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

Arnold, Tyler 2022, ‘Manchin popularity drops double digits in West Virginia’, The Center Square, 13 October, available at:https://www.thecentersquare.com/west_virginia/article_b8cd3b56-4b30-11ed-9492-9f2029aaa679.html

Baccini, Leonardo and Stephen Weymouth 2021, ‘Gone for Good: Deindustrialization, White Voter Backlash, and Presidential Voting’, American Political Science Review, 115 (2): 550-567.

Biven, Megan Milliken and Leo Lindner 2023, The Future of Energy & Work in the United States: The American Oil & Gas Worker Survey, True Transition, available at:https://www.truetransition.org/_files/ugd/0ad80c_069ea867b3f044afba4dae2a1da8d737.pdf?index=true

Bluestone, Barry and Harrison, Bennett 1982, The deindustrialization of America: Plants closings, community abandonment, and the dismantling of basic industry, New York: Basic Books.

Broadwater, Luke 2023, ‘Manchin Clashes with Biden Administration Over Climate Law’, The New York Times, 16 May, available at:https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/16/us/politics/biden-manchin-inflation-reduction-act.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Cha, J. Mijin, Vivian Price, Dimitris Stevis and Todd E. Vachon with Maria Brescia-Weiler 2021, Workers and Communities in Transition: Report of the Just Transition Listening Project, Labor Network for Sustainability, available at:https://www.labor4sustainability.org/jtlp-2021/jtlp-report/

Christophers, Brett 2023, ‘Why Are We Allowing the Private Sector to Take Over Our Public Works?’, The New York Times, 8 May, available at:https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/08/opinion/inflation-reduction-act-global-asset-managers.html

Coulthard, Glen Sean 2014, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Dudley, Kathryn Marie 1994, The end of the line: Lost jobs, new lives in postindustrial America, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Edelman, Marc 2021, ‘Hollowed out Heartland, USA: How capital sacrificed communities and paved the way for authoritarian populism’, Journal of Rural Studies, 82 (2021): 505-517.

Hall, Stuart. 2021[1988]. The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left. London: Verso

Harvey, David 1990, The Condition of Postmodernity, Malden: Blackwell Publishers.

Harvey, David 2006 [1982], Limits to Capital, London: Verso.

Lamont, Michele, Bo Yun Park, and Elena Ayala-Hurtado 2017, ‘Trump’s Electoral Speeches and his Appeal to the American White Working Class’,  British Journal of Sociology 68(S1): S153-S180.

Levien, Michael 2018, Dispossession without Development: Land Grabs in Neoliberal India. New York: Oxford University Press.

Luce, Edward 2022, ‘Hillary Clinton: ‘We are standing on the precipice of losing our democracy’’, Financial Times, 17 June, available at:https://www.ft.com/content/2e667c3f-954d-49fa-8024-2c869789e32f

Markowitz, Gerald and David Rosner 2002, Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution. Berkeley: University of California Press.

McCully, Patrick. 2001. Silenced Rivers: The Ecology and Politics of Large Dams. London: Zed Books.

Milkman, Ruth 1997, Farewell to the factory: Auto workers in the late twentieth century, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Monmouth University 2022, National: GOP Has Congress Edge by Default, available at:https://www.monmouth.edu/polling-institute/documents/monmouthpoll_us_012622.pdf/

Morgan, Stephen and Jiwon Lee 2018, ‘Trump voters and the white working class’, Sociological Science, 5: 234-245.

Mufson, Steven 2022, “The win for activists in two halted chemical plants—by the numbers.” The Washington Post, September 16. Available at:https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2022/09/16/louisiana-chemical-formosa-environmental-justice/

Neumann, Dan 2019, ‘Maine’s Green New Deal aims to ‘link economic justice with climate justice’’, Maine Beacon, 16 April, available at:https://mainebeacon.com/maines-green-new-deal-aims-to-link-economic-justice-with-climate-justice/

Nostrand, James M. Van. 2022. The Coal Trap: How West Virginia was Left Behind in the Clean Energy Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

O’Leary, Sean and Ben Hunkler 2021, Carbon Capture, Use, and Sequestration (CCUS) Would Decarbonize the Electric System… in the Worst Possible Way, Ohio River Valley Institute, available at:https://ohiorivervalleyinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/CCUS-Report-FINAL-3.pdf

Orenstein, Walker 2023, ‘A guide to the Minnesota DFL’s 100% carbon-free standard’, MinnPost, 23 January, available at:https://www.minnpost.com/environment/2023/01/a-guide-to-the-minnesota-dfls-100-carbon-free-standard/

Reid, Donald 1985, The miners of Decazeville: A genealogy of deindustrialization, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Sicotte, Diane 2021, ‘Will the Green New Deal Bring About a “Just Transition,” or Just Transition?’, Footnotes, 49, 3, available at:https://www.asanet.org/footnotes-article/will-green-new-deal-bring-about-just-transition-or-just-transition/

Sicotte, Diane M., Kelly A. Joyce and Arielle Hesse 2022, ‘Necessary, Welcome or Dreaded? Insights on Low-carbon Transitions from Unionized Energy Workers in the United States’, Energy Research & Social Science, 88 (102651): 1-10.

Silver, Beverly 2003, Forces of Labor: Workers’ Movements and Globalization since 1870, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Spengeman, Sarah 2022, ‘A Bigger Tent Delivers Stronger Wins for Climate: The Lessons from Illinois’, The Revelator, 14 January, available at:https://therevelator.org/bigger-tent-climate-illinois/

United Church of Christ 1998, From Plantation to Plant: Report of the Emergency National Commission on Environmental Justice in St. James Parish, Louisiana. Cleveland, OH: United Church of Christ.

U.S. Department of Energy 2019.,GeoVision: Harnessing the Heat Beneath Our Feet, available at:https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2019/06/f63/GeoVision-full-report-opt.pdf

U.S. Department of Energy 2022, United States Energy & Employment Report 2022, available at:https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2022-06/USEER%202022%20National%20Report_1.pdf

U.S. Energy Jobs 2020, Wages, Benefits, and Change: A Supplemental Report to the Annual U.S. Energy and Employment Report, National Association of State Energy Officials, Energy Future Initiatives, and BW Research Partnership, available at:https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5a98cf80ec4eb7c5cd928c61/t/606d1178a0ee8f1a53e66206/1617760641036/Wage+Report.pdf

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.

9–12 November 2023,SOAS and Birkbeck, Russell Square, Central London

Deadline for Online Registration: Monday 6th November 2023: https://conference.historicalmaterialism.org/e/hm2023.

The programme is available here: https://tinyurl.com/2p8fcmk9.

The book of abstracts is available here:https://tinyurl.com/4jv3y875.

Whether the discussion is about reforming pension systems, overhauling health care or the sources of inflation, we are constantly reminded that life has a cost, a price to pay, a burden to bear. At the same time, we are also periodically reminded that not all lives are valued or priced in the same manner; some lives are cheaper and more expendable than others: from over-work and deteriorating living conditions for billions of ‘essential workers’ to police violence and incarceration; from sexual abuse and the denial of bodily autonomy to the socially determined vulnerability and ‘susceptibility’ during the pandemic; from the persistence of racialised exploitation and oppression to the many faces of neocolonialism; from militarised borders turned into kill zones to the ongoing climate disaster.

But there is also the struggle of life (and the struggle for a decent life). As the impressive UK strike wave, the French insurrection against Macron’s aggressive neoliberalism, mass protests in Greece, farmers’ strikes in India, the new wave of struggles in the Americas, and the continuous youth rebellion against a future of extinction show us, there is a multitude of resistances to exploitation, racism, systemic violence and ecological degradation;  resistances that are facing the increasingly authoritarian mutation of contemporary capitalist states trying to cope with the hegemonic crisis of ‘actually existing neoliberalism’.

These recent struggles pose important practical and theoretical questions. How can we articulate a reading of the conjuncture that can bring forward the common thread running through all these attacks on life, the common thread of capitalist social-property relations in their articulation with patriarchy, racialisation and imperialism? How can we bring together the collective aspirations, demands and desires in a manner that leads to a coherent strategy for emancipation? What can we learn from these struggles and how can we treat them as experimental terrains for new political practices? And how can critical Marxist theory, in all its necessary and welcome polyphony, contribute to such an endeavour, bridging the gap between radical theory and collective praxis? These are some of the questions we want to be discussed at the twentieth annual Historical Materialism Conference.

We still believe that this particular format of the in-person conference offers a unique and irreplaceable form that brings together comrades, enables discussion, helps the dissemination of new and original research, creates research networks and communities, and builds solidarity. This is why we will not accept online presentations, except in very rare and specific cases. We would also note that we do engage in online broadcasts and podcasts all year round for such sessions.

As in the past, the conference ethos is strictly egalitarian. This means everyone is invited to contribute in a comradely spirit, the conference is open to all currents of critical Marxist theory and we expect all presenters to attend the entire conference, not just their own session (with no ‘cameo appearances’). We also expect all speakers to make themselves available for the whole period of the conference for their sessions (with only completely immutable circumstances constituting exceptions), as tailoring a conference of this size around individuals’ preferences and desires is not feasible or desirable. The conference is an important part of the broader Historical Materialism project – including the journal, the book series, and the global network of HM conferences – and we want to encourage all conference participants to get involved with these different elements, for example by subscribing to the journal and submitting their conference paper to us for consideration.

In line with the central theme of this year’s conference, we particularly want to invite contributions on the following non-exclusive questions:

· Marxist perspectives on the capitalist economic conjuncture and the signs of an emerging crisis;

· Contemporary imperialism, the shift towards a more divided and polarised world, and all these fuelling war;

· The tendency towards hegemonic crises in advanced capitalist formations;

· Racism and processes of racialisation.

· The new wave of struggles and their strategic significance;

· The social conditioning of pandemic and health threats and the social production of vulnerability;

· Authoritarianism and restrictions over the conditions of life;

· Ecology, the ongoing climate disaster and the movements against extinction;

· The new and old forms of collective politics emerging within struggles and how they might help or hinder the renewal of radical politics.

Whilst we encourage papers and panels that address these themes, as always, the Historical Materialism conference seeks to provide a space for critical Marxist theory and research across the globe and a range of disciplines and interests, so submissions on other themes are welcome.

The following streams will each be issuing individual CFPs:

·         Workers’ Inquiry Stream

·         Marxist Feminist Stream

·         Sexuality and Political Economy Stream

·         Race and Capital Stream

·         Culture Stream

·         Marxism and Technology Stream

·         Ecology and Climate Change Stream

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The Professional Class Vanguard of Climate Justice: A Response to Michael Levien’s Review of Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet

This interview begins with the definition of utopia, exploring the relationship between scientific and utopian socialism, revealing contemporary revisions of utopian socialism.^[i] There are many different approaches to and definitions of the key notion of utopia, so in the first section, we consider how to understand the notion of utopia correctly, in the context of Prof. David Leopold’s research. Second, we explore the relation of Marx, Engels, and utopian socialists, what the Marxian criticisms of utopianism are, and how to approach these criticisms. Additionally, we compare Leopold’s and Marx’s understandings of utopia. Finally, we summarise Leopold’s contribution to reconfiguring Marxian and utopian philosophies and conclude that Marxian and utopian socialism can be compatible in many ways. This creates the possibility for people to design new ‘recipes’ for the future.

Li Liu: You contribute actively to academic debates on utopian socialism. So to start off, could you say something about your research process and share some insights about your definition of utopia with us?

David Leopold: Sometimes, people offer distinctive definitions of a concept and all the work is focused on the definition, whereas I think of my definition of utopia as relatively neutral and open. It could be acceptable to many people. The word ‘utopia’ in English was invented by Thomas Moore, and for him, it was a play on words, a kind of a joke, because it had two very different connotations: ‘good place’ and ‘no place’—put together we get a ‘good place that does not exist’. The only thing that I add to that account is that I think it has to be a reasonably detailed description of a good place—the ideal society which does not exist (at least not yet). The only thing that this explicitly adds is the idea of that detail, but I think that is implicit in Moore’s original usage. Moore himself describes the utopia in reasonable detail, and I think of my definition as not hugely controversial.

My views on the relationship between Marxism and utopianism may be more controversial, but I do not want my definition of utopia to be controversial. I hope that this is a definition that many people could accept: utopias are detailed descriptions of an ideal society that does not exist. That said, I should say something about the use of ‘ideal’ here, which people sometimes worry about. How ‘ideal’ is this notion of the ideal society? I want this notion of ‘ideal’ to be reasonably flexible. Sometimes people characterise utopia not just as something which does not exist but as something that could not exist; it is not feasible—where feasible means compatible with what we know about human nature and social design—and could never exist. Whereas other people want their notion of utopia to be a feasible utopia, a realistic utopia. I want my definition to be neutral about that debate. I want ‘the ideal’ here to include both ‘feasible’ and ‘not feasible’ ideals. I do not want to say that if this ideal society is feasible it is not a utopia. Feasible ideals would be included in my notion of ‘Ideal’.

Qian Luo: This is crucial to us. Usually, in our understanding, we think that utopia is in contradiction to scientific socialism; utopia could not be realised because it is an imagination. Should the notion of utopia be understood as an ideal society that is difficult to reach or an ideal society that has not yet been realised?

David Leopold: You might think of there being three helpful distinctions among the best kind of society. First, there is the best kind of society that we could reach, given where we are now and where we start from (call this the best accessible society). Second, there is the best feasible society, that is the best society that is compatible with what we know about social design and human nature. This best feasible society might be more demanding than what we can reach now. Perhaps approximating the best feasible society will take hundreds and hundreds of years, but the best we can reach now (the best accessible society) is what we can reach in our lifetimes, from our starting point. So there is the best accessible, meaning that we can reach it; then there is the best feasible, meaning that it could be realised, given what we know about the world, social structures, and human beings like ourselves; and then, third, there is the best that we can imagine. This third option, the best that we can imagine might not be feasible. For example, maybe the best that we can imagine involves human beings living forever; the best feasible might involve us living as long as it is possible for humans to live; and the best accessible might involve just living a bit longer than our parents, but not as long as our children.

LL: If utopia is understood as the ideal society that has not yet been realised—while not unlikely to be achieved—then we also know that in the Marxian account, communism is an ideal society that has not been realised but will ultimately be. Why then, did Marx and Engels reject utopian socialism?

DL: Well said. So, in response to this question of the relationship between Marxism and utopianism I maintain that Marx provides two kinds of arguments against utopianism. Some of them are (what I call) ‘foundational’ arguments and some are ‘non-foundational’ arguments. The latter are concerned with views that particular utopian thinkers may hold, and which Marx thinks are mistaken, but which have no necessary connection with their utopianism.. So, for example, in The Communist Manifesto, Marx suggests that the utopian socialists have a paternalistic view of the proletariat. That might be true of some utopian socialists, but it is not necessarily a feature of utopianism. You could be utopian and create detailed designs for an ideal society, without having a paternalistic view of the proletariat.

So, I put those arguments aside here because they do not seem to penetrate the heart of the matter. They might or might not be true of particular utopians but they do not undermine utopianism as such. In contrast, the foundational arguments that Marx advances are targeted against utopianism as such. I elucidate these arguments in my article about Marxian utopophobia where I identify three claims about utopian designs: (1) Marx thinks that they are undemocratic; (2) Marx thinks they presuppose a kind of knowledge which we cannot have; and (3) Marx thinks that they are unnecessary, given the way that the historical process works. Regarding those three arguments, I want to say, in general, that if they worked, they would be devastating for utopianism—but that they do not work. Marx’s foundational criticism of utopianism is mistaken. I could sugar-coat that and put it more cautiously, but I just think that he is wrong here.

That said, I so think that some of that erroneous thinking is understandable, given the context in which Marx was writing, but that it is still erroneous. Consider, for example, the third of Marx’s claims: that capitalism will evolve into communism without us having to decide what communism would look like. I think it was probably easier to believe that claim in the nineteenth century than it is to believe it in the twenty-first century. I maintain that socialist arrangements will only be realised if people embark on design work. They need to think about the kind of society that they want to live in, what kind of values it would embody, and what kind of institutions would best embody those values. To do that well, they would need to provide advance descriptions of the ideal society.

