Historical Materialism, Volume 19, Number 3, 2011

Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 3–28 brill.nl/hima Revisiting the Domestic-Labour Debate: An Indian Perspective Roh...

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Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 3–28

brill.nl/hima

Revisiting the Domestic-Labour Debate: An Indian Perspective Rohini Hensman Union Research Group, Bombay [email protected]

Abstract The class-struggle under capitalism is shaped by the fact that for capital, labour-power is merely a factor of production and source of profit, whereas for workers it is an element of their own lives. Given the centrality of labour-power to the accumulation of capital, it is surprising that Marx nowhere describes or analyses its production. The domestic-labour debate of the 1970s was a useful attempt to fill this gap, but left many issues unresolved. This article attempts to carry forward this theoretical task, using examples mainly from India, and to draw practical conclusions for the working-class struggle. Keywords domestic labour, production of labour-power, Marx, gender, feminist theory, India

Introduction At the heart of the class-struggle under capitalism is the fact that for capital, labour-power is merely an element of production and source of surplus-value, whereas, for workers, it is inseparable from themselves as living human beings. Struggles over wages, the duration and conditions of waged work, and control over it, have easily been recognised by Marxists as important aspects of classstruggle. Yet the relations and conditions under which labour-power is produced, though equally important, have received far less attention, except from Marxist feminists and feminist Marxists. Given the centrality of labourpower to capitalism – since, as the only commodity that can produce surplusvalue, and therefore profit, it is the sine qua non of accumulation – it is somewhat surprising that Marx nowhere describes its production. Engels did recognise the existence of domestic labour and the gendered relations within it, but did not take the analysis further. The domestic-labour debate of the 1970s was an attempt to fill this gap, but it left many of the crucial issues unresolved. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011

DOI: 10.1163/156920611X592850

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R. Hensman / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 3–28

One consequence of the under-theorisation of this particular arena of classstruggle by Marxists is that it has been largely ceded to reactionary ideologies and politics. In Third-World countries such as India, it also results in extremely high rates of infant and maternal mortality, malnutrition, and disability or premature death resulting from preventable or curable diseases. This article attempts to take up this theoretical task using examples from contemporary India. Recognition that the production of labour-power constitutes a crucial arena of class-struggle would enable Marxists both to combat male domination within the working class more effectively, and to play a more effective rôle in revolutionising the social relations of production.

Marx and Engels on domestic labour Under capitalism, according to Marx, labour is either productive – in the sense that it is exchanged with capital and produces surplus-value – or unproductive, in the sense that it is exchanged with capitalists’ revenue or workers’ wages, and does not produce surplus-value.1 However, this definition of productive labour is relevant only from the standpoint of individual capital: labour is or is not productive according to whether it does or does not produce surplus-value for the individual capitalist. A problem arises, however, when we look at production from the standpoint of total social capital, as Marx himself realised when he considered the capitalist production of articles of luxury-consumption: ‘This sort of productive labour produces use-values and objectifies itself in products that are destined only for unproductive consumption. In their reality, as articles, they have no use-value for the process of reproduction’, and hence, if there is ‘disproportionate diversion of productive labour into unreproductive articles, it follows that the means of subsistence or production will not be reproduced in the necessary quantities’.2 The result will be a reduction in the rate of accumulation of capital as a whole. In other words, what is productive labour from the standpoint of individual capital can be unreproductive labour from the standpoint of total social 1. ‘Since the immediate purpose and the authentic product of capitalist production is surplus value, labour is only productive, and an exponent of labour-power is only a productive worker, if it or he creates surplus-value directly, i.e. the only productive labour is that which is directly consumed in the course of production for the valorization of capital. . . . Every productive worker is a wage-labourer, but not every wage-labourer is a productive worker. Whenever labour is purchased to be consumed as a use-value, as a service . . . labour is not productive and the wagelabourer is no productive worker. His work is consumed for its use-value, not as creating exchangevalue; it is consumed unproductively, not productively’. (Marx 1976, pp. 1038, 1041.) 2. Marx 1976, pp. 1045–6.


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capital. In Volume II of Capital, Marx does refer to luxury-production in the reproduction-schemas for simple reproduction, but the schemas for reproduction on an expanded scale (i.e., capitalist accumulation) include only department I producing means of production for capital, and department II producing means of subsistence for wage-workers.3 Implicitly, he makes a distinction between reproductive labour, embodied in products – including workers – that re-enter capitalist production, and unreproductive labour, embodied in products that do not. (We are here referring to social, not biological, reproduction, although biological reproduction, without which there would be no new workers to replace those who die, is a necessary element of social reproduction.) Marx comes closest to describing the process of production of labour-power in the chapter on ‘The Sale and Purchase of Labour-power’: Given the existence of the individual, the production of labour-power consists in his reproduction of himself or his maintenance. For his maintenance he requires a certain quantity of the means of subsistence. Therefore the labour-time necessary for the production of labour-power is the same as that necessary for the production of those means of subsistence[.] . . . If the owner of labour-power works today, tomorrow he must again be able to repeat the same process in the same conditions as regards health and strength. His means of subsistence must therefore be sufficient to maintain him in his normal state as a working individual. . . . The owner of labour-power is mortal. If then his appearance in the market is to be continuous, and the continuous transformation of money into capital assumes this, the seller of labour-power must perpetuate himself ‘in the way that every living individual perpetuates himself, by procreation’. . . . Hence the sum of means of subsistence necessary for the production of labour-power must include the means necessary for the worker’s replacements, i.e. his children[.] . . . The costs of education vary according to the degree of complexity of the labour-power required. These expenses (exceedingly small in the case of ordinary labour-power) form a part of the total value spent in producing it. The value of labour-power can be resolved into the value of a definite quantity of the means of subsistence.4

Marx goes on to give examples of means of subsistence such as food and fuel, which need to be replaced daily, while others, such as clothes and furniture, can be purchased at longer intervals. But that is all. Unlike his detailed descriptions of the production of other commodities, here there is no description of a labour-process, nor even a mention of instruments of production (such as a stove, pots and pans, broom, bucket and mop). Just raw materials – means of subsistence – and the finished product: labour-power. 3. Marx 1978, Chapters 20 and 21. 4. Marx 1976, pp. 274–6.

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The implicit assumption is that all that is required to convert those means of subsistence into labour-power is a process of individual consumption. Yet the worker would not be maintained in his or her ‘normal state as a working individual’, nor be replaced when he or she could no longer work, unless somebody carried the raw materials and instruments of production home from the market or shops, cooked the food and washed up after the meal, dusted, swept, mopped floors and washed clothes, fed the baby, changed it, gave it a bath, and so on and so forth. The home is therefore a site of individual consumption, but also of production;5 both are necessary for the production of labour-power, and Marx’s failure to identify and analyse the latter has been attributed to his ‘patriarchal position’.6 In fact, Marx’s confusion of production with individual consumption leads to bizarre contradictions in his work. For example, he writes of domestic labour that: ‘The largest part of society, that is to say the working class, must incidentally perform this kind of labour for itself; but it is only able to perform it when it has laboured “productively”. It can only cook meat for itself when it has produced a wage with which to pay for the meat’.7 If we generalise this proposition to all commodities, it would state that until a commodity has been sold, it cannot be produced. But commodities are usually sold only after they have been produced, and this is especially true of labour-power, which cannot be sold for the first time until many hundreds of hours of labour-time have been spent on its production, as Marx recognises elsewhere: ‘Its exchange value, like that of every other commodity, is determined before it goes into circulation, since it is sold as a capacity, a power, and a specific amount of labour-time was required to produce this capacity, this power’.8 Engels not only recognised the existence of domestic work and the genderdivision of labour within it, but even went so far as to observe that the reversal of gender-rôles during the industrial revolution, and the distress caused by it, was possible only ‘because the sexes have been placed in a false position from the beginning’.9 He did not carry the analysis further, however, nor was there 5. In case this is doubted by anyone, one way of demonstrating the point would be to ask: is it possible for someone else to substitute for a person in this particular activity or not? If someone else eats all my meals for me, I would die of starvation within a month or two. On the other hand, if someone else cooks all my meals for me, I would not suffer at all, and might even enjoy them more than if I cooked them myself ! Thus, in general, if it is possible to substitute one person for another in some activity, it is a process of production, while if that is not possible, it is a process of individual consumption. 6. Weinbaum 1978, p. 43. 7. Marx 1963, p. 161. 8. Marx 1976, p. 1066. 9. Engels 1975, p. 439.


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much progress on this front until the debate around domestic labour (i.e. housework and childcare) erupted in the 1970s.10 Let us look at the issues taken up which throw light on the production of labour-power.

The debate of the 1970s Most participants in the debate agreed that domestic labour was socially useful and necessary: i.e. it was useful not just to other members of the household but to society as a whole. It is clear that domestic labour transfers the value of the commodities bought with the wage to the end-product, labour-power, but does it also create value? Here, those who say ‘yes’11 are surely correct, while those who say ‘no’12 are wrong. Domestic labour is part of the production-process of labour-power, a commodity that is sold on the (labour) market, and to say that it does not produce value would contradict the whole starting-point of Marx’s theory of surplus-value, according to which ‘the value of each commodity is determined by . . . the labour-time socially necessary to produce it. . . . Hence in determining the value of the yarn, or the labour-time required for its production, all the special processes carried on at various times and in different places which were necessary, first to produce the cotton and the wasted portion of the spindle, and then with the cotton and spindle to spin the yarn, may together be looked on as different and successive phases of the same labour process’.13 Whether the materials that go into the production of a commodity are produced as commodities or not makes no difference to the value of the final product, so long as their quality is comparable. In the case of labour-power, one male worker may eat his meals at restaurants, get his clothes and linen washed at a laundry, and pay for a cleaner to clean his flat, while another worker doing the same job at the same workplace and earning the same wage may have a wife who does the shopping, cooking, washing-up, washing and cleaning, but the value of their labour-power would be the same. To deny that the housewife’s labour in the latter situation creates value would entail arguing that the first worker’s labour-power has a much higher value than that of the second; an analogous contention would be that the piece of cloth woven by a handloom-weaver whose wife spins the yarn at home has less value than an 10. Malos (ed.) 1982. 11. Dalla Costa and James 1972; Seccombe 1974 and 1975. 12. Benston 1969; Coulson, Magas and Wainwright 1975; Gardiner, Himmelweit and Mackintosh 1982; Himmelweit and Mohun 1977. 13. Marx 1976, pp. 293–4.

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identical piece of cloth woven by one who buys the yarn on the market, which clearly cannot be the case. To the extent that domestic labour performs a function that is necessary for the production of labour power, it produces value: ‘The value of labour-power is determined, as in the case of every other commodity, by the labour-time necessary for the production, and consequently also the reproduction, of this specific article’.14 And this is reproductive labour in the sense that it makes an essential contribution to social reproduction. Once we acknowledge that domestic labour contributes to the value of labour-power, the neat division of the working day into necessary and surpluslabour performed in the workplace collapses. The equation becomes even more complex when the generational reproduction of labour-power and the contribution of state-education and healthcare are brought into the picture. The rate of surplus-value would then have to be calculated taking into account all the necessary labour (in the workplace as well as the home) done by members of the household that is the unit of production of labour-power, and all the payments made by the capitalist, not only by way of wages, but also in contributions to services such as state-education and healthcare. Does domestic labour produce surplus-value? A housewife is not paid wages, but her labour is paid for out of her husband’s wage, so his employer pays her indirectly. If the amount paid for her labour is the same as or more than what her husband would have to pay to buy the services she performs on the market, then she would not be producing surplus-value. (However, it is possible that her husband keeps for himself part of the amount paid by the employer for her labour, in which case, he would be exploiting her.) But, if the amount paid for her labour by her husband’s employer is less than the value of the services she performs, that means the employer is keeping part of what he would otherwise have had to pay out as wages, and her labour is therefore contributing indirectly to his surplus-value. The disparity is likely to be greatest where there are small children in the family, since the cost of waged childcare would tend to be considerably greater than the cost of the labour-power of their mother. Thus, although Dalla Costa and James15 were wrong to think that domestic labour is always productive (i.e. always produces surplus-value for the individual capitalist), it is true that when its duration is extended unduly, this labour allows extra surplus-value to be appropriated by subsidising the production of labour-power. The Bolivian women’s leader and miner’s wife Domitila Barrios de Chungara made a precise calculation of this, comparing 14. Marx 1976, p. 274. 15. Dalla Costa and James 1972.


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the work performed in the home with the cost of the same services bought on the market: One day I got the idea of making a chart. We put as an example the price of washing clothes per dozen pieces and we figured out how many dozens of items we washed per month. Then the cook’s wage, the babysitter’s, the servant’s. . . Adding it all up, the wage needed to pay us for what we do in the home . . . was much higher than what the men earned in the mine for a month.16

Thus, if a miner’s wife died or stopped working, and the man was compelled to buy on the market the services that she had formerly performed, his wage would not have been sufficient, showing that it was less than the value of labour-power; indeed, the shortfall would have been even greater, because Domitila, with help from her children, also made and sold small pies called ‘salteñas’ to supplement the family-income. Thus, the women’s surplus-labour allowed the mine-owner to appropriate more surplus-value than he would otherwise have been able to do. But it is impossible to see this effect so long as the production of labour-power (and its value) is seen solely as the activity of waged workers. Only if it is seen as the collective product of the unit of production of labour-power – the working-class household – is it possible to calculate the real rate of surplus-value. What happens when there are two or more wage-earners in the family? We can examine this by looking at three different situations that are found in India. Situation A is one where a male worker in a formal-sector enterprise is able to support his wife and, say, two school-going children. They might rent a two-bedroom flat with running water, use a gas-stove, and eat fairly well. The woman is there when the children come home from school, and can spend time with them even while she does other chores. In effect, the man’s wage is sufficient to pay for the upkeep of another person (his wife) to do all this work.17 If it is a woman who is the formal-sector employee, the continuity between her waged and unwaged work is clearer: she must do both, perhaps with some help from others at home, in order to support the family, since they cannot eat raw rice, wheat, dal or other food off dirty plates. The increase in time spent on domestic labour in order to compensate for lower wages is also more obvious. A study in Delhi showed that, in response to a cut in real wages between 1994/5 and 1999/2000 resulting from inflation and restrictions in access to the Public Distribution System, the total time expended on waged 16. Barrios de Chungara and Viezzer 1978, p. 35. 17. See Seccombe 1974.

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work and domestic labour by women-workers increased from 13–14 hours to 16–17 hours a day, as they spent more time shopping around for the cheapest goods, queuing-up at the ration-shop, and cleaning inferior rice.18 If the male breadwinner loses his job and has to take an informal job in a small enterprise which subcontracts work from his former company, earning just half of what he was earning before (situation B), his wife has two options. They could move to a basti (shanty-town) where she has to spend many more hours collecting water from the shared tap, cooking on a kerosene-stove, queuing-up at the ration-shop, cleaning, preparing food and washing up, and so on. Their standard of living would be lower, but by spending much more time on housework – perhaps 16 as opposed to 10 hours per day – she could feed everyone on the lower wage and keep the children in school. Alternatively, she might find a job that pays half or less of her husband’s former wage. They can then stay in their flat and keep the gas-stove, but everyone has to chip in and help with the housework even though she continues to do the bulk of it, working perhaps 18 or more hours a day. In both cases the rate of surplusvalue has gone up. If the technology in the small enterprise where the man now works is the same as in the large one (which is quite common), half of his former wage is being taken as additional surplus-value. If his wife does not get a job, this is partly compensated for by her increased domestic work; if she does, then her wage may compensate for the loss in his earnings, but she works even longer hours as well as creating surplus-value for her own employer. The family-wage is now split up between them. Situation C is the most tragic: the man loses his job and cannot find another – at most, he can find only casual work for a few days a month. His wife takes a job, but even their combined earnings cannot support the family, so the children are taken out of school and sent to work too. The family-wage is now split up between four people, and the rate of surplus-value is even higher. Their collective working hours, including necessary labour spent on household tasks, has also increased, since they are too poor to afford ready-cooked food or laundry and cleaning services. This sequence of events is not purely fictional, it is only too common: it occurred, for example, as a consequence of the closure of textile-mills in Ahmedabad.19 Millions of agricultural and migrant-labour families have always been in situation C, as indeed most working-class families were in Marx’s time: ‘everywhere, except in the metallurgical industries, young persons (under 18), women and children form by far the most preponderant element in the factory personnel’;20 even a 18. Chhachhi 2005, pp. 247–9. 19. Breman 2004, pp. 203–9. 20. Marx 1976, p. 577.


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steel- and ironworks ‘employs 500 boys under 18, and of these about a third, or 170, are under the age of 13’.21 If we include other permutations – for example, where there are small children in the family, and a slightly older girl is kept at home to look after them while her parents go out to work – the bulk of the labour-force in India belongs to situations B and C. In all of these cases, except the rare one where a man’s wage is adequate to keep the family in relative comfort without anyone being subjected to overwork, domestic labour compensates for the fact that part of the value of labour-power is being kept by capital as additional surplus-value.

The genesis of the working-class family Left to itself, capital’s ‘werewolf-like hunger for surplus value’22 pushes down wages and extends the working day to such an extent that all members of the family, excluding only the smallest children, work long hours in wage-labour simply in order to survive. If at any time it needs to retrench workers, it dismisses men rather than women and children. The family as a space apart from capital is destroyed. It is workers, through their struggles for higher wages, abolition of child-labour and restriction of working hours, who win back time and space for the family. In this, they are supported up to a point by the state, acting in the interests of the capitalist class as a whole. At an earlier stage, in both England and India, the state used legislation to force reluctant workers to labour long hours; but after capital extended these hours to such an extent that it ‘produces the premature exhaustion and death of this labour-power itself ’23 – in other words, when the supply of labour-power for capital was threatened – the state stepped in again to limit working hours and ensure that labour-power was not ‘maintained and developed only in a crippled state’; in such a situation, the price of labour-power (embodied in wages) falls below its value, since ‘the value of every commodity is determined by the labour-time required to provide it in its normal quality’.24 Thus, both wages and working hours enter into the calculation of whether the price of labour-power is or is not below its minimum value. The worker sells her labour-power for a specified period of time, just as the rent for a flat is for a specified period of time. If a tenant can rent one flat for two weeks with

21. 22. 23. 24.

Marx 1976, p. 371. Marx 1976, p. 353. Marx 1976, p. 376. Marx 1976, p. 277; emphasis added.

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a certain amount of money, but can rent another flat for three weeks with the same amount of money, the latter rent is only two-thirds of the former. Similarly, if one capitalist pays a certain wage for an eight-hour working day while another pays the same wage for a twelve-hour working day, the latter wage is only two-thirds of the former. If working hours are extended beyond a certain point, the price of labour-power falls below its value even if the wage is kept constant. This calculation cannot be accurate unless all the hours worked by all the members of the family in order to produce labour-power are taken into account. Labour-power is not a purely physiological entity. ‘In contrast . . . with the case of other commodities, the determination of the value of labour-power contains a historical and moral element’.25 Wages must enable the working class to live at an acceptable standard of living. Ensuring that the price of labour-power does not fall below its value, and setting this value at an acceptable level, are both products of working-class struggle. The ‘moral and historical’ element would differ from one society to another, but it seems reasonable to set the minimum value at a level where income covers basic requirements of food, water, clothing, shelter, healthcare and education; where the minimum age for employment complies with the International Labour Organisation’s norm of 15 years; and where adults get at least 11 or 12 hours per working day for sleep and recreation, plus paid weekly days off, annual leave and holidays. In the formal sector in India, workers have made progress in winning space and time for the family. By contrast with the situation in 1890, when womenmillworkers in India were getting up at 4:30am and working till late at night in order to complete their household duties as well as wage-labour,26 and children as young as seven years would be working in the factories, the Factories Act of 1948 (still in force) prohibits the employment of children under 14 in registered factories, and the statutory work-week is 48 hours. When combined with travel to and from work and with domestic labour, even a 48-hour week means that women never get enough time for rest and recreation: women-workers in Chennai reported getting up at 4:30–5:00am, working for 16–18 hours, and being forced to miss meals in order to meet their workschedules.27 However, some unions have negotiated a shorter work-week. For workers in formal employment, there has been considerable advance in raising the standard of living and wresting family-time away from wage-labour.

25. Marx 1976, p. 275. 26. Savara 1986, p. 38. 27. Swaminathan 2002, pp. 9–10.


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The same cannot be said for informal women-workers. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, malnutrition and ill-health resulted in a maternalmortality rate of 540 per 100,000 live births, with around 136,000 women dying each year from pregnancy-related causes. Maternal malnutrition resulted in 30% of infants with ‘low birth-weight’, creating health-risks that would last for the rest of their lives. The infant-mortality rate was 67 and under-five mortality rate 93; 47% of under-five-year-olds were severely or moderately malnourished. This resulted in a large number of children dying or becoming disabled as a result of contracting preventable and curable diseases.28 In other words, the exceedingly low wages, long working hours and unhealthy working conditions of the vast majority of women-workers resulted in the production of labour-power in a crippled state. Unions have demanded equal wages for women for the same work, yet arguments for a ‘family-wage’ also reveal an underlying assumption that many women will not, in fact, be employed, but will be dependent on male wageearners who will therefore have to be paid enough to support them. Two union-officials in Bengal who were interviewed by the Royal Commission on Factory Labour (1931) argued for a wage that would be sufficient to support female dependants as well as children. ‘Although not formulated explicitly as a demand for a “family wage” based on a male-breadwinner/dependent wife conceptualization of the family, the complaints of the Bengali trade unionists over wage levels certainly involved the assumption that the typical worker was a married male with a range of non-employed dependants whom he had increasing difficulty maintaining’.29 The Delhi Agreement of 1935 between the Ahmedabad millowners and the Textile Labour Association made this assumption explicit by specifying that married women-workers whose husbands were employed in the mills would be dismissed.30 The fact that no union has ever used the clause in the Equal Remuneration Act prohibiting the rampant discrimination against women in recruitment, promotions and training is eloquent testimony to the near-universal agreement that a woman has less right to a job (especially a well-paid one) than a man. What has happened here? Are these developments a victory or defeat for women in particular? The working class as a whole? The answer to these questions, unsatisfactory though it may seem, is ‘both’. Comparing the employment and working conditions of nonunionised informal workers and their families with those of unionised formal workers and their families, 28. UNICEF 2004, Tables 1, 2, 5 and 8; Krishnakumar 2004; Pelletier, Frongillo Jr., Schroeder and Habicht 1995. 29. Standing 1991, p. 149. 30. Chhachhi 1983, pp. 41–2.

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no-one could possibly deny that men, women and children in the latter category are vastly better off in terms of living standards, rest and leisure, and access to healthcare and education. It would be hard to find a housewife married to a formal-sector worker who would want to trade places with an informal woman-worker in her hut, chawl or pavement-shack; it is indisputable that ‘the retreat of certain family members from the labour force, in conjunction with an organized attempt to secure a “family wage” ’31 has resulted in a very welcome rise in the standard of living. Like the woman-miner who was glad that she had left her job because she did not have to do domestic work after coming home exhausted from a day’s labour,32 most women-workers in India too are glad to escape from heavy labour and have more time to spend on home-making. It is less obvious, but also true, that compared with young women and men living on construction-sites or in dormitories supplied by their employers, who are often nervous to be seen talking to ‘outsiders’ for fear of losing their jobs, workers who have homes that are outside the purview of their employers have greater freedom to discuss, organise and struggle collectively.33 These are gains. Yet the development of the male-breadwinner/family-wage norm was also a defeat for working-class women, and thus for the working class as a whole. Some women, especially if they have no young children, prefer to have formal employment and to get help with housework rather than sit at home all day.34 For large numbers of women-headed households, the acute shortage of formal employment for women means there is no alternative to poverty, and often the compulsion either to send children out to work or keep daughters at home to look after smaller children while the women themselves go out to work. The assumption that only men have dependants is not sustainable, nor is it true that all men have dependants: single young men living in their parental homes might need a ‘family-wage’ even less than a woman whose husband is employed. Moreover, even when husband and wife are earning, there is no basis for the assumption that his wage pays for basic subsistence while hers is supplementary: indeed, most research shows that in such situations, women’s wages are spent entirely in ensuring family-survival, while a variable portion of men’s wages is spent on alcohol, tobacco, gambling and other activities.35 So there is a negative element in the way that the demand for a ‘familywage’ has been posed, fought for, and won in formal employment. It is directly 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

Humphries 1980, p. 157. Pinchbeck 1930, p. 269. See Humphries 1980, pp. 159–63. See Chhachhi and Pittin 1996, p. 110. See Elson 1995, pp. 183–4; Kottegoda 2004, pp. 137–55.


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oppressive to women, and also disadvantageous to their dependants if they have any.36 Gandhi’s justification of the expulsion of women from the Ahmedabad mills made the patriarchal assumptions behind this decision explicit: It is not for our women to go out and work as men do. If we send them to the factories, who will look after our domestic and social affairs? If women go out to work, our social life will be ruined and moral standards will decline.37

This attitude undermines the working-class struggle as a whole, by constituting women as secondary-wage earners and therefore cheap labour. In formal employment, capitalists may have lost the battle to draw all members of the working-class family (except the very youngest) into the wage-labour force and compel them to produce surplus-value; but they have very astutely used male dominance in the working class, which shaped the outcome of this struggle, to their own advantage, by constituting women as a reserve-army of cheap labour.38 In Bombay and Ahmedabad, women’s formal jobs in the textile-mills were destroyed in the early-twentieth century,39 but when men’s jobs were in turn destroyed, women had to enter informal employment to ensure family-survival. Their constitution as a cheap and flexible labour-force with the collusion of male workers and unionists meant that in this latter situation, living standards for the whole family fell drastically. Moreover, as discussions with women pharmaceutical workers in Bombay showed,40 even well-paid formal women-workers have great difficulty participating actively in the union, due to a combination of domestic-labour commitments, objections from husbands, and prejudice in the workplace, thus posing obstacles to united struggles. How can all of these problems be overcome?

Mechanisation, commercialisation, and state-contributions to domestic labour Moving towards a resolution of these issues requires us to take a closer look at the work that is performed in the home. It can further be divided into (i) work which results in a product that is distinct from a person (such as cooking a 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

Hartmann 1981, pp. 20–1; Barrett and McIntosh 1980; Barrett 1980, pp. 26–7. Patel 1988, p. 380, cit. Breman 2004, p. 112. Beechey 1977 and 1978. Kumar 1983, p. 110; Westwood 1991, pp. 292–5. Hensman 1996.

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meal or washing clothes) and (ii) work whose product is inseparable from a person (such as childcare). The first kind of production can quite easily be mechanised or taken over by capitalism. Cleaning is a special case. There is not much scope for mass-production techniques here; it is labour-intensive work, made more onerous by the fact that its product is noticed only when the work is not done. The second kind is exemplified by caring work, where there can be no mechanisation, no substitution of dead for living labour: caring and nurturing work is, by its nature, labour-intensive. Although the majority of people needing care are children (since everyone begins life as a child), there are also adults who need it. Many people with disabilities and old people need part-time or full-time attendance, and an accident or stroke can, at one blow, convert even an able-bodied adult into one needing long-term care.41 One way in which the workload of domestic labour can be reduced is by mechanising tasks that were formerly performed manually, or by using laboursaving devices. This process has probably gone as far as it can go in the First World, but the same cannot be said for India. While refrigerators, which can cut down the frequency of shopping and cooking, are common among professionals and better-paid employees, and washing machines are somewhatless common, they are not an option for millions of working-class households in rural areas and urban slums, for the simple reason that they have no powersupply. Women in these households spend hours each day collecting water. They sometimes also collect and prepare fuel for cooking on primitive stoves, the smoke from which causes respiratory problems in the ill-ventilated shacks they inhabit. Lack of sanitation further undermines the reproduction of labour-power by causing widespread illness and death from water-borne diseases. This is an area where the state urgently needs to contribute to the social reproduction of labour-power. Providing such households with subsidised housing, electricity, potable running water, sanitation, and stoves (including solar-powered ones) that do not require the collection of fuel would result in an enormous reduction in the time and effort spent on domestic labour as well as a reduction in avoidable sickness and death. Another way of reducing domestic labour is by buying on the market products formerly made in the home. Again, the process has probably gone as far as it can in the First World, and possibly even too far, substituting not only ready-made for home-baked bread and frozen vegetables for fresh ones, but also fast foods of doubtful nutritional value for more nutritious cooked meals. In India, there has been some substitution of bread or ready-made chapatis for 41. Marx’s analysis allows for means of subsistence for such people, but not for the care that is equally important to their well-being.


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home-made ones, rice and pulses can be bought cleaned and packed, spices are commonly bought already processed, and people often buy flour rather than buying wheat and getting it milled. The use of packed and processed foods (ranging from ice-cream and frozen peas to yoghurt and pasteurised milk) is common among the families of professionals and better-paid employees, who also often eat their mid-day meal at a restaurant or indigenous fast-food stall if their workplace has no canteen of its own, and send their clothes and linen to be laundered, ironed or dry-cleaned. But there are three obstacles to the wider spread of such practices. One is the abject poverty of the largest section of the working class, which simply cannot afford to buy processed foods, much less get their clothes laundered. Another is the patriarchal assumption that it is the duty of women in the household to do this work. And the third is the availability of extremely cheap labour, which can be employed to do such tasks in the home. The substitution of waged for unwaged domestic labour is universal among the rich, many of whom employ whole retinues of live-in domestic workers. Among professionals and better-paid white- and blue-collar workers, it is more selective, in the sense that domestic workers are employed for some tasks and not others, the most common tasks being cleaning, washing, and washing-up. The employment of child-minders to look after small children when both parents are working is also common. Such practices were common in the First World in Marx’s time, then disappeared from all but the richest households, but recently started spreading again with the influx of cheap migrant-labour into these countries as well as parts of West Asia. One form is the cleaning firm, which sends its employees to clean the houses of customers. Another is the direct employment of domestic workers to work in the homes of their employers. These practices do free women in more affluent households from the ‘double burden’ of domestic labour and paid work, but at a heavy cost to the reproduction of labour-power in the households of the workers who take up the burden. This is unregulated, informal labour, and suffers from low pay, long hours and lack of social security. In India, child-labour is rampant in this sector. Women and girls who do such work, especially if they are live-in maids, are extremely vulnerable to verbal, physical and sexual abuse; such cases are reported from time to time, especially if they result in the death of the worker, but most are unreported, and serious crimes go unpunished. There are similar horror-stories about migrant workers in First-World countries, who are even more vulnerable because they may not speak the language of the country where they work or know anyone to whom they can turn for help, may be illegal immigrants or on visas that allow them to work only for a specified

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employer, and may have had their passports confiscated by employers.42 In the case of live-in maids who are mothers, the money they send home often does not compensate for the neglect their own children suffer. If the worker is a child, she loses the time she needs for education, play and rest. Domestic workers in India, especially those engaged in cleaning work, are unionising, and the ILO is working to strengthen the rights of migrant domestic workers. It is possible that these efforts will succeed in improving their employment-conditions. But employing domestic workers, even if they come in only for an hour or two per day to do cleaning work, cannot be the solution to the problem of domestic labour. It is not accessible to most working-class families, makes use of cheap labour, and tends to reinforce a social perception that cleaning work, which is socially necessary for hygiene and health, marks out a person as inferior. In most societies it is ill-paid work (if paid for at all), and in India has traditionally been consigned to Dalits, who were at one time – and still are in some places – treated as untouchable.43 Paradoxically, regulating this sector of employment so that child-labour is abolished, a living wage and social-security contributions are paid, and paid leave is available, would make it unaffordable for the few working-class families that use it. Thus, its rôle in the reproduction of labour-power – as opposed to the provision of services to the affluent – is minimal.

Socialist and radical-feminist solutions Yet childcare and help with the care of disabled and old people is essential if women are to be released from full-time domestic labour; sick people need specialised care and treatment, children need to be educated, and those who have no means of support need to be supported. One solution that emerged in countries with social-democratic and state-socialist régimes was the provision of these services by the state. Ideally, this would make it possible for workers performing these services to have decent employment-conditions without making the services inaccessible to those who need them most, some of whom may be poorer than the workers. But the Indian state has been particularly recalcitrant in providing these services, even by comparison with much poorer Third-World countries. Millions of children do not even get schooling, much less pre-school care; providing adequate socialised care and education for all children would require a substantial investment. Socialised care of adults is 42. Heyzer, Lycklama à Nijeholt and Weerakoon (eds.) 1992; Young 2000; Ehrenreich and Hochschild (eds.) 2003. 43. Menon 2005.


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hardly available at all except for the rich; the appalling cruelty with which mentally ill patients are treated in many institutions, as well as the routine appearance of people with disabilities and old people begging on the streets, are testimony to the disastrous under-funding of this sector.44 A radical solution to the specific problem of childcare proposed by Lilina Zinoviev shortly after the Russian Revolution was state-run child-rearing: ‘Our task now is to oblige the mother to give her children to us – to the Soviet State’. The idea was taken up in Kollontai’s formulation: ‘Children are the State’s concern’. She added: ‘The social obligation of motherhood consists primarily in producing a healthy and fit-for-life child. . . . Her second obligation is to feed the baby at her own breast’.45

A similar suggestion was that ‘it would . . . be desirable for the child to be left to his parents infinitely less than at present, and for his studies and his diversions to be carried on . . . under the direction of adults whose bonds with him would be impersonal and pure’.46 A logical conclusion following from this approach is that women’s liberation requires the application of modern technology to the production of children in order to free women from the ‘social obligation’ to produce, breastfeed and care for them.47 However, the practical results of institutionalised care were not particularly positive. Small children left in full-time nurseries in Russia were found to be more backward than those looked after at home,48 and, as a woman lamented in a samizdat-publication smuggled out of Russia in 1979, Kindergartens and crèches are a utopia, which in real life turn out to be antiutopias. If we send healthy children to such establishments, we get back sick children. Women must constantly report sick in order to be at home with the child. Not with the healthy child, as the case was earlier, but with the sick child.49

Another problem, where day-and-night nurseries were tried out in Russia and China, was that women themselves wanted more contact with their children.50

44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

For more details, see Hensman 2011, pp. 190–203, 246–50, 262–75. Broyelle 1977, p. 71. de Beauvoir 1997, p. 539. Firestone 1970. Rowbotham 1974, p. 168. Malachevskaya 1979; cf. McAuley 1981, pp. 198–9. Rowbotham 1974, p. 196; Dunayevskaya 1996, pp. 73–4.

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It is hard to see how such proposals are an improvement on the more usual feminist demands for women to be able to control their own bodies, sexuality and fertility,51 and for the development of technology which would enable them to do so safely, thus ensuring that women have babies only if and when they want them.52 They also suggest that the cause of the oppression of women is their biological difference from men. Biological differences such as sex and skin-colour can certainly be made the pretext for oppression, but it is the social relations under which this occurs that are to blame, not the differences themselves. The biological difference in this case – the fact that women’s bodies are adapted to pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding53 while men’s bodies are not – need not in all circumstances lead to the oppression of women. Whether it does or not depends on technological developments and social relations, which in turn determine whether or not women can control their own sexuality and fertility safely, whether or not childbearing is a physically safe and socially respected activity, and whether or not there is provision of facilities (such as extended maternity-leave and workplace-crèches) which provide social support for women who wish to combine breastfeeding with paid work. As for other aspects of the gender-division of labour, there is no evidence that they have any biological basis, in the sense that all the tasks can be performed either by men or by women, and competence depends, not on gender, but on inclination and acquired skills. However, given particular social relations, it may well make economic sense to relegate certain tasks to women other than those for which they are biologically adapted. In precapitalist agricultural societies where having a large number of children was an asset, where child-mortality was high, and where women breast-fed each child for one year or more, they might spend 20 or more years of their lives in childbearing and breastfeeding, in which case it was more efficient for them to do other household tasks as well. But these relations are revolutionised 51. Weinbaum 1978, pp. 29–30. 52. A woman’s right to control her own fertility is also partially a protection of a child’s right to be wanted, loved and adequately cared for by at least one parent. This is absolutely essential, given the huge amount of time and effort that is involved in this work – indeed, preferably two or more adults should make this commitment before the child is brought into the world. Advocates of socialised childcare often forget that this presupposes a much larger number of people who love children and wish to spend time on childcare than do so at present. 53. Breastfeeding can be substituted by bottle-feeding, either of expressed breast-milk or infant-formula, but in India and other Third-World countries this can lead to high rates of infant-mortality where conditions are not hygienic or the milk-powder is diluted too much, hence it is recommended that babies should be breast-fed for at least six months. But this does not mean that the mother has to be solely responsible for childcare during this period, since there is still a great deal that others can do for the baby.


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by capitalism.54 In India, having a large number of children is no longer an asset and may be a liability, with children constituting more mouths to feed, and child-labour driving down wage-rates and causing unemployment by competing with adult labour. Government family-planning programmes make birth-control relatively easily accessible and have succeeded in reducing the birth-rate; child-mortality, while still high, is rapidly being reduced; and a combination of these two developments means that women need not spend more than two or three years of their lives breastfeeding infants. On the other side, the interest of capitalism in women as wage-labourers provides them with an alternative that is often also necessary for the survival of the family. In other words, the material basis for the gender-division of labour has changed drastically. Since caring work involves a relationship between the carer and the person being cared for, it cannot completely be passed on to others without damaging the relationship, but this does not mean that it cannot be socialised at all. Indeed, at a slightly higher age – five or six years – children now routinely go to school, where they are looked after by people from outside the family for several hours a day, and it can be argued that full-time care-giving constitutes a workload that is too heavy for one or even two people to carry alone. However, good-quality socialised care requires a high ratio of care-givers to people being cared for, which makes it expensive.55 This is probably why, under capitalism, it is not provided without a struggle by both feminists and the labour-movement,56 except as an expensive service to the privileged few who can afford it, or in circumstances where a shortage of labour-power makes it necessary for large numbers of women to be inducted into the labour-force. Although there is not much formal socialisation of caring work in India, a great deal of informal sharing of care does take place. The boundary between the family and the outside world is not as sharp in South-Asian cultures as it has become in Western ones. To begin with, the term ‘family’ would usually refer to the extended family, even where, as in Bombay, there are many nuclearfamily households due to migration; and it is quite normal for people who are not kin to be called by family-designations (brother, sister, aunt, uncle, mother, father, son, daughter, etc.). In traditional communities these honorary relatives would tend to be from the same caste and religion, but in other settings they might simply be neighbours or friends who could, for example, be relied upon 54. Ferguson and Folbre 1981, pp. 321–3. 55. This applies to schoolchildren too, since teachers are responsible for pastoral care as well as education. Therefore, even a ratio of one teacher for 25 to 30 children – forget about the usual Indian ratio of one teacher for 50 to 70 children! – is not enough. 56. Zaretsky 1982, pp. 215–17.

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to look after children on an ad hoc basis. The extended family has advantages as well as disadvantages. In traditional families, it means that young women – and men, for that matter – are more tightly controlled; young women have a heavier workload because they are catering to a larger number of people; and even if there are grandparents around to help with childcare, this comes at a price, in the sense that the children may then be imbued with traditional values such as rigid gender-rôles. On the other hand, the fluidity of boundaries means that the isolation of mothers with young children is less common. The small minority of alternative families that are not based on biological relationships and heterosexual marriage are more easily accepted in a metropolis such as Bombay where traditional communities have partially broken down.

Solidarity instead of competition or domination and subordination Socialising some caring work helps to reduce the huge burden now carried mainly by women within the family, but it does not by itself eliminate the gender-division of labour. It is quite possible that carers in the socialised facilities are women, that the nurturing which continues to be done in the home is also done by women, and that women continue to be treated as cheap labour. Changing this would require challenging the gender-division of labour both practically and ideologically, because it stunts both those involved in round-the-clock caring work, who never get a chance to exercise other skills and abilities, and those who do not engage in it at all, who never develop the skills and intelligence required for this work. Practical measures to counter it would include eliminating the gender-division of labour in employment, working towards the equal sharing of domestic labour between men and women, provision of crèches and nurseries for all children whose parents need childcare and sheltered accommodation or home-care for adults who need it, shorter working hours, and regular part-time jobs – if possible with flexible working hours to suit the needs of the employees – for both men and women who have caring responsibilities.57 It would also mean demanding that a much larger proportion of social-labour time be allocated to this work, which, in a capitalist society, means state-funding. But the ideological struggle in a sense has priority, because without winning that the practical struggle will not be won, either in the home or outside. The fact that, despite decades of feminism, and well over one-and-a-half centuries of the labour-movement, caring and nurturing continue to be undervalued and seen as ‘women’s work’ even within the working class, needs to be explained. 57. See Molyneux 1979, p. 27.


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One strand of the explanation can be identified in what has been described as ‘a great intellectual and cultural ambivalence within feminism’, in that it ‘represented both the highest development of liberal individualism and also a critique of liberal individualism’.58 The bourgeois ideology of competitive individualism penetrated not just bourgeois feminism but also radical and socialist feminism, leading to a devaluation of caring and nurturing because they constitute, inevitably, a handicap in the competitive struggle for recognition. But this has, at least partly, been a response to the attempt within workingclass movements to eliminate competition between women and men by reinforcing relationships of domination over women by men, and this constitutes the other strand of the explanation. Although Marx cannot be accused of advocating such domination, he did help to create the basis for it by ignoring and thereby devaluing the socially necessary caring work traditionally done by women, and assuming that a patriarchal family with the man as sole breadwinner was the model for the working class. The result was that when the working-class struggle wrested from capital time and space for a family, that family was to a greater or lesser extent modelled on capitalist society, with its social division of labour and hierarchical, authoritarian relations. Condoning oppressive and sometimes-violent domestic relationships by attributing them to the pervasive ideological influence of capital or male domination, as some Marxists and feminists do,59 simply perpetuates a situation where children grow up to believe that this is the only possible model of human relationships. But if it is possible to live in a capitalist society and struggle against it, it is equally possible and, in fact, easier to struggle against authoritarian relationships between men, women and children within the working class.60 Indeed, without this struggle, the labour-movement will continue to be subordinated to capital. Challenging the domination of capital requires the full involvement of working-class women and children, including those who are not directly exploited by capital, in the class-struggle. As Domitila puts it, ‘the first battle to be won is to let the woman, the man, the children participate in the struggle of the working class, so that the home can become a stronghold that the enemy can’t overcome. Because if you have the enemy inside your own house, then it’s just one more weapon that our common 58. Gordon 1982, p. 45. 59. See Chodorow and Contratto 1982, pp. 68–9. 60. However grim the situation is, it is not inevitable that men or women turn the anger generated by their own oppression against victims who are weaker and more vulnerable than themselves (women and children in the case of men, children in the case of women, or minority communities). This form of resistance to oppression – i.e. the refusal to become an oppressor oneself – is available even to the most powerless.

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enemy can use toward a dangerous end’.61 Women have an advantage in this struggle, to the extent that they recognise ‘both human needs for nurturance, sharing and growth, and the potential for meeting those needs in a nonhierarchical, nonpatriarchal society’.62 But it can only be won by the working class as a whole. What are the elements of such a struggle, and how far can it progress under capitalism? The first requirement is an understanding and acceptance within the labour-movement of the value of caring work and the skills and intelligence required for it, followed by the recognition that these need to be fostered in all human beings.63 Caring for a person conforms to the Marxist ideal of work that is directly for the satisfaction of human need and not for profit; hence recognising its importance is crucial to the struggle against capitalist exploitation and oppression. While the demand for ‘wages for housework’ has the drawback that, if met, it would eliminate even the limited autonomy enjoyed by working-class women and bring their domestic labour directly under the control of the state as employer,64 the demand that the value produced by domestic labour be recognised – for example, in statistics such as GDP, in settlements on divorce, and in allocating pensions to women – is an important one, helping to make this vast amount of labour visible. Counting the time spent in domestic labour as part of the working day is also important, especially in the case of women-workers, who often do not get enough time to reproduce their own labour-power through rest and recreation. The backwardness of the situation in India, where traditional hierarchies based on gender and age still predominate, could be an advantage if it allows the women’s liberation-movement to avoid the dead-end of liberal individualism, which is often confused with the development of individuality but is in fact as destructive of the full development of individuality as authoritarianism and patriarchy, which crush individuality in a more obvious way. Individuality can develop in a child only if she is surrounded by the loving attention of other human beings; children completely deprived of this – wolf-children, for example – fail to develop their human potentialities, while the development of children who are deprived of adequate interaction of this type is severely retarded. Yet providing this unstinted love and attention inevitably puts the giver at a disadvantage in a competitive market, and would therefore be ruled out in a purely market-driven economy.

61. 62. 63. 64.

Barrios de Chungara and Viezzer 1978, p. 36. Hartmann 1981, p. 33. Ruddick 1982. Freeman 1982.


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This contradiction at the heart of bourgeois ideology – the fact that, taken to its logical conclusion, it threatens bourgeois society with extinction, and therefore the reproduction of competitive individualism depends on its opposite (the reproduction of self-sacrificing women) – is what leads to the right-wing insistence on the family as a separate realm from which the logic of capital is excluded.65 However, from the standpoint of the socialist principle of solidarity, which posits an indissoluble link between the rights and well-being of each individual with those of others, such a contradiction does not exist; an ethic of care, in which the happiness and well-being of the person who is being cared for is essential to the happiness and well-being of the carer, is entirely compatible with it. Working for an ideal of nurturance and equal respect for human beings both inside and outside of the family (whatever shape or form it may take) is thus an essential component of a labour-movement built on the principle of solidarity. The practical outcome of this understanding would be movement towards an equal sharing of nurturing between men and women and a struggle for conditions which would make that possible. Equally important is the struggle for the allocation of vastly more social-labour time to this work than occurs currently, reversing the neoliberal policy of cuts in spending on healthcare, education and welfare. For most trade-unions in India, which have engaged in collective bargaining exclusively for their own members and have never had a solidaristic policy,66 the idea of a social wage (including education and healthcare for all) as a trade-union demand would be a new and important departure. Shortening working hours and increasing the number of part-time jobs with pro rata benefits would improve productivity and expand employment in addition to allowing more time for domestic labour. The Maternity Benefit Act and Factories Act, which require individual employers to pay maternitybenefits and provide crèches for the children of their women-workers, are direct disincentives to their employing women, as well as being somewhat unfair, since the generational reproduction of labour-power is a service to the capitalist class as a whole rather than the individual capitalist. Funding parental leave and childcare from contributions made by all employers, workers and the government, as in the case of Employees’ State Insurance Scheme benefits, removes this anomaly. The final goals of mutually affirmative relations within the household and adequate resources for the production of labour-power cannot be reached under capitalism, yet it is possible to make considerable progress in that 65. Thorne 1982, p. 19. 66. There are a few exceptions, such as the Chhattisgarh Mines Mazdoor Sangh, which is also unusual in the rôle that women have played (see Hensman 2002).

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Engels, Frederick 1975, ‘The Condition of the Working-Class in England: From Personal Observation and Authentic Sources’, in Marx and Engels 1975. Ferguson, Ann and Nancy Folbre 1981, ‘The Unhappy Marriage of Patriarchy and Capitalism’, in Sargent (ed.) 1981. Firestone, Shulamith 1970, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, New York: Bantam Books. Freeman, Caroline 1982 [1980], ‘When Is a Wage Not a Wage?’, in Malos (ed.) 1982. Gardiner, Jean, Susan F. Himmelweit and Maureen Mackintosh 1982 [1980], ‘Women’s Domestic Labour’, in Malos (ed.) 1982. Gordon, Linda 1982, ‘Why Nineteenth-Century Feminists Did Not Support “Birth Control” and Twentieth-Century Feminists Do: Feminism, Reproduction, and the Family’, in Thorne and Yalom (eds.) 1982. Hartmann, Heidi 1981, ‘The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union’, in Sargent (ed.) 1981. Hensman, Rohini 1996, ‘Urban Working-Class Women: The Need for Autonomy’, in Chhachhi and Pittin (eds.) 1996. —— 2002, ‘Trade Unions and Women’s Autonomy: Organisational Strategies of Women Workers in India’, in Gender, Diversity and Trade Unions: International Perspectives, edited by Fiona Colgan and Sue Ledwith, London: Routledge. —— 2011, Workers, Unions, and Global Capitalism: Lessons from India, New York: Columbia University Press. Heyzer, Noeleen, Geertje Lycklama à Nijeholt and Nedra Weerakoon (eds.) 1992, The Trade in Domestic Workers: Causes, Mechanisms and Consequences of International Migration, London: Zed Books. Himmelweit, Susan F. and Simon Mohun 1977, ‘Domestic Labour and Capital’, Cambridge Journal of Economics, 1, 1: 15–31. Humphries, Jane 1977, ‘Class Struggle and the Persistence of the Working-Class Family’, Cambridge Journal of Economics, 1, 3: 241–58. —— 1980 [1977], ‘Class Struggle and the Persistence of the Working-Class Family’, in The Economics of Women and Work, edited by Alice H. Amsden, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Kottegoda, Sepali 2004, Negotiating Household Politics: Women’s Strategies in Urban Sri Lanka, Colombo: Social Scientists’ Association. Krishnakumar, Asha 2004, ‘Unsafe Motherhood’, Frontline, 21, 16, available at: <www.frontlineonnet .com/fl2116/stories/20040813002709600.htm>. Kumar, Radha 1983, ‘Family and Factory: Women in the Bombay Cotton Textile Industry, 1919–1939’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 20, 1: 81–96. Malachevskaya, N. 1979, ‘The Mother – Family’, The Almanac, Leningrad: n.p. Malos, Ellen (ed.) 1982 [1980], The Politics of Housework, Third Edition, London: Allison and Busby. Marx, Karl 1963 [1863], Theories of Surplus Value, Part I, Moscow: Progress Publishers. —— 1976 [1867], Capital, Volume I, translated by Ben Fowkes, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. —— 1978 [1885], Capital, Volume II, translated by David Fernbach, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels 1975, Collected Works, Volume 4, Moscow: Progress Publishers. McAuley, Alastair 1981 [1980], Women’s Work and Wages in the Soviet Union, London: Allen and Unwin. Menon, Sindhu 2005, ‘Safai Karamcharis: Reinvented Untouchables in Modern India’, Labour File, 3, 6: 5–12, available at: .

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Molyneux, Maxine 1979, ‘Beyond the Domestic Labour Debate’, New Left Review, I, 116: 3–27. Patel, B.B. 1988, Workers of Closed Textile Mills: Patterns and Problems of Their Absorption in a Metropolitan Labour Market, Ahmedabad: Oxford and IBH Publishing Co. Pelletier, D.L., E.A. Frongillo Jr., D.G. Schroeder and J.P. Habicht 1995, ‘The Effects of Malnutrition on Child Mortality in Developing Countries’, Bulletin of the World Health Organization, 73, 4: 443–8. Pinchbeck, Ivy 1930, Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution, 1750–1850, London: George Routledge and Sons, Ltd. Rowbotham, Sheila 1974, Women, Resistance and Revolution, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Ruddick, Sara 1982, ‘Maternal Thinking’, in Thorne and Yalom (eds.) 1982. Sargent, Lydia (ed.) 1981, Women and Revolution: A Discussion of the Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism, London: Pluto Press. Savara, Mira 1986, Changing Trends in Women’s Employment: A Case Study of the Textile Industry in Bombay, Bombay: Himalaya Publishing House. Seccombe, Wally 1974, ‘The Housewife and Her Labour Under Capitalism’, New Left Review, I, 83: 3–24. —— 1975, ‘Domestic Labour: Reply to Critics’, New Left Review, I, 94: 85–96. Standing, Hilary 1991, Dependence and Autonomy: Women’s Employment and the Family in Calcutta, London: Routledge. Swaminathan, Padmini 2002, ‘Labour-Intensive Industries but Units Without “Workers”: Where Will ILO’s Social Dialogue Begin?’, Working Paper No.168, Chennai: Madras Institute of Development Studies. Thorne, Barrie 1982, ‘Feminist Rethinking of the Family: An Overview’, in Thorne and Yalom (eds.) 1982. Thorne, Barrie and Marilyn Yalom (eds.) 1982, Rethinking the Family: Some Feminist Questions, London: Longman. UNICEF 2004, The State of the World’s Children, available at: . Weinbaum, Batya 1978, The Curious Courtship of Women’s Liberation and Socialism, Boston: South End Press. Westwood, Sallie 1991, ‘Gender and the Politics of Production in India’, in Women, Development and Survival in the Third World, edited by Haleh Afshar, London: Longman. Young, Brigitte 2000, ‘The “Mistress” and the “Maid” in the Globalized Economy’, in Socialist Register 2001, edited by Leo Panitch and Colin Leys, London: The Merlin Press. Zaretsky, Eli 1982, ‘The Place of the Family in the Origins of the Welfare State’, in Thorne and Yalom (eds.) 1982.


brill.nl/hima

Workerism’s Inimical Incursions: On Mario Tronti’s Weberianism Sara R. Farris University of Konstanz [email protected]

Abstract This article considers the engagement of Mario Tronti – one of the leading figures of classical Italian workerism [operaismo] – with the thought of Max Weber. Weber constituted one of Tronti’s most important cattivi maestri. By analysing Weber’s influence upon Tronti’s development, this article aims to show the ways in which this encounter affected his Marxism and political theory in general. In particular, during the period of the debate in Italian Marxism about the thesis of the autonomy of the political, Tronti increasingly adopted Weberian terminology and theoretical points of reference. Ultimately, the article argues that Tronti’s heretical method led him to incorporate and to re-propose theoretical and political problematics that are characteristic of bourgeois political theory: namely, the dyad administration/charisma, and a teleological and anthropological approach to history. Focusing upon this heterodox encounter therefore enables us to understand one of the trajectories of the transformation of Marxism that occurred during its recurrent rendezvous with the ‘Marx of the bourgeoisie’. Keywords workerism, operaismo, Mario Tronti, Max Weber, autonomy of the political, friend/enemy, charisma, partisanship

Words, however you choose them, always appear things that belong to the bourgeoisie. But this is the way it is. In an enemy society there is no free choice of the means for fighting it. And the weapons for proletarian revolts have always been taken from the bosses’ arsenal.1

1. Tronti 2006a, p. 14. For comments on a previous version of this article, I am thankful to Harrison Fluss, Jan Rehmann, Peter Thomas, Massimiliano Tomba, Steve Wright, members of the Historical Materialism editorial board and the anonymous referees. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011

DOI: 10.1163/156920611X594731

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S. R. Farris / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 29–62

1. Introduction In a recent publication devoted to the founding fathers of Italian operaismo, Mario Tronti retrospectively described one of the dilemmas that troubled the circle of early workerists in the following terms: ‘the dispute [inside Quaderni Rossi] was whether to start from Marx or from Weber; we resolved it by finding a synthesis and saying: “let’s start from Marx Weber.” ’2 There is a noticeable discrepancy between the importance that Tronti here attributes to Max Weber and the relative neglect of such an influence in the growing secondary literature devoted to the workerist tradition of Italian Marxism.3 However, it would not be an exaggeration to regard Weberian references as something of a Leitmotiv of the entire tradition, from Panzieri’s regular quotations and allusions, to Negri’s early works and Cacciari’s enduring engagement. Indeed, Weber was such a constant point of reference in workerism’s early years in particular that it could legitimately be described as a ‘Weberian Marxism’, a concept first essayed by Merleau-Ponty in 1955 in his Adventures of the Dialectic.4 It is not the aim of this essay to reconstruct the full extent of the workerists’ engagement with Weberian themes.5 Rather, I aim to focus in particular upon the ways in which the Marxism of one particularly significant figure of that 2. In Borio, Pozzi and Roggero (eds.) 2005, p. 292 (my italics). 3. Two Italian studies have analysed Panzieri’s relationship with Weber’s work: Cavazzini 1993 and La Rosa 2005. There is not yet a study in English. 4. Similarly, a full account of Marxist engagements with Weber lies beyond the purposes and the scope of this essay. For a summary of some of the most important contributions, see Löwy 1996. 5. A full study of the workerist tradition’s ‘Weberianism’ would undoubtedly uncover a series of implicit and explicit references. For instance, as Steve Wright notes, ‘many within the Turin circle of Quaderni Rossi, including Panzieri himself, were partial to Weber’ (Wright 2002, p. 25). Panzieri’s interest in Weber can be traced back to his enthusiasm for sociology. He regarded Weber ‘as the most important figure in the history of sociology [who] gave Marxist theory serious consideration’ (Panzieri 1965). Negri devoted the second part of his master’s thesis [tesi di laurea] to Weber and later published a long review-essay on Weber scholarship (see Negri 1967). In later works, he has continued to refer to Weber, especially regarding his typology of domination (see Hardt and Negri 2000; Negri 2008). Former workerist Massimo Cacciari devoted numerous studies to Weber. Self-admittedly inspired by Tronti’s Postscript to Workers and Capital (but apparently also by Negri’s work on German philosophy), Cacciari regarded Weber as the necessary complement to Lenin’s theory of organisation, arguing that Weber was ‘the great author’ who suggested to him the articulation of ‘negative thought’ (see Trotta and Milana (eds.) 2008, p. 834). Vittorio Rieser (an early member of Quaderni Rossi) published a book in 1992 with the suggestive title Factory Today: The Strange Case of Dr Weber and Mr Marx [Fabbrica oggi (lo strano caso del dottor Weber e di mister Marx)]. Finally, Alberto Asor Rosa, a literary critic and close associate of Tronti in Quaderni Rossi and, later, Classe Operaia, criticised the ‘Weberian wing’ (especially Rieser) inside Quaderni Rossi, paradoxically, for not being consistently Weberian (see Asor Rosa 1965).


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tradition – namely, Mario Tronti – has been influenced by an ongoing engagement with the thought of the German sociologist.6 Although Tronti has never provided a systematic treatment of Weber’s thought, Weberian terms and theoretical perspectives pervade his most important texts. In particular, Weber’s political theory and depiction of the qualities of the political leader, together with the underlying totalising notion of rationalisation, have played an increasingly strong rôle in Tronti’s theoretical development. However, what is most distinctive about Tronti’s engagement with Weber’s thought, and the feature that perhaps makes it representative of an important 6. Though perhaps not as well-known internationally as other founding figures of workerism such as Negri, for instance, Tronti has nevertheless enjoyed recognition by a non-Italian audience for many years. At the beginning of the 1970s, the North-American journal Telos translated some sections of Tronti’s main work Workers and Capital. More recently, Steve Wright’s reconstruction of classical workerism emphasised the foundational importance of Tronti’s contribution to this tradition of ‘heretical’ Marxism, and the journal Historical Materialism, and some of its editors in particular, have begun to explore the relevance of Tronti’s thought for contemporary debates (see Wright 2002; Chiesa and Toscano (eds.) 2009; Mandarini 2009). Mario Tronti, born in Rome in 1931, began his political activity in a Roman branch of the PCI in the 1950s. At the end of the decade, while still a university-student in Rome, Tronti encountered the thought both of Galvano Della Volpe and of Raniero Panzieri, who had a profound impact on his intellectual and political development (for a reconstruction of Della Volpe’s influence on workerism, see Alcaro 1977). He initially followed Panzieri’s plan of creating a new journal (Quaderni Rossi ) as a theoretical space for rethinking Marxism outside the constraints of Party lines and for analysing the changes induced by the ongoing process of massive industrialisation in postwar Italy. After the experience of Quaderni Rossi, which he abandoned in 1963 together with Antonio Negri and others, Tronti founded what became the new mouthpiece of classical workerism, Classe Operaia. His articles in these two journals were later collected in Workers and Capital (published in 1966 and reprinted in 1971 with the addition of a lengthy Postscript). This volume immediately became a manifesto of so-called ‘theoretical workerism’. With his seductive prose and assertive rhetoric, Tronti’s magnum opus systematised some of the main theoretical premises that have characterised Italian workerism ever since: the idea of the primacy of workers’ struggles over capital, of the ‘factorisation of society’ as the increasing extension of the functioning of the factory to society as a whole, and the idea of politics as a war between arch enemies. The latter element was not only elaborated on the theoretical level, but also performed in a particular style of political writing, characterised by its harshness and vehemence. The end of the project of Classe Operaia in the mid-1960s marked the beginning of Tronti’s increasing disillusion regarding the possibility of an effective politics at a distance from the traditional organisations of the workers’ movement. From the 1970s onwards, he engaged actively inside the leadership-structures of the PCI, finally being elected from the lists of the PDS as a senator in 1992. Beside his directly political engagement, Tronti was also a professor in political philosophy at the University of Siena until his retirement in 2000, and subsequently became the Director of the Centre for the Reform of the State (CRS) in 2006. Alongside the now-classic Workers and Capital, Tronti is also the author of a considerable number of monographs and particularly articles on political theory and political philosophy, including interventions in contemporary debates.

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dimension of the workerist tradition more generally, is its presuppositions. Unlike the advocates of many other Weberian Marxisms, Tronti has not proposed that Weber’s thought, or elements of it, can be regarded as compatible with or complementary to Marxism. Rather, Tronti has argued that Weber’s thought could provide a lesson for Marxism and even fill a gap in Marx’s political theory precisely due to the fact that it was a form of ‘enemy-thought’, that is, a form of thought inimical to the perspectives and presuppositions of Marxism and the working-class movement. In this sense, Tronti’s Weberianism exhibits the heterodox approach that was characteristic of workerism more generally, which aimed to learn from non-Marxist and, especially, conservative authors as a way of developing new perspectives in the Marxist tradition. In this essay I therefore aim to identify the specificity of Tronti’s engagement with Weber by framing it within the broader idea of the necessity of ‘learning from enemies’. What are the theoretical assumptions of such an idea? What are its historical and political consequences? Above all, what lessons can an avowedly Marxist research-project today learn from both Weber’s thought itself and the particular way in which Tronti proposed to learn from such an ‘enemy’?

2. ‘Seedbeds’ for a reception of Weber in Tronti’s early writings Tronti begins to quote Weber extensively only in the Postscript to the second edition of Workers and Capital in 1971. The Postscript has sometimes been read as a coupure that marks Tronti’s departure for the supposedly ‘politicistabstract’ elaboration of the thesis of the ‘autonomy of the political’ of the 1970s, in contrast to the more ‘political-conjunctural’ focus of the militant interventions of the 1960s.7 Tronti’s engagement with Weber would thus seem to be linked to this second stage of his intellectual trajectory, as opposed to his early work. Nonetheless, it would be difficult to understand the ways and forms in which Tronti referred to Weber without mentioning some of the most important points elaborated in his early writings. A closer consideration reveals that we can in fact find in these writings the assumptions and presuppositions that arguably constituted the fertile soil or ‘seedbeds’, so to speak, for a certain reading and ‘incorporation’ of Weber’s thought. These ‘seedbeds’ for a reception of Weber in Tronti’s early writings can be schematically summarised in the

7. See Peduzzi 2006; Terzi 2007.


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following four elements:8 first, the nexus factory-society-state, conceived in terms of increasing rationalisation, departing from the former and progressing to the latter; second, a privileging of the political dimension in terms of a Kampfplatz in the analysis of the opposition between workers and capital; third, the necessity of an ‘hetero-integrationist’ approach aiming to fill the gaps in Marxian and Marxist political theory; and finally, the necessity of the analysis of bourgeois thought as a crucial stage in the project of developing a ‘partisan perspective’. 2.1. ‘Rationalisation’ One of the early workerists’ most significant analytical contributions was the idea of the increasing extension of the factory’s functioning to society as a whole. Tronti’s famous essay in Quaderni Rossi of 1962, ‘Factory and Society [La fabbrica e la società]’, later republished in Workers and Capital, was highly influential in diffusing this point of view. As Tronti put it, ‘at the highest level of capitalist development, the social relation becomes a moment of the relation of production, the entire society becomes an articulation of production, that is, the whole society lives as a function of the factory and the factory extends its exclusive dominion over the entire society.’9 By arguing that the ‘factorisation’ of society and of the state was a necessary consequence of industrialisation, Tronti re-proposed a hypothesis that had already been formulated by Panzieri, although in a significantly different way.10 Whatever their differences in formulation, however, they were united in affirming a conceptual framework that was at least indirectly or implicitly influenced by Weber (in Panzieri’s case, via his reading of Lukács),11 but which was also explicitly acknowledged. Panzieri in fact quoted Weber directly in the context of his remarks on the factory-society-state nexus, attributing to him the understanding of the link between the application of the principle of calculation 8. These elements, while not exhausting Tronti’s numerous and significant remarks of the period, certainly appear among the most important ones. 9. Tronti 2006a, p. 48. 10. Maria Turchetto provides one possible interpretation of this difference when she suggests that, in Panzieri, ‘the idea of a “plan” that extends from factory to society essentially refers to the phenomenon of growing capitalist concentration and its effects. In Tronti, by contrast, the idea of the extension of the factory above all refers to the phenomenon of the expansion of the servicesector in the economy. It was Tronti’s interpretation that prevailed in the subsequent development of operaismo, where it played a crucial rôle. These premises in fact gave rise to the idea of the “social worker” ’ (Turchetto 2008, p. 292). 11. As Cavazzini has noted in one of the rare discussions of ‘Weberian workerism’, Panzieri’s ‘approach to Weber’s problematic . . . on the regulatory principles of capitalism’ (Cavazzini 1993, p. 72) was structured through the filter of his reading of History and Class Consciousness.

