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Rohini Hensman
Union Research Group, Bombay
rohinihensman@yahoo.co.uk
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 class-
struggle. 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 labour-
power to capitalism – since, as the only commodity that can produce surplus-
value, 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
4 R. Hensman / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 3–28
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 wage-
labourer is no productive worker. His work is consumed for its use-value, not as creating exchange-
value; it is consumed unproductively, not productively’. (Marx 1976, pp. 1038, 1041.)
2. Marx 1976, pp. 1045–6.
R. Hensman / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 3–28 5
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.
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 gender-
division 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.
R. Hensman / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 3–28 7
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.
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 surplus-
labour 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
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
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.
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 women-
millworkers 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 work-
schedules.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.
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.
14 R. Hensman / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 3–28
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 ‘family-
wage’ has been posed, fought for, and won in formal employment. It is directly
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
36. Hartmann 1981, pp. 20–1; Barrett and McIntosh 1980; Barrett 1980, pp. 26–7.
37. Patel 1988, p. 380, cit. Breman 2004, p. 112.
38. Beechey 1977 and 1978.
39. Kumar 1983, p. 110; Westwood 1991, pp. 292–5.
40. Hensman 1996.
16 R. Hensman / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 3–28
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 labour-
saving 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 somewhat-
less 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 power-
supply. 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.
R. Hensman / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 3–28 17
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
18 R. Hensman / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 3–28
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.
42. Heyzer, Lycklama à Nijeholt and Weerakoon (eds.) 1992; Young 2000; Ehrenreich and
Hochschild (eds.) 2003.
43. Menon 2005.
R. Hensman / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 3–28 19
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 anti-
utopias. 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
44. For more details, see Hensman 2011, pp. 190–203, 246–50, 262–75.
45. Broyelle 1977, p. 71.
46. de Beauvoir 1997, p. 539.
47. Firestone 1970.
48. Rowbotham 1974, p. 168.
49. Malachevskaya 1979; cf. McAuley 1981, pp. 198–9.
50. Rowbotham 1974, p. 196; Dunayevskaya 1996, pp. 73–4.
20 R. Hensman / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 3–28
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
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.
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 working-
class 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
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 non-
hierarchical, 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.
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 maternity-
benefits 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
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Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 29–62 brill.nl/hima
Sara R. Farris
University of Konstanz
sara.farris@gmail.com
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
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
30 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
2.1. ‘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 service-
sector 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.
34 S. R. Farris / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 29–62
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
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.
36 S. R. Farris / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 29–62
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 hetero-
integrative 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.
S. R. Farris / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 29–62 37
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.
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 social-
democratic 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 workerist-
autonomist 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.
40 S. R. Farris / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 29–62
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.
S. R. Farris / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 29–62 41
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
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.
42 S. R. Farris / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 29–62
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 trade-
union 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 starting-
point for the subsequent phase of Tronti’s development, encapsulated in the
thesis of the ‘autonomy of the political’.
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
S. R. Farris / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 29–62 43
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.
44 S. R. Farris / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 29–62
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).
46 S. R. Farris / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 29–62
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 value-
judgments 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.
S. R. Farris / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 29–62 47
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.
S. R. Farris / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 29–62 49
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
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
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 anti-
political, 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,
The workers’ state, never realised, presented itself in the twentieth century as the
possible form of government of the best. Not élite, though the nineteenth-
twentieth 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
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
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
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:
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.
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
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
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—— 1994a [1918], ‘Parliament and Government in Germany under a New Political Order’, in
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Marxism, London: Pluto Press.
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Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 63–105 brill.nl/hima
Michael R. Krätke
Lancaster University
m.kraetke@lancaster.ac.uk
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
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
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.
M. R. Krätke / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 63–105 67
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 mechanical-
physical 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 five-
dollars-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.
68 M. R. Krätke / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 63–105
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 already-
established 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
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
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 often-
quoted 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
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).
M. R. Krätke / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 63–105 75
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).
76 M. R. Krätke / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 63–105
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).
M. R. Krätke / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 63–105 77
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.
78 M. R. Krätke / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 63–105
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).
80 M. R. Krätke / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 63–105
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 side-
rôle – 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
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).
