Historical Materialism 10. 3 - Historical Materialism

Giovanni Arrighi
Lineages of Empire
I
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire is a powerful
antidote to the gloom, suspicion and hostility that have
characterised the predominant reaction of the radical
Left to the advent of so-called globalisation. While
excoriating its destructive aspects, Hardt and Negri
welcome globalisation as the dawn of a new era full
of promise for the realisation of the desires of the
wretched of the earth. In the same way that Marx insisted
on the progressive nature of capitalism in compari-
son with the forms of society it displaced, they now
claim that Empire is a great improvement over the
world of nation-states and competing imperialisms that
preceded it.
Empire is the new logic and structure of rule that
has emerged with the globalisation of economic and
cultural exchanges. It is the sovereign power that
effectively regulates these global exchanges and thereby
governs the world. Unlike empires of pre-modern and
modern times, the singular Empire of postmodern times
has no territorial boundaries/frontiers or centre of power.
It is a decentred and deterritorialised apparatus of rule
that incorporates the entire global realm.
Historical Materialism, volume 10:3 (3–16)

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2002
Also available online – www.brill.nl
4 Giovanni Arrighi
The establishment of this new logic and structure of rule has gone hand
in hand with ‘the realization of the world market and the real subsumption
of global society under capital’.1 The world of nation-states and competing
imperialisms of modern times ‘served the needs and furthered the interests
of capital in its phase of global conquest. At the same time, however, it
created and reinforced rigid boundaries . . . that effectively blocked the free
ow of capital, labor and goods – thus necessarily precluding the full
realization of the world market’.2 As capital realises itself in the world mar-
ket, it ‘tends toward a smooth space dened by uncoded ows, exibility,
continual modulation, and tendential equalization’.3
The idea of Empire as a ‘smooth space’ is a central theme of the book. The
smoothing does not just affect the division of the world into nation-states
and their empires, merging and blending the distinct national colours ‘in the
imperial global rainbow’.4 Most signicant, it affects its division into First,
Second and Third Worlds, North and South, core and periphery. While
the Second World has disappeared, the Third World ‘enters into the First,
establishes itself at the heart as the ghetto, shanty town, favela’.5 The First
World, in turn, ‘is transferred to the Third in the form of stock exchanges
and banks, transnational corporations and icy skyscrapers of money and
command’.6 As a result, ‘center and periphery, North and South no longer
dene an international order but rather have moved closer to one another’.7
As in most accounts of globalisation, Hardt and Negri trace its origins to
the new power that the computer and information revolution has put
in the hands of capital. By making it possible ‘to link together different
groups of labor in real time across the world’, the revolution enabled capital
‘to weaken the structural resistances of labor power’ and ‘to impose both
temporal exibility and spatial mobility’.8 Speculative and nancial capital
strengthen the tendency by going ‘where the price of labor is lowest and
1
Hardt and Negri 2000, p. 332.
2
Ibid.
3
4
Hardt and Negri 2000, p. xiii.
5
6
Ibid.
7
8
Lineages of Empire 5
where the administrative force to guarantee exploitation is highest’.9 As a

result, ‘the countries that still maintain the rigidities of labor and oppose its
full exibility and mobility are punished, tormented, and nally destroyed’.10
In contrast to most accounts of globalisation, however, Hardt and Negri
do not conceive of the forces of labour as the more or less reluctant recipi-
ents of the tendencies of capital. On the one hand, proletarian struggles ‘caused
directly’ the capitalist crisis of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and thus ‘forced
capital to modify its own structures and undergo a paradigm shift’.11
If the Vietnam War had not taken place, if there had not been worker
and student revolts in the 1960s, if there had not been 1968 and the second
wave of the women’s movements, if there had not been the whole series
of anti-imperialist struggles, capital would have been content to maintain
its own arrangement of power. . . . It would have been content for several
good reasons: because the natural limits of development served it well;
because it was threatened by the development of immaterial labor; because
it knew that the transversal mobility and hybridization of world labor power
opened the potential for new crises and class conicts on an order never
before experienced. The restructuring of production . . . was anticipated by
the rise of a new subjectivity . . . was driven from below, by a proletariat
whose composition had already changed.12
On the other hand, this new proletariat – or ‘multitude’, as Hardt and Negri
call it – promptly seized the new opportunities of empowerment and liber-
ation created by globalisation. The key practice in this respect has been
migration. ‘The multitude’s resistance to bondage – the struggle against
the slavery of belonging to a nation, an identity, and a people, and thus the
desertion from sovereignty and the limits it places on subjectivity – is entirely
positive. . . . The real heroes of the liberation of the Third World today may
really have been the emigrants and the ows of population that have destroyed
old and new boundaries’. 13 The multitude is thus both protagonist and
beneciary of the destruction of boundaries that marks the coming of Empire.
9
10
Hardt and Negri 2000, pp. 337–8.
11
12
13
6 Giovanni Arrighi
Moreover, the very globalisation of capital’s networks of production and

control empowers each and every point of revolt. Horizontal articulations
among struggles – and hence the mediation of leaders, unions and parties –
are no longer needed. ‘Simply by focusing their own powers, concentrating
their energies in a tense and compact coil . . . struggles strike directly at the
highest articulations of imperial order’.14
As Hardt and Negri recognise, this double empowerment of the multitude
under Empire leaves open the fundamental question of what kind of political
programme can enable the multitude to cross and break down the limits that
imperial initiatives continually re-establish on its desire of liberation. All
they can say at this point is that global citizenship (papiers pour tous!) is a rst
element of such a programme, followed by a second element: a social wage
and a guaranteed income for all individuals. ‘Once [global] citizenship is
extended to all, we could call this guaranteed income a citizenship income,
due each as a member of [world] society’.15
This is probably the most optimistic picture of the nature and consequences
of globalisation proposed thus far by the radical Left. The authors’ endeav-
our to do away with any nostalgia for the power structures of an earlier
era of capitalist development is, in my view, commendable. And so is their
endeavour to show that the emerging logic and structure of world rule is
both a response to past struggles of the exploited and oppressed and a more
favourable terrain than previous structures for ongoing struggles against new
forms of exploitation and oppression. There are, nonetheless, serious prob-
lems with the way Hardt and Negri pursue these commendable endeavours.
Most problems arise from Hardt and Negri’s heavy reliance on metaphors
and theories and systematic avoidance of empirical evidence. While many
readers will undoubtedly be taken in by the erudition deployed throughout
the book, more sceptical readers will be put off by statements of fact unbacked
by empirical evidence or, worse still, easily falsiable on the basis of widely
available evidence. I will limit myself to two crucial examples, one concerning
the ‘smoothness’ of the space of Empire, and the other concerning the role
of the contemporary mobility of labour and capital in equalising conditions
of production and reproduction across that space.
14
15
It is hard to question that the disappearance of the Second World makes

it anachronistic to continue to speak of a First and a Third World. There is
also plenty of evidence that the signs of modernity associated with the wealth
of the former First World (the ‘icy skyscrapers of money and command’) have
proliferated in the former Third World; and it may also be the case that
the signs of marginalisation associated with the poverty of the former Third
World are now more prominent in the former First World than they were
twenty or thirty years ago. Nevertheless, it does not follow from all this that
the distance between the poverty of the former Third World (or South) and
the wealth of the former First World (or North) has decreased to any signicant
extent. Indeed, all available evidence shows an extraordinary persistence
of the North-South income gap as measured by GNP per capita. Sufce it
to mention that, in 1999, the average per capita income of former ‘Third
World’ countries was only 4.6% of the per capita income of former ‘First
World’ countries, that is, almost exactly what it was in 1960 (4.5%) and in
1980 (4.3%). Indeed, if we exclude China from the calculation, the percentage
shows a steady decrease from 6.4 in 1960, to 6.0 in 1980 and 5.5 in 1999.16
Hardt and Negri’s assertion of an ongoing supersession of the North-South
divide is thus clearly false. Also awed are their assertions concerning the
direction and extent of contemporary ows of capital and labour. For one thing,
they grossly exaggerate the extent to which these ows are unprecedented.
This is especially true of their dismissal of nineteenth-century migrations
as ‘Lilliputian’ 17 compared to their late twentieth-century counterparts.
Proportionately speaking, nineteenth-century ows were in fact much larger,
especially if we include migrations within and from Asia.18 Moreover, the
assertion that speculative and nancial capital has been going ‘where the
price of labor is lowest and where the administrative force to guarantee
exploitation is highest’ is only in small part true. It is true, that is, only if we
hold all kinds of other things equal, rst and foremost per capita national
income. But most other things (and especially per capita national income)
are not at all equal among the world’s regions and jurisdictions. As a result,
by far the largest share of capital ows is between wealthy countries (where
16
All gures calculated from World Bank 1984 and 2001.
17
18
See Held et al. 1999, Chapter 6.
8 Giovanni Arrighi
the price of labour is comparatively high and the administrative force