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in the capitalist enterprise and the bureaucratic organisation of society as a whole.12 ‘Rationalisation’, a pre-eminently Weberian concept,13 thus became a key-concept for understanding increasing ‘factorisation’, that is, the progressive extension of capitalist relations to the entire society, not only for Panzieri but also for Tronti. As Tronti argued, echoing Weber’s analysis of capitalist logic as the octopus of rational, totally instrumental action that increasingly pervaded the Western world, the process of ‘growing rationalisation of the productive process has to be extended now to the entire network of social relations’.14 It is this notion of rationalisation, already present in Workers and Capital, that will later constitute the latent theoretical framework by means of which Tronti, in the 1970s, interprets the autonomy of the political as the autonomisation of the state-apparatus in the course of capitalist development. 2.2. ‘Politicism’ Tronti’s employment of Weber’s theoretical apparatus from the 1970s onwards focused in particular on Weber’s theory of politics, as developed above all in Politics as Vocation. Nonetheless, Tronti’s early essays were arguably already characterised by a politicist focus that displays certain significant Weberian dimensions.15 Tronti’s most renowned assertion in the 1960s was the idea that the working-class struggle had been ‘the principle’ of capitalist development,16 an idea that was intended to be more ‘performative’ than ‘informative’ or analytical.17 Above all, it was a pre-eminently political proposition. By assuming that capitalist development is pushed forward by ‘struggle’, i.e., by the expression of organised, political action, Tronti put the focus of his analysis on the political/subjective moment of the contradiction between workers and capital. In this way, the problem was largely defined in political and tactical 12. Panzieri 1972, p. 197. 13. For Weber, the process of rationalisation constituted the omnipervasive dimension of the Western capitalist world. It represented the release of economic behaviour from goals that were not informed by the rational search for profit, and the affirmation of a structure of the state in which the impersonality of bureaucracy had replaced the links of personal loyalty towards a traditional lord or a charismatic chief. See Weber 1978. 14. Tronti 2006a, p. 69. 15. On the separation between economics and politics in early operaismo and the primacy of politics in Tronti’s early analysis see, in particular, Bellofiore 1982. 16. As Tronti wrote: ‘Even we have seen, first, capitalist development, and then the workers’ struggles. It is an error. We need to overturn the problem, change the sign, begin again from the beginning [principio]: and the beginning is the struggle of the working class . . . capitalist development is subordinate to workers’ struggles, it comes after it’ (Tronti 2006a, p. 87). 17. The idea of starting from workers’ struggle, as Tronti himself suggested, had a ‘performative’ rather than informative purpose insofar as it aimed to create the very climate for fighting against pessimism and subalternity and to place workers at the centre of history. See also Tomba 2007.


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terms already in the 1960s. The depiction of the struggle between workers and capital as essentially a battlefield of moves and counter-moves anticipates in certain important respects Tronti’s characteristic representation of politics as a war between arch enemies. What is worth highlighting here, however, is the way in which this ‘politicist imperative’ led Tronti to conceive of politics in terms that can be regarded as much closer to Weber’s and Schmitt’s image of a clash between different values than to Marx’s idea of politics as ‘class-struggle’ founded upon social contradictions.18 This latter element has been emphasised in a particularly clear way by Gianfranco Pala. As he argues, workerism was affected from the beginning by a ‘ “mythological” tendency in seeing the workers’ antagonism based on proletarian “values” presupposed as alternative, instead of posed by real material and social contradictions of the capitalist mode of production in its becoming. . . . Politically such a reference to presumed workers’ “values” degenerates into a purely ideological instrument that is presupposed to be “autonomous” (finally arriving at the result of the so-called “autonomy of the political”).’19 A certain type of politics, conceived as the combative confrontation between opposite factions on the terrain of the state, then becomes, as we will see, the new and sole terrain of the contradiction between workers and capital, and, according to Tronti, the only possible ground on which workers could regain their centrality. 2.3. ‘Hetero-integration’ Tronti’s engagement with non-Marxist thinkers – at least in explicit terms – begins largely in the 1970s. Nonetheless, it is possible to trace back the theoretical presuppositions on which such an engagement was based already to his early writings. Tronti’s openness to bourgeois and conservative thinkers (Schmitt and the élitists, among others) was especially rooted in his conviction of the need to ‘abandon’ what he called the ‘petrified forest of vulgar Marxism’.20 18. This element has been also highlighted by Illuminati, according to whom the thesis of the autonomy of the political ‘can be represented with the Weberian metaphor of the transition from the monotheism of a totalising Weltanschauung to the polytheism of contradictory values, from omni-comprehensive rationality to the arbitrary choice between substantially irrational values, though each of them has their own structural coherence’ (Illuminati 1980, p. 114). 19. Pala 1995, pp. 62–3. Tronti himself seems to have been conscious of the risk of falling into a ‘value-like’ position entailed in the politicist version of class-struggle. In the mid-1970s, he observed that ‘taking away the firm ground of objective relations from workers’ centrality, the firm ground of structural elements, risks setting them adrift in a sea of “values” ’ (Tronti 1978, p. 20). Nevertheless, a few lines later, he reassessed that it was ‘necessary to find another and more functional objective anchoring for the concept of workers’ centrality. Anchoring with politics is the test of the moment’ (Tronti 1978, p. 21). 20. Tronti 2006a, p. 11.

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This proposition was not only due to the early workerist desire for novelty and the discovery of new paths of research against dogmatic readings of Marxism.21 Rather, it was also due to Tronti’s argument that Marx’s theory itself was insufficient. According to Tronti, ‘modern workers’ science’ could not rely forever upon historical materialism in its classical form, because historical transformations entailed the necessity of ‘updating’ or ‘changing the form of science’ that the working class needed to develop for its struggles.22 On the basis of this ‘anti-dogmatic’ position, Tronti could thus increasingly refer to non-Marxist authors and theories in a way that Norberto Bobbio would later call in the 1970s ‘hetero-integrationism’,23 or the recourse to other theoretical traditions in order to find necessary concepts and systematic theories that could not be found within one’s own theoretical paradigm. Bobbio recommended that Marxists adopt such a strategy in his critique of those Marxists who, instead of conceding that Marx did not provide a full theory of the state and politics, persisted in trying to find one in Marx’s texts or in those of his followers, ‘between the lines’. In his early writings, Tronti was clearly not referring to Bobbio’s chronologically later position; nonetheless, his heterointegrative approach avant la lettre could be regarded as a sign of an openness that would later result in a varied and intense engagement with non-Marxist political theorists, amongst whom was Weber. 2.4. ‘Partisanship’ Tronti has often been read as a strong adversary of bourgeois claims of objectivity and as the advocate of working-class unilateral and self-sufficient knowledge. This interpretation is based upon his repeated and emphatic insistence on the necessity of assuming a ‘partisan perspective’. Against the false bourgeois pretension of a universality that could accommodate all positions, the early Tronti argued that ‘synthesis . . . can only be unilateral, can

21. Many young intellectuals at the beginning of the 1960s regarded the politics and culture of the PCI with scepticism, when they did not reject it entirely, especially after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. Tronti insists particularly on this point: ‘Without this transition [1956] workerism would not have existed’ (in Trotta and Milana (eds.) 2008, pp. 29–30). 22. As he wrote in 1965: ‘from the workers’ point of view, the form of science is chosen, on the basis of the weapons that it can procure in order to fight capital. Neither the forms of struggle, nor those of science are given once and for all. . . . It is certain that to consider historical materialism still as the modern form of workers’ science means to write this science of the future with the quill of the medieval scrivener. We think that any transformation that constitutes an epoch in the history of workers’ struggles poses the problem for the workers’ point of view of changing the form of its science’ (Tronti 2006a, pp. 209–10). 23. Bobbio 1978, pp. 100ff.


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only be consciously science of class, of one class’.24 At the same time, as we have seen, he argued for the necessity of engaging with bourgeois thought, stealing the arms for proletarian revolt from the ‘bosses’ arsenals’, in the rousing words of Workers and Capital. Taken strictly, these two propositions would appear to be irreconcilable: on the one hand, an emphasis on ‘partisanship’ as the unilateral science of one class; and, on the other, a proposal to ‘learn from enemies’. In order to understand this apparent contradiction, we need to analyse more closely the specific nature of Tronti’s notion of a ‘partisan perspective’. Tronti’s early writings elaborated an idea of partisan knowledge as an instantiation of struggle; as he put it, knowledge is ‘tied to the struggle’ because to know truly means ‘to hate truly’.25 Nonetheless, rather than an abrupt dismissal of the ‘hated’ position, Tronti also seems to suggest that the dimension of antagonism is constitutive of knowledge. In other words, knowledge becomes a perspective that can be shaped only in a conflictual relation with the other, in that reciprocal recognition of one’s rôle and place in the world (the self-consciousness of both the slave and the master in Hegel’s famous image). At the same time, the necessity of developing a partisan perspective does not imply the denial of the notion of objectivity, because, according to Tronti, the ‘partisan’ perspectives of both the bourgeoisie and the workers contributed to shaping the ‘world of unitarian human knowledge’.26 It can thus be argued that Tronti’s criticism of objectivity was aimed, not against the notion of objectivity as such, but rather against a particular formulation of objectivity in terms of ‘neutral knowledge’.27 What Tronti criticised, then, was the idea of objectivity as negation of subjectivity, as the perspectiveless ‘view from nowhere’ (to paraphrase Thomas Nagel’s apposite notion)28 that was supposed to have been divested (undressed or neutralised) of its class – or ‘partisan’ – viewpoint. Tronti did not deny, however, the possibility of knowing the ‘objective functioning’ of society, conceived as the possibility of attaining to the ‘scientific control of the whole’, nor did he deny a particular idea of universality as the whole of knowledge that includes all the partisan viewpoints. Such mastery was lost, however, when there was the pretension to place oneself ‘in the place of the whole’. This could lead ‘only to the partiality of the analysis . . ., to understand only detached parts. . . . [O]n 24. Tronti 2006a, p. 10. 25. Ibid. 26. Tronti 2006a, p. 8. 27. On Tronti’s idea of partisanship and universal science, though from a slightly different point of view, see also Toscano 2009, pp. 117ff. 28. Nagel 1986.

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the basis of capital, the whole can be comprehended only by the part.’29 It is thus possible to understand in what way the necessity of developing an ‘iron partisan logic’ could be reconciled with the idea of appropriating the enemy’s science. On the one hand, the enemy’s thought (qua thought which is itself intrinsically partisan) could help to form the workers’ partisan perspective, as its necessary opposite; on the other hand, the enemy’s thought, once purged of its ideological pretensions to neutral objectivity, could contribute to the totality of human knowledge of the social world, alongside its partisan opponent. Although they belong to a phase in which there are not yet explicit references to Weber, Tronti’s early writings thus already contained certain elements that can be regarded as the ‘seedbeds’ on which a Weberian sensitivity ante litteram could germinate.30 While they should not be read teleologically, as if they dictated the path of Tronti’s subsequent development, their identification nevertheless enables us to see that there was room for a favourable and responsive reading of Weber already in Tronti’s early thought. Such receptive elements will be developed in two strictly intertwined directions: on the one hand, the politicist and, particularly, hetero-integrationist dimensions can be seen as the basis of what will later be called the thesis of the ‘autonomy of the political’. Such a theory, in its turn, as we will see, presents a problematic which is typical of Weber’s own ‘politicism’; that is, the dialectic between politics-as-administration and politics-as-charisma. On the other hand, the conception of the class-struggle in terms of the confrontation between competing ‘partisan’ and ‘value-like’ positions in the political arena can be seen as the basis of a philosophy and anthropology of history that will become increasingly prominent in Tronti’s thought, particularly in his most recent writings.

3. Lenin and Weber in the Postscript of Workers and Capital As previously noted, Weber begins to figure prominently in Tronti’s writings in the Postscript to Workers and Capital. Though not a coupure with his previous work, as I argued in the previous section, this text certainly marks Tronti’s transition towards the more defined problematic of the autonomy of the political which begins to be elaborated in the following year (1972).31 It is 29. Tronti 2006a, p. 10. 30. Tronti’s reading of Weber goes alongside his interest in Nietzsche and Schmitt, who also constitute recurring points of reference – in the case of the latter, increasingly so. 31. As a ‘transitional text’, the Postscript in fact should be understood in the broader


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in this text that the theoretical and political tasks of the new decade are more clearly identified in the political understanding of class-composition and the historical conjuncture. Yet, such tasks, according to Tronti, required attempting to grasp what had happened ‘inside the working class after Marx’.32 He meant this literally. The new assignment of the Marxist research-programme at the beginning of the 1970s consisted in the historical recognition and analysis of those ‘great historical knots [nodi] . . . not yet touched by critical knowledge of workers’ thought’.33 Focusing on these historical turning-points would enable the workers’ movement to understand the paths, dynamics and mistakes of the past, thus permitting it to overcome these limitations in the new conjuncture.34 Above all, it was the historical ‘knot’ constituted by German ‘classical’ social democracy that appeared to have a privileged place in this analysis. According to Tronti, the theme of the ‘political organisation of the working class’ found ‘in the German-speaking world its place of election’, particularly in light of the dramatic growth of the SPD in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century.35 However, such a strength was proportional to its theoretical poverty. As Tronti argued: ‘This miracle of organisation of German social democracy has, as a reverse side, an average level of intellectual mediocrity, a scientific approximation, a theoretical misery that could only produce the failure they produced. . . . Here is then the true illusion within which the tactical socialdemocratic horizon is always imprisoned: a sort of optimistic view of the historical process that moves forward due to a gradual unfolding of its part, instead of due to a violent crash with the opposite part’.36 For Tronti, social democracy’s theoretical misery was due in particular to the progressivist and optimistic philosophy of history that it promoted, exemplified by its peaceful framework of what the end of the 1960s represented for one of the leaders of the workeristautonomist experience: the experience of Classe Operaia (the Negri-Tronti joint venture after Quaderni Rossi) came to end in 1967; in 1968, the student-movement exploded and accentuated the differences in the group around Classe Operaia; and, finally, workers’ struggles turned out to be less strong and mature than the workerists’ triumphalistic rhetoric of the 1960s had supposed or wished. 32. Tronti 2006a, p. 265. 33. Tronti 2006a, p. 269. 34. In this historical perspective, Tronti identifies and starts to articulate three privileged historical knots: the development of Marshall’s theory and the workers’ movement in England; the peak-period of German social democracy at the beginning of the twentieth century; and the workers’ struggle in the USA in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Each of these knots, according to Tronti, revealed specific developments of the confrontation between workers and capital, all of which needed to be analysed closely. 35. Tronti 2006a, p. 277. 36. Tronti 2006a, pp. 282–3.

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portrayal of the Klassenkampf. The exception to this generalised ‘theoretical misery’ was represented by Lenin, the figure ‘who gave social democracy a theory of the party’. Lenin, perhaps even more than Marx, became the ‘muse’ of classical workerism. Tronti’s Lenin was the militant who ‘brought Marx to Saint Petersburg’, that is, the historical figure that had been able to reveal practically the misery of the social-democratic gradualist theory by achieving a communist revolution where it was assumed to be impossible. In light of this result, and consistent with his idea that the working class was the principle of history and not its passive spectator, Tronti launched the idea of the necessity of positing ‘Lenin in England’.37 He meant by this the necessity of confronting the ‘theme of the struggle and organisation at the highest level of political development of the working class’38 because ‘the link where the chain will be broken will not be that where capital is weakest, but that where the working class is strongest’.39 However, Lenin had been able to develop what Tronti called the ‘laws of tactics’ not because of his proximity to workers’ struggles, but, on the contrary, due to his distance from them. This distinguished him from the main currents of German social democracy. Indeed, for Tronti, Lenin’s ‘logic was based on a concept of political rationality that was absolutely autonomous from anything, independent from the class-interest itself, common if anything to the two classes’.40 In what might be regarded as an attribution to Lenin of a conception of the ‘autonomy of the political’ avant la lettre, Tronti also invoked Max Weber: The true theory, the high science, was not within the field of socialism, but outside and against it. And this entirely theoretical science, this scientific theory, had as content, as object, as problem, the fact of politics. And the new theory of a new politics arises in common in great bourgeois thought and in subversive workers’ praxis. Lenin was closer to Max Weber’s Politik als Beruf than to the German workers’ struggles, on which mounted – colossus with feet of clay – classical social democracy.41

Along with Lenin, it was Weber who understood and developed politics, ‘high science of capital’, as an autonomous object of investigation with its

37. This is the famous title of the lead article that appeared in the first number of Classe Operaia in 1964. 38. Tronti 2006a, p. 93. 39. Tronti 2006a, pp. 99–100. 40. Tronti 2006a, p. 279. 41. Tronti 2006a, p. 281.


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autonomous mechanisms.42 Tronti continued praising Weber for his view of politics as Machtinstinkt, and for his determination of the political as fundamentally the constant struggle between classes for power, against the peaceful compromised line of social democracy. Moreover, the passionate, farsighted and responsible political leader that Weber describes in Politik als Beruf is, according to Tronti, nobody other than Lenin. At the meetings of the Heidelberg workers’ and soldiers’ council that Weber attended in 1918, he could have brought and elaborated well the proletarian laws of a politics of power[.] . . . The struggle between classes and individuals for domination or power seemed to him to be the essence, or, if you prefer, the constant matter of fact of politics. No, we are not talking of Lenin but again of Max Weber[.] . . . Yet the politician described by Weber is called Lenin. Cannot the burning passion and the cold far-sightedness be found in that ‘rightly mixed blood and judgement’ that Lukács attributes to his Lenin . . .? And does not the sense of responsibility coincide with the ‘permanent readiness’ of Lenin, with his figure as the ‘embodiment of continuously being prepared ’? The truth is that only from the workers’ point of view could perhaps the Weberian conception of the entirely and solely political action be completely applied.43

For Tronti, Weber elevated the ingredients of political action – partisanship, subjective will, passion, continuous preparation and cold far-sightedness – to the level of theoretical vision. He strove to analyse the historical elements and moments more favourable to the deployment of the will in the course of history, thus elaborating a conception of ‘the entirely and solely political action’. In doing so, Weber provided a portrait of a zoon politikon that seemed to be embodied in a particularly strong fashion by Lenin himself. Continuing in this register, Tronti adds that Certainly, Lenin did not know Weber’s Freiburg inaugural lecture of 1895. Yet, he acts as if he knew and interpreted in praxis those words: ‘As far as the dream of peace and human happiness is concerned, the words written over the portal into the unknown future of human history are: abandon all hope’. This is the greatness of Lenin. He was able to come to terms with great bourgeois thought, even when he did not have any direct contact with it, because he could obtain it directly from the things, that is, he recognised it in its objective functioning.44

42. The Weber-Lenin comparison was later deepened by Cacciari, inspired by Tronti, in an essay published in 1972. The Weber-Lenin comparison has been the object of several other studies from very different traditions. See Olin Wright 1975; Katznelson 1981; Bolsinger 2001. 43. Tronti 2006a, pp. 283–4. 44. Tronti 2006a, p. 284.

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For Tronti, Weber thus represented the ‘great bourgeois thought’ that Lenin had been able to recognise in its ‘objective functioning’, namely, in the way in which the bourgeois elaboration of politics was able to be implemented as a concrete project in the emerging mass-societies of the twentieth century. Tronti’s reference to Lenin and Weber was thus not simply an unusual theoretical and political combination. Rather, we can understand this proposal as an intervention in the politics of the time and as an attempt to escape an historical nemesis. In other words, Tronti seems to suggest that the situation of the German working class on the eve of the 1920s could be compared with the situation experienced by the Italian workers’ movement at the end of the 1960s. They both grew dramatically in terms of struggles, party and tradeunion membership, and electoral results. However, as Tronti suggests, the defeat of the workers’ movement in Germany was due to the ‘theoretical misery’ of its main party, which was evident in its inability to come to terms with the sophistication of the bourgeois elaboration of politics. The lesson that the Italian workers’ party, not yet defeated, could therefore draw from the past – Tronti seems implicitly to suggest – was that of the necessity of forging a leadership able to comprehend the ‘laws of politics’. For such a task, it was necessary to understand the autonomous dynamics of politics, an understanding that Weber, alongside Lenin, could help to develop. This was the startingpoint for the subsequent phase of Tronti’s development, encapsulated in the thesis of the ‘autonomy of the political’.

4. Weber behind the scenes: the inauguration of the ‘autonomy of the political’ Tronti introduced the thesis of the ‘autonomy of the political’ in 1972 at a conference in Turin chaired by Norberto Bobbio. Ever since this inaugural moment, he has continued to refer to it as a permanent theoretical and political acquisition. Originally, however, this thesis was closely linked to the specific nature of Italian politics in the early 1970s, which witnessed a decreasing autonomy of the social, i.e., a weakening of the workers’ and students’ movement, in comparison to the 1960s. The main argument of Tronti’s thesis of the ‘autonomy of the political’ can be briefly summarised as follows: ‘the political’ (to be understood as the institutions of power and the practice of taking and keeping power) cannot be analysed as a superstructural level, as had been the case, according to Tronti, in ‘vulgar Marxism’.45 Rather, ‘the political’ has its own autonomous dynamics; 45. In Tronti’s words, ‘The very term “political”, “the political”, is just as strange in the Marxist tradition as the term “autonomy”. This is because we are introducing, not only a new


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it is autonomous from everything that is not power, i.e., from society, and from ‘what was conceived, in general, to be the foundation [fondamento] of power’.46 This conceptual framework was founded on the presupposition that there is ‘a different rhythm of development between the political and the social’47 due to the ‘existence of a political cycle of capital . . . that has its specificity compared to the classical economic cycle of capital’.48 This, according to Tronti, was visible in the usual ‘lateness’ of the political compared with the economic. An example of this was the ‘flaw of rationalisation, weak efficiency of the political apparatus’ that Tronti argued to be discernible in the Italian case in particular, in which the capitalist modernisation and industrialisation of the 1950s and 1960s had not been matched by a comparable modernisation of the state.49 In order to understand this ‘autonomy’ – that is, in order to understand how the political and, especially, the state functions – Tronti argued that previous Marxist paradigms were not very helpful. According to him, the deterministic reading of the base/superstructure-relation, in which ‘everything that happens . . . at the so-called “above” level is moved by what is below’, was a ‘simplification’.50 Marx’s supposed scheme of continuity between the development of capital and of the political had thus been historically demonstrated to be incorrect. The failure of this model in terms both of its explanatory and predictive power was due to the lack, if not complete absence, of a theory of politics and the state in Marx, insofar as, for Tronti, Marx ‘does not effectively advance a critique of politics, but of ideology’.51 He continued to argue that this gap in Marx’s thought was due to the fact that historical materialism itself was ‘a product of early capitalism’. Later historical developments, however, as a result of the continuous confrontation between workers and capital, led to the ‘historical necessity of a professional class to which to entrust the management of power. . . . From this necessity there derives the historical necessity of an art of politics, namely of particular name, but also, I would say, a new category into our discourse. What does this category contain within itself? It contains, on the one hand, the objective level of the institutions of power; on the other hand, the political class [ceto], that is, the subjective activity of doing politics. That is, the political holds together two things, the state plus the political class.’ (Tronti 1977, p. 10.) It is important to note that, at least at this early stage of his theorisation, Tronti conceived of ‘the political’ in concrete institutional terms. 46. Tronti 1977, p. 9. 47. Tronti 1977, p. 10. 48. Tronti 1977, p. 12. 49. Tronti 1977, p. 11. 50. Tronti 1977, p. 10. 51. Tronti 1977, p. 15. Particularly in the 1970s, several Marxists argued about the lack of a theory of politics and the state in Marx. See, for instance, Anderson 1976, Althusser 1978, Horkheimer 1978, Lucio Colletti’s contributions to Bobbio 1976, and Hobsbawm 1982.

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techniques for the conquest and conservation of power, of a science of practical collective activity’.52 It was these techniques and this art that the Italiancommunist intelligentsia in the 1970s had to grasp as their autonomous raison d’être, without thinking of deducing them from a mere study of the economic situation. At this point, it might be noted that Tronti’s reasoning on the ‘autonomy of the political’, containing ambiguous and arguably contradictory formulations, recalled certain dimensions of Weber’s problematic. On the one hand, in a first moment, Tronti declared that the political was ‘autonomous’ because it is usually ‘late’ compared to economic development; its temporal relation to economic development thereby immediately cancelled its ‘autonomy’, re-establishing its dependent, if not derivative, status.53 To this extent, Tronti’s thesis remained closer than he was willing to admit to what he had dismissed, in a Weberian fashion, as the ‘simplification in the manner of historical materialism’.54 On the other hand, however, Tronti also argued that this autonomy involved an historical process, in which the autonomy of the political emerges as a consequence of the fully accomplished rationalisation of the economic. In this second scenario, the state (as the fundamental dimension of the political) is autonomous because it has gone through the process of sophistication induced by capitalist development, which evokes Weber’s theory of the development of the state-apparatus in terms of rationalisation.55 We can thus see that, although Tronti only occasionally refers explicitly to Weber in his writings of the 1970s (almost entirely devoted to the idea of the ‘autonomy of the political’), the latter’s problematic seems to be working behind the scenes. As Tronti further develops his thesis in subsequent decades, Weber will play an increasingly important rôle as a ‘muse’ of this theoretical elaboration. In so doing, as Illuminati suggests,56 Tronti will rediscover in

52. Tronti 1977, p. 17. 53. In other passages, however, Tronti seems to suggest that the political can also anticipate the economic. See Tronti 2006a, pp. 303ff. 54. Tronti 1977, p. 10. Tronti’s strong rhetorical attack on ‘vulgar Marxism’ echoes Weber’s famous critique of Marxism’s ‘naivety’, because it claimed that ideas ‘originate as “reflections” or “superstructures” of economic situations’. See Weber 2001, p. 20. 55. In Weber’s words, ‘historically “progress” towards the bureaucratic state . . . stands in the closest relation to the development of modern capitalism’ (Weber 1994a, p. 147). For Weber, just as for Tronti, this rationalisation of the state ultimately meant the formation of a professional class of politicians skilled in the exercise and management of power. 56. Criticising the theory of the ‘autonomy of the political’ as a ‘political expropriation of the masses’, Illuminati argued that such theory did nothing but represent the ‘classical dialectic between charisma and administration. It was not by accident that the architects of the autonomy of the political rediscovered Weber’ (Illuminati 1980, p. 144).


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particular a theme that is central to Weber’s theory of politics: namely, a dialectic between administration and charisma.

5. From the ‘weapons of criticism’ to the ‘critical technique’: politics as administration Tronti’s notion of the ‘autonomy of the political’, as briefly summarised above, aimed to have both practical and theoretical implications. On the practical level, it aimed to put ‘politics in command’ by reconquering workers’ centrality on the institutional terrain, namely, on the level of the relation of the party with the state. The ‘delay’ of the political or the lacking rationalisation of the state – as we have seen, one of Tronti’s ambiguous arguments for its ‘autonomy’ – could be corrected only by studying and engaging directly in its mechanisms.57 On the theoretical level, this thesis proposed to comprehend the autonomous laws of politics and the state by means of a careful, ‘heterodox’ investigation, which required reference to non-Marxist traditions. The practical implications of the autonomy of the political debate increasingly became the question of a direct participation of the workers’ political organisation in the government of the state.58 Predictably, this position was subject to numerous criticisms, especially from former workerists and from Antonio Negri in primis. Negri argued that the notion of the ‘autonomy of the political’ was nothing more than the ‘ideology of the historical compromise’,59 and thus, ultimately, a theoretical position that had the precise political function of supporting Eurocommunism.

57. As Tronti put it: ‘instead of relying on those moments of lacking political mediation of power-institutions with respect to capital (by seizing the revolutionary occasion and substituting ourselves in the position of power, in the management of power, as it was done, in my view, in a nineteenth-century vision of political struggle), it is instead a case of arriving – also consciously – at taking in hand this process of modernisation of the state-machine, of arriving even at managing, as is said in the jargon, not reforms in general, but that type of specific reform in particular that is the capitalist reform of the state. In this reading, the working class turns out to be the only possible rationality of the modern state’ (Tronti 1977, p. 19). 58. As Tronti would argue in the late 1970s, ‘political force’ meant demonstrating that the working class – or rather, the workers’ party – was ‘able to govern. The capacity to govern of the working class is what we are all committed to build’ (Tronti 1978, p. 24). 59. In an essay of 1976, Negri polemicised against the ‘autonomy of the political’ as the ideology of the historical compromise: ‘the “compromise” has occurred, with characteristic funeral-orations of “inevitability”, the struggle against the crisis and against the workers who have determined it is, in the autonomy of the political, unanimously conducted’ (Negri 1976, p. 5). Similarly, Ferrajoli and Zolo defined the ‘autonomy of the political’ as a ‘form of intellectual apology for the historical compromise’ (Ferrajoli and Zolo 1978, p. 8).

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The ‘administrative-technicist’ dimension of Tronti’s proposal and its close relation to Weber’s theory of politics, however, can be most clearly observed by focusing on its theoretical implications. Once again, it was Negri who advanced a criticism of ‘technicism’ as inherent to Tronti’s thesis. Although Negri himself seemed to share the idea of the absence of a Marxist theory of the state,60 he argued that the thesis of the ‘autonomy of the political’ was no solution to this problem, but merely the ‘technocratic reinvention’ and ‘new edition of the technology of the political’.61 Negri’s critique of the autonomy of the political as a technology of the political thus seemed to be based upon the assessment that Tronti’s theoretical proposal did not amount to a tactically updated analysis of the function of the state that could be integrated with the Marxist tradition’s strategic vision of the necessity of abolishing the bourgeois state. Rather, on the basis of the assertion of the absence of a theory of the state in Marx and on the basis of the supposed historical disconfirmation of a deterministic continuity between the economic and the political, Tronti, according to Negri, seemed to have abandoned Marx’s thesis of the necessity to ‘smash the state-machine’.62 The idea of the ‘autonomy of the political’ in fact implied the necessity of engaging with the state and of appropriating the autonomous mechanism of its functioning as its characteristic ‘know-how’. It is such an idea, according to which politics is a set of skills to be acquired, with the aim of better administering the bureaucratic state-machine, that most closely recalls the instrumentalist Weberian notion of political science as a ‘technical critique’. In Weber, this amounted to the idea of political science as ultimately the assessment of the instruments chosen by the politician by means of techniques of knowledge and counselling.63 In this vision, social scientists function as political advisers insofar as they have the knowledge to suggest to politicians the best means required in order to achieve their goals. A political 60. While engaging with Bobbio’s perennial claim that there is not a theory of the state in Marx (see Bobbio 1976 and 1978), Negri defined it as mere ‘statement of fact [una registrazione]’, affirming that ‘the official workers’ movement (and the communist movement, for instance) does not possess a doctrine of the state’ (Negri 1977, p. 273). 61. Negri 1979, p. 129. 62. See Marx 1987; Lenin 1952. 63. In Weber’s view, ‘technical critique’ pertains to the social and political sciences insofar as they are sciences that do not ‘tell anyone what he should do, but rather what he can – and under certain circumstances – what he wishes to do’ (Weber 1949, p. 60). Unlike the widespread idea that he regarded the social sciences as informed by a principle of neutrality [Wertfreiheit], Weber in fact defines them in political terms from the outset. They constitute a type of knowledge intertwined with political concerns insofar as social science ‘first arose in connection with practical considerations. Its most immediate and often sole purpose was the attainment of valuejudgments concerning measures of State economic policy’ (Weber 1949, p. 51). See Hennis 1994 and Jameson 1973 on the political origins of the concept of Wertfreiheit.


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science of this type, in other words, is reduced to bureaucratic competence, to a task that is functional to the hyper-specialisation, fragmentation and bureaucratisation of the apparatuses of domination. Politics thus undergoes a shift to governance, as management of the status quo. The technicist element of Tronti’s notion of the ‘autonomy of the political’ is similar to Weber’s notion of ‘critical technique’ in several ways. First, by conceiving of politics as a specialised and separated sphere, one ends up detaching political theory from a ‘class-based’ political perspective, that is, theory is separated from praxis. The ‘unity of theory and practice’ – as Fredric Jameson has recently argued, the distinctive feature of Marxism compared to the old philosophical systems – is thus annulled.64 Moreover, by stating the necessity of acquiring the art of politics as a ‘toolbox’ of theoretical instruments elaborated in autonomy, one runs the risk of conceiving of politics as a set of instruments that are good for many usages, that is, as deployable for different goals. In this way, as in Weber’s critical technique, the thesis of the ‘autonomy of the political’ ran the risk of separating means and ends.65 Consequently, the Marxist tradition’s – or, at least, one Marxist tradition’s – emphasis upon the danger of a conception of politics in which means are separated from ends is replaced by a position much closer to the calculations of Realpolitik.66 In the end, the political realism that Tronti arguably wanted to be a corrective to the supposed lack of political analysis and political pragmatism of the Marxist-theoretical framework ended up incorporating a technicist-bureaucratic dimension in which politics becomes management and administration. It was this dimension that eventually tended towards the other element of Weber’s political theory, namely, the dimension of charisma as organising instance of political power.

64. See Jameson 2009. 65. Tronti has more recently retrospectively explained the rationale for his decision to draw upon non-Marxist thinkers in order to grasp the laws of the political as tools adjustable for different ends in strikingly Weberian terminology. ‘When you handle the ethics of conviction, that is the moment when you know that the problem is not to convince somebody, because in that precise moment, the fact that you understand, that you comprehend for yourself, costs what it costs. Knowing that which is, as it is, has absolute priority. And if that which you must know was known before you by your enemy, it doesn’t matter. You use that knowledge for other goals’ (Tronti 2008, p. 40). Consequent with this line of reasoning, Tronti argues that theoretical Marxism failed ‘every time it abandoned the terrain of political realism’. See Tronti 2009a, p. 3. 66. See Callinicos 2007 for a good sketch of the means/ends problematic in the Marxist tradition, discussed also in relation to Weber’s twofold political ethics.

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6. The illusions of democracy: politics as charisma In order to understand the way in which the dimension of charisma plays a rôle within Tronti’s position, it is essential to recall Weber’s own characterisation of its distinctive features. In his political theory, charismatic power is one of the three types of legitimate domination, alongside the traditional and the legal/bureaucratic types. They are defined according to the disposition of the ruled to subject themselves to constituted forms of domination. The dialectic between administration and charisma in Weber’s political theory consists in the fact that both have historically become two moments in the same chain of political power. On the one hand, charisma arises as an ‘extraordinary and revolutionary’ force that questions and breaks with bureaucratic forces; on the other hand, charismatic domination does not last as such, as it is subjected to a process of routinisation that transforms it into its opposite, that is, precisely, bureaucracy.67 Yet, in its statu nascendi, the charismatic power has a peculiarity that radically distinguishes it from the other two types of legitimate domination. Charisma is the extraordinary gift of the political (or religious) leader who is able to obtain obedience precisely because of such a gift. It is not, therefore, the recognition of the ruled that legitimises the leadership of the charismatic chief; rather, it is the charisma, the gift itself, that is legitimate and consequently recognised as such. In Weber’s words, ‘Charisma is self-determined and sets its own limits. Its bearer . . . does not derive his claims from the will of his followers, in the manner of an election; rather, it is their duty to recognize his charisma.’68 The dimension of charisma thus entails a typically élitist and aristocratic notion of power as the inherently legitimate rulership of ‘the few and the best’ who do not need to ask for popular recognition in order to dominate. As in Weber’s theory, a certain charismatic dimension of power appears also as the other side of the coin of Tronti’s administrative idea, particularly in his later writings. Unlike his own warning at the beginning of the 1960s – ‘never set about constructing a perspective at a distance from the masses’69 – the turn to the ‘autonomy of the political’ in the 1970s also meant ‘autonomy of the political from the class-organisation’, or autonomy of the party ‘from the class’.70 At that time, such a statement was intended to be provocative and 67. In Weber’s reconstruction, this occurs insofar as the charismatic leaders want to keep their power; they thus have to come to terms with the material necessity of systematising a corpus of rules/principles and organising a group of functionaries/professionals who take care of the new apparatus of domination. 68. Weber 1978, pp. 1112–13. 69. Tronti 2006a, p. 22. 70. Tronti 1977, pp. 34–5.


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‘scandalous’, as Tronti admitted. Yet, this ‘self-referential vision of the workers’ organisation’ has characterised the development of Tronti’s thought ever since. In his writings of the 1990s, one can find this dimension stated even more clearly and directly: The future of the Left depends substantially on the capacity to accomplish the task of providing politics again with subjectivity and strength. My idea is that such a task can be accomplished by assuming and conjugating . . . the tradition of struggle of the workers’ movement . . . and the tragically Weberian figure of modern politics, including the history of autonomy and therefore of sovereignty, of the modern State[.] . . . The new intertwining of these planes has to be proposed politically from above and from the outside of contemporary civil consciousness: because it, alone, spontaneously, after centuries of capitalism, is not able anymore to produce anything seriously alternative[.] . . . Government and opposition are not two politics, but two forms of the same politics. And certainly, the most adequate of these forms, now, after the wars and the peace of the twentieth century, after that socialism and in this capitalism, is engaging in opposition from the heights of government[.] . . . Only from here, from this politics of responsibility and conviction, could the nobility of action be exercised, expressed, once again.71

In the passage above, Tronti reaffirms the ‘administrative’ dimension of politics insofar as he identifies ‘opposition from the heights of government’ as the most adequate form of politics, in the wake of the defeats of the twentieth century. He also highlights that it is ‘from above and from outside’ that a political programme of combining workers’ struggle and the autonomy of the state has to be proposed to the citizens, as they are declared unable to do it themselves ‘from below’. Confronted with such an assertion by a communist intellectual, one might hazard the judgement that we are faced with a neoLeninist neo-vanguardist vision of the party, according to the caricature often, and incorrectly, ascribed to Lenin.72 Tronti, however, offers no such organisational proposal; his appeal to Leninist rhetoric remains, precisely, rhetorical. Instead, in the passage above, Tronti explicitly refers to the ‘Weberian tragic figure of modern politics’ together with the politics ‘of responsibility and conviction’ as the loci where the ‘future of the Left’ could be rescued. Thus, the Weberian ingredients of politics are invoked as necessary antidotes to the contemporary lack of ‘strength and subjectivity’ of politics – that is, as antidotes to its Krisis. In order to understand how the Weberian element of charisma is present in Tronti’s reflection, we thus need to understand how the crisis of politics has been diagnosed in Tronti’s later writings in particular. 71. Tronti 1998, pp. 110–11, my italics. 72. See Lih 2006.

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This diagnosis is especially evident in a monograph published at the end of the 1990s, Politics at Dusk [Politica al tramonto]. The tendency of Tronti’s thought in this text, already highlighted in the ‘conclusive’ title, is exhibited clearly in the following formulation: ‘now we need to think not politics but the crisis of politics’.73 After the long slumber of reason of the 1980s, eventually concluded with the fall of the Soviet Union, the short century was proclaimed to be at an end. Also finished was the idea of politics that for decades had nourished the struggles and hopes for liberation of the organisations that had been inspired by the ten days that shook the world. The defeats of the workers’ movements permeated Tronti’s writings at the end of the twentieth century in the form of a pessimism of reason without that optimism of the will which had been the distinctive characteristic of his early work. By elaborating on the causes of the crisis of politics expressed in the defeats of the workers’ movement, Tronti eventually came to identify the origin of the problem in democracy itself. He argues that the workers’ movement has not been defeated by capitalism. The workers’ movement has been defeated by democracy. . . . The twentieth century is the century of democracy. . . . It is democracy that won the class-struggle. . . . Democracy, as once monarchy, is now absolute.74

Yet, Tronti’s critique of democracy does not amount to a ‘classically’ Marxist critique of bourgeois democracy, but of ‘democracy’ as such. Recalling Tocqueville’s critique of American democracy,75 Tronti asserts that the winner of the twentieth century was the ‘democratic mass-man’ or homo democraticus: the ‘last degree of depoliticisation of the homo oeconomicus’.76 In an essay that has recently been published in English, Tronti further clarifies his critique of democracy in revealing terms.77 Following Schmitt’s critique of the identitarian nature of democracy,78 Tronti argues that democracy must not be conceived as an ideal to come, as the potentiality that still needs to find its full historical completion. Rather, it is necessary to accept that the essence of democracy is the reality that has entirely realised itself, particularly in the twentieth century, 73. Tronti 1998, p. ix. 74. Tronti 1998, p. 195. 75. As Tronti puts it: ‘As the European Tocqueville envisaged with concern in one of his trips . . . [d]emocracies unified themselves under the centrality, the hegemony, the cult, even the religion of this form of average individual’ (Tronti 1998, p. 133). 76. Tronti 2006b, p. 14. 77. Tronti 2009b. 78. Tronti quotes Schmitt approvingly: ‘Democracy is a state-form that corresponds to the principle of identity; it is the identity of the dominated and the dominating, of the governing and the governed, of those who command and those who obey’ (Tronti 2009b, p. 101).


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as the ‘power of all on each and every one. That is because democracy is precisely the process of the homogenization, of the massification of thoughts, feelings, tastes, behaviours expressed in that political power which is common sense’.79 As such, democracy for Tronti is anti-revolutionary because it is antipolitical, insofar as the political entails precisely the dimension of antagonism and struggle that is lost once the homogenisation and ecumenical dimension of democracy has taken over. Without the pretension of providing ultimate answers to this impasse, Tronti attempts to indicate some paths of research, or to refer to traditions that might have been able to prevent democratic systems from falling into what he sees as their ‘totalitarianism’. In this context, he has increasingly referred over the years to the Italian school of élitists, particularly Roberto Michels, Gaetano Mosca and Vilfredo Pareto. Famously, they criticised democracy (and socialism as the ideal of ‘absolute democracy’) as a mere utopia unable to come to terms with the everlasting historical recurrence of the dyad rulers-ruled and the circulation of élites.80 The élitists believed in what is known, after Michels, as the ‘iron law of oligarchy’, according to which every form of government and power is inevitably destined to develop into an oligarchy, with an organised minority of rulers (an élite) that overpowers the majority of the unorganised ruled. Furthermore, the élitists argued that the idea of democratic systems as representative of the people’s will was a mere illusion. In reality, it is not people who decide who they will delegate or elect as their representatives, but the representatives themselves who make people choose them; that is, they impose themselves because of their privileged access from the beginning to the sources of power, thus establishing the rules of the democratic game. Ultimately, therefore, the élitists’ critique of democracy was based upon pessimism about the feasibility of true democracy, which had seemingly been disconfirmed by history: all attempts to realise the kratos of the demos seemed to have evolved eventually into the kratos of the oligoi. The similarity between this perspective and Weber’s line of reasoning on the inevitable bureaucratic fate of charisma – though Weber’s elaboration is far more complex and articulated – is due to both biographical (Roberto Michels was a student of Weber) and broader historical circumstances. The conservative ideas of politics developed both by the élitists and in Weber’s neo-Kantian environment arose in the intense years of the turn of the twentieth century, when so-called mass-society and the rise of parliamentary democracies and political parties provided new challenges for political analysis. In this context, 79. Tronti 2009b, p. 103. 80. On the élitist school, see Nye 1977.

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the ‘German-Italian frontline’ – to use Rehmann’s apposite phrase – answered with a contemptuous and conservative critique of democracy as an expression of their fear of workers’ organisations.81 In light of these brief remarks on the élitists’ position and its historical coincidence with that of Weber, we can better understand the senses in which Tronti’s political theory presents a charismatic-élitist dimension. First, for Tronti, one of the mistakes of the workers’ party consisted in the fact that it had not taken seriously the élitists’ critique of democracy. In other words – as Tronti seems to suggest – the communist intelligentsia had not understood the élitists’ warnings against illusions in the idea that democratic systems can really represent people’s will; they had thought that the communist movement could avoid the iron law of oligarchy. It is for this very reason that Tronti identifies one of the causes of the workers’ defeat in the fact that their party ‘became the party of the whole people . . . and workers’ power, where it existed, became the popular management of socialism, thereby losing its destructive, antagonist character’.82 What Tronti seems to reproach the workers’ party for, albeit in his hermetic way, is the fact that, in Italy, it had tried to represent interclassist interests, while, in Russia, it became popular management instead of promoting the ‘circulation of élites’ in which the people and leaders could fight for power. The necessity of the dyad of rulers-ruled for communist politics, however, is not questioned in this analysis; remarkably, it is instead defined as essential to workers’ power. Tronti thus even goes beyond the pessimistic positions of the élitists in the following revealing passage, radicalising their initial theses: The workers’ state, never realised, presented itself in the twentieth century as the possible form of government of the best. Not élite, though the nineteenthtwentieth century theory of élite was the only proposal able to correct in advance the subsequent defects of dictatorship and democracy. . . . Instead, yes, aristocracy, social-political body of government, from inside, more than from above, legitimacy embodied in a collective subject, not for divine grace but for its own 81. In a penetrating reconstruction of German neo-Kantianism, Rehmann defines the ‘German-Italian frontline [deutsch-italienische Frontstellung]’ as opposed to the Anglo-French frontline. Against positivism and naturalism – typically Anglo-French constructions – that instituted the idea of equality of humanity and the laws of history and society, thus eventually leading to socialism and modern democracy, German and Italian intellectuals (Rickert and Weber, on the one hand, and Croce on the other hand) attempted to subject history to a scientific consideration by assessing the intrinsic individuality of its object, the ‘historical individual [das historische Individuum]’. This position amounted to strong nationalism (the nation, the people, cannot be flattened by a principle of equal humanity) and anti-socialism (society and history do not have laws). See Rehmann 1998, pp. 144ff. 82. Tronti 2009b, p. 105.


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history, that produces charisma and does not ask for delegacy; authority instead of power, neither force nor consent, neither dictatorship nor democracy, rulers and ruled neither contrasted nor identical, instead in reciprocal recognition.83

By defining the ideal of the workers’ state as ‘aristocracy’, ‘legitimacy that produces charisma and does not ask for delegacy’, Tronti provides a very clear demonstration of the political consequences of the charismatic dimensions of his theory of political power. As in Weber, this charisma does ‘not ask for delegacy’; precisely as charisma, it is legitimate in itself, without reference to the ruled who are then expected to subject themselves to it ‘in reciprocal recognition’. The analysis of the crisis of politics in the twentieth century in terms of the full and disappointing unveiling of democracy leads Tronti to a form of realist pessimism. In this perspective, he attempts what can be seen as a ‘workerist’ reformulation of the dialectic between the rulers and the ruled in terms of a ‘people’s aristocracy [aristocrazia di popolo]’.84 In such terms, however, the dialectic itself is not overcome but instead maintained, although within the frame of the same social body, that is, the working class which realises the workers’ state as ‘possible form of the government of the best’. Alongside what I propose to term a ‘partisan aristocracy or élitism’, as a sort of ‘workerist appropriation’ of a theme debated for a long time in bourgeois political theory, Tronti’s gloomy diagnosis of modern politics and democracy also revives another perennial theme of the bourgeois tradition, that is, a philosophy and anthropology of history.

7. Entzauberung of politics: philosophy and anthropology of history Tronti has depicted the crisis of politics as the end of its Beruf.85 In this perspective, whoever does politics . . . knows that almost nothing of his decision is in his hands. Economic compatibilities are an iron cage for the initiative of political action. . . . From all of this arises the degradation of political classes, reduced to brainless masks, the fall of the political personality, without either profession or vocation.86

83. Tronti 2008, p. 58. 84. Tronti 2008, p. 56. 85. ‘Politik als Beruf: The End’ is the title of one of the last chapters in La politica al tramonto (Tronti 1998). 86. Tronti 1998, p. 129.

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The sunset of politics thus seemed to amount to the decline of the Weberian qualities of the political personality, qualities that had run into the fate of the ‘iron cage’, the totally administered society sine ira et studio. The latter represented the stage of bureaucratised capitalist development led by individuals without vocation that Weber described as the ‘power of the bureaucrats’. For Weber, such a result was already embedded in the historical process that he termed ‘rationalisation’, which described the historical emergence of instrumental reason and consequently the extension of the principle of calculation to all spheres of social life. Such a process, in Weber’s account, had a double face: on the one hand, it was a progressive development, inscribed in the trajectory that led to Protestantism. In its ‘positive’ dimension, the process of rationalisation liberated the individual from the ties of patriarchal authority and serfdom, thus leading to the ideological formation called individualism and to the realisation of the self-made man as the embodiment of bourgeois virtues. On the other hand, it also carried in itself the seeds of the complete opposite of this ‘state of majority’, that is, alienation and the loss of individual autonomy. ‘Since asceticism undertook to remodel the world and to work out its ideals in the world, material goods have gained an increasing and finally an inexorable power over the lives of men as at no previous period in history’.87 Weber thus described modernity as what can be called a ‘negative dialectic’.88 The disenchantment [Entzauberung] of the world and the autonomisation of the individual found their necessary mirror-images in the iron cage of bureaucracy and the alienation of humans. This depiction presupposed two strictly related problematics. First, Weber proposed a quite classical argument of philosophy of history by means of a teleology of reason. Second, Weber’s analysis of modernity in terms of the affirmation of the ideal type of individual, corresponding to the homo oeconomicus of classical economics, constitutes what I propose to call an ‘anthropology of history’. In this vision, history is conceived as the theatre of appearances of different and determined anthropological characters – characters in which history itself finds its meaning and goal. Can we speak of a philosophy and anthropology of history in Tronti’s work? Cacciari seems to suggest such a result, in particularly clear and even Weberian terms. He argues that:

87. Weber 2001, p. 124. 88. In this context, I refer to Benedetto Croce’s concept of negative dialectic, as elaborated in 1906 in his famous essay ‘What is Living and What is Dead in the Philosophy of Hegel’: ‘In this negative dialectic the result is not the synthesis, but the annulment, of the two opposite terms, each on account of the other’ (Croce 1906).


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The study of the modern-contemporary Political, of the categories or regularities of its relative autonomy, leads Tronti to ‘discover’ that the sunset of politics, the process of de-politicisation, is inscribed in its ‘code’, it is immanent to the forms of its genesis and of its development . . . [.] This technical-scientific-economic rationality, which Weber mentions at the end of his essay on Protestantism . . . this rationality arises from the development itself of the modern Political. The sunset of the Political is its destined result. The twentieth century, as Tronti writes, marks the triumph of politics and its definitive tragedy. Yet it is not a suicide . . . it is the meaning of the modern Political to realise itself in the planetary unfolded rationality of victorious capitalism.89

In his turn, Tronti himself explicitly praised Weber’s depiction of the process of rationalisation as the bearer of instrumental reason in its inextricable entanglements with capitalism: ‘Weber grasped well, in the principle of rationality, an element which is constitutive of modernity. Instrumental reason, which the German thinker notices also in particular connections between the dimensions of ethics and economy, carried in itself the destiny of an objective reason which was organic to the spirit of capitalism’.90 It is particularly due to this reading of the fate of depoliticisation, almost inscribed into the ‘DNA of politics’ itself, so to speak, that several commentators have identified a ‘philosophy of history’ in Tronti’s thought.91 Rather than the optimistic tale of progress of nineteenth-century philosophies of history, however, Tronti’s particular version constitutes a Weberian negative dialectic without synthesis; that is, it is a philosophy of history inscribed in a negative register.92 This Weberian ‘regressive’ philosophy of history, furthermore, is characterised by a fundamentally anthropological dimension.

89. Cacciari 2006, p. 44. 90. ‘Crisi della ragione’, available at: . The Nietzschean theme of ‘destiny’ is increasingly important in Tronti’s thought. He devoted his lectio magistralis, delivered on the occasion of his retirement from the University of Siena in 2001, to the theme of ‘Politics and Destiny [Politica e destino]’. The lecture was subsequently published alongside contributions from some of his closest collaborators in the form of a Festschrift in 2006. See Tronti 2006b. 91. According to Tomba, such an outcome has also to be ascribed to ‘the reflection that [Tronti] made his own in order to learn from enemies, to hegemonise the ambits of thought, to make the low classes speak the high language’, but which ended up presenting itself ‘in the form of the philosophy of history of the sunset’ (see Tomba 2007). Zanini, on the other hand, attributes to theoretical workerism, including Tronti, the constitution of a philosophy of subjectivity ‘founded on an immanent idea of difference, irreducible to a philosophy of history’. See Zanini 2006. 92. In this, Tronti was also influenced by Cacciari’s turn to so-called ‘negative thought’. See Corradi 2005, p. 227. On Italian-left readings of Heidegger and ‘negative thought’, see also Mandarini 2009.

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This result in Tronti’s development can be identified in his depiction of the process of depoliticisation as giving rise to its own anthropological ideal-type: the homo democraticus as ‘the last degree of depoliticisation of the homo oeconomicus’. We witness the epochal encounter between homo oeconomicus and homo democraticus. The subject of the spirit of capitalism is precisely the animal democraticum. The figure that has become dominant is the mass bourgeois, which is the real subject internal to the social relations. There will be no genuine and effective critique of democracy without a profound anthropological investigation, a social anthropology but also an individual anthropology, taking ‘individual’ here too in the sense of the thought-practice of difference.93

The homo democraticus is thus for the political-democratic system what the homo oeconomicus is for the economic-capitalist system; that is, its anthropological embodiment. Just as the critique of political economy required a radical analysis and critique of the myth of homo oeconomicus, Tronti argues that an ‘effective critique of democracy’ requires an analogous critique of its anthropological foundation. However, he does not propose to negate or to invalidate the anthropological argument. On the contrary, he urges its assumption and ‘partisan’ articulation. He thus proposes a ‘partisan anthropology’ as a new method of inquiry that can throw light upon the end of the ‘Weberian vocational profession of politics’, namely, the crisis of politics itself. In Tronti’s words from the end of the last century, ‘the reason for this fall of meanings is still to be explained, for this loss of recognition, for this triumph of appearance and for this collapse of qualities in the two Weberian vocational professions of the twentieth century, that of the politician and of the intellectual. Perhaps it will be necessary to turn one’s hand to a partisan anthropology, declined from below’.94 More recently, he has emphasised that homo oeconomicus, in the modern age, is a more natural datum than zoon politikon. Neither the noble savage of Rousseau, nor the social individual of Locke’s reasonable Christianity, but Hobbes’s homo-lupus is the interpreter-protagonist of the bourgeois state of nature. Political economy won over the critique of political economy, Smith defeated Marx, because the former began from an anthropology, the latter arrived at a sociology.95

93. Tronti 2009b, p. 102. 94. Tronti 1998, p. 49. 95. Tronti 2008, p. 51.


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Tronti thus argues that the lack of such an anthropology constitutes ‘the great theoretical void in the tradition of workers’ Kultur’. Furthermore, in Tronti’s view, the crisis of militant Marxism requires us to reconstruct the foundations of the crisis. Such a task demands ‘the research of a new anthropology’ because it was upon an anthropology that classical political economy as well as the political theories of the state that emerged as the victors of the twentieth century were ultimately based.96 The critique of political democracy itself must thus be founded upon an anthropology; that is, it must be a critique that radically questions ‘the idea and practice of man’ that democracy presupposes.97 By positing the anthropological analysis as a ground on which the defeats of the workers’ movement and the delusions of democracy of the twentieth century could be measured, Tronti arguably undertook a path opposite to that forged by Marx. The latter began from an anthropological reflection on social inequalities in which a key-rôle was played by the concept of man (or individual), and species-being [Gattungswesen] as the common trait of humanity, and arrived at an articulation of society as not consisting of ‘individuals’, but as an expression of ‘the sum of interrelations . . . within which these individuals stand’.98 Tronti, on the other hand, started by asserting that working-class struggle was the fundamental driving force of history; in other words, his initial work put a collective subject’s action at the core of his analysis. He then later emerged as the advocate of a workers’ anthropology in which the identification of the driving motives of what we can term an imagined homo proletarius seem to predetermine its possible collective expression.

8. Concluding remarks To return to my initial research-question: what lessons can an avowedly Marxist research-project today learn from the particular way in which Tronti proposed to learn from the ‘enemy’ Max Weber? Tronti’s heterodox approach led him to begin to read Weber, alongside the authors of the conservative traditions. Convinced that Marx’s elaboration of politics and the state was ultimately inadequate, and with the aim of ‘integrating’ and ‘updating’ it up to the level of the complexity of the 96. See Tronti 2006b, p. 26. 97. In this regard, despite his masculinist mode of expression, Tronti is also referring to feminist theory of difference, which he increasingly addresses in positive terms in his later writings. 98. Marx 1973, p. 265.

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contemporary state, Tronti embraced the theory of the ‘autonomy of the political’. It is in the context of the development of this theory that Tronti resorted increasingly to Weber. The latter’s elaboration of politics as the fundamental terrain of struggle, his articulation of the features of the political realm from the level of the state as the monopoliser of violence to the level of the subjective traits of the charismatic leader along the lines of the ethic of responsibility and conviction, permeated Tronti’s reflection on the political, particularly from the late 1970s onwards. Nonetheless, the ‘politicist’ turn in Tronti’s development seem to have led to a terrain of elaboration less novel than he supposed. On the one hand, the thesis of the autonomy of the political resulted in the affirmation of the terrain of state-mediation as the only possible level of political confrontation and in the reduction of political elaboration to a toolbox detached from a specific class-project in the fashion of Realpolitik. On the other hand, Tronti conceived the autonomy of the political as an independence of the party from the class itself. He turned to the élitists’ critique of democracy, in the process of elaborating the notion of a people’s aristocracy, in order to reassess the ineluctability of the duality between rulers and ruled. Arguably, however, instead of introducing innovation and novelty into the Marxist-theoretical field, Tronti ended up re-proposing a classical theme of bourgeois political theory: namely, the dialectic between administration and charisma, as the two sides of the coin of an authoritarian conception of power. Furthermore, Tronti recovered two idealist themes, strictly intertwined, from Weber and the liberal-conservative traditions: a philosophy and anthropology of history. The former led him to analyse the crisis, or ‘sunset’, of politics as the necessary realisation of its own fate; he thus presented a classical teleological movement that explicitly recalled Weber’s reading of the process of rationalisation. The latter resulted in Tronti’s important project to develop and reframe the question of anthropology, an element that certainly constitutes one of his most intriguing and potentially challenging ideas. Nonetheless, the still-underdeveloped nature of such a project, alongside Tronti’s ambiguous appreciation of bourgeois anthropology as the seemingly necessary term of comparison for the development of an alternative Marxist anthropology, ultimately has fallen short of what he proposed, at least until now. By identifying in Hobbes’s or Smith’s anthropological foundation of politics and economics the ‘added value’ of bourgeois political theory that had enabled it to win against competing positions, Tronti did not seem to acknowledge that such a foundation was and is the ideological expression of the dominant classes that seek to conceal and legitimate real historical relations of domination and exploitation. It does so by naturalising them at the level of


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human nature, thus reinforcing the status quo. Such an anthropological foundation for politics, that is, resulted in a denial of the possibility of change – precisely what Tronti’s Marxism ostensibly aimed to promote. In the end, Tronti’s proposal to study bourgeois thought qua ‘enemythought’ constitutes an extremely intriguing and potentially fruitful approach. Instead of attempting dubious re-interpretations of conservative thinkers as carriers of inherently leftist projects (as, for instance, in various attempts to win Nietzsche, and to some extent even Weber, to the cause of the proletariat),99 Tronti assumed at the outset the ‘inimical’ nature of their thought. He was well aware, that is, of the inextricably partisan feature of their political elaborations, which could therefore only play a heuristic rôle for the development of a truly alternative political theory and practice. However, this antidotal methodology did not prevent him from incorporating some of the very concepts and problematics of these inimical theories into his own thought, which thus failed to produce the theoretical innovation for which he strove. His attempt to introduce novelty into the ‘petrified forest of vulgar Marxism’ by engaging with the enemy thus brought him perilously close to imprisonment in the ‘iron cage’ of Weberianism.

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—— 2006, ‘Dall’estremo possibile’, in Tronti 2006b. Callinicos, Alex 2007, ‘Leninism in the 21st Century? Lenin, Weber, and the Politics of Responsibility’, in Lenin Reloaded, edited by Sebastian Budgen, Stathis Kouvelakis and Slavoj Žižek, Durham NC.: Duke University Press. Cavazzini, Guido 1993, Interpretazioni di Weber e teorie della società, Milan: Franco Angeli. Chiesa, Lorenzo and Alberto Toscano (eds.) 2009, The Italian Difference: Between Nihilism and Biopolitics, Melbourne: Re-Press. Corradi, Cristina 2005, Storia dei marxismi in Italia, Rome: Manifestolibri. Croce, Benedetto 1906, ‘What Is Living and What Is Dead in the Philosophy of Hegel’, available at: . Ferrajoli, Luigi and Danilo Zolo 1978, Democrazia autoritaria e capitalismo maturo, Milan: Feltrinelli. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri 2000, Empire, Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press. Hennis, Wilhelm 1994, ‘The Meaning of “Wertfreiheit”: On the Background and Motives of Max Weber’s “Postulate” ’, Sociological Theory, 12, 2: 113–26. Hobsbawm, Eric John 1982 [1978], Il marxismo ai tempi di Marx, in Storia del marxismo, Volume 1, Turin: Einaudi. Horkheimer, Max 1978, Dawn & Decline: Notes 1926–1931 and 1950–1969, translated by Michael Shaw, New York: Seabury Press. Illuminati, Augusto 1980, Gli inganni di Sarastro. Ipotesi sul politico e sul potere, Turin: Einaudi. Jameson, Fredric 1973, ‘The Vanishing Mediator: Narrative Structure in Max Weber’, New German Critique, 1: 52–89. —— 2009, Valences of the Dialectic, London: Verso. Katznelson, Ira 1981, ‘Lenin or Weber? Choices in Marxist Theories of Politics’, Political Studies, 29, 4: 632–40. La Rosa, Michele 2005, Weber, Marx e Panzieri. Ricerca sociologica e capitalismo, Rome: Sapere 2000. Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich 1952 [1918], The State and Revolution, in Selected Works of V.I. Lenin, Volume II, Part I, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow. Lih, Lars T. 2006, Lenin Rediscovered: ‘What Is to Be Done?’ in Context, Historical Materialism Book Series, Leiden: Brill. Löwy, Michael 1996, ‘Figures of Weberian Marxism’, Theory and Society, 25, 3: 431–46. Lukàcs, Georg 1971 [1923/67], History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, translated by Rodney Livingstone, Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press. —— 1972, « Kommunismus » 1920–1921, Padua: Marsilio. Mandarini, Matteo 2009, ‘Beyond Nihilism: Notes Towards a Critique of Left-Heideggerianism in Italian Philosophy of the 1970s’, in Chiesa and Toscano (eds.) 2009. Marx, Karl 1973 [1953], Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, translated by Martin Nicolaus, Harmondsworth: Penguin. —— 1987 [1871], ‘Letter to Dr Kugelmann Concerning the Paris Commune’, in Marx and Engels 1987. Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels 1987, Collected Works, Volume 44, Moscow: International Publishers. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 1973 [1955], Adventures of the Dialectic, translated by Joseph Bien, Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Mommsen, Wolfgang J. 1989, The Political and Social Theory of Max Weber: Collected Essays, Cambridge: Polity Press. Nagel, Thomas 1986, The View from Nowhere, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Negri, Antonio 1967, ‘Studi su Max Weber (1956–65)’, Annuario bibliografico di filosofia del diritto, Milan: Giuffrè.


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—— 1976, Proletari e stato: per una discussione su autonomia operaia e compromesso storico, Milan: Feltrinelli. —— 1977, La forma stato, Milan: Feltrinelli. —— 1979, Dall’operaio massa all’operaio sociale: intervista sull’operaismo, Milan: Multhipla Edizioni. —— 2008 [2006], The Porcelain Workshop: For a New Grammar of Politics, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Nye, Robert A. 1977, The Anti-democratic Sources of Elite Theory: Pareto, Mosca, Michels, London: SAGE. Olin Wright, Erik 1975, ‘To Control or to Smash Bureaucracy: Weber and Lenin on Politics, the State, and Bureaucracy’, Berkeley Journal of Sociology, 19: 70–108. Pala, Gianfranco 1995, ‘Panzieri, Marx e la critica dell’economia politica’, in Ripensando Panzieri trent’anni dopo 1995. Panzieri, Raniero 1965, ‘Uso socialista dell’inchiesta operaia’, Quaderni Rossi, 5: 67–76, available at: . —— 1972, La ripresa del marxismo-leninismo in Italia, Milan: Sapere Edizioni. —— n.d. [1965], ‘Socialist Uses of Workers’ Inquiry’, translated by Arianna Bove, available at: . Peduzzi, Antonio 2006, Lo spirito della politica e il suo destino. L’autonomia del politico, il suo tempo, Rome: Ediesse-CRS. Rehmann, Jan 1998, Max Weber: Modernisierung als passive Revolution, Hamburg: Argument. —— 2004, Postmoderner Links-Nietzscheanismus. Deleuze & Foucault. Eine Dekonstruktion, Hamburg: Argument. Rieser, Vittorio 1992, Fabbrica oggi (lo strano caso del dottor Weber e di mister Marx), Rome: Edizioni Sisifo. Ripensando Panzieri trent’anni dopo 1995, Pisa: BFS Edizioni. Terzi, Riccardo 2007, ‘Recensione a Operai e Capitale’, available at: . Tomba, Massimiliano 2007, ‘Tronti e le contraddizioni dell’operaismo’, ERRE: Resistenze Ricerche Rivoluzioni, 22: 93–100. Toscano, Alberto 2009, ‘Chronicles of Insurrection’, in Chiesa and Toscano (eds.) 2009. Tronti, Mario 1977, Sull’autonomia del politico, Milan: Feltrinelli. —— 1978, Operaismo e centralità operaia, Rome: Editori Riuniti. —— 1998, La politica al tramonto, Turin: Einaudi. —— 2006a [1971], Operai e capitale, Rome: DeriveApprodi. —— 2006b, Politica e destino, Rome: Luca Sossella Editore. —— 2008, ‘Noi operaisti’, in Trotta and Milana (eds.) 2008. —— 2009a, ‘Il lavoro prima di tutto nella crisi della politica’, available at: . —— 2009b, ‘Towards a Critique of Political Democracy’, in Chiesa and Toscano (eds.) 2009. —— n.d., ‘Crisi della ragione’, available at: . Trotta, Giuseppe and Fabio Milana (eds.) 2008, L’operaismo degli anni Sessanta. Dai « Quaderni rossi » a « classe operaia », Rome: DeriveApprodi. Turchetto, Maria 2008, ‘From “Mass Worker” to “Empire”: The Disconcerting Trajectory of Italian Operaismo’, in Critical Companion to Contemporary Marxism, edited by Jacques Bidet and Stathis Kouvelakis, Historical Materialism Book Series, Leiden: Brill. Weber, Max 1949, The Methodology of the Social Sciences, translated and edited by Edward A. Shils and Henry A. Finch, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. —— 1978 [1922], Economy and Society, Volume II, edited by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, Berkeley: University of California Press.

