to the mother-country and were there turned into capital.

For all that, despite their new hypercritical take on colonialism, one cannot expect to find in Marx and Engels, a fully developed theory of the emancipation of colonised peoples. Their epistemological turn in understanding the role of colonial domination in the creation and perpetuation of a hierarchical configuration of the world could not suffice on its own to rid them entirely of the Eurocentric prejudices pregnant in their cultural environment. Traces of such prejudices can be found in their writings to the end. However, rather than being key elements of their worldview, these were no more than cultural residues.

Engels defined the position that the European labour movement should adopt on the colonial question in the event of victory in 1882. In a letter to Karl Kautsky dated 12 September, he formulated, with particular reference to Algeria, Egypt and India, the following principles: the metropolitan proletariat must lead the colonial countries to independence as quickly as possible; it must refuse any colonial war, even if the national revolutions in the colonial countries were to take a violent turn; the independence of the colonised countries is the best solution for the European proletariat; it is by example and economic attraction only that the European proletariat must convince the colonial countries to advance towards socialism; it cannot impose its social policy on another people.

As I see it, … countries that are merely ruled and are inhabited by natives, such as India, Algeria and the Dutch, Portuguese and Spanish possessions, will have to be temporarily taken over by the proletariat and guided as rapidly as possible towards independence. How this process will develop is difficult to say. India may, indeed very probably will, start a revolution and, since a proletariat that is effecting its own emancipation cannot wage a colonial war, it would have to be given its head, which would obviously entail a great deal of destruction, but after all that sort of thing is inseparable from any revolution. The same thing could also happen elsewhere, say in Algeria or Egypt, and would certainly suit us best. We shall have enough on our hands at home. Once Europe has been reorganised, and North America, the resulting power will be so colossal and the example set will be such that the semi-civilised countries will follow suit quite of their own accord; their economic needs alone will see to that. What social and political phases those countries will then have to traverse before they likewise acquire a socialist organisation is something about which I do not believe we can profitably speculate at present. Only one thing is certain, namely that a victorious proletariat cannot forcibly confer any boon whatever on another country without undermining its own victory in the process.

Kautsky is known to have later set himself up as the guardian of Marxist orthodoxy within German Social Democracy and the Second International, notably against Eduard Bernstein’s reformist revisionism. What is less known is that his defence of orthodoxy also encompassed the colonial question: Kautsky remained faithful to the line defined by Engels, whose letter he published as an appendix to his 1907 pamphlet Socialism and Colonial Policy. It was a response to Bernstein who, in an article published the same year, had defended “the historical necessity of colonisation” and the idea that a moderate colonial policy would be in the interest of the proletariat of the metropolises.

This “socialist colonialism” had been expressed for the first time within the Second International three years earlier, at the Amsterdam Congress (1904). The Dutch Social Democrat Henri van Kol had submitted to the congress a draft resolution justifying the maintenance of colonisation under a workers’ government by invoking a “socialist” version of the civilising mission. This generated a heated debate within the International at a time when colonial expansion was at its peak on a world scale and when growing European socialist parties, having gained access to their national parliaments, found themselves increasingly confronted with the question of “imperialism”.

The debate was continued and settled at the Stuttgart Congress (1907). Van Kol reiterated his push with the support of the majority of the German delegation that included Bernstein. In the heat of the debate, he made vulgarly racist remarks which clearly revealed the hypocrisy of the Saint-Simonian-like paternalistic attitude which he affected. These particularly shocking remarks deserve to be quoted as they are revealing – along with the reaction of part of the audience – of the colonial mentality of a large part of Social Democracy in its heyday. They put into perspective the alignment of most sections of the Second International behind their respective governments in the war of colonial redistribution of the world that the First World War has been to a large extent. Kautsky advocated development aid instead of colonialism: “We have every interest in seeing primitive peoples achieve a higher culture, but what I dispute is that this requires practising colonial politics. … If we want to act as civilisers on primitive peoples, the first necessity for us is to win their confidence, and this confidence we will only win when we grant them freedom.”

Van Kol retorted, “If we send a machine to the Negroes in Central Africa, do you know what they will do? It is very likely that they will perform a war dance around our European product (laughs) and it is also likely that the number of their innumerable gods will be increased by one (more laughs). … If we Europeans went to Africa with our European machines, we would be the victims of our expedition [Van Kol had explained that “they (the natives) might even skin us, or else they might eat us…”]. We must, on the contrary, bear arms in hand to defend ourselves if need be, even if Kautsky calls it imperialism. (‘Very good’ on a few benches.)”

The Left prevailed, but by a small margin despite Kautsky’s prestige. This debate had opposed right-wing majorities from the colonising countries (with the exception of the Russians, who were left-wing in majority), and left-wing minorities from these same countries, supported by delegations from non-colonising countries. Among the latter, the Polish delegation that included Rosa Luxemburg, whose The Accumulation of Capital, published in 1913, was to be the first major Marxist theoretical work to grant a large place to the colonial universe, even if it lacked a political theory of anticolonialism. Having noted the nature of the divisions at the Stuttgart Congress, Lenin was led to elaborate his theory of a “labour aristocracy” sustained by imperialist exploitation, by which he explained the “social-chauvinist” turn of the majority in most of the Social-Democratic parties of belligerent countries.

The abortive revolution of 1905 in Russia, like the victory of Japan, an Oriental power, in the Russo-Japanese war of 1904–05, catalysed revolutionary upheavals in Persia, Turkey and China, three countries in cultural osmosis with the colonial domain of the tsarist empire. The First World War galvanised political radicalisation in all three countries, as well as in India and other countries of Asia and North Africa. Having come to power in Russia through the October 1917 revolution, the Bolsheviks would bet more and more on the national and revolutionary movements of the East to break their isolation, especially after the failure of the German revolution of 1918–19 and in the face of the war waged against them by the Entente Powers from 1918.

Bringing together the radical Left of pre-war Social Democracy, the Third International, founded in 1919, put national and colonial questions on the agenda of its second congress in 1920. The tenor of the debates there was very different from that of Stuttgart: they no longer dealt with the attitude in the metropolises towards colonialism, a question on which the position of the Communist International was in conformity with orthodoxy, but with the attitude to be adopted towards the nationalist movements of the colonial and semi-colonial countries – both by the communists of the metropolises and by the communists of these countries themselves, whose representation within the new International was from the outset more important than it was in the preceding one.

Added to this latter question was the attitude of the Bolsheviks in power towards the peoples and nations of the Russian colonial empire. Since 1913 particularly, Lenin had projected himself as an ardent upholder of the right of nations to self-determination in various controversies, the most famous of which opposed him to Rosa Luxemburg. He pleaded for the strict respect of this right by the new government against the convergence of an ultraleft attitude, strongly represented in the ranks of the Bolsheviks, with the persistence of contempt for the “backward” populations in the name of the interest of the new state, equated with “the interest of the proletariat”.

“What, then, can we do in relation to such peoples as the Kirghiz, the Uzbeks, the Tajiks, the Turkmen, who to this day are under the influence of their mullahs? … Can we approach these peoples and tell them that we shall overthrow their exploiters? We cannot do this, because they are entirely subordinated to their mullahs. In such cases we have to wait until the given nation develops, until the differentiation of the proletariat from the bourgeois elements, which is inevitable, has taken place”, exclaimed Lenin at the Bolshevik Party Congress in 1919, calling on the Bolsheviks to refrain from imposing their will on the peoples formerly oppressed by Tsarism. It was in vain: in his very last notes of December 1923 on the question of nationalities, the founder of Bolshevism will confess guilt for not having fought with enough vigour for the principle of self-determination, going so far as to describe the new Russian state as an apparatus which “we took over from tsarism and slightly anointed with Soviet oil”.