to guarantee exploitation comparatively low) with relatively little capital
actually owing from wealthy to poor countries.
These are not the only statements of fact in the narrative of Empire that,
on close inspection, turn out to be false. They are, nonetheless, among the
most crucial for the credibility not just of the book’s reconstruction of
present tendencies but for its political conclusions as well. For Hardt and
Negri’s optimism concerning the opportunities that globalisation opens
up for the liberation of the multitude largely rests on their assumption that
capital under Empire tends towards a double equalisation of the conditions
of existence of the multitude: equalisation through capital mobility from North
to South and equalisation through labour mobility from South to North. But,
if these mechanisms are not operative – as, for the time being, they do not
appear to be – the road to global citizenship and to a guaranteed income for
all citizens may be far longer, bumpier and more treacherous than Hardt and
Negri would like us to believe.
II
I will deal with the possible conguration(s) of this bumpy and treacherous
long march by responding to Hardt and Negri’s criticism of my own account
of the evolution of historical capitalism in early modern and modern times.
Hardt and Negri include me among the authors who ‘prepare[d] the terrain
for the analysis and critique of Empire’.19 At the same time, they single out
my reconstruction of systemic cycles of accumulation in The Long Twentieth
Century as an instance of cyclical theories of capitalism that obscure the
novelty of contemporary transformations (‘[f]rom imperialism to Empire and
from the nation-state to the political regulation of the global market’)20 as well as
the driving force of those transformations (a ‘[c]lass struggle [that], pushing
the nation-state towards its abolition and thus going beyond the barriers
posed by it, proposes the constitution of Empire as the site of analysis and
conict’).21 More specically, in their view,
19
20
Hardt and Negri 2000, p. 237; italics in original.
21
in the context of Arrighi’s cyclical argument it is impossible to recognize

a rupture of the system, a paradigm shift, an event. Instead, everything
must always return, and the history of capitalism thus becomes the eternal
return of the same. In the end such a cyclical analysis masks the motor of
the process of crisis and restructuring. . . . [I]t seems that the crisis of the
1970s was simply part of the objective and inevitable cycles of capitalist
accumulation, rather than the result of proletarian and anticapitalist attack
both in the dominant and in the subordinated countries. The accumulation
of these struggles was the motor of the crisis, and they determined the terms
and nature of capitalist restructuring. . . . We have to recognize where in the
transnational networks of production, the circuits of the world market, and
the global structures of capitalist rule there is the potential for rupture and
the motor for a future that is not simply doomed to repeat the past cycles
of capitalism.22
I nd this assessment curious for two reasons. One is that, for thirty years, I
have been advancing a thesis about the crisis of the 1970s that, in many
respects, resembles what, according to Hardt and Negri, The Long Twentieth
Century obscures. And the other is that, although The Long Twentieth Century
does construct cycles, its argument is not at all cyclical, nor does it contra-
dict my earlier thesis about the crisis of the 1970s. It simply puts that thesis
in a longer historical perspective. Let me deal with each of these two issues
in turn.
In an article rst published in Italian in 1972, I pointed out some crucial
differences between the incipient capitalist crisis of the 1970s and the crises
of 1873–96 and of the 1930s. The most important among these differences
was the role of workers’ struggles in precipitating the crisis of the 1970s. I
further maintained that this and other differences meant that the incipient
crisis was less likely than the earlier crises to result in an intensication of
inter-imperialist rivalries and a consequent break up of the world market.
Rather, the crisis could be expected to result in a strengthening of the unity
of the world market and of the tendency towards the decentralisation of
industrial production towards capitalistically ‘less developed’ regions of the
global economy.23
22
Hardt and Negri 2000, p. 239; italics in original.
23
See Arrighi 1978.
10 Giovanni Arrighi
In The Geometry of Imperialism, published six years later, I carried this

analysis one step further. Not only did I underscore again that the kind
of world-economic integration via direct investment that had developed
under US hegemony was less likely to break down in a generalised state of
war among capitalist powers than the kind of world-economic integration
via commodity and nancial ows typical of nineteenth-century British
hegemony. In addition, I pointed out that workers’ struggles consolidated
this new form of world-economic integration and suggested that, over
time, the consolidation could be expected to weaken nation-states as the
primary form of political organisation of world capitalism.24 It followed from
this argument that the very theories of ‘imperialism’ that had been most
successful in predicting trends in the rst half of the twentieth century 25
had become hopelessly obsolete. These theories had become obsolete for the
simple reason that world capitalism as instituted under US hegemony was
no longer generating the tendency towards war among capitalist powers
that constituted their specic explanandum. And, to the extent that the
system of nation-states was actually ceasing to be the primary form of polit-
ical organisation of world capitalism, the obsolescence of these theories would
become permanent.26
Twelve years later27 I recast these arguments in an account of the ‘long’
twentieth century that focused on the rise of the world labour movement
in the late nineteenth century, the bifurcation of the movement into social-
democratic and Marxist trajectories in the early twentieth century, the success
of workers struggles along both trajectories in provoking a fundamental,
‘reformist’ re-organisation of world capitalism under US hegemony at the
end of the Second World War, and the crisis that both kinds of movements
faced in the 1980s as the unintended consequence of their previous successes.
As in Hardt and Negri’s similar story, I diagnosed this crisis – including and
especially the crisis of Marxism as instituted in the rst half of the twentieth
century – as a positive rather than a negative development for the future
of the world proletariat. Whereas Marxism had developed historically in a
24
See Arrighi 1983, pp. 146–8.
25
Most notably, Hobson 1932; Hilferding 1981; and Lenin 1952.
26
See Arrighi 1983, pp. 149–73.
27
See Arrighi 1990.
direction antithetical to the one foreseen and advocated by Marx, I argued,

ongoing transformations of world capitalism – rst and foremost the unpre-
cedented degree of integration of the global market – were making Marx’s
predictions and prescriptions for the present and future of the world labour
movement more rather than less relevant.
Starting from different premises and following a different line of argument,
I thus reached conclusions very similar to one of the central theses of Empire.
Unlike Hardt and Negri, I nonetheless qualied these conclusions with a
warning against excessive condence in the Marxian scheme of things.
For in one major respect the Marxian scheme itself remains seriously
defective – namely in the way in which it deals with the role of age, sex,
race, nationality, religion and other natural and historical specicities
in shaping the social identity of the world proletariat. . . . To be sure,
the cost-cutting race of the [1970s and 1980s] has provided compelling
evidence in support of [Marx’s] observation that for capital all members of
the proletariat are instruments of labour, more or less expensive to use
according to their age, sex, colour, nationality, religion, etc. However, it has
also shown that one cannot infer, as Marx does, from this predisposition
of capital a predisposition of labour to relinquish natural and historical
differences as means of afrming, individually and collectively, a distinc-
tive social identity. Whenever faced with the predisposition of capital to
treat labour as an undifferentiated mass with no individuality other than
a differential capability to augment the value of capital, proletarians have
rebelled. Almost invariably they have seized upon or created anew what-
ever combination of distinctive traits (age, sex, colour, assorted geo-historical
specicities) they could use to impose on capital some kind of special treat-
ment. As a consequence, patriarchalism, racism and national-chauvinism
have been integral to the making of the world labour movement along
both trajectories, and live on in one form or another in most proletarian
ideologies and organizations.28
Even before completing The Long Twentieth Century, I was thus far less
sanguine than Hardt and Negri about the possibility that under the emerg-
ing condition of world-market integration, proletarian ‘exit’ (South-North
28
Arrighi 1990, p. 63; emphasis in original.
12 Giovanni Arrighi
migrations) and ‘voice’ (struggles against exploitation, exclusion and oppres-