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—— 1994a [1918], ‘Parliament and Government in Germany under a New Political Order’, in Weber 1994b. —— 1994b, Political Writings, edited by Peter Lassman and Ronald Speirs, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —— 2001 [1920–1], The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, translated by Talcott Parsons, London: Routledge. —— 2004 [1917/19], The Vocation Lectures, translated by Rodney Livingstone, Indianapolis: Hackett. Wright, Steve 2002, Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism, London: Pluto Press. Zanini, Adelino 2006, ‘Sui “fondamenti filosofici” dell’operaismo italiano’, in Da Marx a Marx. Un bilancio dei marxismi italiani del novecento, edited by Riccardo Bellofiore, Rome: Manifestolibri.


brill.nl/hima

Antonio Gramsci’s Contribution to a Critical Economics Michael R. Krätke Lancaster University [email protected]

Abstract According to conventional wisdom, Antonio Gramsci is a political philosopher lacking in, and who avoids, a serious interest in political economy. That is a serious misrepresentation of Gramsci’s works and thought. Equally wrong is the widespread view that anything Gramsci had to say about political economy is to be found in his scattered notes on ‘Americanism and Fordism’. On the contrary, a careful rereading of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks shows that Marx’s great and unfinished project of the critique of political economy plays a crucial rôle for Gramsci’s efforts to come to grips with the basics of a critical social science that could live up to the aspirations of a ‘scientific socialism’. As Gramsci was fully aware of the everyday battles of ideas in capitalist societies to be fought about the notions and tenets of popular or vulgar political economy, he did the best he could in order to understand and clarify the bases of a ‘critical’ and ‘scientific’ political economy. A political economy that was and still is urgently needed in order to fight the strongest of the strongholds of bourgeois hegemony – the ideas of vulgar economics in everybody’s heads. Keywords Gramsci, Marx, political economy, philosophy, method, classical economics, market, state, value-theory, tendencies, laws

Gramsci as non-economist Most of his admirers regard Gramsci as a pure-political theorist, and misread his critique of ‘economism’ as a lack of theoretical interest in political economy. This fatal misunderstanding has rendered many on the intellectual Left defenceless against the dominant forms of ‘economism’ of our time. Any understanding and serious critique of ‘economism’ in its various forms has to be firmly grounded in a critical understanding of the ‘real worlds of capitalism’ and the various forms of fetishism inherent to them. Marx’s critique of political economy starts and ends with a critique of the enchanted world of social © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011

DOI: 10.1163/156920611X573824

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forms, inherently fetishistic and irrational forms both of thought and action that together make up the strange universe of modern capitalism.1 As a serious rereading of the Prison Notebooks clearly shows, Gramsci was no ignoramus regarding political economy. The notebooks contain numerous notes and considerations on political economy. These notes give evidence of a serious engagement with the history and logic of economic science.2 Gramsci wrote dozens of notes entitled ‘Points to Reflect on for a Study of Economics’ or ‘Brief Notes on Political Economy’ or ‘Brief Notes on Economics’.3 There is also a lot of material in his critique of Croce,4 or in short excerpts from or notes on other authors (for example, on the economists Einaudi and Graziadei).5 Here, Gramsci studies the economic history of Italy and other countries, the course of the world-economic crisis as well as the latest developments in economic theory. He reflects upon the philosophical significance of the 1. See Krätke 2001 and Krätke 2002. 2. Already on 11 December 1926, shortly after his arrest, Gramsci wrote to his friend Piero Sraffa and asked him to send him a textbook of economics and finance – a ‘fundamental’ book that the economist Sraffa could choose (cf. Gramsci 1994a, p. 44). Sraffa found and sent him a number of books, among them the Principles of Economics (1890) of Alfred Marshall in Italian translation, the Geschichte der Inflation (1926) of Richard Lewinsohn in French translation and the Corso di scienza delle finanze (1926) of Luigi Einaudi (cf. Potier 1987, p. 62). In the following years, Sraffa continued to send Gramsci economic literature, as well as opening an account for him at a bookshop to order books as he pleased. 3. See Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §23 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 168–70); Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §25 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 164–5); Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §30 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 170–1); Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §32 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 171–3); Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §37i (Gramsci 1995, pp. 176–9); Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §53 (Gramsci 1995, p. 229); Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §57 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 189–90); Gramsci 1975, Q8, §216 (Gramsci 1995, p. 180); Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §15 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 166–7); Gramsci 1975, Q15, §26 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 225–6); Gramsci 1975, Q15, §43 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 174–5); Gramsci 1975, Q15, §45 (Gramsci 1995, p. 176). References are given to the Italian critical edition of Gramsci’s prison-writings (Gramsci 1975). Three volumes of this work now exist in English. I have adopted the internationally accepted standard of citation in Gramscian studies, giving the number of the notebook (Q), followed by the number of the individual notes (§). Additionally, references are provided to one of the anthologies of Gramsci’s texts in English translation where available (Gramsci 1971 and Gramsci 1995, respectively). 4. See Gramsci 1975, Q7, §42; Gramsci 1975, Q8, §222; Gramsci 1975, Q10I, §13 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 360–1); Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §32 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 171–3); Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §36 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 430–3); Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §39 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 422–3); Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §41vi (Gramsci 1995, pp. 426–8); Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §41viii (Gramsci 1995, pp. 419–20). 5. See Gramsci 1975, Q1, §63; Gramsci 1975, Q7, §22; Gramsci 1975, Q7, §33 (Gramsci 1971, pp. 381–2); Gramsci 1975, Q7, §42; Gramsci 1975, Q8, §162 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 163–4); Gramsci 1975, Q8, §166 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 186–7); Gramsci 1975, Q9, §77; Gramsci 1975, Q11, §29 (Gramsci 1971, pp. 458–61); Gramsci 1975, Q11, §52 (Gramsci 1971, pp. 410–14); Gramsci 1975, Q15, §26 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 225–6).


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discoveries of classical political economists (in the first instance, Ricardo). In 1930–2, Gramsci writes extensive notes on the history of political economy and on the methodological foundations of ‘critical’ economics. Hence, Gramsci’s lack of concern for political economy is largely a myth.6 With a few exceptions, Gramsci’s studies of political economy have remained largely unexplored.7 On the one hand, the Italian Gramsci scholars (mostly philosophers) who have commented on these passages have not focused on Gramsci’s thoughts as far as economic theory and its peculiar scientific status is concerned. Rather, they have tried to read Gramsci’s efforts to understand the origins of the basic concepts of Marx’s critique of political economy in relation to the elaboration of the concept of immanence, thus neglecting the particular problems of economic thought and its history.8 Of course, careful students of Gramsci know that his close friend Piero Sraffa was a professional economist of high reputation.9 While Gramsci was imprisoned, Sraffa started to work in Cambridge on the first complete edition of the Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo. Gramsci was aware of this project and quite enthusiastic about it.10 In their correspondence, both talked about 6. Accordingly, the concept of ‘Western Marxism’ as developed by Perry Anderson and based upon an alleged shift of focus towards philosophy and away from political economy, is highly misleading. As I have shown elsewhere, the alleged shift was never made: not by Gramsci, not by Karl Korsch or Georg Lukács, not even by Theodor Adorno (cf. Krätke 2009). 7. See Giorgi 1979; Giovanni 1979; Bertoni 1980; Potier 1986; Calabi 1988; Boothman 1991; Lunghini 1994. A collection of Gramsci’s writings on political economy appeared in Italy in 1994 (Gramsci 1994c), leading to some interest in Gramsci’s contributions to Marxist economic analysis among Italian Gramsci scholars (see, for example, Badaloni 1994; Cavallaro 1997; Frosini 1999). Further Selections from the Prison Notebooks (1995) contains the most important notes and marginal notes on political economy in the Prison Notebooks in two sections (cf. Gramsci 1995). 8. Francioni 1984, p. 94. Cavallaro argues that when Gramsci is dealing with political economy he is actually dealing with something completely different, that is, a general theory of transition. Frosini claims that the ‘technical-economic’ meaning of Gramsci’s reflections on political economy are less important than their contribution to the development of the concept of ‘immanence’ (cf. Cavallaro 1997, p. 60 and passim; Frosini 1999, pp. 54, 60 and passim; Frosini 2003, pp. 143–9). Some of the neo-Gramscians among the (international) political economists provide a striking counterpart to this attitude, as they are mostly interested in Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, and make only a selective use of his reflections on political economy (cf. Gill 1991; Gill (ed.) 1993). 9. The friendship between Sraffa and Gramsci, which lasted from their first encounter in 1919 until Gramsci’s death in 1937, has often been regarded under a purely biographical aspect. See Napolitano 1978; Napolitano 2005; Vacca 1999. 10. On 7 September 1931, when Gramsci heard of Piero Sraffa’s work on the criticalcollected edition of Ricardo’s works (a project that Sraffa started on behalf of the Royal Economic Society in 1930), he wrote to Tania that he hoped ‘soon to read Ricardo in the original text, when this edition comes out’ (Gramsci 1994b, p. 66). Sraffa answered that he hoped that the

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economics and political economy many times. Many years later, in 1947, commenting upon the first plan to publish Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, Sraffa opined that with respect to political economy they contained some ‘extremely acute remarks’, but also great weaknesses – mostly due to the fact that Gramsci did not have Marx’s texts with him. Sraffa even advised not to publish some of Gramsci’s notes, in particular those on ‘classical and critical economics’, which he regarded as sometimes confused and undeveloped.11 However, as Gramsci’s discussion of Croce’s Marx critique shows clearly enough, he knew Marx’s Capital well, and not only its first volume. On the other hand, in the international debate, Gramsci’s remarks on ‘Americanism and Fordism’, scattered throughout his notebooks from the very beginning and then assembled and partly revised in the twenty-second of the Prison Notebooks, compiled in 1934, have been extensively used in recent attempts to come to grips with the alleged ‘crisis of Fordism’ and the emergence of ‘post-Fordism’.12 Despite frequent claims for their novelty, however, Gramsci argues in ways that are more often than not rather close to the orthodox Marxism of the Second International. He insists that all the different phenomena of Americanism and Fordism are linked together as parts of one overarching process of the transformation of capitalism, a transformation from the ‘old individualism’ towards a programmed (or planned) economy which follows an ‘immanent necessity’. Gramsci explains the ‘necessity’ of all the transitions and transformations in American- and European-capitalist societies according to what may seem to be an ‘old fashioned’ perspective: namely, the ‘law’ of the falling rate of profit and the continuous struggles of the capitalist class to overcome or escape it. Fordism is just an extreme point in this ongoing process.13 Many of Gramsci’s conjectures on these themes are edition would appear in one to two years, and that he would naturally send Gramsci a copy (Gramsci 1994b, p. 71). In fact, the edition was published only in the 1950s. 11. In his comments, Sraffa gave a whole list of Gramsci’s misreadings of core-tenets of the classical and neoclassical tradition, including confusions about the concept of value and the concept of comparative costs (cf. Badaloni 1992, pp. 44, 45; Boothman 1995, p. xxxv). 12. Many commentators have failed to note that the debate on Americanism and Fordism had started long before World-War One and was already far advanced in the 1920s, particularly in Germany. When Gramsci started to rethink the new phenomena in prison, they were not so new anymore. The first Marxist critiques of Fordism and the first extensive Marxist analyses of the process of rationalisation had already been published (see, for example, Walcher 1925 and Bauer 1976). 13. See Gramsci 1975, Q22, §1 (Gramsci 1971, pp. 278–9). The combination of economic ‘laws’ that are avoided, circumvented or even overcome by capitalists’ actions, puzzling as it might appear, was not unfamiliar among the Marxists of the Second International. From 1915 onwards, many of them were engaged in an ongoing debate on the transformations of capitalism towards some sort of ‘organised’, even ‘planned’ capitalism.


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correct, but certainly not original in the Marxist tradition. For example, his observation that the rationalisation-process creates a ‘new man’ and a new type of worker as all labour is systematically reduced to the ‘merely mechanicalphysical aspect’ is not particularly ‘originally new’, as he himself correctly remarks, but just the most recent phase of a process which started with industrialisation itself. What is more, the very process of the transformation of labour – creating more-and-more ‘abstract labour’ in reality – and the creation of modern wage-workers fit for performing abstract labour, is a core-theme not only in many of Marx’s manuscripts that remained unknown to Gramsci, but right at the centre of Capital, Volume One.14 Again, Gramsci’s brief discussion of the phenomenon of the ‘high wages’ is largely correct as an intuition. He rightly stresses the problem of high fluctuation among the workforce in Ford’s factories and argues that the ‘high wages’ (the famous fivedollars-a-day ‘minimum wage’, introduced together with the eight-hour working day in January 1914 in some of Ford’s factories) were more appearance than reality, because the enhanced intensity and stress of work was hardly compensated for by the enhanced pay. Furthermore, like many other theorists, Gramsci argues that once the new type of Ford worker together with the new level of labour-intensity became the average or norm in American and European industries, the high wages would disappear. Equally correct, and also more widely acknowledged, was Gramsci’s observation of the clash between the traditional ‘moral economy’ of the factory-worker and the new economy of ruthless rationalisation of factory-work that ‘Fordism’ represented.

Gramsci’s anti-economism With the term ‘economism’, Gramsci, like his predecessors and contemporaries in the international-socialist movement,15 meant a theoretical orientation and a political movement: in the case of Italy, syndicalism and the syndicalists, who 14. See Gramsci 1975, Q22, §2,11 (Gramsci 1971, pp. 302ff.). 15. In the Russian workers’ movement, the bitter struggle against ‘economism’ – that is, a group in the (illegal or half-legal) trade-unions who named themselves ‘economists’ and were explicitly against a political engagement of the Russian workers – intermittently played an important rôle. Plekhanov, Dan, Martov, Lenin and others attacked these politics of political abstinence, for example, in Iskra, printed outside Russian and illegally distributed within it (cf. Grossmann 1971, pp. 41ff.; Anderson 1976). The concept of ‘hegemony’ was coined for the first time in these debates and, just as quickly, became the bone of contention between the fighting factions, who mutually accused each other of having fundamentally misunderstood the concept of the hegemony of the working class in a bourgeois revolution.

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had entered into a curious alliance with the Italian version of liberalism in the late-nineteenth century. What he is fighting against are the forms of a workers’ movement that stand in the way of the struggle for hegemony. ‘The proletariat, in order to become capable as a class of governing’, he wrote in 1926 in the fragment, On Some Aspects of the Southern Question, ‘must strip itself of every residue of corporatism, every syndicalist prejudice and incrustation’.16 As a spontaneous-oppositional movement against the reformism of the alreadyestablished parliamentary workers’ parties, syndicalism, with its calls for ‘direct action’ (strikes, boycotts, sabotage, factory-occupations, and so forth) had found some support in the Italian workers’ movement (as well as in the Spanish and French movements). Many socialist theorists entertained sympathies for syndicalism; some (such as Sorel, Pelloutier, Arturo Labriola and Panunzio) attempted to give it its own distinctive theory. Syndicalism in France and Italy produced its own theoreticians, its ‘organic’ intellectuals, its ideas and programme.17 As Gramsci saw in 1926, syndicalism was the ‘the instinctive, elemental, primitive but healthy expression of working-class reaction’ against reformism.18 In Italy, the leading minds of syndicalism came from the South; as such, Gramsci thought to be able to recognise an attempt of the peasants of the South to influence the industrial workers of the North.19 Theoretically, the syndicalists were usually followers of Proudhon or other ‘utopian’ socialists. Gramsci suspected that there was a connection between the liberal credo – free market and free trade under all conditions – and theoretical syndicalism. He resolutely declared in 1926 that ‘the ideological essence of syndicalism is a new liberalism, more energetic, more aggressive, more pugnacious than the traditional variety’.20 In the Prison Notebooks he formulated this insight more cautiously: it should be investigated ‘whether economism, in its most developed form, is not a direct offshoot of liberalism’, and if it began from the ‘theoretical movement for free trade’.21 Gramsci brings together the ‘theoretical free trade movement’ and ‘theoretical syndicalism’, which are united in their rejection of any type of superordinate planning, coordination and control of

16. Gramsci 1978, p. 448. 17. See Schecter 1994, pp. 24ff. 18. Gramsci 1978, p. 450 (my italics). 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid. 21. Gramsci 1975, Q13, §18 (Gramsci 1971, pp. 158–67). That is simultaneously a moment of political self-criticism and self-reflection. Until the end of WWI, as a journalist and secretary of the Turin section of the PSI, Gramsci had proposed a consistent free-trade politics – with the argument that the socialists in Italy had to take over the historical task of the liberals (cf. Riechers 1970, pp. 55ff.).


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the economic processes, in the ‘category of economism’.22 However, at the same time, he sees and emphasises the different significance of both currents – the liberal conception being of the ‘ruling’ class, that of the syndicalists of the ‘subaltern’ classes.23 Free-market liberalism is based on a ‘theoretical error’, on the belief that ‘economic activity belongs to civil society and the State must not intervene to regulate it’.24 In liberal thought, a methodological and analytical differentiation, between ‘politics’ and ‘economics’, is reified and raised to a political norm. In order to avoid this conclusion, it is necessary to understand that the free market and the liberal market-economy is ‘a “regulation” of a statal nature, introduced and maintained by means of law and compulsion’.25 A free market, just like free trade between nation-states, must ‘be introduced by law, that is, by the intervention of political power’. The free market is forged on the political road, it is ‘a fact of the will, not of the spontaneous, automatic expression of economic (natural) laws’.26 Thus, liberalism is also ‘a political programme’ determined by its victory to replace the leading ‘personnel of a state and the economic programme of the state itself ’.27 However, it is not a case of a new political or social order, only a case of replacing the government, in order to change ‘the existing legal framework in the field of trade and indirectly industrial policies’.28 Syndicalism, on the other hand, represents a more complex phenomenon: there was a strong syndicalist movement, in some countries (France, Italy, Spain) even temporarily dominant. This was a movement of the factory or industrial workers and the agricultural workers. It rejected the ‘Marxism’ of the Social-Democratic parties of Northern Europe. Proponents of conciliar ideas, they quickly turned, after initial enthusiasm, against the development of the Soviet Union, where councils and unions were absorbed into the new state. They subsequently became bitter opponents of the Communist parties.29 Gramsci attacks the syndicalists in the Prison Notebooks, because, as we have

22. Gramsci 1975, Q4, §38 (Gramsci 1971, p. 160). 23. See Gramsci 1975, Q4, §38 (Gramsci 1971, p. 160). 24. Gramsci 1975, Q13, §18 (Gramsci 1971, pp. 158–67). See Gramsci 1975, Q4, §38 (Gramsci 1971, p. 160). 25. Ibid. 26. Gramsci 1975, Q4, §38 (Gramsci 1971, p. 160). 27. Gramsci 1975, Q13, §18 (Gramsci 1971, pp. 158–67). 28. Gramsci 1975, Q4, §38 (Gramsci 1971, p. 160). 29. In the course of the 1920s, many syndicalists in Italy drew closer to the Fascist régime, which appeared to promise them a preferential position in the new corporative state based on estates.

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seen, he argued that ‘theoretical syndicalism is an aspect of market liberalism’.30 Presumably, he means the then-current idea of the organisation of a future economy by ‘syndicates’: enterprises administered by the respective workforces and between which only a loose federation exists. The syndicalists refused the idea of a ‘proletarian Leviathan’ and always preferred a (regulated) market to central state-based planning and control. This appeared to offer them a guarantee for the autonomy of the syndicates (producers’ collectives in selfadministered enterprises).31

The three foundations and three sources of Gramsci’s economic studies In order to be able to criticise liberalism in the workers’ movement, one needs a critique of political economy – a critique that also engages with the second or third economy of the working class in capitalism, with its more-or-less utopian projects of self-help and social reform, and a critique that is fair to the ambivalence of the workers’ movement and its organisations. Marx’s critique of political economy begins in 1844–7 with a critique of the political economy of the working class, its practical experiments such as the Bourses de Travail (labour-exchanges and banks of exchange – like Proudhon’s ‘Bank of the People’) and the corresponding theories of radical money and credit-reformers (in the first place, Proudhon and his followers).32 However, in order to be able to grasp this contradictory rôle of the political economy of the working class and its institutions in capitalism, we must first have a clear concept of the capitalist mode of production. The liberal or syndicalist utopianism of the real workers’ movement is no chimera of individual theorists. It emerges out of a particular historical situation, in which the trade-unions were in reality still spontaneous self-help organisations, which were and had to be many things at once: professional associations, cooperatives, insurance-associations and associations for mutual help. It emerged in an explicitly social-revolutionary frontal opposition to the state, which did not treat wage-workers in any sense as emancipated citizens and fully-fledged legal subjects. It contained anticapitalist and even precapitalist elements, such as the idea of a ‘just exchange’ on a market, in which, thanks to the syndicates, the inequality and lack of freedom among the formally equal commodity-owners is abolished and money is reduced to a pure fiat-money, so that it can no longer be transformed into capital. The ambivalence towards the market – on the one hand, the sphere of 30. Gramsci 1975, Q4, §38 (Gramsci 1971, p. 160). 31. See Schecter 1994, pp. 40ff. 32. See Krätke 2005.


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freedom, equality and the fulfilment of all possible desires; on the other hand, a sphere of inequality, lack of freedom and frustration – plays a rôle in all modern social movements right up until today. Liberal utopianism re-emerges even today in the garb of ‘market-socialism’. Gramsci’s thought was in the second place strongly marked by the encounter with the Italian version of legal, academic Marxism.33 Benedetto Croce, a student of the Marxist philosopher Antonio Labriola and one of the first and most influential critics of Marx (who did not limit himself to philosophical themes but engaged extensively with all three volumes of Capital ),34 is the most important author for Gramsci. Croce saw clearly that Marx’s Capital is neither pure economics nor a history of the economy.35 Marx, he claimed, provided a sort of sociological and comparative-historical explanation and presentation of modern capitalism.36 The problem of ‘pure’ economics, of the general economic laws that are valid for all times, however, is not resolved in this fashion. Croce criticised Marx on three fronts: first, Croce claimed that Marx did not want to engage with ‘pure’ economics, that his economic theory is not a general theory, and that his concept of value is not a general concept.37 Second, Croce argued that Marx is not clear about his mode of presentation: his theory of value as well as his theory of surplus-value is based upon ‘elliptical’ comparison, that is, upon a tacit comparison of an ideal situation of a classless society of pure producers with the existing relations of capitalism.38 Third, according to Croce, Marx fails to provide a justification of the ‘law’ of the tendential fall in the profit-rate. Croce argued that it can be observed, differently from Marx’s claims, that the mass of profit sinks tendentially, while its rate must rise in the course of capitalist development.39 Croce was not only famous in Italy; he represented a moral and intellectual authority hovering above the parties. Like all young Italian intellectuals of his time, Gramsci was not able to avoid a confrontation with Croce and his critique of Marx. In the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci gathers together his commentaries and objections to Croce, which were supposed to go into a planned but never-written essay, a full-blown ‘Anti-Croce’. He took over from Croce a series of problems that mark his self-clarification regarding Marx’s ‘critical’ economics: the question concerning the status and the explanatory 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

See Riechers 1970, pp. 37ff. See Boulay 1981. Croce 1901, pp. 96, 98. Croce 1901, pp. 116ff., 127. Croce 1901, pp. 117, 120ff. Croce 1901, pp. 102, 226, 228. See Croce 1901, pp. 237ff.

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value of the theory of value, the question concerning the relations between the ‘pure’ economics of Pareto, Pantaleoni and others and Marx’s work, and the question regarding the specificity of the method Marx employed in Capital. In opposition to Croce, who disputed the philosophical status of Marxism, Gramsci argued that Marx had founded his own fully-fledged world-outlook, which was just as original and comprehensive as the Christian world-outlook.40 This philosophy, however, was not presented anywhere by its author in a systematic form; it must be searched for in the totality of Marx’s works.41 As Marx had ‘dedicated his intellectual forces to other problems, particularly economic (which he treated in systematic form)’, the philosophy of praxis was only present ‘in the form of aphorisms and practical criteria’.42 In an oftenquoted passage of the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci remarks that the ‘philosophy’ of a theorist (a ‘great personality’) must not necessarily be contained in his explicitly ‘philosophical’ writings or expressions. His ‘real’ philosophy could rather lie precisely in his formally unphilosophical, political (or, by extension, economic) writings.43 Thus Gramsci was interested in the philosophical significance of the new type of theory that he thought to find already in Ricardo (see below). Related to Marx, Gramsci’s thesis would seem to suggest that his ‘philosophy of praxis’ may lie in his critique of political economy, particularly as the critique of economics was the ‘dominant and predominant activity’ of Marx the scientist.44 Finally, Gramsci does not avoid an engagement with the socialists and Marxist economists of his time. Here there are the Italians Achille Loria and Antonio Graziadei. They had considerable influence on the socialist movement and the official image of ‘Marxism’ in Italy. Both were fond of reconciling Marx with the dominant academic doctrine by means of adventurous 40. See, for example, Gramsci 1975, Q7, §34. 41. Gramsci 1975, Q3, §31 (Gramsci 1971, p. 386). Croce, who died in November 1952, was able to read and comment upon the first Italian editions of Gramsci’s prison-writings (Lettere dal carcere (1947), Il materialismo storico e la filosofia de Benedetto Croce (1947), Gli intelletuali e l’organizzazione della cultura (1949), Il Risorgimento (1949), all thematic editions edited by Platone under the direction of Togliatti). Croce wrote four short reviews of Gramsci’s work, published between 1947 and 1949 in the Quaderni della critica. His remarks are very respectful, but maintained his criticism of the philosophy of praxis as being fundamentally wrong and totally political, not philosophical. In short, Croce rejected the very premises of Marxist thought and restricted himself to a very brief rebuttal of Gramsci’s criticism of his own work and rôle in Italian intellectual life (cf. Caserta 1984; Caserta 1987). 42. Gramsci 1975, Q11, §26 (Gramsci 1971, pp. 425–7). 43. Gramsci 1975, Q4, §46 (Gramsci 1971, p. 403); Gramsci 1975, Q11, §65 (Gramsci 1971, pp. 403–4). 44. Otto Bauer had already proposed a very similar position within the Austromarxists circle before WWI (cf. Bauer 1909, p. 480; Bauer 1979; Krätke 2010b).


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constructions, or, rather, of overcoming him by means of such constructions. Loria receives particular attention in the Prison Notebooks. As ‘populariser, in the worst sense, of historical materialism’,45 he serves Gramsci as a prototype of an intellectual species: Lorianism. Loria, a formidably prolific author, had caused something of a sensation before the turn of the century with a type of Marxism garbed in the ‘historical economism’ in fashion at the time.46 Much of what was regarded as Marxism in Italy in Gramsci’s time was actually Loria’s ‘historical economism’.47 Gramsci, however, considered that the differences between the ‘economistic’ interpretations of Marx by Croce and Loria were not in fact so great.48 Alongside the ‘left-wing’ vulgar economists of Italy, there were also the Soviet-Marxist economists who, with the canonisation of Marx’s critique of political economy in the 1920s, formulated a special doctrine of ‘MarxismLeninism’. Gramsci knew the Abstract of Political Economy compiled by Lapidus and Ostrowitjanow, which was translated into many languages (Gramsci had available to him the French edition of 1929).49 This work, intended and used as a textbook for courses in political economy in state and party-schools, was a singular annoyance for Gramsci.50 He regarded this textbook as erroneous and not ‘scientific’, but, rather, ‘dogmatic’, and entirely inadequate for the phase of development in which Marxism found itself in the 1920s and 1930s. What he said regarding Bukharin’s ‘Popular Essay’ (as Gramsci referred to it) is equally valid for the Abstract of Political Economy: ‘Is it possible to write an elementary book, a handbook . . . on a doctrine that is still at the stage of discussion, polemic and elaboration? . . . If the doctrine in question has not yet reached this “classical” phase of its development, any attempt to “manualise” it is bound to fail’.51 If, as Gramsci seems to suggest, 45. Gramsci 1975, Q7, §13. 46. It was not uncommon to characterise Marx’s theory as ‘historicism’, ‘economism’, and usually also ‘positivism’ at the same time (see, for example, the influential work of Masaryk (Masaryk 1899, p. 116 et sqq.)). From 1886 to 1894, Loria wrote a whole series of books (Loria 1886; Loria 1889; Loria 1892; Loria 1894) that brought him a reputation as a knowledgeable and competent political economist, one who furthermore was not uncritical of Marx’s theory. 47. Gramsci 1975, Q7, §13. 48. Gramsci 1975, Q10I, §13 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 360–1). 49. This first textbook of Marxist-Leninist political economy appeared in Russian: Abstract of Political Economy and Theory of the Soviet Economy (two volumes, Moscow 1926). By 1941, it had been through seven reprintings and was translated into many languages (with English and French editions in 1929). It was only in the course of the 1950s that it was replaced by new textbooks; Ostrowitjanow was once again active in formulating their conception. 50. See, above all, Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §23 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 168–70); Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §37ii (Gramsci 1995, pp. 176–9). 51. Gramsci 1975, Q7, §29; Gramsci 1975, Q11, §22 (Gramsci 1971, pp. 433–5).

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Marx’s critique of political economy is unfinished and contains many unresolved problems, and if it is not a closed ‘system’ but rather a researchprogramme only partially developed, then the adequate form of the popularising, introductory presentation would be a book ‘in which a series of essential problems of the doctrine are presented in monographical form’.52 That would be ‘more serious and more scientific’ and necessary,53 as ‘many formulations of critical economics . . . have been “mystified” ’ – a proposition that Gramsci illustrates with the example of the ‘law’ of the tendential fall of the profit-rate.54 Such ‘myth-formation’ – like the ‘law of immiseration’ or the ‘law of collapse’ ascribed to Marx by friend and foe alike – perhaps could have practical meaning.55 Scientifically, they are damaging.56

Classical, critical and pure economics in Gramsci Gramsci uses the term ‘critical economics’ to characterise Marx’s critique of political economy, in opposition to what he describes as ‘pure’ economics, under which term he includes also ‘orthodox’ or ‘liberal’ economics.57 Occasionally, he speaks of Marx as the ‘founder of critical economics’.58 ‘Critical’, in opposition 52. Ibid. 53. The presentation of Lapidus and Ostrowitjanow is in reality not ‘problem-oriented’, but, rather, cut up into fixed and finished ‘doctrinal pieces’: they insist that political economy treats the ‘laws’ of commodity-producing society – in the idealised sequence running from ‘simple’- to ‘socialist’-commodity production – treated from different ‘class-standpoints’. Correspondingly, they present beside and following each other the laws of value, surplus-value, wages, profit, trade, money and credit, ground-rent, accumulation and internationalisation for, respectively, ‘capitalism’ and ‘socialism’ (i.e. the Soviet economy), from the standpoint of the ‘interests of the working class’ (cf. Lapidus and Ostrovitianov 1929). 54. See Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §37i (Gramsci 1995, pp. 176–9). 55. Ibid. 56. Gramsci did not know the discussion among Marxist economists undertaken in the Soviet Union in Russian – one thinks of the value-theory works of I.I. Rubin, or E. Preobrazhensky’s theory of ‘socialist’ accumulation. Similarly, Gramsci knew only indirectly – from reviews – the contemporary works of Marxist economists in Western Europe – for example, the work of Sternberg or Grossmann. See Gramsci 1975, Q7, §41; Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §33 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 428–30). Similarly, he was not able to read the volumes of the first MEGA that had been appearing since the end of the 1920s, thought he heard of their publication, particularly the volumes containing Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, in a letter from Sraffa, written on 21 June 1932 (cf. Sraffa 1991, pp. 74–5). 57. See Gramsci 1975, Q8, §128; Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §23 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 168–70); Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §30 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 170–1); Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §32 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 171–3); Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §41vii (Gramsci 1995, pp. 433–5); Gramsci 1975, Q14, §57 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 223–5); Gramsci 1975, Q15, §45 (Gramsci 1995, p. 176). 58. Gramsci 1975, Q11, §30 (Gramsci 1971, pp. 465–6).


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to ‘pure’ economics, is ‘historicist’,59 because the ‘critique’ of political economy begins with the ‘concept of the “historicity” of the “determinate market” and of its “automatism” ’, while ‘pure’ economics (pre-) supposes these elements as ‘eternal’ and ‘natural’.60 The ‘critique’ of political economy realistically ‘analyses the relations of forces that “determine” the market, evaluates the “possibilities of modification [modificabilità]” connected with the appearance of new elements and their strengthening and presents the “transitory nature [caducità]” and “replaceable nature [sostituibilità]” of the criticised “science” ’. It finds in the inner-core of the modern economy the elements that will dissolve it and inevitably superannuate it.61 The ‘historicism’ of critical economics is therefore meant in a double sense: its author, Marx, concentrated and limited himself to the investigation of a determinate historical form of economy; consequently, he assumes that there are different historical types of economy. Economic categories, even highlycomplex ones such as that of the market, carry a particular ‘historical trace’; the critical economist therefore strives to grasp them in their historical specificity; that is, instead of comprehending ‘the market’ as such, the critical economist seeks to comprehend the historically specific market (or the historically specific system of markets) in capitalism. On the other hand, in the study of the ‘automatism’, of the mode of efficacy of the modern, capitalist market-economy, he seeks to detect traces of its ‘dynamic’, its ‘laws of movement’, but also the tendencies of its development. The relations in capitalist economies do not always remain the same; modern capitalism is capable of ‘modifying’ its forms of ‘development’. Even more scandalously, for the followers of the traditional economic mode of thought fixated upon the ‘natural tendencies towards equilibrium’ and ‘closed cycles’, critical economists study the self-destructive tendencies that are immanent to capitalism. They do not define it, a priori, as a stable, regularly and unproblematically selfreproducing system that can only be disturbed from without. Rather, they demonstrate how and why this economic system continually brings forth from within crises and structural breaks, and that this system in the long-run not only fails to reproduce its own presuppositions, but even undermines them. Gramsci also claims, however, that ‘classical’ economics is ‘only “historicist” [economics] under the appearance of its abstractions and its mathematical language’.62 For Gramsci ascribes the distinctive concept of the ‘determinate 59. Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §30 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 170–1); Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §37i (Gramsci 1995, pp. 176–9). 60. Gramsci 1975, Q8, §128; Gramsci 1975, Q11, §52 (Gramsci 1971, pp. 410–14). 61. Ibid. 62. Gramsci 1975, Q8, §216 (Gramsci 1995, p. 180).

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market’ already to the classical economists, in the first instance, to Ricardo.63 Therefore, in his opinion, the theory-type of ‘classical’ economics is much more present in ‘critical’ economics (which emerged as a critique of it) than in the theory-type of ‘pure’ economics (which turned against both classical as well as critical economics). However, there are, in his view, ‘foundational concepts’ and ‘fundamental principles’ of economics that determine the ‘logic of this science’.64 These fundamental concepts are valid for ‘classical’ economics just as for the ‘critical’ variety, and even for ‘pure’ (that is, neoclassical) economics. However, the same foundational concepts – Gramsci explicitly names the most important of them as that of the ‘determinate market’ and that of the ‘homo oeconomicus’ – are comprehended very differently in ‘pure’ economics from in ‘classical’ and ‘critical’ economics. Consequently, there must be assignable methodological differences between the three types of economic theory. We thus come to the leitmotif that runs through Gramsci’s numerous notes and provisional remarks on political economy: how and by what means is ‘critical’ economics distinguished from ‘classical’ and from (neoclassical) ‘pure’ economics? To what extent, and for what reasons, is it superior to these theory-types? Is ‘pure’ economics, as it was presented in Italy by, for example, Pantaleoni, pure ideology? Or is it perhaps a form of (social) science – with a special, ideological use-value? Is there a particular method, a specific type of presentation and mode of argumentation – for example, the combination of theoretical derivation and historical interpretation, of ‘deduction’ and ‘induction’, of ‘dialectical’ argumentation – upon which the ‘superiority of critical economics over pure economics’ is founded?65 Is ‘pure’ economics really only vulgar economics, or are there still scientific findings to be gained or expected from it even in the postclassical and neoclassical period? And what is the scientific character of the theory-type of ‘classical’ economics? Gramsci inclines towards seeing ‘critical’ (Marxian) economics and classical economics together; both belong to the same ‘historicist’ theory-type. However, he also inclines towards including ‘pure’ just as much as ‘classical’ economics in ‘scientific’ economics; at the same time, he sees and emphasises the difference between the ‘hypothesis-type’ (or theory-type) of ‘critical’ and (postclassical) ‘pure’ economics. Precisely how the methodological differences between the three types of the independent new science of economics are to

63. See Gramsci 1975, Q7, §30 (Gramsci 1995, p. 187); Gramsci 1975, Q8, §216 (Gramsci 1995, p. 180); Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §9 (Gramsci 1971, pp. 399–403); Gramsci 1975, Q11, §52 (Gramsci 1971, pp. 410–14). 64. Gramsci 1975, Q7, §22. 65. Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §37i (Gramsci 1995, pp. 176–9).


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be defined, however, is something that is not clear to him. Without formulating it clearly, Gramsci struggles with a double problem: (a) What is the new, epoch-making element in Marx’s ‘critique of political economy’? By what means and to what extent did Marx actually, as he claimed, ‘revolutionise’ the science of political economy through his ‘general critique of the entire system of economic categories’?66 How is this ‘critical’ Marxian economics distinguished from the equally ‘scientific’, albeit in a different way, classical economics, and what meaning does this renewal, this overcoming or sublation of the theory-type of classical economics by Marx, have for the social sciences in general? (b) Was Marx correct when he claimed that, with the dissolution of the Ricardian school around 1830, there was also at the same time the end of any ‘real science of political economy’,67 or at least the end of any ‘scientific bourgeois economy’, so that henceforth there could only be ‘vulgar economy’ and ‘critical economy’?68 Was there still ‘classical’ economics after Ricardo and after Marx’s critique, and is a renaissance or continuation of the classical tradition possible?69 Gramsci, as we will see, repeatedly, explicitly attributed, beyond a merely economic significance, also a ‘philosophical’ meaning to Ricardo’s contribution to classical political economy. He can therefore hardly deny an at-least-comparable ‘philosophical’ meaning – for the ‘philosophy of praxis’, as for the social sciences in general – of Marx’s ‘critical’ economics. Gramsci continually engages in the Prison Notebooks with the foundation and development of an independent political science. The question concerning ‘politics as an autonomous science’, that is, concerning the ‘place that political science occupies in a systematic (coherent and consistent [conseguente]) 66. Marx, Economic Manuscripts of 1861–1863, in Marx and Engels 1975–2005c, p. 388. 67. Marx, Economic Manuscripts of 1861–1863, in Marx and Engels 1975–2005d, p. 344. 68. See Marx and Engels 1975–2005a, pp. 20ff., 24–5; Marx and Engels 1993, pp. 491ff. and passim. Marx, Capital, Volume I, in Marx and Engels 1975–2005e, pp. 15ff.; Marx, Capital, Volume II, Engels’s ‘Preface’, in Marx and Engels 1975–2005f, p. 22; Marx, Economic Manuscripts of 1861–1863, in Marx and Engels 1975–2005c, pp. 500ff. and passim. 69. The neo-Ricardians who, following on from Piero Sraffa’s The Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities (1960), attempted a new formulation of economic theory in its entirety on the use-value foundation of Sraffa’s reproduction-model, cleansed of value-theory, have claimed precisely that. Actually, one can view Sraffa’s attempt, which in the subtitle is called ‘Prelude to a Critique of Economic Theory’, as a ‘type of brilliant rehabilitation of the classical (and to a certain extent, the Marxist) approach’ (Meek 1967, p. 161), against the value and distribution-theories (marginal utility and marginal productivity) dominating the neoclassical doctrine of ‘pure’ economics. Marx also recognised that there were still ‘classical economists’ after Ricardo, representatives of the ‘real science of political economy’, like, for example, Richard Jones; and, besides Ricardo, he knew another theoretical pinnacle of classical economics, namely, Sismondi. Both are still neglected by proponents of the ‘critical’ tradition.

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Weltauffassung’,70 is intertwined with the development of ‘economics as an autonomous science’. Gramsci discusses the conditions under which the new science of political economy emerged. How is it possible that ‘economic’ and ‘political’ sciences were separated and became two independent thoughtforms?71 Historically, ‘at a certain stage of development of the world market’, the elements of a ‘determinate market’ and a ‘preformed “economic automatism” ’ were elaborated; only in such an historically determinable ‘political-social milieu’ could economic thinking not [M.K.: anymore] merge into general political thought.72 Such a milieu was inherited and – theoretically – presupposed by classical economists. What is therefore the new, historically determinate fact and what is the specific concept that underlies the ‘modern science of economics’ – and indeed, ‘independent of the other concepts and facts relevant to the other sciences’?73 It can only be the fact of the commodityeconomy and the concept of ‘the commodity, the production and distribution of commodities, and not a philosophical concept’.74 That, however, is Marx’s critical conception, which in no way corresponds to the self-understanding of classical, to say nothing of postclassical, ‘pure’ economics. However, Marx’s conception is more differentiated: he recognises at least two such ‘political-social milieux’, whose two lines of development correspond to classical-economic science – French agrarian and manufacturing-capitalism and English agrarian, manufacturing and commercial capitalism, just like the French and the English classical political economy (from Boisguillebert to Sismondi and from Petty to Ricardo). Furthermore, Marx knew his classical authors and praised Aristotle’s original and genial economic research. The sphere of money and commodity-economy can be theorised in those societies 70. Gramsci 1975, Q13, §10 (Gramsci 1971, pp. 136–8). 71. That is an element of ‘transcendental’ critique, investigating the very conditions of existence and change of the ‘economic mode of thought’, that Gramsci shares with Marx and with other Marxists such as his contemporary Karl Korsch. Since he studied the emergence of an independent ‘science of politics’, he logically also had to take an interest in the elements of a political economy, which he thought he could find in Machiavelli’s thought, and in the first economists such as Petty and Botero, whose thought marked the transition from a merely practical, directly political concern with economic facts to their scientific treatment. See Gramsci 1975, Q8, §162 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 163–4). 72. Gramsci 1975, Q8, §162 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 163–4). It is already clear here that Gramsci’s concept of the ‘determinate market’ means something other than the concept of the ‘determined market’ in equilibrium-economics, where it only means that a market, that is, a system of equations, which is supposed to be modelled on a market-exchange situation, is then ‘determined’ if all necessary and adequate conditions for an equilibrium are given. Otherwise, it is ‘undetermined’, that is, an equilibrium-price cannot be indicated. 73. Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §41vii (Gramsci 1995, pp. 433–5). 74. Ibid.


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in which there are markets, regular exchange, trade, money and monetary transactions, and even a certain degree of production for exchange. However, the economic structure of ancient society, in which there was already an independent market-sphere, but not yet an ‘automatism’ unhinged from all social obligations dominating the society, places historical limitations on the possible insight into these market-relations.75 Even if, with the establishment of the market as an ‘autonomous sphere’, as Gramsci suggests, the historical condition of possibility of a ‘science of economics’ were exactly grasped, the common point of departure does not explain why and how economics then further developed. How did economics emerge in the form of ‘classical’ economics, which was then confronted by ‘critical’ economics, both then subsequently being confronted by ‘pure’ economics? Gramsci emphasises that the ‘science of economics is a sui generis science, even unique in its type’.76 It is not a ‘ “historical” science in the usual sense of the word’.77 Regarding ‘pure’ economics, Gramsci remarks that it should not be pushed in the direction of mathematics, even though some mathematical economists would gladly see that happen.78 One should rather ask if ‘pure economics is a science or if it is “something else” ’, a thought-form that uses strongly scientific methods – like, for example, scholastic theology.79 Gramsci is not clear about the status of ‘pure’ economics as a science.80 He sees that the pure economists are willing to separate themselves from the (socio-) philosophical ballast of their history, from utilitarianism and from the ‘hedonistic postulate’, through which their concept of economic trade changes.81 The new concept of ‘rational’ exchange and of ‘homo oeconomicus’ as ‘rational man’, reduced ‘pure’ economics to the (formal) science of ‘choices’ 75. See Marx, Capital, Volume I, in Marx and Engels 1975–2005e, pp. 69–70. As a matter of fact, he knew much more of such ‘milieux’ – also Russia, Germany and America – as his notebooks and manuscripts clearly show. 76. Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §57 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 189–90). 77. Ibid. 78. Ibid. 79. Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §32 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 171–3). 80. He seems, for example, to be insecure in dealing with the marginal-utility concept, which he sometimes ascribed to the classical economists, sometimes treats as a type of economic natural fact, sometimes as an alternative ‘value-conception’ with which one could come to similar results as those of the classical or critical value-theory. See Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §22 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 467–9); Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §23 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 168–70); Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §32 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 171–3); Gramsci 1975, Q15, §43 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 174–5). That is not, however, a scandal. Many Marxist and socialist economists have attempted to reconcile the ‘objective’ (labour-value) and ‘subjective’ (marginal-utility) theories with each other (cf. Krätke 2010b). 81. See Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §30 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 170–1); Gramsci 1975, Q15, §43 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 174–5).

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between alternative goals with limited means.82 Thus, the concept of economic action or behaviour is so ‘expanded and generalised’ that it becomes empirically and historically empty and coincides with a formal category, that of ‘rationality’.83 Lionel Robbins summarised the object of knowledge of ‘pure’ economics in a formula that is still often used today: ‘Economics is a science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses’.84 Economists can therefore occupy themselves with everything that includes a ‘rational’ decision. Thus, the traditional borders of economics as social science were broken. Pure economists built upon the determinate abstractions of classical economics, which isolated ‘the pure economic facts from the more or less important connections in which they really appear’ and thus constructed an ‘abstract schema of a determined economic society’.85 On the way to ‘pure’ economics, this ‘realistic and concrete scientific construction’ of the classics was set aside and overlaid with new ahistorical abstractions, which were related to the generic ‘human’ as such.86 By avoiding all (historically) ‘determinate’ abstractions, one thus ended up increasingly closer to formal logic and mathematics. Can we thus explain its claim to be the only, the ‘true’ science of economics? And what is then its relationship with the elements of ‘classical’ economics, which, in the ‘pure’ economics stylised as neoclassicism, were certainly not completely lost, but in a certain sense ‘sublated’? Gramsci is not clear about what constitutes the specific difference between Marx’s ‘critical’ economics and ‘classical’ economics. Thus, he did not deal extensively with Croce’s thesis that ‘critical’ economics plays a valuable siderôle – as ‘comparative-sociological economics’ besides the ‘general science of economics’.87 On the contrary, he claims that classical economics certainly had given the ‘impulse’ for the ‘critique of political economy’, but that a ‘new science or a new approach of the scientific problematic appears up until now not to be possible’.88 Occasionally, he remarked that ‘critical’ economics had 82. Gramsci 1975, Q15, §43 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 174–5). 83. Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §30 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 170–1). 84. Robbins 1932, p. 16. Gramsci knew Robbins’s 1932 book Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science from a review. He correctly guessed that the formal approach proposed by Robbins was a sign of a function of marginal-utility theory, thus of any valuetheory. See Gramsci 1975, Q15, §43 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 174–5). 85. Gramsci 1975, Q11, §52 (Gramsci 1971, pp. 410–14). 86. Ibid. 87. Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §41viii (Gramsci 1995, pp. 419–20). Not a few economists would still today immediately subscribe to this Crocean thesis, which denies Marx’s critique of economics any disciplinary-scientific competence and relevance. 88. Gramsci 1975, Q11, §52 (Gramsci 1971, pp. 410–14).


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only given a ‘more precise solution’ of the (value-theory) problematic offered by Ricardo.89 In other places, he paraphrased the achievement of critical economics as a ‘deepening’: critical economics deepened the theoretical investigation of the concept of ‘labour’, with which the actual science of economics begins.90 Thus, Gramsci holds that some of the solutions offered by the classical economists had not been completely superannuated. Some of their theorems – for example, the later so-called ‘law of diminishing returns’ – still have their place in ‘modern official economics’. Gramsci, at any rate, holds that the classical (Ricardian) theorem of comparative costs – one of the ‘underlying theorems of classical economics’ – is valid, also for critical economics.91 What needs to be investigated is therefore whether this is not ‘completely bound up with the Marxist theory of value [and the fall of the profit-rate]’, corresponding to it ‘in another language’. It would thus be ‘its scientific equivalent in official and “pure” language’.92 He emphasises that orthodox economics ‘treats the same problems [as critical economics] in other languages’. He was fascinated by the thought that problems had to be able to be ‘translated’ from one theorylanguage of economics (or of another social science) into another.93 This is something quite different from the thesis that the ‘mutual translatability of 89. Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §41vii (Gramsci 1995, pp. 433–5). 90. Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §27 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 167–8). That is, however, an unsatisfactory description of the work of critical economics, which Marx himself repeatedly described as the ‘critique of economic categories’ or ‘the system of bourgeois economy critically presented’ (Marx, letter to Ferdinand Lassalle, 22 February 1858, in Marx and Engels 1975–2005h, p. 270) and as a ‘scientific attempt at the revolutionising of a science’ (Marx, letter to Ludwig Kugelmann, 28 December 1862, in Marx and Engels 1975–2005i, p. 436). 91. See Gramsci 1975, Q9, §32 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 233–4). Marx was of a quite different opinion. Gramsci can hardly be blamed for the fact that he did not know Marx’s decisive critique of Ricardo’s ‘false theory of international trade’. The Grundrisse manuscript from 1857/8 was first published in 1939/41. The well-known text of the first book of Capital that Gramsci was able to consult contains only a short reference to modifications of the law of value to be developed later, with which the state of affairs of market-exploitation on the world-scale, highlighted by Marx, or the enrichment of one capitalist nation at the expense of another (capitalist and/or non-capitalist), were supposed to be analysed and explained. See Krätke 2007. 92. Gramsci 1975, Q7, §22. 93. See Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §20 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 182–4). Gramsci 1975, Q11, §46 (Gramsci 1995, p. 306). This supposition of Gramsci appears to have been inspired by a remark of Engels, who, in the ‘Preface’ to the third volume of Capital, refers to the fact that some ‘vulgar economic’ explanations of capital-profit could be used for conclusions similar to Marx’s surplusvalue theory. In a way capable of being misunderstood, Engels characterised the profit-theory of Lexis as a ‘paraphrase’ of Marx’s theory, while adding, however, that on this basis an ‘even plausible vulgar socialism could be built, such as been built here in England on the basis of the Jevons-Menger use-value and marginal utility theory’ (Capital, Volume III, Engels’s ‘Preface’, in Marx and Engels 1975–2005g, p. 13). Thus, according to Engels’s perspective, the ‘vulgar

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different philosophical and scientific languages’ is an element of any conception of the world, and thus also of the philosophy of praxis.94 In order to understand the translatability of theory-languages of economics, we must first be clear about the very different grammars of these languages, which are certainly not bound up with one and the same conception of the world. Strangely, Gramsci seems to forget here the ‘philosophical’ meaning of the different theory-types of economics, which he otherwise regularly emphasises.

Economic fundamental concepts: determinate market and homo oeconomicus Gramsci oscillates in the definition of the foundational concepts or fundamental concept and the (historical and logical) point of departure of economics. For him, there are three concepts: homo oeconomicus, determinate market and tendency-laws. The concept of ‘homo oeconomicus’ is the most general, for, according to Gramsci’s idea, it plays a central rôle in all three types of economic theory. The concepts of ‘determinate market’ and ‘tendency-laws’, on the other hand, are recognised only by classical and critical economics. How the three theory-types are distinguished from each other is dependent not least on the different versions of these fundamental concepts. The foundational concept of ‘homo oeconomicus’ is an abstraction that Gramsci regards as fundamentally and historically determined – it is a case of a ‘determinate abstraction’.95 This means nothing other than the fact that the content of this abstraction must be different according to the ‘political-social milieu’. Gramsci nominates the concept of ‘homo oeconomicus’ even as ‘a specific abstract concept for classical economics’,96 without expressing himself in more detail regarding the specific, natural-law version of this concept in the classical economists. For classical economics (just as for critical economics), equally important is the concept of ‘determinate market’, in its turn an historically ‘determinate abstraction’, which Gramsci repeatedly attempts to explain. It is not the concept of the market in general, for there were markets in different forms in different historical periods and in different societies, in economic’ theory-language also had consequences, namely, ‘vulgar socialist’ consequences, and the ‘translation’ of one theory-language into another had its price. 94. Gramsci 1975, Q11, §46 (Gramsci 1995, p. 306). Today, we would call this a concept of ‘inter-’ or ‘transdisciplinarity’. 95. Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §32 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 171–3). See Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §15 (Gramsci 1971, p. 208); Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §25 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 164–5); Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §37ii (Gramsci 1995, pp. 176–9). 96. Gramsci 1975, Q11, §59–60 (Gramsci 1971, pp. 345–6).


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which the concept meant something different in each case. He also does not mean a determinate market-form that is construed in ideal-typical terms (according to the known triad of perfect competition-oligopoly-monopoly).97 What is meant is a market that has become sufficiently extensive, sufficiently dense and regular, a market that has developed into an ‘automatism’ of exchange-relations and acts of commerce, so that the exchange-actions of market-participants demonstrate an observable ‘equality of form’, ‘regularity’ and ‘predictability’. Only such a market – the market in the ‘historical milieu of a capitalist economy’ – can be studied as a particular phenomenon.98 Both foundational concepts are bound up with each other: the modes of behaviour and orientations of action that are described with the concept of homo oeconomicus first come about and can thus be studied for the first time when a significantly extensive and stable market-‘automatism’ has developed, which includes and dominates the everyday thought and action of many individuals. However, there are different versions of these fundamental concepts of economics: classical, critical and pure (post- or neoclassical). Gramsci describes the conception that would be adequate to Marx: the ‘homo oeconomicus’ is an abstraction, but not an ahistorical or extra-historical abstraction. Rather, it is an historically determinate abstraction, the ‘abstraction of economic activity of a determinate social form’.99 It does not exist in general. ‘Every social form has its homo oeconomicus, that is, its own economic activity’.100 With the transformation of social form or of its economic structure, the corresponding activity or ‘economic mode of employment’ must also change.101 Thus, via abstraction, the type of any of the actors or protagonists of economic activity that follow each other in history can be formed: the capitalist, the worker, the slave, the slave-holder, the feudal baron, the serf.102 In order to be able to deal with such determinate abstractions, one needs, in each case, relatively homogenous economic modes or types of action (a ‘relatively homogenous

97. Gramsci only once explicitly refers to ‘pure competition’ and its counterpart, ‘pure monopoly’, as basic concepts of economics. See Gramsci 1975, Q7, §30 (Gramsci 1995, p. 187). 98. Gramsci 1975, Q7, §30 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 187–9); Gramsci 1975, Q8, §128; Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §9 (Gramsci 1971, pp. 399–402); Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §30 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 170–1); Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §32 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 171–3); Gramsci 1975, Q11, §52 (Gramsci 1971, pp. 410–14). 99. Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §15 (Gramsci 1971, p. 208). 100. Ibid. 101. Ibid. 102. Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §37ii (Gramsci 1995, pp. 176–9).

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type of economic man’).103 In ‘critical’ economics, this abstraction is not thrown away, but, rather, ‘operationalised’, by showing, departing from the value-concept, how exchange-value, in everyday transactions, habits, needs and preferences, dominates action and how ‘use-value is potentially reduced to exchange-value’.104 The ‘pure’ economists, however, see that very differently. Gramsci correctly remarks that their concept of (utility-maximising) ‘homo oeconomicus’ is not a mathematical abstraction, even though it appears in mathematical form (as assumption of behaviour-maximisation or optimisation of a variable).105 The ‘pure’ economists interpret this foundational concept completely ‘generally’ and suprahistorically, even if only heuristically. Gramsci claims to be able to demonstrate that also the conception of ‘homo oeconomicus’ in ‘pure’ economists is still an historically determinate abstraction.106 The classical economists, for their part, certainly did not mean by homo oeconomicus any determinate historical abstraction. For them, the homo oeconomicus is a philosophical category of natural law, which describes man in his ‘natural’ appetites and situations; they make no distinction between the classes – possessing and non-possessing, capitalists, land-owners and proletariat. As homini oeconomici, they are all the same, they want the same thing and they behave in the same way, if they are only allowed to do so.107 Gramsci is not clear about the content of ‘the abstract concept of “homo oeconomicus” specific to classical economics’.108 For this reason, he is not able to clarify his correct intuition that the concept – never used by Marx – is bound to have quite different meanings in classical and critical economics.

103. Ibid. 104. Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §32 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 171–3). 105. See Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §27 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 167–8). With the homo oeconomicus, there enters already a sociological element into ‘pure’ economic theory (cf. Löwe 1935, p. 53) – thus the angry attempts of the ‘pure’ economists ‘to clean’ the homo oeconomicus, that is, to drive any historically determined meaning out of this category. 106. See Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §27 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 167–8). However, he only formulated the programme of such an investigation: ‘One could do something useful by systematically bringing together the “hypotheses” of some great “pure” economist such as M. Pantaleoni, and correlating them so as to show that they are in fact the “description” of a given form of society’ (Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §27; Gramsci 1995, pp. 167–8). The classics of neoclassicism – Walras, Marshall, Menger, Pareto – would be just as suitable. Bukharin had already attempted this for marginal-utility theory, with the Economic Theory of the Leisure Class of 1919, which Gramsci seemingly did not know. 107. See Demeulenaere 1996; Laval 2007. The rather new idea of a ‘rational man’, resourceful and calculating, inspired and guided by his interests rather than by his passions, indeed had a lot of moral and ethical implications. Classical political economists were actually propagating a new ‘moral economy’ for a new society. 108. Gramsci 1975, Q11, §59 (Gramsci 1971, pp. 345–6).


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A similar difficulty is found in the category of the ‘determinate market’. Gramsci argues that ‘the concept of the determinate market must be established. How it is taken up in “pure” economics and how it is taken up in critical economics’.109 ‘Pure’ economics deals with markets as such (or, more exactly, with simple barter). It understands ‘market’ and ‘exchange’ as ‘general economic activity’, instinctively abstracted from ‘all the economic actors who have appeared in world history’; it goes back to ‘biological man’ (and his ‘natural disposition for exchange’) and regards all market-relations as ‘eternal’ and ‘natural’.110 Critical economics, however, ‘starts from the concept of ‘historicity [storicità]’ of the ‘determinate market’ and of its ‘automatism’.111 In critical economics, the ‘determinate market’ is a highly complex concept, which denominates the ‘ensemble of concrete economic activities of a determinate social form’; it thus signifies a multiplicity of relations within a determinate economic structure.112 It is a concept of structure: ‘what is the “determinate market”, and by what is it determined?’. By the ‘underlying structure of the existing society’ or those (relatively constant) elements of this social structure that determine the relatively unchanging structure of the market in this society, just as ‘those other “variables and self-developing elements” ’, which determine the structural changes and breaks, the conjunctures and crises in this society.113 But it is also a concept of action and historical change, as Gramsci suggests. The critique of political economy ‘analyses the relations of forces that “determine” the market’, evaluates the ‘possibilities of modification [modificabilità] connected with the appearance of new elements’ and thus, by analysing the processes of transformation of markets and market-structures, provides the clue to understanding the changing and transitory nature of the science [M.K.: classical political economy] which it criticises.114 It is, nevertheless, an abstract concept that is based upon two ‘determinate abstractions’. First, abstraction is made from the ‘individual multiplicity of economic actors’ of the relevant society (of modern capitalism).115 Marx, therefore – like the classical economists – operates with economic classes as actors, that is, with the well-founded assumption, corresponding to his structural concept of the system of markets in capitalism, that, firstly, not all 109. Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §32 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 171–3). 110. Ibid; Gramsci 1975, Q8, §128. 111. Ibid. 112. See Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §30 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 170–1). Gramsci 1975, Q11, §52 (Gramsci 1971, pp. 410–14). 113. Gramsci 1975, Q8, §216 (Gramsci 1995, p. 180). 114. Gramsci 1975, Q8, §128. 115. Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §32 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 171–3).

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economic actors are the same; secondly, not all can appear on the same market; and, thirdly, not all can operate in the same way in the markets available to them. Second, however, the (classical and critical) concept of ‘determinate’ market includes the abstraction of the state, or the abstraction of a ‘determinate political, moral, juridical superstructure’, which makes possible and guarantees the given situation of any ensemble of market-relations.116 This second, central element of ‘determinate abstraction’ of modern capitalist market-economics is highly remarkable, also because Gramsci ascribes it in the first place to ‘classical’ economics. The modern state, itself an economic actor sui generis is, as lawgiver and regulator providing ‘the determinate market [with] its legal form in which all economic actors operate’,117 an ‘element of the determinate market’, a condition of any economic activity in this market-economy.118 In order to study ‘purely’ economic activity in such a market-economy, one must abstract from the state, that is, from organised political violence and from the ‘state of violence’ that it creates – protections and guarantee of property, that is, of monopoly of the means of production, and the subordination of the possessors of labour-power.119 One must not only abstract from stateviolence in general, but ‘from “States” (I say “States” deliberately)’, that is, from the system of states and the structure of the world-market determined by it.120 Behind the determinate abstraction of the determinate market there is thus an implicit state-theory, a ‘theory about the State as an economic actor’, which Gramsci believes to find in the first instance in Ricardo.121 Gramsci knows that also the ‘liberal’ and ‘pure’ economists were not naïve on this point. He regarded the old discussion about the limits of the state’s activity as the ‘most important political science discussion’, which served to determine ‘the limits between liberals and non-liberals’;122 many theoretical differences of opinion in economics have their foundation in different conceptions of the state, in the struggle over the ‘correct’ relationship of state and market.123 The differences between classical and critical economics on this point do not 116. Gramsci 1975, Q11, §52 (Gramsci 1971, pp. 410–14). 117. Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §20 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 182–4). 118. Ibid. 119. See Gramsci 1975, Q7, §42; Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §20 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 182–4); Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §41vii (Gramsci 1995, pp. 433–5). 120. Gramsci 1975, Q7, §42; Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §41vii (Gramsci 1995, pp. 433–5). 121. Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §41vii (Gramsci 1995, pp. 433–5). At first glance, this is correct insofar as Ricardo’s Principles are, for the larger part, a treatise on the true principles of taxation. However, the theory Gramsci is looking for is to be found, on closer inspection, in Marx, who has a much more determinate and more complex idea of what the state in a capitalist marketeconomy does or can and must allow (cf. Krätke 1998a; Krätke 1998b). 122. Gramsci 1975, Q3, §142. 123. See Gramsci 1975, Q6, §82 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 435–9). A core-point in his sketch of


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disturb Gramsci; both are for him ‘economics without the State’. The actual problems of any ‘economic State theory’ – to what extent the ‘automatism’ of a determinate market and the statal regulation of this market hang together or condition each other, to what extent economic activities on the markets and determinate-statal activities outside the market condition each other – do not seem to have been a concern for Gramsci, beyond reference to the state’s guarantee of property. In his remarks on Americanism and Fordism, Gramsci actually goes a step further. The transformation towards a new industrial structure in advanced capitalist countries then underway is closely linked – in fact, only possible due – to a peculiar form of the state and a corresponding social structure. It can and it will, however, be influenced, even shaped, by state-action. This is inevitably the case in Europe, where the remaining class-structure of the ancien régime, the parasitic layers and classes of society, form a major impediment for the ‘Americanisation’ of capitalism.124

Ricardo as philosopher – on the methodology of classical economics There are a number of mostly short references and notes on the history of political economy in the Prison Notebooks.125 Gramsci had available to him in prison the textbook of Gide and Rist on the history of political economy (1926). However, he did not have original texts of classical economics with him. Gramsci wrote to Piero Sraffa and asked for his help (via Tania Schucht, in a letter from 20 May 1932): is there a ‘specialist literature on the method of investigation of economics of Ricardo and in particular on the new elements the Americanisation process is the difference between America and Europe in terms of their societal and state-structures. 124. See Gramsci 1975, Q22, §2, 7 (Gramsci 1971, pp. 281–4, 293). 125. Some of them have received a significance that they do not have in the sparse literature on the topic. Gramsci read an article of G. Arias about the economic thought of Machiavelli in early 1932. Before, he had asked Sraffa if Machiavelli could be seen as a ‘mercantilist’ who said in political language what the contemporary mercantilists said in the language of political economy (letter to Tania on 14 March 1932). Sraffa drew his attention to a possible parallel to Petty. After reading, Gramsci made the suggestion (not claim) that ‘Machiavelli implicitly in thought had overcome the mercantilist phase and already showed signs of a “physiocratic” character’ (Gramsci 1975, Q8, §162; Gramsci 1995, pp. 163–4). He conjectured thus, because there are some considerations on the rôle of the rural population in the renewal of the Italian city-republics in Machiavelli. His conjecture goes too far (cf. Begert 1983). Many mercantilists of the seventeenth century dealt also with rural economy (or economic politics), without thereby thinking in a ‘physiocratic way’. The physiocrats were likewise conditioned by a determinate ‘socio-political’ milieu, that of the so-called ‘agrarian revolution’, which, however, in the time of Machiavelli played no rôle yet.