The difference, of course, was not limited to ointment: the new state even tried to instrumentalise indigenous movements in the East by championing them, sometimes indiscriminately, provided they opposed Western powers. The main moment of this attempt was the Congress of the Peoples of the East held in Baku in 1920 and chaired by Grigory Zinoviev, whose participants (1,891, of whom only 55 women) belonged overwhelmingly to the former tsarist colonial domain. The Indian communist M.N. Roy, who had played an important role in the Third International’s debates on the colonial question, refused to take part in this enterprise which he described as the “Zinoviev circus”, according to what he recounts in his memoirs posthumously published in 1960. Read today, his remarks are reminiscent of the criticism of Orientalism inverted into “Orientalism in reverse”: indeed, Roy reproaches the Russian leaders for painting anticolonial nationalism and pan-Islamism in red, and for not applying to the peoples of the East the same class analysis grid that they applied to the peoples of the West.

That was a well-known source of tension between the new Bolshevik state and the communists of colonial countries, as state diplomatic interests do not necessarily coincide with revolutionary internationalism. An early illustration of this tension was Moscow’s persistence in portraying Turkey’s new leader Mustafa Kemal as a revolutionary, despite his government’s persecution of the fledgling Communist Party of Turkey. The Chinese question was another occasion of tension between Moscow’s inclination to flirt with the nationalist leaders of the countries of the East, outside the Soviet Union, and the local Communists confronted with these same nationalist leaders. Conversely, when the Comintern under Stalin, at its 7th congress in 1935, confirmed its turn to the right in favour of the broadest anti-fascist front, the Communist parties of countries of the Orient under British or French domination were invited to dissociate themselves from the anticolonial struggle. The French Communist Party, led by Maurice Thorez, was a particularly zealous follower of this new Comintern policy, which reinforced the already strong tendency among its ranks towards “socialist colonialism”, particularly in relation to Algeria.

It was not until the Chinese Communists came to power in Beijing in 1949 that European domination of the international Communist movement, with its natural tendency to reproduce an “Orientalist” outlook, was to be seriously undermined. The Sino-Soviet schism was the culmination of this great divergence. However, from the question of Tibet to that of Xinjiang today, the Chinese state has itself in turn reproduced a colonial attitude, even “Islamophobic” in the latter case. Neither Marx nor Engels, however, would identify with any of the governments that claimed their heritage in the 20th century. The combination of socialism and radical democracy in power, as well as the implementation of a policy based on a true internationalism repudiating all ethnocentrisms and refusing to subordinate the revolutionary struggle to state interests, have yet to be invented.

References

Achcar, Gilbert, Marxism, Orientalism, Cosmopolitanism (Chicago: Haymarket, and London: Saqi Books, 2013).

Anderson, Kevin, Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies, enlarged edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).

Carrère d’Encausse, Hélène and Stuart R. Schram, Marxism and Asia (London: Allen Lane, 1969).

Charléty, Sébastien, Histoire du Saint-Simonisme (Paris: Gonthier, 1965).

Dreyfus, Michel, L’Antisémitisme à gauche. Histoire d’un paradoxe, de 1830 à nos jours (Paris : La Découverte, 2009).

Gallissot, René, Marx, marxisme et Algérie. Textes de Marx-Engels, présentés par René Gallissot avec la collaboration de Gilbert Badia (Paris, UGE, coll. 10/18, 1976).

Haupt, Georges and Madeleine Rebérioux, eds., La Deuxième Internationale et l’Orient (Paris : Cujas, 1967).

Said, Edward, Orientalism, 25th anniversary edition with a new preface by the author

(New York: Vintage Books, 2003).

By Roberto Finelli and Tania Toffanin

Abstract

The Covid-19 syndemic has brought to light the profound unease affecting contemporary society. It bears witness to the breakdown of the dialectical relationship between body and environment and – considering the inefficiency of the response to the spread of the virus – to the effects of the commodification of public health. While one would expect that this impasse would attract sharp materialist critiques, we are instead witnessing a debate that displays alternatingly reactionary and liberal-conservative traits. We address here the positions expressed by Massimo Cacciari and Giorgio Agamben, which, in our opinion, deserve some reflection. The distance of the two authors from a realistic understanding of the problem of the syndemic ultimately stems from their reliance on Martin Heidegger’s metaphysics of ‘ontological difference’, and from their deployment of the archaic and exhausted philosophical category of ‘Being’. In contrast to any immanent and materialistically critical reading of social life, the aristocratic-transcendent device of ‘ontological difference’ introduces a point of view on history and human society that is as apparently original and refined as it is dogmatic and regressive. 

1. Freedom and Zeitgeist
2.  

We have decided jointly to write down some thoughts on what Giorgio Agamben and Massimo Cacciari published on 26 July 2021 on the website of the Italian Institute for Philosophical Studies (about the decree on the "green pass"[i]), because it seems useful to shed some light on the spirit of the time, on the Zeitgeist, of which the two authors mentioned appear to be only the most visible and accredited epiphenomena.

We would like briefly to try to grasp what is behind these assertions of individual freedom, removed from any conditioning and mediation with collective freedom – in a gesture that entirely ignores the definition given some time ago by Franco Fortini, according to whom "my freedom begins, not where it ends, but where the freedom of the other begins". And thus, to understand why our historical and cultural time is characterised, more and more, by the multiplication and hypertrophy of individual rights, in contrast to common and social rights. 

The debate sparked in Italy by the compulsory nature of the “green pass” is part of an international situation that requires some consideration. We believe, in fact, that this debate is fundamentally centred on individual rights, in a context – the Italian one – in which individualfreedoms are fully guaranteed. On the other hand, what is happening in Afghanistan or on the Belarussian-Polish border requires us to reflect in less Eurocentric terms, starting from individual freedoms. We believe that acknowledging this distinction is necessary in order to escape from the provincialism of the Italian and European debate on fundamental rights and personal freedoms.

The gist of the accusation levelled by those who oppose the introduction of the green pass is largely based on the notions of limitation of personal freedom and discrimination against those who refuse it. 

In his various writings, Giorgio Agamben has raised issues regarding not so much the formal legitimacy but the substantive nature of the – in his words – "protective-repressive" measures put in place by government institutions. Together with Cacciari, he then compared the green pass (which we must remember is not just a certification of vaccination because it can also be obtained with a negative test if one is not vaccinated–an issue which was exploited to sow confusion) with discriminatory practices established within states, such as China and the Soviet Union, which turned population control into an organic instrument of territorial governance. These provocative statements recall those analogies frequently used by the conservative and liberal right to hail the imperatives of the market and induce the retreat of the state – and they are ill-suited to reflecting on the pandemic. We believe that comparing the population control mechanisms used in the past with those applied after the outbreak of the pandemic serves only to prefigure the argument by anticipating its conclusions: "we are preparing for a regime" (Cacciari) in which the green pass “turns those not possessing it into carriers of a virtual yellow star" (Agamben).

According to the two philosophers, the green pass implemented by the Italian government serves as a control device in order to differentiate citizenship on the basis of compliance with what is required by the vaccine plan. Cacciari further amplifies what Agamben has summarily outlined and articulates a strong criticism of the decrees which, by resorting to the formula of the state of emergency, would in fact represent a suspension of democracy. In order to articulate this criticism of the state of emergency and the consequent suspension of democracy, Cacciari invokes the (much abused) Italian Constitution in order to reiterate that the limits enshrined in articles 13, 16 and 32 on the inviolability of personal freedom, concerning restrictions on movement and the obligation to accept health treatments, have never been defined in formal terms. This vagueness, according to Cacciari, left wide discretion to the Italian government to pass laws reducing if not suppressing individual autonomy in the name of a state of necessity never clearly defined.

In our opinion, attacking the government’s response in the name of an abstract idea of collective interest, which can be wielded against any legislative provision, is not a worthy pursuit. Of course, the Italian government has managed in a totally objectionable way the timing, means and resources for the containment of the pandemic! But this is another story, and it requires a specific examination of the mechanisms put in place, of the relationship between the central government and Italy’s various regions, and of the resources available in the healthcare system. However, the government's legislative initiative is part of a historical framework that must be taken into account. Did we just discover the abuse of emergency decrees with the pandemic? The issuing of decrees that have the weight of law is covered by article 77 of the same constitution that Cacciari invokes repeatedly and is granted in extraordinary cases of necessity or urgency. Since the 1980s, the use of decree-laws has been increasing, even to regulate issues that require parliamentary discussion. The government's use of emergency decrees in managing the pandemic outbreak is not a preeminent issue in our view, if we really intend to examine what is at stake.