M. R. Krätke / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 63–105 83
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).
84 M. R. Krätke / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 63–105
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).
M. R. Krätke / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 63–105 85
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 state-
violence 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
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
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.
88 M. R. Krätke / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 63–105
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
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.
90 M. R. Krätke / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 63–105
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).
M. R. Krätke / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 63–105 91
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).
92 M. R. Krätke / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 63–105
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).
M. R. Krätke / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 63–105 93
‘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.
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.
M. R. Krätke / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 63–105 95
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
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).
M. R. Krätke / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 63–105 97
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)
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).
100 M. R. Krätke / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 63–105
187. Ibid.
188. Ibid.
189. See Cropsey 1980.
190. See Bürgin 1993.
191. See Collini, Winch and Burrow 1983.
M. R. Krätke / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 63–105 101
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.
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M. R. Krätke / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 63–105 105
Pepijn Brandon
University of Amsterdam
p.brandon1@uva.nl
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) 106–146 107
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.
108 P. Brandon / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 106–146
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.
P. Brandon / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 106–146 109
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.
110 P. Brandon / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 106–146
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 mid-
1840s 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 merchant-
capital could find accommodation there; therefore, it disappeared to Holland
and England”.’39 Thus, Marx linked the shifts in late-medieval and early-
modern 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
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
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 capital-
investment 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 wage-
labourer 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.
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.
118 P. Brandon / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 106–146
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 market-
orientation was combined with intensive subsistence-farming. Peasant-
landholding 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
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.
P. Brandon / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 106–146 121
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.
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
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.
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 urban-
agrarian 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.
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 luxury-
goods 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:
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, small-
scale 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 urban-
commercial 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.
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 seven-
teenth 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 state-
power for their own exclusive benefit. Despite a number of spectacular cases
of corruption, public auctioning and ‘open’ competition in government-
contracting 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
Conclusions
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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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
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.
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.
Review Articles / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 147–156 149
‘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 well-
researched 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,
150 Review Articles / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 147–156
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 fully-
formed 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
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 always-
already ‘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
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.
154 Review Articles / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 147–156
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 non-
discursive, 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.
Review Articles / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 147–156 155
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.
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.
Review Articles / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 157–175 157
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 game-
changer, 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
158 Review Articles / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 157–175
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 counter-
blow, 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.
Review Articles / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 157–175 159
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 ‘post-
Maoist 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?
might call ‘Leninist political temporality’, as counterposed to the ‘homogeneous and empty’
time of mechanical progress that Lenin detected in Kautsky’s thought.
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.
Review Articles / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 157–175 161
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 never-
ending 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 mass-
scale. 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.
162 Review Articles / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 157–175
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.
Review Articles / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 157–175 163
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).
164 Review Articles / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 157–175
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.
166 Review Articles / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 157–175
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 internal-
dialectical 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
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:
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 self-
determination and rational choice).
168 Review Articles / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 157–175
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.
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,
170 Review Articles / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 157–175
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 more-
or-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).
Review Articles / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 157–175 171
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 party-
form: 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 ‘post-
Seattle’ 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
172 Review Articles / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 157–175
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
Review Articles / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 157–175 173
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 past-
organisational 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:
174 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.)
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.
Review Articles / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 157–175 175
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.
176 Review Articles / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 176–189
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
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
Review Articles / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 176–189 177
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.
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: <http://www.caute.net.ru/ilyenkov/lib.html>.
178 Review Articles / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 176–189
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.
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
(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.
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
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 mid-
1970s, 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
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,
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
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.
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
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.
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.
Review Articles / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 176–189 189
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: <http://caute.net
.ru/am/text/diagramma.html>.
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.
190 Review Articles / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 190–195
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
1. Althusser 2001.
2. Althusser 2008.
3. Derrida 1993.
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011 DOI: 10.1163/156920611X573860
Review Articles / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 190–195 191
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 non-
identity 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 non-
objectifiable absolute subject, which is itself nothing other than eternal freedom, the
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 post-
Kantian 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’ inter-
pretations 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:
194 Review Articles / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 190–195
‘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.
Review Articles / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 190–195 195
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.