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that Ricardo introduced into methodological critique?’126 Can one claim that ‘Ricardo, beyond the history of economics, where he certainly has an important place, has also had an important meaning in the history of philosophy? And can one say that Ricardo had contributed to setting the first theoreticians of the philosophy of praxis on the way to the superannuation of Hegelian philosophy and to the elaboration of their new historicism, purged of all traces of speculative logic?127 With this hunch, Gramsci clearly goes beyond the usual and uncontested conception according to which classical English (and French) economics contributed some essential component elements (categories and theories) to the development of Marx’s conception of social science. He was concerned to see ‘how and to what extent classical English economics in the methodological form developed by Ricardo contributed to the further development of the new theory’.128 He suggests that Ricardo’s contribution is also ‘synthetic’, namely, that it ‘concerns the Weltauffassung and the way of thinking in general and [is] not merely analytic, regarding a particular doctrine, fundamental though it may be’.129 He supposes that at least two of the ‘foundational concepts for economics’ go back to Ricardo: that of the ‘determinate market’ and that of the ‘law of tendency’.130 These concepts, which Gramsci ascribes to Ricardo, were ‘perhaps’ the ‘stimulus’ for Marx and Engels to replace the Hegelian theory of history with a new causal and dialectical theory of ‘immanent’ development of human societies.131 Sraffa’s answer (from 21 June 1932, mediated via Tania’s letter to Gramsci on 5 July) shows a certain reluctance. Sraffa responded: Ricardo was, and always remained, a ‘stockbroker of mediocre education’; the only element of culture that can be found in him comes from the natural sciences; it is difficult to estimate Ricardo’s philosophical significance, if there is any, for he himself had never attempted an ‘historical treatment of his own thought’. Ricardo did not question himself about the historical character of the laws that he investigated, he never adopted any ‘historical point of view’ and treated the laws of the society in which he lived as natural and unchangeable. The concept of ‘tendential laws’ belongs rather to vulgar economics and is to be found in Alfred Marshall rather than in Ricardo.132 126. Gramsci 1994b, pp. 178–9. 127. Ibid. 128. Ibid. 129. Ibid. 130. Ibid. 131. Ibid. 132. See Sraffa 1991, p. 74. Derek Boothman is mistaken to suppose that we can draw the conclusion from Sraffa’s answer that he had not understood Gramsci’s question (Boothman 1991, p. 61). Sraffa knew the real Ricardo even better than Marx had been able to know him – he


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Gramsci did not allow himself to be deterred. In the Prison Notebooks, he formulates a programme of methodological investigations related to the laborious transition from classical to critical economics: it is necessary to study exactly the way in which Ricardo established economic laws, for these are one of the ‘points of departure of the philosophical experiences’ that led Marx and Engels to historical materialism.133 One must particularly investigate whether Ricardo is not only important for Marx as an economist, for example, due to his development of the theory of value, or rather, beyond that, whether he did not also suggest ‘a “philosophical” significance, a way of thinking and seeing life and history’.134 To this end, one must look at the conceptual and methodological novelties that Ricardo introduced into economics, in order to check if these ‘new methodological rules’ or ‘formal scientific principles’ in reality had the ‘significance of a philosophical innovation’.135 Thus, one should first summarise ‘Ricardo’s discoveries’ on the terrain of methodologyas-rules, and then further ‘research [into] the historical origin of these Ricardian principles’.136 Third, this programme would also need to include the investigation of the question of what Marx did with these methodological new elements of Ricardo, to what extent he saw them as such and to what extent the confrontation with the work of Ricardo was for him a ‘philosophical experience’. And there is also, of course, the question of what rôle this experience, that is, Marx’s intensive and repeated reading and fundamental critique of Ricardo (as of the Ricardian school), had for Marx’s work on the critique of political economy. Gramsci did not formulate explicitly this third, necessary step of his work-programme, even though it is clear that the actual goal of his study of Ricardo consisted in clarifying for himself the origin of the characteristic scientific hypotheses and theory-type and the proper and

was then editing Ricardo’s correspondence and his unpublished manuscripts, which do not present anything that would vindicate any of Gramsci’s conjectures. Sraffa’s response was polite and cautious. He says that he would have to study Marx and Engels again – and that is why he mentions the unpublished work by Marx from 1844, first published in the same year, 1932, in that very same letter. Gramsci’s fundamental thought, however, is entirely correct. Ricardo’s efforts to systematise the principles of political economy, based upon value as its core-concept, was crucial for Marx’s critique. It is only that in a more exact investigation something rather different turns out to be the case: Marx needed all of classical political economy, Ricardo is only one element of it and not in every respect the most meaningful. 133. Gramsci 1975, Q8, §128; Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §9 (Gramsci 1971, pp. 399–402). That is, of course, inspired by Lenin’s well-known idea that Marxism came from three sources – German idealist philosophy, English political economy and French socialism. 134. Gramsci 1975, Q11, §52 (Gramsci 1971, p. 412). 135. Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §9 (Gramsci 1971, p. 400). 136. Ibid.

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essential methodological principles of critical economics.137 Gramsci contents himself with the bold claim that Marx ‘universalised Ricardo’s discoveries’, that is, extended them to history in its entirety.138 Thus, in Gramsci’s view, Ricardo, the discoverer of fundamental elements of the new method of scientific treatment (not only) of economics, has a key-position – not only for critical economics, but also for the philosophy of praxis overall: one can say that ‘the philosophy of praxis equals Hegel + David Ricardo’.139 What are the earthshaking methodological new elements that Gramsci supposes to find in Ricardo? He names two of them: (a) the method of ‘presupposing that’ or ‘positing that’;140 and (b) the ‘tendential laws’.141 The first new element, which Gramsci only sketches out briefly as the positing of ‘premises from which results a determinate consequence’, is, of course, not quite so new.142 All classical economists, just like their predecessors, reason occasionally in this ‘theoretical’ way: ‘what would be the case, if . . . ?’. They operate, that is, with more-or-less clearly formulated suppositions and abstractions from what they regarded as irrelevant for the matter at hand. This highly unsatisfactory characterisation of the ‘deductive’ or ‘abstract’ procedure, which had been attributed to Ricardo already by his contemporaries, is derived almost literally from the textbook of Gide and Rist that Gramsci had with him in prison: there, this method is characterised as ‘hypothetical’; it is even claimed that Marx was ‘inspired’ by it.143 Aside from the more-or-less successful formulation – the presentation of price-theory in mathematical models was attempted shortly after the end of the Ricardian school (for example, by Cournot in 1838) – any judgement of this procedure depends not only on the type of selected premises, but also on the ‘rigour’ with which the necessary abstractions are carried out, which, in their turn, are connected with the moreor-less clear idea of the theorist of the ‘goal of proof [Beweisziel ]’ of his investigation. Gramsci recognises that it is the type of suppositions and abstractions that counts, not the abstraction as such. Presumably, he means the concept of ‘determinate market’, which, according to his perspective, had served Ricardo to investigate ‘purely the economic hypotheses’.144 What is lacking here, however, is a confrontation with Marx’s much clearer and 137. See Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §37ii (Gramsci 1995, pp. 176–9). 138. Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §9 (Gramsci 1971, p. 400). 139. Ibid. 140. Gramsci 1975, Q8, §128; Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §9 (Gramsci 1971, pp. 399–402). 141. Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §9 (Gramsci 1971, p. 400); Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §33 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 428–30); Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §36 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 430–3). 142. Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §9 (Gramsci 1971, pp. 399–402). 143. See Gide and Rist 1929, pp. 161ff. 144. Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §41vii (Gramsci 1995, pp. 433–5).


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more elaborated critique of Ricardo’s method of investigation: Marx exerted himself to note both the ‘historical justification’, even the contemporary ‘scientific necessity’ of Ricardo’s method, as well as its ‘scientific inadequacy’, an inadequacy that he claimed had not only led to mistakes in formal presentation, but also to materially ‘erroneous results’.145 Gramsci is clearer regarding the ‘tendential laws’. Here, his thesis of the ‘new elements’ is even more plausible, for the classical economists in reality troubled themselves more-or-less consciously regarding what ‘laws’ of economic-social life could look like, given that they were not ‘natural laws’, but also not norms drawn from notions of ‘natural justice’. No ‘law of political economy can be anything other than tendential’, Gramsci claimed.146 What makes a law a ‘tendential law’? What is this reference to the ‘tendential’ character or the ‘tendentiality’ of an (economic) law supposed to mean?147 Gramsci was concerned to clarify this ‘formal-logical principle’: tendential laws are not laws in a ‘naturalistic sense’ (analogous to laws of nature) and are not laws in the sense of ‘speculative determinism’, but, rather, laws in an ‘historicist’ sense.148 When Gramsci attempted to clarify this particular tendency-character of economic laws, he referred to Marx’s law of the tendential fall of the profit-rate (which he also characterised as the ‘tendential law of the profit-rate’),149 or to Croce’s critique of this law. He did not refer to the tendential laws that Ricardo established – for example, Ricardo’s version of the law of the fall of the rate of profit, which Marx, in his turn, had extensively criticised. In Croce’s critique, according to Gramsci, there was a ‘fundamental error’. Croce did not recognise that the technical progress and the thus possible relative surplus-value production (and the rising of the surplus-value rate) is actually an integral moment of Marx’s law, which Marx already presented in the first volume of Capital; it is therefore wrong to play off the presentation in the first volume against the presentation in the third

145. Marx, Economic Manuscripts of 1861–1863, in Marx and Engels 1975–2005b, pp. 389ff. and passim. The copious excerpts and commentary on Ricardo’s chief work that Marx produced from 1844 onwards remained unpublished until very recently, in Section IV of the second MEGA. This section of Marx’s workshop was still closed to Gramsci. 146. Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §33 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 428–30). 147. See Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §9 (Gramsci 1971, p. 400); Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §33 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 428–30); Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §36 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 430–3). 148. Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §9 (Gramsci 1971, p. 400). Marx, as might be remembered, had formulated his many ‘laws’ of the capitalist mode of production with many conditions, allowing for various ‘modifications’ even for the most fundamental and general laws such as the ‘law of value’. 149. Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §33 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 428–30).

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volume.150 Gramsci conducted his anti-critique in the direction of two moreexact definitions of ‘tendential laws’: (a) the fall of the profit-rate is tendential, because Marx does not ignore the ‘forces working in the other direction’, as ‘in the usual economic hypotheses’, but, rather, brings together two (and more) mutually contradictory aspects or moments of the same process – of the production of relative surplus-value – into an ‘organic’ whole.151 Gramsci’s formulations betray his uncertainty – he did not have the text with him – but he is referring to the interaction of the rising surplus-value rate and rising organic composition of capital. His surprisingly modern insight is the following: the tendency is finite, because the immanent ‘forces working in opposed directions’ that are bound up with relative surplus-value production have technical and social limits, that is, they exhaust themselves. When, therefore, the ‘whole world economy will have become capitalist and at a determinate stage of development’, the economic contradiction will become a political contradiction and will be resolved politically in a transformation of praxis.152 (b) Also the type and way that the law is supposed to be established shows that it is not a case of an ‘automatism’, certainly not of ‘something immediately pre-existing’. On the contrary, technical progress in capitalism sets in motion a ‘contradictory process of development’, a ‘dialectical process’ in which the molecular developmental advances that are activated by the individual entrepreneur on their unending hunt for extra profits put all the others under pressure to follow and thus lead to ‘a tendentially catastrophic result for the totality of capitalists’, which all in their turn try to escape by means of ‘further individual progressive advances’.153 However, what Gramsci here correctly deploys against Croce is to be found in Marx and not in Ricardo. Ricardo establishes his analogous law in a very different way – with the quasi-natural law of diminishing fertility of land and the limitation of natural resources. Marx’s ‘law’ is dealing with a process of creation and destruction of value, a permanently contested change of social relations of production, disguised as

150. Ibid. With that, Croce’s objection is only partly refuted. There remains the problem of how and why the rise of the surplus-rate per employee cannot, in the long run, compensate or even overcompensate the rise of the organic composition of capital, that is, the relative decline of the number of employed workers. A possible solution that emerged after decades of debates between Marxist economists consists in giving up the alleged ‘generality’ of the law and in explaining the dynamic of the profit-rate in different periods of modern capitalism separately, and partially differently. 151. Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §33 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 428–30). 152. Ibid. 153. Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §36 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 430–3).


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‘values’. Gramsci is right in stressing that the ‘fall’ of the rate of profit is just one aspect of a whole highly contradictory process of capitalist development.

A philosophical reading of the critique of political economy In the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci formulated the preliminary point of departure and the direction for a renewed study of Marx’s critique of political economy – nothing more, and nothing less. He thus marks the first, important step towards the reconstruction of the philosophy of praxis, whose core-material of scientific propositions are to be found in Marx’s critique of economics. In order to ‘generalise’ and to ‘apply’ it, one must first be clear about what the claimed ‘superiority of critical economics’ over classical and pure economics is based upon. One must know what its particular scientific potential actually consists in, precisely that which makes it ‘more fertile for scientific progress’ than those other theory-types.154 In order to be clear about this, it is sensible to begin in the same place where Marx’s own process of research began, namely, in the study of classical economics. However, the element that Gramsci tentatively proposes as the actual strength and methodological particularity of ‘critical’ economics, namely, an ‘adequate’ integration of ‘deductive’ and ‘inductive’ method, of ‘theory’ and ‘history’,155 is, in reality, not a strength of Ricardo or of the Ricardian school ( James Mill, MacCulloch, de Quincey).156 Marx was not able to take over these methodological new elements in a finished form from Ricardo or any other classical economist; he had to work them out via the process of critique. Gramsci, thanks to his ‘philosophical’ interest in economics, saw the significance of the ‘new type of scientific treatment, of specific method’, which was carried out for the first time in Marx’s critique of political economy. Only the Austro-Marxists clearly saw this before Gramsci.157 However, Gramsci was no longer in a position to be able to carry out a programme of study.

154. Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §37i (Gramsci 1995, pp. 165–6). 155. Ibid.; Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §37ii (Gramsci 1995, pp. 176–9). 156. It is, however, correct that at least James Mill and then John Stuart Mill, differently from Ricardo himself, produced extensive considerations on the methodology of political economy. Marx viewed John Stuart Mill’s Logic with derision. 157. Between Max Adler, Otto Bauer, Rudolf Hilferding and others there was an extensive discussion of method in the period before WWI, in which they attempted to clarify the new and specific dimension of the historical and social-scientific research founded by Marx. Rosa Luxemburg, a trained economist, also had some hunches, but did not engage in any scholarly debate on the matter.

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Given the chance to study again Marx’s and Ricardo’s texts and to study for the first time the specialist literature about classical economics and the fate of the Ricardian school, he would perhaps have reconsidered many of the perspectives expressed in the Prison Notebooks. He would have quickly noted that Ricardo’s strong and coherent version of the labour-theory of value was in no way seen by Ricardo’s contemporaries as harmless or, as he wrote in the Prison Notebooks, a ‘purely objective and scientific presentation’, and that it in fact caused a scandal.158 He would have seen that the theory of value, because of the ‘polemical and morally and politically contentious significance’ that it already had long before Marx’s time,159 but also because of its recognisable deficiencies, was already at the time of Ricardo heavily criticised and successfully contested. After 1831, there was no longer a Ricardian school of economics in England.160 There was still a classical tradition. However, it was cultivated either in the form of ever more detailed critique of Ricardian theorems or in the form of an encyclopaedic presentation of many economic theories, mixed up with historical and social-philosophical considerations. In this perspective, John Stuart Mill and Henry Sidgwick followed the great model of Adam Smith. Gramsci’s intuition, however, was correct on one important point. Ricardo’s attempt to make a strict science out of political economy led to the first great dispute over method in economics. Ricardo was attacked due to his disposition for abstract, deductive reasoning. His anything-but-harmonic perspective on the development of industrial capitalism quickly brought to political economy the charge of being a ‘dismal science’ in opposition to the ‘noble science’ of politics. The economists sought to liberate themselves from this stigma by turning against the ‘Ricardian vice’ of overreaching abstraction, which unhesitatingly proposed purely logical argumentation on the basis of abstract hypotheses. Even ‘at the time of Ricardo and in opposition to him’, political economy confronted ‘critique’, as Marx remarked.161 It confronted critique in the person of Malthus, as well as in the persons of Richard Jones and Simonde 158. See Gramsci 1975, Q7, §42; Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §41vii (Gramsci 1995, pp. 433–5). 159. Ibid. 160. At the beginning of 1831 – almost eight years after Ricardo’s death – there was a series of debates among the leading English economists about Ricardo’s theoretical legacy in the posh London ‘Political Economy Club’. The question concerned which of the tenets and theories proposed by Ricardo had to be given up or revised. The gentlemen – there were no women among them – agreed on a voluminous catalogue of Ricardo’s theoretical errors; almost all his principles and theories were explicitly condemned by the gathered élite of economists, with only a few dissenters (cf. Meek 1967, pp. 68ff.). 161. Marx, Capital, Volume I, in Marx and Engels 1975–2005e, p. 14.


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de Sismondi. Despite the great differences of their perspective, they all turned against Ricardo’s method – in the name of history and empiricism. It became fashionable in the circles of English economists to play off the healthy tradition of economics – embodied in the work of Adam Smith, elevated to a model – against the artificial, metaphysical speculations of Ricardo and the Ricardians. Many classical economists and contemporaries of Ricardo posited political economy in opposition to the natural sciences and mathematics; many flatly rejected the use of mathematical methods (a perspective that Marx famously did not share). Ricardo was regarded as a speculative ‘philosopher’ who, differently from the members of the healthy tradition, had no respect for or even knowledge of the ‘facts’ (including historical ‘facts’).162 Marx not only studied Ricardo seriously (as far as the texts were available to him) but also intensively read all the major and minor critics of Ricardo (Bailey, Thompson, Richard Jones, Sismondi, Malthus, etc.). Given the opportunity to read Marx’s preparatory works for ‘critical’ economics closely, Gramsci would have seen that they contain a twofold critique – critiques of Ricardo as well as critiques of critics of Ricardo. Marx is neither a Ricardian nor on the side of Ricardo’s opponents. Nevertheless, some of them – Richard Jones and Sismondi in the first instance – play a rôle just as important for the emergence of critical economics as Ricardo. Marx’s critique of the scientifically unsatisfactory method of investigation of Ricardo clearly does not regard abstraction as such, nor does it negate the rigour with which all categories of the capitalist economy are submitted to a fundamental principle: that of the determination of value by labour-time. It was precisely in this that Marx saw the significant progress of Ricardo in opposition to the ‘trotting’ of the economists before him. Marx’s critique takes aim at the bad, abstract way in which Ricardo confronted the fundamental principles of the determination of value by labour (-time) directly with all of the phenomena of a developed capitalist economy and attempted to subjugate them theoretically to this principle.163 Methodologically, Marx accused Ricardo of abstracting falsely, incompletely or formally, of not going far enough and not coherently enough, thus resulting in false abstractions.164 He attempted to comprehend all phenomena of bourgeois economics immediately as confirmation of the general law, instead of first developing these forms of appearance and their

162. See Sowell 1974, pp. 112ff. 163. See Marx, Economic Manuscripts of 1861–1863, in Marx and Engels 1975–2005b, pp. 389ff. 164. See Marx, Economic Manuscripts of 1861–1863, in Marx and Engels 1975–2005b, pp. 337ff., 392ff.; Marx and Engels 1975–2005c, p. 72.

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necessary contradictions with the general law.165 Marx’s critique of Ricardo, in so far as it is methodological, is the critique of a theorist schooled in Hegel. Here, Gramsci’s intuition is correct.

A new textbook of critical economics Gramsci’s sketches suffer from the fact that, apart from a German edition of Wage-Labour and Capital, he did not have access in prison to any of the writings of Marx himself. Therefore he himself noted the necessary limitation, that ‘the texts of the Critique of Political Economy [must] be read again’, for everything that he wrote down was based ‘for the most part on memory’.166 His different notes flow into a consideration that is characteristic of him: how can today (that is, at the beginning of the 1930s, around 50 years after Marx’s death) a précis, an introductory textbook of critical economics, that is, an economics that connects with Marx’s political economy and develops it further, be written ‘in a modern way’? After the ‘diverse works of critical economics’ have been made available (in the first MEGA, which had then just begun to appear), an adequate ‘solution of the problem of the new edition of such textbooks becomes a necessity, a scientific desideratum’.167 Gramsci notes some criteria that such a textbook of critical economics would have to satisfy: (1) It must be written on the basis of all three volumes of Capital; it must also take note of the remaining economic writings of Marx, his entire ‘treatment of economics’ (thus, for example, also the Theories of Surplus-Value, earlier writings such as the Poverty of Philosophy, Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy and Wages, Price and Profit).168 It should give a ‘correct presentation of the whole corpus of the doctrine of critical economics’, not only a résumé of individual writings.169 (2) As if he had a presentiment of the ‘Marxist’ literature of the 1970s, Gramsci emphasised that the method of presentation should not follow Marx in a slavish way; ‘unimaginative and slavish summaries’ are to be avoided at all costs. Instead, one must orient oneself according to current critical and cultural standards. The whole matter should be placed ‘on an “original” level and 165. Ibid. 166. Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §33 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 428–30). 167. Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §37ii (Gramsci 1995, pp. 176–9). 168. One should not forget that Gramsci was unable to read any of Marx’s texts that were only published after his imprisonment, some very recently. Gramsci’s demand for a comprehensive initial survey has thus not only become much more urgent today, but also much harder to honour than in his own time. 169. Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §37ii (Gramsci 1995, pp. 176–9).


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reorganised’, preferably in a ‘systematic fashion’, and presented in a way appropriate for learning. The ‘entire set of examples and concrete facts’ that is contained in the original texts are to be updated – and the given facts of the economic and legal terrain of the country for which the textbook is intended are to be taken into account. Furthermore, the textbook must be written ‘energetically, polemically and aggressively’. With this demand, Gramsci turned expressly against the ‘dogmatic’ style of the textbook of political economy of Lapidus and Ostrowitjanow,170 which in his time was used everywhere in the Soviet Union and in the Communist movement. In Gramsci’s opinion, this textbook suffered from the fact that it announced the perspectives of critical economics as the uncontested dogma of a ruling, established doctrine, as the form of expression of an official canon of knowledge, which was ‘“contested” by nobody and rejected radically by nobody’.171 Gramsci explained what he meant by ‘polemically and aggressively’: not strong words and bad style, but, rather, a presentation that went into economic debates of the time, which did not leave any ‘essential questions, or those presented by the vulgar economists as essential, without an answer’, which thus did not ignore the ruling doctrine, but attacked it vigorously, hunting it out of its ‘cover and fortresses’ and discrediting it ‘before the eyes of the young generation of learners’.172 Rarely does Gramsci attack so aggressively and blatantly.173 He argued that Lapidus and Ostrowitjanow did not understand how to affirm the ‘organic and historically current forms’ in the relation between dominant and critical economics. What ‘interests beginners immediately and gives the general direction to the whole further research’ – namely, the question of how the two currents of political-economic thought differentiate themselves from the beginning in terms of approach and how they are distinguished today ‘in the current cultural terms’ and not only ‘in the cultural terms from 80 years ago’ – is simply ignored. How critical economics relates to ruling economics is ‘not only assumed to be known but

170. See Lapidus and Ostrovitianov 1929. 171. Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §37ii (Gramsci 1995, pp. 176–9). 172. Ibid. 173. In Gramsci’s time, there were only a few introductory texts that corresponded to his demand in terms of their approach. Among them would be Julian Borchardt’s Die volkswirtschaftlichen Grundbegriffe nach der Lehre von Karl Marx (1923) and Otto Bauer’s lectures on the Einführung in die Volkswirtschaftslehre of 1927–8 (cf. Bauer 1976). Gramsci knew Borchardt’s ‘textbook’ and praised it, because ‘it is not only based on the foundation of Volume I of the Critique of Political Economy, but on the basis of all three volumes’ (Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §37ii; Gramsci 1995, pp. 176–9). Unfortunately, however, he did not know Rosa Luxemburg’s Einführung in die Nationalökonomie, published for the first time in 1925.

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also is accepted without discussion, while neither of the two is true’.174 In this way, however, any scientific progress in economics becomes impossible.175 If one wants to defend the ‘critical conception of economics’, one must show ‘systematically’ that ‘orthodox economics treats the same problems in another language’; one must first show this ‘agreement of the treated problems’ and then prove ‘that the critical solution is superior’.176 The text of such a textbook must, that is to say, be ‘bilingual’: the ‘authentic text and the “vulgar” translation or that of liberal economics, in the margins or between the lines’.177 (3) Such a textbook would not be complete without a ‘course on the history of economic opinions’. The ‘whole conception of critical economics is historicist’, therefore its ‘theoretical treatment’ cannot do without the history of economic science.178 ‘Critical economics’ must be interested in the scientific work of its predecessors, above all of the classical economists, for it inherits their way of posing problems and categories, as Gramsci explains with the example of the concept of value: classical economists were only marginally interested in the ‘abstract and scientific concept of value’, even if individual economic researchers (like Ricardo) made an effort to value theoretical consistency. For the first economists, the ‘more concrete and more immediate concept of individual or enterprise profit’ was much more important. They were concerned above all with the local, national and international processes of value-formation and concentrate in the first instance on ‘the particular labour crystallised in the different commodities’.179 However, they end up comprehending the concept of value – the concept of ‘socially necessary labour’ – generally and, as Gramsci suggests, in ‘a mathematical formula’. Thus, and thanks to this preliminary work of the classical economists, the interesting problem begins for critical economics. One must know this prehistory if one is not to misunderstand critical economics as a fixed and finished product sprung fully-grown from the head of the genial thinker Marx. Lapidus and Ostrowitjanow’s textbook (unlike the later work of Rubin (1929) 174. Gramsci 1975, Q15, §45 (Gramsci 1995, p. 176). 175. Ibid. With uncommon acidity, Gramsci continues: ‘What strikes one is how a critical standpoint that requires the greatest intelligence, open-mindedness, mental freshness and scientific inventiveness has become the monopoly of narrow-minded, jabbering wretches who, only by reason of the dogmatism of their position, manage to maintain a place not in science itself but in the marginal bibliography of science. In these matters the greatest danger is represented by an ossified form of thought: better a certain disorderly refractoriness than the philistine defence of preconceived cultural positions’ (Gramsci 1975, Q15, §45; Gramsci 1995, p. 176). 176. Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §20 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 182–4). 177. Ibid. 178. Ibid. 179. Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §23 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 168–70).


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that Gramsci unfortunately did not know) is silent on these historical contexts. Gramsci argues that this is unsatisfactory for a scientific textbook of critical economics.180 Additionally, critical economics has a prehistory and its own history, including ‘different historical phases’; in each phase, the emphasis lies upon ‘the historically prior theoretical and practical context’.181 In terms of the capitalist mode of production, the accent lies upon ‘the “totality” of socially necessary labour’. For critical economics needs this concept not only for the goal of ‘scientific and mathematical synthesis’, for its ‘own scientific construction’; the critics of political economy wanted (already before Marx) to make clear to the new class of wage-workers that their value-creating labour is ‘specially a “totality” and that as a “totality” it effects the foundational process of the economic movement’.182 If the working class has become no longer the object of the apparently independent movement of ‘value’, but rather, ‘manager of the economy’, then the critical economists would no longer be able to think only of ‘socially necessary “average value” ’, but, rather, would have to enter into the problems of ‘particular labour’. The mode of posing the problem and the way of working of a critical economics of socialism are unavoidably different from those of the critical economics of Marx and the Marxists who studied capitalism.183 (4) Gramsci emphasised that such a textbook could not do without a ‘short general introduction’ in which a summarising presentation of the philosophy of praxis and the ‘most important and most essential methodological principles’ of critical economics should appear.184 This presentation could be based upon the ‘totality of the economic works’ of Marx, in which numerous methodological expressions are ‘included or dispersed and indicated, when the concrete opportunity for it is available’.185 Croce had raised the demand that a presentation of economics needed a ‘theoretical preface’ in which ‘the concepts and methods specific to economics are presented’.186 Gramsci followed him, not only because he emphasised the methodological originality of critical economics or the philosophical significance of Marx’s critique of political 180. See Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §23 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 168–70). 181. Ibid. 182. Ibid. 183. Ibid. 184. Gramsci 1975, Q10II, §37ii (Gramsci 1995, pp. 176–9). 185. Ibid. Gramsci repeatedly refers to the prefaces to the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy and to Capital as examples of a ‘philosophical-methodological introduction to essays on economics’; they are ‘perhaps too short and compressed, but the principle is held to’. They were to be extended, based upon the numerous methodological remarks in the main texts (cf. Gramsci 1975, Q15, §43; Gramsci 1995, pp. 174–5). 186. Gramsci 1975, Q15, §43 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 174–5).

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economy. For him, it was also a matter of the foundation of a tradition of theory. The dominant academic economics had been working for a long time with great care on the improvement of the ‘logical instruments of its science’ and owed a large part of its kudos to its ‘formal rigour, the exactness of expression’.187 In critical economics, until that point, there had been no comparable tradition of continual work on concepts, analytical techniques and forms of presentation. One uses there ‘much too often stereotypical concepts’ and expresses oneself with ‘a tone of superiority’, which does ‘not correspond to the significance of the presentation’.188 A deficiency, Gramsci argues, that needs to be redressed.

Gramsci’s critical economics and political economy today According to the classical conception, political economy included the triad of ethics, economics and politics.189 It emerged in the seventeen-hundreds in the sovereign-territorial states, which competed with the city-mercantile republics and the city-federations such as the Hanseatic League and the supra-territorial political powers such as the (Catholic) Church and the (Holy Roman) Empire, and finally drove them from the field.190 Political science, which then only existed as ‘science of the statesmen’ or ‘science of legislation’, obtained a new form: political economy and history combined. Since Adam Smith, methods and concepts of political economy dominated the political debates just as they dominated political theory; political economy enjoyed pre-eminence, for it was regarded as the science whose knowledge was valid independently from the respective form of government or the composition of the government in any particular country. This privileged position – as foundation and model of all social sciences and as a guiding perspective for political decisions – was only lost by political economy when it became ‘apolitical’ in the wake of the so-called ‘marginalist’ revolution at the end of the nineteenth century, transforming itself into ‘pure’ economics.191 This neoclassical ruling doctrine claims the status of a science for itself – and with success. It claims to be the only true social science, because of its comparatively hard, theoretical core – the assumption of maximisingbehaviour, the assumption of a natural tendency towards market-equilibrium 187. 188. 189. 190. 191.

Ibid. Ibid. See Cropsey 1980. See Bürgin 1993. See Collini, Winch and Burrow 1983.


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and the assumption of given and stable preferences that make possible ‘rational’ activity. Its basic model should be applicable to all forms and types of human behaviour, independently from historical time and social location.192 That imperialistic claim for general competence in the social sciences has been carried forward with remarkable élan, creating a new and highly influential form of ‘economism’. Many social scientists let themselves be bedazzled by the formal elegance and reputed conceptual ‘rigour’ of neoclassical economics and join in the party. Today, we urgently need an effort to revive political economy. We need it in order to overcome the fruitless and damaging division between an apolitical ‘pure’ economics and a political science that ignores the economy. We have to reinvent the post- or inter-discipline of a ‘new’ political economy that will reunite politics and economics. Using Gramsci’s insights and intuitions, which point in the direction of an analysis of the ‘economy in its inclusive sense’ (‘l’economia integrale’), we will manage to grasp the political element which was and still is at the core of both classical and critical political economy.193 A new political economy will embrace and assimilate what ‘pure’ economics has lost – history, dynamics, variety, whatever makes the ‘real world of markets’ real and vivid. A new political economy will outgrow the erroneous form of political economy popular today which depicts the world of politics as just another market and thus cripples and disables democractic theory and practice. A second renaissance of political economy might even help to end the contemporary ‘resignation of the intellectuals’, their impotent and meek attitude in the face of the predominant form of contemporary (neoliberal) ‘economism’. Gramsci, for one, would rejoice in such a prospect. Translated by Peter Thomas

References Anderson, Perry 1976, ‘The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci’, New Left Review, I, 100: 5–78. Badaloni, Nicola 1992, ‘Due manoscritti inediti di Sraffa su Gramsci’, Critica marxista, II, 1, 6: 43–50. —— 1994, ‘Gramsci e l’economia politica. Discussione con Lunghini’, Critica marxista, II, 3, 4: 35–41. Baratta, Giorgio and Andrea Catone (eds.) 1989, Modern Times: Gramsci e la critica dell’americanismo, Milan: Cooperativa Diffusioni ’84. Bauer, Otto 1909, ‘Marx-Literatur’, Der Kampf, 2, 10: 478–80.

192. See, for example, Becker 1976, p. 5; Hirshleifer 1985, p. 53. 193. See Krätke 1998a; Krätke 1998b; Krätke 2010a.

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Loria, Achille 1886, La teoria economica della costituzione politica, Rome: Fratelli Bocca. —— 1889, Analisi della proprietà capitalista, Rome: Fratelli Bocca. —— 1892, La terra e il sistema sociale, Verona: Drucker. —— 1894, Problemi sociali contemporanei, Milan: Max Kantorowicz. Löwe, Adolph 1935, Economics and Sociology: A Plea for Co-operation in the Social Sciences, London: George Allen and Unwin. Lunghini, Giorgio 1994, ‘Introduzione: Gramsci critico dell’economia politica’, in Gramsci 1994c. Lütkens, Charlotte 1929, Staat und Gesellschaft in Amerika. Zur Soziologie des amerikanischen Kapitalismus, Tübingen: Mohr. Marcuzzo, Maria Cristina 1974, ‘Piero Sraffa, il marxismo e la critica dell’economia politica’, Annali della Fondazione Feltrinelli, 15: 1461–74. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels 1975–2005a, Marx Engels Collected Works, Volume 23, London: Lawrence and Wishart. —— 1975–2005b, Marx Engels Collected Works, Volume 31, London: Lawrence and Wishart. —— 1975–2005c, Marx Engels Collected Works, Volume 32, London: Lawrence and Wishart. —— 1975–2005d, Marx Engels Collected Works, Volume 33, London: Lawrence and Wishart. —— 1975–2005e, Marx Engels Collected Works, Volume 35, London: Lawrence and Wishart. —— 1975–2005f, Marx Engels Collected Works, Volume 36, London: Lawrence and Wishart. —— 1975–2005g, Marx Engels Collected Works, Volume 37, London: Lawrence and Wishart. —— 1975–2005h, Marx Engels Collected Works, Volume 40, London: Lawrence and Wishart. —— 1975–2005i, Marx Engels Collected Works, Volume 41, London: Lawrence and Wishart. —— 1993, Werke, Volume 26, Part 3, Sixth Edition, Berlin: Dietz Verlag. Masaryk, Tomáš Garrigue 1899, Die philosophischen und sociologischen Grundlagen des Marxismus. Studien zur socialen Frage, Vienna: Konegen. Meek, Ronald L. 1967, Economics and Ideology and other Essays: Studies in the Development of Economic Thought, London: Chapman and Hall. Napolitano, Giorgio 1978, ‘Our Debt to Sraffa’, New Left Review, I, 112: 65–7. —— 2005, ‘Sraffa and Gramsci: A Recollection’, Review of Political Economy, 17, 3: 407–12. Nemeth, Thomas 1980, Gramsci’s Philosophy: A Critical Study, Brighton: Harvester Press. Potier, Jean-Pierre 1986, Lectures italiennes de Marx, Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon. —— 1987, Un économiste non conformiste: Piero Sraffa, Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon. Riechers, Christian 1970, Antonio Gramsci. Marxismus in Italien, Frankfurt: Europäische Verlagsanstalt. Robbins, Lionel 1932, An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science, Basingstoke: Macmillan. —— 1981, ‘Economics and Political Economy’, American Economic Association Papers and Proceedings, 71: 1–10. Rubin, Isaak Ilyich 1979 [1929], A History of Economic Thought, translated and edited by Donald Filtzer, London: Ink Links. Schecter, Darrow 1994, Radical Theories: Paths Beyond Marxism and Social Democracy, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Sen, Amartya 2003, ‘Sraffa, Wittgenstein, and Gramsci’, Journal of Economic Literature, 41, 4: 1240–55. Sowell, Thomas 1974, Classical Economics Reconsidered, First Edition, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Sraffa, Piero 1951, ‘Introduction’, in The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo, edited by Piero Sraffa with the collaboration of Maurice Dobb, Volume 1, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.


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brill.nl/hima

Marxism and the ‘Dutch Miracle’: The Dutch Republic and the Transition-Debate Pepijn Brandon University of Amsterdam [email protected]

Abstract The Dutch Republic holds a marginal position in the debate on the transition from feudalism to capitalism, despite its significance in the early stage of the development of global capitalism. While the positions of those Marxists who did consider the Dutch case range from seeing it as the first capitalist country to rejecting it as an essentially non-capitalist commercial society, all involved basically accept an image of Dutch development as being driven by commerce rather than real advances in the sphere of production. Their shared interpretation of the Dutch ‘Golden Age’, however, rests on an interpretation of Dutch economic history that does not match the current state of historical knowledge. Rereading the debate on the Dutch trajectory towards capitalism in the light of recent economic historiography seriously challenges established views, and questions both major strands in the transition-debate. Keywords Dutch Republic, capitalism, feudalism, transition-debate, Netherlands, bourgeois revolution, history, Marx, Smith

Introduction1 The Dutch case has long puzzled historians of the transition from feudalism to capitalism.2 Here is a country that, to all outside appearances, attained 1. The names given to the area that today comprises the Netherlands are cause for some confusion. In early-modern times, ‘the Netherlands’ and ‘Low Countries’ were used both for present-day Belgium (the Southern Netherlands or Southern Low Countries) and the Netherlands (the Northern Netherlands or Northern Low Countries). These areas did not form a nation, but a collection of formally independent provinces. Holland was one of those provinces, in the North-West, as was Flanders in the South. The name ‘Holland’ is often used to describe the whole of the present-day Netherlands (as by Marx in many of the here-quoted passages), but, strictly speaking, this is wrong. After the Revolt against Spain, the Southern Netherlands remained part of the (Spanish and, later, Austrian) Habsburg Empire, while the Northern Netherlands formed a state, alternatively called the Dutch Republic or the United Provinces. 2. I would like to thank the participants at the Fifth Historical Materialism Annual Conference © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011

DOI: 10.1163/156920611X573806

P. Brandon / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 106–146

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capitalistic features from a very early stage in its history. If nothing else, even its art would have helped to shape public notions of early-modern Dutch society in this direction. The many group-portraits of the merchant-élite governing the Dutch Republic bear the unmistakeable marks of a society driven by the logic of commodity-production. Whether exercising control over the quality of textile-production, administrating an orphanage or overseeing an almshouse, the core-business of the men and women portrayed was making money. Rembrandt’s staalmeesters, the syndics of the cloth-makers guild, are bent over the account-book they were discussing just a moment before the audacious spectator forced them to temporarily cease their business. Simply on the basis of its self-representation, many will agree with the Dutch historian Huizinga who described Dutch civilisation of the seventeenth century as ‘thoroughly bourgeois’.3 However, the question of whether the social structures underpinning this culture were capitalist or merely highly urbanised and bürgerlich4 remains hotly disputed. After all, despite the flourishing of its seventeenth-century ‘Golden Age’, the Dutch Republic was not the location of an early industrial revolution. After a brief spell in which Amsterdam acted as the central entrepôt of world-trade and the geographically tiny Republic reached the status of a global superpower, a period of decline set in which saw the locus of economic growth and military might shift decisively away from the sandy shores of the province of Holland. For many, this signifies that the United Provinces, at best, represented a preliminary stage to real capitalist development – a prime example of a failed transition to industrial society5 and, at most, a detour in the process of capitalist state-formation.6 Non-Marxist and Marxist historians alike can be found on either side of this debate. The main focus of this article will be on the latter, but, of course, there is a high level of mutual influence.7

(November 2008) and the Economic History Lunch-Seminar of Utrecht University (March 2009) for their willingness to engage with me in this puzzle. Special thanks are due to Bas van Bavel, Neil Davidson, Jessica Dijkman, the late and greatly-missed Chris Harman, Marjolein ’t Hart, Maarten Prak, Maina van der Zwan, and the two anonymous referees for their detailed comments and suggestions on earlier drafts, as well as for sharing unpublished material. Naturally, they do not share any responsibility either for the theoretical direction taken or for any mistakes this article contains. 3. Huizinga 1941, p. 62. 4. As is the main focus of studies such as Prak 2010. 5. Krantz and Hohenberg (eds.) 1975. 6. Lachmann 2002, p. 147. 7. For some influential non-Marxists who treat the Dutch Republic as a ‘modern’ phenomenon, see North and Thomas 1973, Kennedy 1989, and De Vries and Van der Woude 1997.

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Within the wider debate on the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the Dutch Republic occupies a marginal position at best.8 But, even so, the position taken by different authors, often only in passing and based on very general perceptions of Dutch history, is of significance for their overall views on the rise of capitalism. The Dutch Republic is the obvious contender to Britain in producing the first ‘really-existing capitalist country’. Rejecting or accepting this case therefore tells us something important about the supposed uniqueness of the British experience. Given that much of this debate has been cast as a discussion on ‘why Britain succeeded where the rest failed’, the Dutch case becomes an interesting point for corroboration. The aim of this article is twofold. First, it is to locate the debate on the nature of the Dutch Republic within the wider transition-debate, tracing back the roots of the different positions to the scattered comments of Smith and Marx on this subject. However, many of the arguments used in this debate are based on a model of Dutch ‘merchant-capitalism’ that is scantily worked out, often stereotypical, and which on the whole does not correspond to the findings of state-of-the-art historiography on early-modern Dutch society. The second objective of this article is therefore to provide an alternative for this standard interpretation that is more firmly grounded in Dutch economic historiography. Central to the alternative narrative laid out in the second part of this article is the ‘urban-agrarian symbiosis’ that arose in the course of the late-medieval period. This particular interrelationship was the founding stone of Dutch success in the seventeenth-century ‘Golden Age’. It was based primarily on a transformation in production, not on the expansion of international trade. But it did allow the Northern Netherlands, particularly after the revolt against the Spanish Habsburgs and the establishment of the Dutch Republic, to profit from this expansion in a qualitatively different way than previous trading empires had done. Although this basis was not sufficient for the Netherlands to complete the transition to industrial capitalism in its own right, the advances made by Dutch capital did become a major contributing factor to the final and more definitive breakthrough of capitalism elsewhere. Treating the Dutch case thus not primarily as a failed transition to capitalism, but as one stage in a fundamentally and a priori international process of transformation can also help to overcome the Anglocentrism that in the past has characterised much of the debate.

8. See the various contributions in Hilton (ed.) 1976 and Aston and Philpin (eds.) 1985. For an overview of Dutch Marxist historiography on the early-modern period, see Van der Linden 1997.


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The Dutch Republic in the transition-debate The position taken by different Marxist historians on the Dutch Republic is roughly correlated to the two great alternative strands in the transition-debate. The first argues that the rise of capitalism was primarily driven by the expansion of trade, leading to the dissolution of feudal relations ‘from the outside’ and transforming the social structure in turn. The second focuses on the less visible and spectacular (but ultimately more profound) changes that took place at the point of production. Among the latter group, probably the most eminent today are those who, following Robert Brenner, argue that the main changes leading to the transition to capitalism took place in what they call the ‘socialproperty relations’ in agriculture.9 It will come as no surprise that the most enthusiastic endorsement of the Dutch Republic as a capitalist state has come from those such as Immanuel Wallerstein who are firmly on the ‘commercialisation’-side of the discussion. For Wallerstein, the rise of the Dutch coincided with the real breakthrough of the modern world-system in the sixteenth century. The motor of both processes was the expansion of European trade, accelerated by the subjection of the Americas. The United Provinces, freeing themselves from the grip of the Habsburg Empire during the Eighty-Years War (1568–1648), could build on their previously acquired strong position in Baltic trade. From there they established a trading empire that provided them with the wealth needed to keep their position at the top of the European hierarchy during the remainder of the seventeenth-century ‘Golden Age’.10 Admittedly, Wallerstein does accord production a prominent rôle in his account of the strength of the Republic. He even makes the assertion that ‘success in mercantilist competition was primarily a function of productive efficiency and that the middle-run objective of all mercantilist state policies was the increase of overall efficiency in the sphere of production.’11 He proceeds to trace this efficiency in both Dutch agriculture and manufacture. Nevertheless, the picture he paints of Dutch productive development still ultimately stems from the primacy that Wallerstein assigns to trade. Production, both for early-modern and for latecapitalist hegemonic powers, is primarily a tool for domination in the process of unequal exchange with their peripheries. And it was here that the Dutch Republic supposedly set the mark for all of its successors.

9. A description of the two main strands in the debate from an essentially ‘outside’ or third perspective can be found in Harman 1989 and Harman and Brenner 2006. 10. Wallerstein 1980, p. 46. 11. Wallerstein 1980, p. 38.

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In his challenging long-term vision of the history of world-capitalism, the late Giovanni Arrighi pushed this model still further away from questions concerning production. His account of the ‘Dutch Systemic Cycle of Accumulation’ puts even more stress on the commercial and financial nature of Dutch hegemony that lasted far into the eighteenth century.12 It was the superior banking techniques at the Amsterdam Bourse that ensured that ‘the upper strata of the Dutch merchant class remained the leaders and governors of the European capitalist engine. Throughout this period, the Amsterdam Bourse remained the central regulatory mechanism through which idle capital was rerouted towards new trade ventures’.13 Against these trade and finance-centred accounts stand those which look for the origins of capitalism primarily in the sphere of production. In the main, this has led these authors to a more negative estimation of the impact of Dutch development on the emergence of capitalist relations. Of course, they allow as well for some important capitalist elements evolving in the Low Countries (comprising the medieval-Flemish and Brabant centres of trade and production as well as the Northern Netherlands). However, writers such as Maurice Dobb tended to see the subordination of production to trade as an insurmountable barrier to capitalist growth beyond a ‘promising and precocious adolescence’. The position taken by Dobb is the mirror-image to the Wallerstein-Arrighi approach: ‘It would seem as though the very success and maturity of merchant and money-lending capital in these rich continental centres of entrepôt trade, instead of aiding, retarded the progress of investment in production; so that, compared with the glories of spoiling the Levant or the Indies or lending to princes, industrial capital was doomed to occupy the place of a dowerless and unlovely younger sister.’14 The rise of capitalist production was not aided, but hindered, by the dominance of international trade. Eric Hobsbawm put this argument in an international context in his seminal article, ‘The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century’. He argued that the embeddedness of Dutch commerce in a still-feudal European system of trade, reflecting the underdeveloped nature of productive capacities in the homemarket, put constraints on its economic development that the Republic was not able to break. Even at the peak of its seventeenth-century splendour, the Netherlands remained ‘in many respects a “feudal business” economy; a Florence, Antwerp or Augsburg on a semi-national scale.’15 In line with the Brenner thesis, Ellen Meiksins Wood has recently extended this argument to 12. 13. 14. 15.

Arrighi 2002, pp. 127–44. Arrighi 2002, p. 140. Dobb 1963, p. 160; compare p. 195. Hobsbawm 1967, pp. 44–5.


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questions of agricultural change. For her, instead of being forced to invest by the competitive pressure of rival capitals, Dutch merchants and (crucially) commercial farmers only made clever use of market-opportunities as a temporary strategy.16 The main interest of the ruling class did not reside in accumulation and ‘improvement’ in production, but in public office as a means to control monopolistic trading advantages. When international trading opportunities declined under pressure of the seventeenth-century crisis, the Dutch élite fully withdrew to ‘political accumulation’. For Wood, ‘the Dutch Republic enjoyed its Golden Age not as a capitalist economy but as the last and most highly developed non-capitalist commercial society’.17

The Dutch Republic in Smith and Marx The authors cited differ significantly in their analysis of Dutch society and its place within the wider transition. But they do share a similar appreciation of the sources of Dutch wealth. Whether they put more emphasis on the European bulk-carrying trade or the colonial luxury-trade, all agree that commerce was at the origin of the Dutch ‘Golden Age’. Production is viewed from the angle of this commercial success, not as a factor in itself. In taking the merchant-regent as the essential Dutch character, they can build on a large body of popularising literature well-known in the English-speaking world.18 The pedigree of this view goes back to the eighteenth century, if not earlier, when the Dutch Republic – not completely realistically – was held up as a successful example of the unfettered rule of free trade.19 The writings of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century pamphleteers and early political economists such as Petty and Davenant formed the limited sources from which both Adam Smith and Karl Marx drew their views on the Dutch Republic. For Adam Smith, the Dutch Republic was the prime example of a purely commercial society. This country, he wrote in a passage extolling the advantages of a free-port system, ‘not only derives its whole wealth, but a great part of its necessary subsistence, from foreign trade’.20 Elsewhere, Smith again takes foreign trade as the basis of Dutch success: ‘Holland, in proportion to the extent of the land and the number of its inhabitants, by far the richest country 16. Wood 2002a, p. 90; Wood 2002b. 17. Wood 2002a, p. 94. Very similar arguments can be found in Teschke 2003, pp. 136 and 208, and Dumolyn 2004, p. 257. 18. For example, Barbour 1950, Boxer 1965 and Wilson 1968. 19. Nijenhuis 2002, p. 118, and Reinert 2009, pp. 30ff. 20. Smith 1999b, p. 76.

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in Europe, has . . . the greatest share of the carrying trade of Europe.’21 He suggested that the Dutch primacy in European trade was still a fact in the second half of the eighteenth century.22 Low interest-rates stimulated the Dutch bourgeoisie not to let their money lay idle and invested the whole of society with a mercantile frame of mind. ‘It is there unfashionable not to be a man of business. Necessity makes it usual for almost every man to be so, and custom everywhere regulates fashion.’23 Writing in the decade running up to the fourth Anglo-Dutch War, Smith of course acknowledged that the leading position of the Dutch was not entirely due to free trade. Military strength played an important rôle as well.24 But, on the whole, it was the favourable attitude taken by the Dutch rulers to the interests of free trade that formed the main reason for its success. This attitude was promoted by the fact that merchants themselves ruled the country: The republican form of government seems to be the principal support of the present grandeur of Holland. The owners of great capitals, the great mercantile families, have generally either some direct share or some indirect influence in the administration of that government. . . . The residence of such wealthy people necessarily keeps alive, in spite of all disadvantages, a certain degree of industry in the country.25

Smith provided a framework that still shapes many of the mainstream interpretations of Dutch economic history. Two hundred years after The Wealth of Nations, North and Thomas wrote their influential history, The Rise of the Western World, explicitly aimed at providing ‘a framework consistent with and complementary to standard neo-classical economic theory.’26 In it, they take the Netherlands to be ‘the first areas of Western Europe to escape the Malthusian checks’ associated with feudalism.27 Like Smith, they treat trade and commerce as ‘the prime mover of the Dutch economy throughout the early modern period’.28 And, again following Smith, they argue that the republican political institutions were key to its success: ‘it is clear that in the Netherlands property rights appropriate for the development of both an efficient product market and a short-term capital market had been created. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

Smith 1999a, p. 473. Smith 1999b, p. 40. Smith 1999a, p. 199. Smith 1999b, pp. 40–1. Smith 1999b, p. 505. North and Thomas 1973, p. vii. North and Thomas 1973, p. 132. North and Thomas 1973, p. 134.


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The influence of those developments . . . permeated the entire Dutch economy.’29 The most elaborate version of this Smithian view can probably be found in the magnum opus of Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism. Here, Braudel tells the story of a ‘poor country’ that, due to geographical and historical coincidence, could become the nodal point between the different developing markets of Europe. Dominance in the Baltic trade, primarily the grain-trade that the Dutch called their ‘mother-trade’, was enough to propel the Dutch ‘high-voltage urban economy’30 into a long period of success.31 ‘Once Holland had conquered the trade of Europe, the rest of the world was a logical bonus, thrown in as it were.’32 It is this view of Dutch primacy built on the founding stone of international trade that provides the framework for many mainstream interpretations of Dutch history. Mediated by the work of its twentieth-century popularisers, it constitutes the prism through which both sides in the transition-debate have consistently read Marx’s own comments on Dutch capitalism. Marx’s approach to the Dutch case revolves around two remarks. In the first volume of Capital, Marx famously described Holland as ‘the head capitalistic nation of the 17th century’.33 But this description seems to be contradicted by the passages in the third volume of Capital, where he stresses the limits of societies dominated by merchant-capitalism.34 Accordingly, his ultimate judgement on the extent to which the Dutch Republic reached the stage of capitalism seems more negative: ‘The history of Holland’s decline as the dominant trading nation is the history of the subordination of commercial capital to industrial capital.’35 Taken by themselves, these could easily be held for throw-away remarks and even for simple adaptations of Smith’s conclusions to his own theoretical framework. The notebooks now available through the MEGA project show that this was not the case.36 They show that Marx had a keen interest in Dutch economic history, and that his observations in Volumes 1 and 3 of Capital were grounded in a wide reading of contemporary economic historians and pre-Smithian economic texts.37

29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

North and Thomas 1973, p. 141. Braudel 2002, p. 180. Braudel 2002, p. 282. Braudel 2002, p. 207. Marx 1965, p. 704. Marx 1991, p. 448. Marx 1991, p. 451. Lourens and Lucassen 1992. Marx and Engels 1983, pp. 246–8, 390–2, and 389–404.

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The first thing to note is that Marx’s main focus was not on the development of trade as such, but on the interconnections between trade and production. In Volume 3 of Capital, he explains that ‘the great revolutions that took place in trade in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’ could only become accelerating-factors in the transformation of the economic base where changes in the field of production had already begun. ‘[T]he modern mode of production in its first period, that of manufacture, developed only where the conditions for it had been created in the Middle Ages. Compare Holland with Portugal, for example.’ The difference between the two, Marx explains, lay in the ‘predominant role of the basis laid by fishing, manufacture and agriculture for Holland’s development’.38 In an excerpt he made in the mid1840s from a work by Friedrich List, he articulated the same contrast in relation not to Portugal but to the Hanseatic cities: ‘The Hanseatic cities founded their trade “not on the production and consumption, on the agriculture and manufacture of the land to which the merchants belonged” . . . “they bought there, where they could have the commodities at the cheapest. But when the countries from which they bought, and the countries to which they sold excluded them from their markets, neither their own agriculture nor their internal manufacture were so developed that their superfluous merchantcapital could find accommodation there; therefore, it disappeared to Holland and England”.’39 Thus, Marx linked the shifts in late-medieval and earlymodern trade-routes that benefited the Low Countries to the presence of an already more developed productive base. Marx differed from Smith and his followers not only in this assertion that changes in production were the starting point of Dutch commercial success. He also highlighted different factors in the ending of Dutch trading supremacy. It is this element that writers such as Dobb and Wood point to. Indeed, Marx considered the dominant position that commercial capital attained over its productive counterparts in areas such as Northern Italy and the Low Countries as much a barrier as an advantage to further development in production. This ‘law that the independent development of commodity capital stands in inverse proportion to the level of development of capitalist production appears particularly clearly in the history of the carrying trade, as conducted by the Venetians, Genoans, Dutch, etc., where the major profit was made not by supplying a specific national product, but rather by mediating the exchange of products between commercially – and generally economically – undeveloped communities and by exploiting both the producing countries.’40 Once the 38. Marx 1991, p. 450. 39. Marx and Engels 1981, p. 513; my translation. 40. Marx 1991, p. 446.


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societies at both extremes of this mediation became centres of capitalist production in their own right, the rôle of the independent intermediary became more-and-more obsolete. Being out-competed first in the area of production and then in the area of trade, the capitalists in the former commercial centres started to transfer their money elsewhere, and became agents for capitalist development across borders. Thus the villainies of the Venetian thieving system formed one of the secret bases of the capital-wealth of Holland to whom Venice in her decadence lent large sums of money. So also was it with Holland and England. By the beginning of the 18th century the Dutch manufactures were far outstripped. Holland had ceased to be the nation preponderant in commerce and industry. One of its main lines of business, therefore, from 1701–1776, is the lending out of enormous amounts of capital, especially to its great rival England.41

Even though the Amsterdam capital-market still commanded enormous amounts of wealth in the first decades of the eighteenth century, Marx dated the highpoint (and therefore the start of decline) of Dutch commercial wealth as early as 1648.42 Hereafter, Dutch capital started to suffer from increasing competition from the English and the French. This competition translated into fierce military conflict, mercantilist measures protecting home-markets from Dutch intrusion, and the building-up of local manufactures that ended the English and French dependence on Dutch imports. The flowering of the Amsterdam stock-exchange in the eighteenth century, far from being a symptom of continued economic strength, was a result of the relative decline of the productive base. A third difference between Marx’s account and Smith’s lies in his views on the rôle of the Dutch state. Whereas Smith and his followers stressed the commercial virtues of the Dutch political élite, Marx held a rather less friendly – and much more realistic – position on the Dutch ruling class. Not respect for property-rights in general, but a deep commitment to the property of the Dutch capitalist élite at the cost of anyone else characterised the operations of the Dutch state. The property-rights of either colonial peoples or the poorer classes within the Netherlands were never part of the equation, and the state did not act as a neutral guarantor towards them. Marx approvingly quoted a description of Dutch colonial administration as ‘one of the most extraordinary relations of treachery, bribery, massacre, and meanness’.43 The large public 41. Marx 1965, p. 707. 42. Marx 1965, p. 705. 43. Marx 1965, p. 704. The quote is from the former Lieutenant-Governor of Java, Thomas Stamford Raffles.

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debt and developed system of taxation underpinning Dutch naval and military power – two other Dutch novelties that Smith greatly admired – were viewed in the same spirit. Public debt formed both a secure outlet for capitalinvestment and a source for state-demand, thus becoming ‘one of the most powerful levers of primitive accumulation’.44 But the cost of this system was high taxation, which rested disproportionably on the lower classes: Modern fiscality, whose pivot is formed by taxes on the most necessary means of subsistence (thereby increasing their prices), thus contains within itself the germ of automatic progression. Over-taxation is not an incident, but rather a principle. In Holland, therefore, where this system was first inaugurated, the great patriot, De Witt, has in his ‘Maxims’ extolled it as the best system for making the wagelabourer submissive, frugal, industrious, and overburdened with labour.45

The picture that emerges from those passages clearly differs from the one painted by Smith and his followers. But the most important element of this difference has been missed by all Marxists writing on the subject. In taking ‘agriculture, fishing and manufacture’ as the founding stone, rather than as a by-product of Dutch commercial success, Marx hinted at an explanation of the origins of the Dutch ‘Golden Age’ that is seriously at odds with the prevalent view of the Dutch case as a ‘pure’ form of merchant-capitalism. However, this focus on the productive base underneath the glittering expansion of trade fits in remarkably well with the findings of economic historians over the last thirty years.

Medieval roots and divergent paths Within the confines of this article, only a short and summary overview is possible of the transformation of the Dutch economy in the late-medieval and early-modern period. This necessarily comes at the expense of many important aspects of this story. Too little attention can be given to the relationship between the Northern and Southern Netherlands (now Belgium), which contained Europe’s most developed urban economies but were cut off from the North in the course of the Dutch Revolt.46 Another real omission is a 44. Marx 1965, p. 706. 45. Marx 1965, p. 708. The work cited, long wrongly ascribed to the seventeenth-century Dutch statesman Johan de Witt, is the Interest of Holland, written by Pieter de la Court, the author of the first systematic defence of free trade and a labour-market free from guild-regulations. 46. A short overview of the interrelation between North and South before the Revolt can be found in Van Zanden 1993a.


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proper account of the structure of the Dutch colonial empire.47 This is not because these issues are unimportant, but simply because some of the main interpretative battles to be waged are about the structure of Dutch society at home and its position within European markets. Understanding those will also increase our understanding of the Dutch mode of operation overseas. Taking in all those aspects would require at least a book. What follows must therefore remain highly incomplete. We nonetheless hope that this article will provide a vantage-point for further debate, which can compensate for these shortcomings and omissions. Traditionally, the rise of Dutch commercial dominance has been dated from the fall of Antwerp to Spanish troops in 1585. The influx of Southern merchants into the Northern cities and the blockade of the Scheldt allowed Amsterdam to become what Antwerp had been until then: the staple market of Europe. The overrunning of the Flanders and Brabant towns by the Spanish armies certainly accelerated the shift of economic weight from South to North. However, as Blockmans has rightly stressed, ‘It would have been impossible to take up this role immediately without having developed a structural basis during the preceding centuries.’48 Recent historiography therefore puts much more emphasis on the medieval roots of Dutch economic expansion. Already in the fifteenth century, the Western provinces formed the most urbanised area of Europe. They also contained a highly differentiated, commercialised and technologically advanced agriculture. At least in the seaborne peat-areas in the West and the North and the river-clay regions, this coincided with a class-structure on the land that was markedly different from that of most European agriculture. In the Land of Culemborg, large tenant-farms worked by wage-labourers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries replaced small and medium-sized family-farms. New types of extensive agriculture were developed in order to reduce the required labour-input and maximise profits.49 In Southern Holland, even before the Revolt, wealthy burghers bought plots of land from peasants on a large scale.50 And, in Guelders during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, ‘three-quarters of the land was leased out, the mobility of the lease land was high, population pressure was relatively low and market specialisation was attractive in view of the proximity of large population centres in Brabant, Flanders and especially Holland’.51 As 47. The classic work in the English language on this subject remains Boxer 1965. 48. Blockmans 1993, p. 42. For recent studies on the impact of Southern-Netherlands merchants on Dutch trade, see Gelderblom 2000, pp. 242ff., and Lesger 2006, pp. 139ff. 49. Van Bavel 1999a, p. 307. 50. Van Bavel 2004, p. 139. 51. Van Bavel 2004, p. 141.

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a result, a structure of landholding arose in which ‘already from the sixteenth century onwards the only distinction that mattered was between property (eygendom) and short-term leasehold (huer), even if, in a formal sense, all the older categories of land tenure . . . somehow survived.’52 Moreover, the advanced structure of agriculture went hand-in-hand with the rise of substantial urban production, connected to a growing integration within international markets. This marketisation, however, was in no way a natural given. Around the year 1250, according to Hoppenbrouwers ‘the Netherlands by all signs retained a backward, rather primitive peasant economy. Towns and markets were virtually non-existent, as was anything like centralized power.’53 Feudal structures in those areas were weak, but this was a result of their marginal position. Small-scale manorialism, subsistence-farming and simple commodity-production characterised the structure of agriculture in many areas until the time of the great late-feudal crisis. In the centuries that followed, fundamental changes took place in the organisation of agriculture in the Low Countries, stretching from production-techniques to the forms of landownership, the distribution of control between peasants, lords and burghers, the application of wage-labour, the rôle of specialisation and the measure of marketisation. But these changes did not follow similar paths in all of the Netherlands’ different regions, and not every area underwent them to the same extent. In his recent overview of Dutch agricultural history from 500 to 1600, Van Bavel discerns roughly three types of regions:54 (1) Areas such as Drenthe and the Veluwe, where very little change took place until the seventeenth century or even later. Agriculture remained largely subsistence-oriented, peasants retained control over the land, and only slight specialisation took place until some of them were forced to adapt to the capitalist relations becoming dominant elsewhere. (2) Areas such as the Guelders river-area, coastal Frisia and coastal Flanders, in which a transition to large-scale, labour-extensive, capital-intensive farming took place relatively early. By the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, land had accumulated into the hands of wealthy tenant-farmers, who employed fullyproletarianised wage-labourers in market-oriented cattle-breeding and graincultivation. Around 75 per cent or even more of the land was leased out, often

52. Van Bavel and Hoppenbrouwers 2004, p. 16. 53. Hoppenbrouwers 2006, p. 254. 54. Van Bavel 2010a, pp. 244–7, 336. For a general summary of the argument, see also Van Bavel 2010b.


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on contracts with very short terms, and the rate of turnover for land under the pressure of competition was high.55 (3) Areas such as inland Flanders and Holland, where increased marketorientation was combined with intensive subsistence-farming. Peasantlandholding remained dominant for a long time, and specialisation was reached on rather small plots, using labour-intensive techniques to produce for nearby urban markets. Proto-industrial activities, taking place on an impressive scale, were usually combined with subsistence-farming. In Holland, this became the launching-pad for a further transformation towards large-scale capitalist agriculture on the one hand and more proletarianised wage-labour on the other, whereas, in inland Flanders, this did not occur until much later. It is useful to examine these diverging paths in a bit more detail. In Drenthe, it seems that the combination of low yields on the sandy grounds and successful peasant-resistance against the strengthening of feudal control account for the survival of small-scale peasant-production and communal lands. After a coalition of nobles suffered a crushing defeat in 1227, in which the Bishop of Utrecht and some four-hundred nobles were killed in the swamps, what remained of manorial lordship disintegrated, allowing the peasants to strengthen their hold on the land and the commons.56 In the long run, technological change remained slow, sheep were herded in communal flocks for centuries to come, subsistence-farming remained predominant, less than a quarter to a third of the land was leased out, and, even during the seventeenth century, the spread of wage-labour was rather limited (though, with 25–30 per cent, still high in comparison to most of Europe).57 Here, then, we seem to have a classic Brennerian case in which ‘the emerging predominance of small peasant property’ short-circuited a transition to rural capitalism.58 However, it should be noted that, even here, the conservatism inherent in the existing structures was not absolute, and market-influences started to penetrate from the outside once the transition to agrarian capitalism had been made in neighbouring regions.59 The situation in the Guelders river-area was very different, if not the complete opposite. Manorial lords, territorial rulers and religious institutions had maintained strong control over the colonisation of this highly fertile region, resulting in a predominance of large landholding. During the thirteenth 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

Van Bavel 2010a, p. 172. Van Bavel 2010c, pp. 252–3. Van Bavel 2010a, pp. 172, 204, 336. Brenner 1985, p. 30. Bieleman 1987, pp. 40–2.

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and fourteenth centuries, however, manorial organisation came under intense pressure. On the one hand, colonisation of the nearby peat-areas offered a possibility for peasants to escape serfdom by migration. On the other hand, the monetisation of feudal relations and the intense competition between manorial and territorial lords forced the landowners to search for means of exploitation that were directly profitable. The rise of cities and markets in Holland and Brabant enabled them to do so by starting to exploit their land commercially, leading to a very early transition to the large-scale lease of land on increasingly short terms.60 The competition for lease-contracts created strong pressures towards investment, with large landowners spending about 16 to 20 per cent of their gross income on ‘improvement’ of their agricultural holdings (with further increases in the sixteenth century).61 On the other hand, it stimulated full proletarianisation, in which former peasants began to be employed as wage-labourers on the land. Van Bavel calculates that, in the early-sixteenth century, as much as 60 per cent of all labour in this area was performed as wage-labour – a proportion only reached in even the moreindustrialised areas of Europe during the nineteenth century.62 It is important to note that, until the second half of the sixteenth century, this transformation did not lead to a great shift in the distribution of landownership between peasants and lords. Rather, large-scale landownership in the hands of the lords remained intact, while the underlying social forms of exploitation of the land underwent considerable changes towards agrarian capitalism.