sion) would promote greater solidarity, equality and democracy across national,
civilisational, racial and gender divides. It seems to me that the 1990s have
provided plenty of evidence both against the idealised and idealistic view
of the multitude that Hardt and Negri advance in Empire, and in favour
of my earlier warning that intensifying competition in the global market –
including and especially intensication through labour migration – could
well strengthen the patriarchalist, racist and national-chauvinist dispositions
of the world proletariat. This is a rst important reason why, in my view, the
road to global citizenship and to a guaranteed income for all citizens can be
expected to be far longer, bumpier and more treacherous than Hardt and
Negri maintain.
Other equally important reasons have to do with Hardt and Negri’s ideal-
ised and idealistic view, not just of the multitude, but of capital and Empire
as well. It is in this connection that their misreading of my reconstruction of
systemic cycles of accumulation becomes relevant. For the reconstruction
neither prevents a recognition of systemic ruptures and paradigm shifts, nor
describes the history of capitalism as an eternal return of the same, nor masks
the motor of the process of crisis and restructuring, as Hardt and Negri main-
tain. Indeed, it does exactly the opposite by showing that, world-historically,
systemic ruptures and paradigm shifts occur precisely when the ‘same’ (in
the form of recurrent system-wide nancial expansions) appears to (and in
a sense actually does) return. Moreover, by comparing successive periods of
return/rupture, it shows how the motor of crisis and restructuring (as well
as the agency of capitalist expansion) has changed over time, making the pre-
sent crisis novel in key respects.
More specically, the reconstruction of systemic cycles of accumulation
serves a double purpose. First, it serves the purpose of identifying the dis-
tinguishing features of world capitalism as an historical (as opposed to an
ideal-typical) social system. And second, it serves the purpose of identifying
what is truly new in the present condition of world capitalism in the light of
its entire life history, as opposed to what may appear new in the light of some
temporally or spatially partial view of that history. It seems to me that these
two identications are essential to an historically grounded recognition – to
paraphrase Hardt and Negri’s previously quoted passage – of where in the
global structures of capitalist rule there is the potential for rupture and the
motor for a future that is not simply doomed to repeat the past cycles of
capitalism. Such an historically grounded recognition does not so much
contradict (though in part it does) as it adds important new dimensions to
my earlier – and Hardt and Negri’s present – assessment of the emergent
condition of world rule. Let me briey mention the most important of these
new dimensions.
First, while conrming the plausibility of the contention that a world
state (which I have no objections to calling ‘Empire’) is in formation, my
reconstruction of systemic cycles of accumulation adds both a temporal
scale and an element of uncertainty to the ongoing transition from a phase
of world history based on national states to a possible but by no means
certain world-state phase. As The Long Twentieth Century and subsequent work
on hegemonic transitions show, world capitalism was originally embedded
in a system of city-states and the transition from the city-state phase to the
nation-state phase of capitalism stretched over several centuries. For at
least two centuries of this transition, city-states (most notably Venice) or
business diasporas originating in city-states (most notably the Genoese)
remained protagonists of the capitalist dynamic, while the leading agency
of the transition itself was a state (the United Provinces) that combined
characteristics of the declining city-states and of the rising nation-states.29
Although we also noted a certain acceleration in the pace of world-systemic
transformations, past experience seems to suggest that the present transi-
tion from the nation-state to a world-state phase of world rule will take at
least a century to complete. It also suggests that at least some national
states or hybrid forms of nation- and world-state may be protagonists of the
transition.
Second, much of the uncertainty surrounding ongoing transformations
derives from the fact that past periods of nancial expansion and hegemonic
transition have been moments of increasing instability and unintended
capitalist self-destructiveness. Although a major factor of past instability
and self-destructiveness (inter-imperialist wars) is unlikely to intervene, the
attempt of today’s declining hegemonic power (the United States) to impose
on the world an exploitative domination may well become a more important
29
See Arrighi 1994, pp. 11, 36–47 and 82–158; and Arrighi and Silver 1999, pp. 37–58.
14 Giovanni Arrighi
source of instability and self-destructiveness than similar attempts by its

predecessors.30 Thus, paraphrasing Joseph Schumpeter,31 The Long Twentieth
Century concluded that ‘before humanity chokes (or basks) in the dungeon
(or paradise) of a post-capitalist world empire or of a post-capitalist world
market society, it may well burn up in the horrors (or glories) of the escalat-
ing violence that has accompanied the liquidation of the Cold War world
order’.32
Third, a comparison of the present with past transitions does conrm the
historically novel role that proletarian and anticapitalist struggles, both in the
dominant and subordinate countries, have played in precipitating the crisis
of the 1970s. Indeed, in a very real sense, the present nancial expansion
(unlike previous similar expansions) has been primarily an instrument – to
paraphrase Immanuel Wallerstein33 – of the containment of the combined
demands of the peoples of the non-Western world (for relatively little per
person but for a lot of people) and of the Western working classes (for
relatively few people but for quite a lot per person). At the same time,
however, the nancial expansion and associated restructuring of the global
political economy have had considerable success in disorganising the social
forces that were the bearers of these demands in the upheavals of the late
1960s and 1970s. Integral to this success has been the reproduction of the
North-South income divide which, as previously noted, is as large today as
it was twenty or forty years ago. It is hard to believe that this huge and
persistent divide will not continue to play a decisive role in shaping, not just
proletarian identities and dispositions North and South, but also processes
of world-state formation. As the implosion of the World Trade Organisation
talks in Seattle has shown in exemplary fashion, the struggle over the social
orientation of the emerging world-state is as much a struggle between North
and South as it is between capital and labour. Indeed, since the possessors
of capital continue to be overwhelmingly concentrated in the North, while a
vast and ever-growing majority of the world’s proletariat is concentrated in
the South, the two struggles are in good part obverse sides of the same coin.34
30
See Arrighi and Silver 2001, pp. 976–9 and 982–3.
31
Schumpeter 1954, p. 163.
32
Arrighi 1994, p. 356.
33
Wallerstein 1995, p. 25.
34
See Silver and Arrighi 2001 and Silver forthcoming.
Finally, while the overall North-South divide has remained remarkably

stable, over the last forty years there has been a major relocation of manu-
facturing activities and world market shares from North America and Western
Europe to East Asia. Thus, between 1960 and 1999, the East Asian share
of world value added (a good measure of the share of the world market
controlled by the residents of the region) increased from 13% to 25.9%, while
the North American share decreased from 35.2% to 29.8% and the Western
European share decreased from 40.5% to 32.3%. Even more signicant was
the shift in the shares of world value added in manufacturing, with the East
Asian share increasing in the same period from 16.4% to 35.2%, against a
decrease in the North American share from 42.2% to 29.9% and of the Western
European share from 32.4% to 23.4%.35 It is hardly plausible that shifts of
this order will not affect the constitution of Empire, particularly in view
of the fact that East Asia has a much longer history of state and market
formation than Europe and North America.36 And yet, Hardt and Negri
focus exclusively on the Euro-American lineages of Empire and do not even
entertain the possibility of their hybridisation with Asian lineages.
In short, Empire may indeed be in the making, but, if it is, it may well
take a century or more before humanity will know whether its constitution
has succeeded or failed, and if it has succeeded, what its social and cultural
contents will be. In the meantime, all we can hope for is that the ruling classes
of the declining and rising centres of the global economy deploy in their
actions a greater intelligence than they have done so far; that proletarian
struggles shun patriarchalist, racist and national-chauvinistic temptations;
and that activists and intellectuals of goodwill develop a better understanding
of where Empire is coming from and where it can and cannot go.
References
Arrighi, Giovanni 1978 [1972], ‘Towards a Theory of Capitalist Crisis’, New Left Review,
I, 111: 3–24.
Arrighi, Giovanni 1983 [1978], The Geometry of Imperialism: The Limits of Hobson’s
Paradigm, second edition, London: Verso.
35
All percentages calculated from World Bank 1984 and 2001.
36
See Arrighi and Silver 1999, Chapter 4.
16 Giovanni Arrighi
Arrighi, Giovanni 1990, ‘Marxist Century, American Century. The Making and Remaking
of the World Labour Movement’, New Left Review, I, 179: 29–63.
Arrighi, Giovanni 1994, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins our
Time, London: Verso.
Arrighi, Giovanni and Beverly Silver 1999, Chaos and Governance in the Modern World
System, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Arrighi, Giovanni and Beverly Silver 2001, ‘Capitalism and World (Dis)order’, Review
of International Studies, 27: 257–79.
Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri 2000, Empire, Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University
Press.
Held, David, Anthony McGrew, David Goldblatt and Jonathan Perraton 1999, Global
Transformations, Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Hilferding, Rudolf 1981 [1910], Finance Capital: A Study of the Latest Phase of Capitalist
Development, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Hobson, John 1938 [1902], Imperialism: A Study, London: George Allen & Unwin.
Lenin, Vladimir I. 1952 [1916], Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, in Selected
Works, Volume One, Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House.
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Silver, Beverly forthcoming, Forces of Labour: Workers’ Movements and Globalisation since
1870, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Ellen Meiksins Wood
Landlords and Peasants, Masters and Slaves:
Class Relations in Greek and Roman Antiquity 1
Few historians would hesitate to single out slavery

as an essential and distinctive feature of the social
order in ancient Greece and Rome. Many might
even be prepared to accept that slavery is in some
sense the distinctive and essential characteristic,
so that Greece and Rome can be meaningfully and
informatively described as ‘slave societies’, ‘slave
economies’, or instances of the ‘slave mode of pro-
duction’. There is little agreement, however, about
what precisely it means so to characterise them and
how – or even whether – such characterisations are
intended to shed light on historical processes.
At least two separate questions must be raised in
assessing the usefulness of describing Greece and
Rome as slave societies. The rst concerns the extent
and location of slavery in the Greek and Roman
1
This article, written in 1983, has been sitting in my drawer ever since, no doubt
in the hope that I would get back to it. Some of the arguments concerning ancient
Greece were later developed in Wood 1988. But, since I am now unlikely to return to
systematic work on the ancient world, I have agreed to let this piece be published as
is, even though I would do some things differently if I were writing it now. The text
here remains as it was when I left it in 1983, with the exception of footnotes which
refer to publications that have appeared since then, a few places where a misleading
word has been replaced, and the deletion of one especially confusing passage.