I think of Marx’s attempt to put a divide between socialism and utopianism as unsuccessful. Achieving socialist arrangements requires people to think about  how we want to live, and what kind of world we want to live in. Marx remarkably thought that we did not need to think about these questions; that it was a mistake to think about these questions. Whereas I think that socialists do need to think about these questions if they wish to have any hope for the future.

LL: Marx and Engels provide various complaints about utopian socialism in their writings and you divided these complaints into two categories, non-foundational and foundational. Could you please explain this further?

DL: Foundational complaints are arguments which, if successful, would count against utopianism as such, they would suggest that it is pointless to spend time and energy engaging with issues of social design. Non-foundational arguments, in contrast, attack other beliefs that utopian socialists may hold, but which are not necessarily related to their utopianism (their engagement with social design).

I have already given an example of one of Marx’s non-foundational criticisms of utopian socialism: he maintains that the utopians have a paternalistic view of the proletariat (they see workers as the object of change rather than the subject bringing it about). However, this view of the proletariat is not necessarily connected to utopianism.

Interestingly this point is implicitly recognized by Engels, in a late preface to The Communist Manifesto.[ii] Engels acknowledges that there are what he calls ‘utopian communists’, such as Weitling and Cabet. These thinkers are distinctive because they have plans and blueprints for socialist designs but they do not have a paternalistic view of the proletariat. They claim that only the proletariat can bring about socialism. That claim might be a matter for debate but it does not affect whether or not we need utopianism.

I have already mentioned three of Marx’s foundational objections. Let me say a little more about his idea that utopian designs are unnecessary, because the solutions to social problems emerge from the historical process (without needing to be designed). This involves a number of complex empirical claims which makes it difficult to challenge (people can always say: ‘Well, it just has not happened yet but that does not mean it will not happen’, and so on.)

However, I think that this foundational objection is unwarranted and implausible. Marx never identifies the mechanisms which would select the optimal solutions. I also think that all the empirical evidence is against a good society simply emerging as a result of activity that does not involve design. All of the societies which have historically thought of themselves as socialist, have at some point had to think, ‘How are we going to do this?’ They had to make hard design decisions – deciding whether markets were necessary, or where the state fitted in – but they often had to make them at short notice. Whereas I argue that socialists need to be thinking about these things from the very beginning if they want to change the world in a desirable direction.

LL: What you emphasise in utopianism is a detailed description of the future society, so when you claim it is necessary to draw blueprints for future generations, there is a possibility that the unrealised society can be realised in the future. We cannot reject the possibility because it might be realised. When we draw the blueprint for the future, there is a possibility that it can be realised. Right?

DL: I think there are many different kinds of ‘blueprints’. Sometimes you want a blueprint which is a guiding light. It is not a plan that you literally want to put into action, but rather a reference point for the plan that you want to realize. John Stuart Mill had an apt quotation that I often borrow. He says, ‘The North Star is useful even if you attempt to travel no further than Hull’ [Hull is a city in northern England]. The thought is that if you want to make the existing world a little more just, you have to know what justice is. Even if perfect justice cannot be embodied in the world—even if the world can only approximate perfect justice.

To have such approximations, you need two things: you need to know what ‘perfect justice’ is, and you need to know what a ‘best approximation’ is. Some blueprints might be the best imaginable arrangements, some might be the best feasible arrangements, and some might be the best we can achieve in our lifetimes, given our starting point. We need all kinds of blueprints. But I am sympathetic to the view that for the best accessible plans we need to know something about the best feasible arrangements, and for the best feasible arrangements we need to know something about what the best imaginable is, independent of feasibility constraints.

I want to say something further about my use of the term blueprints. The word originates from engineering drawings; it is the design for something, which is going to be manufactured. These drawings were reproduced on blue tinted sheets of paper (hence ‘blueprints’). I use this analogy because it suggests the idea of detail. However, it also has another connotation—which is unfortunate and which I regret—which is that you have to follow the plan exactly as it is. Blueprints of the engineering drawing kind are not flexible or open-ended, but the kind of blueprints that I am arguing for should be. They should not be thought of as stipulative but as open to revision and criticism.

For example, the utopian socialists all created detailed descriptions of their ideal society, but thought of them in different ways. Fourier’s [version of blueprints] is prescriptive. He would say: ‘Unless you have exactly the covered walkways that I describe, the whole settlement will fail’. He insisted on every detail being followed. If you questioned anything, if you didn’t follow his plans exactly, he predicted that you would never succeed. However, other utopians were much more flexible. Owen, for example, at least in some moods, was quite happy with open-ended blueprints, and took a more experimental view. He was trying to give us his best estimate of how to create communal work arrangements, but if after implementation, a better solution was found and put into practice, that would be acceptable. We can think of his blueprints as more open-ended and flexible, as open to improvement by future generations.

In any event, the element that I am borrowing from the idea of a blueprint is the element of detail, not the element of prescription. My enthusiasm is for a plurality of competing blueprints, and for people to adopt an open-minded and experimental attitude towards them.

LL: I think that in your account of utopianism, it is necessary to draw a detailed description, but Marx and Engels thought that it was unnecessary to draw a blueprint. So, is your understanding of utopianism different from Marx’s or should we see that our understanding of the Marxian account is wrong?

DL: I do disagree with Marx on this particular issue, but not with all of the things that Marx says about utopian socialists. On the need for socialist design, I do think that the utopians are right and Marx is wrong. However, this does not exhaust Marx’s views on utopian socialism. It is also important to notice that Marx says many positive things about the utopians. People sometimes assume that he thinks, first, that all socialism is either utopian or scientific; and, second, that the utopian variety is just wrong about everything.

In fact, Marx thinks that utopian and scientific socialism are just two forms of socialism among many. In addition, he thinks that lots of things that utopians say and do are valuable, interesting, and important, both for the development of Marxism and for the emergence of socialism as a historical movement. So, Marx is much more enthusiastic and positive about utopian socialism than people often assume. He is not wholly negative about utopianism, but also very positive about some aspects. For example, he thinks of Fourier as a brilliant social critic—an insightful commentator on the existing world from whom all can learn.

One of the places where I disagree with Marx, is with his claim that you do not need to design the future because he—Marx—thinks that the future will unfold as a result of the laws of history. It is not just that the utopians go into too much detail, or that some of their detail is far-fetched. Marx rather denies that there is a need to design the institutional and other arrangements of socialism. Rather, the role for human agency is to bring about the future that is emerging within the existing society. He often uses obstetric metaphors, metaphors of childbirth and pregnancy. The role of the proletariat is like that of a midwife, they are to deliver the baby, not to design the baby. However, I argue that we need to ‘design the baby’.

LL: Maybe this criticism is about Marx’s ideal of history. If Marx’s material view of history is economic determinism—history is an automatic process—maybe he thinks that the detailed description is unnecessary, but as we know Marx and Engels have said that history is just a process of activities pursuing human purposes. What do you think of the role of history?

DL: I think there may be a tension in the theory of history. If you examine Marx’s theory of history, what it suggests is that no form of society lasts forever. Every form of society is replaced by another form, and each of those subsequent forms is more productive than the previous one. This historical pattern, of course, reflects the human struggle to overcome scarcity. Earlier societies capitulate to new societies, which are more productive. Nothing that I am saying about the need for design affects that central thread in the theory of history.

Now it may be that capitalism came about by some hidden-hand mechanism, and not by agents seeking to bring about capitalism. However, I am not confident that any desirable alternative to capitalism will simply emerge, without our conscious engagement with issues of social design. Marx thinks you need agency to deliver the new kind of society, but you do not need an agency to design the new society. Whereas I am sceptical that there is a hidden-hand mechanism which will guarantee a desirable alternative. I think that desirable alternatives will need to be designed and delivered.

LL: I feel that this is a bit strange. If Marx and Engels had said that History is a process of people pursuing (their) purpose, why is it not necessary to describe it in detail?                

DL: I think that this is a really good question, particularly to put to somebody like me, who is sympathetic to Marx and who regards Marx as a great thinker—a profound thinker. In a way what I am accusing him of is a gross error. I think it is always a good question in those circumstances to ask: how did such a smart person make such a mistake?

I am tempted to say that it is Hegel’s fault. Hegel’s picture of History is that there is a God-given plan, and the role of human beings is to ‘roll it out’. We don’t design it; we just give deliver it. And I think that what we find in Marx is thus a vestigial Hegelianism. I would add that Marx is not entirely consistent—some of the things he says are in tension with each other. In some moods, when he is attacking Hegel, Marx effectively says: ‘This is ridiculous; why on earth would you assume there is a God-given plan that we are driven to realize? We are not just vehicles of Geist [Spirit], fated to carry out that plan? It is a ludicrous view of the world’. However, when he attacks the utopian socialists, he effectively reproduces the Hegelian view that, in another context, he was attacking. If you ask me the source of Marx’s mistake, I think it is an unexamined fragment of Hegelianism that remained in his thought. That is my explanation.

LL: As you said, Marx and Engels are not entirely critical of utopian socialism. They also have some positive opinions about its political ideas. What did they absorb from utopian socialism?

DL: I think this is an interesting question. There are primary and secondary aspects to these positive claims. I should also acknowledge that Engels is more enthusiastic about utopian socialism than Marx. In all these cases you can find examples from both Marx and Engels, but the tone of the latter is often more enthusiastic. The main distinction that is helpful here is between criticizing the existing society and constructing a future society. As we already know Marx and Engels disagree with the utopians about the need for constructive future plans (because Marx and Engels think that the socialist ‘baby’ needs only to be delivered not designed).

Putting that aside, and focusing on the criticism of existing society, we can find many examples where Marx and Engels borrow from the utopians. Much of their commentary in The Communist Manifesto about the bourgeois family and hypocrisy is similar to points made by Fourier. Similarly, there are arguments inCapital about how manufacturers and capitalists treat workers as instruments of production that appeal to Owen’s arguments. These familiar Marxian criticisms of capitalism’s instrumental treatment of human beings, and about the hypocrisy of bourgeois society, are borrowed directly from, and credited to,  utopian socialism. Some commentators (for example, Isaiah Berlin) claim that Marx seldom credits other people for their ideas. This is not true in this context. There are many places where Marx is very generous towards utopian authors. He credits Fourier’s brilliance often and inCapital he quotes Owen directly. The main thread in these positive remarks concerns the critical dimension of utopian writings, their attack on existing society. However, in some moods, Marx and Engels say positive things about other threads.

Marx sometimes allows that utopians anticipate aspects of what communism will look like. Marx and Engels think the utopians are wrong about the need to design communism, but they are right about some of its features. I will provide two examples. One concerns education and is from Capital: Marx credits Owen’s idea of how education should function as an anticipation of how (it) will work in communism. Similarly, Marx endorses the utopian idea—found in Fourier and Owen—that communism will somehow overcome the antagonism between town and country, between cities and rural areas. Again, he thinks of these as ideas of the utopian socialists, which anticipate features of future socialist society.

Marx and Engels also allow some backwards-looking claims as well. Engels, for example, argues that Fourier has a dialectical view of History—that he views history as progressing through social conflicts, of various kinds.

I think that there are many ways in which Marx and Engels are generous about the utopians as fellow socialists. Not least, they regard scientific socialism as the heir of utopian socialism and hence viewed themselves as the inheritors of some of that tradition. However, Marx and Engels thought it was problematic to continue wanting to be utopian when there were better ways of viewing the world, ways that incorporated some of those utopian insights but did not make some of its errors. Whereas I am suggesting that some of these utopian errors might not be errors after all.

QL: Just as you said, when we talked about communist society, people tend to think of Marx as being similar to Fourier and Owen. Most people, when they criticize Marx and Marxism, say that Marxism is full of utopianism. So, when we defend Marxism, do we need to emphasize the scientific dimensions, which may appear similar to utopianism?

DL: So what I want us to move away from—and you might tell me it is not possible in China because it is too deeply rooted—is the idea that to call something utopianism is necessarily a criticism. Utopianism is not necessarily a bad thing that people should avoid. Utopianism involves thinking about how you want the world to be, and that is something that we should be engaging in. It is a mistake to think of Marxism and utopianism as opposites that you have to choose between. Nearly all of Marx’s insights into history, capitalism, human nature, and what socialism would look like, are compatible with the need for social design. There is no general requirement to choose between Marxism and utopianism.

The utopian socialists are not Marxists. And some Marxists are not utopian because they do not think that you need to engage in social design. However, I think there is a possible overlap here. There is a potential ‘Venn diagram’ which locates a point where you can be consistently and coherently both utopian and Marxist. At this point, utopian is not a criticism. Utopian here means that you are thinking seriously about the kind of values that socialism should promote, and the kind of institutions that might best embody these values. I think that utopianism in this sense is a good thing, not a bad thing. I want to recapture the term as a positive one, and avoid just assuming that utopianism is a bad thing that should be avoided. I think that socialists should reclaim the idea of utopia.

LL: As you said, the utopians mainly thought about the future world, and Marxism emphasizes criticism of the existing society, so if we combined utopianism and Marxism, would that strengthen the criticism of the power structures of the present, or would that be weakening the critical power?

DL: Well, I think it strengthens it in two ways. If you talk to people in the West about socialism, one familiar assumption is: it is a great idea in theory but does not work in practice; that socialist arrangements are desirable but not feasible. What socialism infused by utopianism can potentially do is take feasibility seriously. It might think seriously about feasibility and institutional design, adopting an experimental approach towards socialism, and the attempt to work out what works and what doesn’t. This potentially makes socialism more powerful because it engages with one of the central aspects of resistance to socialist ideas (‘It is a nice idea but it is not feasible’).

Marx effectively said: ‘Do not worry about the feasibility issue, that will all get sorted out by the laws of history’. I do not think that is any longer persuasive. In contrast, the utopians say: ‘Let us look at how markets work, whether there are alternatives to markets, or whether there are combinations of socialism and markets that might be feasible’. They discuss the details of the institutional design and how things might work. This does two things: it eliminates some of the feasibility worries—where people think that it just is not possible—and it potentially increases the desirability of socialism (because people have a better sense of what it might involve).

I am also interested in William Morris, who wrote a utopian novel, News from Nowhere, which is, in certain ways, influenced by Marx and Engels (Morris knew Engels). I am very fond of the novel. It begins with a socialist activist going home after a depressingly factional meeting with his comrades. Sitting alone on the Underground [the subway system in London] the protagonist says to himself: ‘If I could but see it?’. What he was asking for was a sense of what socialism might look like in order to renew his enthusiasm and motivation for struggling to improve the world. And that sense is provided by the imaginative picture of the future that follows in the rest of the book. I think that utopias can play this important motivational role.

People are only going to be motivated to do the work of delivering socialism if they are enthusiastic about the likely result. And they have to know more about the result if they are to devote time and energy to promoting it. There is something rather odd in Marx and Engels’s works: they say that we should strive and struggle to the best of our abilities to deliver this future world, but they do not say what it will look like. I think that is a very bad way to motivate people to engage in the struggle to deliver it.

LL: You have indicated that communism is like a baby and that the proletariat will deliver it. Utopian socialist, Owen, provided a detailed description of the future and engaged in communal experiments. He provides descriptions and guidelines but failed to put them into practice. We know that utopian socialism has failed, so how do you view the failure of utopian socialists?

DL: One of the non-foundational objections to utopianism that Marx raised is that the methods that some of the utopians sought to use to realize socialism were not going to work. For example, Marx is sceptical about the scope for piecemeal experimentation within capitalism. He rather thinks that you need first to change the wider social framework.

Marx’s thought seems to be that piecemeal experiments within a society which is characterized by competition, self-interest, social division, and inequality, are liable to fail. You cannot build little islands of equality and community within such a social framework, because they will be corrupted from the outside. You might be able to achieve it on a very small scale—monastic orders might be an example—but it is not going to be possible for everyone in the society. As it happens, some communal experiments did endure and have some success. (I am thinking of communitarian groups in North America that lasted over a hundred years.) However, they tended to remain small, not to spread by example—as some communitarians thought that they would—and to survive because they had outside supporters who subsidized and supported them in various ways.