The trajectory of Holland: an urban-agrarian symbiosis The most interesting case, and probably the most decisive for the later fate of the Low Countries, is that of the regions such as Holland. Here, as in the Guelders river-area, early commercialisation took place. However, there were substantial differences in the nature of this commercialisation. Whereas, in Guelders, colonisation during the high middle ages had produced patterns of large-scale landownership under seigneurial control, in Holland, colonisation had taken place under the direction of the territorial lords, undercutting the power of manorial lords in most areas. Therefore, in large regions, feudal control ‘on the ground’ was almost absent, and peasant small-holders owned their own land. Population-pressure led to a further subdivision of plots, 60. Van Bavel 2010a, pp. 88–9 and 180; Van Bavel 1999b, pp. 469ff. 61. Van Bavel 2010a, p. 334. 62. Van Bavel 2010a, p. 204.


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which must have made conditions for subsistence-farming increasingly difficult. These changes then started to accelerate around the fourteenth century. Ecological processes resulting from the use of the land led to a sinking of the surface by two metres or, in some places, even three metres or more.63 As a result, the soil ceased to be suitable for subsistence-farming. As Bieleman rightly emphasises, this could have led to depopulation, as happened elsewhere in Europe.64 But development in Holland took a different course. An economic redirection started towards commercial farming, largely the keeping of livestock for the production of butter and cheese, and, to a lesser extent, the cultivating of ‘industrial’ products such as hops (for brewing) and hemp (for rope-making), linseed (for oil) and madder (for dyestuffs). Although peasants remained in control of their small tracts of land, natural circumstances increasingly forced them to combine labour-intensive forms of agriculture with wage-labour in export-oriented fishing, peat-digging and dike-building, proto-industrial activities in rural areas or manufacturingwork in the towns.65 For this redirection to be possible, a number of conditions had to be met earlier, or, at least, more-or-less simultaneously. First, the maintenance of any kind of agricultural production under the special ecological circumstances of the Low Countries’ peat-areas required rather sophisticated techniques for water-management, from wind- and watermills to developed systems of cooperation for dike-maintenance.66 The fourteenth to sixteenth centuries saw a steady increase in their application. Wealthier farmers and townspeople increasingly replaced manorial lords or the Church as investors in such instruments for improvement.67 Introduction of new technologies in this rural setting laid the basis for their later use in rural or urban manufacturing. A second precondition for the shift towards commercial farming was the possibility to import basic foodstuffs. Without some international specialisation, and without the development of trading systems to tap into the agricultural surpluses of other regions, it would have been impossible to have a majority of Holland’s population producing non-subsistence items. This connected the rise of commercial agriculture in Holland directly with the increase of trade with other, grain-producing regions – Germany, the Southern Netherlands, and France at first, gradually replaced as the main suppliers of 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

Bieleman 1993, p. 162. Ibid. Van Zanden 1993b, Chapter 2. Davids 2008, pp. 64–5. Van Bavel 2010a, p. 148.

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grain by the Baltic from the late-fifteenth century onwards.68 The nodal points connecting the emerging highly differentiated agricultural society to those inter-regional networks of trade, of course, were the many towns of medieval Holland. Rapid urbanisation took place roughly in the same period as the emergence of commercialised agriculture (see Table 1). Jessica Dijkman shows that urban fairs in Holland played the rôle that in many other countries was played by local village-markets, both because these urban markets were geographically close, and because institutional barriers to selling rural products on the urban markets were limited.69 These towns provided the markets to which much of rural production was geared, not only as centres of distribution and consumption, but also increasingly as independent centres of production. Leyden, the biggest city in Holland at the start of the sixteenth century, had evolved into one of the leading centres of cloth-production. Other industries, such as brewing, had started to develop on a large scale throughout the province of Holland. Those urban industries became intimately connected with rural development, both for the supply of raw materials and labour-power. Table 1: Urbanisation in the Low Countries and Britain, 1375–1800 Number of cities with over 10,000 inhabitants 1475 1500 1550 1600 1650 1700

1375 Northern Netherlands (Holland in parentheses) Southern Netherlands Britain

1750

1800

2 (0)

9 (4)

10 (5)

11 (6)

19 (12)

19 (12)

20 (12)

18 (10)

19 (10)

11

11

11

12

11

12

12

12

18

1

1

5

4

6

9

13

23

47

Total population of cities with over 10,000 inhabitants per territory (in thousands) 1375 Northern Netherlands Southern Netherlands Britain

1475

1500

1550

1600

1650

1700

1750

1800

20

98

120

182

365

600

640

570

580

210

310

300

360

250

360

380

350

460

35

70

80

110

250

500

720

1,020

1,870

Source: Israel 1995, p. 115.

68. Tielhof 2002, pp. 6–7. 69. Dijkman 2010.


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Slowly but surely, the changes in direction of Holland’s agriculture led to the spread of credit-relations to the countryside, combined with a differentiation inside the peasantry, in which some peasants managed to become successful capitalist-farmers and others were forced to combine their agricultural activities with proto-industrial labour. This can be seen as a preceding stage to the rise of real capitalist agriculture. However, close connections between rural proto-industries and urban production were not necessarily beneficial towards further capitalist development.70 Inland Flanders had seen very similar patterns of rural production emerging as Holland; labour-intensive commercial agriculture on small plots owned by the peasants, combined with extensive proto-industrial activities geared towards the large urban centres of (mainly textile-) production.71 However, the market-relations between the large Flemish cities such as Ghent, Bruges, and Antwerp and their hinterland became much more unequal and exploitative than those among their northern cousins. The mighty Flemish towns, with ample privileges gained in long and bloody struggles against the territorial lords and strong guilds dominating urban production and politics, jealously guarded their markets against any encroachment by agricultural producers. Peasants could only sell their products in the town under tight restrictions, and attempts at independent economic development in the countryside, for example by building watermills or introducing other more advanced machines, were crushed – sometimes by force of arms.72 The proto-industrial activities that developed in the important Flemish linen-industry took the form of a ‘Kauf-System’, in which peasants individually owned the means of production and produced the linen, but were fully dependent on urban merchants for the sale of the end-products. Rather than forming a stepping stone for further proletarianisation, these forms of rural proto-industrial labour remained static for many centuries.73 In Holland, on the other hand, extra-economic coercion to control the countryside by the urban centres remained much more limited. Certainly, there were a number of attempts to institute the same barriers to rural development as in Flanders.74 But none of the towns of Holland, smaller and less powerful than their Flemish counterparts, individually had the strength to carry those through. Furthermore, as ’t Hart concludes, ‘the high density of towns meant that urban control over the countryside was strongly contested. Coercive moves by one town could always be hindered or mitigated by the 70. 71. 72. 73. 74.

Epstein 2001, p. 21. Thoen 2001, pp. 119ff. Dijkman 2010. Thoen 2001, p. 122. Noordegraaf 2009, p. 133.

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actions of another.’75 Unable to control the countryside politically, burghers were much more prone to extend their reach by purely economic means. This led to a very different type of proto-industrial development, in which urban merchant-entrepreneurs invested directly in rural industries. Thus, a layer of urban proto-capitalists emerged who not only attained possession of the end-products of rural labour, but gained substantial control over every stage of the production-process. On the other hand, the loss of control over the means of production among peasants set the stage for full proletarianisation once these merchant-entrepreneurs started to move large swathes of the productionprocess to the cities.76 It is this particular urban-agrarian symbiosis that set the stage for the transition to capitalism in Holland. The ‘discovery’ of rural capitalism in the Northern Netherlands has led to a debate on the applicability of the ‘Brenner thesis’.77 Unlike most of his followers, Brenner does see important steps in the development of capitalist agriculture taking place in the Netherlands. But his theoretical focus sits uneasily with the particular trajectory towards agrarian capitalism followed in Holland (and, to a lesser extent, Flanders), in which the towns played such a crucial rôle.78 As we have seen, the path of specialisation taken by many Dutch peasants was only made possible by the presence of strong and independent towns, increasingly integrated into a European trading system. Even Brenner himself acknowledged this. ‘Here, of course, urban development was more intense than in any other region of Europe throughout the long epoch from the ninth and tenth centuries into the eighteenth. . . . The outcome was great, sustained demand pressure on agriculture over a very extended period, the reply to which by Low Countries’ agriculturalists was, moreover, very much facilitated by their access to the international grain market.’79 The Dutch case, and particularly the path taken by Holland, suggests that to look for the roots of capitalism either exclusively in the countryside or in the towns rests on an artificial separation. True, towns were not simply the representatives of capitalist trade against a feudal hinterland. But neither were they simply an extension of the power of the lords. Town and country were integrated in common systems of both trade and production. As Rodney Hilton showed convincingly, the towns in Europe arose not in opposition to, but in symbiosis with the development of feudalism.80 But this symbiosis itself was not static. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80.

’t Hart 2001, p. 84. Compare Aten 1995. Van Bavel 2010a, pp. 249–50. Hoppenbrouwers and Van Zanden (eds.) 2001. See also Wood 2002b. A point also made in Mielants 2001, p. 112. Brenner 2001, p. 302. Hilton 1992.


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Even when the cities of the fifteenth century were part of a wider European feudal network of trade, they were not the same as the market-villages that feudal lords had once set up to provide for their luxury-demands. A considerable number of them had become powerful centres of wealth and production in their own right. The urban industries that arose in Holland were intimately connected with rural-capitalist development. When the Northern Netherlands started to gain a foothold in European trade, this did not simply mean further integration into a larger feudal whole. It was coupled to another, opposite effect: a slow but fundamental change in the relationship between town and country. The connected systems of urban and rural trade and production that arose created a society in which the old feudal institutions were steadily being pushed to the background. As far as class-struggle accompanied and shaped these processes, it was at least three-tiered, involving urban classes as well as lords (both manorial and territorial) and peasants.81 At least in Holland, the late-medieval period saw an almost complete erosion of local feudal institutions. The lords who still dominated the province politically during most of the sixteenth century had their main landed estates elsewhere. The main group of large feudal landowners that remained were the religious institutions. However, the power of both traditional groups of representatives of feudal society was backed up by the larger feudal states into which the Dutch provinces were integrated: first the Burgundian state, then the Habsburg Empire. The description given by Hobsbawm for the Dutch Republic of the seventeenth century might actually be applied with more success to the Northern Netherlands of the sixteenth: this was a ‘feudal business-economy’. On the ground, both in the countryside and in the towns, commerce already ruled supreme. At the top, the independence of the capitalist élites was limited by their subordination to feudal-political entities. This subordination held important advantages to the urban élites, and most of the time they subordinated themselves willingly. But this willingness, or rather the ability to settle for a comfortable niche within the larger feudal superstructure of Europe, was not without limits. A string of crises during the sixteenth century would show the boundaries within which these contradictions could be maintained, with truly revolutionary consequences.

From the Dutch Revolt to the Golden Age The sixteenth century was an age of economic expansion, but also of serious disruptions. It is no coincidence that, at the turn of the century, the artistic 81. Van Bavel 2010c.

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exuberance of the Flemish masters found their counterpoint in the gruesome world of Hieronymus Bosch. A number of important industries in this period faced stagnation or even decline. Leyden cloth-manufacture did not manage to adapt to the rising competition of the ‘new draperies’, as a conservative urban élite – including the merchants who controlled the old draperies – finally succeeded in throwing up prohibitions against the establishment of new and competing manufactures.82 Trade was affected by the great dynastic wars, and the absolutist Habsburg rulers to whom all of the Dutch provinces after 1543 belonged tried to gain leverage over merchant-wealth through increased taxation and large-scale borrowing on Holland’s capital-market.83 The merchant-fleet of Holland grew considerably between 1530 and 1567 due to the expansion of Baltic trade, but also was hindered in the 1560s by the closure of the Sound.84 This drove up grain-prices, which caused serious unrest among the urban lower classes at a time already characterised by the rise of popular religious opposition. With the successful spread of Anabaptism, both worldly and spiritual authorities – with the Catholic Church spanning both categories – had to contend with a popular Reformation that contained semicommunist undertones. These tensions came to a head in the Dutch Revolt that covered the full last-third of the sixteenth century. No one will deny that, as well as completely changing the political conditions and religious order, the series of events that go under this name opened up a new phase in the economic history of the Netherlands, even though the exact relationship between the revolution against the Habsburg Empire and the ‘Golden Age’ of the seventeenth century is hard to trace. Marx and Engels thought of the Revolt as one of the ‘classical’ bourgeois revolutions.85 But the bourgeoisie certainly did not make the revolution, as I have argued elsewhere.86 Opposition of the leading feudal lords to the centralising policies of Philip II first destabilised the politicalreligious settlement for the Netherlands, and three great waves of urban uprisings (1566, 1572 and 1578–9) driven by the artisanal-middle and lower classes then shifted the point of gravity of the Revolt away from the nobility. Only then could the bourgeoisie in the Northern Netherlands become the main benefactor of the Revolt. It is a classic example of Marx’s aphorism that 82. Brand 1993. 83. Anderson 1986, pp. 60–1; Tracy 1985, p. 221. 84. Van Zanden 1993c, p. 8. 85. For example, Marx 1973, p. 192: ‘The model for the revolution of 1789 was (at least in Europe) only the [English] revolution of 1648; that for the revolution of 1648 only the revolt of the Netherlands against Spain’. 86. Brandon 2007.


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‘The chevaliers d’industrie . . . only succeeded in supplanting the chevaliers of the sword by making use of events of which they themselves were wholly innocent.’87 The Revolt had a number of unintended side-effects that greatly stimulated the further capitalist development of the Dutch economy. One was the confiscation of church-lands, which were sold by public auction and thereby greatly augmented land-possession as a form of urban investment. Large-scale capitalist participation in land-reclamation, combined with the hardships suffered by peasants from both government and rebel-troops, further altered the rural property-structure.88 In Holland, the dominance of small-scale peasant-ownership of the land finally started to give way to commercial exploitation on a large scale.89 A second direct result of the Revolt was the loss of the political influence of the nobility and the Catholic clergy, which, at least in the province of Holland, left the urban élites in complete control over the provincial estates. The same goes, to a somewhat lesser extent, for the other provinces. Out of a total of 47 votes in the seven sovereign provincial diets, 33 were reserved for the towns.90 The purging of former Catholic loyalists from the city-magistrates could also have had some effect in opening the way for new groups of merchants, who had previously been excluded by more conservative merchant-factions. This, for example, seems to have been the case in Leyden, where the purging of the magistrate opened up city-government to southern refugees involved in new drapery, leading to a rapid transformation of Leyden cloth-production.91 Indirectly, the Revolt had an economic impact through the transformation of the state. Overall, the Dutch Revolt left the state firmly under the control of the merchant-industrialists. This became especially clear in matters of war and peace, where dynastic ambitions were wholly replaced by commercial considerations. Internally, through their control over the provincial States of Holland, the merchants exerted enormous political influence as well. The financial weight of Holland over the rest of the Republic provided the necessary coherence among the different provinces, despite internal divisions and regional varieties in the pace of the transition. Although the Dutch federal state seems like a rather ramshackle construction when looked at in the light of later development, the outcome of the manifold political balancing acts 87. 88. 89. 90. 91.

Marx 1965, p. 669. ’t Hart 2011, forthcoming. Van Bavel 2004, p. 139. ’t Hart 2001, p. 82. Lamet 1972, p. 43.

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between local élites and their particular interests was not unfavourable to the further development of capitalism in the seventeenth century. Even when the new governors increased taxes to a level the Habsburg rulers could not have dreamt of, both the super-rich and substantial parts of the wealthy middle-class layers beneath them could feel that their interests were well-served. Besides, the state never let the urban élites bear the brunt of taxation. Confirming Marx’s observation on the nature of Dutch state-revenues, in 1640 over 70 per cent of taxes were levied through excises and semi-direct taxes. In 1650, of all taxes farmed out in the Southern part of Holland, 74.6 per cent consisted of taxes on basic necessities.92 The new state that emerged out of the Revolt was extremely effective in letting the poor and working classes pay for its commercial-military exploits through a high cost of living. The rich, as well as substantial layers of the middle classes, contributed through the various forms of state-debt which became an increasingly heavy burden on Dutch society as a whole, but remained a secure and profitable form of investment for the élites. The Dutch Revolt liberated one of Europe’s most developed regions from the constraints of an empire in which trade and industry were always subordinated to royal interests, ultimately guided by the landed interests of the Spanish aristocracy and the Catholic Church. The independent republic was established in the 1580s – a status that was recognised by the Spanish Crown only at the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. On the basis of the urbanagrarian symbiosis created in the late middle ages, the growth in Baltic trade of the sixteenth century, the rise of the Amsterdam entrepôt at the expense of Antwerp and the unscrupulous use of state-power whenever essential economic interests became imperilled, this republic became Europe’s dominant centre of capital-accumulation.

Merchants and manufacturers Probably the most spectacular effect of the revolt was to launch the newly founded republic onto the international scene. Among the first deeds of the newborn nation was the institution of a naval blockade of the Scheldt estuary, a form of economic warfare against the trade of its erstwhile sister provinces that it kept in place for over two centuries. From its small territorial base, the Dutch started to rival the two Iberian colonial empires, and, soon after the

92. ‘t Hart 1993, pp. 138–9.


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founding of the East India Company (VOC) in 1602, it became the leading power in Asia. As in the English Civil War and the French Revolution, the revolutionary phase of the Dutch Revolt went seamlessly over into the empire-building phase. From the 1590s to the Peace of Utrecht of 1713, the Dutch Republic held the position of a European great power. In 1672, it survived a combined attack at land and sea by France, England and their allies on the eastern border. In 1688, it managed to send an invading force of 15,000 troops in order to effect ‘régime-change’ within its main commercial rival, installing William III of Orange as King of England. During the War of the Spanish Succession (1702–13) the Dutch state could pay and supply provisions for an army of 120,000 on the strength of a population of barely two million. This military power was based on unrivalled commercial supremacy. Around 1648, when the war with Spain came to an end, Dutch shipping outstripped that of all its European rivals put together. According to one estimate, England’s commercial fleet grew from approximately 400 to 1,400 ships between 1600 and 1700. But, already in 1600, around 1,900 ships sailed under the Dutch flag. This figure grew to 2,600 in 1670, to decline to the still considerable number of 2,200 in 1700. The total tonnage of the English merchant-fleet amounted to approximately 300,000 tons in 1700, whereas the Dutch reached double that number in 1670.93 Even in 1800, after roughly 150 years of stagnation in overall economic growth, per-capita income in the Netherlands was probably higher than in the neighbouring countries.94 Popular myth has it that the main source of this wealth was colonial trade. Of course, the plundering of the East Indies by the VOC and the active rôle in slavery of its less successful brother, the West India Company, contributed greatly to the amassing of wealth by many powerful merchant-houses. These commercial activities were accompanied by all the great crimes that Marx so vividly described in the concluding chapters of the first volume of Capital. But, in purely numerical terms, the so-called ‘rich trade’ in colonial luxurygoods was overshadowed by the less adventurous (though certainly not peaceful) trade in grain, wood, iron, copper, furs and other bulk goods. As the figures compiled by De Vries and Van der Woude show, European trade, rather than colonial trade, formed the backbone of Dutch merchant-capital:

93. Schipper 2001, p. 55. 94. Van Zanden 1993c, p. 6.

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Table 2: Dutch foreign trade in millions of Guilders per year Ca. 1650

Ca. 1720

Ca. 1770

Export to Europe, over sea Southern Netherlands and Germany, over land Outside Europe Total

105 10

73 10

72 20

5 120

7 90

8 100

Export consisted of European goods (re-export) Colonial goods (re-export) Inland products

49 11 60

26 22 42

29 40 31

120 5

78 6

95 10

15 140

24 108

38 143

Import from Europe, over sea Southern Netherlands and Germany, over land Outside Europe Total

Source: De Vries and Van der Woude 1997, p. 499.

Colonial goods (including those imported from other European nations) formed just over 11 per cent of imports and a mere 9 per cent of exports at the height of the ‘Golden Age’. This had grown to 31 and 24 per cent respectively around 1720, partly reflecting the decline of European overseas import and export, partly the growing importance of transatlantic commerce. Only in the latter half of the eighteenth century did colonial goods come close to European goods as a proportion of foreign trade. True, more of the European imports were meant for the Dutch home-market, giving colonial goods greater prominence (though still smaller than European goods) in re-export. But the export-figures show something else that challenges the image of a nation thriving on long-distance luxury-trade. Dutch products comprised a full 50 per cent of the total value of exports in 1650, and still 47 per cent in 1720. An important part of inland-production was directly connected to the Dutch function in international trade. This was true for those sectors that were at least partially based on the processing of imported materials, the so-called trafieken [traffics]. Examples are the processing of salt – connected to the export of salted herring – and sugar, the sawing of wood, and the distilling of alcohol. Rope and sail-making used imported hemp in combination with


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the Dutch product, and tobacco-industries also depended both on imports and on locally produced leaves.95 Shipbuilding was, of course, another sector that was tied to trade. De Vries and Van der Woude estimate that, between 1625 and 1700, an average of 400 to 500 ships a year were produced. They calculate that around 10,000 people were employed in this sector – 5 per cent of all manufacturing-workers in the province of Holland.96 To escape guild-regulation in the towns, much of this production took place in rural areas. North of Amsterdam, the area called De Saen [de Zaanstreek] developed into a thriving industrial centre. Its development depended on a considerable use of technologically advanced machinery such as industrial windmills. The total number of industrial mills in De Saen grew from 128 in 1630 to 584 in 1731, then declined to the still high number of 482 at the end of the eighteenth century.97 Technological advance underpinned the competitiveness of Dutch trade. Already in the sixteenth century, two new types of ships were developed that gave the Dutch a competitive advantage in fishing and carrying trade: the herring-buys and the fluyt-ship. The herring-buys allowed a part of the processing of the catch to be done on board, enabling the ships to remain at sea for longer periods and function as floating processing factories. The fluyt was an easy-to-sail ship, which could carry large tonnages with relatively small numbers of men. Since the size of the crew was an important determining factor in the total costs of a voyage, the introduction of the fluyt greatly enlarged trading profitability. The process of shipbuilding itself was also streamlined, introducing assemblage in standardised parts.98 Not only in shipbuilding but also in many other forms of manufacturing-production during the seventeenth century, the Dutch exported their knowledge, technologies and skilled workers to the rest of Europe.99 The textile-industry was the largest employer in the Netherlands. It had both a rural and an urban component. Even in Amsterdam, which was not a textile-city, 26 per cent of all craftsmen and crafts-workers were employed in this trade. Since over half the Amsterdam working population was involved in the ‘industrial’ sector, this amounts to a total of 14 per cent of all married men.100 In cities such as Leyden and Haarlem, in which textile-production was the leading industry, the proportion was much higher. Dutch capitalism did not take a lead in 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100.

De Vries and Van der Woude 1997, p. 271. De Vries and Van der Woude 1997, p. 297. De Vries and Van der Woude 1997, pp. 346–7. Unger 1978, p. 86. Davids 2008, Chapter 5. De Vries and Van der Woude 1997, p. 270.

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textile-production in Europe as it did in shipbuilding, but the use of advanced techniques for production allowed it to find a substantial niche based on high-quality products. Van Bavel has painted a pessimistic picture of the development of manufacture in the Northern Netherlands after 1600. He attaches much importance to the introduction of institutions of forced labour, such as workhouses, and the apparent strengthening of the guilds from the middle of the sixteenth century. The possibility to revert to the use of semi-free labour would have formed a barrier to the introduction of manufacture on a large scale.101 However, the work of many other authors contradicts this. Noordegraaf emphasised the changes occurring in labour-relations due to the growth of new types of manufacture. Even when formal guild-structures were maintained – and, especially in sectors connected to exports, they often were not – in practice those structures did not hinder, and sometimes even stimulated the introduction of capitalist relations. ‘Division of labour and hierarchization characterized an increasingly large part of industrial activities. Even though the traditional craftsman-based businesses continued to represent a numerical majority, the economic importance of these businesses declined, in part due to the rapid growth of new types of enterprises which were not based on the traditional craftsman structure.’102 The seventeenth century saw the establishment of some of the largest manufacturing production-lines to be found anywhere in the world up until the advent of the Industrial Revolution. The shipyards of the East India Company and the five admiralties employed thousands of workers under régimes of intense labour-discipline. Workhouses and orphanages were run as commercial undertakings, and rather then being a regression to old patterns of semi-forced labour, they might better be seen as instruments for the creation of a capitalist work-ethos. The growth of new manufactures was accompanied by a great intensification of capitalist investment in agriculture, completing the social and technological revolution that had begun in the preceding period. On the basis of this transformation, the rural areas in the seventeenth century gained a productivity that was high even compared to the most developed European areas of the nineteenth century. De Vries argued that its main result was a process of differentiation within rural communities, in which ‘commercial, highly capitalized farm enterprises’ gained the upper hand. ‘Surrounding these new households, nonagricultural specialists in crafts, transportation, marketing, fuel supply, and education arose to provide goods and services that the 101. Van Bavel 2010a, pp. 260–2. 102. Noordegraaf 1993, p. 137. On the guilds, see Lis and Soly 2006, Epstein and Prak 2008, and the other contributions in these volumes.


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unspecialized households of earlier times had endeavored to provide for themselves.’103 Countering one of Wood’s main arguments for a non-capitalist dynamic in Dutch commercial agriculture, competing for Dutch farmers was an imperative rather than an option. Among other things, this can be seen from the continued high turnover-rate of land-holding in the most commercialised parts of the Netherlands.104 The urban and rural economies were linked up by the growth of a developed system of river-transport, carrying both persons and goods.105 Peat was used as fuel in smaller industries such as the making of bricks, tiles, glass and pottery, as well as in breweries, distilleries, bakeries and textiles. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, about 15,000 ships left or returned to Overijssel harbours in the rural east to transport peat to the more urbanised parts of the country.106 The urban-agrarian symbiosis of the late middle ages had been reconstituted at a higher level, reflecting a further deepening of the process of original accumulation in which labour was ‘freed’ in the double sense used by Marx, and capital gained control over large swathes of the home-economy. Partly, this was done through an extension of the putting-out system. Leyden textile-merchants, for example, managed to gain control over previously independent peasant-spinning and weaving activities in Dutch Brabant. However, over time, these areas of peasant-production started to evolve as industrial centres in their own right. Tilburg forms a striking example of such rural-industry led expansion, growing from a small village to a town of 9,000 inhabitants in a few decades. Individual merchants moved from the Western urban centres to these rural regions in order to gain more direct control over the production-process.107 Wallerstein, then, was right when he attacked those who wanted to describe the Dutch Republic only in terms of its carrying trade: ‘So much ink has been spilled to explain why Holland did not industrialize that we tend to overlook the fact that it did do so.’108 However, it is probably as important to insist that, despite this advance, productive capital never escaped the control of merchantcapital to become an independent force, as writers from Marx himself to Dobb have rightly stressed. The typical capitalist entrepreneur of the early-seventeenth century was not the modern industrialist but a merchant-industrialist, who brought under his control sections of production as an extension of his 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108.

De Vries 1974, p. 120. Van Bavel 2004, p. 139. De Vries 1978. Slicher van Bath 1982, p. 26. ’t Hart 2001, pp. 92–4. Wallerstein 1982, p. 100.

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trading ventures, but whose primary concern always remained with the latter rather than the former part of his business.109 Once competitive pressures started to rise, their response was not to build up the protective walls of mercantilism in order to further the interests of ‘national industries’, since this would harm their trading interests. Instead, they slowly retreated from productive investment into more secure forms of financial dealing. The ties between traders and producers gradually weakened, and, even in trade itself, these merchants increasingly took a step back. Around the third quarter of the seventeenth century, trading on commission overtook trading on the merchant’s own account among the major Dutch merchant-houses.110 Moreover, the relatively advanced nature of manufacturing-production in a number of important sectors should not blind us to the conditions prevailing in many others. Numerically, if not in terms of its economic weight, smallscale handicraft-production still dominated in the seventeenth century, as it probably did everywhere else at that point in time.111 Though fully directed at the market, the focal point of most of the output remained local. The federal state, built on a medieval heritage of provincial autonomy that was reinforced rather than challenged by the Dutch Revolt, further retarded economic integration on a national scale, as Richard Yntema has shown convincingly for the beer-industry.112 The weight of local institutions within the federal state meant that small urban producers often mounted successful pressure on their rulers in order to shield them from the full blows of open competition. Thus, while merchant-interests successfully prevented mercantilist measures for industrial development on a national scale, protectionism on a local level did strengthen with the waning of the ‘Golden Age’. Although economic reforms countering these trends were widely discussed during the eighteenth century, the state, firmly held in check ‘from above’ by the competing factions of the merchant-oligarchy, and ‘from below’ by the strong position of the urbancommercial middle classes, did not have the strength to push through a process of productive modernisation and started to act as a conservative force instead. Dutch capitalist development finally bit itself on the tail.

109. 110. 111. 112.

Gelder 1982, p. 38. Jonker and Sluyterman 2000, pp. 83ff. Van Dillen 1970, p. 197. Yntema 2009.


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Decline without ‘refeudalisation’ Does the onset of decline prove that there never had been development towards capitalism to begin with? This seems to be the thesis of Ellen Meiksins Wood. In her view, already during the ‘Golden Age’, public office, not production or trade, was the predominant source of private wealth for Dutch merchantoligarchs.113 This wealth was not ploughed back into the economy through productive investment, and so the Dutch economy retained a ‘disproportionate dependence on luxury consumption by the wealthy few at home or abroad’. This dependence was brought to light by the impact of the seventeenthcentury crisis, which reduced prices of staple exports and demand for luxurygoods, dragging the other sectors of Dutch production down.114 As a result, Dutch élites withdrew into ‘ “extra-economic” strategies and investment in politically constituted property’ such as public office.115 Following Hobsbawm, Wood puts great stress on the impact of the ‘seventeenth-century crisis’ on the Dutch economy. But the mechanism through which this crisis dragged down the Dutch ‘Golden Age’, and the timing of this happening remains unclear. This is not only the case in Wood’s argument, but actually more generally. Often, the impact of ‘the general crisis’ on the Dutch economy is assumed without explaining which sectors were affected when, and why. The problem might reside in the rather underspecified nature of the notion of a ‘general crisis’ itself. As for Europe as a whole, this links a string of economic depressions which had their epicentre in the decades between 1620 and 1660, the political crises in France and England of the 1640s and 1650s, and a long period of secularly declining prices.116 But, as Steensgaard noted long ago, the ‘decades in the middle of the century, when the greatest economic difficulties were to be found in Spain, Germany, France and England, were at the same time the golden age of the Netherlands’.117 This is borne out by a closer inspection of growth-trends for the main sectors of the Dutch economy.118 Probably, as Marx suggested, growth reached its zenith around 1650. But this does not mean that, after this, overall decline set in. The second half of the seventeenth century did not see a complete collapse of the Dutch economy, but, rather, a long period of stagnation which was felt as a decline because others had started to set out on the first steps on the road to

113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118.

Wood 2002b, p. 73. Wood 2002b, pp. 78–80. Wood 2002a, p. 92. Trevor-Roper 1967, p. 63; De Vries 1976, pp. 16ff. Steensgaard 1978, p. 36. Van Zanden 1993c, p. 16.

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recovery. Furthermore, the timing of the onset of depression was highly diverse for different sectors of the Dutch economy. The coincidence of stagnation with the increasing competition the Dutch faced from the English and the French, both militarily and in trade and manufacture, would suggest that it was not the seventeenth-century crisis itself, but, rather, its ending that put the Dutch economy in a tight spot. The way in which both England and France used the state to draw themselves out of the crisis was itself a particular response to Dutch commercial dominance. The Navigation Act and Colbert’s tariff-walls launched a new, militarised phase in the transition to capitalism. There were two areas in which real, absolute decline indeed slowly set in during the second half of the seventeenth century. These were the productive sector and the traditional carrying trade in grain, herring, salt, textiles and wood. The effects were felt sharpest during the eighteenth century, when unemployment became endemic in most Dutch cities and many formerly successful industries dwindled. However, the order in which economic depression hit seems to have been opposite to the one suggested by the Hobsbawm-Wood argument. Following the logic of the Dutch Republic as a ‘feudal business-economy’ or ‘non-capitalist commercial society’, with indigenous commodity-production fully dependent on the strength of merchant-capital, it could be expected that a long-term decline in international trade would have dragged down the productive sectors of the Dutch economy, beginning with those directly connected to the world-market. The opposite seems to have been the case. Whereas the production of beer, soap, salt, barrels, pottery, tiles, bricks, and the building industry all started their descent during the seventeenth century, cloth-production was retained at a stable level until ca. 1715, and ship-building, the production of sail-cloth and sawing wood until ca. 1725.119 Meanwhile, as the figures compiled by David Ormrod show, the total volume of Dutch trade managed to recover after the initial blow of the 1660s, and remained high well into the 1700s. The decline in Baltic trade was apparently more than compensated for by the rise of trade with other areas. Luxury-trade, far from pulling down the Dutch economy, actually grew in absolute size, as can be seen from the figures for colonial trade.

119. De Vries and Van der Woude 1997, p. 336.

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Table 3: Estimated values of English and Dutch foreign trade, 1622–1790 (£ ’000) English imports 1622 1624–5 1640s 1660s 1690s 1699–1701 1716–20 1733–5 1749–55 1753 1764–76 1772–4 1779 1784–8 1790

English re-exports

2,619

English domestic exports 2,320

Combined Combined total total English Dutch

Dutch VOC & WIC

4,939

4,395

900

3,239

8,534

5,849 6,054 7,757 8,144 8,625

1,986 2,291 3,104 3,438 3,511

4,433 4,739 5,717 8,645 8,732

12,268 13,084 16,578 20,227 20,868

12,735 10,660 15,303 17,443

5,818 5,580 4,286 4,828

9,853 7,013 11,050 14,057

28,406 23,253 30,639 36,328

12,163 17,110 12,200 17,529

557 1,106 1,626 2,224

16,392

4,067

15,784

3,308

14,350

2,759

Source: Ormrod 2003, pp. 56–7.

Neither is it true that the initial reaction to increased competitive pressures was decidedly non-capitalist. According to De Vries and Van der Woude, the response of manufacturers was threefold: ‘changes in product mix, introduction of labor-saving technology, and locational shifts toward lower-wage regions’.120 Ultimately, many of these strategies remained unsuccessful, but this only became clear in the course of the eighteenth century. The other central argument for the non-capitalist nature of Dutch society is the supposed withdrawal of the Dutch merchant-élite into non-economic forms of surplus-extraction. This ties in with a long-lasting debate within Dutch historiography on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century processes of ‘aristocratisation’. After they had established their power during the Dutch Revolt, the ruling merchants soon started to develop into a closed oligarchy with a strong hold on urban and provincial governments. With economic decline, these ruling merchants tended to withdraw from active trading, instead investing in landed property and government-bonds, and acquiring a more ‘aristocratic’ lifestyle.121 This argument certainly contains much that is 120. De Vries and van der Woude 1997, p. 676. 121. For example, Roorda 1964.

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valid. Members of the Dutch ruling class became increasingly involved in the accumulation of political functions. Already in the seventeenth century, many had combined business-careers with public office, often shared within their family or close circle.122 However, only for a minority of those involved in running the state did office-holding become the most important source of income.123 Most positions within the state did not earn an income of more than f 2000 a year. Only a minority of all regents became rich or richer just by taking part in politics.124 The most successful members of the Dutch governing élite of the seventeenth century managed to combine office-holding with their economic functions as merchant-entrepreneurs or long-distance traders. Not everyone did so in such a caricatured fashion as Willem Hoppevelt and Abraham Keyser, who substituted their income from minor functions as scribes for the province of Holland with a highly profitable international business in secret state-papers.125 Much more common were the cases of Reynier Cant, Louis Trip and Gillis Sautijn, who combined ruling functions in the Amsterdam city-government with trade in cannons and ammunition.126 Whereas, in many other countries, such interpenetration of office and trade led to the complete overpowering of the market by monopolistic practices and personal trading privileges, this seems to have been far less the case in the Dutch Republic. The direct participation of a very substantial part of the economic ruling class in office created strong checks against individual merchants using statepower for their own exclusive benefit. Despite a number of spectacular cases of corruption, public auctioning and ‘open’ competition in governmentcontracting were probably more dominant even than in England.127 In absolutist France or Spain, the close ties between small groups of merchants or financiers and the state led to a colonisation of the growing market-relations by royal interests. In the Netherlands, similar integration resulted in a form of collective ‘bourgeois self-rule’. Large-scale investment in state-obligations became a favourite form of securitisation of existing wealth for those merchants-cum-politicians. But laying a hand on state-revenues was not a hidden form of refeudalisation or a transition to tributary relations, as it might have been in countries such as 122. Adams 2005. 123. Zandvliet 2006, p. xv. 124. De Jong 1987, p. 82. 125. Knevel 2001, pp. 97–9. 126. Burke 1974, pp. 59–60. 127. This conclusion is affirmed by my own research on military contracting in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which I hope to publish soon.


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Spain or France where state-income still ultimately rested on surpluses amassed by extra-economic extraction. Dutch tax-income in the eighteenth century as much as in the seventeenth rested on the highly commercialised nature of the Dutch economy. It was a form of redistribution and concentration of wealth, but one that was firmly rooted in the developed commercial base of the economy. Once decline in the industrial sector set in, a substantial part of the ruling capitalists transformed themselves from active merchant-industrialists into financial capitalists. In this way, aristocratisation did take place, although it should be sharply delineated from the ‘refeudalisation’ that occurred when the ruling merchants of the Italian city-states reverted to non-commercial landholding. In his study of the Leyden élite of the eighteenth century, Maarten Prak showed that an average member of the city-magistrate held a staggering 60 per cent of their assets in state-obligations, for which they received a rent. Another 11.7 per cent – or 15 per cent for the family-members of regents – was invested in foreign, mainly British, loans and stocks. Houses, land and titles made up 13.9 per cent of the regents’ wealth, but much of this consisted of productive investments in capitalist agriculture.128 The situation in Leyden was more-or-less representative for most of the Republic, except that ‘industrial’ decline was probably sharper than elsewhere. The large amount of revenues that could be redistributed among the Dutch ruling class through state-bonds is a reminder that eighteenth-century decline should not be seen in overly absolute terms. Even in the sphere of production, the Dutch Republic probably remained one of the most advanced societies in Europe. But the inability to break through the trends toward financialisation, the persistent economic localism and political fragmentation did mean that Dutch early-modern capitalism could not become the launching-pad for an industrial revolution. The ruling class of the Dutch Republic by-and-large did not favour the attempts at reform for industrial revival that were proposed by more farsighted statesmen in the course of the eighteenth century. Instead, the Amsterdam capital-market became a major source of money-capital underpinning the British state-debt and private investment.129 Whereas, from a national perspective, the transition to capitalism was stalled, from a global perspective it was partially displaced, feeding into the British industrial revolution while continuing to fill the pockets of the Dutch ruling class. When in the 1780s, and again in 1795, revolutionary movements rose against this regent-class, the ‘fight against aristocracy’ became a popular battle-cry. But those movements never had to dispose of a real aristocracy of the land. This 128. Prak 1985, p. 117. 129. Riley 1980, pp. 119ff.

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had been broken economically in the late-medieval period, and politically in the course of the Dutch Revolt. What remained of it was largely a symbolic force. The second round of the bourgeois revolution was directed against the monied aristocracy of the Amsterdam stock-exchange, which had managed to integrate itself into international capital while forming a barrier to industrial development in the Netherlands itself.

Conclusions In the debate on the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the Dutch Republic has figured as a fully crystallised form of merchant-capitalism. But the arguments on both sides of the debate have been based on an image of pre-industrial Dutch society that is often sketchy, stereotypical and outdated. This article has sought to provide a more rounded view, corresponding to the current state of historical research. Central to the alternative interpretation of Dutch early-modern capitalism presented here has been to show how strongly Dutch commercial primacy was actually rooted in a transformation at the point of production, rather than being artificially crafted on a non-capitalist base. This reinterpretation raises serious difficulties for both major strands in the debate. On the one hand, if even the most mercantile of all merchantRepublics could only flourish on the basis of a prior social transformation at the point of production, this adds to the criticisms that were made of the Sweezy-Wallerstein school of commercialisation as the driving force towards capitalism. On the other hand, taking seriously the interplay between ruraland urban-economic development that was so central to the Dutch case poses real problems for the Brenner school, with its almost exclusive focus on agricultural class-relations and its elevation of one privileged English path of agrarian transformation as the ultimate measure of success. First, even within the small area of the Northern Low Countries, not one, but at least three distinct trajectories led to the spread of capitalist relations in agriculture. Second, their form and content did not only rely on class-relations in the countryside, but, crucially, on the interaction between development in the countryside and in the towns, leading to an urban-agrarian symbiosis involving trade and production. Third, the success of this symbiosis depended on the growing division of labour between various regions of Europe expressed in the expansion of international trade, even when the way in which the Dutch provinces managed to integrate themselves into this expanding trade-network differed from that of the Hanse cities or the Italian city-states because of the extent to which capitalist relations had already taken root in fishing,


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manufacture and agriculture. Fourth, the importance of the Dutch Revolt in freeing the economy of the Low Countries from the political constraints that followed from their integration into the Habsburg Empire suggests that a revolutionary transformation of the state-structure was indispensible in furthering capitalist development, even though this revolution was not initiated by the bourgeoisie itself, and was neither the starting-point nor the final act in the transition. The seventeenth-century expansion of Dutch capitalism left a huge imprint on the spread of the system worldwide. While important, this impact was certainly not confined to that of the Dutch East India Company and the Dutch rôle in the transatlantic slave-trade. Contrary to long-established views, homeland-production far outstripped colonial goods and luxuries even in foreign trade. The seventeenth-century ‘Golden Age’ saw the deepening of the medieval urban-agrarian symbiosis, extension of wage-labour, substantial development of manufacture and the growing economic integration of the different regions within the Dutch Republic. However, the Dutch trajectory of capitalist development also carried strong marks of its early birth. Although the strength of merchant-capital went hand-in-hand with substantial changes in production, the core of the capitalist class always remained focused primarily on trade. This started to become a serious hindrance to further capitalist development once the Dutch were outcompeted or forced out of international markets by political means from the 1650s onwards. Financialisation, based on the strong integration in international capital-flows, proved the easier option for the Dutch ruling class over a restructuring of production, leading to the long eighteenth-century depression. Meanwhile, the consistent localism and small scale of production meant that drawing-up the walls of urban protectionism remained the preferred answer to increased competition for much of the urban middle classes. The federal state-apparatus, probably more directly populated and controlled by the leading capitalist families than any state before or afterwards, could never act as a counterweight to these trends. Instead, it helped to enforce economic policies that were characterised by the absence of protectionism on a national scale and strong protectionism on a local scale. These strongly favoured merchant and financial capital over productive capital, creating social tensions that contributed to the revolutionary waves of the 1780s and 1790s. The advanced economic structure of the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic did not become the launching-pad for an early industrial revolution. But, reading the history of the transition backwards from its late-eighteenth century result has marred our understanding of the many changes in the shape of capitalism before its final breakthrough. Too much of the transition-debate

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has been recast as a debate on ‘why Britain succeeded and the rest failed’. What is lost in this way is Marx’s fundamental insight into the international character of the transition, in which the ‘different momenta of primitive accumulation distribute themselves . . ., more or less in chronological order, particularly over Spain, Portugal, Holland, France, and England’.130 The story of this distribution of moments is not simply one of linear national trajectories, consisting of many failures and one privileged path to success. Rather, it consists of a real dialectical unity, in which the stalled fragments of capitalist development in one country formed the elements of its further development in the next.

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brill.nl/hima

Review Articles Althusser, el infinito adios, Emilio de Ípola, Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 2007 Althusser: une lecture de Marx, edited by Jean-Claude Bourdin, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2008 Althusser et la psychanalyse, Pascale Gillot, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2009 Machiavel et nous, suivi de ‘Des problèmes qu’il faudra bien appeler d’un autre nom et peut-être politique’, Louis Althusser; Althusser et la insituabilité de la politique et de ‘la recurrence du vide chez Louis Althusser’, François Matheron, Preface by Étienne Balibar, Paris: Éditions Tallandier, 2009 Abstract A review of recent French and Latin-American work on Althusser suggests that the received interpretations of the latter’s work may profitably be re-examined. The notion that there exists an early, middle and late Althusser, each distinct from the others in important ways, is called radically into question by this body of scholarship. Various authors show the presence of an aleatory dimension, usually associated with the late Althusser, in even his most ‘structuralist’ concepts (for example, structural causality). These works help us read Althusser in a new way. Keywords philosophy, materialism, psychoanalysis, structuralism, Marxism

Spectres of Althusser In 1990, at the very moment a relieved intellectual world was convinced that it could finally, in good conscience and with unimpeachable theoretical and political justification, forget Althusser, he had the impudence to die. If he had been, as he expressed it, entombed in silence during the last decade of his life – a bit of hyperbole that nonetheless captured the sense that, legally, professionally and socially, from the moment he strangled Hélène Legotien in 1980, he was already dead, waiting only for the official pronouncement that came a decade later – his death paradoxically brought him back to life. Not only did it bring the eulogies and encomia that should (but perhaps could not) have been uttered during his lifetime: the words of praise and admiration, the tributes both expected and unexpected, which revealed that the silence that had surrounded Althusser was determined by causes external rather than internal to his work, as if the desire to give Althusser his due had only been waiting for the appropriate moment to express itself. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011

DOI: 10.1163/156920611X592427

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Review Articles / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 147–156

Perhaps it could not have been otherwise given the generalised contempt that surrounded his most important texts, Pour Marx and Lire le Capital, texts that had been confined to a historical moment not only past but surpassed, namely the structuralist moment, a moment well-known to be deprived of any theoretical interest. In the English-speaking world, the fact that E.P. Thompson’s The Poverty of Theory, with its portrait of Althusser as both structuralist and Stalinist, preceded Hélène Legotien’s death by little more than a year made it appear prescient. The revelations concerning Althusser’s long history of mental illness gave Thompson’s assertion that much of Althusser was mere ‘nonsense’ a certain credibility, as if the difficulty that many anglophone readers experienced in reading his work was grounded in their objective poverty, rather than any lack of preparation on the readers’ part. Althusser’s death, however, ten years later, marked the time not only of a burial but also of an uncovering: its effects altered forever the narrative of the rise and fall of Althusser’s ‘structural Marxism’ (to cite the title of Ted Benton’s well-known study). Althusser, it turned out, had produced an enormous body of work over a period of more than four decades that he, for various and often-complicated reasons, had never published. It included not only a thesis on Hegel but a number of book-length manuscripts, essays, course-notes, as well as an astonishing number of letters, many touching on philosophical and political themes. Of these, none was more notorious than Althusser’s autobiography, The Future Lasts Forever [L’avenir dure longtemps], which began by describing and then proceeding to (attempt to) explain the death of his wife. The publication of this text in 1992 succeeded in re-opening the ‘case’ of Althusser, although primarily in a psychiatric sense (the Writings on Psychoanalysis published the following year contained lengthy letters to Althusser’s analyst), as if he had only to take his place alongside Dr Schreber or Pierre Rivière. To a lesser extent, however, its publication succeeded in leading readers back to his published œuvre. His brief remarks on philosophy were enough to cast doubt on the received reading of Althusser, and opened the way for the appearance in 1994 of the first volume of the Écrits philosophiques et politiques.1 Of the texts included in the Écrits philosophiques, none proved to be more stimulating or provocative than ‘The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter’,2 a text selected and assembled from a number of fragments by François Matheron. Made up of materials written by Althusser in 1982, it was almost immediately received in the mid-nineties as the announcement of nothing less than a new project: the establishment of an ‘aleatory materialism’. Furthermore, in the same year another posthumous publication appeared, Sur la philosophie, which contained a long, carefully organised interview with the Mexican philosopher Fernanda Navarro, ‘Philosophie et marxisme’, which repeated the themes (sometimes verbatim) of the ‘Underground Current’. Thus, the ‘late Althusser’ was born, an Althusser who, it was argued, had liberated himself from the errors and failures of ‘the early Althusser’ (which significantly was not the Althusser of the forties and fifties, but of the sixties, that is, Althusser after the book on Montesquieu), characterised as a proponent of structuralism, or structural Marxism. It was as if Althusser’s own work was marked by an epistemological break (Toni Negri called it his 1. The two volumes of Althusser’s Écrits philosophiques et politiques have been translated into English as Althusser 1997, Althusser 2003, and Althusser 2006. 2. Althusser 2006, pp. 163–207.


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‘Kehre’) by which he separated himself from his own metaphysical or idealist past. Perhaps such a reading was inevitable, as if the only way to refer to Althusser at all was to dissociate him from himself and declare him innocent of his ‘early’ work. With all of its problems, though, such a reading succeeded in identifying the antagonisms internal to Althusser’s work, even if it could do so only by translating these antagonisms into the language of what Althusser himself called the chronological time of successive theoretical problematics, and thus to a ‘before’ and ‘after’. The weight of this view remains so great that not only has the posthumous publication of texts written before 1975 failed to displace it, but Machiavelli and Us, of which the bulk had been written in 1972–3 (and thus, as Étienne Balibar has pointed out, contemporaneously with the Reply to John Lewis) continues to be regarded as a ‘late’ text. Now, finally, nearly twenty years after Althusser’s death, we have reason to hope that the situation has begun to change. In the English-speaking world, G.M. Goshgarian’s wellresearched prefaces to the English versions of the posthumous publications, as well as William Lewis’s Louis Althusser and the Traditions of French Marxism, meticulously reconstruct the political context and stakes of Althusser’s work, above all, of the sixties and seventies. A revised and updated version of Gregory Elliot’s classic, Althusser: The Detour of Theory, provides an indispensable overview of Althusser’s work as a whole. Nor is the renewed interest in Althusser confined to the US and Britain. A group of French and Spanish studies that I propose to examine here have returned to the ‘early’ Althusser with a clear sense of the incomplete and contradictory character of even the most polished of texts, often insisting on performing nothing less than a symptomatic reading of Althusser himself: Emilio de Ípola’s Althusser, el infinito adios, Pascale Gillot’s Althusser et la psychanalyse, and a collection of essays edited by Jean-Claude Bourdin, Althusser: une lecture de Marx. But perhaps even more significantly, they have returned to the investigations and debates that took place in and around Althusser’s texts before they were suspended and then set aside by the events of 1968 and rendered nearly illegible by the theoretical and political conjuncture that these events produced. Now, many years later, in a very different conjuncture, it appears not only that these investigations and debates have retained their interest, but that they are now endowed with a new significance and relevance. Such a view not only rules out the evolutionary reading of Althusser’s ‘development’, but forces us to confront the irreducible complexity that characterises his œuvre from beginning to end. I will take as my starting-point Emilio de Ípola’s extraordinary work, Althusser, el infinito adios [The Infinite Farewell ]. I say extraordinary because it is, by turns, strange, exhilarating, and surprising. Ípola had been Althusser’s student in 1965, and, while there is an incontestably ‘personal’ quality to the work, there is not a trace of nostalgia. On the contrary, far from yearning for the theoretico-political ‘golden age’ of 1960s Paris, Ípola resumes the debate around the theme, all-but-forgotten in France and still the object of scorn in the anglophone world, of structural causality. He writes as if the participants (above all, Althusser, Jacques-Alain Miller, and Badiou) had reconvened after a night’s rest to resume the discussion, the past forty years nothing more than an instant in the time of theory. In fact, all three of the books under consideration here share the sense, most emphatically argued (or even dramatised) by Ípola, that the debates around the concepts of structural causality, conjuncture and subjection were in a perfectly aleatory fashion suddenly suspended (and never, until now, to be taken up again) by the events of 1968 and a new ‘theoretical conjuncture’, to use Althusser’s phrase, in which, for better or worse,

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other theoretical and political questions, which appeared far more urgent and unavoidable, emerged. From such a perspective, according to which historical succession cannot be confused with progress and that which comes after is not necessarily superior to what came before, the debates that took place within Althusser’s circle neither reached a theoretical impasse nor did they cease for lack of interest or significance. The texts in which they assumed their material existence wandered invisible through the theoretical void until an encounter or series of encounters, as unpredictable as those that rendered them for nearly half-a-century unreadable, endowed them, not only with visibility, but also with a new theoretical power. The legibility of Althusser’s texts and the texts of his students, however, is neither spontaneous nor given. It is not easy to free ourselves from the grid of interpretation that an objective alliance of Althusser’s critics and admirers have succeeded in imposing upon his work. It is for this reason that Ípola proposes a protocol for reading Althusser, a protocol that, far from seeking to identify or reconstruct the coherence and consistency of Althusser’s arguments (Althusser according to the order of his reasons), instead opens itself to the lacunæ, the décalages, the silences, that is, the symptoms, that traverse, according to Althusser himself, even the most apparently rigorous texts: ‘There is no doubt that there exists in Althusser’s œuvre an explicit philosophical and political aim [propuesta], a stated [declarada] project that the majority of his exegetes, for better or worse, have seen as his only contribution. Nevertheless, to the extent we enter without preconceptions into the details of his analysis and into the subtle texture of his writing, we, not without increasing perplexity, discover in it the unexpected presence of certain dissonances, the intermittent but systematic eruption of certain atypical statements, and, on occasion, of certain moments of incoherence in the logic of his argumentation, all of which serve to cast doubt on the univocity of his project.’3 With certain precautions, we can speak of two intertwined but distinct and opposing projects whose disjunctive synthesis, in which distinct projects diverge and then meet in a confrontation, producing a diffraction of meaning across the surfaces of texts, characterises Althusser’s work. But we would be mistaken to regard the ‘subterranean’ project(s) as fullyformed but hidden beneath the stated project as its inverse or its mirror-image, as in the religious conception of exoteric and esoteric textual meanings. It is more accurate to describe the intertwining of these projects as a process of uneven and combined theoretical development, a process that neither ends nor simply ceases at the limit of Althusser’s work, but pursues its unpredictable development through the encounters that constitute the afterlife of Althusser. The underground project, according to Ípola’s argument, emerged as the unthought remnant of his stated project, existing ‘in a sporadic manner, in certain formulæ that Althusser in an allusive and intermittent way let slip in his first writings.’4 Bourdin’s description of Althusser’s own practice of reading will use another formula, which is as applicable to Althusser’s own texts as to those of Marx: ‘The task thus consists of “reading” texts such as Capital with the aim of extracting from them the philosophy that inhabits them in “the practical state” ’.5

3. Ípola 2007, pp. 36–7. 4. Ípola 2007, p. 39. 5. Bourdin (ed.) 2008, p. 195.


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‘Structural causality’, as becomes quickly apparent, is a point of intersection, a crossroads where two concepts simultaneously meet and diverge in Althusser’s work: the concept of conjuncture and the concept of the (interpellated) subject. The first reminds us that Althusser’s primary task was to gather together and think the deferred effects that, insofar as they returned to alter the meaning of Marx’s own texts, constituted his ‘scientific revolution’. As Balibar reminds us, Althusser has been read as a thinker of structure and a thinker of conjuncture, as a ‘structural functionalist’ and as a thinker of indeterminacy, that is, as a thinker of opposing and irreducibly antagonistic poles. His use of the term ‘structure’, especially in the early sixties, together with his antihumanism and antihistoricism, convinced many Marxist readers that he had in fact reasoned himself into an ahistoricism from which there was no way out: E.P. Thompson is the perfect specimen of such a reader. On the other side, his constant recourse to the idea of the conjuncture – an idea that found its way into few commentaries on Marx, which generally sought the deep, not surface structures of history, the site of necessity, as Gramsci suggested in the Modern Prince, not the site of the accidents by which it was resisted or retarded – appeared (to a smaller, and perhaps more discerning, group of readers) almost as a provocation, an attempt to use the language of political practice and the confrontation of forces to disguise his smuggling of foreign philosophies across the borders of official Marxism. Was not his constant reference to Lenin, to the ‘concrete analysis of the concrete situation’ – the ‘soul of Marxism’, and his corresponding contempt for any Marxist ‘religion of history’ understood as an unerring movement towards communism, a way of talking about Machiavelli and perhaps even Spinoza, and therefore a movement away from Marxism, a movement all the more cunning in that it was carried out in the name of a return to Marx? Ípola suggests exactly the opposite: the apparently opposing poles of Althusser’s thought are better understood as attempts to respond to the same theoretico-political problem. Structural causality belongs neither to the early nor to the late Althusser, it is neither on the side of the structure nor of the conjuncture: it is the element in Althusser’s thought which, once understood in the nexus in which it took shape, nullifies these polarities, which can be seen as nothing more than attempts to think the same historical problem from different vantage-points. Here, Pascale Gillot’s careful reconstruction of the place and stakes of the notion of structural causality – especially insofar as it was shaped by the encounter with Lacanian psychoanalysis – is very useful. Althusser was inspired rather than instructed by psychoanalysis, particularly by the notion of ‘metonymic causality’ apparently constructed by Althusser on the basis of Jacques-Alain Miller’s presentation to Althusser’s seminar on psychoanalysis from 1963–4. Citing Balibar’s notes on Miller’s presentation, Gillot illuminates this otherwise-mysterious concept: the manque-à-être (the lack in being) that characterises the subject’s existence in and through the order of language cannot be said to be the ‘cause’ of the desire that simultaneously attempts and fails to fill that lack [manque]. Instead, ‘desire is the metonymy of the lack in being [le désir est le métonymie du manque à être]’. Here, and I move beyond Gillot’s analysis, we can see the way in which Althusser’s increasing interest in and familiarity with Spinoza shaped his ‘construction’ of metonymic causality. Refusing to follow Miller’s rejection of the very notion of cause, he reads metonymy as the action of a cause that does not exist outside of or prior to its effects. In the sense that it is nowhere present except in the effect that it ‘produces’, it is an absent cause. Spinoza, who rejected the notion of the vacuum or the void, whether in the scientific or theological sense, preferred to call such a cause (to be precise, God) an immanent cause,

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perhaps ruling out in advance any recourse to an originary void or nothingness, as, in his way, did Miller. The difference between the absent cause and the immanent cause, so slight as to appear insignificant, would prove decisive to the emergence of ‘aleatory materialism’. But perhaps even more importantly, the concept of structural causality marked Althusser’s attempt to break with the models of emanative or expressive causality whose practical as well as theoretical effects within Marxism had proven so disastrous. The idea or principle of faith that an immanent teleology of the productive forces was realised in the contradiction between the forces of production and the relations of production (or even the contradiction between the economic base and the ideological superstructure) governed the apparently opposing politics of social-democratic evolutionism and ultra-left voluntarism (or in Althusser’s time, the PCF and the Maoism of the Union des Jeunesses Communistes Marxistes-Leninistes (1966–8) and its successor, La Gauche Prolétarienne (1968–73)). This implacable faith in the immanent teleology of history was expressed in such formulas as ‘late capitalism’ or ‘the first stages of the transition to communism’. It was Althusser, above all the ‘structuralist Althusser’, who repeatedly noted Lenin’s insistence, often against not only his own prior arguments but perhaps even against his own instincts, that a political line was not determined by the stages of historical development (capitalism was alwaysalready ‘overripe’), but by the conflictual unity of the conjuncture whose very configuration, whose ‘objective’ alliances and conflicts, often appeared utterly to contradict the ‘immutable’ laws of historical development. In his Introduction to the new French edition of Machiavelli and Us, Balibar makes the very important observation that more than the fragments in which Althusser’s attempt to think an ‘aleatory materialism’ often treated as his ‘final’ word, was realised, the text on Machiavelli represents a sustained attempt, more than a decade long, to examine certain key-problems: ‘the interpretation of Machiavelli constituted for him a privileged site of invention and experimentation, and did not represent an application to a “particular case” ’.6 If indeed Machiavelli was the element in which Althusser, at the risk of falling into the ‘empiricism’ and ‘pluralism’ of which he had been accused following the publication of ‘Contradiction and Overdetermination’ in 1962,7 would pursue a line of thought that began with the notions of over- and underdetermination, it is only here in Machiavelli and Us that he will, as he liked to say, ‘put his cards on the table’. Did there exist, on the one hand, the objective conditions for the realisation of the Italian nation (or the construction of socialism), and, on the other, the merely accidental and epiphenomenal obstacles (whose eventual disappearance is thus guaranteed) to this realisation? Althusser, following Gramsci following Machiavelli, will ask whether a historical necessity (itself the product of the laws of history) that can be ‘deferred’, ‘delayed’, ‘retarded’ for years, decades or centuries, can accurately be called a ‘necessity’ at all. As he famously or infamously argued in ‘Contradiction and Overdetermination’, a historical scheme which consists of necessity and its (ever-growing list of ) ‘exceptions’ must give way to the recognition of the necessity of the exception which thereby ceases to be understood as an exception at all. In speaking of Machiavelli, and therefore at a safe distance from the themes of revolutions betrayed, deferred and abandoned, Althusser can say openly that historical necessity does 6. Althusser and Matheron 2009, p. 14. 7. English translation in Althusser 2005.


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not exist prior to or outside of the conjuncture, which would then be understood as its imperfect or degraded expression. Rather, historical necessity exists in, and only in, its conjunctural realisation. The necessity or cause of the conjuncture is ‘structural’, ‘the structure of the conjuncture’, immanent in or absent from (that is the question) its effects. Thus, conjuncture is not the name of a random or haphazard list of elements, determinations or circumstances; it is instead the codification of multiple relations of force. The ‘system’, as fragile and unstable as a system can be, that these forces, in their very antagonisms, form determines the movements of displacement and condensation which ensure that ‘the solitary hour of the last instance’ never comes.8 Given the interest in the aleatory or conjunctural tendency in Althusser, it is all the more striking that no single work by Althusser receives more attention by these recent studies than ‘Ideologie et appareils idéologique d’état’. This text, extracted from a longer manuscript posthumously published by Jacques Bidet as Sur la reproduction in 1995, has exercised greater influence on more fields of study than any of Althusser’s other works. Indeed, in certain important ways it is profoundly unlike Althusser’s other (published) works: it is, in part, a manual of Marxism-Leninism written in a simplified, not to say simplistic, language and in part a dense and extremely elliptical account (in which, once again, Althusser stages an encounter between Spinoza and Lacan) of the constitution of subjects in a way that completely transforms the very idea of ideology. The co-existence of these two utterly dissimilar parts in a single text has produced the effect, perhaps intended, of obscuring the originality and difficulty of the latter part of the essay and of ensuring that it would be read in the light of the first part: to use the label – or imprecation – applied to the Althusser of the ISAs text in American sociology-textbooks, its ‘structural functionalism’. We must be absolutely clear: this is not a misreading. In fact Althusser’s postponing of any discussion of resistance and struggle to a brief postscript, in which he attempts to deny what he has just done by citing ‘the primacy of class-struggle’, only enforced the separation between the reproduction of capitalist social relations and class-struggle, whose mutual immanence the essay renders unthinkable. As Isabelle Garo notes, in the ISAs text, ‘ideology is situated only on the side of the functions of conservation and reproduction’.9 In fact, it is this very functionalism – the argument that capitalism produces the very ideological apparatuses necessary to its reproduction, the means by which a collective subject pursues the end of its own survival – that secured the essay its prestige. A comparison of the ISAs essay with the parts of Sur la reproduction from which it was taken, however, reveals some surprising facts. For reasons that remain to be explored, Althusser carefully removed passages from the published version that would in any way qualify or complicate the functionalism that most readers have found in the essay, especially those in which he describes the antagonistic ‘by-products [sous-produits]’ that the process of reproduction ‘excretes’. For Ípola, Gillot and several contributors to Althusser: une lecture de Marx (most directly, Garo and Franck Fischbach, but also, if at a certain remove, Jacques Bidet and

8. See Yves Vargas’s ‘L’horreur dialectique (description d’un itinéraire)’ for an account of this tendency in Althusser’s thought, especially as it took shape within and against the notion of the dialectic (Bourdin (ed.) 2008, pp. 147–92). 9. Bourdin (ed.) 2008, p. 54.

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Roberto Nigro),10 all these problems are condensed into the single ‘thesis’: ideology interpellates individuals as subjects. As both Garo and Fischbach point out, this thesis is unprecedented within Marxism for which, at least in its dominant forms, the human subject was a given, and more, an origin that would only belatedly come to be divided, fragmented, lost to itself, in a word, alienated. However ‘complex’ and sophisticated they might be, from Lukács’s theory of reification to the notion of ‘the society of the spectacle’, what might be called ‘theories of the subject’ tended to focus on the deception of an already-constituted subject. Althusser alone, at least in a direct form, posed the question of the constitution of the subject, how the free and equal individuals who are the actual subjects of ‘democratic’ societies, but merely the potential subjects of ‘totalitarian’ régimes (I place these terms in quotation-marks because Althusser’s essay calls these distinctions radically into question), are called into being and made responsible – and punishable – for the actions of which they are the authors and owners. The concept of the interpellated subject, however, cannot be grasped independently of the theses that precede it in Althusser’s argument. To extract it from the context of its theoretical development, and to imagine, as many commentators have, that interpellation is primarily a discursive act or linguistic act in which a Subject calls the subject into being through a speech-act, is to restore Althusser to a dualism of the discursive and the nondiscursive, if not exactly of spirit and matter. In fact, the Lacanian references and allusions in the essay have often served to encourage such readings. The more closely we read the essay, however, the more we can glimpse the outline of Spinoza beneath that of Lacan. It is not simply, or primarily, the notion of interpellation that separates Althusser from previous theories of ideology. More fundamentally, the term ‘ideology’ in the ISAs essay has nothing in common with earlier uses but the name, and the essay itself may have contributed to the declining frequency of the use of ‘ideology’. Ideology suggests a system of ideas which, in the modern period at least, tended to be regarded as false or inadequate (Althusser himself offered a version of such a theory in ‘Marxism and Humanism’ in For Marx). In his 1970 essay on the ISAs, Althusser broke irrevocably with such notions of ideology: ‘ideology has a material existence’, which means that not even ideas have an ‘ideal’ existence, but are always-already realised ‘in an apparatus and its practice or its practices’. Thus, as Garo notes, the phrase ‘ideology represents the imaginary relation of individuals to their real conditions of existence’, often understood as an illusory notion, ‘what individuals imagine’ (i.e., falsely) their relation to reality to be, takes on a radically opposed meaning. The imaginary relation is not only fully material and real, it is inscribed in apparatuses and practices. What is this relation? It is just as Spinoza described in the Appendix to Part I of the Ethics, as well as in the Scholium to Proposition 2, Part III: individuals imagine themselves to be the cause of their actions, they imagine that an act of will moves the body to do the bidding of the mind. But these ‘subjective’ errors are ‘mirrored’ in the objective existence of apparatuses: they are not only regarded as the ‘authors’ of their acts, their authorship is an ever-increasing theoretico-practical network organised around the theme of ‘intention’, which is attributed to and imposed upon them

10. I say this because, in a certain sense, the problems of alienation (Bidet) and anthropology (Nigro), problems that, if we take him at his word, Althusser rejected, can perhaps more accurately be said to have been displaced to the problematic of interpellation.