18 Ellen Meiksins Wood
economies, and, in particular, the degree to which production rested on

slave labour. The second concerns the sense in which slavery, whatever its
location and extent, can be said to account for historical movement, economic
development, social change, political and cultural processes. One way of
formulating the latter question might be to ask whether slavery should be
looked upon as a kind of prime mover, the ‘distinctive characteristic’ in
reference to which other features of Greco-Roman antiquity can be explained;
or whether it is more fruitful to treat Greek and Roman slavery as effect rather
than cause, the ‘distinctive characteristic’ which itself most demands expla-
nation, by reference to other, prior, historical factors.
In what follows, it will be argued that the focus on slavery as the primary
or dominant characteristic of Greco-Roman antiquity may obscure more
than it explains, and that historical processes in ancient Greece and Rome
would be more clearly illuminated by the proposition that their ‘distinctive
feature’ is a particular and unique relationship between free producers and
appropriators and, more specically, between landlords and peasants. This
is true only partly because the extent of slave production, especially in Greece,
is itself open to question. Even in Rome, where the evidence for widespread
slavery in basic production is far less ambiguous (though, even here, there
has been some exaggeration), the relations between landlord and peasant are
the framework within which historical processes – including the rise and
decline of slavery – can most fruitfully be understood.
Master and slave vs. landlord and peasant

The proposition that Greece (meaning, for the most part, specically Athens)
and Rome were ‘slave societies’, ‘slave economies’ or instances of the ‘slave
mode of production’ is problematic, rst, because there is little agreement
not only about the explanatory value of these formulae but even about
what facts they are meant to represent. These designations were relatively
unproblematic for those who believed – as many Marxists, but not only
Marxists, have traditionally done – that the bulk of production in Greece and
Rome was performed by slaves and that class divisions were reasonably clear
and transparent, opposing a legally dened community of free men – and
especially citizens – to a subjected producing class of slaves. Since it is now
more commonly accepted that production throughout Greek and Roman
Landlords and Peasants, Masters and Slaves 19
history rested at least as much on free labour as on slavery, and since this
inevitably raises questions about class divisions within the free population,
the role of slavery as the key to ancient history has become a rather more
thorny question. Many commentators still nd it useful to speak of ancient
Greece and Rome as slave societies; but the formula alone no longer tells
us what claims its users want to make about Greek and Roman economic
and social organisation, about the prevailing forms of production and appro-
priation, or about the dominant social relations and conicts.
In the case of Athens, there are at least two senses in which the adequacy
of the formula ‘slave society’ or ‘slave mode of production’ must be ques-
tioned. First, there is considerable ambiguity in the evidence concerning the
degree to which slaves were engaged in production (particularly as distinct
from domestic service), especially in agricultural production, which was
still the basis of the Greek economy, and hence also the degree to which they
produced the surplus that created and sustained the propertied classes. Second,
it is far from clear how the formula helps to account for historical movement,
social change, political development, or the production of ideology – processes
in which the relations between propertied classes and free producers were
at all times central.
The role of slavery in Athenian agriculture has been a matter of hot
dispute. Historians have generally tended toward the view that slavery in
classical Athens was far less important in agriculture than in industry and
trade, which is clearly a fact of critical signicance in this predominantly
agrarian economy. Recently, this view has been challenged by some historians
who claim that agricultural slavery was far more widespread and important
than is generally believed; but their arguments have been far from convincing.2
Given what is known about patterns of landholding, the relatively limited
concentrations of property and disparities of wealth, the austerity of the
material culture, and the simplicity of the state apparatus, it seems unlikely
that there was a great deal of scope for labour on the land beyond the peas-
ant family unit. Landholdings were generally modest, and even wealthy
2
There is no room in this article to do more than assert this boldly and without
supporting argument. A detailed elaboration of this assertion can be found in Wood
1983 where I canvass the evidence and critically examine the two most important
recent arguments in favour of widespread agricultural slavery in classical Athens:
Jameson 1977 and Ste. Croix 1981, especially in Appendix II.
landlords tended to own several scattered smaller properties rather than large
estates. There were no plantations like the Roman latifundia. The bulk of the
proprietors were smallholders who worked their own land, while wealthier
landlords probably ‘farmed out’ their several smallholdings to tenants
and sharecroppers. On large estates, there was undoubtedly a permanent
but probably not very large stock of farm slaves. It is known that casual
wage-labour was widely used at the harvest, and it seems likely that it was
available at all times in the form of propertyless citizens and smallholders
whose own lands (or tenancies) were insufcient to support their families.
Nevertheless, if the contribution of slaves to production has in the past
been exaggerated, and if the degree to which free men not only produced –
both in agriculture and in craft-production – but were subject to exploitation
has been underestimated, it remains true that chattel slavery was much
more widespread and signicant in Greece and Rome than anywhere else
in the ancient world, sufciently so that it can reasonably be considered
a ‘distinctive characteristic’ of these societies. It also remains true that free
producers, especially in democratic Greece, were free from exploitation to an
unusual degree, so that this, too, must be regarded as a distinctive feature of
that society. The question then might be: what is the relationship between
the two primary sets of social relations – slaveowners/slaves, and propertied
classes/free producers or, more specically, landlords/peasants? And, if either
of these should be accorded explanatory priority, which is it to be?
The peasants of Attica differed from their counterparts elsewhere (with the
partial exception of Rome) above all in one respect: their citizenship. In no
other known ancient society – and in no society since to the same extent –
were peasants full members of the political community. The peasant-citizen
was certainly a ‘distinctive characteristic’ of Athenian society (and Roman,
up to a point). Among the many implications of this unique social formation
is that Attic peasants, as well as small urban producers and tradesmen,
enjoyed an unusual degree of freedom from various forms of exploitation
by landlord and state. The civic status of the small producer limited the
two principal forms of surplus extraction to which peasants, in particular,
have historically been subject: rent and tax. The democracy – or rather,
the conguration of social and political power that it represented – restricted
the wealth and power of landlords by limiting the opportunities for con-
centrating property and by protecting small producers from various forms
of personal dependence – slavery, serfdom, debt-bondage. Thus, both the

form and the extent of rent-extraction were severely restricted. Furthermore,
as M.I. Finley has suggested, exemption from regular taxation was a hallmark
of ‘that novel and rarely repeated phenomenon of classical antiquity, the
incorporation of the peasant as a full member of the political community.’3
Taken together with the relatively simple state apparatus that characterised
the polis, this meant a freedom from state exploitation which distinguishes
Athens (and early republican Rome) radically from other societies where
tax-burdened peasants have borne the weight of kingdoms and empires.
It is not, however, only the free producers themselves who were affected
by their unique civic status. The whole system of production and surplus
extraction, including the emergence and development of slavery, must be
understood against the background of the peasant-citizen. It has often been
said that slavery made Athenian democracy possible. This proposition has
often been associated with the profoundly mistaken view that Athenian
citizens were generally free from the necessity to labour and that production
rested essentially on slave labour. Since it is now a generally accepted fact
that the majority of citizens worked for a livelihood – in agriculture, crafts,
or trade – and since the contribution of slaves to production, especially in
agriculture, is, to say the least, open to question, the association of democ-
racy with slavery must be formulated somewhat differently.
One possibility is to say (as Michael Jameson does, for example 4) that slaves
supplemented the labour of the ordinary farmer in a way that made possible
his performance of civic and military functions. Even this formulation, while
it assumes that agricultural slavery was essential and widespread, implies
that the growth of slavery presupposed the emergence of the farmer-citizen.
The argument is not simply that because slaves somehow became available
in large numbers, Attic farmers found themselves able to become citizens.
On the contrary, the object of an argument like Jameson’s is precisely to
explain what was unique about ancient Athens which compelled farmers
to seek an unusual means of responding to increasing demands on their
productive capacities. In other words, according to this view, it is because
3
Finley 1973, p. 96.
4
This is, in fact, the essence of his article cited in note 2 above.
the Athenian farmer had attained the apparently unprecedented status of full
citizenship that he was obliged to seek the assistance of slaves.
This formulation, though it places slavery and the farmer-citizen in the
correct order, will not quite do. Since, as we have seen, the civic status of
the farmer actually restricted the need for surplus production by limiting the
pressures of surplus extraction in the form of rent and taxes, the citizenship
of the peasant could just as easily be regarded as a limitation on his need for
slave assistance.5 What can, however, be said with some assurance is that
the status of the peasant citizen and his freedom from dependence created
an incentive for wealthier landlords to seek alternative sources of labour;
and it is almost certainly true that slavery grew as Athenian smallholders
themselves became unavailable as dependent labourers.
Even here, caution is needed. Not only must we keep in mind that
smallholders remained available to their wealthy compatriots as tenants,
sharecroppers, and casual wage-labourers, and also that there were property-
less citizens who required employment; but we must also consider the extent
to which the relations between landlords and peasants restricted the form
and extent of slave-utilisation itself. In particular, the conguration of class
power within the citizen body, to the extent that it curtailed concentration
of property, also limited the possibilities of slave exploitation. As long as
properties remained small and peasant tenures relatively secure – and even
wealthier landlords tended to own several scattered smaller holdings – the
scope for the utilisation of labour in production beyond the peasant family
was limited. In the forms of exploitation more appropriate to smallholdings
and a free peasantry – tenancy, sharecropping, casual wage-labour – family
labour would still have been the predominant productive force. The growth
of the urban economy, craft-production, and trade expanded the scope of
slave exploitation (though the extent of these developments should not be
exaggerated, since production for the market remained undeveloped); and it
is worth noting that the very few known large slave-enterprises in Athens,
in addition to the mines, were ‘industrial’ rather than agricultural. In sharp
contrast to Rome, the intensive exploitation characteristic of latifundia worked
5
In Wood 1983, I elaborate this argument in reply to Jameson’s contention that the
utilisation of slave labour was probably the norm on ordinary small farms, because
it was the best way to intensify labour without sacricing the farmer’s civic status.
by slave-gangs, made possible by enormous accumulations of property, never