In short, Marx might well be right about the failure of communitarian experiments. However, the alternatives here are also problematic. For instance, it is not obvious that frontal assaults on the state are feasible or desirable. Questions of transition—of how to get from here to there—seem to me unresolved, they are something that we have to think about, argue about, and discuss. I do not have a clear and persuasive answer to the question: how will socialism come about. But I don’t think the idea that it will develop automatically as a result of the laws of history is clear and persuasive either.

LL: You made a very important distinction between foundational and non-foundational arguments. You also indicate that many Marxian objections to utopianism and arguments against utopian socialists are best characterised as non-foundational, so it seems to me that the abundant non-foundational arguments are worth exploring. However, why are you concerned with foundational rather than non-foundational Marxian objections to utopianism?

DL: I started with foundational arguments because philosophically they were the most interesting. They formed the subject of my recent article ‘On Marxian Utopophobia’.[iii] However, I have also started writing a piece about non-foundational arguments, which is in the early stages. [This article has since been published.][iv] And, at some point, I might also write something more about the possibility that the foundational arguments could be reformulated in a non-foundational way (which is alluded to in the original article). There is also a realism about power and self-interest in Marx’s account, which explains why certain utopian ideas about transition will not work. For example, Owen thought that you needed only to talk to people and explain what the desirable future society would look like for them to sign up and support the project. People would simply be politically persuaded by the power of the argument. In contrast, Marx is deeply sceptical about how efficacious reason alone might be, and he recognizes that power and self-interest often impedes purely rational humanitarian reasoning. This is the point at which Marx’s realism might trump utopian rationalism.

However, those reflections do not count against the need to design the future. They merely suggest that to realise that future, you will need a realistic and hard-headed strategy that addresses the interests and ideology of those opposed to social change. Marx maintains a realism about power and conflict which, it seems to me, any sane account of transition must address. However, that kind of Marxian realism is compatible with engaging in social design. As a result, Marxism and utopianism [are] not, in this respect, in conflict. Nor do I think that utopianism and realism are necessarily in conflict. You can have realistic blueprints as well as unrealistic blueprints.

LL: Are there any later Marxian commentators who rejected utopianism or shifted their attitudes towards utopianism, other than Marx and Engels?

DL: There are a few later Marxist thinkers who have a more positive attitude towards utopianism. The most famous of these is Ernst Bloch, who was a twentieth-century German philosopher, whose most famous book is The Principle of Hope. William Morris, who was influenced by and sympathetic towards Marx’s views, might also be an earlier example of someone who might be sympathetic to what I am saying. In short, I think there are a few examples of fellow travellers—like-minded people who have said adjacent things.

However, I think it is still a minority view. Oddly, the anti-utopianism of Marxism has been one of its most influential aspects. Not only amongst Marxists, but also amongst liberal academics with little wider sympathy with Marx. So, I do not think there are a lot of people sharing my views.

QL: Thinkers such as Jacques Derrida and Fredric Jameson also criticise contemporary society based on future dimensions. When they discuss utopia, they use the term to criticize reality but not to provide a detailed description of the future. So, how do you think they would view your work?

DL: I think that many of Marx’s defenders—Bloch would be an example—use a very expansive notion of utopianism. Utopia becomes associated with any vague wish for something better. However, it can thereby lose the original connotation of the ideal society which I have sought to emphasise and preserve. My approach towards utopia is thus more archaic than some of these more fashionable characterisations. However, I think it is worth preserving that original focus, which both respects its historical origins and is consistent with the way Marx understood utopianism.

I have not engaged much with either of the thinkers you mention. Derrida’s relation to Marxism is complicated. Jameson is obviously more sympathetic, but I do not find all of his work on utopia as clear as I would like.

QL: What is the difference between their understanding of future dimensions and your blueprints for the future?

DL: I am genuinely unsure about how far they might share my views about the desirability and possibility of socialism. It is in that context that I have sought to rehabilitate utopianism. Socialists ought to engage in questions of socialist design, ought to think imaginatively and seriously about how the basic institutions of a future society might function, and the kind of values they might embody.

Erick Olin Wright is an important figure in this context. And I would recommend his Envisioning Real Utopias book,[v] as well as the volumes he has edited in the series. He is not so much interested in the connections with Marx, but he writes eloquently about the need for socialism to have this design element. And he has written interestingly and engagingly about a variety of potential solutions to particular problems in socialist design. I would welcome more work in this vein. In this context, I might also mention the interesting book by Joseph Carens about market socialism.[vi] He outlines a utopian model in which the informational effects of markets are preserved, but without their distributive consequences.

LL: One Marxian objection to utopian thought is that a normative account is undemocratic. However, this undemocratic claim is not persuasive. In your view, are there any democratic concerns in Marx’s thoughts?

DL: I think that is an interesting example of the kind of question that is difficult to answer because of Marx’s unwillingness to say what socialism would look like (his refusal to ‘write recipes’ for the future). And yet we often have questions about the detail; we want to know what this alternative world might look like, not because we want a blueprint that we can slavishly implement, but because until we know more about the detail here, we cannot know whether we are sympathetic to this vision or not.

Marx is not alone here. John Rawls would be an example of a contemporary thinker who gestures at social alternatives—I am thinking of his remarks about ‘liberal socialism’ and ‘property owning democracy’—without describing them in much detail. He provides an abstract principle but does not enable us to see how it would operate in a concrete social setting.

Until some flesh is put on the bones—until we have more detail—we cannot tell what these Marxian or Rawlsian alternatives might look like. And until we know much more about those details, it seems impossible to come to a considered judgement about their desirability or feasibility.

With Marx, the most detail we have is from adjacent discussions. Looking closely at his political writings (for example on the Paris Commune), we can see that he is sympathetic to certain democratic institutions (initiative, recall, annual elections, imperative mandate, and so on). But he is reluctant to say any more.

The idea that utopias are undemocratic seems to assume that they are always stipulative, but as I suggested earlier, utopias can be detailed without being stipulative. Utopias can just be part of a conversation about what an alternative might look like. And collectively discussing and deciding how we want to live looks compatible with democracy. Questions of social design can be tackled in an experimental and open-minded manner. There is no necessary incompatibility between social design and democracy.

QL: Five years ago I conducted an experiment in Beijing. I invited 160 graduate students to participate in an utopian experiment. Do you think that utopian experiments are desirable or feasible? What do you think of utopian experiments?

DL: Well I think that some utopian experiments might be feasible, and that some subset of those might be desirable. However, I suspect that in order to locate that desirable and feasible subset, a large number of experiments in living are required.

Individually we are often experimenting, trying different ways of living and working in order to find out what works. I would like to see more of that happening, in a conscious and careful way, in the more collective dimensions of our social and political lives. Of course, doing this collectively is much harder. Not least, democratic experiments require some agreement about both what our goals are, and how to achieve them. However, it is important to remember that social experiments can operate at all kinds of scale.

Critics of utopianism often assume that it is always concerned with society-wide forms of social change. Historically, however, utopian experimentation often took a small scale communitarian form, and thought of its voluntaristic character as an advantage. Enthusiasts for experimentation should remember that social experiments do not have to involve imposing institutional and other arrangements on unwilling participants.

QL: The organizer designed the society, provided the ideas, and asked volunteers to join the experiment. So, it is a small-scale experiment. My point is, even if we argue that the utopian ideal is a desirable society, or desirable way of living, we are still discussing it theoretically. As a theorist, I did not want to volunteer to join the experiment. In what ways is a utopian experiment desirable?

DL: I fear that contemporary culture is not especially conducive to social experimentation. As others have observed, contemporaries find it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Moreover, some experiments in living are about escaping from the existing social world rather than changing it. And other social experiments embody institutions and values that I am unsympathetic to.

In short, I am sympathetic to the idea of social experimentation, but not all of its contemporary forms strike me as attractive.

QL: This reminds me of biographies—these biographies argue that Marx and his wife once lived communally in an experiment in Paris, and very quickly stopped living communally. The problem is that they propose that this experiment affected Marx and his views on utopianism, and the future. What do you think of this theory?

DL: My view is slightly different. I think there might be a contrast here between Marx and Engels.

I think that Marx was always hostile because there is early evidence of anti-utopianism in Marx in the very early 1840s, even before he moves to Paris. Moreover, I don’t think that Marx briefly having to share a house, was Marx engaging in a communal experiment. Marx’s anti-utopianism is always theoretically grounded (rooted in Hegelianism), and he was sceptical about utopian experiments from a very early stage. In contrast, for Engels it was the failure of Owenite and other communitarian experiments, particularly in Britain and America in the early 1840s, which turned him against them. In short, Engels’s anti-utopianism looks more empirical than that of Marx.

LL: I want to say that in the ‘later Marx’, the inventors of the socialist revolution transform [society], rather than conduct experiments. Maybe this idea emerged because his early experiment failed, and the answer is different?

DL: Marx sometimes suggests that there is no scope to escape the effects of private property and individualism, without overthrowing the entirety of existing social arrangements. He sometimes suggests that modern economic life will always corrupt and contaminate piecemeal social experimentation; that you either have to change the whole or nothing will really change.

I hope that he is wrong about that because I do not think the chances of changing the whole from nothing are great, and because I think it is perfectly reasonable for people not to want to take leaps in the dark. It is not that the social experiments have to be perfect but they have to provide enough sense of the desirability and feasibility of alternative arrangements for others to want to promote and protect those arrangements.

LL: We need recipes and that is a key point. Just as Engels said: ‘To take the socialist design, we need to make the design’. I think as you mentioned, the people who are familiar with utopian socialism are not fond of Marxism; the people who research Marxism may not agree with utopian socialism. However, you have done a very good job in this area, and if people are asked to create a socialist design, I think that you are the best choice. Perhaps there is an opportunity for everyone to make the effort to think about ‘recipes’. However, I want to ask you personally, If you are asked to do the job, what recipe will you write for the future kitchen?

DL: Well that is certainly what I want people to do. However, although I insist on the need for recipes, I am not confident in my own recipe writing skills. I feel more at home critically engaging with the recipes of others.

For example, I have already mentioned News from Nowhere, but I do not think that Morris’s ideal is my ideal. We can read Morris as saying that the only way we can achieve equality is to give up on technology and lead a simpler life. I hope that he is wrong about that because I value many of the achievements of technology and industrialization. I can see the attractions of ‘the simple life’, but I do not think that is my social ideal.

When I am confronted with a recipe, I can reflect and engage with it, and say what I like and do not like. However, if you just gave me a blank sheet of paper, I do not know if I would come up with anything of much value.

I fear that I am not temperamentally suited to writing utopias myself, but I would still encourage others to have a go.

References

Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels 1976[1845], The German Ideology, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels Collected Works Vol 05, London: Lawrence & Wishart.

Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels 2004[1848], The Communist Manifesto, translated by Samuel Moore, London: Penguin Classics.

Marx, Karl 1992 [1844], ‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts’, in Early Writings, translated by Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton, London: Penguin Classics.

Marx, Karl 1992, Capital Vol 1, translated by Ben Fowkes, London: Penguin Classics.

Marx, Karl 1993, Capital Vol 3, translated by David Fernbach, London: Penguin Classics.

Engels, Frederick 1989[1880], Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels Collected Works Vol 24, London: Lawrence & Wishart.

Carens, Joseph, 1981, Equality, Moral incentives, and the Market: An Essay in Utopian Politico-Economic Theory, Chicago: Chicago University Press.

More, Thomas 2003, Utopia, translated by Paul Turner, London: Penguin Classics.

Morris, William 2003, News From Nowhere, edited and introduced by David Leopold, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Leopold, David 2007, The Young Karl Marx: German Philosophy, Modern Politics, and Human Flourishing, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

——2013, 'Marxism and Ideology: From Marx to Althusser', in The Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies, edited by Michael Freeden, Lyman Tower Sargent, and Marc Stears, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

——2014，'Marx and British Socialism', in The Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-Century British Philosophy，edited by William Mander, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

——2015，‘Marx, Engels, and Other Socialisms’ in The Cambridge Companion to the Communist Manifesto, edited by Terrell Carver and James Farr, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

——2016, ‘On Marxian Utopophobia’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 54,1:111-134.

——2018, ‘Marx, Engels, and Some (Non-Foundational) Arguments Against Utopian Socialism, Jan Kandiyali (edited), Reassessing Marx’s Social and Political Philosophy. Freedom, Recognition and Human Flourishing, New York: Routledge. 

Wright, Eric Olin 2010, Envisioning Real Utopias. London: Verso.

[i] We would like to take this opportunity to thank Prof. David Leopold for the constant support and encouragement through the years. We had accomplished four academic interviews on topics ranging from liberalism and analytical Marxism to utopian socialism when we were affiliated to the department of politics and international relations at the University of Oxford. The first interview was published in 2017, ‘Karl Marx: Son of Liberty —Interview with David Leopold’ can be accessed at: http://zzs.ujs.edu.cn/xbskb/EN/article/searchArticle.do . The second one was published in 2019, ‘Analytical Marxism: Methods and Approaches’ can be accessed at:

https://oversea.cnki.net/KNavi/JournalDetail?pcode=CJFD&pykm=LJSK . The third one was published in 2021, ‘G. A. Cohen’ s Political Philosophy Thoughts’ can be accessed at: https://seer.ufs.br/index.php/tempopresente/article/view/15446 and this is the fourth one. Prof. David Leopold has been kind enough to go through this interview and significantly improved it with his careful and accurate reading.

[ii] Preface to 1888 English edition of “The Manifesto of the Communist Party.” In MECW 26.

[iii] See Leopold 2016.

[iv] See Leopold 2018.

[v] See Wright 2010.

[vi] See Carens 1981.

by Michael Levien

Matthew Huber, (2022) Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet, London: Verso.

The year-long American saga that culminated in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) underscored the difference between two ways of mitigating climate change at the national level. The first is elite climate policy in which wonks and technocrats come up with the smartest policies to incentivise private capital to invest in the right technologies. This is, ultimately, what we got with the IRA, which has been accurately characterised as the triumph of ‘green industrial policy’.¹ The second is popular climate politics which seeks to build a broad political coalition for decarbonisation by tying it to social programmes that directly improve people’s lives. This is the idea behind the Green New Deal, which to a surprising extent made its way into the initial Build Back Better bill before Joe Manchin got his hands on it. Matthew Huber’s book Climate Change as Class War provides a powerful critique of the first while advancing a labour-centred version of the second.

Huber lands many good punches against what he calls professional-class climate politics. Building on the Ehrenreichs’ concept of the professional managerial class (PMC),² Huber argues that PMC climate politics characteristically over-emphasises that class’ stock-in-trade: education and credentials. In their hands, climate politics thus becomes a matter of knowledge (communicating the science) more than one of power (tackling the class power of the fossil-fuel industry). PMC policy technocrats further internalise neoliberal logic with their obsession with pricing carbon – a policy that ultimately balances the carbon budget on the backs of working-class consumers. In its more radical manifestations, PMC environmentalism – degrowth being the main target here – espouses an ascetic ‘politics of less’ that has no resonance with working-class people who already do not have enough. This type of environmental politics, Huber argues, explains why the right has been able to mobilise the working class against the environment.

By way of alternative, Huber advances a theory of working-class climate politics which he dubs ‘proletarian ecology’. The starting point, developed over Chapters 1 and 2, is to recognise that industrial fossil capital is responsible for the vast majority of emissions. As Huber sketches with discussions of the cement and fertiliser industries – for the latter, Huber draws on some interviews with managers of a fertiliser plant in Louisiana – their carbon intensity is not a matter of greed but of the structural imperative to produce surplus value, and therefore will not be halted (as opposed to greenwashed) by any amount of shaming. Thus, ‘Climate change requires an antagonistic approach towardsowners of capital in the “hidden abode” of production’ (p. 106). The problem is that ‘the climate movement today – made up of professional class activists and the most marginalized victims of climate change – is too narrowly constructed to constitute a real threat to the power of industrial capital’ (p. 69).

This brings us to the bold and controversial claim of Climate Change as Class War: it is the working class (and organised labour in particular) that must be the main agent of radical climate politics, not the diverse coalitions of ‘marginalised groups’ – which includes Indigenous movements against pipelines and Black-led environmental justice organisations – who are currently the vanguard of the climate justice movement. What Huber calls ‘livelihood environmentalism’ only sees the working class as having environmental interests when their communities’ land, water or health are directly threatened (p. 195). Huber’s theory of proletarian ecology, by contrast, proceeds from the broader recognition that ‘a defining feature of working-class life under capitalism is profound alienation from the ecological conditions of life itself’ (p. 188). Thus ‘a working-class interest in ecology will emerge not from the experience of environmental threats, but from a profoundseparation from nature and the means of subsistence’ (pp. 181–2). Rather than defending bodies or landscapes, it will focus on the working class’s material interest in decommodifying the means of subsistence (p. 196).