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and upon their bodies, a fact that Foucault, a perceptive but critical reader of the ISAs essay, would capture in his famous dictum: the soul is the prison of the body. Michel Pêcheux, one of Althusser’s privileged interlocutors in the matter of ideology, and whose important text, Language, Semantics, Ideology [Les vérités de la palice], was published in 1975 in Althusser’s ‘Théorie’ collection, argued that for Althusser the autonomy of the subject is the form of its subjection. We might think of the vagabonds simultaneously ‘set free’ (i.e. expelled and abandoned) and criminalised by the process of primitive accumulation in England described by Marx, the ancestors of today’s ‘illegal immigrants’. Thus, interpellation is no more reducible to speech or discourse than the call that the Apostle Paul heard on the road to Damascus: it is the call, vocatio or κλέτις, already inscribed in the movement of persecution and counter-persecution, of violence and counter-violence (‘it is hard to kick against the pricks’, that is, to resist torture). It is that call by which the police individualise the subject who will be asked ‘to identify himself ’, so as better to be held accountable for his deeds, a call in which speech and armed force, and thus not simply the force of speech, are one and the same thing. Pêcheux took very seriously the charge (notably by one of Althusser’s former students, Jacques Rancière) that Althusser’s emphasis on reproduction at the expense of transformation leaves little room for resistance that is not simply a ruse of capitalist development. Fischbach surveys the two most prominent attempts to imagine resistance to interpellation, those of Judith Butler and Slavoj Žižek, but finds neither satisfying. For Butler, ‘subjectivity is more extensive than the identity of the subject that results from the subjection of ideological interpellation’.11 According to Žižek, subjectivity recovers that negativity in which the symbolic order is grounded in a gesture that affirms its own non-substantiality. Both options, subjectivity as a reserve of possibility and subjectivity-as-negativity tend to the ‘derealisation’ and ‘disincarnation’12 of the subject. In opposition, Fischbach posits that composite body whose very persistence would take the form of resistance to ‘the abstraction and alienation to which ideological interpellation subjects us’.13 It appears, then, that if Althusser once incited us to read Spinoza, that is, really read Spinoza, seeking in the remotest corners of his work the solutions to the pressing problems confronted by the theoretical practice of Marxism, so now Spinoza directs back to Althusser and his contemporaries, casting a brilliant light on passages so often read, but overlooked. To take these recent studies seriously is to see Althusser, not as a ghostly presence hovering at the margins of the world, haunting it like a bad memory, but rather as an indispensable part of the process by which the present may become intelligible to itself, his work in its unevenness and its conflictuality returning upon the present to furrow a hole in its walls, a hole through which something new, a future, may pass. Reviewed by Warren Montag Occidental College [email protected]

11. Bourdin (ed.) 2008, p. 144. 12. Ibid. 13. Bourdin (ed.) 2008, p. 145.

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References Althusser, Louis 1959, Montesquieu, la politique et l’histoire, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. —— 1965, Pour Marx, Paris: Maspero. —— 1973, Réponse à John Lewis, Paris: Maspero. —— 1992, L’avenir dure longtemps, Paris: Stock/IMEC. —— 1993a, Écrits sur la psychanalyse: Freud et Lacan, edited by Olivier Corpet and François Matheron, Paris: Stock/IMEC. —— 1993b [1992], The Future Lasts a Long Time, translated by Richard Veasey, London: Chatto and Windus. —— 1994a, Écrits philosophiques et politiques, two volumes, edited by François Matheron, Paris: Stock/IMEC. —— 1994b, Sur la philosophie, Paris: Éditions Gallimard. —— 1995, Sur la reproduction, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. —— 1996 [1993], Writings on Psychoanalysis: Freud and Lacan, edited by François Matheron, translated by Jeffrey Mehlman, New York: Columbia University Press. —— 1997, The Spectre of Hegel: Early Writings, translated by G.M. Goshgarian, London: Verso. —— 2003, The Humanist Controversy and Other Writings, translated by G.M. Goshgarian, London: Verso. —— 2005 [1969], For Marx, translated by Ben Brewster, London: Verso. —— 2006, Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings 1978–1987, translated by G.M. Goshgarian, London: Verso. —— 2008 [1971], On Ideology, London: Verso. Althusser, Louis, Étienne Balibar, Roger Establet, Pierre Macherey and Jacques Rancière 1965, Lire le Capital, Paris: Maspero. Althusser, Louis and Étienne Balibar 2006 [1970], Reading Capital, translated by Ben Brewster, London: Verso. Althusser, Louis and François Matheron 2009, Machiavel et nous, suivi de ‘Des problèmes qu’il faudra bien appeler d’un autre nom et peut-être politique’/Althusser et la insituabilité de la politique et de ‘la recurrence du vide chez Louis Althusser’, Preface by Étienne Balibar, Paris: Éditions Tallandier. Bourdin, Jean-Claude (ed.) 2008, Althusser: une lecture de Marx, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Elliot, Gregory 2006, Althusser: The Detour of Theory, Second Edition, Historical Materialism Book Series, Leiden: Brill. Gillot, Pascale 2009, Althusser et la psychanalyse, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Ípola, Emilio de 2007, Althusser, el infinito adios, Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno Editores. Lewis, William S. 2005, Louis Althusser and the Traditions of French Marxism, Lanham: Lexington Books. Pêcheux, Michel 1975, Les vérités de la palice: linguistique, sémantique, philosophie, Paris: Maspero. —— 1982 [1975], Language, Semantics and Ideology, translated by H.C. Nagpal, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Spinoza, Baruch 1992 [1677], The Ethics, Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, and Selected Letters, translated by Samuel Shirley, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company. Thompson, Edward Palmer 1978, The Poverty of Theory: or an Orrery of Errors, London: Merlin Press.


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Lenin Reloaded: Towards a Politics of Truth, edited by Sebastian Budgen, Stathis Kouvelakis and Slavoj Žižek, Durham, NC.: Duke University Press, 2007 Abstract This review looks back at Lenin Reloaded: Towards a Politics of Truth, the 2007 collection of essays from Slavoj Žižek, Alain Badiou, Fredric Jameson, Sylvain Lazarus, Terry Eagleton, and others. Taking up the volume’s central questions, it moves through the problems posed explicitly and implicitly by an attempt to think the figure and politics of Lenin today. In so doing, the review takes on the Leninist conception of history and revolution, the position of dialectics as description and as method, the rôle of the partisan, the debate about voluntarism, and the status of the party as historical and contemporary form. Keywords Lenin, dialectics, party, voluntarism, Žižek, Jameson, Badiou

Lenin undead On 25 June 1935, Leon Trotsky dreamed of Lenin. Not Lenin in the past, when he was alive, but Lenin undead in the present, unaware that he had died. And in the dream, Trotsky could not bring himself to remind his comrade of that unfortunate fact. For many on the Left, the figure of Lenin occupies a similar unsettled position: he whose legacy haunts the Marxist tradition, who belongs to another epoch, who stood outside of the ‘natural’ progression of socialist politics, and who should stay dead and buried. For others, these same charges become the very reason to turn back to Lenin, as one who refused to accept the trend-lines of the ‘spontaneous development’ of worker-politics dictated by capitalist ideology. From this perspective, we need a reanimation, not of Lenin the man, or even of Leninist politics per se, but of the Leninist gesture, of the move through this mode of analysis, this mode of conviction, and the consequent capacity for such interventions. Lenin Reloaded: Towards a Politics of Truth,1 the 2007 collection of essays edited by Sebastian Budgen, Stathis Kouvelakis and Slavoj Žižek, aims for just such a reanimation of that which never died: not Lenin the unwelcome reminder of what the Soviet project became, but Lenin the thinker and the partisan. Not the statist doctrine called Leninism, in its Stalinist variation, but a ‘singular politics’ called Lenin. To borrow Fredric Jameson’s phrase from this volume, the book concerns itself with theorising the desire called Lenin from a group of distinct perspectives.2 Composed of seventeen essays, the volume is divided 1. The title cannot but help echo the 2003 film The Matrix Reloaded, an echo that is likely intentional. It is worth recalling that the film is obsessed with repetition and what goes wrong with it as it tells the story of the messianic ‘One’ – like the proletariat, the ‘sum of the flaw of the system’ – who is expected to make the choice of ‘saving humanity’ at the expense of ‘resetting the program’ and having to rebuild the resistance from scratch. What is less obvious, in the context of Lenin, is how it is the One’s choice to ditch humanity for a woman he loves that is the gamechanger, the wrong choice that breaks the ceaseless cycle of failed revolution and moves it forward. 2. It is worth noting here that the series in which this volume appears (SIC, edited by Žižek) self-designates as offering ‘Lacanian interventions’. We need to ask what this Lacanian orientation © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011

DOI: 10.1163/156920611X592418

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into four parts, each of which articulates a particular lens onto the topic: ‘Retrieving Lenin’, ‘Lenin in Philosophy’, ‘War and Imperialism’, and ‘Politics and Its Subject’. The obvious question that lies at the heart of the book is, why Lenin now? What is specific about our historical moment in which this look back would be productive for the Marxist Left? Any provisional answer needs to take stock of previous attempts to think Lenin. The most powerful of these attempts have undoubtedly been those, such as this volume, that venture Lenin as a theoretician of practice and attempt to decouple and reforge this link: as Lenin himself reminds us, revolutionary practice requires advanced theory. In this way, Lenin Reloaded may be thought of as the inheritor of a tradition that would include, among others, Lukács’s Lenin: A Study on the Unity of His Thought (1924),3 C.L.R. James’s Notes on Dialectics: Hegel, Marx, Lenin (1948),4 Althusser’s ‘Lenin and Philosophy’ (1968),5 and Negri’s Thirty-Three Lessons on Lenin (1972–3).6 However, to consider the specificity of Lenin in our moment, and the aggregate position of this collection, is to approach the supposed general acceptance of the foreclosure of revolutionary politics in our day, following the collapse of the revolutionary movements of the 1960s and 1970s and the ascendance of neoliberalism in the 1980s. More particularly, the volume situates itself against the prevailing theoretical accompaniment to this historical closure. In a stance that should be familiar to readers of Žižek, Alain Badiou, and other contributors to the volume, a return to Lenin functions as a counter-blow to the ‘postmodern relativism’ of neoliberal capital and its apologists, especially those on the Left. This counterblow, the editors argue, is particular in its insistence on a ‘politics of Truth’: Breaking out of this deadlock, the reassertion of a politics of Truth today, should, in the first place, take the form of a return to Lenin. But once again, the question arises: Why Lenin, why not simply Marx? Is the proper return not the return to origins proper? (p. 2.) In short, returning to Lenin should not mean returning to a more recent Marx in Bolshevik clothing. The wager is an improper return, constitutively different from a proper return to the origin called Marx. (Therein the specificity of ‘reloading’, which carries simultaneous connotations of a completed project started over again differently, a second attempt at what did not take correctly the first time, and, in a different register, putting more bullets into the gun to finish a battle that needs finishing.) Rethinking Lenin – or the particularity of his historically situated gesture – is, for this volume, different precisely because of how he manifested a total political conviction, in which a certainty of force is undergirded by a certainty of interpretation. Truth, in this Leninist vein, is necessarily partisan truth: ‘Lenin’s wager – today, in our era of postmodern relativism, more actual than ever – is that truth and partisanship, the gesture of taking sides, are not only not mutually exclusive but offers, when it does show itself intermittently in this collection, to a ‘reloading’ of Lenin. However, given the Marxist specificity of this journal, this question will be addressed only when productive. 3. Lukács 1970. 4. James 2005. 5. Althusser 2001. 6. Negri 1977.


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condition each other: the universal truth in a concrete situation can only be articulated from a thoroughly partisan position. Truth is by definition one-sided.’ (p. 3.) Extended further: is it not that truth can only be articulated from a partisan position but rather that the very procedure of truth – particularly a politics of truth – consists in the act of taking a side? This might be the heart of the radical Leninist gesture as sketched here: there is no truth that is not that of becoming-partisan. However, we should note that the use of the word ‘partisan’ and its rôle as a structuring concept here signals a dominant tension that runs through the volume, a tension that might be broadly described as that between a ‘postMaoist Lenin’ and a ‘Trotskyist Lenin’. Crudely put, this makes itself felt in the volume by the recurrent emphasis on the partisan for the former tendency and on the party for the latter, although in both cases the issue is not simply terminological but that of a designated centrality as a theoretical and political category. (Indeed, one of the values of the book is to flesh out another Lenin that does not represent a tradition following his death, but the placement in an antecedent lineage: namely, a ‘Hegelian Lenin’ which cannot be easily situated in either camp.) Such a gap is unmistakable, yet there are few moments of direct confrontation between these positions. This is ultimately a shame, given that in the absence of such line-drawing, certain issues – most notably, what exactly is meant by ‘the party’ today? – remain more opaque than they deserve to be. Taken as a whole, however, we can summarise the guiding questions of Lenin Reloaded as follows: 1. What is the Leninist conception of history? What is the event we call a revolution, if revolution is even to be thought of as ‘evental’ in character? What does it mean to intervene in the course of history when we no longer believe that it has a discernible course, but instead that it is a discontinuous set of conjunctures only sutured together by analysis and practice? 2. Does Leninist analysis detect cracks in the totality of capital, or does it produce them, driving wedges into what seems like an impenetrable surface? What is the link between dialectical reason and a politics grounded in partisan truth (the truth-procedure oriented in terms of antagonism)? What is the particular truth that makes possible the certainty of the Leninist gesture? 3. How do we move from our analyses of the historical conjuncture to the organisation of real bodies and minds that can intervene? Does a reloaded Leninism require the resurgence of the Leninist party? What is the form to be taken – and the form given – by the vanguard that does not ‘stand outside’, if such a concept has any analytical or political utility now?

History and intervention History, the scattered field To address the first set of inquiries that I see Lenin Reloaded articulating, we need a grasp of what, for the authors, a Leninist sense of history looks like and how it conceives of the cohesion and directionality of events (or, more accurately, how it renders fraught the category of event itself ). Daniel Bensaïd’s essay ‘ “Leaps! Leaps! Leaps!” ’ details what we

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might call ‘Leninist political temporality’, as counterposed to the ‘homogeneous and empty’ time of mechanical progress that Lenin detected in Kautsky’s thought. Lenin, in contrast, thought of politics as a time full of struggle, a time of crises and collapses. For him the specificity of politics is expressed in the concept of a revolutionary crisis, which is not the logical continuation of a social movement, but a general crisis of the reciprocal relations between all the classes in society. The crisis is then defined as a national crisis. It acts to lay bare the battle lines, which have been obscured by the mystical phantasmagoria of the commodity. Then alone, and not by virtue of some inevitable historical ripening, can the proletariat be transformed and ‘become what it is’. (p. 150.) There is much here to return to, particularly the ‘laying bare’ of battle-lines so crucial to Lenin’s thinking. For now, however, what is at stake is a fundamental mechanism of how politics happens across time. A revolutionary crisis7 occurs, but this is not the culmination of the slow ramping-up of revolutionary potential. Rather, the untenability of the capitalist system shows itself, rendering visible its insurmountable contradictions (this does not mean, however, that such a system is a weak, tottering enterprise waiting for any militant intervention: it is precisely because it is so flexible that one cannot just ‘wait for the right moment’). Yet, while the root of the crisis is the damned-to-fail motor of capitalism itself, the crisis must become conceived as a national crisis, so as to stitch the general conditions of possibility to a particular historical conjuncture. The political singularity of the crisis, read through a localised sequence of events and actors, serves to ‘lay bare’ the battle-lines, the work of exposure central to the vanguard. Only at this point, when the fundamental antagonism is shown, can the proletariat become what it is. Or, more precisely, the proletariat retroactively becomes what it was, the missing sign that renders thinkable the scattered events gathered under the category of revolution. From a Leninist perspective, then, since the one thing that should be the inevitable outcome of capitalism – the negation of the capitalist project by the class-conscious proletariat – comes about through general crises which may or may not become politically productive, the best we can do is to develop reading practices, detect trend-lines, and gauge what actions refigure and disrupt these patterns. More important, however, is how the Leninist gesture situates itself within the historical field: it is because history fundamentally has no determinate course that we have to intervene so as to direct that absent course. As Alex Callinicos writes in his contribution to Lenin Reloaded, for Lenin, ‘the very unpredictability of history requires that we intervene to help shape it’ (p. 20). Or, in the words of Sylvain Lazarus:

7. To be noted here is the fact that Bensaïd writes of ‘the concept of revolutionary crisis’. To be sure, for Lenin, the chain of actions and contingencies that retroactively become a revolution can never be understood according to the abstract category of revolution. However, an issue worth pursuing in detail elsewhere is what changes if the people involved think of what they are doing as revolutionary, rather than it being designated as such after the fact. For more on this question, consider the pieces by Lazarus, Shandro, and Lih in this volume.


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History is clear (analysis of the war), politics is obscure . . . History and politics are thus out of phase, and we are extremely far from the mechanism of historical materialism and dialectical materialism that Stalin was to theorize and that Althusser paradoxically took over as well. Politics, in this sequence, is in a neverending discussion with history, just as with philosophy, while maintaining disjunctive relations with both. Politics is charged with assuming its own thought, internal to itself. This is the condition for its existence, and it is also this point that requires the disjunctions. (p. 260.) Several of the other essays give a further sense of just how deep this insistence on unpredictability and invention runs. In Lars Lih’s ‘Lenin and the Great Awakening’, he draws forth, via analogy to the evangelical tradition, the rôle that radical conviction plays in the Leninist project. Not only conviction in the correctness of one’s course of action, but also in the transmissibility of that militant will to others. As with a preacher, there is a double condition of faith: you have to act with the certainty of conviction, and you have to believe that the ‘word’ can be spread. There are two transfers of will: from action to discourse (within the militant subject) and from the discourse of the militant subject to the actions of the masses. This, then, raises a hard question when we recall Bensaïd’s description of the temporal framework in which Leninist political consciousness flourishes on a massscale. Can Leninist will be achieved and transmitted without certain cultural and material underpinnings, namely, certain changes in labour-conditions and living standards? This is the crux of what has been called the ‘spontaneist-versus-voluntarist’ debate. Aside from the broader set of thoughts about vanguardism, labour-autonomy, and ideological legacies, this is what the voluntarist position articulates: although we cannot dismiss the ‘organic’ material composition of the working class, ‘consciousness comes from without’, and it is the ‘artificial’ interventions into what appear as the spontaneous developments of consciousness that produce revolutionary discourse. The reference to discourse here is not accidental, drawing particularly from Jean-Jacques Lecercle’s ‘Lenin the Just, or Marxism Unrecycled’, a piece that oddly combines an affective portrait of Lenin with a move toward a Lenin-inflected Marxist philosophy of language. Lecercle offers that, ‘what is suggested here is a political concept of discourse – of discourse as intervention.’ (p. 274.) Returning to the question of Leninist temporality and sense of historical narrative offered by Bensaïd, Callinicos, and Lazarus, we might read Lecercle as pointing elsewhere and asking: if what makes discourse political is its interventionist character, should political be thought of as commensurate with interventionist? The concept of ‘discourse as intervention’ gives traction here, for this is not a ‘discourse of intervention’, a discursive intrusion into a homogeneous field. ‘Discourse as intervention’ means, rather, that there is no course of history into which we intervene, because all singular instances – enunciations, contingencies, and happenings that compose the material of history – have the character, or category-form, of interventions. As such, drawing together Lih and Lecercle indicates that the Leninist stance requires at once the utter conviction of political will and the recognition of the utter messiness of the scene upon which one acts. Étienne Balibar’s compelling ‘The Philosophical Moment in Politics Determined by War: Lenin 1914–16’ is particularly sharp about this messiness of conjunctures, ‘impure revolution’, and the ways in which heterogeneous elements (such as national characters) are recombined in encounters, producing new global scenarios that can scarcely be predicted.

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As he writes: ‘it appears that the war profoundly transformed the very notion of a revolutionary situation. This was no longer a postulate bound up with the idea of a certain “maturity” of capitalism (of which war was the symptom), but rather the result of an analysis of the effects of the war itself on a differentiated global structure, in which the “advanced” and “backward” countries coexisted and interpenetrated.’ (p. 218.) Here, then, is where the general intervention of Lenin Reloaded shows itself most clearly. For, aside from its particular takes on what rethinking Lenin today should look like, it remains a theoretical enterprise, insisting that the desire called Lenin remains, not only a politics of truth, but also, circling back to our earlier framing, an emphasis on the hard work of analysis, of mapping historical situations onto theoretical frameworks. To paraphrase Lenin, advanced politics requires advanced theory. And it is indeed advanced theory that offers the way out of the deadlock, a move from the recognition that we must intervene, but in a field consisting purely of effects, of symptoms of capital that veil their absent cause. Revolution How, then, to think about the revolutionary ‘event’? I want to track through the related arguments of two of the essays, from Fredric Jameson and Sylvain Lazarus, to draw the tenor of this knotty conceptual and practical problem. Jameson’s essay (one of the book’s strongest in its clarity and movement) opens with Trotsky’s previously mentioned dream and Lacan’s reading of it in the seventh Seminar. However, our interest here is in the explicitly dialectical core Jameson detects, both in Lenin’s thought and our attempt to think it. Lenin, Jameson offers, presents a paradox for us. On one hand, Lenin remains remarkable in the totalising optic of his politics, in the way in which ‘everything is political’ for him. However, Marxism is, as an analytic practice and horizon onto the world, a priority of economics over the political, reading state and legal forms as consequent symptoms of the fundamental economic antagonism. Is returning to the Leninist encounter with capitalism a betrayal of the core of historical-materialist analysis? For Jameson, this apparent deadlock is the dialectical centre of ‘reloaded’ Leninism: revolution is the third term, not just in thought, but as a temporal instance, when politics and economics become indistinguishable. Of more importance is the other dialectical two, event and process, whose slippage produces the category of revolution. Revolution is neither the utterly incommensurable event which undoes the symbolic and rational order that it disrupts, nor is it just another point in a continual augmentation of the political awareness of the working class. It is the ‘event-as-process’ and ‘process-as-event’, the moment that, in our earlier terms, is both an intervention and a coming-into-being of a historical lens through which we can recognise the force of that intervention. We are clearly far from the Engelsian definition of revolution as the act where one part of a population imposes its will upon the other part by violent means.8 8. However, in State and Revolution, this is the basic definition that Lenin holds to (Lenin 1970, p. 74), and it is perhaps symptomatic of our historical moment that the volume’s authors do not appear to aim to ‘reload’ this aspect of Lenin. To be sure, Žižek and Badiou in particular maintain a conviction in the importance of this more ‘unpleasant’ side of Leninism. However, in this volume, the relation between a politics of truth and the violence (possibly) required to bring such a politics into being remains largely obscure.


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Lazarus, by contrast, refuses the general dialectical function of ‘revolution’, restricting it to a particular political ‘sequence’ in which it designated the constitutive political-subjective stance of the period (the French Revolution and its spectres). The notion of ‘revolution’ has been captured by a historicist sequence of politics, a sequence most prominent now in its statist articulation. However, this is only a facet of the larger narrative: ‘seen from today, the capture of revolution by historicism is only one of the elements and symptoms of a far more fundamental capture, which is that of politics by the state’ (p. 263). Consequently, Lazarus wants to ‘remove from October the description of revolution, to give it back its originality and its unprecedented political power – that of being the invention of modern politics’ (p. 264). However, what is the fundamental problem with the ‘historicist’ conception of politics? It is precisely around the conception of the revolutionary event that Lazarus detects the lineage that must be cast aside, for the historicist vision thinks of politics only in terms of great events concerning the limits of forms of power, of which revolution is the ultimate ‘paroxysmic’ event articulating the impossible, unthinkable end of the state. At this point, ‘[p]olitics then belongs to the order of the event and not to that of thought’ (p. 262). How, if it is possible, to square this with Jameson’s reflections on event, process, and revolution? The event, for Lazarus, can only be recognised by the historicist/statist model in exteriority: it is a ‘break of order in the social mechanism’, yet ‘there can never be an idea of singularity’ (pp. 264–5). It is, rather, an ‘order of before and after’, as if the thinkability of the political remains constant while its material configurations are altered. Against this, Lazarus aims for the event in interiority, ‘when it is the specific material that gives rise to identification, the study of deployment and cessation’ (p. 265). To parse this out: against a model – a prior political ‘sequence’ – that legitimates or delegitimates the event according to its conditions of readability, trying to think the event in interiority is a study of ‘deployment and cessation’, of the intervention into a field that is no longer recognisable. For Jameson, however, this study of deployment and cessation is precisely revolution, when the event ruptures a political sequence as singularity, yet is dialectically folded back as part of a process, as a designated point in a narrative that could not be recognised previously. We might ask, what does it mean to guard the word ‘revolution’? Lazarus wishes for a politics in thought, an active emptying-out of the holdovers misused by the historiciststatist conception, while Jameson sees it as a still-necessary suturing-point for a Leninistdialectical conception of politics across time. This is a longer, harder debate that needs to be continued, as Lenin himself was deeply attentive to the importance of ‘naming’.9 For now, the issue becomes: no matter what we call it, the revolutionary event remains the necessary horizon of Leninist thought. So, out of this field of messy conjunctures, phantomsequences that may or may not emerge, and scattered interventions, what grounds a politics of truth and points it toward that horizon? The answer provided in this volume is two-fold: a certain mode of dialectical thought and a particular approach to, and mobilisation of, class-antagonism.

9. Consider, for example, Lenin’s writings on slogans (Lenin 1974) and his call to abandon the name of social democracy when it became apparent that it was emptied of its disruptive specificity (Lenin 1965, pp. 126–42).

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Dialectics and antagonism Turn and turn again As mentioned previously, Lenin Reloaded is best read, not only as a timely optic onto the possibilities of the Leninist gesture, but also as an insistence on the political urgency of ‘advanced theory’. This manifests itself in the volume in several incarnations: the Lacanianinspired thought of Žižek, Badiou and Jameson, the post-operaismo, Spinozist work of Negri on immaterial labour and the general intellect, and the philosophical-political texts (to be distinguished from ‘political philosophy’) of Balibar and Lazarus. Yet, at the literal centre of the volume, rests a set of four inquiries, from Savas MichaelMatsas, Kevin B. Anderson, Daniel Bensaïd, and Kouvelakis, into Lenin’s notebooks on his reading of Hegel in 1914, and his explicit confrontation with dialectical reason that exceeded his 1909 Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. Kouvelakis’s expansive and subtle essay, ‘Lenin as Reader of Hegel: Hypotheses for a Reading of Lenin’s Notebooks on Hegel’s The Science of Logic’, provides a lucid sense of the historical particularity of why Lenin, at the outbreak of the First World-War, turned to an intensive reading of The Science of Logic. As Kouvelakis argues, in the context of the modernised innovations of this historical catastrophe, Lenin’s return to Hegel is an attempt to read Hegel as a materialist, not by turning to the more explicitly political writings, but by a return, against the Second International’s devalorisation of Hegel, to his most abstract and idealist text and the one in which the Marxian conception of dialectics via ‘leaps’ is most present. For Lenin, the philosophical consequences of this were a stress on the dialectical as the immanent selfmovement of things grasped by thought, the undoing of any stress on simple evolution or flux, and, most critically, that the grasping of self-movement as a transformative action is revolutionary praxis. Taken in dialectical combination with the material particularity of his collaged notebooks, Lenin moves toward a true ‘materialist reversal’ of Hegel, transforming the interest in the subjective logic into an assertion of the primacy of practice. However, rather than dig heavily into the readings of the notebooks offered in Lenin Reloaded, I want to follow the crucial line of thinking proposed by Kouvelakis at the end of his piece, namely that, ‘the new position that Lenin attained with his reading of Hegel is to be sought nowhere else than in his political and theoretical intervention in the years that followed the First World War’ (p. 194). In other words, what is the particularity, not of Lenin’s reading of Hegel, but of ‘Leninist dialectics’ themselves?10 10. Given this shift of emphasis pushed by Kouvelakis, I should note that I find the section on ‘Lenin in Philosophy’ to be the weakest of the volume, not on the grounds of their scholarly value, but in terms of the desire for a ‘reloaded’ Lenin proposed by the volume. This is, to be sure, a matter of contention and preference, though two comments are in order regarding my qualification of these texts. First, although Lenin’s 1914 reflections on Hegel certainly constitute an advance in his thinking, Lenin, at the end of the day, is not a highly original or productive reader of Hegel. The question that Balibar and others raise – why Lenin turned to metaphysical Hegel’s Logic in the moment of international war – is significant, but this has more to do with grasping the trajectory of his thought than with how he is to be refigured for our times. Put bluntly, I do not find that the importance of a reloaded Lenin has much to do with his relation to Hegel. This leads to the second point: if there is something in Lenin, in our ‘improper return’ to him as a lost moment within the Marxist-theoretical tradition, it is not to be found in what


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What might the specificity of Leninist dialectical theory look like? Savas Michael-Matsas notes, in his essay ‘Lenin and the Path of Dialectics’, that Lenin distinguishes between a motion without repetition, without a return to the point of departure, and dialectical motion, ‘motion precisely with a return to the point of departure’ (pp. 106–7). However, this depiction of the Leninist motion needs to be clarified. For, in one sense, the point of departure never remains still: the historical conjuncture is always shifting, and our point of departure may become unrecognisable, undesirable, recuperated by bourgeois or reformist logic and unusable for our project. Yet, in another sense, the issue is not just that we must return to a point of departure, but to the same point of departure, to the basic social contradiction that is the incessant motor of capitalism. In this way, analysis is required to parse out what is and what is not relevant, to make sure that we can detect how this constant contradiction manifests itself in unforeseen ways. These ‘returns’ to the point of departure, Michael-Matsas offers, are Knottenpunkte, or nodal-points, turnings of the spiral that, in Hegelian logic, provide the basic form of the fundamental dialectic of thought toward the absolute. Thought passes through a position, through its negation, and carries the traces of that motion back to its earlier position. These positions are the Knottenpunkte, not the static first position but the first position turned, rendered strange by the thought of its negation. We need to ask, however: does this describe the fundamental Leninist conception of dialectical thought? If we consider the notes on Hegel, the essays here support this conception. But, if we consider Lenin’s political and historical writings, the answer would be no. The point is that, unlike a Hegelian dialectic, which could not fully grasp the world-to-be of capitalism, Lenin’s dialectic – in the practice of his historical and situation-analytical writings, rather than his notes on Hegel – does not return to the point of origin in this sense of passing through positions, and does not ‘move up the spiral’ by returning to origins. Why do I claim this? After all, many of the authors of Lenin Reloaded stress, quite rightly, that one of the vital strengths of the Leninist gesture is its ability to re-evaluate, to circle back upon itself to its ‘point of departure’, and to grasp how its analytical mode must never remain constant. However, Lenin remains most powerfully for us today, not a thinker of the horizons of thought qua thought, but of the horizons of thought and action in historically specific organisations of global capitalism. And the specificity of that organisation in which Lenin struggled and wrote is the logic of an uncanny, stalled dialectic that goes nowhere without the conscious intervention of an organisation, the revolutionary party. Splitting images As such, it is not a ‘choice’ to be voluntarist, but rather the necessary conclusion for a Leninist conception of capitalism, the ‘main and basic fact’ of which is ‘the cleavage of

he did with Hegelian metaphysics. It is, rather, to be found in the partisanship of his truth and the conception of the ‘Two’ that underpins this. As such, dialectics are of serious concern here, but I want to argue that we should seek his dialectical thought, not in his notes on Hegel, but in his fundamental approach to the circuits and mechanisms of capitalism and the social contradictions thereby brought into being. The value of the Lenin-avec-Hegel section is that it raises this tension powerfully and helps us to think through this gap.

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society into irreconcilably antagonistic classes.’11 For this splitting is at once the necessary precondition for the production of capital and the impossibility of a dialectical unfolding of socialism without active intervention. It is at once the constant motor of capital and that which is veiled. To speak paradoxically, it is hidden out in the open. So, what does this mean for the Leninist gesture and its conception of how it intervenes in the world? Its specificity lies in its insistence that the capitalist totality is, contrary to its projected image, an open totality. As Michael-Matsas puts it: ‘Lenin’s approach to dialectics does not have any closed totality as a point of departure but the “splitting of a single whole” and the discovery of its contradictory tendencies and aspects. Only through this penetration in the interior of the object is the latter revealed as an open totality.’ (p. 116.) The vital point in this schematic is that against the ‘vulgar anti-Leninists’ – who claim Leninist voluntarism is a forcing of radical will against the ‘natural order’ of the working class’s spontaneous development – the contradictions were already there, and the act of penetrating, the analysis of the conditions and directions of its history, is not the act of hammering away at a whole, but of exposure, of revealing the openness and splitness of this totality. If Lenin is a dialectical thinker, it is not because he understands the capitalist world as dialectical. Rather, this volume suggests, it is precisely because the capitalist world lacks internaldialectical movement – the development of the productive forces and social relations do not necessarily engender the forces of their negation – that we need dialectical analysis and action to interrupt it. That said, I want to argue, through consideration of Badiou’s significant contribution to the volume, ‘One Divides Itself into Two’, that what remains striking and potent in the Leninist gesture, as it is theorised in this collection, is its recognition that, while conjunctural analysis demands the defamiliarising capacity of dialectical thought, the result of that thought is a call to non-dialectical action, at least insofar as we think of dialectics as involving an internal negation. In an argument familiar to readers of his 2005 book The Century, Badiou claims that we must think the ‘century’ – from 1917 to the end of the 1970s – as the century thinks itself: ‘Its subjective determination is Leninist. It is the passion of the real, of what is immediately practicable, here and now’ (p. 9). What exactly is meant by the ‘real’ here? It remains rather slippery, as Badiou does not fully specify the degree to which its Lacanian echoes should be followed. However, to locate it within a properly Leninist (and productive) register, Žižek’s comments in his polemical essay, ‘A Leninist Gesture Today: Against the Populist Temptation’, give vital clarification. Following a discussion of real abstractions and of capital as a structuring logic, Žižek writes: ‘Here we encounter the Lacanian difference between reality and the Real: “reality” is the social reality of the actual people involved in interaction and in the productive processes, while the Real is the inexorable “abstract” spectral logic of capital that determines what goes on in social reality.’ (p. 90.)12 Clearly, the Leninist passion for the real is neither a passion for the social reality of capitalist life nor its spectral architecture.13 11. Lenin 1970, p. 11. 12. To put this in other terms: the symbolic order of capitalism – its determined flows of capital and dictated modes of subjectivity, all the codes of being that undergird ‘social reality’ – overlays, yet is threatened by, the uncanny drive of capital (its invisible hand, so to speak), the Real of anti-subjectivity that is utterly incompatible with the ideology of free choice as the fundamental mechanism of competition and market-trends. 13. If anything, Lenin urges the vanguard to become a sort of counter-spectre, a structuring


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It is, instead, a passion for modes of praxis – forms of being-in-the-world – that are materially quite possible, particularly with the technological advances of the industrial revolution, but that are politically unthinkable under capitalism. The ‘passion for the real’ is the passion to stand outside of the totality of capitalism and to forcefully decouple the ‘here and now’, itself a horizon of what could be, from this totality.14 Crucially, this work insists that, despite its variations, when the symptoms are aligned correctly, we see in the totality the same form as always, the tension between the non-dialectical ‘Two’ and the background from which it emerges, capitalism’s fantasy of the unified ‘One’. Hence the title of Badiou’s piece and its central move in determining the ‘subjective determination’ of the century: The century is a figure of non-dialectical juxtaposition of the Two and the One. The question here is to know what balance sheet the century draws of dialectical thinking. The driving element for the victorious outcome, is it the antagonism itself or the desire for the One? (p. 10.) In the ‘century’ that Lenin inaugurated, the world is comprehended according to a political optic that divides the world into an irreconcilable ‘Two’, an opposition that cannot be ‘talked through’ or ameliorated. It is the final conflict of a historical era coming to a head, manifested in the communist vision of the war between classes and the fascist version as that between opposed nation-races. However, although the ‘Two’ is the figure of the century, it is so only in its attempted overcoming, for, as the passion for the real, it is the animation toward the ‘One’. Where Badiou’s piece moves from this observation, however, is the real site of his thinking in Lenin Reloaded, as it cuts to the heart of Leninist ‘dialectics’. For the question of whether it is the antagonism itself or the desire for the ‘One’ that compels the conviction of final confrontation is, at its basis, a question of what dialectical model we use. In the terms in which this debate was fought in China in 1965: ‘This struggle opposes those who think that the essence of dialectics is the genesis of the antagonism and that the just formula is “One divides itself into two”; and those who estimate that the essence of dialectics is the synthesis of the contradictory notions and that consequently the correct formula is “Two unite into one.” . . . Is it the desire to divide, to wage war – or is it the desire for fusion, for unity, for peace?’ (pp. 10–11.) For Lenin, the desire is obviously the former, to divide, to wage war. However, in asserting this, we need to ask: what is the specificity of this antagonism, what are its consequences, and how does it orient political action? The specificity is that although the capitalist totality thinks itself as – and defends its historical perpetuation according to the logic of – a ‘One’, it is fundamentally split. It is constituted along the mechanisms of

abstraction capable of reshaping the matter currently moved by capital. As he writes in What Is to Be Done?, ‘what else is the function of Social-Democracy if not to be a “spirit,” not only hovering over the spontaneous movement, but also raising this movement to the level of “its program”?’ (Lenin 1973, p. 63). 14. To flesh out the Lacanian schematic hinted at by Badiou and Žižek, we might think of the totality of capital (its subjective formation in total) as the intersections and contradictions of the following: its Real (spectral market-logic), its Imaginary (the libidinal attachments to commodities and social phenomena), and its Symbolic (the consequent illusions of selfdetermination and rational choice).

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its non-dialectical ‘Two’, the opposition between workers and capitalists that is the tangible manifestation of the broader logic of antagonism between subjects and capital. Therefore, to claim the necessity of ‘One divides itself into two’ is to say that the functional contradictions of capital lead to the division of itself, always-already divided. This is the crucial lesson Žižek draws out in his rejection of understanding Leninist communism as populist, in Laclau’s sense: ‘Against the “populization” of Communism, one should remain faithful to the Leninist conception of politics as the art of intervening in the conjunctures that are themselves posited as specific modes of concentration of the “main” contradiction (antagonism). It is this persisting reference to the “main” contradiction that distinguishes the truly “radical” politics from all populisms.’ (p. 83.) Reading this alongside Badiou’s text, the work of revolutionary consciousness cannot be the antithesis that the annihilative passion forges itself as (the destructive embodiment of the antagonism itself ), but something else, a horizon toward a third that escapes either the unary phantasm of the ‘One’ or the terroristic deadlock of the ‘Two’. Badiou offers a version of the ‘subtractive’ passion for the real; of interest, here, however, is how the other writers in the volume conceive of the Leninist strategy, that of the vanguard-party and the practical work of organisation that makes an escape from this deadlock possible.

Vanguard and party To touch on ‘organisation’, we should ask why this doubled question of enmity and nonspontaneous consciousness remains so important for the Leninist conception of politics, and what the concrete apparatus of the Leninist gesture – the ‘partisan’ vanguard and the party-form – means for radical politics today. The objections are familiar: the categories of bourgeois and proletariat no longer apply to a globalised market of precarious life, an insistence on political enmities leads to a validation of political terror, and the time of the ‘Two’ is over. However, we know better. To be sure, we have lost this fundamental division, but in ideology, not economic reality. We should insist that this is exactly the reason why the Leninist work of exposure and splitting is necessary more than ever today. But what does it mean to insist on partisan truth, as the Introduction stresses, on this politics of vigilant antagonism and declaring enemies? This is, after all, the core of the vanguard: not their status as ‘intelligentsia’ (as shown by Eagleton and Shandro), but as professional partisans who specialise in clarifying messy conjunctures so as to let the proletariat-to-be see who the real enemies are. As such, it is a misreading of the Leninist project to condemn it for too-rigidly designating enemies, fetishising antagonism, and subsuming all to a binary division. For, as Lenin writes in What Is to Be Done?: ‘Since there can be no talk of an independent ideology being developed by the masses of the workers in the process of their movement the only choice is: either bourgeois or socialist ideology. There is no middle course (for humanity has not created a ‘third’ ideology, and, moreover, in a society torn by class antagonisms there can never be a non-class or above-class ideology).’15 We want to insist on such a rigid division (‘either bourgeois or socialist ideology’), but not because conjunctures, cultural objects, and political decisions are cleanly bourgeois or proletarian. It is precisely the opposite: it is because all objects of analysis are overdetermined 15. Lenin 1973, p. 82.


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by ideological cross-currents – because such divisive terms perhaps do not obtain – that we need the hard work of parsing out these two tendencies through this political optic, to insist that they remain the basic building-blocks of ideology. This is, of course, the work of the ‘conscious vanguard’, who are, in Alan Shandro’s words, ‘called upon both to foster the spontaneous working-class movement and to combat it’ (p. 309). In his piece, ‘Lenin and Hegemony: The Soviets, the Working Class, and the Party in the Revolution of 1905’, Shandro sums up, with admirable clarity, the critical basis for Lenin’s ‘anti-spontaneity’: ‘Lenin analyzes the spontaneous movement as the movement of the working class, not simply as it is determined by the relations of production, but also as it is subjected to the influence of the ideological apparatuses of the bourgeoisie . . .’ (p. 310.) The absolutely vital point here is that countering the spontaneous movement of the working class is neither a symptom of élitism nor an over-valorisation of ‘trained’ intelligentsia. For ‘what is thus subject to this domination is not the working class as such but the spontaneous unfolding of its movement, that is, the working-class movement considered in abstraction from its revolutionary socialist vanguard, from those intellectuals and workers whose political activity is informed by Marxist theory and is, in this sense, conscious.’ (p. 310.) If, as Lenin urges, there is no ‘middle-path’, and the political conjuncture is a composite of bourgeois and socialist ideology, this must extend to the ‘spontaneous’ movement of the working class. The very conception of becoming-proletariat is constricted and directed by the dictates of bourgeois ideology as long as we accept our subject-position as somehow authentic, as a product capable of vaunting the system. Such a view should remain as unacceptable to us as it was to Lenin in his critiques of ‘party-traitors’. For it is at heart a question of the persistence of political form and of the ideological stains that persist beyond their utility or welcome, even when we think that we have cast aside a past tradition. The proletariat, if conceived as the figure of the self-developing internal negation, tracks out the categories of politics allowed by the bourgeois state: it is the extension of how the bourgeois state thinks itself, not a supersession of the political architecture of capitalism. But what of the ‘form’ of the Leninist project, the party? It is a question raised across Lenin Reloaded, but the general consensus can be paraphrased as such: the Leninist vanguard, yes, the Leninist party, no. (Regarding the party-issue, there are notable exceptions to which we shall return.) Those who cringe at the thought of an intellectual vanguard are unlikely to be interested in Lenin Reloaded, as it is a book, without question, of ‘theoretical’ texts by recognised figures of the ‘intelligentsia’. And the claim that vanguardism is simply veiled élitism is patently absurd, as Eagleton demonstrates in his witty and sharp text included here. What remains harder to confront is the form to be adopted by the vanguard: is it still the party? The general tenor of argument regarding the party in Lenin Reloaded is that, while we have lost the organisational force rendered possible by the party, we have to accept its consignment to that specific dustbin of history containing avant-garde forms transformed into mechanisms for the maintenance of capitalist hegemony. My use of ‘avant-garde’ is not accidental, as Eagleton raises this in his discussion of State and Revolution, a text that is ‘audaciously avant-garde . . . not only in the sense of being poised at a political cutting-edge, but in the more technical sense of promoting the politics of form’ (p. 56).16 This is to say: 16. As Eagleton writes of the Dublin Post Office situation in 1916 (and of the mobile, conjunctural form of the vanguard ): ‘They were a vanguard because of their relational situation – because,

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the vanguard must be radical, not only in their analysis and action, but also in the form of their politics and the politics of the form they adopt. It is for this reason that adopting the crystallised shape of the ‘Leninist party’ cannot be our strategy now: not because it is moreor-less élitist, but because the codes and arrangements of capital have been conditioned to ward it off. However, one should not ignore the useful counter-balance that Alex Callinicos’s essay, ‘Leninism in the Twenty-first Century? Lenin, Weber, and the Politics of Responsibility’, gives to the more dominantly ‘Žižekian’ position of the Lenin at hand here. Following immediately after Badiou’s piece, it serves also to delineate that wider split mentioned earlier, between a post-Maoist Leninism and a Trotskyist one which Callinicos’s piece exemplifies. The general thrust of the piece is a necessary question about the consequences, in terms of strategy and of outcomes, of a decisionism that valorises the conviction to follow through on the revolutionary ‘event’, take full responsibility for the consequences of one’s actions, and leave behind the sphere of liberal-universal ethics that limits the range of revolutionary practice. Broadly, we might divide the argument into three moves. First, it raises a disagreement with Žižek, via an analysis of how his opposition between a politics of responsibility and a liberal inconsequential politics maps onto Weber’s distinction between an ‘ethics of conviction’ and an ‘ethics of responsibility’.17 Second, it follows from its critique of the Lenin he sees valorised by Žižek to venture a version of Leninist thought he sees as more correct, tempered, and important as a political legacy. This version focuses on the ‘rational kernel of decisionism’ (‘that no theory can unambiguously entail or uniquely determine a course of political action’) and the fact that, without appeal to universal normative principles (such as those of the left-liberals denounced by Žižek), decisionism can devolve into a focus on the intentions behind the act (p. 28). Moreover, given that the consequences on which Žižek focuses are ‘less the future outcome that might justify our actions in the present than the means necessary to achieve this outcome’ (p. 29), Callinicos worries that this focus on intention (and on having the conviction to do ‘what needs to be done’) excuses itself from a more genuine responsibility to the type of disastrous outcomes that may be brought about. Disavowing a universal-ethical framework for the brakes it can put on partisan activity, it eschews moderation and, potentially, the rôle of reason and analysis.18 As such, unlike a Weberian decisionism in which reason ‘can only play at best an instrumental role, identifying the most effective means for achieving ends in whose selection it has played no part’ (p. 23), Callinicos sees in Lenin (and in Trotsky) a movement from the key-recognitions of ‘the complexity and unpredictability of history’ and ‘the necessity of political intervention’ to a moderated decisionism that requires ‘careful analysis’ and practical theory. In this way, like the revolutionary cultural avant-gardes in contrast with the modernist coteries, they saw themselves not as a timeless elite but as the shock troops or front line of a mass movement. There can be no vanguard in and for itself, as coteries are by definition in and for themselves.’ (p. 49.) 17. Here, it is worth noting that the specificity of ‘foreseeable’ consequences is of more importance than Callinicos appears to grant it: one of the key-points of Žižek’s position is the conviction to accept also the consequences that could not be foreseen. 18. In fairness to the post-Maoist and Žižekian lines of thought, we should be quite clear of the gap between a ‘disavowal of reason’ (which it has never advocated) and a ‘disavowal of a universal-ethical framework’ (which it indeed often advocates).


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Lenin becomes one of Weber’s rare breed of Gesamtpersönlichkeit, the ‘total personality’ capable of crossing the gulf between the two opposing ethical modes. Lastly, Callinicos calls for both the primacy of political struggle, organisation, and a return to a serious consideration of the socialist ‘party’ as a structure for articulating a range of grievances and needs. Of the final calls he makes (the first being the importance of strategic analysis of capitalism), the last two push toward a continued belief in the partyform: the specificity and centrality of politics and a continued belief in the weakest link (p. 37). Both of these indicate ‘the necessity of political organization’ and, more specifically for Callinicos, the need for ‘a socialist political organization that generalizes and gives focus to all the myriad grievances produced by capitalist society’ (p. 38). Given his other writings, we may know well that ‘socialist political organization’ here does mean ‘socialist party’. But, taken on its on terms, in this essay, no such move is explicitly made. As such, in the conclusion of Callinicos’s piece, we can detect a tendency that runs throughout the volume, particularly visible in those essays that tend to focus more favourably on contemporary attempts to form mass-socialist or communist parties while still acknowledging the ‘postSeattle’ world of organising. To be sure, there are limits of space in a collected volume such as this one, and its tone is generally analytic rather than prescriptive. Moreover, I am not implying that the absence in these essays of fleshed-out justification for a continued faith in, return to, or revision of the ‘party-form’ implies that such a justification is impossible. However, I would contend that such an attempt to broaden its meaning, either to fold in perspectives originally hostile to it, or to claim it is still ‘up with the times’ despite the massive structural changes acknowledged by these authors, belies a more genuine problem. In the immediate context of this volume, one has to ask: by ‘a socialist political organisation’, do we still mean ‘the party’? Whether the answer is yes or no, the dodged direct address of this indicates both a reticence to fully associate with a term and concept whose legacy is less than spotless, and an unwillingness – or an incapacity – to leave behind a category of organisation and political thinking around which so much of the twentieth century took shape. Such a broadening of the meaning of ‘party’ is particularly evident in Bensaïd’s piece, which, in addition to detailing the specificity of Leninist political temporality, also defends the continued relevance of the party-form, particularly against charges of the ‘undemocratic’ nature of the party. As he writes, ‘a certain degree of centralization, far from being opposed to democracy, is the essential condition for it to exist – because the delimitation of the party is a means of resisting the decomposing effects of the dominant ideology, and also of aiming at a certain equality between members, counter to the inequalities that are inevitably generated by social relations and the division of labor.’ (p. 161.) This is at once true and of real significance, and I think one would be hard-pressed to find any on the Left now, including anarchists and others opposed to the party-form as such, who would disavow the necessity for political formations to delimit themselves against dominant ideology and to produce, in their own organisation, a mode of relation more egalitarian than the hierarchies of labour. However, it is when Bensaïd turns to criticise those who want ‘a politics without parties’ that his argument falters: ‘A politics without parties (whatever name – movement, organization, league, party – that they are given) ends up in most cases as a politics without politics’ (pp. 161–2). Barring the petty celebration of that ‘politics without politics’ by some of the very targets of this criticism, it is clear that this is indeed usually the case. But what Bensaïd poses against this ‘politics without politics’ is far from the particularity of the

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Leninist party. Rather, we have a double move that understands the distinction between ‘movement, organization, league, party’ to be largely terminological and, simultaneously, that folds these other forms in under the general framework of parties. In short, this collapses the specificity of, and justification for, ‘the party’, rendering it unclear as to what exactly distinguishes it and makes the development of it, as opposed to other modes of collective political practice, the task for the present. Politics without parties may indeed be politics without politics, but this is parties without the party. And, at this point, we need to ask seriously what is gained, that could not be otherwise, by continuing to think about, and give shape to, our modes of organisation under the sign of the party. Interestingly, in one of the more striking passages of the volume, Bensaïd points in a distinctly different direction, one which celebrates the indeterminacy of political formation, not as a sign of weakness, but as the basic condition for, and expression of, an immanent and contagious communism: For Lenin, everything leads to the conception of politics as the invasion whereby that which was absent becomes present: the division into classes is certainly, in the last resort, the most profound basis for political groupings, but this last resort is established only by political struggle. Thus, communism literally erupts from all points of social life: decidedly it blossoms everywhere. If one of the outlets is blocked with particular care, then the contagion will find another, sometimes the most unexpected. That is why we cannot know which spark will ignite the fire. (p. 153.) Without question, the political struggle of this ‘last resort’ does not happen without organisation. However, one of the crucial and constant projects for Marxist analysis and struggle is to recognise which outlets are blocked with particular care, which turning-points are stuck and which openings have closed over. We cannot know which spark will ignite the fire, but we have to know what cannot catch. Reading between the lines of this volume, at least, ‘the party’ begins to look like one of these potentially wet matches, dampened all the more by the attempt to make of it many things it was not. A final question to follow this: has the economic ‘base’ changed so drastically that these Leninist tactics, reversals, and theories have become outmoded? Will the reloading of Lenin resemble him only in name, a hollow echo of an evental rupture in our century? Two essays confront this shifting ground directly in order to approach the particularity of our historical moment. In ‘From Imperialism to Globalization’, Georges Labica asks if the stage of capitalism Lenin analysed as ‘imperialism’, a new superstructural development of capitalism, has been superseded by this set of phenomena we call ‘globalisation’. For Labica, the answer is a resounding no: we have witnessed merely mutations of the fundamental imperialist world-order, and globalisation – in the true sense of a socialist international – remains a real horizon for our politics. In Negri’s ‘What to Do Today with What Is to Be Done?, or Rather: The Body of the General Intellect’, which rereads Lenin through the framework of biopolitics and immaterial labour, he grapples with the shifting ground on which we can advance from modes of production – and the consequent forms of general intellect – to modes of subversive subjectivity. Regardless of the degree to which claims about the ‘immateriality’ of contemporary labour may or may not be overextended, the fact remains that the political


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force of the figure of abstract labour – as a strong, material, industrial proletariat – has vanished along with the party capable of mobilising that figure. What remains? A biopolitical multitude hemmed in by lost political legacies? A sea of precarious life, of informal labour, over which hovers the autogeneration and speculation of finance? There was a time, according to Negri, when it was indeed the party: ‘The party was the engine that powered the production of subjectivity – or rather, it was the utensil employed to produce subversive subjectivity’ (p. 301). The point of the party was not the organisation of subjects, but of the production of a body, the constituted body of the proletariat, which alone is capable of fully recognising and articulating ‘the life of the masses and the entire articulation of their needs as a physical, corporeal potential that alone can ground and give content to the abstract violence of revolutionary intellectuality’ (p. 299). Taken in this way, Lenin, alongside Luxemburg, ‘thus represents not an apology for the autonomy of the political sphere but the revolutionary invention of a body’ (p. 299). However, according to Negri’s account, significant shifts in the organisation of capital – above all, the rise of immaterial labour and the distinct mode of social cooperation it requires – have changed the terrain on which this body took shape. What, then, could do the same now, what ‘production of subjectivity for seizing hold of power is possible for today’s immaterial proletariat?’ (p. 301). He sketches two possibilities worth citing at length: ‘In order to make the event real, what is required is a demiurge, or rather an external vanguard that can transform this flesh into a body, the body of the general intellect. Or perhaps, as other authors have suggested, might the becoming body of the general intellect not be determined by the word that the general intellect itself articulates, in such a way that the general intellect becomes the demiurge of its own body?’ (p. 302). Given his own trajectory, and his relation to Lenin’s thought at different points in his life, from the early 1970s of Italian autonomia to the late 1990s of the multitude’s becoming, Negri has expressed both of these positions, and the arc of his work might be read as the passage between the two. In this text, however, there is a remarkably honest, and remarkably refreshing willingness to say we just do not know: ‘I myself do not believe that we have the power to identify which road to take; only a genuine movement of struggle will be able to decide that’ (p. 303). He does want to hold out the party, if not as a predominant mode of political organising, then as a category by which to organise our thinking about the political situation. Yet, as he recognises, ‘in concrete, political, and material terms there is no longer a space but a place, no longer a horizon but a point, the point at which the event becomes possible. For the party, therefore the subject of space is subordinated to a specific kairos, the untimely power of an event’ (p. 304). Shortly after this, we read that only ‘a specific kairos will enable the body of the general intellect to emerge’ (p. 304). One can debate the degree to which the kairos, the evental moment, can be ‘made’ to emerge and what rôle a party can play in fostering the conditions by which one can discern that moment. But it is clear, nonetheless, that the subordination of the subject of space, and the rejection of the weakest-link model, indicates that the gap between the spatial-political conjuncture in which the Leninist party took shape and the one that we face now is so large as to make the transposition of that pastorganisational model, however successful it may have been at its proper kairos, to this formless struggle hard to fathom. To end, then, we might take up Negri’s question:

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Review Articles / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 157–175 But what does all of this actually mean? Regarding these considerations we can come to no theoretical conclusion. Never as in this case has there been so great a need for militant action and experimentation. (p. 304.)

I would argue that this language of ‘experimentation’ is of immeasurable importance, not least because it takes stock of a situation in which those outlets of which Bensaïd wrote cannot be discerned other than through a constant testing, scrapping, and trying otherwise. In this light, the genuine difficulty, not just of justifying a party, but of all theoretical questions about what models of organisation are to be employed might appear in a different light, as the consequence of another Leninist inheritance not fully examined in this volume. Namely, an insistent localism, even as it reached toward the constitution of an International, a recognition that what works elsewhere does not work here. Moreover, that which was ‘supposed’ to happen elsewhere and did not – i.e. revolution in the more developed capitalist core – finds its success where ‘the conditions are not right’, against the odds. This indicates, not just the critical worth of a theory of history that sees a ‘scattered field’ in which things bloom wrongly and which therefore requires constant returns to a ground we thought we knew well, but also that an experimenting and ruthlessly self-revising mode of struggle, with no fidelity to ‘general models’ or past traditions, alone can provide that necessary cartography. A vanguard without a front-line, a Leninist without a party? Clearly, with this we are far from what is commonly, or even uncommonly, understood in terms of a lineage of Leninism. What is less clear is the degree of what is gained or lost in the attempt to grasp these major shifts in world-order, mode of production, and attendant subjectivity in terms of political models, concepts, and practices associated with Lenin. Even less certain, and more problematic, is the particularity of the party-form and whether or not it is a ‘correct’ mode of organisation for the myriad situations now faced. All that is certain is the degree to which our theory and practice, our thought and battles must – like Lenin’s body and thought – refuse to go away, to overstay a respectable welcome and become truly unacceptable to bourgeois ideology, to be profoundly ‘incorrect’. Ceaselessly, we have to keep renaming our enemies, misusing our dead, re-splitting the world. Reviewed by Evan Calder Williams University of California, Santa Cruz [email protected]

References Althusser, Louis 2001 [1968], Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, translated by Ben Brewster, New York: Monthly Review Press. Badiou, Alain 2007 [2005], The Century, translated by Alberto Toscano, Cambridge: Polity Press. Budgen, Sebastian, Stathis Kouvelakis and Slavoj Žižek (eds.) 2007, Lenin Reloaded: Towards a Politics of Truth, Durham, NC.: Duke University Press. James, Cyril Lionel Robert 2005 [1948], Notes on Dialectics: Hegel, Marx, Lenin, London: Pluto Press.


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Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich 1965 [1918], ‘Extraordinary Seventh Congress of the R.C.P.(B.)’, in Collected Works, Volume 27, Moscow: Progress Publishers. —— 1970 [1918], The State and Revolution: The Marxist Teaching on the State and the Tasks of the Proletariat in the Revolution, Peking: Foreign Languages Press. —— 1973 [1902], What Is to Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement, Peking: Foreign Languages Press. —— 1974 [1917], ‘On Slogans’, in Collected Works, Volume 25, Moscow: Progress Publishers. Lukács, Georg 1970 [1924], Lenin: A Study on the Unity of His Thought, translated by Nicholas Jacobs, London: New Left Books. Negri, Antonio 1977, La fabbrica della strategia: 33 lezioni su Lenin, Padova: CLEUP.

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From the History of Soviet Philosophy: Lukács – Vygotsky – Ilyenkov, Sergey Mareev, Moscow: Kul’turnaia revoliutsiia, 2008 Abstract This review-essay explores the subterranean tradition of ‘creative Soviet Marxism’1 through a recent book by the Russian philosopher Sergey Mareev, From the History of Soviet Philosophy: Lukács – Vygotsky – Ilyenkov (2008). It provides a brief overview of the history of Soviet philosophy so as to orient the reader to a set of debates that continue to be largely unexplored in the Western-Marxist tradition. Mareev offers a new account of the development of Soviet philosophy that not only explodes the myth that Soviet philosophy was simply state-sanctioned dogma, but also reinterprets the relationship between the key creative theorists so as to offer a new way of understanding its development that challenges several key-aspects of the dominant Western scholarship on this subject. He argues that alongside official Marxist philosophy in the Soviet Union – the crude materialism of Diamat and Istmat – there existed another line, which counterposed the central rôle of social activity in the development of human consciousness. He traces this line of anti-positivist theory from V.I. Lenin through Georg Lukács and Lev Vygotsky to Evald Ilyenkov – a pivotal figure in the ‘Marxian renaissance’2 of the 1960s, but who ‘has to this day remained a Soviet phenomenon without much international influence’.3 Specifically, Mareev disputes the rôle of A.M. Deborin as a precursor of the Ilyenkov school, and instead introduces Georg Lukács – a figure primarily recognised in the West as one of the founders of Western Marxism – into the line of development of creative Soviet Marxism. Furthermore, he reconsiders the rôle of V.I. Lenin and G.V. Plekhanov – the so-called father of Russian social democracy – in the development of Soviet philosophy. In the process, the author provides a detailed history of the emergence of Diamat and Istmat, and shines a spotlight on a figure widely recognised as the most important Soviet philosopher in the post-Stalin period – E.V. Ilyenkov. Keywords Soviet Marxism, Russian philosophy, S. Mareev, E.V. Ilyenkov, G. Lukács, A.M. Deborin

Towards a history of ‘creative’ Soviet theory In a recent article on the history of Russian philosophy, Evert van der Zweerde recalls the joke that ‘in Russia nothing is more difficult to predict than the past’.4 This bit of popular wisdom reflects an understanding that the past is more than something that happened before us, but a relationship that is always informed by present concerns.5 Indeed, the history of philosophy in the Soviet Union, as a constellation, continues to be reconfigured. I have sought to explore elsewhere the subterranean tradition of ‘creative Soviet Marxism’ – a body of thought that existed on the margins of official state-sanctioned Marxism in the 1. ‘Creative Soviet Marxism’ is a body of thought that developed side-by-side with official state-sanctioned Marxism, which was suppressed in the Soviet Union and not sufficiently studied in the ‘West’. 2. Oittinen 2005, p. 224. 3. Oittinen 2005, p. 228. 4. Van der Zweerde 2009, p. 178. 5. Benjamin 2003, p. 397. ‘The historian who proceeds from this consideration ceases to tell the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary. He [sic] grasps the constellation into which his own era has entered, along with a very specific earlier one’. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011

DOI: 10.1163/156920611X592878


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Soviet Union and that has not been sufficiently studied in the ‘West’.6 This ‘creative’ Soviet Marxism could be found in various academic disciplines, most notably in the 1920s and 1960s. What principally distinguished these currents from official Soviet thought was their departure from positivist conceptions of subjectivity. However, a history that draws out the historical and theoretical connections between these currents, which articulates creative Soviet Marxism as a coherent tradition, has yet to be written. There is, however, an emerging body of work that illuminates various aspects of creative Marxist thought in the Soviet Union. For instance, in his recent book, From the History of Soviet Philosophy: Lukács – Vygotsky – Ilyenkov (2008), Russian philosopher Sergey Mareev offers a new account of the development of Soviet philosophy that not only explodes the myth that Soviet philosophy was nothing more than state-sanctioned dogma, but also reinterprets the relationship between the key creative theorists so as to offer a new way of understanding its development that challenges several key-aspects of the dominant Western scholarship on this subject. He argues that alongside official Marxist philosophy in the Soviet Union – the crude materialism of Diamat and Istmat – there existed another line, which counterposed the central rôle of social activity in the development of human consciousness. He traces this line of anti-positivist theory from V.I. Lenin through Georg Lukács and Lev Vygotsky to Evald Ilyenkov – a pivotal figure in the ‘Marxian renaissance’7 of the 1960s, but who ‘has to this day remained a Soviet phenomenon without much international influence’.8 Mareev’s book is an interesting contribution to a growing body of work9 on the legacy of the Ilyenkov school of Soviet philosophy. By reconsidering Ilyenkov’s rôle in the history of Soviet philosophy, Mareev reconsiders that history itself, challenging several key-features of its dominant understanding in Western scholarship. Specifically, he disputes the rôle of A.M. Deborin as a precursor of the Ilyenkov school, and instead introduces Georg Lukács – a figure primarily recognised in the West as one of the founders of Western Marxism – into the line of development of creative Soviet Marxism. Furthermore, he reconsiders the rôle of V.I. Lenin and G.V. Plekhanov – the so-called father of Russian social democracy – in the development of Soviet philosophy. In the process, the author provides a detailed history of the emergence of Diamat and Istmat, and shines a spotlight on a figure widely recognised as the most important Soviet philosopher in the post-Stalin period – E.V. Ilyenkov. A short course on Soviet philosophy English-language accounts of Soviet philosophy often begin with a justification for their object of inquiry. For example, David Bakhurst’s Consciousness and Revolution in Soviet Philosophy (1991), the main English-language work on the Ilyenkov school, begins with an 6. The term ‘creative [Творческий]’ Soviet Marxism is used by some contemporary Russian theorists to distinguish certain currents in Marxist theory from ‘official’ Soviet Marxism (Maidansky 2009, pp. 201, 202; Tolstykh (ed.) 2008, p. 10; Levant 2008; Mezhuev 1997). David Bakhurst uses the term ‘genuine’ (Bakhurst 1991, p. 3). 7. Oittinen 2005, p. 224. 8. Oittinen 2005, p. 228. 9. Such as is to be found here, for instance: .