2. Medicine and Capitalism
3.  

From our critical perspective, we think that the syndrome produced by the SARS-CoV-2 virus is an expression of what Freud would call the ‘malaise of civilisation’. In even more explicit terms, we think that the current syndrome is closely linked to the circuits of capital.[ii] In this way, it is perhaps more appropriate to define the current wave of outbreaks as a syndemic, and not a pandemic. The term syndemic was coined in 1994 by the American anthropologist Merrill Singer, who observed the close relationship between the spread of AIDS and other pathologies linked to social, political and economic factors. In our view, this syndemic approach is entirely appropriate for defining the dynamics at work in the present. We believe, in fact, that the SARS-CoV-2 virus is a pathological condition that should be interpreted with a view capable of integrating its clinical phenotype with environmental, economic and political factors.

The debate on the efficiency of vaccines and on the usage of population control devices are based on misleading questions. At least for those who wish to uphold a materialistic perspective. In relation to the first point, we think that – as Vicente Navarro has pointed out in is masterful work Medicine Under Capitalism – at this stage of the capitalist development of societies.

The expropriation of political power from the citizenry that takes place in the political process, and the absence of control over the product and nature of work that workers face in the process of production, are accompanied by the expropriation of control from the patient and potential patient over the nature and definition of health in the medical sector. And it is the bureaucracy – the medical profession – that is supposed to administer and remove the mass of disease. In this respect, the medical profession is assigned an impossible task, i.e. to solve something that because of its actual economic and political nature, is beyond its control.[iii]

In essence, medicine is being asked to solve problems that are general in scope and linked to the political and economic dynamics of late capitalism. Dynamics which pertain to the relationship between man and the ecosystem and between capital and labour. Of course, medicine makes a substantial contribution to mitigating these. However, it is only a tool. A tool that, as Navarro notes, can only legitimise the interests of the capitalist system and the capitalist class. It should come as no surprise, then, that, in our era, the process of capital accumulation has penetrated the sphere of public health. This penetration is not instantaneous – it is a long-term process. Stating this is not at all to say that it is acceptable or immutable, quite the contrary. 

From our perspective, the potential for change is based on an analysis of reality focusing on the totality of ongoing material processes. This perspective must start from the observation that – since the 1980s – public health has been gradually impoverished at the global level, with obvious repercussions on collective well-being. Although the division of labour and knowledge characteristic of neoliberalism have resulted in an increasing inability to connect the study of the parts of society to the whole, there have been improvements in medical science that have produced significant advances in the discovery of new diagnostic techniques and treatments. However, these advances have taken place in parallel with severe setbacks. The privatisation of national health services and the reduction of health care services have stripped preventive medicine of the resources it requires and increased the number of people suffering from chronic diseases. The gradual erosion of public health care has widened social polarisation, helping to embolden reactionary forces in many countries.

The crisis in the health system is first and foremost a crisis of legitimacy brought about by decades of cuts to public spending. This is an area that is indispensable to our individual psychological and physical integrity – and, more than this, to the well-being of society. Let us not forget that public health is a lever for the redistribution of economic and political power and thus for reducing inequalities and increasing collective well-being. Why else would progressive forces fight to strengthen and extend it to the entire population, regardless of class, gender or race?

Since the neoliberal turn of the 1980s, public health, has been under attack by conservative forces that have contributed to depoliticising it; reducing its problems purely to managerial and technological questions. A materialistic critique of the state of public health in this syndemic phase cannot, in our opinion, be separated from the need to re-politicise it. What is required, then, is a movement that asserts this demand forcefully, spurring broader mobilisations for the enlargement and strengthening of social rights. The contemporary scene offers us a picture of reality that is still very fragmented and thus incapable of structuring public discourse in a way that can break the stranglehold of dominant economic groups.  

The second point we want to address is that of population control mechanisms. The attack from various political factions on the measures put in place by national governments for limiting the proximity of individuals and by extension the spread of the virus has been justified as a necessary stance against the ‘tyranny’ of elite groups over the people. In our opinion, this stance has two major limitations. On the one hand, it does not undertake any detailed analysis aimed at fully defining the dynamics at work. On the other hand, it excludes any reference to the class dimension, in the name of a generalised reference to the conditions of subordination and limitation imposed on everyone. In concrete terms, who benefits from controlling the mobility of the population? Which groups particularly benefit from the restrictions imposed on the population as a whole? Are certain groups more disadvantaged than others, and, if so, why? How can the right to health for all be guaranteed without infringing on individual freedoms?   

These are just some of the questions that arise from the contemporary debate. 

Let us be clear: from a materialistic perspective, opposition to government-imposed efforts to restrict mobility, such as that of Agamben, might have some value if it concerned itself with the impact that these measures have on the conditions of the population with respect to class, gender, and race. But, to embrace an anti-materialist stance is ultimately self-defeating. Indeed, in affirming the rise of a New World Order (NWO) based on a worldwide conspiracy to undermine democracy, by removing the materialistic analysis of ongoing processes, those movements which wish to suppress individual and collective participation in decision-making processes are legitimised. Moreover, it seems to us that Agamben’s denunciation of the state of emergency stems, beyond the event of the syndemic, from a theoretical apparatus that is rigidly presupposed in all of his thought: namely that the foundation of law is always extra-legal. As he has stated since the first volume of the Homo Sacer series, legal order and institutions are established by a sovereign power that at the same time retains the possibility of suspending them. Therefore, at the centre of the state order, throughout the 20^th century, there exists an authority that – through the use of the ‘state of exception’ – has the capacity to impose emergency statutes. Within this ontological structuring of law, law is always shadowed by its reverse–the immanence of its own suspension.

3. Public Health and Individual Rights
4.  

In our view, the fundamental questions we must ask are different, and all have to do with the materiality of the processes at work. For example, the right to self-determination when it comes to healthcare is strongly upheld by Agamben and Cacciari, but there is no equal emphasis on the fact that this right can be exercised only because a choice is given between vaccination or treatment and no treatment at all (whereas the latter puts others at risk). Perhaps it is worth remembering that the extension of restrictions on mobility was necessary due to the rapid saturation of intensive care units, produced by years of underinvestment in the name of containing public spending.

The statistics pertaining to the Italian healthcare system belong to the category of facts, and it is on this basis that we can make incisive criticisms and advocate correspondent actions. So far, in our opinion, both criticism and action have been very modest and thus completely inadequate to the fundamental needs of all of us during the syndemic (and not only then). In fact, it is crucial to be aware of the state of the healthcare system, beginning with the organisation of hospital facilities – above all the capacity and equipment of intensive care units – but also basic medicine, and to understand how the disease has implicated it.  Have new resources been invested in the national health system? How will the relationship between the central government and regions, which has contributed to loosening the grip on the spread of the syndemic, be managed in the future? Which and how many resources have been allocated to scientific research? Which and how many resources have been allocated to the salaries of healthcare personnel? Do we have to wait for an undesirable reprisal of the syndemic in order to have answers to these legitimate questions?!

The good state of the health system is the prerequisite for widening the sphere of rights and for expanding that self-determination to which Agamben and Cacciari continually refer – but to do so in substantial and not just formal terms. Self-determination is crucial. However, it should be examined on the basis of the objective conditions that promote it and not just by analysing the measures that limit it. And, here, we come to the crux of the matter.

There is a question in the writings of Agamben and Cacciari that is continuously and deliberately evaded. Who can exercise the right to opt out of the vaccination plan and under what conditions can they do so?

It seems to us that their approach replicates a Eurocentrism that is as feeble as it is useless for explaining the current impasse, but which also incapable of proposing solutions that are truly able to avoid discriminating and creating new divisions between those, for example, who can use healthcare services that are expedient and reliable, and those who have to be content with contingent availability and long waiting times.