existed in classical Greece. These signicant differences between Greek and
Roman slavery reect different congurations of power and property which
characterised relations between peasants and landlords in the two cases.
The signicant point, then, is that however many complexities and
qualications are introduced into the relation between slavery and that ‘rare
social phenomenon’, the peasant-citizen, we are always brought back to the
latter as historically prior. While there can be no simple equation between
chronological and causal precedence, it would be difcult to sustain an
argument that explained the emergence in Greece of a special kind of
small producer – and a unique set of relations between property, class, and
state – by referring to an increase (for whatever reason) in the availability
of slaves. The slave factor is neither sufcient nor necessary to explain this
development. In contrast, while the relative unavailability of free producers
for certain kinds of exploitation may not be sufcient to explain the parti-
cular development of slavery in Greece, it is certainly a necessary factor in
accounting for the nature and extent of that development.
It is not only slavery itself that must be explained within the more
inclusive framework of class relations within the citizen body. The latter are
also more inclusive in their ability to explain other essential characteristics
of Athenian society, notably its distinctive political and ideological features.
In particular, Athenian democracy, that most remarkable phenomenon of
classical antiquity, cannot be explained (as Marx, for example, appears to
suggest) as the means by which a community of proprietors organised itself
militarily and politically against the outside world and especially against
an alien subjected producing class of slaves; instead, it is more fruitfully
understood as a means of organising the class struggle between lords and
peasants. The democracy, whose foundations were laid before large-scale
slavery became a signicant factor in Athenian social life, grew out of class
conict between small proprietors and the landlords who had subjected many
peasants to dependence, especially in the form of debt-bondage.6 The nature
6
These arguments are developed in Wood and Wood 1978, Chapter 2. While
there is much that I should like to improve in this account, the basic outline of the
class conict between producers and appropriators and how it contributed to the
development and shape of the democracy still seems to me essentially correct. It
is interesting to note that a similar argument is made in Part II of Ste. Croix 1981.
of that class conict within the citizen-body changed as slavery grew and
as the number of citizens engaged in ‘urban’ production as craftsmen and
artisans increased; but the class conict among citizens never ceased to play
an essential role in Athenian politics. Although political divisions between
democratic and oligarchic factions never coincided neatly with class
divisions, these political conicts cannot be understood without reference
to the antagonisms between those for whom the democracy represented a
protection from various forms of surplus extraction and those for whom it
represented a limitation on their powers of appropriation.
These class divisions within the citizen body are equally visible in the great
cultural products of Athenian society. The political philosophy of Plato, for
example – indeed much of his non-political philosophy, even his conceptions
of knowledge and virtue – is unintelligible if abstracted from the social
division between those who laboured for a livelihood and those who lived
on the labour of others. His contempt for labour and those who are bound
to the world of material necessity by the need to work for a living, the
principle that such material bondage is morally and politically debilitating
and renders true knowledge (which is virtue) impossible – a principle that
lies at the very heart of his whole philosophical project – has often been treated
(especially by Marxists) as a reection of the ‘slave mode of production’;
but it is demonstrably an aristocratic reaction to the realities of Athenian
democracy and the unprecedented power, protection, and freedom it afforded
to the free producing classes, the ordinary peasants, craftsmen, and trades-
men who constituted the bulk of the Athenian citizenry.7 For Plato, as for
many aristocrats in non-slaveowning societies as well as ‘slave economies’,
all labour is in essence servile; and Athenian democracy violated the essen-
tial principle that political life should be the exclusive preserve of people
freed from the realm of material necessity by the labour of others.
Clearly, any attempt to explain the dynamics of Athenian history must, at
the very least, take into account the complex interactions between the two
primary sets of social relations, those between slaveowners and slaves and
Despite his emphasis on slavery in the conceptual arguments of Part I, his historical
account of Athenian society focuses almost exclusively on the class struggle within
the citizen body, with virtually no reference to slavery. More on this later. [A later
elaboration of my argument occurs in Wood 1988.]
7
See Wood and Wood 1978, Chapter 4.
those between propertied classes and free producers. If primacy must be

given to one set of relations over the other, however, the case for the latter
seems more convincing, because the development of slavery itself took
place within the framework of the relation between propertied classes and
free producers, and because the latter accounts for much that is distinctive
in Athenian social, political, and ideological formations.
A similar case can be made for Rome. The fact that here – or at least in
Roman Italy – slaves were far more prominently employed in agricultural
production than in Greece does not alter the primacy of the relations between
landlords and peasants in Roman history. It is true that slavery in agricul-
ture was extensive, and that slave plantations – which never existed in Athens –
gured prominently in the Roman economy in certain periods and places.
Nevertheless, even in Rome, the large-scale use of slavery, and especially
slave latifundia, developed late and remained localised, concentrated largely
in the West and in Italy and Sicily in particular. Peasant production survived
even here and always predominated in other parts of the Empire, where other
forms of surplus extraction prevailed, such as various forms of tenancy and
sharecropping. Slavery in agriculture was never important, for example, in
North Africa or in the East. It has been estimated that, even in Roman Italy,
when slavery was at its height, the majority of the population outside the
city of Rome were probably still peasants.8
Even granting the extraordinary prominence of slavery in the Roman
economy, that very prominence demands explanation. The historical rarity
of ‘slave societies’ alone should turn our attention to the peculiar circum-
stances that made them possible and/or necessary;9 but the dramatic growth
of slavery in Roman Italy is especially remarkable for reasons that go
beyond the numerical scarcity of ‘slave societies’ throughout history. As Keith
Hopkins has pointed out, there is a signicant difference between Roman
(and Greek) slavery and the slavery of the other, more recent slave societies
in the Americas. In the latter, slaves did not displace local labour but existed
8
Hopkins 1978, p. 7.
9
‘Slave societies’ – societies with ‘an institutionalised system of large-scale
employment of slave labour in both the countryside and the city’ – have been rare
throughout history, as pointed out, for example, in Finley 1980, p. 67. Keith Hopkins
also emphasises the rarity of slave societies, suggesting that there have been only a
handful of cases: classical Athens, Roman Italy, the West Indian islands, Brazil, and
the southern states of the USA. Hopkins 1978, pp. 99–100.
alongside a local labour-force inadequate to the demands of the ‘incipient

industrial revolution’ (as Hopkins puts it) or, more precisely, to the growing
needs of capitalism. By contrast, Hopkins explains, ‘In Roman Italy (and to
a much smaller extent in classical Athens), slaves were recruited to cultivate
land already being cultivated by citizen peasants.’10 In the early Republic,
before imperial expansion, the relations between landlord and peasant
had probably been roughly similar to our description of classical Attica
with respect to the size of landholdings, the disparities of wealth, and
the prevailing forms of surplus extraction. Peasants produced surplus for
landlords as tenants, sharecroppers, casual labourers; and there was a limited
scope for labour beyond the peasant family unit. By the end of the Republican
era, Rome was characterised by huge concentrations and disparities of wealth
and a growing imperial apparatus. The period in between was also marked
by the tremendous growth of slavery and the partial displacement of peas-
ants by slaves in part of the empire.
The question of slavery, then, is rst and above all the question of the
peasantry. How, why, and under what circumstances were relations between
landlords and peasants transformed in such a way as to displace peasants
on a signicant scale as agricultural producers and to permit or necessitate
a massive intrusion of slaves into the Roman economy? The question becomes
even more pressing if (as Hopkins convincingly argues) slavery was a difcult
and costly mode of exploitation and ‘by no means an obvious solution to the
élite’s needs for agricultural labour’.11
If the history of slavery in Rome is the history of peasants, it is also the
history of peasant expropriation and struggles over land. Some have argued
(e.g. Pierre Dockès)12 that the massive inux of slaves provided the Roman
‘élite’ with an incentive, or even a need, to squeeze out small proprietors in
order to concentrate land and take full advantage of the opportunities afforded
by slavery. No doubt it is true that, once set in train, the intrusion of slaves
created pressures for expropriation; but this argument evades the essential
questions. How and why did slavery on such a scale become an option in
the rst place? If slavery was the result of conquest and empire, how and
10
Hopkins 1978, p. 7.
11
Hopkins 1978, pp. 9, 108 ff.
12
See below, pp. 54–5.
why did Roman imperial expansion become possible and necessary, and why
did the Romans transform captives into slaves when this disposition of
conquered peoples was far from an obvious or universal practice? It can
hardly be maintained that the inux of slaves provided the original impetus
for expropriation, since the very motivation for large-scale slavery presupposes
a signicant degree of land concentration; therefore, where did this impetus
come from and how did it become possible to expropriate peasants on such
a scale that vast numbers of slaves could be employed? One might even
ask why it became necessary for landlords to adopt a form of exploitation
that required concentration of property to make it economically feasible. At
any rate, what made the advantages of this burdensome form of exploitation
outweigh its disadvantages?
Whatever the answers to these questions, the important thing is that they
are there to be asked. In other words, slavery cannot be taken for granted.
And whatever the answers, the questions will inevitably lead us back to the
relation between landlords and peasants and to the peculiar circumstances
surrounding the displacement of peasants by slaves. This process has two
equally problematic aspects: the process by which many peasants were pushed
off their properties while larger proprietors gained possession of vast
concentrations of land; and the process by which slaves were set to work on
this land instead of the dispossessed peasantry. Furthermore, it is not simply
the peculiar outcome of struggles over land that needs to be explained. The
very fact of these struggles requires explanation.
Hopkins writes that ‘The central place of land in Roman politics sprang
from the overwhelming importance of land in the Roman economy.’13 At rst
glance, this may seem a trivial observation about the self-evident importance
of land in an overwhelmingly agrarian economy. Nevertheless, although
Hopkins does not make this clear, the point is that land and conicts over it
held a special place in Roman history beyond anything that can be explained
by its agrarian economy alone. The Roman ‘élite’ was arguably distinctive
in the degree to which it depended for its wealth on the acquisition of
land. Hopkins contrasts the Roman imperialist élite, for example, to the
Manchu conquerors of China in the seventeenth century ‘who latched on to
13
Hopkins 1978, p. 6.
the existing bureaucracy and became pensioners or sinecurists of the tax

