Book Reviews

In the the second, posthumous volume of Sartre’s masterpiece, The Critique of Dialectical Reason, which is largely given over to the attempt to make deeper sense of Russia’s industrial expansion under Stalin, that is, to the problem of how a command economy works, Sartre explains that the best history is defined as a synthetic movement or what he calls “totalizing compression”. He writes, “two dialectical procedures are possible on the basis of an identical social reality. On the one hand, a procedure of decompressive expansion which starts off from the object to arrive ateverything … in this case thought may be calleddetotalizing and the event loses out to the signified ensembles. On the other hand, a procedure of totalizing compression which, by contrast, grasps the centripetal movement of all the significations attracted and condensed in the event or in the object”.Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol.2, pp. 49, 188. I want to suggest in this lectureThis paper was presented as a keynote at the conference on primitive accumulation organised by the Institute of Social History in Amsterdam in May 2019. that we need to integrate Marx’s notion of primitive accumulation into a wider history of capitalism that allows for the combined nature of its evolution, and that one way of doing this is to treat primitive accumulation as one of those “practical significations” or “signified ensembles” or structures that form a permanent dimension of capitalism. This means breaking with the linearity of the simplified model of primitive accumulation that many Marxists still subscribe to, with its “stagism” if you like, and with the strong resonance of teleology that usually goes with that. Retrospective readings of capitalism start with large-scale industry and imagine that primitive accumulationexplains how that came about. But, if there is a sense in which this may account for Britain’s industrial primacy, it is hard to see how it would “explain” most other industrial trajectories which were in any case influenced by Britain’s own expansion, either correlatively (as in India) or by negation (as with Britain’s main industrial competitors). In a critique of Marx’s pages, Gerschenkron made a great deal of this point, noting that the bank-financed industrial expansion that occurred in Germany did not presuppose anything like the protracted processes Marx had described.Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective, Chapter 2, e.g., “Original accumulation of capital was not a prerequisite of industrial development in major countries” (p. 46). But, if my general suggestion is accepted, the obvious question of course is – what wider history? Do we have the categories for that? And how exactly do we see primitive accumulation fitting into this broader canvas?

A Review of A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology by Robert Brandom

A Review of Un court moment révolutionnaire: La création du Parti communiste en France (1915–1924) by Julien Chuzeville

A Review of Terrorism and Communism: A Reply to Karl Kautsky by Leon Trotsky, with a Preface by H.N. Brailsford and a Foreword by Slavoj Žižek

A Review of Fascism and the Masses: The Revolt against the Last Humans, 1848–1945 by Ishay Landa

A Review of Red Hamlet: The Life and Ideas of Alexander Bogdanov by James D. White

A Review of Undervalued Dissent: Informal Workers’ Politics in India by Manjusha Nair

A Review of Revolution and Its Narratives: China’s Socialist Literary and Cultural Imaginaries, 1949–1966 by Cai Xiang

A Review of Na Contracorrente da História: documentos do trotskismo brasileiro 1930–1940 [Against the Current of History: Documents of Brazilian Trotskyism, 1930–1940], edited by Fúlvio Abramo and Dainis Karepovs

A Review of Market Threads: How Cotton Farmers and Traders Create a Global Commodity by Koray Çalışkan

A Review of The Implosion of Contemporary Capitalism by Samir Amin