Thus far, Huber appears to have merely redefined the means of subsistence as ecological to establish that there is a working-class interest in ecology. But how could the material interests of the working class concretely lead from class consciousness to climate consciousness? Huber admits that it is not obvious, but that it must come from linking ‘direct material improvements in people’s lives to climate action’ (p. 198). It would ultimately be up to political organisations ‘to name those improvements as measures taken to address the climate crisis’ (p. 198). It must be said that this ‘political education’ is left unelaborated. It is also in tension with Huber’s insistence throughout the book that direct material class interests will drive climate politics. It suggests, instead, the far more convincing argument that a left climate movement necessarily involves what Stuart Hall would call the articulation of climate and class (not to mention other types of struggle, to be discussed shortly). This is the messy work of politics, which is certainly conditioned and constrained by class structures, but cannot be read directly from them.

Huber advances two distinct strategies that he never harmonises. Chapter 5 elaborates the case for a Green New Deal, which follows quite directly from the case made thus far. The basic idea is that ‘positive and easy-to-understand material gains are the only path to mass, popular support for climate action’ (p. 199). In contrast to the politics of less, this agenda providesmore to the working class, whether through broad measures like universal healthcare or programmes that clearly combine climate and redistributive goals – such as free public transport or weatherising homes to reduce electricity bills. This ‘politics of life’ focuses, in Marxian terms, on social reproduction (p. 194). Because it requires the state to make the needed investments in social reproduction and green energy while also euthanising the fossil-fuel industry, it must necessarily involve an electoral strategy. Yet the lesson Huber draws from the failure of the Sanders campaign is that to achieve a Green New Deal, like the original New Deal, we need strong organised working-class power.

This leads Huber to conclude that unionised energy workers must be the key agents of climate politics. While the Just Transition discourse posits an alliance of workers and ‘frontline communities’ affected by fossil-fuel industries and climate change, it treats both as victims rather than as sources of power (p. 226). The environmental justice movement, Huber argues, has not succeeded in transforming the geography of environmental harm and does not have a theory of how to build a powerful coalition (p. 207). Indigenous-led direct protests against fossil-fuel infrastructure (for example, the DAPL, Keystone XL and Line 3 struggles) may sometimes stop a new project, ‘but fail to put much of a dent in the mass fossil fuel complex at the center of the reproduction of capitalism’ (p. 231). Student strikes and youth activism also have no leverage. Only the working class organised at the point of production has the disruptive capacity to make real gains: therefore, we need labour strikes, not school strikes.

Given the overall weakness of the American labour movement and the short timeframe we have to work with, Huber proposes that we concentrate efforts in one sector: electrical utilities. This sector is obviously central to the needed energy transition and has several benefits: it is highly unionised for the United States (24%), highly regulated, and strategically crucial to the functioning of capitalism. Huber’s vision is that organised electric-utility workers can use their leverage to force a transition to public power, democratising and socialising utilities, and from there push for a renewable energy transition. Huber cheekily calls this strategy ‘socialism in one sector’. While he recognises that energy workers’ unions in the US are currently far from radical, he spends the better part of his last chapter demonstrating that there once were militant electrical unions and that there still are in other parts of the world. Strangely, however, Huber ends the book without elaborating the connection between the politics of social reproduction advanced in Chapter 5 and the politics at the point of production emphasised in the remainder of the book. The first suggests a broad and indeed multi-class – effectively left-populist – coalition that would have an interest in things like free healthcare and lower electricity bills; the second a narrow workerism. Huber never resolves this ambiguity though ultimately leaves his eggs in the second basket.

The first strength of Huber’s book is its critique of elite environmentalism, which is largely convincing with the caveat that he is arguing against a strawman version of degrowth. While Huber appears correct about the dim political prospects for this position in the United States (and much of the world), I would still point out that he misconstrues degrowthers as advocating green austerity when its most sophisticated advocates are at pains to emphasise the centrality to their political programme of redistribution (withinand between countries) to raise the living standard of the majority.³ There is also the problem, as Geoff Mann observes,⁴ that there is also no evidence for the alternative assumed by Huber: that something like a green (socialist) modernisation can ultimately resolve the climate crisis by decoupling growth and carbon emissions.⁵ I am convinced by Huber’s argument – a second strength of the book – that a Green New Deal (or something like it) is the most likely-to-win left alternative to elite climate policy in the United States. Nevertheless, this argument requires neither his theory of proletarian ecology nor his argument that energy workers will be the vanguard of an energy transition – which are far less convincing.

The most obvious criticism that may be levelled here is that Huber dismisses the struggles of Indigenous and Black-led movements against fossil-fuel infrastructure and industries. ‘All these struggles are extremely important’, Huber weakly affirms on page 286, after making clear they have no place in his theory. Leaving no doubt that he believes such struggles are stuck in local particularism and therefore not the true agents of history, Huber doubles down on the classical Marxian postulate that only the proletariat – ‘the universal class’ – ‘has the capacity to look beyond the local, the parochial, and the community, to see humanity as a whole’ (p. 43). Huber’s high-modernist – indeed stageist – conception of socialism (buttressed by quotations from Kautsky throughout) leads him to dismiss any alternatives that emerge from such movements: ‘all efforts to recover a rooted and localized relation to nature ignore the very basic definition of working-class proletarian ecology: the lack of direct connection to the ecological means of life’ (p. 286). This is, of course,Huber’s definition and it is strange (PMCish?) to admonish social movements for their lack of adherence to an academic definition. While one can rightly debate the scale at which transformations of both the energy system and capitalism must be orchestrated, Huber’s assertion that the proletariat stands for a universal modern future while struggles emanating from other axes of oppression are essentially backward-looking parochialisms reproduces the most crass and teleological versions of Marxism (and nineteenth-century thought in general), flies against the wind of a century of history – in which most Communist revolutions were driven by peasant wars while Western workers turned reformist –, and ignores corresponding reconstructions of Marxism to account for the failure of the Northern proletariat to fulfil its historical mission. Third World and Black Marxism, the vast literature on the agrarian question, neo-Gramscianism and the vital Marxist-feminist work on social reproduction have expanded our conception of class struggle and taken seriously the interactions of racism and gender domination with capitalism. But Huber engages none of this, falling back into the simplistic position of emphasising class over race while ignoring the empirical reality of their interaction and avoiding the problem of their political articulation.

Given the strong political emphasis on anti-racism and Indigenous critiques of settler colonialism on the climate left – which respond to the very real imbrication of fossil-fuel industries with histories of racism and colonial dispossession – Huber’s emphasis on the agency of the overwhelmingly white⁶ energy workers of the United States will have no shortage of critics and is more likely to burn than build bridges. What makes this central argument of Climate Change as Class War more perplexing is that Huber providesno evidence that the energy proletariat of the Global North has any interest in, or even a latent tendency to organise around, decarbonisation. Given Huber’s belabouring of the point that material interests drive politics, he nowhere seriously confronts the fact that an energy transition will clearly put many workers – in coal and gas-fired power plants and also in the extractive sector, which Huber ignores entirely – out of work. Most estimates put the number at over a million or several million jobs in the United States.⁷ While these might be replaced in the aggregate with green jobs, an energy transition is almost certainly going to amount to deindustrialisation for many workers and regions. There is thus far more reason to believe that an energy transition isagainst many energy workers’ material interests. This is, of course, why ‘just transition’ advocates spend so much time elaborating the measures that would be required – job guarantees, transition assistance, early retirement, etc. – to cushion the blow.⁸ Their proposals are thus far totally inadequate to this truly daunting task and show no signs of being popular with energy workers. But Huber never even addresses the problem; he simply assumes it away.

Most fossil-fuel workers in the United States are white men without college degrees living in red or purple states. About 90% are non-unionised but nonetheless earn salaries in the upper five digits.⁹ The largest unions in the fossil-fuel sector (including the major utility workers’ unions) have historically fought environmental and climate regulation¹⁰ and, at best, espoused an ‘all of the above’ energy policy with a large focus on carbon capture. Although many energy unions are supportive of renewable energy with union contracts and the more progressive supported versions of Build Back Better (though critically without the binding renewable standards for utilities), they simultaneously support pipeline projects like Keystone and DAPL, warn about premature transition to renewables, and vehemently defend coal, oil and gas. In sum, they are fine with green investments because they bring additional (though often poorer-paying) jobs, but are immediately off board when there is talk of shutting anything down. It is understandable that workers should want to protect their jobs; it is harder to understand how Huber can interpret them as beingless parochial than those seeking to stop pipelines from both despoiling their territory and dooming Earth.

The crux is that, while energy workers may possess structural power, Huber offers no reason why they would direct that power towards an energy transition that would put many of them out of work. Huber’s short discussion of the history of energy unions fighting for classic union goals in Chapter 7 does nothing to explain why they would wield their class power to fight climate change. Even if one could build union power in the electrical-utility sector, what is the plan to effectively counter the political backlash from coal, oil and gas workers (only 5.6% of whom are unionised) or those in the carbon-intensive industrial sector? How can the left counter the sway of Trumpism among energy workers when a part of its appeal is that it does address their material interests in prolonging the fossil-fuel industry? Strangely, though Huber ventured into a fertiliser plant in Louisiana to talk with its managers to flesh out his theory of ‘industrial fossil capital’, he did not appear to talk to any workers in the ‘hidden abode of production’ to test out his theory of proletarian ecology.¹¹ The result is that Huber embraces, on purely dogmatic grounds, a political agent that has shown no empirical tendency to fight climate change, while dismissing the groups that have. He never seems to ask himself: who has more interest in shutting down the fossil-fuel industry – workers earning almost $100k in it, or those being literally killed by its pollution?

It is easy to be the critic and very hard to advance a positive theory that can inspire a fight against overwhelming odds. Huber is not wrong in suggesting that strikes give workers a particularly potent form of leverage, but he is wrong that movements without that power have never won anything. More broadly, failure is overdetermined and the failure of one strategy is not evidence for the success of another. It would certainly strengthen the climate movement to have organised labour on board, but it is almost certainly mistaken to assert that energy workers are going to be the vanguard of an energy transition. Huber simply avoids grappling with the far more likely scenario of an extreme political backlash from fossil-fuel workers in parts of the energy system that cannot transition. 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, or at least made palatable enough to avoid the reactionary political dénouement that has so far been the legacy of deindustrialisation in the United States (a task that is far more difficult when it is the central government and environmentalists rather than greedy automobile companies destroying blue-collar jobs). It also involves thinking a lot more than Green New Deal advocates have done so far about how to envision a low-carbon future in such a way that it could feasibly resonate with the rural and small-town working class where Trumpism has found such fertile ground. But there is also the danger of spending precious time organising a group that is likely to be stubbornly recalcitrant while dismissing natural allies. In an advanced capitalist country with a complex class structure that is thoroughly imbricated with racism, reverting to orthodoxy is no substitute for the hard work of mapping the terrain on which a winning political coalition for climate justice could be built.

References

Aronoff, Kate 2022, ‘The Bitter Triumph of the Inflation Reduction Act’, The New Republic, 8 August, available at: <https://newrepublic.com/article/167337/bitter-triumph-inflation-reduction-act>.

Aronoff, Kate, Alyssa Battistoni, Daniel Aldana Cohen and Thea Riofrancos 2019, A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal, London: Verso.

Bureau of Labor Statistics 2021a, Union Membership (Annual) News Release, available at: <https://www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/union2_01222021.htm>.

Bureau of Labor Statistics 2021b, May 2021 National Occupational Employment and Wage Estimates, available at: <https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm>. 

Cha, J. Mijin, Vivian Price, Dimitris Stevis and Todd E. Vachon with Maria Brescia-Weiler 2021, Workers and Communities in Transition: Report of the Just Transition Listening Project, Labor Network for Sustainability, available at: <https://www.labor4sustainability.org/jtlp-2021/jtlp-report/>.

Climate Justice Alliance 2019, Just Transition Principles, available at: <https://climatejusticealliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/CJA_JustTransition_highres.pdf>.

Ehrenreich, Barbara and John Ehrenreich 1977, ‘The Professional-Managerial Class’, Radical America, 11, 2: 7–32. World, London: Windmill.

Jacobson et al. 2015, ‘100% Clean and Renewable Wind, Water, and Sunlight (WWS) All-sector Energy Roadmaps for the 50 United States’,Energy & Environmental Science, 8, 7: 2093–117, available at: <https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/USStatesWWS.pdf>.

Mann, Geoff 2022, ‘Reversing the Freight Train’, London Review of Books, 44, 16, available at: <https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n16/geoff-mann/reversing-the-freight-train>.

Martin, Nick 2021, ‘Decolonize the Lithium Boom’, New Republic, 12 May, available at: <https://newrepublic.com/article/162350/decolonize-lithium-boom-indigenous-rights>.

Meyer, Robinson 2022, ‘Biden’s Climate Law is Ending 40 Years of Hands-Off Government’, The Atlantic, 18 August, available at: <https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2022/08/climate-law-manchin-industrial-policy/671183/>.

Mildenberger, Matto 2020, Carbon Captured: How Business and Labor Control Climate Politics, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Niarchos, Nicolas 2021, ‘The Dark Side of Congo’s Cobalt Rush’, The New Yorker, 31 May, available at: <https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/05/31/the-dark-side-of-congos-cobalt-rush>.

Pollin, Robert and Brian Callaci 2019, ‘The Economics of a Just Transition: A Framework for Supporting Fossil Fuel-Dependent Workers and Communities in the United States’, Labour Studies Journal, 44, 2: 93–138.

Schmelzer, Matthias, Andrea Vetter and Aaron Vansintjan 2022, The Future is Degrowth: A Guide to a World Beyond Capitalism, London: Verso.

Sicotte, Diane M., Kelly A. Joyce and Arielle Hesse 2022, ‘Necessary, Welcome or Dreaded? Insights on Low-carbon Transitions from Unionized Energy Workers in the United States’, Energy Research & Social Science, 88 (102651): 1–10.

Footnotes

• Michael Levien is Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, United States of America. email: levien@jhu.edu

I first met Bob Meister in Sydney in 2013. I had just started my PhD on the topic of Chinese financialisation and I was struck by Bob’s ability to articulate Marxist categories, techniques of finance, philosophical reflections and politics. I then had the opportunity to meet Bob in other occasions, academic conferences, activist laboratories in Italy and elsewhere. Over these last years, Bob’s contribution has been essential to reflect on the transformation of capitalism in its financialised form. Bob not only encourages us to rethink the politics of justice through the spectrum of capital accumulation and dis-accumulation, but it offers way to use temporality and liquidity – the preferential tools financial capital use for its own reproduction – as a form of counterpower. In this interview, I asked him about his intellectual trajectory and how we can start approaching justice as a “financial option?”

GDM: Hi Bob, it is a great opportunity to be able to do this interview. I think everyone should know more about your work and become familiar with your argument that finance and the way finance works should be used to revise historical injustice and rethink new political actions. At this juncture, in which capitalism is increasingly financialised, the definition of new political perspectives is increasingly urgent.

To better understand this most recent development of your work, I'd like to start by exploring your intellectual trajectory, how you developed the argument for your first book Political Identity: Thinking Through Marx¹ and how much this was influenced by Marxism.