196 Review Articles / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 196–204
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
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 far-
Right 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 left-
political 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: <http://blanchot.info/documents/Bibliographie_des_textes_de_Blanchot_Octobre_
2010.pdf>. 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.
198 Review Articles / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 196–204
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 extreme-
Left 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
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 then-
actually-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 ‘ultra-
leftism’ 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
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.
Review Articles / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 196–204 201
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 One-
Dimensional 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
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 non-
party communism.
This fiercely antihumanist Marxism, very different in style from Althusser’s, was once-
again 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
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 crypto-
fascist, 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.
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: <http://
libcom.org/library/beyond-ultra-left-aufheben-11>, 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 Anti-
Semitism 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.
Review Articles / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 205–212 205
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
2. For example: ‘We call communism the real movement that abolishes the present state of
things’ (Marx 2000, p. 187).
Review Articles / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 205–212 207
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.
208 Review Articles / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 205–212
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 self-
interest 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
Review Articles / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 205–212 209
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 self-
determination 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
210 Review Articles / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 205–212
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 self-
managed 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 self-
management’ (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
Review Articles / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 205–212 211
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 self-
producing 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
addition, it may also prove useful to those seeking to orient their own concerns with a
libertarian or individualist Marxism.
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: <http://ojs.gc.cuny.edu/index.php/situations/article/
viewDownloadInterstitial/329/450>.
Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 213–218 brill.nl/hima
Since Marx’s initial formulation of species- may be the social form of that wealth’ (MECW
questions, the sphere of their practical applica- 35, 47) – but which, on the other hand, is
tions has drastically expanded. The overall equally connected to the social forms of capi-
trajectory of species-questions can be observed talist commodity-production that dominate
in the following stages: 1. Marx’s early discus- it. Without this methodological clarification,
sion of the basis on which human alienation value-theory is permanently threatened by an
would be overcome; 2. Marx’s later treatment obfuscation and conflation of capital-relations,
of capital in its dual exploitative relationship provoked by the equivocation of the expres-
to the worker and nature; 3. The unfolding of sion ‘value’ in ‘use-value’ and ‘exchange-value’.
an ecological crisis, which is interpreted by The terminology surrounding the analysis of
bourgeois ideology as the reflection of an the value-form [Wertform] has remained a
inherent conflict between humanity and the source of misinterpretation, the most impor-
rest of the natural world; and finally, 4. Capi- tant of which, in this context, is the interpre-
tal’s attempt, emerging from its internal devel- tation, used as a testimony to an alleged lack
opmental logic, simultaneously to extend its of concern with the degradation of the natural
hegemony and to escape its contradictions by world, of Marx’s analytic dual thesis, that
manipulating and appropriating life-forms at commodities ‘as exchange-values [. . .] do not
the microbiological level. contain an atom of use-value’ (MECW 35, 49)
and that things of nature, in cases where their
2. Marx’s basic response to alienation – ‘utility to man is not due to labour’ (MECW
whether between man and man or between 35, 51), have no value (in the economic sense
man and nature – is implicit in his account of of labour-value), even though they can have a
its origin. What was imposed by capital will price. That this is a non-theoretical miscon-
have to be removed by liberation from capital. ception is demonstrated by the bold attack
As retreat to earlier forms of social relations is with which Marx opens his Critique of the
impossible, advance to a higher form becomes Gotha Programme of German social democ-
necessary. It is thus in the context of his racy. The alleged free availability of natural
discussion of humanity’s species-being that resources led its authors to state that labour is
Marx engages in his earliest reflections on the creator of all wealth. Marx makes clear
communism. that ‘labour is not the source of all wealth.
Given the dual aspect of humanity’s link to Nature is just as much the source of use values
the rest of nature (as being part of it while yet [. . .] as labour’ (MECW 24, 82).
