Figures

Fergus Millar (1935–2019), Camden Professor of Ancient History at Oxford from 1984 until his retirement in 2002, who died a little over 2 years back. His scholarship was prodigious, but just as important, he was a remarkably kind, unassuming person (not an iota of self-importance!) who would go out of his way to be welcoming to new graduates in the Classics Faculty, as I know from my vivid memory of a reception (in Michaelmas 1987) where Fergus appeared affably out of nowhere to rescue a couple that must have looked pretty lost.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945), the great German theologian who was executed by the Nazis in 1945. He was arrested by the Gestapo in April 1943 and hanged exactly two years later (at Flossenbürg concentration camp), accused of associating with the group that conspired to assassinate Hitler in July 1944. Tragically, his execution took place just three weeks before Hitler killed himself.

Italian literature and cinema have explored the issue of fascism in more subtle and fascinating ways than most comparable traditions elsewhere in Europe. In Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970), Elio Petri’s brilliant political thriller about a police commissioner who murders his lover in cold blood, then deliberately leaves clues at the scene of the crime to demonstrate his own untouchability by the law, Petri gave us a theory of the state in its most lucid and penetrating form, set against the background of the political turmoil in Italy in the late sixties.

Biography

Marx writes, ‘Only labour which produces capital is productive labour’. So what do we say about women who work at home (so-called ‘housewives’) whose labour produces/reproduces the male worker who in turn produces capital? Do they produce capital? In a crucially important passage at p. 274 of volume 1 of Capital Marx offers two radically different definitions of the ‘value of labour-power’, the first in terms of the living labour objectified in the commodity labour-power, the second in terms of the value of the means of subsistence necessary for the maintenance of the worker. It was the latter definition that became standard, viz. the conception of the value of labour-power as a basket of wage goods.

Gillo Pontecorvo (1919–2006), whose masterpiece “The Battle of Algiers” (1966) remains the most perfect example of a ‘reconstructed realism’, the purest cinematic equivalent of Marx’s famous metaphor of the ‘life of the subject-matter’ being ‘ideally reflected as in a mirror’ (1873 Afterword to Capital, vol. 1). What Pontecorvo set out to do was, in his words, ‘represent the irreversibility of a revolutionary process when a colonized people acquires consciousness of its identity as a nation’. And he did this so well that the film was boycotted by the French delegation at the Venice Film Festival in 1966 and banned for over three years in both France and England (till 1971).

Veselin Masleša (April 20, 1906 – June 14, 1943) was a Yugoslav writer, activist and partisan from Banja Luka, Bosnia and Hertzegovina. To scholars of his time, he is known for his literary works, not least two major studies: one on the Serbian socialist philosopher and politician Svetozar Marković and another on the revolutionary organisation “Mlada Bosna” (“Young Bosnia”), which was responsible for the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Masleša also studied law at the University of Zagreb, economics in Frankfurt, and then political economy and sociology in Paris. After returning to Yugoslavia, he was arrested several times for communist beliefs before going underground and joining the partisan resistance in Montenegro during World War II. He died during the infamous Battle of Sutjeska, drowning while crossing the Sutjeska River during a Nazi offensive. In 1951, he was posthumously awarded the title of “People’s Hero of Yugoslavia” and a well-known publishing house in Sarajevo was also named after him – because of which he is still known to the general public across former Yugoslavia. What is less well known, however, is that Masleša regularly attended lectures at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt when it was still known as a hotspot of Marxist economics and before it became known as the birthplace of critical theory, or even before Adorno and Horkheimer arrived. The following article attempts to correct this omission. It consists of an introduction followed by an English translation of a chapter from one of Masleša’s biographies, in which Mira Mitrović, his biographer, describes his stay at the early Frankfurt School, where, among other things, he listened to lectures by the Marxist economist Henryk Grossman.

Among the greatest works of Marxist theory in the 20th century we should count Hilferding’s Finance Capital (1910), Rubin’sEssays on Marx’s Theory of Value (1928), Grossman’sThe Law of Accumulation and Breakdown of the Capitalist System (1929), Emmanuel’sUnequal Exchange (1969) and Sartre’sCritique of Dialectical Reason (1960). The common property these works share is the creative element within them—their drive either to develop theory (Hilferding, Sartre), or to elucidate it in some profound way (Rubin, Grossman), or finally to apply it in a novel way to problems that had not been foregrounded or discussed sufficiently (Emmanuel). Sartre died in 1980, Emmanuel in 2001. Emmanuel was, in fact, the last great left-wing theoretician of the 20th century, even if this is a judgement few Marxists would agree with. Apart from the lively, perfectly lucid, almost seductive nature of his prose and the rigour with which he always insisted on arguing, Emmanuel’s most appealing characteristic (to me anyway) is the sheer iconoclasm with which he approached various left-wing orthodoxies. A good example of this is the way he treated Lenin’sImperialism; about this hallowed text he wrote, ‘Unfortunately a certain piety towards Lenin’s writings still prevents Marxists from disengaging themselves intellectually from the influence of a marginal work which never had any scientific pretensions, and which was written rapidly, in the difficult conditions of exile, with no other documentation to hand but the Bern library’. Emmanuel went on to characterise this kind of intellectually lazy reverence for certain texts as ‘a quasi-religious attitude’. ‘Words are refuted by other words; and no current doctrine of imperialism is accepted by more than a small group’ (New Left Review I/73, May-June 1972, p.36).

It now struck him that nowhere in the modern world had so much crime gone unpunished as in Nazi Germany, with its extraordinary mixture of banality and bloodshed. Asked later why he chose Nazism rather than Fascism, Visconti said: “Because of the difference between tragedy and comedy. Fascism was a tragedy in many many cases…but as the perfect archetype of a given historical situation that leads to a certain type of criminality, Nazism seemed to me more exemplary… Nazism seems to me to reveal more about a historic reversal of values.”

The Jewish German communist Nathan Steinberger (1910–2005)  survived betrayal, imprisonment, and exile, but never gave up the hope for a socialist future.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         Steinberger was born in a deeply religious Jewish family as the youngest of five siblings. The family spoke Yiddish at home and Steinberger attended a Jewish middle school. On Saturdays he studied the Torah. Turning 13 years old, coming of age religiously, came as a liberation for Steinberger. After his Bar Mitzvah, he joined the secular German youth movement, broke with his religious upbringing and began his political activity. He sympathised with the ideas of the Poale Zion; a current that attempted to combine Marxism with Zionism. Only when the Jewish people would have their own state, could a Jewish proletariat successfully fight for socialism, the theory went. Steinberger became a leading activist in the movement of socialist high school students and, in 1928, he joined the KPD.

Here is a passage, drastically abridged, from Braudel’s Mediterranean that illustrates the sense in which history occasionally bursts into poetry:                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             For ‘Islam is the desert’, declares the essayist Essad Bey, it is the emptiness, the ascetic rigour, the inherent mysticism, the devotion to the implacable sun, unifying principle on which myths are founded, and the thousand consequences of this human vacuum… Islam, like the sea and like the desert implies movement. Bazaars and caravanserais, as Vidal de la Blache said, are as characteristic of its civilization as mosques and minarets… Islam is the sum of human realities implied by the desert… the great caravan trails; the coastal zones, for Islam lived off these Sahels, fringes of settled civilization along the shores of the Mediterranean, the Persian Gulf, the Indian Ocean, or the Red Sea, and also bordering the countries of the Sudan; the oases and their accumulated power… Islam is all that, a long road cutting through the strong and rigid mass of the Ancient World. Rome, when she achieved the unity of the Mediterranean, did no more.”