RM:Political Identity tried to learn from Marx himself, as someone thinking through the expansion of capitalism from within, rather than engaging with the Marxism that followed. I began it after graduating from college in 1968, demonstrating at the Chicago Democratic Convention, and moving to England as a draft resister; it went to press in 1989 as the Berlin Wall was falling. The intervening years spanned the global success of anti-imperialist liberation movements by the 1970s to the collapse in the 1980s of the Soviet-style communist states that had prevented those movements from being suppressed. By 1989, my project was to draw on Marx’s own practice—as a writer and reader—to arrive at an anticapitalist politics from within the emergence and apparent triumph of capitalism’s own self-understanding. So, I largely resisted pulling out of Marx a body of doctrines, conclusions, as though he were writing primary texts expounding “Marxism,” as such. Instead, I grappled with the fact that Marx provides mainly secondary texts on the thought of Hegel, Bauer, Smith, Ricardo, Tocqueville, Proudhon, etc., which he reads—often in tandem with their critics--as the self-understanding of a situation that they purport to comprehend (as if they were doing so from outside). Marx asks through this approach what a situation (world) needs to realise orconfess about itself in order to remain as it is. When and how could such confession, rather, constitutes acritique—demonstrating why it can’t just keep on going, and politicising the changes that are already underway? When and how can following through on a critique transform a situation throughconversion? InPolitical Identity, I see Marx’s reading non-Marxist writers, often focused on their disagreements with each other, as effectively decoupling confession from critique, conversion—there by blurring the transformative potential of an emerging situation’s understanding of itself. That was my starting premise.

GDM: Very interesting. I see how a dialectical approach prevails in this line of thought.

RM: My contribution was then to take Marx’s sources (some of whom are now familiar only because he quotes them) as a basis for reconstructing the debates of the 1970s and ’80s to make them available for a similar mode of analysis—Hegelian objects, as it were, that, when read together, reveal something more than what they say. I did this, first, with mid-twentieth-century philosophical literature on freedom as freedom of mind, which is largely about how the process of coming to get what we want is both undermined and enabled by the process of coming to want what we get. The 1960s Left critique of this (“liberation as consciousness-raising”) resulted in various forms of standpoint theory, so I was able to reconstruct Marx’s joint critique of Hegel and the Left Hegelians along these lines. My next topic was the democratic theory of institution-building—both normative and empirical—and, here again, I reconstructed the objects of Marx’s critique (Hegel, Tocqueville) through mid-twentieth-century debates on pluralism, participation, and cooptation. Here, again, I showed how the transformative potential of democracy to mobilise demands for the reversal of historical injustice is converted into a machinery for manufacturing consent by making the confession of an evil past the precondition for decoupling interests from identities going forward. My last broad topic, following Marx, was the critique political economy—here attempting to reconstruct Marx’s critique of Smith and Ricardo out of post-Keynesian account of the relation macroeconomics and international trade in the context of energy crisis, stagflation, cartelisation, and so forth. I didn’t then have a theory of financialisation—its conceptual foundations were still being laid out in the ’80s —but I ended up describing much of Marx’s “economics” (for example, the labour theory of value) in the aftermath of Keynes as a critical theory of the accounting techniques necessary to instantiate a distinction become macroeconomic stabilisation and microeconomic (market) equilibrium.

You asked, originally, whether this book was influenced by Marxism. The short answer is that it confronts, in the spirit of Marx, a set of literatures to which most Marxists are politically and culturally allergic. That’s what my new book does with the financialisation literature. So, in a sense, the earlier project continues.

GDM: So let's go through this gradually though, because there is a lot. I think is truly remarkable the fact that you've followed a strong continuity in your methods and reflections, but, at the same time, your work has always had the capacity to deal with contingency.

RM: Speaking of contingency, I’ve also learned some things since them. I absorbed Lacan and Bataille as a way of complicating my Marxist Hegelianism. I thought about the projection and introjection, transpersonal conceptions of subjectivity, read a lot of theology and psychoanalysis, studied law, and much later some sociolinguistics. Most importantly, perhaps, I’ve updated Marx’s reading of political economy to incorporate, not only Keynes himself, but the broad approaches to financial theory that led from his concept of liquidity preference to the valuation of financial derivatives, and especially of options.

GDM: And all of these elements started appearing in your following bookAfter Evil.² Here, you worked along the concepts of temporality and justice. The concept of transitional justice, in particular. Drawing from your influential teachers: Michael Walzer, John Rawls, Isaiah Berlin, Robert Nozick who worked around the issue of distributive justice, in way you reversed their analysis. So, can you speak about the temporality of justice and injustice, how you link it to the temporality of capital accumulation and dispossession and its perpetuation in relation to cumulative injustice, how do you employ these analyses in your most recent work?

RM: Sure. As a student, undergraduate and graduate, between 1964 and 1973, I was a witness to some major debates that define a liberal political thought 50 years later. One side, essentially, argued thatstructural justice could be reconciled with democracy only if historically oppressed identities were not mobilised to reverse their cumulative disadvantages, so that only forward-looking arguments against such gaps remain; the other side addressed historical injustice, but its remedy must be limited to direct compensation of victims by perpetrators without regard to ongoing beneficiaries, and thus to questions structure and democracy. These were the views my teachers and my presence in their classrooms, even then, was as a Marxist, concerned with the beneficiary question (class relations), and also with when and how confession of persistent and compounding historical inequality could become something more than an unburdening of democratic regimes from responsibility for injustices in the past. All of this eventually played out inAfter Evil, which compares the role of human rights discourse in the age of post-Cold War capitalist globalisation to earlier versions of the rights of man that created tension between the rise of capitalism and the promise of democratic revolution. In post-’89 humanitarian discourse, the apparent tension between resolving historical injustice and advancing structural justice disappears. Why? Because justice itself is now seen to have an essentiallytransitional (that of “transitional justice”), which is to enable moral consensus that the past was evil by imposing a political consensus that the evil is past. Here, the cumulative effects of historical injustice are no longer considered to be a structural problem subject to democratic challenge because the injustice itself is consigned to an earlier time. This means that beneficiaries of past evil who are no longer called up to justify it will be allowed to continue to accumulate the gains accruing from past evil without appearing to perpetuate it.

GDM: This is a strong, materialist turn in the development of your work. Could you please elaborate on this?

RM: So, here’s what capitalism now claims to be: a period historical evil (originary dispossession) for which someone was to blame, followed by an extraordinary run of good luck, for which no one is to blame. What’s left are cumulative benefits on one side, and residual trauma on the other. The beneficiaries of capitalism are free to recognise that unresolved trauma is disabling—it prevents capitalism’s victims from making better, more realistic, choices going forward because they are still stuck in the past. And, because this psychic disability has no necessary link to their accretion of material advantage, acknowledging it can alleviate the anxiety of ongoing beneficiaries about having to disgorge their continuing gains as though they might as well have been perpetrators of the originary injustice. You then have a capitalism in which compounding inequality no longer seems to need a justification, provided that the persistent trauma that it leaves is confessed and, somehow, addressed. This is a main argument inAfter Evil.

GDM: So, from here can we move to the argument of your last book, which isJustice Is an Option: A Democratic Theory of Finance for the 21st Century.³ So how shall we understand the claim “Justice Is an Option?“ Can you elaborate on the double meanings it conveys focusing on the way the theory of options in finance can serve as an analytical frame to understand the development of financial capital accumulation. How can this break capital’s tendency to perpetuate historical injustice… What advantage/ breaking point does finance offer here?

RM: Sure.Justice Is an Option spells outs what historical beneficiaries inAfter Evil ultimately got: it was political protection of the liquidity of the financial vehicles—the assets—through which their benefits can be cumulative. This protection can be described, and valued, in the language of options theory: maybe as a call option allowing them to harvest whatever financial upside attributable to inequality as such; maybe as a put option shielding them from downside risk to associated with political and financial volatility as such. Such options arethemselves financial assets, adding value to a portfolio over and above whatever underlying assets they may be used to hedge or leverage. Their availability tends to have a ratchet effect on pre-existing inequality, widening it in periods of volatility that might otherwise tend to narrow it. So, in theJustice book, I return, for the first time in decades, to my liberal teachers and begin to talk about how they disregarded the value added by the optionality that allows accumulation to continue to compound. If the character and value of cumulative (historical) injustice can be described as an option, so too, can its remedy: historical justice. Hence,Justice Is an Option.

GDM: OK, for everyone to understand, I think it's important that we explain options theory by referring it to an historical event, which you did. Thinking about the financial crisis, you showed how option theory could have served governments to play against capital markets, by means of retaining the power on the assets we saved through public money and thus the wealth that was not adequately redistributed after 2008.

RM: Let me answer by contrasting my “option” view with the “loss/reparation” approach to historical injustice. The first is the view that historical injustice is essentially theloss (often traumatic) of something that you had for which you should be compensated. If the injustice could (except for trauma) have been extinguished by immediate compensation, we get thereparations view--that not paying compensation is a further injustice on which interest compounds--the more ancient the injustice, the more unjust it is due to compounding.

Now, what do I mean when I say that justice is an option? I mean is that the present value of the past is contingent on what happens next, and that it can fluctuate with how rapidly and widely things are changing, rather than simply increasing with the passage of time. So, unlike the passage of time, which always happens next, a change in volatility that affects options pricing is can be affected by what we do. The key chokepoint here is the liquidity of the asset markets through which wealth accumulates and compounds. And democracy can bring about capital disaccumulation by creating asset market illiquidity—which why democratic movements often pull back if they fear there will be no asset values left to redistribute were they to succeed. It also means, as I argue, that capital markets can suppress democracy by threatening to become illiquid unless political risks subside. So, liquidity crisis is now an autoimmune response to any threat we might make because capitalism threatens to destroy its own liquidity unless we give up. This is presently how capital market can benefit from the threats we pose to them, and my book proposes way for us to think about, and possibly to harvest, those gains.

GDM: Well, because there is the issue of capitalism shorting itself, right? So, betting on its own previsualised failure and take this to leverage further and future value. You wrote “shorting is the immune system of capitalism,” which is very, extremely powerful definition.

RM: Yes, so, in a way, this is my contribution to the Left’s self-understanding of its own political failure, and of the possibilities for its future success. Now, let me now zero in on the relationship between optionality and liquidity at a conceptual level. The thing that we as Marxists need to understand is that, in a monetary economy (unlike a barter economy), the exchange of goods for money occurs in two ways: one is that it's a swap of liquidity for utility, where you're exchanging money that you happen to have for a commodity that some other person happens to have. Here, the market value of the commodity is supposed to be, on average, equivalent to the money price. OK. But, then, how does one get the money one doesn’t happen to have—or, for that matter, the commodity? Either can come from an exogenous source, but, in capitalism, the source of each could also be, at least partly, endogenous: for example, the commodity purchase of the commodity could be financed by “borrowing” the money from the seller and pledging the commodity itself as collateral. And the seller could help the borrower to repay the loan by agreeing to repurchase the collateral at a discount (thereby collecting future interest) or at a premium (thereby locking in a future profit). Here, there is no difference between borrowing money and lending collateral—but the valuation of the commodity as collateral—how much you can borrow against it (or be paid for lending it) will almost always be different from its market price at any given moment, because it will reflect the volatility of that commodity price over time. Why? Because a lender against collateral, unlike someone raising cash by selling, must always be concerned with the variance (volatility) of prices rather than their present (or, even their average) level. The spread between pricing the commodity as collateral and the collateral as commodity is the liquidity premium of money relative to that commodity. And, in many markets, you canpay that premium as the price of anoption. So, for example, you can finance the purchase of a car as a commodity by borrowing against it as collateral, but there will be a spread between the price you pay and how much you can finance. A money-back guarantee—the option to resell at its original price—will cost you more than you would pay for the car itself. My book extends this way of thinking (options theory) to macroeconomic aggregates. The literature on this suggests that a fully financialised macroeconomy would be one in which a purchase and sale of commodities on the one hand is also a purchase and sale of collateral on the other. For this to work, you would need a “derivative” market in options, seen as purely financial assets the pricing of which will fill in the gaps by allowing liquidity premium to be continuously priced and monetized.

GDM: And we have seen how the issue of collaterals has been at the centre of the re-purchase agreements (repos), shadow banking interchanges, flows of capital that have been at the roots of the financial crisis exchanged and that reflected the way in which money has been exchanged in very asymmetrical and hierarchical way, bypassing regulation, and taking advantage from the turbulence inherent to capitalism.

RM: My theoretical intervention in the new book is to focus on the liquidity premium as a macroeconomic that applies to government bailouts (guarantees) of major financial markets, and, indirectly, the financial system as a whole. It’s all still based on the difference—and links between—exchanging liquidity for things and borrowing liquidity by lending things, which lies at the heart of finance. And financialisation is essentially the idea that the creation of money is the same as shorting collateral. What we learned in the financial crisis of 2008 was just that, or so I argue in the book.

GDM: Absolutely, and can you refer to this specific mechanism? I mean really retrace that moment of the financial crisis in which we witnessed what you are describing, touching on the public private divide and role, which is also at the core of this power struggle. Because, if we think that some of the assets of the banks that were threatening to blow themselves up like suicide bombers, weren't saved by the Fed, they wouldn't have survived, and no one would have survived… But the bailout (tax payers’ money) in the end mainly benefitted and leveraged the value of the same capital markets assets that were doomed to fail; it went to the advantage of who created the crisis, perpetuating a condition of historical and cumulative injustice.

RM: This is where options theory is illuminating. What we are talking about, when we are talking about options theory, is the degree to which capital markets can be endogenously funded, which is to say the degree to which they are grounded in the purchase and sale of collateral—essentially long and short positions that are, in theory, reversible at a price. What was revealed in the financial crisis of 2008, and again in 2020, is the following stylised story:If (1) commodities have been assetised; (2) assets have been collateralised; (3) collateral is shorted to create liquidity to finance assert markets;then liquidity support of the financial markets becomes increasingly continuous with price support of the broader asset markets. In other words, this is very different from simply bailing out the banking system in particular—it’s about capital accumulation as such, and who pays, and gets paid, for it to continue.

I’m not the only one who noticed this revelation. Three academic fields were created, or resuscitated, because of it. The first now calls itself “critical macrofinance.” It sees that shadow banking, which was the source of the crisis, issuing money by essentially shorting supposedly “safe” collateral on a pre-refundable (repo-based) basis, and that had to be backed. The Fed did this by means of repo, which is to say that it was issuing liquidity by shorting its own debt, and thus acting as a shadow bank for the shadow banking system. Asecond academic field, “modern monetary theory,” has taken on new life based on a similar analysis: it says that, if repo is what the Fed must do to back the shadow banking system (and it’s been happening since before the Fed-Treasury Accord of 1951) why distinguish between the Treasury and the Fed? Or, for that matter, between government spending, government lending, issuing money (and then recapturing it through taxation and government borrowing)? Let’s nationalise, rather than subsidise these functions, and then redirect them to promote GDP growth and other public goods. Athird big field, entirely new since the Great Recession, is the set of ideas surrounding cryptocurrencies, which responds to the collapsing distinction between the Fed’s liquidity support of financial markets and its support of asset values generally, and to the increased interdependence between central banking and shadow banking. Well, once the issuance of both cash and collateral have been reimagined as state subsidies for capital accumulation, the state’s role can be further narrowed, provided that the secure payments system ostensibly protected by law can be better protected by cryptographic protocols.

Well, all of this is based on understanding, with varying degrees of clarity, that the sale and repurchase of safe collateral is indistinguishable from the issuance of money, and that the liquidity creation and collateral creation are the same thing. This was something that I gradually realised only after 2008, as I was publishing After Evil: that themechanism by which the beneficiaries of past injustice get to keep their gains is state support of the asset market liquidity. Once we see the cumulative value of past injustice to be both accessible and vulnerable because it is held in assert form, the cost of maintaining its liquidity can be repoliticised so that historical justice is back on the agenda.

GDM: It’s a very big deal! Linking to that, I’d like to talk about the role of the state. What should be their function according to your vision? As you were saying, after the GFC, they acted in the defence of financial markets to guarantee liquidity —by allowing the future appreciation of the frozen assets, and, in a way, states were the ones that were wrong in not claiming the premium for the people, yet they are the only institutions that could have the potential to do so. Do you see them as legitimate actors, and see their political legitimacy bound to their redistributive power? Toni Negri, Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson,⁴ think that the state is not powerful enough to confront contemporary capitalism and so it is time to reopen politically a perspective of radical transformation, what do you think about this?