acting upon it), it is significant that Marx In Capital Volume I, labour is initially also
identifies the nodal issue – the point of con- analysed in the perspective of the species-
vergence between human-to-human and activity that is both presupposed by and foun-
human-to-nature ties – with the question of dational for the capital-relation as ‘a process
the relationship between the sexes. In this rela- between man and nature, a process by which
tionship, ‘man’s relation to nature is immedi- man [. . .] confronts the materials of nature as
ately his relation to man’ (MECW 3, 295). By [himself ] a force of nature’; but, insofar as he
taking any given historical expression of this ‘acts upon external nature and changes it’, he
tie as the measure of ‘man’s whole level of ‘simultaneously changes his own nature’
development’ (MECW 3, 296), Marx is again (MECW 35, 187). Within this frame of refer-
stressing an aspect of human life that on the ence, which is still without capital, a character-
one hand is prior to class, but that on the istic feature is the specifically human capacity
other hand is inescapably bound up with every to anticipate ideally – that is, in imagination –
form that class-relations – or their transcend- that which is physically realised only after-
ence – might take. wards (MECW 35, 188). By subsequently
A similar observation applies to Marx’s later robbing the worker of this ability – and with
discussions of ‘value’, to which use-value, on that his species-being – capital simultaneously
the one hand, is prior – ‘they [use-values] con- removes all barriers for the plundering [Aus-
stitute the substance of all wealth, whatever plünderung] of nature; hence Marx’s charac-
V. Wallis / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 213–218 215
liberating as the general goals of Perestroika criminately broken up; species-equilibria are
were, the conception of the relation of species- disrupted; ‘pest’-species multiply; synthetic
questions and class-questions remained unclear. poisons are applied; new strains of the pests
The phraseology of the generically human evolve, requiring stronger poisons with
eventually ended up leading to an ignoring of increasingly severe side-effects, and so on. The
class-antagonism. The self-defeating implica- outcome threatens the survival of many spe-
tion of such non-politics [Unpolitik] would cies, including that of humanity itself.
soon become evident, as, now more than ever, At an advanced stage of this ‘taming’ cycle
capital’s global expansion continued unim- appears the practice of crossing species-bound-
peded. What began as a vote of support for the aries; that is, using genetic manipulation to
unification of the species [Gattung] as well as alter the traits of a given species in such a way
the subordination of the ‘competition of social as to make it resistant to the effects of the
systems based on class-antagonism’ to the ‘ques- cycle’s earlier stages. Thus, one of the most
tion of species-survival [Gattungsfragen des common applications of biotechnology is the
Überlebens]’ – concerning which, it must be creation of plant-species with particular
remembered that competition of systems would immunities. The alleged purpose is, typically,
‘change its position and its form of movement to counteract the effect of a given herbicide.
[Bewegungsform], without disappearing as such’ The immediate result is an economic one: to
(Haug 1989, 67) – ended up as capitulation to create a captive market for the herbicide (i.e.,
the most favoured class. What followed was an farmers compelled to grow a plant-strain on
epoch characterised by the completely unre- which no other herbicide can be used). The
stricted primacy of the now globally dominant uncalculated side-effects, however, include the
interest of capital over questions of humanity propagation of the particular immunity (via
and the species [Gattung] as such. natural processes) to other plant-species,
thereby generating new varieties of ‘super-
4. Even as the overexploitation of nature weeds’ with enhanced immunities (Altieri
begins to show the gravest consequences, in 1998, 67; Rifkin 1998, 82 et sq.).
the form of increasingly severe climate-related Man’s appropriation of nature and nature’s
disasters (Davis 1998, 63 et sqq.), it effectively defiance of such appropriation thus appear
remains the agenda of the capitalist global to advance simultaneously. On the one hand,
market to expand relentlessly the appropria- the farmer, even if still a landowner, is increas-
tion of natural processes. The destructive-illu- ingly drawn into a net of vertical integration
sionary character of such appropriation in the in the agricultural sector, in which the
long-run was already expressed by Engels: inputs to every stage of the growing process –
‘For each such victory nature takes its revenge whether of crops or of livestock – must be
on us’ (MECW 25, 460); for as control is obtained from the same monopolistic firm
gained within a limited sphere, the broader (Heffernan 1998, 53 et sqq.). On the other
conditions for predictability – for example, in hand, this extreme level of control unleashes
agriculture – are undermined. Irrigation-sys- its side-effects chaotically in every direction.
tems can accelerate desert-formation; forest- The physical effects include soil-depletion,
clearance ultimately reduces cropland by water-pollution, and an array of degenerative
causing flooding; air-conditioning systems processes affecting wildlife as well as livestock;
increase global warming, and so on. consumers as well as farmworkers (Altieri
Much as the capitalist cycle repeats itself, 1998, 65; Rampton and Stauber 1997). The
however, so does each stage in the illusory social effects are all those implied by the
appropriation of nature. The more man ‘tames’ imposition of a modern form of debt-peon-
natural processes, the more they spin out of age, notably, decaying rural communities
control, provoking new and more aggressive incapable of supplying their own needs, and
‘taming’ measures with increasingly disastrous with populations prone to various forms of
outcomes. Thus, diverse ecosystems are indis- anomic behaviour.