Where does the Eurocentrism of Agamben and Cacciari lie? It is expressed in the attack on what they consider to be a form of stigmatisation via legislation. Aren't there other forms of discrimination in our country (and elsewhere)?  Have the categories of class, gender, and race been superseded by reflections on discriminatory norms and practices? Wouldn’t it be good to know how the syndemic affects the population on the basis of class, gender, and race?  Do we want to ask ourselves or do we really think that the syndemic, like all pathologies, acts on all and affects everyone equally? Or perhaps the discrimination expressed by Agamben and Cacciari applies only to white, wealthy, adult males? Again: how do the discriminatory practices inflicted by the state on the individual stand in relation to the collective interest? Who is this “everyone” who is “threatened by discriminatory practices" mentioned in the piece that appeared on the website of the Italian Institute for Philosophical Studies?

There is no reference to collectivity in the writings of Agamben and Cacciari. The pivot of their invective is the individual and the attack on individual self-determination.

This syndemic is raising many questions, even radical ones if we wish to grasp them, about our lifestyles and consumption, our relationship with the territory and – last but not least – the relationship between production and social reproduction. The reflections of Agamben and Cacciari are in this sense completely outdated. They take us half a century back to when the paradigm of unlimited growth was hegemonic and, together with it, the idea that we could relate to nature and ecosystems in a completely despotic way. 

Their argument reflects the squeamishness of a wealthy class accustomed to a welfare state that, despite repeated attacks, has guaranteed universal healthcare coverage.

We know that this is not the case in many other parts of the world. The ability to relativise one's own existential condition is an essential part of the understanding that should emerge in situations such as the present, in which we are called to ask ourselves not how deeply limited and endangered our freedom is by the impending drift of securitarianism in the name of health monitoring, but how committed we are to expanding the space for social justice.

This syndemic reminds us that we have physical and cognitive limits and that we have contributed extraordinarily to their contraction, for instance by disinvesting in scientific research and in the cultivation of a proper relationship with science. Is investing in the study of the aetiology and pathogenesis of diseases attributable to governmentality or to regard for collective well-being?

4. Precious Pilgrims of the “Outside”
5.  

On the other hand, more generally, it must be said that Agamben and Cacciari have always been thinkers of the Elsewhere, in other words, they think and speak fromanother world, far from that of ordinary people. They therefore participate, by definition, in a culture of theáristoi, of the best, which–following Nietzsche–enables them to be superior and indifferent to the feelings of the masses.

Giorgio Agamben has told us, at least since the publication of Homo Sacer, that the reality we live in is that of the "camp", the Nazi concentration and extermination camp, since for decades we have been in apermanent state of emergency, ofexception, which allows the power of the state and its institutions to liquidate our rights in exchange for the maintenance and protection of ourbare life.

In order to allow us to keep on living, to keep surviving – endowed with a "bare life” that is biological, animal – the democratic state, through the continuous use of emergency legislation, strips us of all our other rights that would allow us to live a socially and culturally dignified life. And it subjects us to the discipline of a biopolitics that invades and decisively controls every existential space we inhabit. Since the most troubled historical phase of the last century, between 1914 and 1945, this obverse of the legal and political institutions of modernity has become increasingly explicit, to the point that “the state of exception has today reached its maximum planetary deployment”.[iv]

For Agamben, this is the Elsewhere, theOutside, the principle and locus of political power in society, according to the great theoretical lesson of the right-wing philosopher of politics, Carl Schmitt, who – in his closeness to Nazism – always affirmed that the source of power lies in those who, by placing themselves outside of constitutional norms, are able to proclaim a state of emergency and suspend the rules of ordinary sociality. In other words, that state power does not originate from agreements and conventions between social partners, mediated by their representation, as has happened in most of the constitutions of modernity, but from the person who is able to determine and impose the "decision".

A philosophy of the Elsewhere, the one that drives Agamben's discourse, manifests itself in his complete obliviousness to Karl Marx's lesson thatlabour power is the real and truebare life of modern capitalist society, since it is originally abstracted from any possession and use of the environment and since it is obliged, so as to safeguard its existence, to provide abstract, standardised and impersonal labour in the places of production.

In the same way, Agamben, remote from any serious engagement with dialectical philosophies, seems to have never been able to understand how the real power of capitalist society lies in the dialectic of essence and appearance. That is, in the ability to conceal relationships of ferocious inequality and exploitation (lodged in the depths of social being) through relationships instead of cosmetic equality, regulated by the universal freedoms that accrues to being subjects of both law and the market. Therefore, that the dominion of capital as atendentially total and all-pervasive subject of contemporary society has as its primary foundation – from which all its other articulations of power derive – the operation of an accumulative/abstract, inhuman wealth, which conceals the protocols of its action through the staging of human subjects, capable of self-determination and freedom of consumption. However, understanding this would have meant producing a reading – even a rudimentary one! – of Marx’sCapital as chronicling the implementation of a socio-historical formation characterised not only by contradictions and class struggles. But also by a prevailing and dominant vector of universalisation, which constructs totalisations on par with Hegel’s ‘Spirit’.

But Giorgio Agamben is as far from dialectical difference as he appears to be close to theontological difference of Martin Heidegger, supposedly the greatest philosopher of modernity. But, as is well known to all, he too had the whiff of Nazism about him for many years. And, in fact, at the core of Agamben'spolitical philosophy, as a perpetuation of the concentration camp and the state of emergency, there is apolitical ontology. That is the reprising of, through Heidegger, such a completely archaic and exhausted philosophical category, in our opinion, as that of "Being", with the consequent handing over of all reality, human and non-human, to a principle – Heidegger’s specific conception of Being – which isindefinable and non-determinable. From which we can only expectdestinal sendings, that is non-debatable impositions of sense, and treatments of history where what is valid is precisely the nexus of exclusion-implication that Agamben uses and repeats, obsessively, for every area of his thinking. Modelled precisely on the original and abysmal fracture betweenBeing and Dasein, that is, betweenontological principle andanthropological principle, for which human beings remove from their horizon – now reduced to the mercantile and utilitarian – that Being (sacred but not religious) that also founds them: thus excluding what is the implicit premise of their living.

In this way, the state of exception, the possibility of reducing every subject to bare life by subordinating him to a sovereign authoritarian power, is the true reality, the immanent principle of the established order of democracies. Just as Heidegger's Being is, in its extreme remoteness, the immanent principle – even if removed and forgotten – of human existence.

This is the original theoretical background in which to situate and evaluate the plea that Giorgio Agamben addresses to us in his battle against biopolitical vaccination; in his resistance to collective and public norms in the name of the rights of the individual.  With the implicit but undeclared conviction, we might add, that, in reality, this discourse can be truly understood only by one who places himself in the nobility of the Elsewhere, of the absolutely Other. And is therefore able to thinkpolitical philosophy only by placing at its base apolitical ontology: sinceit is possible to act in history and society only if one thinks and faces the question of Being (which issues from the aristocratic philosophy of Parmenides of Elea in the 5^th century BCE and, from there, all the scholastic and ecclesiastical philosophy of the Middle Ages).

It is not by chance that the figure of Giorgio Agamben, who has always been obsessed with the state of emergency, has been associated, in his vindication of self-determination against the biopolitical and authoritarianstate, with another, less refined and profound pilgrim of theElsewhere and Outside, Massimo Cacciari.

Since his 1976 text Krisis, Cacciari has given his support to Martin Heidegger's reactionary revolution, theorising that, when faced with the nihilistic failure of reason and science in their claim to fix objective truths, the only approach in the context of a reality traversed by nonstop catastrophes and confrontations between forces is that of "decision". Specifically, in the case of our contemporaneity, the decision to oppose the will to power of "technology", and its deployment as an apparatus which governs our lives, with the values of a humanism deeply mediated by the thought ofBeing and by the comparison withonto-theology.