RM: Yes, and noticing the extent of state support for the liquidity of appreciated assets is a powerful way of illustrating the weakened role of the state within capitalism. But there’s a flip side to this, which is that state support for financial market liquidity is not automatic. It’s contingent on democratic forbearance at precisely those moments when finance is most vulnerable to democratic challenge, and when it must threaten to lose confidence in itself if state is unwilling to pledge “whatever it takes” to restore that confidence. It becomes safe for financial leaders to confess that inequality and injustice will rise as a result, only after this acknowledgement of inevitable “pain” has been delinked from a systemic critique. Now this is a very big deal if you want to understand the relationship of class and capital to political insurgency.

GDM: Well, financial capital has financialised everything: state, first of all, politics, the very traditional political struggles have been financialised because, in some of your arguments, that was even Occupy Wall Street, other strikes, strikes against debt, in particular student debt. These events have been instrumentally used in capitalism, which has found way to leverage itself and bet against its own threats. All of this doesn't leave much opening for traditional form of politics, right? It seems that every kind of attempt would be deemed to failure. And, so, we need a new political reckoning, because the only way to get around this and to fight would be to use finance as a tool to fight against financial capital political domination, but aren't there some risks in thinking about resistance through finance? At the beginning of your book, you state that “the political resistance touches the heart of capitalism only when financial system itself becomes a site of struggle” and then you declare your intention to transform financial liquidity into an object of political contestation. This really points at the current process of financialisation. Could you expand on this passage? Maybe reflecting on this political momentum. Given that, so far, finance has been a tool for economic and thus political domination, isn’t it hazardous to see it as one of the main tools we must manage to exert resistance?

RM: Well, here again, I go back to Marx as an example. He had a theory about how capitalism as a mode of production, and how production growth endogenously funds consumer markets—until it doesn’t. He showed producing wage-earners how much of this in their hands, and how vulnerable it can be to collective action. I'm looking at capitalism as a mode of accumulation as well, and how it endogenously funds itself by supporting the valuation of assets as monetisable collateral. So, I am trying to develop a sense in which people's understanding of their power over the collateral in their hands creates a kind of choke point in the system that can potentially leverage capital's increasing ability to previsualise its own collapse. This is a potential site of political power, but only if and when we understand how potential actions affect the liquidity of assets that are always already pledged in financial markets. The collateralised student debt is something I looked at in 2011: there are many other examples.

GDM: What kind of knowledge/counter knowledge production does this political project entail? Do you think that to achieve this new struggle everyone should be financially literate? I mean… should we teach options theory in school? And then maybe social political movements should claim it to use it subversively? And how can we do that to make people aware?

RM: Well, Marx wroteCapital. It's a difficult book, at time quite academic, but it could be reduced to pamphlets that made people see that capitalism is a system in which the endogenous financing of mass production depends on them to finance mass consumption by selling labour power that cannot be pledged as collateral to get cash. So,Capital is a book that showed people what it looked like to economists for them to feel the way they do. But, in a sense, it also empowered them to subvert the liquidity of commodity markets, and thereby crash the market for producer goods. I'm trying to write a book that reveals the same thing to the objects of financialization. Now, Marx’sCapital was pamphletised for the working class… And people don't read books today, so I guess..

GDM: So we are doing this interview….

RM: …we're creating blogs, we're talking about what it feels like to look like you're a market for financial products, rather than consumer goods, and how this relates to the creation of new asset classes. We both know Dick Bryan in Australia, who is talking about the unionisation of on-call workers focused on the assignation of their cell phone contracts for collective bargaining.⁵ And, at a macrolevel, we know that critical macro finance now argues that the shadow banking system won’t fund green development unless it can be turned into an asset class that can be fully collateralised by being politically de-risked. Some of them suggest that, if shadow banking can't finance green development, then we can’t have shadow banking and must go back to the model of war financing by the state that brought victory in World War II. I would pose a more directly political question: what if the suicide bombers on Wall Street are holding the green development hostage until the shadow banking can politically ensure the assets it creates, thereby putting states on the hook for repressing demands for historical justice as to save the planet?

GDM: Thinking about Mark Carney’s role in driving investments transition from brown (dirty) to green assets, the paradox is that sustainable finance has been created to rescue the financial system from the threats of climate change, and thus to translate climate risk into stability risk. In a way green assets have already been de-risked through premium mechanism, which is now calledgreenium…. Green bonds offer investors thisgreenium, so they already have a kind of added de-risking to them as financial instruments. But then green bonds lose their “greenness” feature by being collateralised as any other assets.

RM: We need to re-politicise what the endogenous funding of social justice and green development would look like. In parts of the book, I imagine a hypothetical justice-granting state that could extract the liquidity premium from financial markets threatening their own collapse by essentially taking a call on capital appreciation when they recover which could be reinvested to reverse inequality, investing in green infrastructure, and so forth. Leading thinkers on global macro finance has estimated the premium that financial institutions should have paid for their bailout from the Great Recession as well over $8 trillion, which could have been used to fund a call option on the recovery of asset values above a specific amount that might, but need not have been, capped. In 2018, Adam Tooze estimates the liquidity to have been a multiple of what was done for capital markets during the Great Recession—perhaps three times as large.⁶

Elsewhere in the book, I recognise that we don't have a justice-granting state, which is why the liquidity premium was given away rather than collected in 2008, and why nearly three times as much in asset price support was given away in 2020, no objections raised, because financiers were not to blame for Covid. How, then, can we harvest the liquidity premia that demands for historical justice generate in capital markets. Perhaps we can develop a kind of mutual fund of allied social movements that are all invested in the potential illiquidity produced by other. There is also platform socialism, and its close counterparts in the world of crypto. If I think back to some of my book on Marx, I now wonder whether we're at a transformational moment and how the issues of liquidity and valuation can be used here.

GDM: Well, this calls for a very political rethinking, both to debunk the myth of crypto and to face the risks we incur to in imagining a powerful state.

RM: Well, yes. And the state we have is currently not powerful enough to threaten the liquidity of capital markets. During the period of stagflation in the 1970s, Minsky proposed an alternative to financialisation, before it happened: nationalising the capital markets. The most radical MMT people, like Hockett and Omarova, are basically recommending a return to this proposal after 40 years of asset market appreciation has occurred. I don’t know what would have happened to the forces benefitting from financialising if another path had been taken forty years ago. To me, however, a more serious question is how to harvest and redirect the value that was created. And, first, we have recognised that it's not all fictitious, not in the same sense that nothing would be lost if it was gone. That said, there is nothing natural or inevitable about the widening spread between asset value growth and growth in output and income. You could call it fictitious, in the sense that its existence is contingent on political choices that could have been made differently. There is, thus, an opportunity for new responses in different times.

GDM: Yes, we should also create opportunities out of turbulence …. Related to that, can we have a few last reflections on the issue of labour? Labour has been deeply destabilized by financialisation in these last thirty years, in two ways: decoupled from the core of capital valorisation, finance, and, at the same time, re-coupled as one of its components, through financialisation of the personal revenue of workers and households. The new political subjects have been defined as speculative subjects; I am thinking for example about the work Michel Feher, Marina Vishmidt but also the recent book by Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou.⁷ Can, in your own view, a new political subject be understood as a speculative subject, a subject able to take advantage of that political and social and economic contingency and turn capital into its own advantage?

RM: I think the question needs to be understood politically as a relationship between horizontal power and vertical power. I look back at the power of the labour movement to sabotage capital accumulation and threaten disaccumulation through a general strike that would crash the value of capital accumulated in the form of producer goods. A century ago, this called for an analysis of the vertical power of organised labour in forming or deposing governments, and how this bears on the power those governments can subsequently exert over capital.

But today’s relationship between organised labour and the market in assets and credits is now completely different than it was for Marx, especially because wage labourers could not, in theory, finance consumption by borrowing against wage goods they had purchased or by collateralising labour they had not performed. Today, credit markets stretch aggregate consumption far beyond what present wage levels would support, financial products (such as loans and insurance) are an important component of household consumption budgets, and many wage-earning households rely more on credit generated from increases in the value of their homes than from on any hope of increased pay. Today, these various household debts are repackaged as collateral in credit markets, after having been themselves financed by bonds that are secured in other ways. Activists today need to be more aware of their impact on the securities market, and also of the degree to which it could be secured by political repression. At some point, there will need to be vertical activism to resist the degree to which the horizontal activism can be repressed.

GDM: Do you see also the possibility of creating collective ownership on assets? I mean, for instance, Corbyn was also talking about the possibility of creating collective shareholding of certain companies or corporations.

RM: I think such proposals are valuable insofar as they are subversive of accumulated wealth. But they can become alternatives to confronting the process of accumulation, rather than ways of leveraging it and subverting it. I look back to the literature in the ’60s and ’70s on the “development of underdevelopment” that indicated intensified levels of social interaction outside the economic system. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz called this “involution” and showed how it subsidised the export economy in post-colonial Indonesia. I’m concerned that in alternative economies, the creation of more demanding, more time-consuming, alternatives to paid jobs can function as implicit subsidies for the mainstream economic system and as drivers of financial accumulation, rather than as ways of subverting it.

GDM: Indeed, these local, bottom up, alternative economic activities often risk being subsumed. And, so, finding ways of subversion and hacking at the roots of the working of capital accumulation, using the opportunities that liquidity and money issuance offer, seems to me a more productive strategy.

RM: And, unfortunately, the alt-right, which is horizontally subverting democracy in many countries, especially my own, has now connected to a kind of vertical partisan politics, which is, at least partially, protecting it from being repressed. This is something that the Left used to be able to do more effectively than it now does. We must learn how to do that again.

1. Meister, R. (1990),Political identity: thinking through Marx, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Roger D. Markwick

‘Soviet Ukraine … can be rightfully called “Vladimir Lenin’s Ukraine.” … He was its creator and architect,’ declared Russian President Vladimir Putin, three days before he launched an illegal invasion of Ukraine. In Putin’s mind, Ukraine is an illegitimate state: the bastard offspring of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution. ‘Modern Ukraine’, Putin vehemently asserted, ‘was entirely created by Russia or, to be more precise, by Bolshevik, Communist Russia.’ⁱ

Putin is right in one respect: the formation of the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic (UkSSR) on 10 March 1919 and its formal incorporation into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) on 30 December 1922 gave Ukraine 72 years of unprecedented status as a territorially defined and internationally recognised nation state (notwithstanding the vicissitudes of the Second World War). However, the formation of the UkSSR and its incorporation into the USSR was a tortuous process, which reveals a great deal about Bolshevik thinking about nationhood in general and Ukraine in particular, a question that was to be intimately tied to the rise of Stalin and the fate of the October Revolution. A key protagonist in the debates about the status of the minority nationalities in the lead up to the formal declaration of the USSR was Christian Rakovsky (1873-1941), the Bulgarian-born Bolshevik who on 19 January 1919, at the height of the civil war, had been nominated by Lenin to be president of the Soviet Ukrainian Provisional Government.ⁱⁱ

Three years later, with Lenin grievously ill, Rakovsky took up the cudgels in favour of a federated USSR as opposed to Stalin’s Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) dominated model. For Rakovsky, at stake in the Union was the principle of the right of nations to self-determination, which he argued should be the founding principle of the Soviet Union. Stalin thought otherwise, surreptitiously embedding Great Russian derzhavnost’ (super-state), that the dying Lenin had denounced, as the bulwark of a centralising, increasingly autocratic state, as Rakovsky predicted. In doing so, Stalin laid the time-bomb of national irredentism and chauvinism that would ultimately tear the USSR apart and unleash Putin’s Great Russian imperial war against a ‘little Russia’ vassal of NATO imperialism.ⁱⁱⁱ

Tsarist Russia was ‘a prison house of nations’ (Tiur’ma narodov), railed Vladimir Lenin. For Lenin, the liberation of imprisoned nations, ‘The Right of Nations to Self-Determination’, was intrinsic to the socialist programme. He stressed, in particular, the ‘right of Ukraine’ to form an ‘independent state’, although whether Ukraine would actually achieve this was impossible to predict. In other words, it would depend upon specific historical circumstances.^iv

Rakovsky’s approach to Ukrainian nationalism and statehood certainly evolved in accordance with specific historical circumstances, or, more precisely, with the course of the socialist revolution, domestic and international, in the wake of the October Revolution. In the life and death context of civil war, class struggle trumped national self-determination. Indeed, as war raged in 1919, Rakovsky repudiated Ukrainian nationalism, given the ‘weakness and anaemia’ of the Ukrainian proletariat, as a dangerous concession to counter-revolution and Western imperialism.^v Declaring that the ethnographic differences between Ukrainians and Russians were ‘in themselves insignificant’, Rakovsky rejected any ‘danger of Russification under the existing Ukrainian Soviet authority’ as ‘entirely without foundation.’^vi For him, the best guarantee of Ukraine’s future was the victory of the international socialist revolution, in the first instance in Germany. ‘Ukraine is truly the strategic nodal point of socialism’, Rakovsky declared. Accordingly, ‘The Ukrainian revolution is the decisive factor in the world revolution.’^vii

For Rakovsky, the end of the Civil War and the introduction of the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1921 facilitated Soviet Ukraine asserting its political and economic autonomy both internationally and domestically.^viii These circumstances opened the way for Ukrainian independence from Soviet Russian party and state institutions, which he increasingly championed in that year. Addressing the VI Congress of the Ukrainian Communist Party on 10 October 1921, he asserted ‘It is necessary to grant more independence to the Ukrainian organs, especially to those that are unified (with the Russian), because the others are already independent.’^ix Pivotal in this regard were independent Ukrainian foreign relations and trade. Accordingly, Rakovsky regarded the January 1922 signing of a Ukrainian-Turkish treaty as a major diplomatic accomplishment.

Enter Stalin

While Rakovsky was increasingly asserting Ukrainian independence, the fraught issue of the constitutional relations between the constituent republics of an emergent Soviet Union was brewing. ‘Great Russian’ derzhavnost’ was rearing its ugly head in Moscow, driven by Commissar of Nationalities, Joseph Stalin. He elaborated his ‘unitarist’ approach to Soviet federalism in an unpublished note to Lenin in June 1920: ‘Our Soviet form of federation suits the nations of Tsarist Russia as their road to internationalism … These nationalities either never possessed states of their own in the past or if they did, long ago lost them. That is why the Soviet (centralised) form of federation is accepted by them without any particular friction.’^x

Friction, however, did soon emerge, igniting a clash between Stalin and Lenin over the status of Soviet national minorities: ‘autonomisation’ versus ‘independence’. Stalin argued that national ‘autonomy does not mean independence and does not involve separation.’^xi Lenin insisted, however, that the right of Soviet minority nations to independence and self-determination, including the right to secede from the Union, was sacrosanct. In essence, this was a clash between imperial Russian super-state derzhavnost’ versus socialist internationalism. Rakovsky, like Lenin, took the latter stance, in defence of an independent Soviet Ukraine. And, like so many of the leading Bolsheviks who confronted Stalin, he would eventually pay the ultimate price.

Soviet international relations exposed this divide between the ‘centralist’ Stalin and the ‘federalist’ Rakovsky. In January 1922, a Russian Central Committee commission, which included Stalin, Rakovsky and RSFSR Foreign Affairs Commissar Georgy Chicherin, proposed abolishing republic foreign-relations commissariats in favour of one RSFSR Commissariat of Foreign Affairs (Narkomindel), which would be a prelude to the incorporation of the republics into Russia. The Ukrainian Narkomindel unequivocally rejected this proposal which, like the commission itself, came to nought.^xii This of course was not end of the matter. ‘Autonomy’ was once more on the agenda with the appointment of Stalin as Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) [RKP (b)] General Secretary in April 1922.