system’.14 He might have added that, in the ancient world, ruling classes whose
wealth and status rested on possession of the state (of which possession of
landed property might be an adjunct) and on surplus extraction in the form
of tax or compulsory services was more the rule than the exception. Class
power rmly and primarily grounded in private property and on individual,
‘private’ surplus extraction may be precisely the special characteristic of
Greco-Roman antiquity (more on this later). Even as imperial administrators,
the Romans had as one of their principal concerns the looting (ofcial or
unofcial) of the local population largely for the purpose of investing the
prots of ofce in land, the only secure and steady source of wealth for
the Roman aristocracy. The particular salience of land, then, lent a special
character to relations and conicts between landlords and peasants. It may
also go a long way toward explaining other remarkable characteristics of the
Romans, including their extraordinary militarism and imperialism. It is only
against the background of these factors that the growth of Roman slavery
can be understood.
Perhaps nothing better expresses the peculiar and paradoxical nature of
the relations between landlords, peasants, and the state in Rome – as well as
their effects in determining the growth of slavery – than the military position
of the Roman peasantry. The Roman peasant was the military backbone of
Roman imperial expansion.15 For many peasants, it was by means of their
exploitation as soldiers rather than through direct extraction of surplus that
they produced the wealth of their aristocratic compatriots. This had several
often contradictory effects. The military role of the peasantry, for example,
was the basis of slavery in more ways than one – not only in the obvious
sense that the slave supply was directly dependent on military conquest,
or that absent peasants were often replaced by slaves in agricultural pro-
duction, but also in the sense that the frequent and prolonged absence
of peasants on military campaigns was a critical factor in making their
14
Hopkins 1978, p. 14.
15
It is worth noting that, while Athenian peasants, too, had military obligations,
they were not as onerous as those of their Roman counterparts. Athenians were never
compelled to bear either the military or the scal burden of creating and sustaining
a vast imperial apparatus. These factors no doubt helped to limit the necessity and
the possibilities of agricultural slavery in Athens.
expropriation possible. ‘Roman peasant soldiers,’ as Keith Hopkins puts

it, ‘were ghting for their own displacement’.16 The military activities
of peasants made them less available for direct exploitation by virtue of
physical absence, but no doubt also by virtue of the powers of resistance
afforded by possession of arms. Imperial expansion also, at least for a time,
provided peasants with an alternative source of income which made them
less dependent on land they had lost and gave them a mobility that often
allowed them to replace ancestral farms which they had been compelled to
give up. In many respects, then, the military role of Roman peasants was a
two-edged sword. In any case, it made the growth of slavery both possible
and, in a sense, necessary. The paradoxes are nicely summed up in Keith
Hopkins’ argument that ‘one of the main functions of slavery was that it
allowed the élite to increase the discrepancy between rich and poor without
alienating the free citizen peasantry from their willingness to ght in
wars for the further expansion of the empire’.17 However this contradictory
situation is viewed, it is clear that the growth of Roman slavery can be
explained only within the framework of the very particular relations between
Roman landlords and peasants.
In both Greece and Rome, then, the distinctive relations that had evolved
between landlord and peasant and the development of the peasant-citizen
account for much else that is distinctive in their social formations when
compared to other ancient civilisations, including the unprecedented growth
of slavery. At the same time, there are signicant differences between Athens
and Rome; and these can be traced to differences in the outcome of the
struggle between landlords and peasants. In both cases, the early relations
between the two agrarian classes issued in a reduced availability of poor
citizens as dependent labour, which may have acted as an incentive to
subject aliens. In Athens, however, the dominant landed class never succeeded
in expropriating peasants or concentrating land to the extent that the Romans
later did, nor did they succeed in maintaining an aristocratic state. In Rome,
the victory of large landed proprietors was more thorough, though never
complete; and the ‘senatorial’ economy together with the aristocratic state,
16
Hopkins, p. 30.
17
Hopkins, p. 14.
unlike the democratic polis, made possible imperial expansion and property-
concentration, together with forms of slave-utilisation that never existed in
Greece. In Rome, too, the groundwork was laid for a reversal of the process
which had created the peasant-citizen and limited the exploitation of
peasants, and a foundation was established for a new subjection in medieval
serfdom.
It is, nally, the relation between landlord and peasant that provides the
element of continuity in Greco-Roman history between the formation of the
early Greek states to the decline of the Roman Empire and the rise of
feudalism. The rise and decline of slavery appears in this historical process
as a ‘dependent variable’. We shall return to a brief consideration of these
processes and to the question of the role of slavery in the ‘decline of the
Roman Empire’ – an historical process that perhaps more than any other has
been explained by reference to the institution of slavery, the consequences of
declining slave supplies, the stultifying effects of slavery on technological
progress, and so on. A consideration of this question should put the explana-
tory value of the ‘slave society’ to the ultimate test. First, however, a look at
some of the most important recent works that have in various ways treated
Greece and Rome as ‘slave societies’, ‘slave economies’ or instances of the
‘slave mode of production’.
‘Slave society’, ‘slave economy’, ‘slave mode of production’

Several important books have appeared in recent years which, in one way
or another, treat slavery as the distinctive feature of the Greco-Roman
world. Each has its own conception of what it means to designate Greece
and Rome as slave societies, though none rests this characterisation on
the predominance of slavery in production. In fact, their arguments often
proceed, explicitly or implicitly, as explanations of the sense in which it
is still possible and important to identify Greco-Roman civilisation as a
slave system despite the fact that the bulk of production was not generally
performed by slaves.
M.I. Finley – most recently in Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology – suggests
that Greece and Rome were slave societies in the sense that, while slavery
occurred elsewhere, there existed in the Greco-Roman world ‘something rare
throughout history’ (there have been only ve ‘slave societies’ throughout
human history): ‘. . . an institutionalised system of large-scale employment of

slave-labour in both the countryside and the cities’.18 He does not mean by
this that slavery in general displaced or even predominated over free labour
but rather that slaves constituted the permanent workforce ‘in all Greek or
Roman establishments larger than the family unit’,19 and that slavery tended
to displace other forms of ‘involuntary’ labour. The centrality of slavery does
not here rest on its weight or preponderance in production generally – for
example, the question is not how much of Greek and Roman production
actually took the form of large-scale units worked by slaves rather than
small-scale farming and petty commodity production dominated by free
producers and family labour. Nor is it Finley’s primary object to explain
the general social consequences of a system of production in which larger
enterprises are dominated by slave labour and where slave labour predom-
inates over other forms of involuntary labour. The essential point is that the
very existence of such a rare formation signies something important that
demands an explanation. (We shall return to the explanation offered by Finley.)
A similar argument is made by Keith Hopkins in Conquerors and Slaves, which
also emphasises the rarity of slave societies.
Perry Anderson in Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism adopts the term
‘slave mode of production’ rather than the more exible ‘slave society’ to
describe Greece and Rome from early Attica to late imperial Rome.20 His
intention, however, is not to make any untenable claims about the preponder-
ance of slavery in production. He acknowledges the continuing importance
of free labour, especially in agricultural production, in these overwhelmingly
agrarian societies. Nevertheless, he argues, slavery represented the dominant
mode of production, in the sense that it cast its shadow over all other coex-
isting forms of production – and he has in mind especially its ideological
shadow. So, for example, the social degradation of labour by its association
with slavery stied technical inventiveness and obstructed the development
of productive forces. Anderson also suggests that, though class divisions
existed within the citizen communities of both Greece and Rome, these
18
Finley 1980, p. 67.
19
Finley 1980, p. 81. The emphasis on permanent is Finley’s.
20
Anderson 1974.
divisions paled before the more essential opposition between citizens, or