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acknowledgement that ‘Soviet philosophy’ is sometimes seen as a contradiction in terms, and then proceeds to answer the question ‘Why study Soviet philosophy?’10 Soviet philosophy has not received adequate attention in Marxist thought outside of the Soviet Union.11 In fact, the term ‘Western Marxism’12 often serves to distinguish certain currents in Marxist thought from theory developed in the Soviet Union, with Soviet Marxism appearing as its ‘other’ in various ways. This near-dismissal of Soviet theory is, in part, a product of the view that Soviet-Marxist philosophy had largely been reduced to rehearsing a set of principles that were sanctioned by the state. As Vadim Mezhuev, a contemporary Russian philosopher from the Ilyenkov school recalls, To be a creative, thinking Marxist, in a state at the head of which were Marxists, was the most dangerous thing of all. This is where the state had its monopoly. It preferred to recognize its opponents, rather than rivals within the sphere of its own ideology. You could be a positivist, study the Vienna School. . . But to write a book about Marxism, that was dangerous. . . . This is the paradox, you see? That is why all the talent began to leave. It was impossible to work here. One had to rehearse dogma, and nothing else.13 This dogma had been codified in a famous text called Dialectical Materialism and Historical Materialism, which was first published as part of the Short History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1938), and is believed to have been written by Stalin. This text became ‘the Bible of Soviet philosophy’,14 as philosophy in the Soviet Union changed from argument to simply referencing Stalin’s writings and speeches. According to Bakhurst, this text became ‘the definitive work on the subject [and] came to define the parameters of all Soviet philosophical discussion’.15 Hence, Marxist philosophy in the Soviet Union became synonymous with Diamat and Istmat.

10. Bakhurst 1991, p. 1. 11. Oittinen 2005, p. 228. 12. The term ‘Western Marxism’ is broadly associated with Perry Anderson’s influential work Considerations on Western Marxism (1976) where it is understood as a body of theory that emerged in the wake of the defeat of ‘Classical Marxism’, associated with names such as Lukács, Korsch, Gramsci, Benjamin, Della Volpe, Marcuse, Lefebvre, Adorno, Sartre, Goldmann, Althusser, and Colletti. According to Anderson, what principally distinguished this body of thought from Classical Marxism was its divorce from revolutionary-political practice (i.e. that its main contributions were produced in a context of isolation from mass-movements and masspolitical organisations). However, this body of thought is also defined by its shift in emphasis from political economy to problems of culture and subjectivity. As Russell Jacoby argues, these theorists are distinguished, not only from Classical Marxism, but also from Soviet Marxism in their concern ‘to rescue Marxism from positivism and crude materialism’ (Jacoby 1983, p. 524). In my view, the theoretical focus of Western Marxism has much in common with ‘creative Soviet Marxism’; however, the latter is often overshadowed and obscured by official Soviet Marxism. 13. Mezhuev quoted in Levant 2008, p. 31. 14. Guseinov and Lektorsky 2009, p. 12. 15. Bakhurst 1991, p. 96.


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The above account, while certainly true, does not contain the whole truth. In a recent article, Russian theorists A.A. Guseinov and V.A. Lektorsky write: ‘In general, when consideration is given to the way the national culture evolved after October 1917, weight is generally placed on the fact that the declared official ideology, which imposed a dogmatically interpreted Marxism, prevented any free philosophical thought. This viewpoint . . . is not without some justification; [it] does not however reflect the full complexity of the facts’.16 This complexity presents itself when we take a closer look at how philosophy actually developed in the Soviet Union. For example, as Mareev reminds us, ‘prior to 1931 in the Soviet Union, Bolshevism was not the dominant current in philosophy’ (pp. 4–5). At this time, Soviet philosophy was the site of vigorous debates on various problems, including efforts to overcome reductionism in Marxist thought.17 These debates coalesced into two schools, the mechanists and the Deborinites, whose rivalry dominated Soviet philosophy for much of the 1920s and constitutes the ‘prehistory’ of what we know as Soviet philosophy in the form of Diamat and Istmat. We can also go further back, prior to 1922, before the prerevolutionary philosophical establishment was expelled from the Soviet Union. In the autumn of 1922, on Lenin’s orders, about two-hundred representatives of the intelligentsia, including Russian philosophers such as Berdayev, Bulgakov and Frank, were sent from Petrograd to Hamburg on what came to be known as ‘The Philosophers’ Ship’.18 Their expulsion brought to an end the development of prerevolutionary schools of philosophy, which were collectively known as the ‘silver age’ and which competed with Marxism within Russian philosophy. This forms the ‘pre-prehistory’ of the context in which Diamat and Istmat developed. After 1931, a new philosophical establishment – the Diamatchiki – took control of the philosophy-departments and academic journals. This group was endorsed by the Central Committee of the Communist Party, which on 25 January 1931 demanded a ‘working out [razrabotka] of the Leninist stage in the development of dialectical materialism’.19 This appeal to Lenin’s name, however, was politically motivated, and had little to do with Lenin’s own philosophical work. In fact (as we shall see below), one of Mareev’s principal arguments is that Lenin’s philosophy has nothing in common with Diamat and the Leninist stage of philosophy. As Bakhurst writes, ‘the true focus of the Leninist stage was not Lenin, but Stalin’.20 Mezhuev’s description of Soviet philosophy above describes well the period of the next 20–30 years. In fact, direct state-control over the development of Marxist theory extended beyond the discipline of philosophy. For example, the famous Marxist developmental psychologist Lev Vygotsky – who produced an original theory of consciousness, anchored in intersubjectivity, language and activity – was blacklisted in the Soviet Union for 20 years (1936–56) following the Central Committee’s resolution of 4 June 1936 against pædology

16. Guseinov and Lektorsky 2009, p. 9. 17. Similar efforts continue in contemporary ‘Western Marxism’. For example, consider the ongoing debates around issues raised in John Holloway’s Change the World Without Taking Power, including the 2005 symposium in Historical Materialism, Volume 13, Issue 4. 18. Guseinov and Lektorsky 2009, p. 23; Van der Zweerde 2009, p. 175. 19. Bakhurst 1991, pp. 92–4. 20. Bakhurst 1991, p. 94.

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(the study of children’s behaviour and development).21 During this period, Soviet Marxism took the form of Diamat and Istmat, and effectively erased its own prehistory, which had produced multiple schools of Marxist theory. The Diamatchiki dominated Soviet philosophy over most of Soviet history after 1931; however, their dominance remained virtually unchallenged only for about a 20-year period. After Stalin’s death in 1953, during Khrushchev’s thaw, a new group of theorists, who were part of the ‘Shestidesiatniki’ (of the 60s-generation), began to question some of the basic tenets of official Soviet Marxism. As V.I. Tolstykh writes in a recently published edited volume entitled Evald Vasilyevich Ilyenkov (2008), ‘At the end of the 1950s begins the crisis of official Soviet ideology, and [Ilyenkov] is among other young philosophers … together with Aleksandr Zinoviev, Gregory Shchedrovitsky, Merab Mamardashvili and others [who] enter into polemics with philosophers of the type of Molodtsov and Mitin’.22 Then a junior lecturer, in 1954 Ilyenkov declared to the Chair of Dialectical Materialism at Moscow State University that in Marxism there is no such thing as dialectical materialism or historical materialism, but only a materialist conception of history (p. 8).23 Over the next 25 years, his original development of Marxist thought, which directly challenged the positivism that dominated official Soviet Marxism, inspired and guided a critical current of Soviet philosophy that continues to this day. The significance of Evald Ilyenkov Ilyenkov has a special place in the history of Soviet philosophy. There is no consensus about his status in the discipline; however, much of our understanding of its history turns on how we see his rôle. He is widely recognised as the leader of the group of philosophers who challenged official Soviet Marxism during the period of the thaw. He was a Marxist and a Leninist, but he was not a model Marxist-Leninist.24 His conception of ideal (non-material) phenomena, as forms of human activity, conflicted with the official view of materialism, placing him on a collision-course with the Diamatchiki.25 He was denounced as a ‘revisionist’, censored, and eventually prevented from teaching. He committed suicide in 1979. Nevertheless, his work was widely published inside the Soviet Union, and had a considerable influence on a whole generation of Soviet theorists. His entry on ‘The Ideal’ in the Soviet Encyclopædia of Philosophy (1962) challenged official Soviet Marxism, which tended to view human consciousness as a machine, a product of the matter that constitutes the human brain. He argued that such a view rested on a crude materialism. In contrast, he revived the Marxist notion that consciousness is a social

21. Bakhurst 1991, p. 60. 22. Tolstykh (ed.) 2008, p. 6. 23. See also Bakhurst 1991, p. 6. 24. For example, in 1965 he was unable to accept an invitation from the University of Notre Dame to present his paper, ‘Marxism and the Western World’, in which he ‘writes not as a Soviet delegate presenting an official line, but as an autonomous scholar addressing the specific concerns of the symposium in his own voice’ (Bakhurst 1991, p. 8). Subsequently, he spoke out against the Soviet invasion of Prague in 1968 (Tolstykh (ed.) 2008, p. 8). 25. Guseinov and Lektorsky 2009, p. 15.


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phenomenon, something that does not develop automatically in each individual, but which rather is a capacity acquired through socialisation.26 This perspective not only posed a challenge to the vulgar materialism of Soviet Diamat, but also offers an original approach to the problem of the ideal that should be of interest to Western Marxism. Although there is a considerable literature in the West that focuses on the rôle of language in the social production of consciousness, what sets Ilyenkov apart is his distinction between language and the ideal. For Ilyenkov, language is not the ideal, but its ‘objectified being’,27 its material form. The ideal does not exist in language for Ilyenkov, or in other material phenomena, but in forms of human activity. His entry on the ideal in the 1962 encyclopædia-article defines it as ‘the subjective image of objective reality, i.e. a reflection of the external world in forms of human activity, in forms of its consciousness and will’.28 One can think of the ideal as the significance that matter assumes in the process of its transformation by human activity. In other words, it is only in-and-through human activity that matter takes on the character of an object with significance. To be clear, Ilyenkov was not referring only to parts of the material world that individuals directly transform, but to all matter that society comes ‘in contact’ with. Idealisation is, for him, a social phenomenon. In the same encyclopædia-entry, he wrote: An ideal image, say of bread, may arise in the imagination of a hungry man or of a baker. In the head of a satiated man occupied with building a house, ideal bread does not arise. But if we take society as a whole, ideal bread and ideal houses are always in existence, as well as any ideal object with which humanity is concerned in the process of production and reproduction of its real, material life. This includes the ideal sky, as an object of astronomy, as a ‘natural calendar’, a clock, and compass. In consequence of that, all of nature is idealised in humanity and not just that part which it immediately produces or reproduces or consumes in a practical way.29 From this perspective, all matter appears in individual consciousness already transformed and idealised by the activity of previous generations, and this ideal informs the individual’s activity in the present. Perhaps the most striking feature of Ilyenkov’s concept of the ideal is its articulation as part of a larger process, as a phase in the transformation of matter. This move allows him to avoid both forms of reductionism: the reduction of the ideal to the physical brain (characteristic of vulgar materialism) and the reduction of the ideal to some extra-human phenomenon such as ‘nature’ (characteristic of idealism). By understanding it as a phase of a process, Ilyenkov is able to grasp the ideal without severing it from human activity. In the 1962 article, he wrote: ‘The ideal is the outward being of a thing in the phase of its becoming in the action of a subject in the form of his wants, needs and aims’.30 Conceiving of it as a phase enables him to capture several moments of its existence – matter invested with

26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

Marx and Engels 1991, p. 51. Ilyenkov 1962, p. 221. Ilyenkov 1962, p. 222. Ilyenkov 1962, p. 225. Ilyenkov 1962, p. 223.

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meaning in the process of human activity, which comes to inform the subsequent transformation of the material world. In the recently published Dialectics of the Ideal (his most complete, authoritative articulation of the concept of the ideal, written in the mid1970s, but published only in 2009), he describes it as follows: The process by which the material life-activity of social man [sic] begins to produce not only a material, but also an ideal product, begins to produce the act of idealisation of reality (the process of transforming ‘the material’ into ‘the ideal’), and then, having arisen, ‘the ideal’ becomes a critical component of the material life-activity of social man [sic], and then begins the opposite process – the process of the materialisation (objectification, reification, ‘embodiment’) of the ideal.31 As individuals, we enter an already-idealised material world, which we continue to transform as we materialise the ideal we inhabit in our own activity. This approach recalls similar readings of Marx that were developed before the Diamatchiki seized control of Soviet philosophy in 1931. It is widely acknowledged that Ilyenkov’s work revives and develops certain themes from the prehistory of official Soviet Marxism.32 For example, in the Preface to Ilyenkov’s posthumously published book, Art and the Communist Ideal (1984), Mikhail Lifshits – a close associate of Lukács who helped publish Marx’s early works in 1932 – writes: ‘By some miracle the seeds that were then sown on a favourable ground began to grow – although in a different, not immediately recognisable form. Evald Ilyenkov with his living interest in Hegel and the young Marx (who was discovered in the 20s and 30s here at home, not abroad, as is often claimed) . . . stood out as an heir of our thoughts’.33 Similarly, Guseinov and Lektorsky describe this period as a ‘philosophical renaissance in the Soviet Union’34 and Ilyenkov as one of its leading figures. Mezhuev writes: ‘It is to him that my generation owes the conscious break with dogmatic and scholastic official philosophy’.35 The 1950s and 60s mark a revival of certain lines of inquiry that had been displaced by official Soviet theory, with Ilyenkov as a principal figure. The specific lines of continuity, however, remain a subject of debate. Mareev’s reconstruction of Soviet philosophy Mareev traces the roots of Diamat and Istmat further back than Stalin’s Dialectical Materialism and Historical Materialism (1938) or even the takeover of Soviet philosophy by the Bolsheviks in 1931. According to Mareev, the positivism and reductionism that define Diamat were already present in the main currents of the 1920s. The period in Soviet philosophy during the years 1924–9 was marked by a vigorous debate between two competing schools of thought – the mechanists and the Deborinites. The mechanists comprised a broad range of thinkers, including Bolshevik Party activist

31. Ilyenkov 2009, p. 18. 32. Bakhurst 1991, pp. 26–7; Oittinen (ed.) 2000, p. 10; Dillon 2005, p. 285. 33. Lifshits quoted in Oittinen (ed.) 2000, p. 10. Ilyenkov became a friend of Lifshits after a correspondence with Lukács who directed Ilyenkov to contact Lifshits. 34. Guseinov and Lektorsky 2009, p. 13. 35. Mezhuev 1997, p. 47.


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I.I. Skvortsov-Stepanov, former-Menshevik Lyubov Akselrod and the early-Bolshevik philosopher Alexander Bogdanov, and received support from the famous Bolshevik leader, Nikolai Bukharin. What united this diverse group was ‘the view that the explanatory resources of science are able to provide a complete account of objective reality’.36 In response, the Deborinites – a more cohesive group of philosophers, most of whom were involved in A.M. Deborin’s seminar at the Institute of Red Professors – ‘dismissed the Mechanists’ optimism about the global explanatory potential of natural science’ and ‘held that the Mechanists were committed to blatant reductionism’.37 ‘In our opinion,’ Deborin argued, ‘thought is a particular quality of matter, the subjective side of the objective, material, i.e., physiological processes, with which it is not identical and to which it cannot be reduced’.38 During this period, theorists in both schools developed a considerable amount of work, much of it aimed at overcoming reductionism in Marxist philosophy. The debate was muted in 1929 when, at the Second All-Union Conference of MarxistLeninist Institutions of Scientific Research, the mechanists were officially condemned. According to Bakhurst, ‘Mechanism was defeated not by new philosophical arguments, but by the charge that it was a revisionist trend and, as such, a political danger’.39 Deborin and his followers accused the mechanists of ‘gradualist’ politics, a charge that resonated at a time when the party was in the midst of a campaign against ‘right-deviationism’, which was associated with Bukharin.40 In Bakhurst’s account, this debate was not properly resolved; rather, it was prevented from being expressed within the confines of the institutions of Soviet philosophy. From this perspective, it reappeared in some ways during the thaw of the 1950s with Ilyenkov expressing the anti-positivism of Deborin’s school. ‘Although contemporary Soviet philosophers may not see themselves as re-creating the early controversy,’ writes Bakhurst, ‘the continuity is undeniable. This is particularly so in the case of Ilyenkov, who can be seen as heir to the Deborinites’ project’.41 The Deborinites’ effort to develop a theory of the relationship between thought and matter, but without reducing thought to the physiological properties of matter, appears to be echoed in Ilyenkov’s own conception of the ideal. Bakhurst sees Ilyenkov as an heir of the Deborin school from the prehistory of official Soviet Marxism. One of the principal distinguishing features of Mareev’s account is that he challenges this reading of the development of Soviet philosophy, which has become dominant in Western scholarship.42 In contrast, he locates the roots of Diamat not only among the mechanists, but also in the work of the Deborinites (p. 18). In fact, he traces its development back to Deborin himself, and even further back to his teacher G.V. Plekhanov. Mareev argues that the thread that runs through this long line from Plekhanov to Deborin to the Diamatchiki is itself characterised by a crude materialism, which reduces consciousness to a reflection of material production. In Deborin, thought is not reduced to 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

Bakhurst 1991, p. 31. Bakhurst 1991, p. 37. Bakhurst 1991, p. 38. Bakhurst 1991, pp. 45–6. Bakhurst 1991, p. 47. Bakhurst 1991, pp. 26–7. Maidansky 2009, p. 202.

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matter, as with some mechanists and Diamatchiki; rather, it is properly understood as a reflection of activity. However, this activity is grasped as production, which, according to John Rees, ‘in fact returns us to the old Second International insistence on the inevitable onward march of the productive process as the guarantor of social change’.43 Deborin’s understanding of dialectical materialism, which, according to Mareev, derives from Plekhanov and Engels, reduces the problem of consciousness to essentially an economic problem. In addition to challenging Western scholarship, which treats Ilyenkov as an heir of the Deborin school, another distinguishing feature of Mareev’s book is his inclusion of the early Lukács as a pivotal theorist in the development of creative Soviet Marxism, and specifically as a precursor of the Ilyenkov school. In fact, Deborin’s reductionism comes into sharp relief when examined against Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness (1923). Taking aim at the determinism inherited from the Marxism of the Second International, Lukács posited a theory of subjectivity that afforded a much greater rôle to human agency in the development of class-consciousness. Lukács’s central argument was that activity is organised in bourgeois society in a way that not only facilitates the development of classconsciousness, but also blocks its development primarily through the effects of the transformation of activity into the commodity, labour-power. He argued that the rôle of the Communist Party is to intervene in this dynamic in various ways, including counterorganising the activity of its members, by creating what he called a ‘world of activity’.44 By broadening the notion of activity from the labour-process to political practice and organisation,45 he went beyond Deborin’s reduction of the ideal to a reflection of the material, thus prefiguring Ilyenkov’s work by several decades. In 1924, Deborin published a scathing dismissal of Lukács’s book, calling it ‘idealist’.46 Deborin’s critique was part of a broad attack on Lukács, Korsch and other ‘professors’47 who were denounced by Zinoviev at the Fifth Congress of the Comintern: This theoretical revisionism cannot be allowed to pass with impunity. Neither will we tolerate our Hungarian Comrade Lukács doing the same thing in the domain of philosophy and sociology. . . . We cannot tolerate such theoretical revisionism in our Communist International.48 43. Rees 2000, pp. 20–1. 44. Lukács 1971, p. 337. He writes: ‘Freedom . . . is something practical, it is an activity. And only by becoming a world of activity [italics mine] for every one of its members can the Communist Party really hope to overcome the passive rôle assumed by bourgeois man when he is confronted by the inevitable course of events that he cannot understand’. 45. Rees 2000, pp. 20–1. ‘All this is beyond Deborin, who can see only the labour process as the site of practice: “the one-sidedness of subject and object is overcome . . . through praxis. What is the praxis of social being? The labour process . . . production is the concrete unity of the whole social and historical process.” Again, this is formally correct but in fact returns us to the old Second International insistence on the inevitable onward march of the productive process as the guarantor of social change, whereas Lukács, without ignoring this dimension, is concerned with political practice and organisation as well’. 46. Deborin 1924, p. 4. 47. Rees 2000, p. 25. 48. G. Zinoviev quoted in Rees 2000, p. 25.


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While Lukács recanted, it is well known that his book, A Defence of History and Class Consciousness: Tailism and the Dialectic (1925), was written in response to these charges. He tried to demonstrate that he was, in fact, championing Lenin’s organisational approach over the determinism of the Second International and the Mensheviks. In fact, Lukács’s polemics with Deborin in philosophy bear a certain resemblance to the polemics between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks on organisation 20 years earlier, where Lenin’s pamphlet What Is to Be Done? and his intervention at the Second Congress of the RSDLP in 1903 had been understood by Lukács and others as the beginning of his shift from the fatalism of Second-International Marxism to what we now know as the Leninist conception of the party.49 In contrast to dominant Western readings of the history of Soviet philosophy, Mareev argues that the debate between Lukács and Deborin reveals two distinct lines in Soviet philosophy: one that runs from Plekhanov through Deborin (themselves Mensheviks) to the Diamatchiki, and a counter-current that runs from Lenin through Lukács and Vygotsky and then to Ilyenkov in the 1950s (p. 42).50 ‘Paradoxically,’ writes Mareev, ‘Lenin’s line won in politics, but Plekhanov’s line won in philosophy’. (p. 17.) Lenin’s victory over Plekhanov in the political sphere is well known, but it was Plekhanov’s views on Marxist theory that shaped Soviet philosophy. Plekhanov committed suicide on 5 May 1918, only a few months following the October Revolution. Nevertheless, as Mareev notes, his followers, who now divided into mechanists and Deborinites, occupied practically all key-positions in the newly created Soviet ideological apparatus and the system of higher Marxist education. D.B. Ryazanov headed the Marx-Engels Institute [and] A.M. Deborin became in 1921 the editor-in-chief of the journal Under the Banner of Marxism. They determined the character of ‘Marxist’ philosophy in the 20s and 30s. (p. 17.) From Mareev’s perspective, these students of Plekhanov, many of whom would soon lose their positions in Soviet academe, inherited a mechanistic reading of Marx which continued to dominate Soviet philosophy during the reign of the Diamatchiki. In contrast to this line, Mareev posits a current of anti-positivist Marxist theory that, in agreement with Bakhurst, re-emerges during the thaw of the 1950s in the work of Ilyenkov. However, unlike Bakhurst, who sees Ilyenkov as an heir of the Deborin school, Mareev roots this line in Lenin’s critique of positivism in his Philosophical Notebooks (1914–15). Mareev argues that Lenin and Plekhanov read Marx very differently, and that Plekhanov’s reading, as we saw above, became institutionalised in Soviet academe. Mareev locates Lenin in the line that runs through Lukács-Vygotsky-Ilyenkov in light of Lenin’s criticism of Plekhanov in the Philosophical Notebooks. Although Lenin considered himself a student of Plekhanov, he criticises his former mentor’s ‘vulgar materialism’ (p. 36). For instance, Lenin writes: ‘Plekhanov criticises Kantianism (and agnosticism in

49. Lukács 1970; Molyneux 1978. 50. Vygotsky is widely recognised as a precursor to the Ilyenkov school. What is novel here is locating Lenin and Lukács in a line that, in contrast to the Plekhanov and Deborin line, leads to Ilyenkov.

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general) more from a vulgar-materialist than a dialectical-materialist perspective’.51 Mareev notes that Lenin’s critique of Plekhanov’s vulgar materialism was echoed in the polemics between Lukács and Deborin in the 1920s, and which again resurfaced in the challenge posed by Ilyenkov and others to the Diamatchiki in the 1950s and 60s. The ‘diamatovskaia’-tradition in Soviet philosophy was indeed dominant. Indeed, it successfully continues in the post-Soviet period. But there was a tradition of Soviet philosophy which was counterposed to ‘diamatskoi’. This tradition is related to names such as G. Lukács, L.S. Vygotsky and E.V. Ilyenkov. (p. 12.) Mareev roots this anti-positivist Soviet Marxism in Lenin’s philosophy, and official Soviet Marxism in that of Plekhanov. He writes: ‘The entire so-called Soviet Diamat, despite becoming rooted during Stalin’s epoch, by its own genealogical history, and even terminology, originates from Plekhanov’s branch of the development of Marxism, and not from Lenin’s’ (p. 30). Mareev also notes that Ilyenkov’s reception has not changed since the collapse of the USSR. According to Mareev, Ilyenkov’s anti-positivist philosophy was marginalised during the Soviet era, and remains so today. ‘The Soviet Union is long gone. But the treatment of Ilyenkov on the side of philosophical officialdom, as has been stated, remains the same, as it was during the Soviet era’. (p. 9.) This is the case, Mareev argues, because contemporary Russian philosophy-texts are, in essence, Diamat under a different name (p. 11). As we can see from this brief sketch, Mareev’s reading of Ilyenkov produces a very different understanding of the history of Soviet philosophy from the dominant reading in the West.

Critical and concluding remarks on Mareev’s book This provocative reconstruction of Soviet philosophy offers a window onto a field that has been studied by barely a handful of serious scholars in the West. A student of Ilyenkov himself, Mareev aligns his own views with those of this influential, yet paradoxically understudied philosopher. As a result, Ilyenkov is presented not only uncritically, but also in a somewhat-hagiographic fashion. While this perspective ‘from within’ has many advantages, as it offers a forceful articulation of Ilyenkov’s strengths, it also has some limits as it tends to overstate Ilyenkov’s status as a dissident, which results in a particular reading of his relationship to Soviet philosophy and to the rôle of Lenin in its development. Mareev’s book presents a one-sided view of Ilyenkov’s relationship to official Soviet philosophy, casting him as an outsider whose Marxism had a different origin than Diamat and Istmat’s. In contrast, the Finnish philosopher Vesa Oittinen (editor of Evald Ilyenkov’s Philosophy Revisited (2000) – the proceedings from the international conference on Ilyenkov, which was held in Helsinki in 1999) challenges the view that Ilyenkov was a dissident Soviet philosopher.52 Oittinen acknowledges that Ilyenkov suffered from ‘ideological mobbing’; however, he also notes that he had influential friends who ensured

51. Lenin quoted in Mareev 2008, p. 36. 52. Oittinen (ed.) 2000, p. 16.


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the publication and wide circulation of his work. Unlike many scholars from within the Ilyenkov school, Oittinen does not side unequivocally with Ilyenkov against his critics, noting that not all criticism of Ilyenkov was politically motivated. Instead, he argues that Ilyenkov’s anti-positivism exemplifies one of two currents within official Soviet Marxism, both of which can be traced back to two lines of thought in Lenin’s philosophy. Challenging Ilyenkov’s status as a dissident calls into question Lenin’s rôle in Soviet philosophy and hence Mareev’s two-line approach to its development. Unlike Mareev, who argues that positivist Soviet philosophy followed the line from Plekhanov to the Diamatchiki, and that anti-positivist Soviet philosophy can be traced back to Lenin, Oittinen argues that both currents are rooted in an ambiguity in Lenin’s own philosophy. According to Oittinen, there was a shift in Lenin’s philosophy, which can be seen in the differences between his Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1909) and the Philosophical Notebooks (1914–15). He writes: ‘It is rather obvious that there are many points of divergence between Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, written in 1909 against the Machist subjective idealist current which at this time was widespread among the Bolshevik intellectuals, on the one hand, and the Philosophical Notebooks, which is essentially a conspect of Hegel’s Logic with Lenin’s own commentaries which Lenin wrote down in the library of the canton of Bern (Switzerland) in 1914–1915, on the other’.53 Lenin’s attempt to break with the Marxism of the Second International on the question of organisation during his Switzerland years appears to also have a counterpart in the sphere of philosophy. Oittinen writes, ‘Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks can be seen as an attempt to find an adequate formulation for a Marxist philosophy that would avoid the deterministic and objectivistic world-view of the Second International’.54 According to Oittinen, Lenin was ultimately unsuccessful in this effort, and this tension between positivist and anti-positivist readings of Marx continued unresolved throughout Soviet philosophy. From this perspective, Ilyenkov is not seen as challenging official Soviet theory, but as expressing one side of an ongoing debate that characterised Soviet theory. Ilyenkov considered himself a Leninist, but he had a particular reading of Lenin. Unlike Oittinen, he did not recognise a ‘break’ between Lenin’s philosophy in 1909 and 1914–15.55 Rather than championing a positivist reading of Marx, Ilyenkov understood Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism ‘as the philosophical counterpart of What Is to Be Done?’.56 According to Bakhurst, ‘For Ilyenkov, Lenin’s great contribution lay in his rejection of empiricism and positivism’.57 Mareev acknowledges that the Diamatchiki tried to use Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism to claim him as a vulgar materialist, but he insists that Lenin distinguished between Marx’s materialism and materialism per se (p. 37). However, and similar in this respect to Oittinen, Bakhurst acknowledges that ‘the ambiguity in Lenin’s materialism has given rise to two opposing schools of thought within contemporary Soviet philosophy’.58 He continues, ‘While the germ of radical realism in Lenin’s philosophy exercised a formative influence on Ilyenkov’s philosophical concerns, Lenin also inspired 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

Oittinen (ed.) 2000, p. 13. Oittinen (ed.) 2000, p. 15. Bakhurst 1991, p. 100. Bakhurst 1991, p. 130. Bakhurst 1991, p. 122. Bakhurst 1991, p. 123.

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the very school of scientific empiricism that Ilyenkov came to see as his principal opponent’.59 The rôle of Lenin’s philosophy in the development of both creative and official Soviet Marxism continues to be a subject of debate; however, this debate does not find expression in Mareev’s book, in part due to the limits of his own perspective from within the Ilyenkov school. Mareev’s book, From the History of Soviet Philosophy: Lukács – Vygotsky – Ilyenkov, is a very important contribution to the study of a vast body of thought that remains largely unexamined in the West. He illuminates a history of creative Marxist thought in the Soviet Union that should be of interest to Marxist theorists in the West. Far from state-sanctioned dogma, this book presents us with a rich tradition with various schools of thought that competed not only with each other, but also with official Soviet Marxism. Although controversial and provocative both in Russia and in the West, this book forcefully challenges several widely held views on the history of creative Soviet Marxism. It convincingly problematises the rôle of A.M. Deborin, and locates the roots of Diamat and Istmat not only in the mechanists, but also in the Deborin school. Furthermore, it traces both of these competing schools of the 1920s to their common root in the work of G.V. Plekhanov, and contrasts his thought with that of V.I. Lenin. Another original feature is the inclusion of Georg Lukács in this history as a precursor to the main protagonist of the book, E.V. Ilyenkov. The Ilyenkov school is perhaps the most interesting and under-studied feature of creative Soviet Marxism for the Western reader. This book offers a reconsideration of the genesis of this school of thought from one of its contemporaries. It is a highly original and important piece of work that merits serious consideration, and constitutes an invaluable contribution to the study of the tradition of creative Soviet Marxism. Reviewed by Alex Levant Wilfrid Laurier University [email protected]

References Anderson, Perry 1976, Considerations on Western Marxism, London: New Left Books. Bakhurst, David 1991, Consciousness and Revolution in Soviet Philosophy: From the Bolsheviks to Evald Ilyenkov, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —— 1995, ‘Lessons from Ilyenkov’, The Communication Review, 1, 2: 155–78. Benjamin, Walter 2003 [1940], ‘On the Concept of History’, in Selected Writings, Volume 4: 1938–1940, Cambridge, MA.: Belknap Press. Deborin, Abram 1924, ‘Г. Лукач и его критика марксизма [G. Lukács and His Criticism of Marxism]’, Under the Banner of Marxism, 6–7: 49–69. Dillon, Paul 2005, ‘Review of Evald Ilyenkov’s Philosophy Revisited ’, Historical Materialism, 13, 3: 285–304. Guseinov, Abdusalam A. and Vladislav A. Lektorsky 2009, ‘Philosophy in Russia: History and Present State’, Diogenes, 56, 2–3: 3–23.

59. Ibid.


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Ilyenkov, Evald 1962, ‘Ideal’noe [The Ideal]’, in Filosofskaia entsiklopedia, Volume 2, Moscow: Sovetskaya entsiklopedia. —— 2009, ‘Dialektika ideal’nogo [The Dialectic of the Ideal]’, Logos, 65, 1: 6–62. Jacoby, Russell 1983, ‘Western Marxism’, in A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, edited by Tom B. Bottomore, Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press. Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich 1972 [1909], ‘Materialism and Empirio-Criticism’, in Collected Works, Volume 14, Moscow: Progress Publishers. —— 1976 [1929], ‘Conspectus of Hegel’s Book The Science of Logic’, in Collected Works, Volume 38, Moscow: Progress Publishers. Levant, Alex 2007, The Problem of Self-Emancipation: Subjectivity, Organisation and the Weight of History, Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation, York: The University of York. —— 2008, The Soviet Union in Ruins, Saarbrucken: VDM Verlag. Lukács, Georg 1970 [1924], Lenin: A Study on the Unity of His Thought, translated by Nicholas Jacobs, London: New Left Books. —— 1971 [1923], History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, translated by Rodney Livingstone, London: The Merlin Press. —— 2000 [1925], A Defence of History and Class Consciousness: Tailism and the Dialectic, translated by Esther Leslie, London: Verso. Maidansky, Andrey 2009, ‘A Diagram of Philosophical Thought’, available at: . Mareev, Sergey 2008, Iz Istorii Sovetskoi Filosofii: Lukach – Vygotskii – Il’enkov, Moscow: Kul’turnaia revoliutsiia. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels 1991 [1846], The German Ideology, New York: International Publishers. Mezhuev, Vadim 1997, ‘Evald Ilyenkov and the End of Classical Marxist Philosophy’, in Drama sovetskoi filosofii, Moscow: The Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Molyneux, John 1978, Marxism and the Party, Exeter: A. Wheaton and Co., Ltd. Oittinen, Vesa (ed.) 2000, Evald Ilyenkov’s Philosophy Revisited, Helsinki: Kikimora Publications. —— 2005, ‘Introduction’, Studies in East European Thought, 57: 223–31. Rees, John 2000, ‘Introduction’, in Lukács 2000. Stalin, Joseph Vissarionovich 1976 [1938], ‘Dialectical and Historical Materialism’, in Problems of Leninism, Peking: Foreign Languages Press. Tolstykh, Valentin Ivanovich (ed.) 2008, Eval’d Vasil’evich Il’enkov, Moscow: ROSSPEN. Van der Zweerde, Evert 2009, ‘The Place of Russian Philosophy in World Philosophical History: A Perspective’, Diogenes, 56, 2–3: 170–86.

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Alienation After Derrida, Simon Skempton, London: Continuum, 2010. Abstract Simon Skempton’s book re-reads Marx’s concept of alienation, and its roots in Hegel, through Derrida’s critique of the metaphysics of presence. In a wide-ranging study that engages with Heidegger, Kant and Lukács, as well as with a large proportion of Derrida’s work, both early and late, Skempton argues that, contrary to the prevailing orthodoxy in critical theory, it is possible to account for a kind of political ‘disalienation’, provided that one first accepts that the metaphysical account of the self-present subject is itself a product of alienation. ‘Disalienation’, on this model, would be a recognition of the inherently differential condition of humankind, with both Marxian and post-Kantian theories of the subject enlisted to support the Derridean thesis of an originary différance. Skempton’s thesis is attractively original, but it risks artificially reducing Kant, Hegel and Marx to mere avatars of Derrideanism avant la lettre, while simultaneously denying the force of Derrida’s critique of post-Kantian philosophy. Keywords Skempton, Marx, Derrida, alienation

The concept of alienation remains contested in philosophical and political circles. Historically, the debate has been divided over the question of the relative ‘innateness’ of alienation, over whether we can assign the concept an ontological status. British Marxism, as a consequence of its general empiricism, has tended to insist on the possibility of disalienation, and has thus largely refused any concession to the constitutivity of alienation as a subjective condition. The French tradition, by contrast, and especially in its postAlthusserian configuration, has tended to install alienation at the very centre of the subject. Althusser himself posited alienation as an inevitable corollary to ideology, transposing the méconnaissance of the ego found in structural psychoanalysis onto the political subject.1 As a result, any notion of disalienation, of the restoration of the subject to a non-alienated state consonant with its essential nature, is found to be chimerical, dictated by the illusory logic of the ego it supports. The concept of alienation is, then, itself alienated, divided between these opposing readings, and others besides. The extent to which such readings can be justified by recourse to Marx’s writings most often depends on the period of Marx’s writing one appeals to, although the Althusserian claim that alienation, as a hangover from Marx’s ill-advised early Hegelianism, was decisively rejected by the ‘scientific’ Marx of Capital is too simple-minded to bear serious scrutiny.2 Jacques Derrida’s political commitments had, from his very earliest publications, been the subject of some debate. Derrida had never been a member of the PCF during its intellectual heyday, and many saw in his ‘grammatological’ writings an implicit pessimism as to the theoretical possibility of a relatively stable subject of political action. His publication, in 1993, of Spectres de Marx3 held out the hope for many that Derrida would make explicit the political implications of deconstruction, in a manner more systematic than his previous, sporadic allusions to being ‘of the Left’. What resulted was rather less, 1. Althusser 2001. 2. Althusser 2008. 3. Derrida 1993. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011

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and rather more, than many had hoped: Derrida mined Marx for elided concepts that might lend themselves to a deconstructive reading, alighting on the repeated figure of the ‘ghost’ as a metaphor for the seeming strength of the spirit of Marx’s radical critique – if not his actual analyses and prescriptions – even after, and perhaps especially after, the fall of actually-existing socialism. It is an unsatisfactory analysis in many ways, and its main legacy seems to have been to turn the unintentionally self-parodic neologism ‘hauntology’ into an inescapable, and largely meaningless, philosophical meme. Terry Eagleton summed up the disappointment of many when he excoriated Derrida for fetishising Marxism only at the time when it seemed to be at its lowest practical ebb, implying that deconstruction could only advocate a position when it had assumed the requisite level of fashionable marginality.4 It is to Simon Skempton’s credit, then, that he cuts through polemical debates around the supposed political quietism of deconstruction with a sustained and convincing exploration of the concepts of both alienation and disalienation in the light of the critique of the metaphysics of presence. Skempton’s purview takes him from the early writings on Husserl and grammatology to the more explicitly political writings on hospitality and justice that characterised Derrida’s final writings. In reading the concept of alienation through a dialectical articulation of Hegel and Derrida, Skempton provides a robust defence of Hegel against Derrida’s contention, elaborated most systematically in his Glas,5 that Hegel’s totalising systematicity excludes and effaces the constitutivity of a remainder, what Rudolph Gasché has called a ‘quasi-transcendental’ horizon of possibility for the system as such.6 For Derrida, the relation in Hegel’s Phenomenology between brother and sister constitutes just such an excluded remainder, the supposed uniqueness of which – its freedom from antagonism – contradicts the system from within. Derrida outlines a series of such supposed remainders, posing the radical openness of the insistence on the remainder with Hegel’s attempt to sublate particularity into the horizon of the absolute (p. 78). Derrida’s Hegel is, then, very much the Hegel of the absolute, of the encompassing of particularity in the movement of the universal, and of the explosion of the Kantian-critical limit within the contours of thought. Put another way, the fate of alienation in such a reading of Hegel is its ultimate subordination to identity, or, in Derrida’s parlance, ‘presence’. Any singularisation of difference, which would do justice to the constitutivity of the exception, is lost in such an account. For Skempton, by contrast, Hegel’s dialectic presupposes the very openness to nonidentity that Derrida finds wanting. Skempton writes: ‘It does not make sense to speak of an excluded remainder to the Hegelian system, because the system is not a closed mechanism. The word “system” simply refers to a thinking together, a thinking of things in their interconnectedness and relationality.’ (p. 81.) With caveats aside, then, Skempton’s Hegel is broadly an ontologist of a Derridean stripe, elevating to its deserved position of importance the point of singularity in its tussle with the universal. The absolute, far from being the closure in the face of difference that Derrida implies, is in fact ‘the nonobjectifiable absolute subject, which is itself nothing other than eternal freedom, the 4. Derrida, Eagleton, Negri et al. 1999, pp. 83–8. 5. Derrida 1990. 6. Gasché 1986.

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freedom of productive indeterminacy or determinability, which . . . prefigures Derridean différance’ (p. 35). There are many comments one could make here, not least that, for Hegel, the absolute must imply rather more than any pre-dialectical opposition between closure and openness, and between freedom and necessity. Further, one must question the fidelity of a scholar to Hegel when all that is made, at least in places, of Hegel’s take on system is the commonsensical ‘thinking of things in their interconnectedness’ (p. 79). Most striking, however, is how close to Kant, and, in particular, Kant’s own account of the subject of freedom, Skempton’s account draws Hegel, and it points to what will become the most important consequence of Skempton’s argument, namely the necessity of a philosophy of the subject for any philosophy that cleaves to the consequences of either the post-Kantian tradition or of deconstruction. Skempton’s argument rests, fundamentally, on the promisingly original claim that it is indeed possible to account for a kind of disalienation, even if one must presuppose the rejection of any account of a disalienated origin. Before alighting on a post-deconstructive theory of disalienation, one must first accept Derrida’s argument as to the necessity of an ‘inalienable alienation’, of the primacy of an originary writing prior to presence or identity. As Skempton puts it in his conclusion, ‘presence [for Derrida] is the basis not only of the notions of substance and identity, but also of consciousness and subjectivity. This is despite the fact that for Kant subjectivity is non-phenomenal and non-substantial.’ (p. 193.) Skempton’s reference to Kant here is key: for him, the standard reading of deconstruction, whereby the positive, substantial subject of Enlightenment-philosophy is rendered impossible by the movements of différance, is itself a misreading of the subject of postKantian philosophy. For Kant, the subject is, necessarily, unknowable when read within the bounds of phenomena, within the transcendental constraints of time and space. The subject of freedom is necessarily noumenal, for to posit such a subject as a knowable objectof-thought would contradict the very conditions of its action, namely a freedom from mechanical causality. The fact that it is Derrida himself who most consistently misreads the subject of philosophy in such a way is a fact not missed by Skempton, whose argument, as a result, begins to read like an attempt to save Derrida from his own philosophical mistakes. Skempton accuses Derrida of a similar misreading in relation to Marx, and it is perhaps in his treatment of Marx and the concept of objectification that Skempton finds his surest footing. Derrida, Skempton finds, sees in Marx a desire to ward off the consequences of différance, to ‘exorcise’ the spectrality of capital in order to restore the fullness of presence. In particular, Derrida’s Marx wants to reveal the ‘truth’ of exchange-value as use-value, which is itself symptomatic of a desire to efface the logic of the trace in favour of the certainty of innate value. By contrast, Skempton insists that, for Marx, humanity is inherently relational and differential, and that the ‘spectral’ nature of capital is simply a ‘formal universality’, ‘an alienated projection of humanity’s own universal character, its generic nature’ (p. 99). Human being, for Marx, is defined through the uniquely human ability to separate from the immediacy of life in order to apprehend generality, and to thus not be determined by the individual, present particularity of one’s situation. As a result, the finitude of particularity is converted into the infinitude of relational existence, of the praxis of human universality. Skempton writes: ‘A human qua conscious being is a “species-being [Gattungswesen]” precisely because it does not “belong” to a “species”, because it is free from specific determination and is hence able to perceive generality.’ (p. 102.) As such,


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disalienation would involve the recognition of the fundamental relationality of the human condition, not a return to the limits of finitude, the persistence of which is the very sign of alienation itself, of the reification inherent to capitalism. When viewed in this way, both the Marxist theory of praxis and the Kantian and postKantian take on the subject read as forms of deconstruction avant la lettre. Skempton writes: ‘The target of deconstruction, the metaphysics of presence, is itself the alienated condition of givenness and positivity. The unalienated condition, in its generative determinability, is itself différance, différance freed from the presence that is its own effacement.’ (p. 198.) Thus, it is a serious misreading to posit the theory of alienation as if it were reliant on a pre-critical metaphysics; instead, disalienation is formally equivalent to the recognition of différance itself, of the insubstantiality of the subject and the differential condition of humankind. By the end of Skempton’s book, Derrida occupies a singularly ambiguous position, on the one hand, castigated for misrepresenting the tradition of critical philosophy as so many instantiations of the logic of positivity and substantiality, and, on the other, celebrated for recalling, in a contemporary mode, the truth of the critical turn, taken by Skempton to be the recognition of the primacy of sociality, and the infinitude of the insubstantial subject. There are benefits to Skempton’s analysis, and it is made with an admirable concision and concern for the philosophical context of the entirety of Derrida’s work, so often taken as mere props to an exotic branch of literary criticism. The parallels Skempton draws between Kant’s transcendental turn and the philosophy of praxis that underlines much of Marx’s work is suggestive, although one wonders whether as much is lost as is gained in such a transhistorical-philosophical comparison. Skempton’s move is, after all, essentially a reductive one: by denying the force of Derrida’s grammatological critique of Kant and Hegel, and by asserting the equivalence of disalienation and différance, Skempton runs the real risk of obscuring the singularity of the thinkers he marshals in service of his argument. It is, after all, one thing to assert an infinite, ontological relationality as the underlying truth of human existence, and quite another to deny the particularity of the different ways that one might conceive of such a relationality philosophically. There are points during the reading of Skempton’s book when one becomes suspicious that his argument rests ultimately on the persistent substitution of terms, back and forth, such as it suits the argument: ‘presence’ for ‘identity’, ‘difference’ for ‘non-identity’, ‘objectification’ or ‘externalisation’ for ‘alienation’, and so on, until Derrida resembles Hegel and Hegel resembles Derrida. Such suspicions are ultimately, however, allayed by the systematic force of Skempton’s arguments, particularly in debunking some of the more persistent, ‘traditional’ interpretations of Hegel that continue to distort dialectical philosophy. Instead of contenting himself by taking apart some of the more obviously defective analytical-philosophical reductions of Hegel, Skempton also questions the veracity of some canonical, left-critical approaches to dialectics. Addressing Lukács, for instance, Skempton detects a simplistic, organic approach to Hegel, predicated on ‘the retreat and the promise of the return of the origin’ (p. 58). For Lukács – as well as for Althusser and Foucault, at least on Skempton’s account – Hegel’s dialectic is best understood as expressing the loss of an original immediacy, regained through the eventual, immanent coincidence of subject and object. Such metaphors of an organic originary presence are sporadically used by Hegel himself, Skempton concedes, but the ultimate consequence of such an approach to Hegel is to deny the primacy of negativity, and, in particular, the negativity of the subject. Skempton writes:

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‘the relationality of the “organic whole” . . . is itself dependent on the dissolution of the isolated fixity of abstract positivity, an ex-position rendering fixed thoughts fluid through the negativity and self-ex-position of the pure “I” that is their basis’ (p. 59). For Hegel, the subject takes the position of an ultimate, negative contingency, that disrupts both the self-closure of substance and any attempt to generalise the movement of dialectic to the status of a teleology. Read this way, Skempton’s occasional reduction of the implications of Hegel’s pro-social ontology to a kind of commonsensical intersubjectivity is forgivable, if inexplicable, and one hopes Skempton might expand his take on Hegelian subjectivity in future work. Skempton’s reading points towards an intriguing take on the anti-Fichteanism of post-Hegelian dialectics, with the ‘pure “I” ’ less the force of an absolute positing, and more the negative glitch in the forward-movement of dialectics. Obvious here, of course, is the influence of reading Hegel through a deconstructive lens, although perhaps the contemporary model of subjectivity that best fits Skempton’s reading is that developed out of Jacques Lacan’s structural psychoanalysis.7 There are productive parallels to be found, too, between Skempton’s reflections on the non-organicism of the Phenomenology and Fredric Jameson’s recent reading of a non-teleological Hegel in his The Hegel Variations.8 At any rate, the implications of such a non-, if not anti-teleological dialectics for the wider thesis on alienation and disalienation proposed in the book is that alienation, far from effacing a positive origin, can only be understood as representing a denial of the impossibility of totalisation. Derrida, of course, rejects any philosophy of the subject through his critique of substantiality and of the metaphysics of presence, although Skempton insists, rightly, that such predicates are not necessary for a theory of the subject inspired by the post-Kantian tradition. Indeed, I think it is through a focus on the persistence of the subject in this tradition that Skempton’s wider arguments around the question of alienation become especially forceful. If the ontological condition of disalienation is itself différance, is itself the consequences of the trace-structure of time, then the question that looms largest is the survival of the subject in such conditions; what, in other words, remains of the subject upon its desubstantialisation? Skempton seems to want to retain a subject that, in a broadly Kantian mode, is ultimately unknowable and yet determinant of the process of disalienation. It is not entirely clear, however, how even such a de-substantialised subject, liberated as it may be from the metaphysics of identity and presence, might survive the relentless paradoxes of Derrida’s analysis. Skempton’s answer is to align such a subject with ‘the subject of practical activity, of praxis’ (p. 199). Thus, reading Marx through Hegel, the subject becomes ‘the singular act that breaches the positive givenness of the determined totality of presence’ (p. 199). But how to account for the persistence and relative stability of such a subject in time, if the subject is reduced to being only an instance of disruption? A more developed engagement with work outside the legacy of post-Kantian philosophy, 7. The Lacanian subject names the ‘movement of [the] non-totalizable . . . that both found[s] and breach[es] totalities’ (Skempton 2010, p. 166), and it would have been interesting to see how Skempton reconciles his deconstructive sympathies with Lacan’s perplexity in the face of Derrida’s anti-subjectivism; how, Lacan asks, can Derrida ‘reject’ the subject when it is only, finally, the subject of the unconscious that names the ineliminability of what Derrida names différance? 8. Jameson 2010.


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particularly, perhaps, with work in the psychoanalytical tradition, is required to answer such questions, if an ‘answer’ is indeed possible at all. That the focus on the subject of disalienation ultimately reaches an impasse is less a fault in Skempton’s argument and more an inevitable consequence of the philosophy of deconstruction itself. Indeed, in reorientating our understandings of Hegel and Marx through such a productive aporia, Skempton has done a considerable service in underlining, again, the persistence of the subject as a question that haunts deconstruction, and that remains, indeed, its very condition of possibility. What is unspoken in Derrida’s work is the extent to which the elaboration of différance itself relies both on the straw-man of the substantial subject that Skempton so ably subject to critique, but also the bounds of a deconstructed subjectivity that must be presupposed, but, crucially, not admitted, for deconstruction itself to subsist as a set of philosophical propositions. What remains in question at the end of Skempton’s account is how to finally reconcile this hidden subject of deconstruction with the Hegelian and Marxist insistence on praxis, which may be another way of asking after the philosophical possibilities of the subject as an explicit model of emancipation. How do we ground, in our perpetually deconstructive ‘moment’, the subject that must bear the weight of political action? Skempton’s book poses the question, even if only implicitly, better than most. Reviewed by Tom Eyers PhD candidate, Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Kingston University [email protected]

References Althusser, Louis 2001 [1970], Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, translated by Ben Brewster, London: Verso. —— 2008 [1965], For Marx, translated by Ben Brewster, London: Verso. Derrida, Jacques 1990 [1974], Glas, translated by John P. Leavey, Jr. and Richard Rand, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. —— 1993, Spectres de Marx: L’Etat de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle Internationale, Paris: Éditions Galilée. Derrida, Jacques, Terry Eagleton, Antonio Negri et al. 1999, Ghostly Demarcations: On Jacques Derrida’s ‘Spectres of Marx’, London: Verso. Gasché, Rudolph 1986, The Tain of the Mirror, Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press. Jameson, Fredric 2010, The Hegel Variations: On the Phenomenology of Spirit, London: Verso. Skempton, Simon 2010, Alienation After Derrida, London: Continuum.

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Political Writings, 1953–1993, Maurice Blanchot, translated and with an Introduction by Zakir Paul, New York: Fordham University Press, 2010 Abstract This review considers the collection Political Writings, 1953–1993 by Maurice Blanchot as a means to assess the relatively little-known political odyssey of this writer and theorist. Noting the absence of his earlier right-wing political texts from the 1930s in this collection, it attempts to probe Blanchot’s idiosyncratic ‘ultra-left’ turn represented in his texts of the 1950s and 1960s. In particular, I analyse how Blanchot develops a communism that focuses on the problem of abstraction: both the abstraction intrinsic to social reality, and the necessity to negate and contest that abstraction through a ‘communist writing’. The review reconstitutes this unusual form of Marxism, and analyses the possible resources it offers and its limits. Keywords Maurice Blanchot, Marxism, abstraction, ultra-left, politics

The publication of this book should offer the opportunity to assess the singular, and relatively little-known, political odyssey of Maurice Blanchot (1907–2003). Cultivating a deliberate discretion, remarking ‘I have always tried . . . to appear as little as possible’ (p. 167), Blanchot was the éminence grise of that strange event known as ‘theory’. His dense and allusive writings on literature, and his own enigmatic literary writing, were profoundly influential, notably on Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida.1 Blanchot also lived a political life of reversals, interruptions, strange continuities and scandals. He was a militant-journalist of the extreme-nationalist Right in the 1930s, but, after withdrawing into literary writing, would reappear in the 1950s and 1960s as a militant of the extreme Left. Elaborating ‘a communism of writing’ (p. 85), protesting against the Algerian War, and then becoming heavily involved in the May ’68 protests, Blanchot would once again withdraw from politics in the 1970s due, he argued, to the Left’s attacks on Israel. He then reserved for himself ‘the right to the unexpected word’ by intervening on particular issues, such as the imprisonment of Nelson Mandela or the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. This collection is limited, as the subtitle suggests, to Blanchot’s political writings of between 1953 and 1993, which obviously implies omissions, as his actual political writing spans the period from 1931 to 2002. In particular, this involves exclusion of his early political journalism for conservative, nationalist and extreme-right journals and newspapers between 1931 and 1937. Instead, the collection is divided into three parts. The first is concerned with Blanchot’s writings from 1953 to 1962, which are focused on his opposition to the Algerian War, his elaboration of a new communism, and several texts intended for the planned, but never-implemented, ‘Revue Internationale’ journal-project. The second section, from 1968, includes the largely anonymous texts that Blanchot wrote for ‘The Student-Writer Action-Committee’, which are some of his most militant and interesting works. These were written for the very short-lived journal of that committee and are dedicated to elaborating a new form of interventional writing that is equal to the emergent struggle of May ’68. Finally, the third section deals with his occasional interventions from

1. See Foucault 1987 and Derrida 2000. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011

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1970 to 1993, which mark his withdrawal from ‘active’ militant writing, and these texts are often concerned with the question of the Holocaust or Shoah. It is the absence of the texts from the 1930s and early 1940s that renders the value of this collection for truly assessing Blanchot’s politics, and especially the abrupt reversal from farRight to far-Left, highly problematic. It is difficult, if not impossible, to analyse the issue of the continuities and differences between these moments of radicalisation without them. The Preface by Kevin B. Hart and the Introduction by Zakir Paul try to address this issue by providing a full and detailed account of Blanchot’s political actions and writings in the 1930s and 1940s. Also, Hart judiciously notes the difficulty caused by this absence, as well as that of other texts by Blanchot which might well be considered ‘political’ (p. xxiii). Obviously, however, these very useful and thorough efforts at amending this absence cannot replace the texts themselves. The result is a lacuna in any account of Blanchot’s political life, one which has often been filled with tendentious and suspect accounts. Although Blanchot’s writings of the 1930s were known of, and some were republished in the French magazine Gramma in 1976, this did not prevent his work from being attached as a minor supplement to the ‘Heidegger Affair’ and ‘Paul de Man Affair’ when seized on by US academics keen to implicate deconstruction with the taint of fascism. Jeffrey Mehlman put this case in its strongest form: accusing Blanchot of ‘investing in fascist ideology’ in the 1930s, and implying continuity between these views and his later leftpolitical writings and involvement in May ’68.2 This argument served a particular ideological use: discrediting the ‘politics of theory’ by imputation of a hidden, toxic, ‘fascist core’, as well as discrediting any form of political radicalism as implicitly fascist. In his detailed and sympathetic account of Blanchot’s intellectual and political itinerary, Leslie Hill has rebuffed the simplifications on which these accounts rest, whilst noting the necessity of an account that can analyse Blanchot’s politics in its entirety.3 And yet, taking into account as well Derrida’s remark that the ‘political prosecutors’ of Blanchot ‘should at least begin by reading him and learning to read him’,4 the unavailability of these texts renders this task difficult, to say the least.5 The actual writings consisted of journalism that Blanchot contributed to nationalist and extreme-right journals and newspapers in the 1930s. Blanchot played an active editorial rôle in the nationalist and conservative Journal des débats, but his most controversial texts would be contributions to the more extreme-right journals such as Combat (eight articles published between 1936 and 1937) and L’Insurgé (a weekly news-sheet Blanchot contributed to in 1937). In these texts, Blanchot would adopt a violent ‘revolutionary nationalism’ that called into doubt the legitimacy of the French state and, as the most notorious work had it,

2. Mehlman 1996, p. 213; see also Melhman 1983, and the retrospective account he offers of his ‘discovery’ in Mehlman 2005. Ungar 1995 offers a slightly milder, but still damning, version of this charge. 3. Hill 1997. 4. Derrida 2000, p. 48. 5. A bibliography of Blanchot’s texts is available in Hill 1997, pp. 274–98, and online (in French) at: . One of the texts of the 1930s, ‘Marxism Against Revolution’ (1933), was republished in Italian by Roberto Esposito for a collection he edited on the ‘unpolitical’ (Blanchot 1996); I owe this reference to Alberto Toscano.

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called for ‘Le Terrorisme, méthode de salut public’ (‘Terrorism as a means of public salvation’). The extremity of these texts was deliberately ‘beyond’ Left and Right, aiming at a dissident contestation of both in order to develop a new politics. These works were obviously not without equivocations or ambiguities. Although Blanchot certainly did not directly make antisemitic arguments, if we except for some derogatory references to Jewish émigrés in the Combat articles, and to Léon Blum in his L’Insurgé writings, his work was nevertheless being published in antisemitic contexts.6 That said, he was firmly anti-Nazi, and often philosemitic, and personally violently rejected antisemitism. The equivocations of his position lie in how far his ‘revolutionary nationalism’ really placed him beyond fascism. His development of this work from the extreme Right makes Blanchot’s ‘case’ far more problematic than the heavily debated stance of his later friend Georges Bataille, who tried to claim the affective forces stirred by fascism and Nazism for the radical Left.7 Certainly, Blanchot’s discourse was disturbing and, deliberately, dissident – although whether this frees him from dangerous continuities is at the heart of the debate. His stance of dissidence was one that, as Denis Hollier puts it, ‘exacerbates contrarieties’ and involves the refusal of a stable political position for ‘a different space altogether’.8 The difficulty remains of how far this actually moves to a new space, or risks collapsing back into existing political options, including the worst of those options.9 What should be noted is that there is an undeniable continuity between Blanchot’s writings of the 1930s and those of the 50s and 60s, which rests upon an insistence on radical dissidence and refusal. In a late text from his period of right-wing radicalism, ‘Dissidents Wanted’ (1937), Blanchot remarked: ‘The true communist dissident is someone who leaves communism not in order to find common ground with capitalism but in order to define the true conditions of the struggle against capitalism. In the same way, the true nationalist dissident is someone who neglects traditional formulas of nationalism, not in order to seek reconciliation with internationalism but in order to fight internationalism in all of its forms, including the economy and the nation itself.’ (p. xv.) If we reverse the order of these statements, and leave aside the crucial implication of equivalence in their symmetrical formulation, we can trace the continuity in Blanchot’s path. Similarly, in regard to ‘refusal’, Blanchot writes in 1933 that ‘[r]efusal tolerates no conditions, except that of never going back on itself ’,10 while, in his 1958 article ‘Refusal’, he insists: ‘What they are left with is the irreducible refusal, the friendship of this sure, unshakeable, rigorous No that unites them and determines this solidarity.’ (p. 7.) Contrary to the usual liberal collapsing-together of the extreme-Right and extremeLeft as shared discourses of absolute state-power and social control – the ‘totalitarianism’thesis – instead, here we find ‘continuity’ lying in absolute refusal, dissidence and negation. This commonality of extreme refusal requires a different form of analysis to unpick continuities and differences, and so also to resist a simple collapsing of extreme-Right and

6. For a balanced discussion, see Hill 1997, pp. 36–8. 7. See Denis Hollier, ‘On Equivocation Between Literature and Politics’, in Hollier 1997, pp. 76–93, for a comparison of Blanchot and Bataille in these terms. 8. Hollier 1997, p. 82. 9. Hollier 1997, p. 83. 10. In Hill 1996, p. 6.


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Left together, which serves, not so much as a political analysis, but rather to provide a legitimation of ‘liberal democracy’ as the only ‘safe’ political option. Here, for the reasons I have noted, I cannot provide that account, but I do want to carefully consider the texts that are reprinted to grasp the particular lineaments of Blanchot’s singular ‘ultra-leftism’. The singularity lies, in part, in the fact that it does not belong to the usual currents of the ‘historic ultra-Left’, which emerged from splits in the Third International, and which were condemned by Lenin for their intransigence in refusing to cooperate with ‘bourgeois’ structures.11 Instead, here it refers to what we could call a ‘theoretical ultra-Left’, concerned with contesting the usual organisational forms of thenactually-existing Marxism, including the Trotskyite and other oppositional currents, and calling for an ‘immediate’ and disruptive ‘communism’ posed against official ‘Marxism’. An influential figure here would be Blanchot’s friend Georges Bataille,12 and such currents would also erupt in full force at the moment of May ’68. With the contemporary emergence of Tiqqun, Theorié Communiste, the currents of ‘communisation’, and anarchist-inspired groups, we could argue for a ‘return’ of this ‘theoretical ultra-leftism’.13 While certainly not arguing for Blanchot as ‘origin-figure’ for these currents, and not discounting the problematic issue of whether Blanchot’s ‘ultraleftism’ is compromised by his earlier extreme right-wing views, I do want to suggest that even an assessment of his later thinking on its own terms may provide some guidance on the value of his political thinking and its implications for our understanding of this strand of Marxism. In particular, Blanchot’s ‘ultra-leftism’ raises the issue of abstraction in the articulation of communism. Of course, it is a common charge that ‘theory’ is fatally abstract, and the politics of an extreme ultra-leftism have also regularly received such criticisms. Blanchot’s deliberately ‘literary communism’,14 with its emphasis on absolute refusal and ‘infinite contestation’ (p. 58), would seem to synthesise, and so radicalise, this abstraction to the maximum degree. If, however, certain currents of ultra-leftism retain their appeal in the contemporary conjuncture, then the question of whether anything is salvageable of Blanchot’s extreme and highly abstract communism gains resonance; to assess whether, in Leslie Hill’s phrase, Blanchot remains our ‘extreme contemporary’. For Blanchot’s elaboration of communism, ‘we are leaning [adossés] on Marxism, pressed up against it, albeit in order to contest it’ (p. 58), and it is this peculiar relation of proximity and contestation that I want to assess as it is elaborated in Blanchot’s texts of the 50s and 60s. We can begin with the first text in this collection: ‘An Approach to Communism (Needs, Values)’, in which, via a review of Le communisme (1953) by his friend Dionys Mascolo, Blanchot traces the major elements of his own ‘Marxism’.15 Mascolo’s work is an obvious reference-point for Blanchot, not only due to their friendship, but also because Mascolo engages with the work of another mutual friend – Georges Bataille. Mascolo analyses 11. See Aufheben 2003. 12. See Noys 1998 and Noys 2000. 13. Noys (ed.) 2011 surveys the currents of ‘communisation’, while Graeber 2002 surveys anarchist currents. 14. The phrase is that of Jean-Luc Nancy. See Nancy 1991, p. 71. 15. Mascolo’s work is also a reference for the work of Daniel Bensaïd in elaborating an antiStalinist Marxism, for example, his text ‘The Mole and the Locomotive’ (Bensaïd 2003).

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communism in terms of drawing together politics and aesthetics as sites of irrecuperable negativity, and against the reifications of Stalinist political configurations.16 He maintains a parallel and separation between these two domains in terms of a radicalised model of communication, derived from Bataille’s concept of ‘sovereign communication’.17 This discourse spoke to Blanchot’s own project of thinking the space of literature as one of infinite contestation, connected to a politics of revolt and rupture. What Blanchot primarily takes from Mascolo, unsurprisingly, is his emphasis on Marxism as ‘communication’ (the subtitle of Le communisme is ‘Révolution et communication ou la dialectique des valeurs et des besoins’), interpreted in Bataillean fashion. This form of communication is as far from any Habermasian-style promotion of communicative rationality as it is possible to be, and Blanchot defines it as ‘the opening, the shattering violence, the fire that burns without waiting, for that is also, that is first of all, what communist generosity is, this inclemency, this impatience, the refusal of all detours, of all ruses, and of all delays: infinitely hazardous freedom.’ (pp. 5–6.) ‘Communication’ is no act of mediation, but rather the ‘immediate’ circuit of a demand that does not wait. Taking this ruptural ‘communication’ (in the form of anti-communication) from Mascolo allows Blanchot to link his own critical writing on modernist literature and ‘ultramodernist’ literary works with the stakes of communism. These works probe the power of literature as one of contestation rather than communication, a power that, Blanchot argues, allies it with communism (p. 6). In one of his relatively few remarks on his shift from farRight to far-Left, Blanchot said, ‘I changed under the influence of writing’ (p. xviii). Typically enigmatic, we could say that it is not so much a matter of writing narrative-fiction freeing Blanchot from false political commitments, but rather the opening to this experience of non-relational communication through writing, and which is continued into communism. The correlation of writing – in the sense of an anonymous, lawless and infinite ‘space’ – and communism is suggestive. In Blanchot’s hands, Mascolo’s intervention inspires a reversal of the usual humanist tropes of opposition to alienation and reification by arguing that Marxism will liberate us ‘by taking the side of things’ (p. 3). This provocative formulation, in fact, comes close to Benjamin’s and Adorno’s arguments of the 1930s that we find liberation in the ‘Dingwelt’, the world of things,18 although Blanchot seems to have come to this point independently. It also echoes Brecht’s formula that we find communism in the ‘bad new’, and this is reinforced by Blanchot’s formulation that we are tasked with ‘returning to a new barbarity in order to break with the polite and camouflaged barbarity that serves as our civilization’ (p. 4). That said, and understandably in a text of such brevity, and in light of Blanchot’s own writing-practice, these remarks are left tantalisingly suggestive and even abstract – a theorists’ communism. It is exactly this question that is raised in the attempt by Blanchot to create the Revue internationale, a journal described by Blanchot, in a letter to Sartre of 2 December 1960, as ‘a review of total critique’ (p. 37). The ambitious plan to form three editorial boards – German, Italian, and French – to produce the journal (with suggested titles including 16. See Crowley 2006 for an excellent account of Mascolo’s work in general, and Le communisme in particular (see pp. 146–9). 17. See Bataille 1985 and Bataille 1988. 18. Adorno 1992.