Human reason, Cacciari theorises, tries to think the empirical, the multiplicity of phenomena in the world, searching for laws and causality. But it fails in its explanation of what should give legitimacy and original strength to this proceeding. That is, in explaining not how things exist, butwhy they exist. To put it in the words of Heidegger again, why is there Being rather than Nothing? Knowledge can legislate on what exists by explaining it causally, but it is silent on the subject of Being, or how it came into existence. For this reason, we must resolutely face the problem of theBeginning, of theAbsolute Beginning; of "an absolute, unconditional Prius [...] The idea of being that precedes all thought, the idea-limit of the unconditionally existing [which] is the 'abyss' of reason".[v]

Like all contemporary neo-Parmenideans, Cacciari has shown himself to be unaware of the long tradition of critical philosophy which, in modernity, has taught that speaking in this way of Being and Nothing means – as masters such as Adorno, Wittgenstein and our own Guido Calogero would have said[vi] – falling into the error of objectifying words; that is, falling into the trap of mistakingwords for things, or rather the fireflies for the lantern. Moreover, he has consistentlytrans-humanised the storied problem of the possible relationship betweenabsolute Beginning and the world. In a way almost analogous to Agamben's, Cacciari came to theorise that theBeing of theBeginning must not be forced to enter into relation with so-called concrete reality – it must not be burdened by the question of the creation of the world. Because, in its absolute indifference with respect to the world, it must also imply thepossibility of non-being: that is, of being perfectly free to be apotentiality-of-being that translates into existence, as well as being thepotentiality of non-being that remains in Nothingness and does not pass into existence.

This is so much the case that Cacciari, recovering the theological radicalisation of the last Schelling, can tell us that the Beginning as the absolutely unconditioned includes not only being but also non-being. It is indeed the ‘Com-possible’ that includes all the possible and therefore also its own impossibility. “Every possible is in the Indifference of the Urmöglichkeit of the perfectly equivalent Beginning. Omni-compossibility could sound, in a Leibnizian way, like the name of the Beginning, but keep in mind that in this term there is no longer indicated any constraint of passage to being – it is perfectly compossible that the Beginning is also the possibility of non-being”.[vii] And it is precisely in this originally infinite field of possibility as the Beginning of every beginning that the authenticity of each person's life as "decision" and free self-affirmation is inscribed.

Now, letting Aristotle – who would, perhaps, have recoiled when faced with a potentiality that is not destined to be realised inactuality – rest in peace, what has been said here about questions of ontology and metaphysics, passingly and almost jokingly, was only worthwhile for us to highlight how distant thisElsewhere andOutside is. From that privileged position, Agamben and Cacciari claim to talk about human pathologies and earthly matters, unaware of the distance that separates planet Earth from their ontological constellations.

Translated by Ludovica Mancini and Conrad Hamilton

Works cited

Agamben, Giorgio 1998, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford: Stanford

University Press.

Agamben, Giorgio 2005, State of Exception, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Cacciari, Massimo 1976, Krisis. Saggio sulla crisi del pensiero negativo da Nietzsche a

Wittgenstein, Milan: Feltrinelli.

Cacciari, Massimo 1990, Dell’Inizio, Milan: Adelphi.

Cacciari, Massimo and Giorgio Agamben 2021, ‘A proposito del decreto sul green pass’,

26 July, available at: https://www.iisf.it/index.php/progetti/diario-della-crisi/massimo-cacciari-giorgio-agamben-a-proposito-del-decreto-sul-green-pass.html.

Calogero, Guido 1967, Storia della logica antica, Bari: Laterza.

Calogero, Guido 1977, Studi sull’eleatismo, Firenze: La Nuova Italia.

Navarro, Vicente 1976, Medicine Under Capitalism, New York: Prodist.

Singer, Merrill 1994, ‘AIDS and the Health Crisis of the US Urban Poor; the Perspective

of Critical Medical Anthropology’, Social Science & Medicine, 39, 7: 931-948.

Wallace, Rob, Alex Liebman, Luis Fernando Chaves and Rodrick Wallace 2020,

‘COVID-19 and Circuits of Capital’, Monthly Review, 1 May 2020, available at:https://monthlyreview.org/2020/05/01/covid-19-and-circuits-of-capital/#…

[i]https://www.iisf.it/index.php/progetti/diario-della-crisi/massimo-cacciari-giorgio-agamben-a-proposito-del-decreto-sul-green-pass.html

[ii]See Wallace et al. 2020.

[iii]Navarro 1976, p. 208.

[iv]Agamben 2005, p. 87.

[v]Our translation. Cacciari, Massimo 1990, pp. 135-136.

[vi]Calogero 1967, pp. 109-170; Calogero 1977, pp. 1-67.

[vii]Cacciari, Massimo 1990, p. 142.

By Michael Levien

Reconstructing Marxism to illuminate the drivers, consequences and politics of climate change seems to me both critical and immensely promising. While the most pressing issues of the climate crisis are social in nature, climate knowledge is currently dominated by natural scientists and policy analysts operating with a conception of society that resembles mid-century structural functionalism. The homeostatic conceptions of “social systems” that one encounters in IPCC reports are incapable of coming to grips with the contradictory dynamics of capitalist development and the configurations of class power that drive climate change, distribute its consequences, and impede its resolution. The Marxian tradition has much to offer here. But Marxism is a living theoretical tradition with many branches and has retained its relevance by evolving in relation to the empirical world. How to bring Marxism to bear on the massively complex and globally uneven process of climate change—a phenomenon outside of Marxism’s classic concerns—is appropriately the subject of debate and demands theoretical reconstruction. In that spirit, I welcome the opportunity to continue the debate with Matthew Huber that starts with his original book, Climate Change as Class Struggle.[1] I also hope to steer it in a more generative direction, though I must necessarily start by identifying the misleading claims and contradictions in Huber’s response to my review of his book.

In brief, Huber attacks bogeyman positions I never advanced and fails to counter the critique that I actually made: that his book provides no convincing theoretical explanation, much less evidence, as to why energy workers in the fossil fuel sector have a direct material interest in leading a transition from fossil fuels. Because this central thesis about energy workers spearheading a class war against fossil capital is impossible to defend, Huber now makes a different argument about unions supporting renewable energy policies in alliance with both green and fossil capital. In other words, Huber’s theory of climate politics now appears focused on class compromise rather than class war. Clarifying, moreover, that he supports a decarbonisation strategy that would perpetuate the racial inequalities of the fossil fuel industry, he doubles down on his dismissal of the Black and Indigenous movements who have shown the far greater empirical tendency to participate in the climate movement than energy unions. Ultimately, Huber leaves us with a crude class-reductionist Marxism that has little purchase on the empirical world, lends itself to a regressive climate politics, and has the danger of weakening rather than strengthening the climate movement.

The bogeyman can be quickly dismissed. First, nowhere in my review did I suggest that the climate movement is “doing fine”—an impossible position to hold given the state of the climate crisis. Second, I never argued that the “professional class” should lead the climate movement—in his defensive reading, Huber apparently missed that I called his critique of elite environmentalism the “first strength of his book.” Third, I never claimed that white workers should be dismissed because of their race or that the left should not try to organise them. In fact, I am deeply concerned with their inability to do so, and this partly animates my current research in West Virginia and Louisiana. I agree with Huber’s argument that a Green New Deal type approach to climate change—which combines decarbonisation with direct material improvements to the working class—is the most promising alternative to liberal climate politics in the US today. I called this the “second strength of the book,” and I do see it as a step forward in thinking about how class and climate politics can be better articulated. However, I did wish that Huber provided more insight as to how this might succeed in gaining support among the working class, especially outside of cities and in regions where fossil fuels are extracted.^[2]

My central critique was of Huber’s argument that unionised energy workers are the most likely agents for leading a renewable energy transition. This argument, made largely through theoretical casuistry and without any empirical evidence, can be generously described as counter-intuitive. It seems incontrovertible that workers in the fossil fuel industries have an immediate material interest in keeping their jobs, many of which will be threatened by decarbonisation. The class interests of many energy workers thus conflict with climate stabilisation. This constitutes a tension for the climate Left—between its commitment to workers and to a transition from fossil fuels. Liberal environmentalists and Democrats hardly address the problem, and there is thus a real material basis for fossil fuel workers’ enthusiastic response to right populist appeals to keep digging coal, fracking gas, and drilling for oil.