free men generally, and slaves. Furthermore, the most important cultural
expressions of Greek and Roman society – such as the works of Plato, Aristotle,
or Xenophon in Athens – must also be understood as reections of the slave
mode of production.
Pierre Dockès, whose Medieval Slavery and Liberation is largely concerned
with the decline of slavery and the consequent emergence of feudalism, puts
slavery at the heart of things for a more fundamental reason. For him, ‘Slavery
is not one type of domination and exploitation among others . . . [but] the
primary and primordial relation of exploitation, that form of exploitation
out of which serfdom and wage labour arise, and that form toward which
the master always strives . . .’.21 Thus, presumably, any exploitative society
could be fruitfully explained in terms of its natural tendency toward slavery
and the factors which promote or obstruct that tendency. Since Greco-Roman
antiquity represents a case in which chattel slavery actually, and not just
potentially, was the ‘chief form of exploitation and oppression’,22 a consider-
ation of its internal contradictions, the conditions that sustained it and the
forces that led to its decline, provides a key to the nature of exploitation in
general and to the possibility of its supersession. In any case, the particular
dynamic of Greco-Roman history derived from the exploitative relations of
slavery and more specically from the class struggles in which slaves resisted
oppression. This resistance ultimately destroyed the imperial state upon which
the whole system eventually depended and brought about the ‘medieval
liberation’, the decline of slavery and its replacement by serfdom.
The most systematic argument has been presented by G.E.M. de Ste. Croix
in The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World. He denies quite explicitly
that in Greek and Roman society ‘. . . the bulk of production was done by slaves,
or even (at least until the later Roman Empire) by slaves, serfs and all
other unfree works put together – I am sure it was not: in my opinion, the
combined production of free peasants and artisans must have exceeded that
of unfree agricultural and industrial producers in most places at all times, at
any rate until the fourth century of the Christian era, when forms of serfdom
21
Dockès 1982, p. 2.
22
Dockès 1982, p. 4.
became general in the Roman Empire’.23 Consequently, he continues, ‘. . . it

would not be technically correct to call the Greek (and Roman) world “a slave
economy”’.24 And yet, he nonetheless regards this designation as reasonable
and accepts the opinion of Marx that ‘Direct forced labour is the foundation
of the ancient world’.25 Again citing Marx, he argues that the most essentially
distinctive characteristic of any society is not the specic form in which the
labour of production itself is conducted, but the form in which surplus is
extracted, that is, the dominant mode of exploitation. Unfree labour was the
dominant form of surplus extraction, and slavery ‘played at some periods a
dominant role and was always a highly signicant factor’26 in unfree labour –
indeed, was (with debt bondage) ‘the archetypal form of unfree labour’.27 The
formula ‘slave economy’, therefore, can be accepted as a characterisation
of Greco-Roman society. This emphasis on the dominant mode of surplus
extraction is at least implicit in other accounts (notably Anderson’s and
Dockès’s, but perhaps even Finley’s); but only Ste. Croix states it so precisely.
The argument, then, is that even if the bulk of production is performed by
producers who remain outside the system of exploitation – acting neither as
exploiters nor exploited – a society can still be characterised by the specic
form in which surplus is extracted from the minority of exploited producers.
In the Greek world, of course, slaves (and other unfree labourers) played
a substantial if not predominant role in production; and, though free pro-
ducers were in practice often exploited, Ste. Croix suggests,28 the ‘typical’
Greek (like the ‘typical’ American Southerner in the era of slavery) was an
independent small producer not involved in the system of exploitation.29 In
this sense, ‘direct forced labour’ and slavery in particular, the predominant
form in which labour was exploited, remains the distinctive feature and
foundation of the ancient Greco-Roman world.
Although Ste. Croix never makes it entirely clear why the mode of surplus
extraction should be accorded such centrality, he provides some important
23
Ste. Croix 1981, p. 133.
24
Ibid.
25
Ibid.
26
Ibid.
27
Ste. Croix 1981, p. 173.
28
Ste. Croix 1981, p. 33.
29
Ste. Croix 1981, p. 55. On p. 53, Ste. Croix seems to suggest that the same is true
of the Romans.
hints – and Marx himself does more than that. In particular, the mode of
surplus extraction is the form in which surplus is supplied to the dominant
classes, that is, it is the specic form in which those classes and their
dominance are created, sustained, and reproduced. And, as Marx tells us in
Volume III of Capital,
The specic economic form, in which unpaid surplus labour is pumped out
of the direct producers, determines the relationship of rulers and ruled, as
it grows directly out of production itself and, in turn, reacts upon it as a
determining element. . . . [and] reveals the innermost secret, the hidden basis
of the entire social structure, and with it the political form of the relation
of sovereignty and dependence, in short, the corresponding form of state.30
Thus, to extrapolate from Ste. Croix’s argument, if slavery was the dominant
form of exploitation in the Greek world, then it provides the key to the whole
system of domination and the nature of the state. Indeed, one might argue,
assuming that slavery was the very condition of existence of a dominant
propertied class, it was also the condition which underlay the relations between
that class and the class of free small producers and any conicts that may
have existed between these classes. Free producers may have been essential
to production in general; and the conicts between them and the propertied
classes may have been crucial in determining social change, political devel-
opment, and historical movement in the Greco-Roman world. Nevertheless,
it could still be argued that slavery remains the essential force in Greco-Roman
history.
Slavery as the key to Greco-Roman history?

While the ‘slave society’ means many different things to different people,
it must be assumed that all those who apply it to the Greco-Roman world
share the conviction that slavery in one way or another provides the essen-
tial key to social life and historical process in ancient Greece and Rome. Again,
however, there is little agreement about precisely what, and in what sense,
it explains.
30
Marx 1971, p. 791.
In Finley’s case, slavery is not the ‘primordial fact’ in relation to which

other phenomena can be explained. Instead, slave society is a rare occurrence,
the fact which itself most demands explanation. He certainly agrees that ‘Once
established, a slave society had its own dynamic’,31 its own conditions of
maintenance, expansion, and decline, which helped to shape the course of
social relations and historical movement; but the essential explanatory value
of the formula ‘slave society’ lies in the nature of slavery as effect even more
than as cause.
Anderson, Dockès, and Ste. Croix, in contrast, are more inclined to take
slavery for granted and thus to treat it as prime mover. Dockès especially
proceeds from slavery as ‘primordial fact’. Ste. Croix very nearly does – at
least he assumes that slavery was the naturally preferred mode of exploita-
tion whose absence or decline is more in need of explanation than its
presence or emergence. It is true that he places conditions on the intrinsic
preferability of slavery as a mode of exploitation but, as we shall see, his
account of these conditions does little to dissuade us from taking slavery for
granted.
We shall return in a moment to the question of slavery as given, ‘primor-
dial fact’. The issue now is precisely how slavery, once established and by
whatever means, can be regarded as the key to Greek and Roman social life.
The most important questions have to do with the role of slavery in social
conict and class struggle, its relation to the form and evolution of the state,
and its ideological effects. Only Anderson and Ste. Croix have attempted
a comprehensive history of Greco-Roman antiquity which explores social,
political, and ideological developments together as a more or less coherent
whole, in such a way that we can judge whether the notion of ‘slave society’
or ‘slave mode of production’ has been vindicated.
If production in the Greek world rested at least equally on free labour as
on slavery, the most convincing grounds for singling out slavery as the
‘distinctive feature’ is the argument offered by Ste. Croix about the centrality
of surplus extraction.32 As a general principle, it seems to me quite correct –
31
Finley 1980, p. 92.
32
I have discussed Anderson’s argument in more detail elsewhere: Wood 1981a.
(Please note that an error in the text of this article is corrected in History Workshop
Journal Autumn 1982, pp. 178–9 in a letter to the editors in no. 14. I do not know why
publication of this correction was so long delayed.)
both as an interpretation of Marx and as a principle of historical explana-

tion – to say that the whole structure of social domination, the political power
that sustains it, the social conicts and ideological struggles that surround
it, and the historical dynamic generated by these conicts and struggles, are
all grounded in the process of surplus extraction and shaped by the specic
form in which this process takes place. It also seems to me demonstrably
true that Greek and Roman history can best be explained in these terms. The
most important social, political, and cultural developments in Greece and
Rome are fundamentally unintelligible without tracing their connections
to the prevailing modes of surplus extraction and the conditions of their
maintenance and reproduction, the struggles arising from the efforts of some
classes to maintain and enhance their exploitative powers and of other classes
to resist them.
Whether or not these principles justify the special role assigned to slavery
in the formula ‘slave society’ or ‘slave mode of production’, however, is
another matter. The proposition is especially problematic in the case of Athens,
if the role of slavery in agricultural production was negligible and if peas-
ants produced wealth for their rich fellow citizens as tenants, sharecroppers,
and casual wage-labourers. There is, then, considerable doubt about the
relative degrees to which slaves and free men were exploited, and it is
questionable whether the evidence actually permits the exclusion of free
producers from the system of exploitation to quite the extent that these
formulae suggest. But, even if we accept both the centrality of surplus
extraction and the proposition that the ‘typical’ free man stood outside the
system of exploitation, questions arise.
If the mode of surplus extraction and exploitation is the essential char-
acteristic of any society, then the fact of exploitative surplus extraction is
more fundamental still. In other words, the rst essential characteristic of
any society is whether surplus is ‘pumped out of the direct producers’ by
someone other than themselves. One cannot simply set aside free producers
on the grounds that they neither exploit others nor suffer exploitation
themselves. Especially if they exist in substantial or even preponderant num-
bers and perhaps even account for a greater proportion of basic production
than do other forms of labour, it must in itself be a highly signicant fact
that they are not exploited and that much or most of production takes place
outside the system of exploitation and without surplus being pumped out of
the direct producers. The existence or non-existence of exploitation, the