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Gulliver and The Other Review) foundered before an issue could appear.19 At the time, Roland Barthes, perhaps tongue-in-cheek, bearing in mind the failure of the review, described Blanchot as ‘a great leader of negativity with a capital N’.20 What is most interesting in the planning of the project is Blanchot’s commitment to an impersonal and collective mode of working, which prefigures his reaction to May ’68 and draws on his characterisation of communism as communication, and his confrontation with charges of abstraction levelled by the German editorial board. In relation to this charge, he writes: ‘I must say this refusal of abstraction and defense of the concrete seemed essentially abstract to us and of a more dangerous abstraction than the kind that we were reproached with, because it is idealizing and, in the end ethical in nature. (To say: “One must stop being abstract, one must be concrete” without worrying whether such a slogan has the least meaning in the state of exploitation of our societies is what I call pure idealism.)’ (p. 45.) What Blanchot wisely points out is how the charge of abstraction is often itself abstract, leaving unspecified and hanging the notion of the ‘concrete’. In fact, the demand for the concrete serves an idealising (pseudo-) ‘materialism’ that neglects to analyse how the ‘abstract’ is embedded in the ‘concrete’. Blanchot would note in a text intended for the review titled ‘Berlin’ (1961) that the literally concrete oppression of the Berlin Wall is, in fact, ‘essentially abstract and that this reminds us – we who forget constantly – that abstraction is not simply a faulty mode of thought or an apparently impoverished form of language but rather our world, the one we live and think in on a daily basis.’ (p. 75.) It is not difficult to assume that this statement is a coded reply to his German critics. What it also indicates is Blanchot’s insight into the abstraction of reality itself, not only in terms of language or thought, but also in the structures of oppression. Returning to his previous reply, Blanchot goes on to point out that the critique of abstraction directed against philosophical thinking from the Left is, in fact, deeply familiar: ‘In France, people from the right unanimously denounce philosophy because they are afraid of contestation and of the questioning that is essentially “philosophy” for us and because, under the pretext of praising the concrete, of praising empiricism without principles, they aim to hold onto the social status quo and sociological comfort.’ (p. 45.) Certainly, we could add, not just in France, and that this kind of manœuvre, which was classically articulated by Edmund Burke, displays remarkable persistence.21 What Blanchot detects is a doxic, and less remarked-upon ideological convergence of ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ around the ‘concrete’, which defuses critique and negation in the name of the preservation of what exists. In Blanchot’s scattered remarks, we can see the coordination of the necessity to pose an ‘abstract’ thought that is capable of grasping the actual abstraction of reality, those ‘real’ or ‘practical’ abstractions noted by Marx, with the need for ‘infinite contestation’ (p. 58). Yet such a call might seem empty or gestural, or, yet again, abstract. In his conclusion to OneDimensional Man (1964), Herbert Marcuse quotes Blanchot’s 1958 text ‘Refusal [Le Refus]’, noting that ‘negation appears in the politically impotent form of the “absolute refusal” ’,22 19. 20. 21. 22.

A discussion of the project can be found in Fynsk 2007. Barthes, as quoted in Holland 2007, p. 51. Toscano 2010. Marcuse 1986, p. 255.

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although adding that ‘if the abstract character of the refusal is the result of total reification, then the concrete ground for refusal must still exist, for reification is an illusion.’23 The abstraction of social reality all the way down, its total ‘real subsumption’, seems to call for an absolute refusal to match, but one left abstract. What we might call the ‘practical’ moment of this contestation was to come with May ’68, into which Blanchot plunged without reserve (Derrida, by contrast, displayed considerable reservations in regard to ’68 ‘spontaneism’ (p. xxvii)).24 To adapt a phrase of Bataille’s, we might talk for Blanchot of a ‘philosophy in the streets’, or ‘negativity in the streets’. What May ’68 realised was an essentially anonymous experience of a ‘community’ of contestation, the promise that had not been delivered with the failure of the Revue internationale. It also promised the concrete realisation of the abstract infinite contestation or refusal in this ‘open’, and deliberately abstract, ‘community’ that was anonymous and plural. Blanchot, for a fairly brief period, welcomed this opportunity to discard the ‘I’ in such a community (and his texts from this period were anonymous and only attributed to him later by Dionys Mascolo). Reiterating his affirmation of rupture in the first bulletin of the Student-Writer Action-Committee, he wrote: ‘for us – penury, speechlessness, the power of nothing, what Marx rightly called the “bad side,” that is, the inhuman.’ (p. 88.) Again, Blanchot returns to his previous articulation to develop an antihumanist communism, a communism of ‘pure’ negativity. This ‘infinite power of destruction-construction’ (p. 91) was, for Blanchot, a ‘communism without heirs’ (p. 92), an immediate and anonymous nonparty communism. This fiercely antihumanist Marxism, very different in style from Althusser’s, was onceagain geared to particular forms of speech and writing: the tract, the slogan, the interruption of ‘usual’ communication. In a brief text, ‘Reading Marx’, Blanchot suggested that three types of speech operate in Marx: the first, a philosophical writing, teleological and humanist; the second, political, which ‘short-circuits all speech’ (p. 104), and carries the moment of rupture at once; the third is indirect and scientific, but a science that upsets and subverts science. For Blanchot, it is a matter of affirming that ‘Communist speech is always at the same time tacit and violent, political and scientific, direct, indirect, total and fragmentary, lengthy, and almost instantaneous.’ (p. 105.) We can note that, in this characterisation, the first ‘voice’ tends to drop out or be downgraded, with the implicit identification of philosophy with (bad) metaphysics. In a sense, Blanchot promises an alliance between politics and science that will break up the serenity of the ‘lengthy’ speech of philosophy. This emphasis on the fragmentary indicates a political incarnation of abstraction, not in the direction of more philosophical writing (as one might imagine), but in a dense writing that is ‘abstract’ by refusing the usual abstractions of the literary ‘I’ and philosophical good conscience. Blanchot was to break-off from this path of inquiry. The very incandescence of May, which could well confirm the scepticism of those who would regard ultra-leftism as an ‘infantile disorder’, was only short-lived. In fact, Blanchot recognised this problem, noting that ‘the will to escape, by any and every means, an alienated order’ confronts an order ‘that is so powerfully structured and integrated that simple contestation is always at risk of being 23. Marcuse 1986, p. 256. 24. See Smith 2009 for a description of Derrida’s ‘Leninist’ response to May ’68.


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placed in its service.’ (p. 79.) Here, the very immediacy and ruptural efficacy of an ultra-left position becomes caught in a dialectic of recuperation; a problem, I would argue, that we continue to confront and that requires a continuing ‘working through’. As I previously remarked, the later political texts collected in this volume are usually brief interventions, often concerned with particular testimonials to friendship, notably to Emmanuel Lévinas, or to reflections on the Holocaust or Shoah and the impossible duty of memory. These texts largely break off from any consideration of the fate of Marxism in a period of historical defeat and crisis; instead, they seem to inhabit a retrospective serenity, a patience (Blanchot remarks: ‘Messianic impatience is perhaps the danger of dangers’ (p. 165)), that is far from the violent urgency and immediacy of the earlier ‘communist’ texts. Although unconventional in form, and often idiosyncratic, they also seem to return to more familiar political themes that preoccupied the 1980s and 1990s. Still, one of these texts, on the prose-poem ‘Factory-Excess [L’Excès-l’usine]’ by Leslie Kaplan, does indicate a more direct continuity with Blanchot’s earlier affirmation of communism. Here, Blanchot reflects on a text that, through discontinuity, traces the experience of the ‘factory-universe’. While refusing the facile comparison of this universe with the concentration-camp (‘Hell has its circles’ (p. 132)), Blanchot does reflect on the day-to-day violence of infinite suffering – ‘you have to know that retirement at sixty and death at seventy will not liberate you.’ (p. 131.) This remarkable text reflects on this ‘eternity’ of suffering for female factory-workers, an inhuman universe that leaves one suffering in human form. Certainly, this is a profoundly abstract text, but it attests to a particular form of abstract violence, one that is itself a kind of perversion of the anonymous community of revolt that Blanchot still retains faith in. In a sense, the overall importance of this collection lies in the broken threads that Blanchot leaves us to take up, in considering the possibilities of a communism articulated through abstraction and negation. His own fragmentary writing deliberately leaves this possibility open through a refusal to stabilise such a communism within discrete forms. Of course, such a strategy could easily licence frustration, and would seem to confirm classical diagnoses of the limits of the ultra-Left. More perniciously, it might even give succour to standard tropes of anti-intellectualism and to those who always condemn political ‘extremism’ as fatal to the good conscience of ‘democracy’. Despite this, I would argue that the challenge of Blanchot’s political writings, which of course cannot simply be quarantined off from his other texts, is that they invite us to read another Blanchot. Whereas the preoccupation has been to condemn the political Blanchot as an anti-democratic cryptofascist, to the benefit of the verities of liberal market-democracy, the possibility of a more nuanced analysis is also possible. This is not the simple matter of reclaiming Blanchot for the Left, but rather a more thoughtful reinterrogation of questions of abstraction, violence, community, and communism after Blanchot. Reviewed by Benjamin Noys University of Chichester [email protected]

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References Adorno, Theodor W. 1992 [1931], ‘On Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop’, in Notes to Literature: Volume Two, translated by Sherry Weber Nicholsen, edited by Rolf Tiedemann, New York: Columbia University Press. Aufheben 2003, ‘Intakes: Communist Theory – Beyond the Ultra-Left’, available at: , accessed 31 January 2011. Bataille, Georges 1985 [1957], Literature and Evil, translated by Alastair Hamilton, London: Marion Boyars. —— 1988 [1954], Inner Experience, translated and with an Introduction by Leslie Anne Boldt, Albany: State University of New York Press. Bensaïd, Daniel 2003, ‘The Mole and the Locomotive’, translated by Alistair Swiffen, Angelaki, 8, 2: 213–25. Blanchot, Maurice 1996, ‘Il marxismo contro la rivoluzione’, in Oltre la politica. Antologia del pensiero «impolitico», translated by Simona Fina, edited by Roberto Esposito, Milan: Bruno Mondadori. —— 2010, Political Writings, 1953–1993, translated and with an Introduction by Zakir Paul, Foreword by Kevin B. Hart, New York: Fordham University Press. Blanchot, Maurice and Jacques Derrida 2000, The Instant of My Death/Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, translated by Elizabeth Rottenberg, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Crowley, Martin 2006, ‘Dionys Mascolo: Art, Politics, Revolt’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 42, 2: 139–50. Derrida, Jacques 2000, ‘Demeure: Fiction and Testimony’, translated by Elizabeth Rottenberg, in Blanchot and Derrida 2000. Foucault, Michel 1987 [1966], ‘Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from Outside’, in Foucault/ Blanchot, translated by Brian Massumi, New York: Zone Books. Fynsk, Christopher 2007, ‘Blanchot in The International Review’, Paragraph, 30, 3: 104–20. Gill, Carolyn Bailey (ed.) 1996, Maurice Blanchot: The Demand of Writing, London: Routledge. Graeber, David 2002, ‘The New Anarchists’, New Left Review, II, 13: 61–73. Hill, Leslie 1996, ‘Introduction’, in Gill (ed.) 1996. —— 1997, Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary, London: Routledge. Holland, Michael 2007, ‘The Time of His Life’, Paragraph, 30, 3: 46–66. Hollier, Denis 1997, Absent Without Leave: French Literature Under the Threat of War, translated by Catherine Porter, Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press. Marcuse, Herbert 1986 [1964], One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society, London: Ark. Mehlman, Jeffrey 1983, ‘Blanchot at Combat: Of Literature and Terror’, in Legacies of AntiSemitism in France, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. —— 1996, ‘Pour Sainte-Beuve: Maurice Blanchot, 10 March 1942’, in Gill (ed.) 1996. —— 2005, ‘Derrida: Notes Toward a Memoir’, SubStance, 34, 1: 25–31. Nancy, Jean-Luc 1991 [1985/6], The Inoperative Community, edited by Peter Connor, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Noys, Benjamin 1998, ‘Georges Bataille’s Base Materialism’, Cultural Values, 2, 4: 499–517. —— 2000, Georges Bataille: A Critical Introduction, London: Pluto Press. —— (ed.) 2011, Communization and its Discontents: Contestation, Critique and Contemporary Struggles, London: Minor Compositions/AK Press. Smith, Jason 2009, ‘ “Crypto-Communist?” ’, in Critical Companion to Contemporary Marxism, edited by Jacques Bidet and Stathis Kouvelakis, Chicago: Haymarket Books. Toscano, Alberto 2010, Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea, London: Verso. Ungar, Steven 1995, Scandal and Aftereffect: Blanchot and France Since 1930, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.


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Libertarian Communism: Marx, Engels and the Political Economy of Freedom, Ernesto Screpanti, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Abstract Book-review of Ernesto Screpanti’s Libertarian Communism: Marx, Engels and the Political Economy of Freedom. In this book, Ernesto Screpanti questions the nature and status of freedom within both Marx’s thought and possible forms of communist organisation. By way of an argument which contends that communism should be understood as a theory of freedom, he extracts a deliberately individualistic version of communism from Marx’s work, and proceeds to develop this into a series of recommendations for practical-organisational forms. These forms, and the notion of freedom that they arise from, are, however, closely related to Screpanti’s adoption of an economic approach that consists of the quantification of freedom. This prompts a number of political and theoretical problems. Keywords Anarchism, freedom, individualism, libertarian, Screpanti, quantification

Ernesto Screpanti’s Libertarian Communism: Marx, Engels and the Political Economy of Freedom begins on a triumphant note, albeit by way of a rather familiar argument. ‘The breakdown of the “communist” regimes in Eastern Europe’, Screpanti writes, has not destroyed but rather ‘liberated’ the communist movement (p. ix). Freed from the authoritarianism of party-doctrine and fostered by struggles against the globalisation of capitalism, ‘the spectre of communism’, he claims, now haunts ‘the entire world’ (ibid.). This has fostered a ‘proliferation of Marxisms’, the ‘diversity’ (ibid.) of which now tends to be celebrated rather than vilified, and the majority of these new currents are said to share common ground in voicing a new libertarian trend within communist thought. This, in his view, necessitates an engagement with the theoretical roots of communism’s concerns with freedom and an attempt to develop the practical politics that it entails. Libertarian Communism attempts to go some way towards meeting both of these requirements, and, in doing so, it offers a ‘fundamentally individualist’ version of communism (p. 83). Screpanti is Professor of Political Economy at the University of Siena, and Libertarian Communism can be seen to continue his interest in the reformulation and modernisation of Marxist economics. Screpanti’s past works have sought to address the difficult connection between Marx’s theory of value and price; to replace the primacy of property-relations with that of contractual relations; to undermine theories of alienated labour, and to ‘free’ (p. 104) Marx, as he puts it in Libertarian Communism, from any latent vestiges of Hegelianism.1 These past attempts to develop classical-Marxist economics and to do away with the latter’s philosophical framework would seem to inform the aims and arguments of this book. Its first section argues that communism cannot be understood as a theory of justice or ethics, and thus cannot be based around egalitarian or utilitarian principles; any appeal to universal notions of right or essence is thus ruled out. The second section then builds on these claims by arguing that communism should be understood as a theory of freedom, and, above all, as geared towards the expansion of the freedom of the individual. The third section then attempts to build on the book’s first two parts by casting this theory 1. See Screpanti’s own website: <www.econ-pol.unisi.it/screpanti/indexeng.html>. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011

DOI: 10.1163/156920611X602579

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of freedom as a form of practical politics. This, however, is attempted by way of a ‘rewriting’ of ‘Marx’s and Engels’ theory of communism’ (p. 143) that involves linking communist freedom to individual choice within a market-system. Consequently, whilst the first two sections of the book offer provocative and salient discussions of the relation between freedom and communist organisation, its third section is decidedly more problematic: Screpanti’s interpretation of freedom lends itself to what he describes as a ‘weak variant of methodological individualism’ (p. 86) which he augments by adopting economic methods of quantifying consumer-choice. As I shall describe below, this seems to give rise to a number of political and theoretical difficulties. Viewing communism as essentially individualistic allows Screpanti to present the latter as ‘a system of maximal equal freedom’ (p. 138) rather than as a system of equal welfare. This then allows him to negotiate the objections that he levels at the famous motto of ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’ (p. 5): a doctrine that is said to suffer from an unworkable ‘inefficiency’ (p. 9), due to its removal of the ‘incentive principle’ (p. 6) required to make people work and perform unpleasant jobs. In order to function, this famous motto would thus need to rely upon a utilitarian and egalitarian ethic, adherence to a moral law or, worse, the realisation of a higher and nobler form of humanity (pp. 11–12). In contrast, Screpanti’s own individualist communism relies solely on self-interest, entailing that binding moral laws and fixed notions of justice can be dismissed. This pertains to Screpanti’s desire to ‘free Marx from Hegelianism’ (p. 104), and, indeed, from any other vestiges of Feuerbachian species-being or Kantian ethic: for a notion of freedom that relies on the realisation of a universal human essence or on the recognition of a transcendental absolute – whether that be a utilitarian ethic, an ideal future or a prescient vanguard – is said to invite oppression and dogma, insofar as it posits an identity or an authority over and above that of the individual (the ‘Hegelian-Marxist notion of freedom’ is thus said to be possessed of ‘totalitarian connotations’ (ibid.)). Furthermore, in the consequent absence of any notions of telos, human essence or species-being, Screpanti is able to use Marx’s views on the historical contextuality of the human subject as a means of casting the latter as being possessed of an almost Sartrean indeterminacy: Marx and Engels’s early descriptions of communism as a historical process2 are thereby given an individualistic reformulation, as in rejecting any sense in which communism might be an ideal state (p. 102). Screpanti describes it instead as a ‘liberation process’ (p. xiv) pursued by self-interested individuals. Screpanti’s focus rests, however, on Marx’s later works. Following Althusser’s notion of an epistemological break (which Screpanti locates with peculiar precision: it can be found, he tells us, between the tenth and eleventh theses on Feuerbach (p. 62)), he equates Marx’s mature economics to a concern with individual freedom and agency. This purportedly scientific concern with the individual is thus placed in contrast with the implicit universalism and ethical idealism of Marx’s earlier Hegelianism, and is subjected to a ‘reformulation’ (p. 141) that makes recourse to a new ‘rigorous scientific method for analysing freedom’ (p. 145).

2. For example: ‘We call communism the real movement that abolishes the present state of things’ (Marx 2000, p. 187).


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Despite frequently stressing the basis of this methodology in ‘contemporary science’ (p. xviii), Screpanti tells us little about its origins. It does, however, involve the quantification of freedom, and it tends towards the identification of the latter with consumer-choice (Screpanti admits that its development was ‘far removed from Marxism’ (p. 145)). We are, however, told that it derived from the work of two political philosophers: firstly from Isaiah Berlin’s notion of positive and negative freedom, and secondly from Gerald MacCallum’s later development of Berlin’s work (p. 104). Screpanti introduces its salient points by way of a brief account of MacCallum’s triadic model of freedom, according to which ‘a correct definition [of freedom] requires three elements to be specified, namely, the subject, the field of choice, and the impediments to freedom’ (ibid., Screpanti’s italics). On this view, the individual becomes ‘a decision making agent’ (ibid.), and his or her freedom is referred to as an ‘opportunity set’ (ibid.): a term borrowed from finance-capital, and used here to refer to the numerical quantity of options available to the individual (thus denoting the degree to which he or she is free). ‘The wider the set,’ Screpanti writes, ‘the greater the freedom’ (ibid.). This approach offers Screpanti the possibility of treating freedom as an objective reality rather than as a philosophical principle. Freedom becomes quite independent of any notions of essence, telos or immanent identity; yet whilst this model can be related to issues of class, insofar as one set of individuals can be said to have a greater amount of freedom than another, it effectively reduces the qualitative difference between communism and capitalism to that between the quantities of freedom that the two systems afford. Furthermore, we no longer have the antipathy to the market generated by theories of alienation (the latter having been dismissed as being ‘based on a universal notion of human nature’ (p. 5)), and this enables Screpanti to present a version of communism based around a competitive market-system (‘Marx and Engels . . . often . . . give the impression of believing the market can only be capitalist and that communism presupposes its overcoming. There is more to it than that’ (pp. 109–10)). It is thus hard to avoid the sense that Screpanti’s libertarian communism constitutes a form of enlightened capitalism: for, in the absence of any intrinsic opposition to the wage-relation, the pursuit of a quantitatively abstract set of choices might just as well involve those afforded by commodities and capital. In this respect, it is perhaps worth noting just how distinct Screpanti’s libertarian communism is from many of the other anarchist and communist currents associated with the term;3 for, rather than arguing for the abolition of wages, private property and markets, Screpanti writes that he does ‘not see what is wrong in conceiving a cooperative firm which produces to sell its goods to another cooperative firm’ (p. 110). Screpanti’s interpretation of ‘Marx’s individualism’ is also said to be ‘radically different’ from liberal individualism (pp. 84–5): this is because it rejects any sense in which the human subject might be viewed as an ahistorical abstraction; hence his concern with Marx’s emphases on historical contextuality, as noted above. This contextuality is, however, figured almost exclusively in terms of individual choice, and, indeed, must be for Screpanti’s quantification of freedom to stand: for in order to maintain the primacy of the individual agent that this methodology relies upon, notions of ideology and determination must be somehow accommodated into 3. See, for example, the Libcom group’s library of (primarily anarchist) texts associated with the term ‘libertarian communism’: <www.libcom.org/tags/libertarian-communism>; see also Toscano 2009 for a discussion of this aspect of Marcuse’s work.

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the opportunity-set: a point that can be introduced by way of Screpanti’s handling of the primacy of the individual over the class. As noted above, Screpanti employs a form of methodological individualism (p. 86), and he even goes so far as to attribute that approach to Marx himself (p. 85), although he concedes its potential conflict with Marx’s concern with class and social structure (p. 86). This informs his concern with ‘the postulate of ethical individualism’, which he terms ‘the most fundamental axiom of modernity’: namely, the principle that ‘each individual is free to think autonomously about what is to be considered the public good’ (p. x). This necessitates the rejection of ‘the dogma of a “general interest”, even a class interest, which is not reducible to private ones’ (p. 84). Thus, whilst class and struggle are ‘the undoubtedly complex result’ (p. 70) of individual actions, they are never their final cause, since ‘the movements of social aggregates are explainable by reducing them to the actions and interactions, as complex as you like, of the individual agents participating in them’ (p. 86, Screpanti’s emphasis). The individual is thus primary, and all individual interest – and thus, by extension, all action and social interaction – lies in the expansion of one’s opportunity-set (p. 144). This, however, becomes problematic when related to the ideological issues that he himself introduces. Screpanti does not deny the existence of ‘historical and social conditioning’, and he claims that social determinants affect the individual’s ‘development and his forms of consciousness’ (p. 69). Arguing for the ontological primacy of individual subjects, he stresses, ‘does not mean that their behaviour cannot be influenced by the relations and institutions in which they are embedded’ (p. 79). There is, however, a problem here: for, if their behaviour is influenced, and if all behaviour stems from self-interest, then there must be a sense in which this conditioning affects that self-interest. However, this same selfinterest would seem to be effectively ‘pure’ by virtue of its primacy, and because of the absence of any natural, essential template that it might be said to have deviated from. So, to talk of conditioning on this basis would therefore only seem to be possible if a) it simply meant that different sets of objective options produce different forms of behaviour on the part of neutral subjects, thus problematising the sovereignty of the individual agent required by Screpanti’s model; or, if b) one posited a ‘natural’ version of self-interest and declared it to be subject to distortion by ideology, thereby entailing a collapse back into the humanism that Screpanti wants to avoid. In the absence of Spirit, species-being or human essence, there can be no sense in which the ends of individual actions are presupposed by human nature. This means that there can be no necessary content to any of the actions that the subject undertakes; and, if actions are not pre-determined, Screpanti concludes that ‘freedom’ must ‘consist only in the range of opportunities which are ex ante open to action’ (p. 98). Thus, freedom for Screpanti lies in capacity rather than in action per se: ‘only the notion of freedom as capacity’, he writes, ‘as an array of possibilities, is compatible with a theory developed on the ground of a materialist critique of Hegel’ (ibid.). If the subject is conditioned, then this must affect its capacity in some way, and thus its freedom. Yet Screpanti’s opportunity-sets are intended to show that freedom is an ‘objective reality’, and that one can view freedom in ‘abstract[ion] from the degrees of rationality of individuals, as well as their motivations and beliefs’ (p. 145). He would thus seem to need a theory of ideology, or at least some account of the ways in which social structures condition social agents; yet, on the other hand, the premises that his account rests upon


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render this problematic: would ideology be a part of the opportunity-set, or a part of the subject? It would presumably need to be both, and yet cannot be: it must be a part of the opportunity-set because it shapes choice; yet, in order to maintain the primacy of the individual, the subject and its choices must be kept distinct. In addition, Screpanti also wants to indicate instances where objective choice is present whilst subjective decision is impaired. This can be seen in the manner in which he illustrates his adoption of the notion of ‘false consciousness’ (p. 121, n. 181), which he contrasts to the conscious self-determination allowed for by communism. For Screpanti, the self-government afforded by communist society entails that the ‘constraints people have to cope with . . . are rationally perceived as autonomously determined by the people themselves’ (p. 121). In contrast to this clear selfdetermination stand ‘ideological deformations’ that ‘induce people to perceive some norms as self-determined when in fact they are not’ (p. 121, n. 181). Now, the first and most obvious question that arises here is as to how any such ‘deformation’ could take place in the absence of a natural and essential consciousness, but the manner in which Screpanti illustrates this point is itself interesting: he presents a situation in which an individual is faced with free, objective choice whilst suffering subjective, ideological restrictions, and his rather provocative example is ‘a woman who complies with the moral norm that obliges her to wear a chador’ (ibid.) (an example that he employs on two further occasions; see pp. 100, 105). Screpanti’s claim is that ‘whilst she might be convinced that the norm is right’, any assumption on her part that ‘she has contributed to its determination would be irrational’ (ibid.). Ironically enough, ‘false consciousness’ and irrationality here presumably means something akin to a Feuerbachian notion of alienation, i.e. a mistaken transposition of the individual’s primacy and capacity to choose onto a (in this case) religious absolute. This, however, can only be explained through the theory of ideology that Screpanti’s approach renders so difficult: if, objectively, she may or may not take part in this custom, and if, subjectively, she chooses to do so nonetheless, then surely – if the primacy of free, individual choice is to stand – she has indeed deliberately ‘contributed’ to this norm’s ‘determination’, and there remains little to differentiate her false consciousness from its true counterpart. If this is not the case, her actions are not entirely her own, she is being influenced by the weight of ideology, and individual-subjective choice is no longer fully free. The issue of rationality and irrationality seems pertinent, as, despite Screpanti’s rejection of transcendental and universal absolutes, his views seem to rely upon the ubiquity of reason. Given the fact that he cannot make any appeal to ethics, essence or any other form of universality, his arguments must rely upon the rational faculties of those to whom they are addressed. Hence his concern with objective and scientific proof (‘the proletariat’, he writes, ‘only needs an effective scientific theory of the reality in which it acts’ (p. 39)), and hence also the pertinence of issues relating to the deformation of subjective choice. This should be qualified: Screpanti rejects all transcendental conceptions of reason, and all cognitive theories of justice (p. xi, passim). Reason, in his account, seems instead to become a faculty for weighing costs against benefits. Yet, as this implies the capacity to produce a (relatively) right answer, it does not entirely remove the authoritarian and ‘totalitarian implications’ of the transcendental versions of reason that it is intended to counter: for, if all those who stand to gain greater freedom from communism recognise that their self-interest lies in that political project, and realise that collective, militant-political

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action is required to realise it, then we have a sense in which reason has led all such actors to the same correct conclusion. By extension, a failure to recognise that the communist future affords broader opportunity-sets than the capitalist present must, presumably, be a product of irrationality (or ‘false consciousness’). Opposition to Screpanti’s communism thus becomes unscientific, wrong-headed, and just as backwards as any purported defiance of the grand telos of Spirit. Such issues, however, fall outside Screpanti’s objective study of opportunity-sets, and indeed must do so; for, if particular actions could be classed as good or bad per se, then the abstract equivalence of the opportunities within the set would be jeopardised. This returns us to the sense in which Screpanti’s approach effaces qualitative distinctions between capitalism and communism. Communism can only be preferable if it allows the maximisation of opportunity-sets, and the very notion of comparing capitalism and communism in this way reflects the sense in which his quantitative views on freedom render the two social systems quantitatively equivalent. This is perhaps marked by the debt that his approach seems to owe to economic analyses of market-choice, which, in turn, returns us to his view that any future ‘co-operative system . . . involves the market’ (p. 109) (‘[t]he autonomy of [communist] co-operative firms’, he writes, entails ‘some form of mercantile exchange’ (p. 110)). Screpanti’s claim that freedom should be understood in terms of capacity means that the possibility of action and the possibility of consumption become abstractly equivalent. Buying, consuming and possessing goods become quantitatively identical components of the opportunity-set and thus instances of real, objective liberty: ‘the field of choice’, he writes, ‘is defined as the array of goods or actions which might be chosen by the individual’ (p. 104). The danger here is that, if we are to view communism as the accumulation of greater possibilities, both in terms of consumption and production (pp. 145–55), then there seems little reason why it should not entail accumulating greater quantities of capital (a danger that he himself notes and warns against (p. 166)). Indeed, when describing the distribution of freedom as a class-issue, Screpanti himself states that ‘the higher the opportunity set (the higher the level of income) the more [freedom] there is’, for ‘a rich man is freer than a poor one’ (p. 150). Screpanti is thus faced with the task of showing communism to afford broader opportunity-sets for the majority of people than capitalism. To this end, and having established the market as his playing-field, he pits the opportunity-sets of a capitalist boss against those of a co-operative, and shows the selfmanaged workers to have a greater number of options. This is followed by further arguments relating to the consumption of goods, in which free ‘social goods’ (p. 151), taxation and socialisation are shown to afford greater opportunities, and, finally, by similar assertions regarding the availability of free time. One of the most memorable of these arguments is Screpanti’s claim that the self-employed worker enjoys ‘the excess opportunity set of selfmanagement’ (p. 147). The argument here is opaque, but it seems to present the case that the self-managed worker’s capacity to determine his or her own income entails greater opportunities than those facing the capitalist, for whom the price of labour is a fixed cost: the worker seems to be free to cut his or her own pay in order to compete more effectively. We thus have the freedom to lower wages, combined with the freedom to trade within a market-system and to thereby enjoy more social benefits. To borrow the words of the


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Libcom group (referenced above), taken from one of their own arguments against a similarly quantified communist future: Screpanti’s account would seem to ‘seek the emancipation of the spirit of capitalism from the limits imposed on it by capitalist society: generalised wage labour for all, but where effort and sacrifice will be fairly rewarded in a way impossible under capitalism as we know it’.4 Screpanti’s book is by no means without virtues. His arguments for a non-absolutist and amoral Marx and Engels are particularly interesting, as is his location of Marxism within an essentially relativist framework. In addressing the relation between individual freedom and communist organisation, he also takes up an undeniably important problematic. It is, however, hard to avoid the sense that he has taken something of a wrong turn in refusing any sense in which that freedom might rest upon more universal concerns. For example, where many other forms of libertarian communism tend to rely on notions of solidarity and mutual aid, Screpanti holds that conceiving of the individual as an element of ‘a selfproducing collective agent’ invites his or her domination by ‘an enlightened and active vanguard’ (p. 104). Yet, other libertarian communists who directly experienced the rise of such a vanguard would seem to disagree: in 1926 the exiled Dielo Truda group set out their response to the Bolshevik victory in a seminal libertarian-communist text entitled the ‘Organizational Platform of the General Union of Anarchists’.5 The rise of an élite should be combated, they claimed, not by abstract individualism, but, rather, by the universality of collective responsibility and solidarity. Certainly, Screpanti’s replacement of such collective responsibility with the operation of the (rational, communist) market (pp. 110– 16) could be seen to ground these universal concerns within objective forms of organisation, thereby precluding their status as moral law. Yet this move of grounding the universal requirements of individual freedom within objective forms of organisation is by no means absent from other libertarian-communist theories – for example, those geared towards councilism6 – which do not rely upon the retention of a market-system. Screpanti’s book has the virtue of raising questions about communist organisation, and, as noted above, its first two sections offer an interesting commentary on the relation between organisation and freedom. Yet, as Libertarian Communism’s recommendations seem so problematic, and the book’s real merit may lie rather more indirectly in the questions that it implies. For example: does a notion of alienation really involve a human essence? Must humanism be thought of as an absolute, or can it not be thought of in terms of process and self-determination (a position which Screpanti comes close to)? And does a concern with producing freedom really require an economic model that seems best suited to theorising consumption? Whilst the opening sections of the book are of interest in their own right, the implications that Screpanti draws from them in its third section are pertinent more by virtue of the issues that they raise than as a result of their actual prescriptions. In consequence, and despite the objections outlined above, this book might not only be of interest to those interested in the relation between Marxism and theories of freedom: in 4. Libcom and The Project for a Participatory Society 2009. 5. Dielo Truda 1926. 6. See, for example, Debord, whose own quasi-existential view of history and concern with individual subjectivity involved the view that the latter was to be fully liberated and realised through the establishment of workers’ councils (Debord 1995, pp. 87–8).

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addition, it may also prove useful to those seeking to orient their own concerns with a libertarian or individualist Marxism. Reviewed by Tom Bunyard Goldsmiths College, University of London [email protected]

References Debord, Guy 1995 [1967], The Society of the Spectacle, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith, New York: Zone Books. Dielo Truda 1926, ‘Organizational Platform of the General Union of Anarchists (Draft)’, available at: <www.anarkismo.net/newswire.php?story_id=1000>. Engels, Friedrich and Karl Marx 2000 [1845–6], ‘The German Ideology’ (extracts), in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, Second Edition, edited by David McLellan, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Libcom and The Project for a Participatory Society 2009, ‘A Participatory Society or Libertarian Communism?’, available at: <www.libcom.org/files/a%20participatory%20society%20or %20libertarian%20communism.pdf>. Toscano, Alberto 2009, ‘Liberation Technology: Marcuse’s Communist Individualism’, Situations, 3, 1: 5–22, available at: .


brill.nl/hima

Historical-Critical Dictionary of Marxism Species-Questions A: al-masāʾil al-mutaʿalliqa bi-n-nauʿ. – F: questions génériques. – G: Gattungsfragen. – R: rodovye voprosy. – S: cuestiones de género. – C: lei wenti 类问题. ‘Species-questions precede class-questions’ was one of the arguments in the late 1980s with which the supposed obsolescence of the Marxian project was proclaimed. Mikhail Gorbachev incorporated it in the ‘new thinking’ of Perestroika in order to accord preeminence to questions of general humanity over those related to class-struggle. This raises questions regarding the articulation of species-questions [Gattungsfragen] and class-questions in Marx’s work. A precise reading can show that, since the 1844 Manuscripts, the relation of speciesquestions to class-questions has generally occupied a central, albeit often unacknowledged, position in Marx’s thought. An appropriate appreciation of the relevant argumentation can serve to undercut later reductionist/ productivist caricatures of his thought. At the same time, it provides the basis for a clear understanding of the environmental contradictions posed by late-twentieth-century capitalist development. 1. The scope of Gattungsfragen is set by Marx for the first time (whilst still influenced by Feuerbach) in the 1844 Manuscripts. Natural relations and species-beings are understood here as fundamental conditions that are affected by capitalist ‘alienation [Entfremdung]’. (Capitalist) private property poses threatening species-questions, because it negates the universality of the human species-being in the structure of the ‘conscious life-activity’ © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011

(MECW 3, 276) specific to humans, which entails a conscious interaction between individual choice and the structures established by others (accumulated choices). The subsumption of human life-activity under capital, and the appropriation of competencies that goes along with it, negates the species-being of the worker, so that the worker ‘only feels himself freely active in his animal functions [. . .] and in his human functions [i.e., work] he no longer feels himself to be anything but an animal’ (MECW 3, 274 et sq.). This critique of the class-structure is lodged in a more general approach, in which the human species is considered both a part of, and separate from, the rest of nature. Significantly, Marx’s initial description of the effects of capital is tied to a conception of the human-nature relation that transcends any particular historical epoch. While Marx would later centre his critical analyses on historically specific, class-related questions, he would never forget that these represent just one dimension of a larger reality (Ollman 1993, 55 et sq.). The social-natural relations [die gesellschaftlichen Naturverhältnisse] constitute the framework within which class-questions are to be understood and in which the need to overcome them can be acted upon. It is in this sense that the domain of class-struggle is situated, in the words of the Communist Manifesto, not in human society as such, but in ‘hitherto existing’ society (MECW 6, 482). If humanity is to progress from the condition of class-struggle to one in which ‘the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all’ (506), certain changes will therefore have to take place not only within the human species, but also in its relations to the rest of nature. DOI: 10.1163/156920611X602588

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V. Wallis / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 213–218

Since Marx’s initial formulation of speciesquestions, the sphere of their practical applications has drastically expanded. The overall trajectory of species-questions can be observed in the following stages: 1. Marx’s early discussion of the basis on which human alienation would be overcome; 2. Marx’s later treatment of capital in its dual exploitative relationship to the worker and nature; 3. The unfolding of an ecological crisis, which is interpreted by bourgeois ideology as the reflection of an inherent conflict between humanity and the rest of the natural world; and finally, 4. Capital’s attempt, emerging from its internal developmental logic, simultaneously to extend its hegemony and to escape its contradictions by manipulating and appropriating life-forms at the microbiological level. 2. Marx’s basic response to alienation – whether between man and man or between man and nature – is implicit in his account of its origin. What was imposed by capital will have to be removed by liberation from capital. As retreat to earlier forms of social relations is impossible, advance to a higher form becomes necessary. It is thus in the context of his discussion of humanity’s species-being that Marx engages in his earliest reflections on communism. Given the dual aspect of humanity’s link to the rest of nature (as being part of it while yet acting upon it), it is significant that Marx identifies the nodal issue – the point of convergence between human-to-human and human-to-nature ties – with the question of the relationship between the sexes. In this relationship, ‘man’s relation to nature is immediately his relation to man’ (MECW 3, 295). By taking any given historical expression of this tie as the measure of ‘man’s whole level of development’ (MECW 3, 296), Marx is again stressing an aspect of human life that on the one hand is prior to class, but that on the other hand is inescapably bound up with every form that class-relations – or their transcendence – might take. A similar observation applies to Marx’s later discussions of ‘value’, to which use-value, on the one hand, is prior – ‘they [use-values] constitute the substance of all wealth, whatever

may be the social form of that wealth’ (MECW 35, 47) – but which, on the other hand, is equally connected to the social forms of capitalist commodity-production that dominate it. Without this methodological clarification, value-theory is permanently threatened by an obfuscation and conflation of capital-relations, provoked by the equivocation of the expression ‘value’ in ‘use-value’ and ‘exchange-value’. The terminology surrounding the analysis of the value-form [Wertform] has remained a source of misinterpretation, the most important of which, in this context, is the interpretation, used as a testimony to an alleged lack of concern with the degradation of the natural world, of Marx’s analytic dual thesis, that commodities ‘as exchange-values [. . .] do not contain an atom of use-value’ (MECW 35, 49) and that things of nature, in cases where their ‘utility to man is not due to labour’ (MECW 35, 51), have no value (in the economic sense of labour-value), even though they can have a price. That this is a non-theoretical misconception is demonstrated by the bold attack with which Marx opens his Critique of the Gotha Programme of German social democracy. The alleged free availability of natural resources led its authors to state that labour is the creator of all wealth. Marx makes clear that ‘labour is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values [. . .] as labour’ (MECW 24, 82). In Capital Volume I, labour is initially also analysed in the perspective of the speciesactivity that is both presupposed by and foundational for the capital-relation as ‘a process between man and nature, a process by which man [. . .] confronts the materials of nature as [himself ] a force of nature’; but, insofar as he ‘acts upon external nature and changes it’, he ‘simultaneously changes his own nature’ (MECW 35, 187). Within this frame of reference, which is still without capital, a characteristic feature is the specifically human capacity to anticipate ideally – that is, in imagination – that which is physically realised only afterwards (MECW 35, 188). By subsequently robbing the worker of this ability – and with that his species-being – capital simultaneously removes all barriers for the plundering [Ausplünderung] of nature; hence Marx’s charac-

V. Wallis / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 213–218 terisation of capitalist farming as the double exploitation of both worker and soil. The fundamental threat to the natural world is thus rooted not in the human species as such, but rather in the accumulation and consumptioneffects of the profit-mechanism, which makes man and nature its twin victims. 3. Although the natural world affects the existence of humanity as a whole, humanity in its entirety affects the natural world in a plurality of ways; this is indicated by the differentiation in energy-consumption between world-regions and historical epochs. By breaking up modes of existence that rested largely on the production of use-values, capitalism introduced an economic calculus that fosters limitless waste. Bourgeois environmentalism seeks to take away from capital the responsibility for environmental degradation and to place it onto the shoulders of humanity as a whole. In this perspective, the whole human species [Gattung] emerges not just as a victim of the ecological crisis, but also as its creator. The primary agents of this supposed species-behaviour are isolated individuals and families, acting as consumers or as procreators [Versorger]. Suitably programmed as consumers, they ‘demand’ ever-higher levels of goods and services; as procreators, their intentionality and objectives may vary, but their practice is shaped overwhelmingly by purely private criteria, whose effects have pointed mostly toward expansion. From such expansion – of both wants and population-size – the ‘carrying capacity’ of the world has run into an acute crisis. The answer of bourgeois environmentalism oscillates between Malthusian warnings against overpopulation on the one hand and the quest for technological solutions for situations of deprivation on the other (for example, recycling in industry; devices to increase agricultural productivity). The latter, in turn, rely heavily on market-incentives and are thus limited by the basic economic calculus that has led to the crisis in the first place (Wallis 1997a, 113ff.). Without the structural/institutional foundation to tackle wasteful production and consumption, only superficial remedies are possible. On the other hand, the enormous

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regional variations in per-capita levels of resource-utilisation (even between zones with similar indices of well-being) confirm the potential of human society to reduce its toll upon the natural world. Such a general reduction, appropriate for the dynamics of this crisis, would presuppose a sharp separation of species-interest from capitalist/productivist imperatives. But it is exactly this distinction that bourgeois ideology – in the form of commodity-aesthetics and commercial massmedia – undercuts by conflating consumerdesires with basic human needs. To challenge this conflation is to call into question every dimension of socially organised production (Wallis 1997b). It thus raises the most fundamental questions of what defines human society and therefore of what constitutes human species-identity. In Marx’s understanding, humanity’s species-interest would come to prevail conjointly with the culmination of working-class struggle, i.e., through the creation of a classless society. The practice of those organisations and states who identify themselves as ‘Marxist’ of interpreting species-questions as opposed to class-questions, and not as constitutive to the background (or the culmination) of such questions, could only emerge on the basis of a crude flattening of Marx’s approach. Such reductionism has been a routine aspect of bourgeois thought, as the bourgeoisie has always tried to present its own interests as being those of the entire society. The Soviet régime was unable to transcend such reductionist transpositions. It began by one-sidedly rejecting the bourgeois approach and affirming the primacy of class-interests, but it suppressed workers’ self-management in favour of despotic industrialism. In the race against capitalism, the ideology of quantity over quality [Tonnenideologie] and inability to transition from extensive to intensive growth amplified the destructive interaction with nature. When uncensored transparency and certain forms of democratic participation were finally revived under Gorbachev, the ‘real dialectic between class and humanity in its totality under the contemporary concrete conditions’ (Gorbachev 1988, 111; cited in Haug 1989, 81) moved to the front of official statements. As

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liberating as the general goals of Perestroika were, the conception of the relation of speciesquestions and class-questions remained unclear. The phraseology of the generically human eventually ended up leading to an ignoring of class-antagonism. The self-defeating implication of such non-politics [Unpolitik] would soon become evident, as, now more than ever, capital’s global expansion continued unimpeded. What began as a vote of support for the unification of the species [Gattung] as well as the subordination of the ‘competition of social systems based on class-antagonism’ to the ‘question of species-survival [Gattungsfragen des Überlebens]’ – concerning which, it must be remembered that competition of systems would ‘change its position and its form of movement [Bewegungsform], without disappearing as such’ (Haug 1989, 67) – ended up as capitulation to the most favoured class. What followed was an epoch characterised by the completely unrestricted primacy of the now globally dominant interest of capital over questions of humanity and the species [Gattung] as such. 4. Even as the overexploitation of nature begins to show the gravest consequences, in the form of increasingly severe climate-related disasters (Davis 1998, 63 et sqq.), it effectively remains the agenda of the capitalist global market to expand relentlessly the appropriation of natural processes. The destructive-illusionary character of such appropriation in the long-run was already expressed by Engels: ‘For each such victory nature takes its revenge on us’ (MECW 25, 460); for as control is gained within a limited sphere, the broader conditions for predictability – for example, in agriculture – are undermined. Irrigation-systems can accelerate desert-formation; forestclearance ultimately reduces cropland by causing flooding; air-conditioning systems increase global warming, and so on. Much as the capitalist cycle repeats itself, however, so does each stage in the illusory appropriation of nature. The more man ‘tames’ natural processes, the more they spin out of control, provoking new and more aggressive ‘taming’ measures with increasingly disastrous outcomes. Thus, diverse ecosystems are indis-

criminately broken up; species-equilibria are disrupted; ‘pest’-species multiply; synthetic poisons are applied; new strains of the pests evolve, requiring stronger poisons with increasingly severe side-effects, and so on. The outcome threatens the survival of many species, including that of humanity itself. At an advanced stage of this ‘taming’ cycle appears the practice of crossing species-boundaries; that is, using genetic manipulation to alter the traits of a given species in such a way as to make it resistant to the effects of the cycle’s earlier stages. Thus, one of the most common applications of biotechnology is the creation of plant-species with particular immunities. The alleged purpose is, typically, to counteract the effect of a given herbicide. The immediate result is an economic one: to create a captive market for the herbicide (i.e., farmers compelled to grow a plant-strain on which no other herbicide can be used). The uncalculated side-effects, however, include the propagation of the particular immunity (via natural processes) to other plant-species, thereby generating new varieties of ‘superweeds’ with enhanced immunities (Altieri 1998, 67; Rifkin 1998, 82 et sq.). Man’s appropriation of nature and nature’s defiance of such appropriation thus appear to advance simultaneously. On the one hand, the farmer, even if still a landowner, is increasingly drawn into a net of vertical integration in the agricultural sector, in which the inputs to every stage of the growing process – whether of crops or of livestock – must be obtained from the same monopolistic firm (Heffernan 1998, 53 et sqq.). On the other hand, this extreme level of control unleashes its side-effects chaotically in every direction. The physical effects include soil-depletion, water-pollution, and an array of degenerative processes affecting wildlife as well as livestock; consumers as well as farmworkers (Altieri 1998, 65; Rampton and Stauber 1997). The social effects are all those implied by the imposition of a modern form of debt-peonage, notably, decaying rural communities incapable of supplying their own needs, and with populations prone to various forms of anomic behaviour.

V. Wallis / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 213–218 The dynamic in question develops through the global enforcement of ‘intellectual property-rights’, and the practice of patenting intrudes into the very nature of species (Shiva 1997). In some cases, this extends to the acquisition by capital of particular cells of the human body, meaning that any medical use of such cells (regardless of whose body supplied them) is tied to a premium demanded by the patent-holders (Rifkin 1998, 61 et sq.; Shulman 1999, 33 et sq.). Moreover, such patents do not even presuppose any genetic alteration of the cells in question; it suffices to have isolated them. As a result of such privatisation of generic human body-parts, control over a given kind of cell, tissue or organ can become subject to market-transactions. The particular persons whose bodies are made available for such procedures are to that extent absorbed into a matrix comparable to the slave-market, or the child-labour market. The victims are in all cases drawn from among those who have fallen below the essential conditions of a minimally human species-existence. Although the commodification of labourpower, the alienation of labour, and the assault on man’s species-being pertain to the entire working class, Marx was well aware of the differentiation of conditions within the working class. He could thus call attention to those women in nineteenth-century England who were ‘still occasionally used instead of horses for hauling canal boats, because the labour required to produce horses and machines is an accurately known quantity, while that required to maintain the women of the surplus-population is below all calculation’ (MECW 35, 397). Capital thus found use, in the most primitive of ways, for those very sectors of the population that had been rendered ‘superfluous’ by the most advanced machinery. In a similar way, the biotechnology of the late-twentieth century threatens to transmute hierarchies of class and empire into biologically distinct communities, in which those with the necessary resources will attain formidable physical resistance and longevity, while the excluded sectors, increasingly deprived of all bases of sustenance, will sink to previously unimagined depths of misery, from which they will

217

again become available for uses incompatible with their humanity. 5. Marx was the first to see the rule of capital as a threat to human species-existence. Beyond his philosophical discussion of Entfremdung, he later documented the extreme physical degeneration of workers drawn into the factory-system (MECW 35, 275). The many improvements that were subsequently gained through workers’ struggles have not altered the underlying dynamic. In part, the centres of misery have shifted away from the industrial core; in part, the health-destroying impact has spread from the immediate environment of the factory to the larger environment of the earth’s ecosystem; and in part, with the aid of new technologies (informational as well as genetic), the difference in levels of power-resources available to ruling and subject classes has been carried to unprecedented heights. The dynamic affecting the natural as well as the social world is thus one in which, as anticipated in the Communist Manifesto, the response of the bourgeoisie to each emerging crisis only paves the way for ‘more extensive and more destructive crises’ (MECW 6, 490). Marx’s approach to the humanity/nature relation, by establishing the context for his treatment of the social relations of production, equips us to understand the global crisis as it appears at the dawn of the twenty-first century. The newly felt dangers presented by the natural world represent the accumulated costs of the devastation imposed upon it by capital. Any large-scale alleviation of these dangers will require a correspondingly vast shift in the system of social relations. The core-Gattungsfrage, namely the question of human survival, will thus remain inextricably linked to the resolution of the class-question. Bibliography: M.A. Altieri 1998, ‘Ecological Impacts of Industrial Agriculture’, in Monthly Review 50 (3), 60–71; B. Commoner 1990, Making Peace with the Planet, New York; M. Davis 1998, ‘El Niño and Year One’, in Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 9 (3), 61–73; J.B. Foster 1998, ‘The Communist Mani-

218


festo and the Environment’, in L. Panitch and C. Leys (eds.), Socialist Register 1998, London, 169–89; M. Gorbachev 1988, Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World, New York; Y. Haila and R. Levins 1992, Humanity and Nature: Ecology, Science and Society, London; W.F. Haug 1989, Gorbatschow: Versuch über den Zusammenhang seiner Gedanken, Hamburg; W.D. Heffernan 1998, ‘Agriculture and Monopoly Capital’, in Monthly Review 50 (3), 46–59; J. King 1998, ‘The Biotechnology Revolution: Self-Replicating Factories and the Ownership of Life Forms’, in J. Davis, T. Hirschl and M. Stack (eds.), Cutting Edge: Technology, Information, Capitalism and Social Revolution, London; R. Levins and R.C. Lewontin 1985, The Dialectical Biologist, Cambridge, Mass.; R.C. Lewontin 1998, ‘The Maturing of Capitalist Agriculture: Farmer as Proletarian’, in Monthly Review 50 (3), 72–84; R.C. Lewontin, S. Rose and L.J. Kamin 1984, Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology, and Human Nature, New York; K. Marx and F. Engels 1975– 2005, Marx Engels Collected Works [MECW], New York; K. Marx and F. Engels 1975–, Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe [MEGA], Berlin/ GDR; K. Marx and F. Engels 1957–, MarxEngels Werke [MEW], Berlin/GDR; B. Ollman 1993, Dialectical Investigations, New York; H.L. Parsons (ed.) 1977, Marx and Engels on Ecology, Westport, Conn.; S. Rampton and J. Stauber 1997, Mad Cow U.S.A.: Could the Nightmare Happen Here? Monroe, Maine; J. Rifkin 1998, The Biotech Century: Harnessing the Gene and Remaking the World, New York; V. Shiva 1997, Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge, Boston; V. Shiva and I. Moser (eds.) 1995, Biopolitics: A Feminist and Ecological Reader on Biotechnology, London; S. Shulman 1999, Owning the Future, Boston; V. Wallis 1997a, ‘Lester Brown, the Worldwatch Institute, and the Dilemmas of Technocratic Revolution’, in Organization

& Environment 10 (2), 109–25; V. Wallis 1997b, ‘Ecological Socialism and Human Needs’, in Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 8 (4), 47–56; V. Wallis 1997c, ‘Elektrifizierung’ [Electrification], in Historisch-Kritisches Wörterbuch des Marxismus Vol. 3, Hamburg-Berlin.

Victor Wallis Translated by Andreas Bolz Accumulation, agrobusiness, alienation, appropriation, biologism, body, Chernobyl, class-society, commodification, communism, consumer/ user, consumism, crisis, destructive forces, domination of nature, earth, ecology, eco-socialism, electrification, energy, entropy, evolution, exchange-value, excrements of production, genetechnology, geography, Gorbachevism, humannature relation, immiseration, industrialism, labour, life, limits to growth, Mathusianism, means of life, metabolism, need, use-value, production of life, productivism, recycling, social costs, social relations with nature, subsistenceproduction, surplus-population, sustainable development, value, waste. Agrobusiness, Akkumulation, Aneignung, Arbeit, Bedürfnis, Biologismus, Destruktivkräfte, Elektrifizierung, Energie, Entfremdung, Entropie, Erde, Evolution, Exkremente der Produktion, Gebrauchswert, Gentechnologie, Geographie, gesellschaftliche Naturverhältnisse, Gorbatschowismus, Grenzen des Wachstums, Industrialismus, Klassengesellschaft, Kommodifizierung, Kommunismus, Konsument/Verbraucher, Konsumismus, Krise, Leben, Lebensmittel, Leib/ Körper, Malthusianismus, Mensch-Natur-Verhältnis, nachhaltige Entwicklung, Naturbeherrschung, Ökologie, Ökosozialismus, Produktion des Lebens, Produktivismus, Recycling, soziale Kosten, Stoffwechsel, Subsistenzproduktion, Tauschwert, Tschernobyl, Übervölkerung, Verelendung, Vergeudung, Wert.


brill.nl/hima

Notes on Contributors Pepijn Brandon is a PhD-researcher at the University of Amsterdam. His current research is focused on the linkages between war, state-formation, and capital-accumulation in the Dutch Republic during the seventeenth and eighteenth century. He has also published on the Dutch Revolt, and was the editor of the first Dutch edition of Rosa Luxemburg’s classic text Social Reform or Revolution? [email protected] Tom Bunyard is a doctoral candidate in the Centre for Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths College, University of London. His work deals with Guy Debord’s theory of spectacle and its relation to Hegelian philosophy. [email protected] Tom Eyers is a doctoral candidate at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Kingston University. From August, he will be Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Interdisciplinary Humanities at Washington University in St Louis. [email protected] Sara R. Farris is currently Research-Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Konstanz (Germany) and European coordinator for the sociological section of the European Union ‘Daphne’ project on discrimination against second-generation migrant women. She is the author of Politics Enchanted: Religion, Subjectivity and Power in Max Weber (Brill, forthcoming 2012). She has published in the history of social and political theory, Orientalism and Islamophobia, female international migrations, Marxism and gender-studies. She is an editor of Critical Sociology. [email protected] Rohini Hensman is an independent scholar and activist who has written extensively on the labour-movement, women-workers, globalisation, and the oppression of ethnic and religious minorities in India and Sri Lanka. Her publications include Workers, Unions, and Global Capitalism: Lessons from India (Columbia University Press, 2011), and two novels. [email protected] Michael R. Krätke is Professor of Sociology at Lancaster University. His recent publications include Rosa Luxemburg. Eine politische Oekonomin in ihrer Zeit (Dietz Verlag, 2009), and Neun Fragen zum Kapitalismus (Dietz Verlag, 2007). [email protected] Alex Levant holds a PhD from York University in Social and Political Thought. He currently teaches communication-studies at Wilfrid Laurier University and political science at York University, Canada. His work focuses on the question of subjectivity and organisation. His recent articles include ‘Introduction: Rethinking Leninism’ ( Journal of © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011

DOI: 10.1163/156920611X594740

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Notes on Contributors / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 219–220

the Society for Socialist Studies, 2009) and ‘De spontaneïteit voorbij het klassieke marxisme: Rosa Luxemburg met de hulp van Benjamin, Gramsci en Thompson opnieuw bekeken’ (Vlaams Marxistisch Tijdschrift, 2009). He currently lives in London on a Postdoctoral Fellowship in Sociology at Goldsmiths College, where he is translating Ilyenkov’s Dialectics of the Ideal. [email protected] Warren Montag works at Occidental College in Los Angeles. He is the author of Louis Althusser (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002) and has another book on Althusser forthcoming from Duke University Press. [email protected] Benjamin Noys teaches in the Department of English at the University of Chichester. He is the author of Georges Bataille: A Critical Introduction (Pluto Press, 2000), The Culture of Death (Berg, 2005), and The Persistence of the Negative: A Critique of Contemporary Continental Theory (Edinburgh University Press, 2010). [email protected] Victor Wallis teaches in the Liberal Arts department at the Berklee College of Music in Boston and is the managing editor of Socialism and Democracy. His recent articles include ‘Beyond “Green Capitalism” ’ (Monthly Review, February 2010), and ‘Workers’ Control and Revolution’ in Ours to Master and to Own: Workers’ Control from the Commune to the Present, edited by Immanuel Ness and Dario Azzellini (Haymarket Books, 2011). [email protected] Evan Calder Williams is a doctoral candidate in Literature at University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of Combined and Uneven Apocalypse (Zero Books, 2011) and Roman Letters (Oslo Editions, 2011). He currently resides in Naples, where he is a Fulbright Fellow in Film-Studies. [email protected]


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Back Issues A full list of back-issues and contents is available at www.historicalmaterialism.org and through brill.nl/hima. HISTORICAL MATERIALISM 18:2 Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial-Prize Lecture • Kees van der Pijl on Historicising the International: Modes of Foreign Relations and Political Economy • Articles • Adam Hanieh on Khaleeji-Capital: Class-Formation and Regional Integration in the Middle-East Gulf • John Roberts on Art After Deskilling • Interventions • Ben Fine on Locating Financialisation • William Beik’s Response to Henry Heller’s ‘The Longue Durée of the French Bourgeoisie’ • David Parker on Henry Heller and the ‘Longue Durée of the French Bourgeoisie’ • Henry Heller’s Response to William Beik and David Parker • Review Articles • Emmanuel Barot on Sciences et dialectiques de la nature edited by Lucien Sève and Eftichios Bitsakis’s La nature dans la pensée dialectique • Steve Edwards on Caroline Arscott’s William Morris and Edward BurneJones: Interlacings and Mike Sanders’s The Poetry of Chartism: Aesthetics, Politics, History • Owen Hatherley on Sabine Hake’s Topographies of Class: Modern Architecture and Mass Society in Weimar Berlin • Elizabeth M. Sokolowski and Amy E. Wendling on New Waves in Philosophy of Technology edited by Jan Kyrre Berg Olsen, Evan Selinger, and Søren Riis • Historical-Critical Dictionary of Marxism • Wolfgang Fritz Haug on General Intellect HISTORICAL MATERIALISM 18:3 Article • Gene Ray on Dialectical Realism and Radical Commitments: Brecht and Adorno on Representing Capitalism • Symposium on Lars Lih’s ‘Lenin Rediscovered’ • Paul Blackledge’s Editorial Introduction • Ronald Grigor Suny on Reconsidering Lenin: What Can Be Said about What Is to Be Done? • Robert Mayer on One Step Forward, Two Steps Back: On Lars Lih’s Lenin • Chris Harman on Lenin Rediscovered? • Alan Shandro on Text and Context in the Argument of Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? • Paul Le Blanc on Rediscovering Lenin • Lars T. Lih on Lenin Disputed • Interventions • Matteo Mandarini on Critical Thoughts on the Politics of Immanence • Mario Tronti on Workerism and Politics • Review Articles • Paul Flenley on Oktyabr’skaya Revolyutsiya i Fabzavkomy [The October Revolution and Factory-Committees] edited by Steve A. Smith, and Oktyabr’skaya Revolyutsia i Fabzavkomy, Volume 3, Second Edition and Oktyabr’skaya Revolyutsiya i Fabzavkomy: Materialy po istorii fabrichno-zavodskikh komitetov, Volume 4, edited by Yoshimasa Tsuji • Jeffery R. Webber on Fernando Ignacio Leiva’s Latin American Neostructuralism: The Contradictions of Post-Neoliberal Development • David Parker on Heide Gerstenberger’s Impersonal Power. History and Theory of the Bourgeois State • HistoricalCritical Dictionary of Marxism • Dick Boer on The Imaginary HISTORICAL MATERIALISM 18:4 Articles • Charles Post on Exploring Working-Class Consciousness: A Critique of the Theory of the ‘Labour-Aristocracy’ • Adelino Zanini on On the ‘Philosophical Foundations’ of Italian Workerism: A Conceptual Approach • Duy Lap Nquyen on Le Capital Amoureux: Imaginary Wealth and Revolution in Jean Genet’s Prisoner of Love • Reflections on ‘Gewalt’ • Domenico © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011

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Losurdo on Moral Dilemmas and Broken Promises: A Historical-Philosophical Overview of the Nonviolent Movement • Interventions • Gail Day, Steve Edwards & David Mabb on ‘What Keeps Mankind Alive?’: the Eleventh International Istanbul Biennial. Once More on Aesthetics and Politics • Geoff Mann on Value after Lehman • Review Articles • Thomas Jeannot on Andrew Kliman’s Reclaiming Marx’s ‘Capital’: A Refutation of the Myth of Inconsistency • Fred Mosely on Andrew Kliman’s Reclaiming Marx’s ‘Capital’: A Refutation of the Myth of Inconsistency • Gail Day on Pier Vittorio Aureli’s The Project of Autonomy: Politics and Architecture Within and Against Capitalism • Historical-Critical Dictionary of Marxism • Richard Dienst on Television HISTORICAL MATERIALISM 19:1 Article • Tom Bunyard on Debord, Time and History • Symposium on Chris Wickham’s ‘Framing the Early Middle Ages’ • Paul Blackledge’s Editorial Introduction • John Haldon on Framing the Early Middle Ages • Neil Davidson on Centuries of Transition • Chris Harman on Chris Wickham’s Framing the Early Middle Ages • Jairus Banaji on Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages: What Kind of Transition? • Kelvin Knight on Agency and Ethics, Past and Present • John Moreland on Land and Power from Roman Britain to Anglo-Saxon England? • Carlos Astarita on Peasant-Based Societies in Chris Wickham’s Thought • Chris Wickham on The Problems of Comparison • Intervention • George Ciccariello-Maher, Roland Denis, Steve Ellner, Sujatha Fernandes, Michael A. Lebowitz, Sara Motta and Thomas Purcell, Edited by Susan Spronk and Jeffery R. Webber on The Bolivarian Process in Venezuela: A Left Forum • Review Articles • Daniel Gaido and Lucas Poy on new research on the history of Marxism in Argentina: Horacio Tarcus’s Marx en la Argentina: Sus primeros lectores obreros, intelectuales y científicos, Hernán Camarero’s A la conquista de la clase obrera: Los comunistas y el mundo del trabajo en la Argentina, 1920–1935 and Osvaldo Coggiola’s Historia del trotskismo en Argentina y América Latina • Giorgio Cesarale on Roberto Fineschi’s, Marx e Hegel. Contributi a una rilettura • Geoff Kennedy on Ellen Meiksins Wood’s Citizens to Lords: a Social History of Western Political Thought From Antiquity to the Middle Ages • Historical-Critical Dictionary of Marxism • Victor Wallis on Electrification HISTORICAL MATERIALISM 19:2 Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial-Prize Lecture • Ben Fine and Dimitris Milonakis on ‘Useless but True’: Economic Crisis and the Peculiarities of Economic Science • Articles • Panagiotis Sotiris on Beyond Simple Fidelity to the Event: The Limits of Alain Badiou’s Ontology • Vivek Chibber on What Is Living and What Is Dead in the Marxist Theory of History • Stefano G. Azzarà on Settling Accounts with Liberalism: On the Work of Domenico Losurdo • Intervention • Bill Bowring on Marx, Lenin and Pashukanis on Self-Determination: Response to Robert Knox • Review Articles • Michael Löwy on Walter Benjamin’s Archive. Images, Texts, Signs, edited by Ursula Marx, Gudrun Schwarz, Michael Schwarz, and Erdmut Wizisla, translated by Esther Leslie, Esther Leslie’s Walter Benjamin, and Benjamin Handbuch. LebenWerk-Wirkung, edited by Burkhardt Lindner • Andrew Lawson on Richard Godden’s William Faulkner: An Economy of Complex Words • Bue Rübner Hansen on Jonathan Nitzan’s and Shimshon Bichler’s Capital as Power: A Study of Order and Creorder • Widukind De Ridder on Douglas Moggach’s The Philosophy and Politics of Bruno Bauer and Massimiliano Tomba’s Krise und Kritik bei Bruno Bauer: Kategorien des Politischen im nachhegelschen Denken • HistoricalCritical Dictionary of Marxism • William W. Hansen on Fanonism

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