The form that the future Soviet federation should take was the focus of a special Politburo commission established in August 1922 to scrutinise relations between the Russian Federation and the five republics of Ukraine, Belorussia, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. At the commission, Stalin argued for ‘autonomisation’, on which basis their key commissariats, such as defence and international relations, and their political police would be incorporated into those of the Russian Federation. De jure, these five states would have been reduced to, in Moshe Lewin’s words, ‘mere administrative units of a centralised Russian state.’^xiii

The ailing Lenin was unaware of Stalin’s proposal until Rakovsky personally alerted him. Rakovsky’s subsequent attempt to postpone the commission meeting until October 1922 was rejected, thwarting any direct intervention by Lenin. Instead, Stalin wrote to Lenin defending his autonomy proposal against that of the ‘genuine Ukrainian (nefal’shivyi ukrainets)’ Rakovsky, as Stalin sarcastically put it.^xiv Lenin, however, immediately after meeting with Stalin on 26 September, rejected ‘autonomisation’ under the Russian Federation in favour of a ‘Union of Soviet Socialist Republics of Europe and Asia’: ‘A new structure, a federation of republics possessing equal rights.’^xv While ostensibly retreating, however, Stalin manoeuvred for the Russian commissariats to retain their prerogatives. In a note to Lev Kamenev, Stalin labelled Lenin’s stance a ‘deviation’: ‘national liberalism.’^xvi

Rakovsky directly challenged the threatened ‘liquidation of the republics.’ In a memorandum dated 28 September 1922, he argued that party congresses, not the commission, should make the final decision on the structure of the Soviet Union. For Rakovsky, constitutional guarantees of republican rights were the most appropriate means to ensure an effective federal government.^xvii The following month, he publicised his continued concerns about the de facto subordination of the republican commissariats to their Russian counterparts.^xviii

‘War on great-Russian chauvinism’

Rakovsky’s consternation about the independence of the republics foreshadowed the clash between Stalin and Lenin on the vexed question of ‘great-Russian chauvinism’ that erupted in October 1922 following the so-called ‘Georgian incident’. After Stalin’s representative Sergo Ordzhonikidze struck one of the leaders of the Georgian Communist Party, the ailing Lenin found the strength to declare ‘war on great-Russian chauvinism.’ In a note to Kamenev, he insisted ‘absolutely that the Union TsIK [Central Executive Committee] be chaired in turn by a Russian, Ukrainian, Georgian etc. Absolutely!’^xix

In December, on the eve of the declaration of the USSR, Lenin dictated a programmatic statement apologising for his failure to address the ‘notorious problem of autonomy’ and calling for the defence of ethnic minorities from the ‘Russian bully (russkaia derzhimorda)’ and denouncing Stalin’s ‘fatal role’ in fuelling ‘great Russian imperial ideology (velikoderzhavnichestvo).’ Stalin’s bullying velikoderzhavnichestvo was at the heart of Lenin’s call for the removal of Stalin as Party General Secretary in his political ‘testament’, which the dying Lenin dictated at the end of December 1922 – beginning of January 1923. Lenin’s ‘Letter to the Party Congress’ was supposed to be discussed at the upcoming April 1923 Twelfth RKP(b) Congress, the focus of which was to be the national structure of the USSR.^xx

While Trotsky held his fire at the Twelfth RKP(b) Congress, Rakovsky did not: neither on the national question nor on its ominous implications for the Soviet political system. Now, for the first time, he publicly held Stalin to account.^xxi Knowing of Lenin’s unequivocal stance on the centrality of the national question, in November 1922, Rakovsky had advocated the establishment of a second chamber for the All-Union government representing the nationalities.^xxii Stalin initially opposed Rakovsky’s proposal but finally relented. The Soviet of Nationalities was established in February 1923, but the precise basis on which it would be formed was fiercely contested at the Twelfth RKP(b) Congress.

For Stalin, seemingly positioning himself as the champion of Marxist class politics, ‘the national question’ was secondary to the ‘primary task’ of ‘strengthening the rule of the workers.’^xxiii For Rakovsky, invoking Lenin, at this juncture in Soviet and world history the national question had surged to the fore, except at the party Congress where it had been relegated to the ‘tail end’, he lamented. ‘On the national question we are making fatal mistakes’, Rakovsky declared to the assembled Congress delegates. In fact, he feared that if the national question was not handled with 'sensitivity and understanding', it could even trigger ‘Civil War’, endangering ‘the foundations’ of both Soviet Russia and the Communist Party. 'Soviet power' itself was imperilled. Accusing the delegates of underestimating the significance of the national question, he asked rhetorically ‘why’ it was being raised for a ‘third time?’ ‘Because,’ he answered himself, ‘the more we pose it the further we get away from a communist understanding and solution of the national question … We have a deep prejudice’, he continued, ‘one that is all the more dangerous because it is a communist prejudice, … because this prejudice conceals our ignorance on the nationalities question’. Dismissing the widely shared view that the national question had been resolved by the October Revolution, so that ‘we all stand for internationalism’, he warned that the ‘union (smychka)’ between the workers and peasants was in danger. ‘National development of the separate, autonomous and independent republics and oblasts,’ he argued, was pivotal for the 60 million ‘non-party’, ‘non-Russian’, ‘peasant masses with their aspiration for a national life, for their own national culture, for their own national state’ to find common ground with communist, working-class internationalism.^xxiv

Accusing Stalin of seriously underestimating the gravity of the national question, Rakovsky pinpointed the growing divorce between the Party and the ‘state apparatus’ as the fundamental driver of national tensions within the Union. A ‘narrow executive bureaucratic psychology’ had begun to prevail in the ‘central state organs’, which following Lenin, he described as a ‘melange of a tsarist and bourgeois apparatus, smeared with soviet and communist myrrh, but only on the forehead and nothing else.’ In dealing with the ‘central administration,’ he went on to argue, the republics are ‘forced to wage … a struggle for survival’ as the Russian Commissariats for their own ‘convenience’ usurped the republics in the realms of the ‘National Economy, Labour and Finance.’ Indeed, Rakovsky pointed out, the Russian Central Executive Committee had assumed responsibility for ‘building the Union’ without any input from the other republics. Again, Stalin was in Rakovsky’s sights. Specifically, Stalin’s proposed version of a ‘two-chamber’ Union government which disproportionately represented the RSFSR, thereby institutionalising the disenfranchisement of the other republics. Rakovsky’s response was greeted with ‘applause’: ‘we must take away nine-tenths of the power of the All-Union Commissariats and hand them over to the national republics.’^xxv

Rakovsky did not object to Stalin’s proposed ‘two-tier’ government. What he opposed was Stalin’s sleight of hand whereby ‘each of the 15 autonomous republics and oblasts of the RSFSR’ would have the same number of votes for the All-Union Central Committee as Ukraine and Belorussia. As a result, the RSFSR would secure at least 280 Central Committee deputies out of total 360, thereby denying the ‘democratic nationalism’ Stalin ostensibly espoused.^xxvi Rakovsky moved that no one republic, by which he meant the Russian Republic, have more than two-fifths of the delegates in the upper chamber. Rakovsky’s motion was dismissed by Stalin as ‘state fetishism’. It was voted down.^xxvii

Internationalism clearly motivated Rakovsky’s forthright defence of the rights of the Soviet republics against Russian Republic domination. For him, nothing less than the fate of the socialist revolution, East and West was at stake. As he put it in a motion he proposed to the Party Congress:

Only the strictest agreement between our policy on the national question within the country and that policy which we propagate on the national question in our state and party line outside the borders, can give the Soviet Union and the Communist Party the moral authority and the principled sincerity which will make them, in the broadest sense, the base for the struggle of the world proletariat with imperialism.^xxviii

Needless to say, Stalin again spoke against Rakovsky’s amendment, which also was defeated.^xxix

‘Dead-handed centralism’

A ‘colossal break (kolossal’naia lomka)’ was how Rakovsky condemned the establishment of the USSR in December 1922 in his speech to the national section of the Twelfth Party Congress on 25 April 1923. It was an acrimonious session, separate from the Congress plenary, punctuated by barbed exchanges between Stalin and Rakovsky. The verbatim transcript of the session, in which Rakovsky invoked Lenin’s critique of ‘autonomisation’, remained secret until 1991.^xxx In answer to Stalin’s theses on the national question, Rakovsky proposed two key amendments. First, to focus on the national question in the West, not only the East as Stalin wanted. Second, the creation of a second chamber of the USSR Central Executive Committee exclusively representing the Union republics. In doing so, Rakovsky aimed to thwart Stalin’s attempt to ensure Russian dominance by giving equal weight to the autonomous nationalities that constituted the RSFSR. Stalin’s manoeuvre to insinuate ‘autonomisation’ in another guise.^xxxi

The latter amendment provoked particularly fiery debate. Stalin’s claim that the February 1922 RKP (b) Central Committee Plenum had already rejected Rakovsky’s proposed Soviet of Republics, was bluntly rejected by him: no specific ‘two-chamber structure’ had been endorsed. When debate on the question was shut down, immediately after Stalin scathingly rejected alleged constitutional ‘machinations (makhinatsiia)’, Rakovsky exclaimed: ‘This is the most fundamental question!’.^xxxii Although some delegates spoke in Rakovsky’s support, notably Mikhail Frunze, he was a largely ‘isolated’ figure at the Congress. Already, it was ‘dangerous’ to challenge the General Secretary.^xxxiii

But challenge Stalin the Ukrainian leadership did at the June 1923 RKP (b) Central Committee conference dedicated to implementing the decisions of the Twelfth Party Congress. Rakovsky, having stressed the Union should be a ‘federation’, took offence at Stalin giving federation a ‘more centralist twist’: ‘I consider that we Ukrainians are no less communist than Stalin.’^xxxiv Nevertheless, in reply, Stalin went so far as to accuse Rakovsky and his comrades, such as Mykola Skrypnyk, of effectively championing a ‘confederation’.^xxxv

Stalin had the final word. The resolutions adopted at the Twelfth Party Congress and the Central Committee Conference and Stalin’s speeches in support of them, committed the Union to ‘forms’ of ‘nationhood that did not conflict with a unitary central state:’ ‘national territories’, ‘languages’, ‘elites’ and ‘cultures.’^xxxvi

It has to be understood that in combatting Stalin’s advocacy of what Rakovsky feared was a resurgent Great Power derzhavnost’, in the guise of a Russia dominated Soviet Union, he was increasingly on-guard against the emergence of a governmental bureaucracy that would stifle Soviet democracy and republican national independence. Stalin’s menacing grip on party and state in the late 1920s drove Rakovsky into the Left Opposition led by Leon Trotsky (August 1927), resulting in his eventual expulsion from the CPSU (December 1927) and internal exile in Astrakhan (January 1928). From exile, Rakovsky elaborated his thinking on Stalinist bureaucratisation in his seminal statement on ‘The “Professional Dangers” of Power’ (6 August 1928).^xxxvii

But just before Stalin removed Rakovsky as head of the Ukrainian government in July 1923, Rakovsky foreshadowed these dangers specifically in relation to national independence in the USSR.^xxxviii Emphasising that ‘the October revolution only began to resolve the national question. It did not solve it,’ he reaffirmed ‘the right of individual republics to secede from the Union on their own initiative.’ And he unequivocally repudiated any suggestion that the ‘Soviet republics should merge into one centralised state’ as having ‘nothing in common with communism.’ While repudiating absolute ‘decentralisation’, and warning against ‘national and provincial separatism’ as ‘one of the most dangerous means employed by the counter-revolution’, he categorically rejected ‘dead-handed centralism’ as the ‘enemy’ of ‘Soviet power.’ Anticipating his subsequent critique of emergent Stalinism, Rakovsky warned of the threat of the rise of a ‘separate estate of officials who joined their fate to centralisation itself.’ ‘If political life becomes the privilege of a small group of people, then obviously the working masses will not be involved in controlling the country and Soviet power will always lose its most important support. Communists will always fight resolutely against such centralisation.’ Against the threat ‘dead-handed centralism’ posed for ‘multinational states’ he invoked Lenin’s antidote of ‘democratic centralism’. From this perspective,

State development within each Soviet republic … should take place on foundations which allow for an overall control and general plan, but which do not exclude the widest civil, administrative, economic, financial and cultural autonomy of individual republics and areas … To overstep either way could only have a crippling result.^xxxix

In essence, Rakovsky discerned the crippling, bureaucratic brutality manifest in Stalin’s drive to centralise power in his own hands, in the first place by subordinating the non-Russian nationalities to the Moscow authorities. Right up until his removal as head of the Ukrainian government, Rakovsky continued his rear-guard fight against Stalin for the rights of the USSR’s republics to be enshrined in its first ‘Lenin constitution’ (1924), not least against the Union Central Executive Committee exercising authority over the congresses of republic soviets: ‘The sovereignty of the individual republics of the Union is restricted only by the limits specified in the treaties and only within the limits of the Union’s jurisdiction!’, he protested unsuccessfully.^xl

Rakovsky’s ‘New Era of Soviet Development’, drawing inspiration from Karl Marx’s analysis of the proletarian state in the 1871 Paris Commune, was, as Pierre Broué asserted, truly a ‘veritable manifesto against the bureaucracy, and a decisive stage in the development of a Marxist theory of bureaucracy.’^xli It was a manifesto against Stalin forging a centralised, multi-national state on his road to his great-power centric ‘socialism in one country’, a doctrine that would drive the inveterate internationalist Rakovsky into the ranks of the anti-Stalinist Left Opposition.

Nationalizatsiia

After 1923, as Terry Martin has argued, the national structure of the USSR was no longer up for public debate, notwithstanding Rakovsky’s private protestations. Henceforth, through to the very end of the Stalin period, ‘nationalizatsiia’ (Stalin’s preferred term, which subsequently became ‘korenizatsiia’ - ‘indigenization’), shaped policy towards established, large, national territories, e.g., ‘Ukrainizatsiia:’ principally, the fostering of national languages and the forging of national elites. Nationalizatsiia adroitly cemented the national territories into a Moscow-centric Soviet state which incorporated ‘national identity’ into an overarching all-Union ‘socialist culture’ thereby surreptitiously disarming any perception of Russian great-power hegemony. Stalin deemed the newly fledged USSR a ‘federation’ (having falsely accused Rakovsky of proposing a ‘confederation’). It was a Stalinist fiction. The territorial nationality structure hammered out in 1923, not the December 1922 constitution as such, forged a hyper-centralised, ‘multiethnic’, unitary state, which while it denied Russia distinct territorial status and its own communist party, de facto made the Russians ‘the Soviet Union’s state bearing people.’ National republics such as Ukraine had no more political and economic powers than Russian regions (oblasti), as Rakovsky feared.^xlii

Nevertheless, a decade later, nationalizatsiia began to be curtailed out of concern that it was undermining the unitary Soviet state. In December 1932, Ukrainian nationalism was blamed in part for the onset of the grain procurement crisis. Thereafter, Russian language, nationality and culture were resurgent, Union-wide. By 1936, Russians were ‘first among equals,’ a trend that would be accelerated in the wake of victory in the Great Patriotic War (1941-1945). Nevertheless, in the post-Stalin period nationalizatsiia simultaneously proceeded apace with russifikatsiia, fuelling an explosive, contradictory, mix of Russian political dominance in the guise of the Soviet Union and korenizatsiia of nomenklatura elites in national territories, such as Ukraine and Belarus. With the faltering of Gorbachev’s perestroika reforms in the late 1980s, the ‘national communism’ of the Ukrainian territorial nomenklatura rapidly found common purpose with anti-communist, anti-Soviet nationalism, and national independence. A prelude to the final scuttling of the USSR almost 70 years after its formation, in which ex-Ukrainian Communist Party Secretary Leonid Kravchuk played a central role.^xliii

A century ago, Rakovsky had warned of the dangers the ‘dead-hand of centralism’ posed to the self-determination of the national republics and to the Soviet Union itself. And he warned of the emergence of a bureaucratic elite that had a vested, material interest in such centralisation. Given the tumultuous times in which the USSR was established, he feared that failure to address ‘the national question’ could tear the Union apart in the immediate future. Rakovsky underestimated the capacity of Stalin to hold the Union together by brute force and by fostering territorial state-political elites that not only had a vested interest in the Union status quo, but eventually also in national, anti-communist independence. Nevertheless, Rakovsky’s guiding principle that the USSR would only survive by the internationalisation of the October Revolution or not at all was ultimately vindicated, catastrophically.

First published as ‘Die Ukraine und die großrussische Macht – Rakowski gegen Stalin, 1922-23,’ in Marxistische Blätter, 1_2023, pp. 87-95. Translated from the English by Prof. Dr Joachim Hösler. Kindly republished here with the permission of the responsible editor, Lothar Geisler.