Overcoming such well-grounded opposition and turning it into support for an energy transition is an absolutely crucial task, but an extremely difficult one. Unions can always be brought on board to policies that create new jobs, but will never vote for shutting down fossil fuel facilities when it threatens their membership.^[3] And there is no decarbonisation pathway that does not involve shutting down fossil fuel industries. There are existing proposals to mitigate this conflict—a combination of alternative green jobs and just transition policies—though, from the standpoint of currently employed fossil energy workers, this amounts to offering hypothetical (and typically lower-paying) jobs for real ones, and some welfare assistance to bridge the gap. In his book, Huber is sceptical of just transition policies (pp. 226-227), which are indeed unpopular among workers. But he evades the problem to which they respond by simply assuming, against reason and evidence, that the material interests of energy workers already align with a renewable energy transition. At the same time, he dismisses those groups who, empirically, have actually been leading the climate movement. Nothing in his reply bolsters his original argument against my critique.

From Class War to Class compromise: Huber’s Embrace of Green and Fossil Capital

In his response, Huber actually shifts away from his book’s argument in two ways. First, he backs off from his argument about “socialism in one sector,” admitting that he over-emphasized electric utility workers. Now his emphasis is on organized labour more generally. Having a significant fraction of organized labour broadly behind an energy transition would obviously be immensely helpful. Unions outside of the fossil fuel sector (or capable of growing in the green economy) may be natural allies. Huber points to some victories in states where unions have thrown their weight behind renewable energy policies. I also view these as hopeful. Almost without exception, however, all of the cases Huber mentions—and others, like Minnesota’s 100% renewable bill—involved “big tent” coalitions of unions, EJ groups, NGOs, and Democratic politicians,^[4] and were hashed out by precisely the “college educated knowledge-workers” (p. 28) that Huber excoriates (unions are, after all, also run by college educated staffers, policy analysts and lawyers). This elite policy making looks nothing like the image he conjures of militant rank-and-file energy workers confronting fossil capital and seizing the means of electrical generation. To get unions and other groups on board, these bills involved putting in place precisely the “just transition” policies Huber dismisses in order to lessen the contradiction between fossil energy workers and a transition to renewables. Such bills represent a class compromise between private utilities and those energy unions that can straddle the fossil and green economy. Importantly, none of these success cases are in states where fossil fuel production is a large portion of the economy and thus where the contradiction is far more difficult to surmount.

What of the workers, unionised and mostly unionised, in the fossil fuel sector that are directly threatened by decarbonisation? Huber’s second shift of argument is to clarify that he thinks green and fossil capital, guided by industrial planning, will take care of them. Huber apparently believes that “green industrialisation”—including renewables, nuclear, geothermal,^[5] and carbon capture and storage—will create replacement (union?) jobs in the same regions and employ the same workers on equivalent terms. This is precisely the position of liberal energy and climate policy, not to mention Democratic politicians, who repeatedly assure us that alternative jobs await displaced workers (and wonder, like Hillary Clinton, why anyone would want to remain a miner^[6]). Huber does not seem to realise that his position is in line with this detached disregard—shown previously in the case of deindustrialisation and now energy transition—for social dislocations inflicted on the working class in the name of progress.

Huber’s optimistic view of the green economy empirically evades the massive dislocations that a successful energy transition would have, in any likely scenario, for the working class he claims to defend. There is no historical precedent for thinking industrial restructuring will work out in the interest of existing workers. Whether it is prior rounds of deindustrialisation that produced the Rust Belt or the half-completed transition away from coal in Appalachia, there is a massive historical and sociological literature on the effects of mine and plant closures, which have been especially devastating in mono-industrial regions (which is characteristic of many places where fossil fuels are produced).^[7] Huber reproduces the typical argument of technocrats and policy boosters: in the aggregate, more jobs will be created than will be destroyed. In reality, the jobs are often in different places, for different people, of lower quality and with even lower likelihood of union protection. Huber gives us no reason to think that a transition from fossil fuels will be any different. While a green industrialisation is likely to make new working classes, it will simultaneously unmake others.^[8]

My critique of Huber was that he had no strategy for dealing with the latter because he assumed their interests were already aligned with an energy transition. I argued, “While the climate Left should address itself to such workers (and the many other people living in regions dependent on fossil-fuel industries), this necessarily involves the formidable challenge of figuring out how an energy transition could be in their interest.” In his response, Huber seems to now admit that some just transition policies may be necessary tomake energy transition in the interest of energy workers. However, he now seems highly confident that green industrial capital will emerge with the scale, labour-intensity, precise skill needs, and equivalent pay/benefits to match fossil fuels, all on a timeline fast enough to match the necessary draw down in fossil fuel production.^[9] While there is some reason to hope for partial overlap,^[10] it is highly implausible that it will be even close to perfect. Uneven geographical development, as Marxists geographers like David Harvey have taught us for decades, is the sine qua non of capitalist development.^[11] It is characterised by periodic bouts of restructuring that devalue assets, undermine existing patterns of investment and violently dislocate and disempower working class communities.^[12] Short of an immediate transition to socialism, how will a massive transformation of the country’s energy system be immune to these dynamics? Politically, Huber’s position amounts to asking working class people in fossil fuel dependent regions to trust the economic and political elites (his so-called professional classes) who they have absolutely no reason to trust.^[13]

It is not an attitude or program that will make any headway among the working class in places like Appalachia being devastated by the energy transition (from coal to gas) already underway. There, holding on to the few mining jobs that remain makes much better sense than trusting the promises of capitalists and politicians. In West Virginia, the economic and social devastation of coal country has been adeptly seized upon by coal companies to demonise anything related to climate action, transforming a once solidly blue union stronghold into a deep red state. This is the reason why Joe Manchin could get away with leaving so much money on the table for his own state, which would have overwhelmingly benefitted from the social programs—child tax credits, subsidised daycare etc.—of the original GND-inflected Build Back Better. His approval ratings actually went up after walking away from BBB and have gone down since passing the pared-down IRA.^[14]

The Manchin saga demonstrates the difficult position of unions in an energy transition. The United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), a union with an absolutely heroic history of class struggle in Manchin’s West Virginia but now with a membership that is majority retirees, is in an unenviable bind: the absolute devastation of the industry and region has encouraged it to embrace economic diversification and support the investments of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). However, it opposed the one stick in the original BBB—the Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS)—because it would clearly lead to coal being phased out more quickly, and it is hoping, against all odds, that carbon capture can keep coal fired power plants economical into the future (they already cannot compete with natural gas, and they will only be less competitive with this massively expensive technology).^[15] Here is the type of dilemma Huber evades: no one deserves the support of the Left more than miners who have toiled under brutal conditions, suffered black lung, and fought coal companies for over a century. At the same time, it is hard to see how their understandable interest in perpetuating the coal industry is compatible with averting the climate crisis.

Instead of assuming the dilemma away, the challenge for the Left is precisely to understand the sound material basis for workers’ suspicion that an energy transition will not work out for them. Overcoming that will require an extremely robust and concrete material programme and ideological message that can counter the hegemony of fossil capital, which does rest on a real material basis–and remains far stronger in oil and gas producing regions than in coal country. While some of the GND ideas are a start in this direction, the fundamental problems to which they respond are glossed over by Huber’s argument that an energy transition is already in the interests of energy workers. Instead of criticising the IRA for the paucity of direct benefits to workers, which were largely gutted by Manchin from the original bill (and which I thought were central to Huber’s own conception of a GND), Huber now seems to have great faith in the trickle-down benefits of its massive subsidisation of green (and not green) capital.^[16]

If we put Huber’s two amendments to his original argument together, it seems that he is now putting greater hope in the unionisation of new green industries rather than the current workers within the fossil energy sector. Of course, we should all support unionising a green sector that is currently less unionised and lower-paying than the fossil fuel sector.^[17] This is going to be a massive and time-consuming project. But, when it comes to the enormously complex problem of dealing with the mismatch between present and future industries, between the skills they involve and the geographies they are likely to follow, Huber only repeats the pious assurances of liberal economists with the additional assertion that, by some unexplained route, industrial planning will be instituted in the United States in the immediate future to take care of the problem.