V. Wallis / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 213–218 217
The dynamic in question develops through again become available for uses incompatible
the global enforcement of ‘intellectual prop- with their humanity.
erty-rights’, and the practice of patenting
intrudes into the very nature of species (Shiva 5. Marx was the first to see the rule of capi-
1997). In some cases, this extends to the tal as a threat to human species-existence.
acquisition by capital of particular cells of the Beyond his philosophical discussion of Ent-
human body, meaning that any medical use of fremdung, he later documented the extreme
such cells (regardless of whose body supplied physical degeneration of workers drawn into
them) is tied to a premium demanded by the the factory-system (MECW 35, 275). The
patent-holders (Rifkin 1998, 61 et sq.; Shul- many improvements that were subsequently
man 1999, 33 et sq.). Moreover, such patents gained through workers’ struggles have not
do not even presuppose any genetic alteration altered the underlying dynamic. In part, the
of the cells in question; it suffices to have iso- centres of misery have shifted away from the
lated them. As a result of such privatisation of industrial core; in part, the health-destroying
generic human body-parts, control over a impact has spread from the immediate envi-
given kind of cell, tissue or organ can become ronment of the factory to the larger environ-
subject to market-transactions. The particular ment of the earth’s ecosystem; and in part,
persons whose bodies are made available for with the aid of new technologies (informa-
such procedures are to that extent absorbed tional as well as genetic), the difference in lev-
into a matrix comparable to the slave-market, els of power-resources available to ruling and
or the child-labour market. The victims are in subject classes has been carried to unprece-
all cases drawn from among those who have dented heights.
fallen below the essential conditions of a mini- The dynamic affecting the natural as well as
mally human species-existence. the social world is thus one in which, as antic-
Although the commodification of labour- ipated in the Communist Manifesto, the
power, the alienation of labour, and the assault response of the bourgeoisie to each emerging
on man’s species-being pertain to the entire crisis only paves the way for ‘more extensive
working class, Marx was well aware of the dif- and more destructive crises’ (MECW 6, 490).
ferentiation of conditions within the working Marx’s approach to the humanity/nature rela-
class. He could thus call attention to those tion, by establishing the context for his treat-
women in nineteenth-century England who ment of the social relations of production,
were ‘still occasionally used instead of horses equips us to understand the global crisis as it
for hauling canal boats, because the labour appears at the dawn of the twenty-first cen-
required to produce horses and machines is an tury. The newly felt dangers presented by the
accurately known quantity, while that required natural world represent the accumulated costs
to maintain the women of the surplus-popula- of the devastation imposed upon it by capital.
tion is below all calculation’ (MECW 35, 397). Any large-scale alleviation of these dangers
Capital thus found use, in the most primitive will require a correspondingly vast shift in the
of ways, for those very sectors of the popula- system of social relations. The core-Gattungsfrage,
tion that had been rendered ‘superfluous’ by namely the question of human survival, will
the most advanced machinery. In a similar thus remain inextricably linked to the resolu-
way, the biotechnology of the late-twentieth tion of the class-question.
century threatens to transmute hierarchies of
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schow: Versuch über den Zusammenhang seiner
Gedanken, Hamburg; W.D. Heffernan Victor Wallis
1998, ‘Agriculture and Monopoly Capital’, in Translated by Andreas Bolz
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Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 219–220 brill.nl/hima
Notes on Contributors
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.
alevant@yorku.ca
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.
montag@oxy.edu
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).
b.noys@chi.ac.uk
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).
ZENDIVE@aol.com
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.
evancalder@gmail.com
Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 221–222 brill.nl/hima
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