Notes

i Address by the President of the Russian Federation, 21 February 2022, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/67828

ii Pierre Broué,Rakovsky ou la Révolution dans tous les pays (Paris: Fayard), p. 144.

iii Roger D. Markwick, ‘“Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality”: Putin’s Remaking of Imperial Russia’, Arena Quarterly, No. 10, June 2022: https://arena.org.au/orthodoxy-autocracy-and-nationality-putins-remaking-imperial-russia/

iv ‘The Right of Nations to Self-Determination’ https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/self-det/;See also: Ditte Gerns, ‘Lenin und das Selbstbestimmungsrecht der Nationen,’ in Marxistische Blätter, 1_2023, pp. 81–87.

v Khristian Rakovskii, ‘Tezisy po ukrainskomu voprosu (19.11.1919g.),’https://www.historians.in.ua/index.php/en/istoriya-i-pamyat-vazhki-pitannya/2897-andrij-zdorov-tezi-z-ukrajinskogo-pitannya-khristiyana-rakovskogo-1919-r-publikatsiya-dokumentu

viIzvestiia 3 January 1919, in Christian Rakovsky.Selected Writings on Opposition in the USSR 1923-30, edited with an introduction by Gus Fagan (London: Allison & Busby,1980), p.24; Cherniavskii G.I., Stanchev, M.G., Tortika (Lobanova), M.V.,Zhiznennyi put’ Khristiana Raskogo (Moskva: Tsentropoligraf, 2014), pp. 124–25.

viiIzvestiia 26 January 1919, in Rakovsky.Selected Writings, p. 24. Rakovsky’s emphasis.

viiiZhiznennyi put’, pp. 134, 136.

ix Rakovsky.Selected Writings, p.28.

x Cited in Moshe Lewin,The Soviet Century, Gregory Elliot (ed.) (London: Verso, 2016), pp. 19-20

xi Cited in Ibid, p. 20.

xiiZhiznennyi put’, pp. 142–43.

xiiiSoviet Century, pp. 20–21.

xivZhiznennyi put’, p. 166.

xv Cited in Ibid, p. 167. Lenin’s emphasis.

xvi Ibid;Soviet Century, pp. 22–23.

xviiSoviet Century, p.24;Zhiznennyi put’, p. 166.

xviiiKommunist 18 October 1922, inZhiznennyi put’, p. 168.

xix Kommissiia 6 Oktiabria,https://istmat.org/node/26881#_ftn3; Soviet Century, pp. 24–5.

xxSoviet Century, pp. 25–31. See V. I. Lenin, ‘Letter to the Congress’:https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/dec/testamnt/congress.htm

In early March 1923, Lenin suffered his second stroke and could no longer write or dictate anything. His last text, ‘Rather less, but better’ of 2 March, appeared in Pravda on 4 March 1923.

xxiZhiznennyi put’, p. 165.

xxii Ibid., p. 169.

xxiii Rakovsky.Selected Writings, p.34;Dvenadtsatyi s”ezd RKP (b), 17-25 aprelia 1923 goda. Stenograficheskii otchet (Moskva: Izd. Poli. Lit., 1968), p. 649.

xxiv ‘Speech to the Twelfth Party Congress’, Rakovsky.Selected Writings, pp. 79–81;Dvenadtsatyi s”ezd, pp. 576-78. For the basis of the policy ofsmytchka see Gert Meyer:Studien zur sozial-ökonomischen Entwicklung Sowjetrußlands. Die Beziehungen zwischen Stadt und Land zu Beginn der neuen ökonomischen Politik (Köln: Pahl-Rugenstein, 1974).

xxv Rakovsky.Selected Writings p. 84;Dvenadtsatyi s”ezd, pp. 579–82.

xxvi Rakovsky.Selected Writings, pp. 86–7;Dvenadtsatyi s”ezd, pp. 657–58.

xxvii Rakovsky,Dvenadtsatyi s”ezd, pp. 657-58; Stalin, Dvenadtsatyi s”ezd, pp. 659–60.

xxviii Rakovsky.Selected Writings, p. 85; Rakovsky,Dvenadtsatyi s”ezd, pp. 656–57.

xxix Stalin,Dvenadtsatyi s”ezd, p. 657.

xxx XII S”ezd RKP (b) stenogramma zasedaniia sektsii s”ezda po natsional’nomu voprosu 25 aprel’ia 1923 g.,Izvestiia TsK KPSS, 1991, No. 3, pp. 171–72.

xxxiZhiznennyi put’, pp. 176–77.

xxxii Ibid., pp. 177–8.

xxxiii Ibid, pp. 179–81;Soviet Century, pp. 12–18.

xxxivChetvertenoe soveshchanie TsK RKP (b) s otvetsvennymi rabotnikami natsional’nykh respublik i oblastei 12 iunia 1923 g (Stenograficheskii otchet) Moskva: 1923 [Moskva: INSAN, 1992), p. 270.

xxxv Stalin, I.V. ‘Zakliuchitel’noe slovo na IV soveshchanii TsK RKP (b) s otvetsvennymi rabotnikami natsional’nykh respublik i oblastei 12 iunia 1923 g. pp. 335–36,https://c21ch.newcastle.edu.au/stalin/t5/t5_25_4.htm#p78

xxxvi Terry Martin, ‘An Affirmative Action Empire. The Soviet Union as the Highest Form of Imperialism’, in Ronald G. Suny & T. Martin (eds),A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 73.

xxxvii ‘The “Professional Dangers” of Power’, Rakovsky.Selected Writings, pp.124–136;https://www.marxists.org/archive/rakovsky/1928/08/prodanger.htm

xxxviii ‘A New Era of Soviet Development’, Rakovsky.Selected Writings, pp. 88–105.

xxxix ‘A New Era of Soviet Development’, p. 103.

xlZhiznennyi put’, p.189.

xliRakovsky ou la Révolution, p. 213.

xlii Martin, ‘An Affirmative Action Empire’, pp. 73–5, 79–80. On the policy of Ukrainisation see Andreas Kappeler,Kleine Geschichte der Ukraine (München: C.H. Beck, 2022), pp. 188–97.

xliii Taras Kuzio,Ukraine: Perestroika to Independence, 2^nd edition (London: MacMillan Press, 2000), Ch. 9.

Gregoris Ioannou*

Simon Clarke was both a scholar of social theory and Marxian thought with deep knowledge of the classic texts and an empirical sociologist analysing contemporary labour relations. He was a political economy scholar whose analysis traversed the macro, meso, and micro levels, situating employment within institutions, labour markets and class relations connecting dynamics operative in local, national, and international settings. He used with ease both quantitative and qualitative methodologies and was able to follow, critique and contribute to both the fields of economic and social sciences which he conceived as an integrated whole. Clarke was a scholar that could situate the object of his study in the broader intellectual universe, that could contextualise knowledge in history, and identify the origins, boundaries and limits of sciences and disciplines, theories, and schools of thought. A committed Marxist always, but neither of the ‘one-dimensional’ and dogmatic type, nor swayed by the post-Marxist intellectual fashions that sprang out in different times during the era of left-wing retreat in which he lived his academic life. 

Simon Clarke, who had an economics background, begun his career as a sociologist through the critique of structuralism, that was a mainstream trend in the 1970s. He subsequently engaged in a thorough study of classical political economy tracing the roots and development of modern economics and sociology as a discipline. In his 1982 book Marx, Marginalism and Modern Sociology, he offered an overview of the intellectual foundations of political economy, liberal social theory and Marxian thought situating modern sociology in its wider historical trajectory. He illustrated the role of ‘marginalism’ in defining and shaping modern economics and critiqued its reductionism and narrow scope, weak conceptual basis and irrational outcomes, and its naturalisation of capitalist social relations. Clarke argued that modern sociology was able to become an autonomous discipline because it could “study forms of social action that could not be comprehended by economics: it could embrace all those phenomena that could not be reduced by the dogma of self-interest” (1982: 230). Yet, modern sociology, as established on its Weberian basis, rests on the same ‘social liberal’ ideological foundations as marginalist economics and implicitly accepts key presuppositions of marginalism, such as the ‘abstract individual as the starting point’ and the ‘separation of economy and society’ which itself shapes the character and imposes limits on what sociology is and what it can do. 

Clarke argued that it is Marxian thought that can move beyond the bounds of modern sociology as it can build on Marx’s devastating critique of the conceptual foundations of liberal social theory and offer a comprehensive and integrated understanding of social relations through the theories of alienated labour, the value form, and commodity fetishism.  Yet Marxism, at least in its orthodox version, failed to realise this potential because it neutralised the critical power of Marxian thought by “assimilating it to the political economy and the materialist conception of history” (1982: 238). Orthodox Marxist economism narrowed down the theory of value into a measurement of exploitation, neglected the constitutive role of labour and consequently alienation and commodity fetishism, conceptualising socialism as a ‘mere change in property relations’ and was thus ultimately unable to sufficiently challenge marginalism. Right-wing revisionist Marxism accepted the marginalist critique of the labour theory of value and sought thus improvements within capitalism while Lenin and, subsequently, Soviet Marxism in the context of the failure of international revolution, sought to ground Marxist philosophy of history and political economy into a ‘science’ that was essentially a canonised ‘eternal truth’ insulated from the need of empirical evaluation. 

Lukacs and, later, Western Marxism and the school of critical theory attempted to bring alienation and commodity fetishism back into the centre, but the notion of ‘reification’ they developed was essentially based on Simmel’s inversion of means and ends, and Weber’s conflict between instrumental and value rationality respectively, rather than Marx’s notion of ‘alienated labour’, and were thus unable to bring a breakthrough. Clarke insisted that the way beyond the antinomies of modern sociology, seeking to reconcile the subjective rationality of capitalism with its objective irrationality by abstracting the concept of the individual and the concept of reason, was Marx’s theory of alienated labour. And that “the contradictions of capitalism do not derive from the contradiction between one form of reason and another, whether between formal and substantive rationality, or between capitalist and proletarian reason, but from the contradictions inherent in the irrationality of alienated forms of social production.” (1982: 252). If Marx was naïve in his optimism “that socialism would inevitably arise out of the spontaneous development of the contradictions of the capitalist mode of production”, Clarke concludes, “the tragedy of Marxism, in both its Leninist and its Western variants, was that it abandoned Marx’s faith in the ability of the working class to achieve its own emancipation” (1982: 255). 

Clarke applied the perspective he developed in the study of 19th and 20th Century history. In 1988, he published Keynesianism, Monetarism and the Crisis of the State in which he elaborated further the theoretical framework he built connecting political economy frameworks such as liberalism, Keynesianism and monetarism with concrete historical developments such as the economic depressions and crises, the formation of the national state and the international system of states, the major wars and revolutions, post war reconstruction and the Marshall Plan, industrial relations and welfare regimes. This was also the time of the Conference of Socialist Economists which evolved into the journal Capital and Class. Clarke contributed substantially to the debates on the Marxist theory of state and the utilisation of Marxian tools to the analysis of the changing environment in the last quarter of the 20th Century. “Monetarism like all state ideologies that have preceded it, is a fundamentally contradictory ideology” but it is also “the ideological expression of fundamental changes in the form of the state, that have reflected, and reinforced, the massive political defeat of the working class” (1988: 353). The divisions within the working class were exploited and exacerbated by capital and the state, which gradually reimposed ‘the rule of money’ and while the political form of the post-war Keynesian class-collaboration settlement survived, its substance did not, rendering it effectively ‘an empty shell’. 

In 1994, Clarke published Marx’s Theory of Crisis, probably his most famous book, translated subsequently in several languages and signalling his consolidation as an internationally known Marxist theorist. In this ‘magnum opus’ monograph, he articulates a Marxian framework for the understanding of capitalist crises as a normal phase in the process of capital accumulation. Clarke argued that, while disproportionality, under-consumption and the falling rate of profit are relevant in determining the vulnerability of capitalism to crisis, “the underlying cause of all crises remains the fundamental contradiction on which the capitalist mode of production is based, the contradiction between the production of things and the production of value, and the subordination of the former to the latter” (1994: 195). The periodic over-production crises indicate the objective limits of the capitalist mode of production but cannot on their own destroy capitalism. The destruction of existing products and productive forces, the capture of new markets and over-exploitation of old markets, removes obstacles and allows the development of the forces of production, but only for opening the way for bigger, longer, and more destructive crises ahead. The ‘limits of capitalism’ however do not make the abolition of capitalism inevitable. The tendency of repeated accumulation crises constitutes the ‘weapon’ with which ‘the bourgeoisie will bring their own death’ – we should never forget however that as Marx-Engels said in the Communist Manifesto it is the organised proletariat that ‘holds this weapon’. 

By the early 1990s, Clarke was an established academic, still working with some like-minded scholars at the University of Warwick, at a time when ‘labour studies and industrial relations’ were beginning to be pushed out of Sociology Departments into Business Schools and be fashioned as ‘Employment Relations and Human Resource Management’. It was then that he begun a fruitful collaboration with a group of young Russian scholars who were studying the impact of the collapse of the USSR, happening at the time, on the labour field and industry of Russia. This major empirical research project led to the establishment of the Institute for Comparative Labour Relations (ISITO) and resulted in numerous collaborative publications throughout the 1990s accounting for the weak workers’ movement in Russia, the changes in industrial enterprises, labour relations and the shifting forms of industrial conflict, the restructuring of employment and the formation of a labour market, household strategies of survival and finally the development of capitalism in Russia.    

The research on labour relations in Russia, which subsequently expanded to also cover China and Vietnam, attempted to engage in debate labour economics and sociology with their different methodologies and diverging bodies of evidence. Although constrained by what data could be made available, the project employed both quantitative and qualitative methods (multivariate analysis and ethnographic case study reports) and accumulated over time a vast body of data. By the late 1990s, Russia had a relatively developed labour market with high labour mobility and a high degree of wage flexibility. These attributes co-existed with poor job creation and persisting wage inequality and thus contrasted with the orthodox economists’ belief that wage and employment decisions are determined by the interaction between supply and demand in the external labour market. It was the interaction of social groups with conflicting interests (such as senior and middle management) that ultimately shaped wages and employment outcomes. There was thus nothing unique with Russia, Clarke argued as “the conflicts which permeate the post-Soviet enterprise can equally be found in any capitalist firm. The difference is simply that in Russia the economists’ theories have been tested to the limit and beyond” (1999: 12).

The resounding failure of the imposition of deregulation and labour market flexibility, resulting in the suffering of the Russian people was the basic lesson of the outcomes of neoliberal shock doctrine. While substantial residues of Soviet institutions, Soviet culture and Soviet practices remained even in the most capitalist of contemporary Russian enterprises, Clarke did not see these as producing a distinctive feature in the developing Russian capitalism. More important, in his view, was the relative absence of class conflict, which could not be explained by a Russian culture of fatalism or other ideological factors. This he concluded was a result of the “incomplete subsumption of labour under capital” which diffuses class conflicts “through the structure of management appearing primarily in divisions within the management apparatus rather than in a direct confrontation between capital and labour” (2007: 242).

Simon Clarke’s contribution to Marxian thought and labour studies has been immense. As a social theorist, he set an example of how to analyse specific issues and themes without losing sight of the bigger picture and of how to examine abstract ideas holistically and in relation to their concrete historical contexts. As a Marxist, he taught us how to disentangle ideology from science, how to understand both the proximity but also the distance between politics and knowledge and how to use Marxian tools to understand the contemporary world. As a labour studies scholar, he demonstrated how systematic and meticulous empirical research can feed back into theory, how employment relations are at the heart of political economy and how class struggle retains its centrality even when it is suppressed, defused, or deformed. Simon Clarke will be remembered by his numerous students and his work will continue to guide those who study the workings of capitalism, the politics of class and the making of history.   

References: 

Clarke, S. (1982) Marx, Marginalism, and Modern Sociology, Macmillan

Clarke, S. (1988) Keynesianism, Monetarism and the Crisis of the State, Edward Elgar

Clarke, S. (1994) Marx's Theory of Crisis, Macmillan

Clarke, S. (1999) The Formation of a Labour Market in Russia, Edward Elgar

Clarke, S. (2007) The Development of Capitalism in Russia, Routledge

A complete list including refereed articles can be found on Simon Clarke's publications page: http://homepages.warwick.ac.uk/~syrbe/Publications.html

*Gregoris Ioannou is currently a Lecturer of Employment Relations and HRM at the Centre for Decent Work, University of Sheffield Management School and was one of the last PhD students of Simon Clarke. 

Historical Materialism London 2022