But Huber does not just put great faith in green capital: his embrace of carbon capture and storage puts him in lockstep with fossil capital and Republican (and many Democratic) politicians who wish to prolong the industry through costly investments in untested, uneconomical, and publicly subsidised technology rather than shift to renewables. In the electricity sector, this will amount to paying massive premiums to private utilities to not harm us with their emissions (I will return shortly to the other social costs of this strategy).^[18] While one can rightly point out that nearly all emission reduction scenarios call for some amount of CCS, I am left wondering how precisely this constitutes “an antagonistic approach toward owners of capital” (p. 106). As a decarbonisation strategy, it is not even something the Left has to fight for, since it is what fossil capital is already pushing. But Huber’s embrace of CCS helps to make more sense of his dismissal of protests against fossil fuel infrastructure (and reticence about the unionised workers who want to keep it): Huber, apparently, does not think the carbon needs to be kept in the ground; he just thinks it must be put back there. Fossil capital can keep going and workers can organise for a larger share.

Despite all of the posturing and name-calling, Huber’s advertised “class war” turns out to be class compromise. It adds union boosterism to liberal—and not even liberal—climate policy and stirs.

Lack of Microfoundations

Much of the unsatisfactory nature of Huber’s arguments about the relationship between energy workers and energy transition stems from the level of abstraction on which he operates: his working class is largely an abstract concept rather than real people working and living in any actual place in the United States. His book gives us no insight into how coal workers in West Virginia, gas workers in Pennsylvania, or oil workers in Louisiana—not to mention the much larger non-industrial working-class population in those regions whose livelihoods, schools and fire departments are nevertheless dependent on the fossil economy—might come to see their interests as aligned with an energy transition. His book would have been immeasurably richer had he spent six months in, say, a small town whose coal-fired power plant was being shut down to understand the real dilemmas those workers and communities face; or had he even interviewed energy workers. The few researchers who have interviewed unionised energy workers and union officials on this issue find significant worry and ambivalence about a transition to renewables, with fossil fuel workers–and the building trades in states with significant fossil fuel infrastructure–being the least supportive.^[19]

Content with some reductive theoretical principles, Huber studiously avoids entering the hidden abode of production to give us any insight into the labour regime of those industries, the subjectivity of workers within them, or of the very serious challenges facing labour organisers. There is no discussion of the powerful hegemonies of fossil fuel industries that have successfully convinced a large regional population that their companies’ interests align with the general interests (e.g. “Coal is West Virginia”). Nor does Huber grapple with the very strong absorption of many such workers into the Trumpian movement, which has had particular success in deindustrialised regions.^[20] Pointing out the demographics of energy workers in the United States is relevant precisely because sociologists have shown that it is precisely white men without college degrees who have disproportionately voted for Trump,^[21] and Huber provides little guidance for how the Left could win them back. Nor does Huber provide any analysis of the contradictory dynamics of fossil capitalism—whether the wrenching boom-and-bust cycles or the increasing capital-intensity, flexibilisation and attendant effects on worker safety in the oil industry—that might actually create openings for organisers.^[22]

If gangs of Huberites decide to get jobs in electric utilities, petrochemical or nitrogen factories to turn their workforce into DSA socialists, I truly do wish them luck. But I do not believe that Huber has prepared them for the obstacles they will face, material or ideological.

Reductive and Race-Blind Marxism

I believe Huber pigeonholes my argument and is unable to see possibilities for disagreement within Marxism (or even about the complex role of unions in an energy transition) because he appears to have a Manichean worldview that consists of precisely two alternatives: you believe the material interests of two great classes^[23] explains everything, or you are a PMC/liberal/identity politics defender of the NGO complex. It should be unnecessary to say that this is an impoverished lens for making sense of the world and can only give rise to bad analysis and distorted politics. His view of Marxism is anachronistic, dismissing a century of theoretical reconstructions within Marxism that were compelled by the empirical anomalies of 20^th and 21^st century capitalism, namely the ability of capitalism to mitigate crises and pacify the Western working class. Huber seems to want to disqualify from Marxism decades of debate over the mechanisms behind this pacification and over which fractions of an increasingly fragmented working class retain greater militancy. But wishing away the theory will not remove the empirical problem to which it corresponds. Huber leaves us with a wooden Marxism based on a mythical conception of the working class that provides no real insight into the actual politics of energy (or any other) workers.

Then there is Huber’s avoidance of any serious grappling with the deep and manifold ways in which race structures both American society and the world at large, and the consequences of this for the politics of energy transition. While Huber advances a conjectural theory of a mythical energy worker with an imaginary interest in energy transition, he treats any serious consideration of race as “moralistic” posturing and dismisses the very immediate material interests—dispossession of land, pollution of air and water, assaults on public health through carcinogenic exposure—driving the Black and Indigenous movements that have empirically taken a lead in the actually existing climate justice movement. He strangely reduces such movements to “NGOs”—even repurposing Marx’s comments about peasants to assert that “they cannot represent themselves”—while failing to recognise the analogous bureaucratism and professional management of unions. There is a jarring and absurd double standard here: it is moralistic to discuss the Black and Indigenous movements who have been fighting fossil fuel infrastructure, but a sober analysis to elevate the energy unions who have not. While the former are stuck in their local parochialism, the latter are the bearers of universal interests. The former are confined to their reformist organisations; the latter have limitless progressive potential despite all evidence to the contrary.

To illustrate where Huber’s climate politics leads us, it might be useful to contemplate what lay beneath and around Huber’s hidden abode of production. Most likely, the Louisiana nitrogen factory that Huber visited sat along the stretch of Mississippi River between New Orleans and Baton Rouge known as Cancer Alley. I wonder if Huber understood that he was probably standing on a former plantation? The political economic succession “from plantation to plant”^[24] could not be more logical, with fossil capital repurposing not only the land and transportation infrastructure but the social and political structures bequeathed by slavery and Jim Crow. If he drove by St. James Parish, he might have seen where a small group of Black residents—many descendants of former slaves—have somehow against all odds (and their white-controlled parish government) stopped a multi-billion dollar plastics factory from adding to their already horrific burden of toxic pollution and cancer (and 13.6 million additional tons of CO2 to the atmosphere per year).^[25] It would, of course, be immensely helpful if some of the energy workers who commute past them in long lines of white pickup trucks every day could join hands and put their leverage at the point of production towards taking on the companies employing them. And, yet, I understand the compulsions of social reproduction—as well as the racial divisions—that keep them from doing so. Instead of helping us understand how such a coalition might be forged, Huber’s solution is to simply keep those factories going while injecting the carbon into underground reservoirs of untested safety. Even if CCS succeeds technically, economically, and politically (it is being resisted on ecological and livelihood grounds by white and black communities across the state), this lifeline for the fossil economy will keep the toxic co-pollutants pouring into the many places like St. James Parish, with all the intersecting race and class disparities that we know this to have.

I do find Huber’s race-blind climate politics morally objectionable. But it is also based on an inaccurate analysis of the US social structure that can only lead to a losing political strategy. It lends itself to proposed solutions that reproduce racial and class inequalities and generate profound costs with which Huber does not even reckon: whether it is CCS or, as a logical consequence of his techno-utopianism, the voracious grabbing of land from Indigenous and agrarian populations of the Global North and South to extract minerals for the high-tech green economy or to build hydroelectric dams.[26] It dismisses allies rather than identifying bases for coalitions (including those that lay behind the state-level policies he endorses). It is also bad for Marxism, which has undergone progressive reconstruction—by Du Bois, Fanon, Cox, and Hall among others—precisely to account for the ways capitalism and race structure social formations, without reducing one to the other. To ignore this empirically and theoretically—or to reduce it to liberal identity politics—is to dramatically misunderstand the social world and is absolutely self-defeating.

Huber’s attempts to revive a reductive and schematic Marxism and dismiss all else as “PMC” deviations will only appeal to a very narrow set of acolytes, and doom Marxism to irrelevance. To have to repeat Stuart Hall’s critique of similar dogmatism thirty-five years later seems sadly necessary:

[E]very commitment to the construction of a new political will must be grounded, if it is to be concrete and strategic, in an analysis of the present which is neither ritualistic nor celebratory and which avoids the spurious oscillations of optimism and pessimism, or the triumphalism which so often pass for thought on the traditional left. Ritual and celebration are for the religious. They are for keeping the spirits up; for consolidating and consoling the faithful; and for anathematizing the heretics. They inhibit advance, while keeping the spirit of sectarian rectitude alive and well. There is no alternative to making anew “the revolution of our times” or sinking slowly into historical irrelevance. I believe, with Gramsci, that we must attend “violently” to things as they are, without illusions or false hopes, if we are to transcend the present.^[27]

Conclusion

I am sure that I do not know the solution to the largest crisis facing humanity. Yet, I am also sure that Huber does not either despite his self-assurance. His contradictory response to my critique suggests that he cannot defend his original thesis about energy workers leading a sustainable energy transition, and that his vision of decarbonisation is actually based on class compromise with both green and fossil capital. This is a pretty confusing strategy, and one that seems hardly differentiated from the capitalist classes or the liberal policy makers that I thought he would have us confront. It does not appear to be aimed at keeping carbon in the ground, and it would reproduce the social inequalities of fossil capitalism.

If Huber’s climate politics is contradictory and normatively troubling, I do not suggest dismissing this out of sheer dogmatism—the scale, urgency, and complexity of the problem we are facing does not allow for purity and petty name-calling. While never mentioned by Huber, it is a truism that the Global North is responsible for the vast majority of historic emissions while it is the Global South that is most exposed to the very material death, destruction and suffering this generates. The North’s colonisation of the atmospheric commons effectively kicks away the ladder to liveable—much less socialist—futures in the rest of the world. While the US Left must work through US society and politics to decarbonise the country as rapidly as possible—and this is an absolutely crucial task given its weight in present and historic emissions—it should above all do so out of a commitment to socialism globally. The efforts of Marxists and the left wing of GND advocates to make climate politics better articulate with domestic class politics are an encouraging step forward. At the same time, we cannot pretend that these forms of politics are perfectly overlapping; the ways in which they do not overlap are precisely the biggest obstacles we must understand and overcome to create a winning climate movement. To simply pretend that they do not exist is the acme of intellectual and political irresponsibility.

References

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Yokley, Eli 2022, ‘Joe Manchin’s Approach to Biden’s Presidency is Paying Off in West Virginia’, Morning Consult, 25 April, available at:https://morningconsult.com/2022/04/25/joe-manchins-approach-paying-off/

[1] See: https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/book-review/white-energy-workers-north-unite-review-hubers-climate-change-class-war andhttps://www.historicalmaterialism.org/index.php/blog/professional-class-vanguard-climate-justice-response-to-michael-leviens-review-climate-change

^[2]The failure of the initial and far broader Build Back Better bill to attract sufficient working-class support suggests the need to rethink how GND-style programmes might politically resonate. In a Monmouth University Poll, only 20 percent of those without four-year college degrees responded that Build Back Better should be a top priority of Congress (2022). The failure to build sufficient support in West Virginia–a state where the transition from coal is half completed and which would have benefited immensely from the social programmes in the original bill–was of course crucial to its defeat and dilution.

^[3] As a Blue-Green Alliance official expressed to me, the unions in their coalition will not support it “If you say we can have clean energy but not natural gas,” but “if it means other jobs and a more diversified set of jobs, sure….” While the environmental groups and unions in the coalition can agree on anything that creates green jobs, disagreement over new and existing fossil fuel infrastructure such as pipelines “is a big tension in our coalition” (Interview, 2.14.12). This dynamic was also captured by the Just Transition Listening Project (Cha et al. 2016). Of the building trades, it observed, “This constant need to create opportunities for their otherwise unemployed members created a strong impetus for an ‘all of the above’ energy strategy when it comes to supporting construction projects, including fossil fuels and renewables” (2016: 27).

^[4] See Neumann 2019; Spengeman 2022; Orenstein 2023.

^[5] The 2008 U.S. Geological Survey identified 241 sites appropriate for hydrothermal geothermal energy production, which requires specific heat, permeability, and fluid conditions. All sites are concentrated within 13 states in the western United States, Alaska, and Hawaii (U.S. Department of Energy 2019).

^[6] In a sit-down lunch with a Financial Times correspondent, Hillary Clinton expressed confusion toward people’s nostalgia for the mining life: “Whether they were from West Virginia or Tyneside, their lives were so grim and disease-prone and unhygienic – but the nostalgia for those days. I don’t know” (Luce 2022).

^[7] See Bluestone and Harrison 1982, Dudley 1994, and Milkman 1997 among many others. For a remarkable study of deindustrialisation and mine closure in France, see Reid 1985.

^[8] For the classic analysis of this dialectic on a global scale, see Silver 2003.

^[9] Huber’s position here contradicts his ssepticism of private green capital in the book (p. 9).

^[10] In the Gulf of Mexico, for example, there is some hope that oil and gas workers have the appropriate skills to plug or re-plug abandoned wells and that the offshore servicing infrastructure for oil and gas can be repurposed for offshore wind (see Biven and Lindner 2023, p. 4). Sicotte et al.’s (2022: 5) study, based on interviews with unionised energy workers, found significant concern in the IBB, UA and USW about “the mismatch of skills they would face if fossil fuel use were phased out.”

^[11] For the classic analysis, see Harvey 2006[1982].

^[12] As Harvey (1990: 294) puts it, “Capital flight, deindustrialization of some regions, and the industrialization of others, the destruction of traditional working-class communities as power bases in class struggle, become leitmotifs of spatial transformation under more flexible conditions of accumulation.”

^[13] The Just Transition Listening Project (Cha et al. 2016: 2), which actually interviewed workers, found that attitudes towards a renewable energy transition were deeply shaped by “the trauma individuals and families experienced as their economies were devastated” by prior waves of capitalist restructuring.

^[14] See Yokely 2022 and Arnold 2022. Seemingly in response to the blowback to the IRA in West Virginia, Manchin is now threatening to join Republicans in repealing it (Broadwater 2023).

^[15] On UMWA’s position on carbon capture, see https://umwa.org/news-media/press/umwa-statement-on-introduction-of-scale-act/. For an analysis of its economic futility in prolonging coal-fired power plants in the state, see Norstrand 2022.

^[16] As Brett Christophers (2023) observes, the IRA has also created a major opportunity for finance capital to privatise America’s energy infrastructure.

^[17]U.S. Department of Energy 2022; U.S. Energy Jobs 2020

^[18] See O’Leary and Hunkler 2022. I owe this formulation to Sean O’Leary.

^[19]  See Labor Network for Sustainability 2016; Sicotte 2021; Sicotte et al. 2022. Their findings also provide some grounds for hope, in that they find less purely ideological opposition to renewables, with it largely coming down to whether equivalent jobs are available that match their skillsets. “But,” Sicotte (2021) observes, “as energy workers have pointed out, jobs in renewable energy aren't necessarily adequate substitutes for jobs in fossil fuels.” There is a great need for more research to capture the full gamut of energy workers, unionized and un-unionized, in different subsectors and regions.

^[20] See Baccini and Weymouth 2021; Edelman 2021.

^[21] See Lamont et al. 2017; Morgan and Lee 2018

^[22] For an analysis of these, see Biven and Lindner 2023.

^[23]Huber works with a dramatically simplified map of the US class structure.

^[24] While there are many studies on this continuity, see chapter 8 of Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner 2002 and United Church of Christ 1998. 

^[25]Mufson 2022.

[26] There is now much documentation of the green mineral rush—including its ecological implications, use of child labor and assault on Indigenous land rights—that need not be reviewed here. The US/Western Left seems less familiar with the social and ecological effects of large dams. There is a massive literature but see McCully (2001) for an accessible overview and Levien (2018: 35-43) on their role in dispossessing adivasis and rural populations in India. Coulthard (2014) provides a sharp critique of their role in American settler colonialism.

^[27]Hall 2021[1988]: 13-14.