organisation of production in exploitative rather than non-exploitative ways,
is, after all, the difference between a class system and a classless society.
The freedom of so many direct producers from exploitation must be treated
as an essential factor in describing and explaining the nature of social arrange-
ments, class conict, ideology, and the form of the state. One must ask how
such a strikingly unusual arrangement came about, and precisely what in
the system of social organisation, class relations, and political power made
it possible. And, at the very least, in explaining the nature and function
of slavery itself, one must ask whether the unusual development of slave
production was cause or effect of the equally unusual system of class rela-
tions in which so many direct producers managed to free themselves, or to
remain free, from exploitation.
At the same time, it must be said that the form in which production is
carried out cannot be treated as peripheral, even if we place surplus extrac-
tion at the centre of our analysis. If it turned out that the bulk of production
was performed by free men rather than by slaves (as seems to be the case in
Athenian agriculture), this alone might raise questions about slavery as the
primary form of surplus extraction. At the very least, it would be necessary
to ascertain whether the proportion of social production carried out by
slaves was sufcient to account for the amount of surplus appropriated by
the propertied classes. After all, surplus must rst be produced in order to be
extracted.
As it happens, both Anderson and Ste. Croix, however much they stress
the centrality of slavery, at least implicitly place free producers and the
class struggle between free producers and their appropriating compatriots at
the heart of their historical explanations. In both cases, there is, in fact, a
noticeable disjunction between, on the one hand, the conceptual analysis
which denes the slave economy or the slave mode of production, and on
the other, the actual explanation of historical processes and the particular
conguration of social, political, and cultural forms in Greece and Rome. Ste.
Croix, for example, provides both the most convincing theoretical case for
regarding the Greek world as a slave society and the most detailed historical
account of social, political, and ideological developments which cannot be
explained without according a determining role to class struggles within the
citizen population.
Ste. Croix’s book is divided into two parts. The rst is devoted to a very
useful conceptual explanation and a detailed catalogue of property forms
and modes of exploitation in general and in the Greek world in particular
(though one is never quite sure when he is speaking of Greece, when of Rome,
or in what periods). The second part purports to apply the Marxist categories
explicated in Part I, notably the concept of class struggle, to an explanation
of historical developments, the processes of social and political change in
the Greek world. It is worth noting that Part II begins with a section entitled
‘Class Struggle in Greek History on the Political Plane’. Here, the relations
between ‘propertied’ and ‘unpropertied’ classes within the free population
take centre stage and slavery recedes. Although Ste. Croix points out that
there was seldom a simple coincidence between political divisions and class
divisions, he clearly believes that class divisions within the citizen body were
essential in determining the direction of social and political change.
In other words, it is precisely when the object is to explain specic historical
processes that the centrality of this class struggle, as distinct from the relations
between masters and slaves, becomes evident. Although Ste. Croix breaks
little new ground here, it becomes clear, for example, that the nature of Greek
democracy, its rise and fall, were the product of a class struggle between free
producers and their appropriating compatriots; that the democratic state
was a means of protecting the one class from exploitation by the other;
that the tensions between these classes never ceased to play a central role
in determining the direction of social change and political action; that (and
this is a point on which Ste. Croix is especially good) the imperial govern-
ment in both the Hellenistic state and the Roman Empire took much of its
shape from the survival of democratic polis and the conscious efforts of the
state to strengthen itself and the propertied classes by gradually absorbing
and destroying democratic forms.
Ste. Croix’s explanation of ‘class struggle on the ideological plane’ also
centres on the opposition between free producers and their propertied class
enemies. For example, he treats Plato’s philosophy, with its contempt for
labour, as anti-democratic propaganda directed against the role of ordinary
peasants and artisans in Athenian political life.33 And Aristotle’s perceptive
33
Ste. Croix 1981, p. 412. [A similar argument was made earlier in Wood and Wood
1978.]
analysis of social conict, which Ste. Croix deeply admires – and which he
cites as conrmation that the notion of class struggle as applied to ancient
Greece is no latter-day imposition but a reality perceived by the Greeks
themselves34 – is concerned precisely with relations between classes within
the citizen body, not relations between masters and slaves. The role of
slavery in all this is far from clear. There is, signicantly, no chapter on
‘class struggle on the economic plane’ in the historical section of Ste. Croix’s
work, no discussion of how the ‘plane’ on which slaves presumably played
their most prominent role gures in the historical process, or even how the
political and ideological ‘planes’ are related to it.35
In Part I, Ste. Croix demonstrates why it is wrong to speak of class only
where there is class consciousness and active political conict (as Ralf Dahren-
dorf, incorrectly, claims that Marx does). He also makes a case for referring
to the relations between masters and slaves as class struggles even when
no overt struggle occurred. His point here is ‘to bring back exploitation
as the hallmark of class’. This is no doubt important, though broadening
the denition of class struggle (to represent any class relations, oppositions, or
antagonisms) is not necessary to achieve that object. It is certainly import-
ant to recognise that the objective fact of exploitation and the inherently
antagonistic relations it entails have profound effects on historical processes,
even in the absence of overt conict and political struggle – something
that many historians and sociologists forget. Exploitation always requires
34
Ste. Croix 1981, pp. 77–80.
35
To speak of economic and political ‘planes’ as if they were separate compart-
ments is in any case rather misleading, especially in the case of precapitalist societies
where ‘economic’ powers of exploitation generally rest to a great extent on access to
‘extra-economic’ powers. (For a detailed discussion of this point, see Wood 1981b. [A
somewhat revised version of the article appears in Wood 1995.]) Ste. Croix’s failure
to acknowledge this difference between capitalist and precapitalist societies allows
him to make some misleading statements about the relationship between political and
economic divisions, class conicts and political contests, in ancient Greece, and, for
example, some misleading analogies between liturgies and property conscations in
ancient Athens and taxation in modern democratic states, Ste. Croix 1981, p. 97. He
also seems to misunderstand the signicance of certain Marxist analyses that stress
the degree to which exploitation in precapitalist societies is based on ‘direct relations
of domination and subjection’. Ste. Croix regards such analyses as ‘clearly contrary
to the views of Marx’ (p. 98), when, in fact, the distinction between ‘economic’ and
‘extra-economic’ modes of surplus extraction, the latter involving various forms of
direct domination and subjection, is precisely the basis of Marx’s distinction between
capitalist and precapitalist modes of exploitation.
means and institutions to sustain and enforce it and to overcome, suppress,

contain, or forestall resistance; and these requirements go a long way toward
explaining the nature of social organisation, political arrangements, and
ideological forms. Ste. Croix’s conceptual analysis of class in general and
slavery in particular is especially welcome for reminding us that the failure
of slaves to play a signicant political role does not by itself entitle us to
deny their existence as a class (though other problems may remain).36 But, to
demonstrate by denition that slaves are a class is not the same as showing
how this ‘classness’ actually affected historical process.
The point, then, is that it needs to be made clear how the largely silent
class struggle between masters and slaves determined the course of Greek
and Roman history, if we are to accept the explanatory value of the propo-
sition that slavery was the distinctive feature of Greco-Roman civilisation.
Ste. Croix has surprisingly little to say about this, much less than he says
about the other class struggle. He now and then hints at ways in which
slavery may have affected this other class conict: for example, he draws
36
Although much of what Ste. Croix says about the existence of class in the absence
of political struggle is undoubtedly correct and important, his argument is somewhat
vitiated, again, by his failure to acknowledge the special role of the ‘political’ in pre-
capitalist societies in this respect. His argument is, however, important in countering
certain objections to the application of class analysis to classical antiquity. It is often
argued, for example, that the concept of class is inapplicable here because people –
and the masses of the peasantry in particular – were never conscious of themselves
as a class nor able to act together in conscious pursuit of their class interests. Although
Ste. Croix may obscure the issue by using the concept of class struggle too loosely,
his argument is useful in pointing out that the relations of exploitation have profound
consequences for the organisation of society and social processes even when they
are not expressed in conscious political struggles between classes. For example, the
necessity of enforcing property relations and ensuring and enhancing the appropria-
tion of surplus against the resistances of direct producers deeply affects the nature of
juridical and political forms, even when producers are not organised consciously as
a class, and certainly nds expression in ideological forms – in attitudes toward labour,
in philosophical justications of social hierarchies, and so on.
As E.P. Thompson has argued, if class is something more than a theoretical con-
struct imposed upon the evidence, it is because it can be seen as a pattern in social
relationships, ideas, and institutions when they are observed over time and through
periods of social change: Thompson 1968, pp. 10–11. To say this, incidentally, is
not to say (as Ste. Croix accuses Thompson of doing) that class exists only in the
presence of class consciousness; but it does imply that if ‘class’ is to have any mean-
ing, we must do more than simply declare its presence by denition. We must show
its dynamic at work in historical processes and in the shaping of social and political
relationships, whether or not this dynamic is expressed in overt displays of class
consciousness.
an analogy between slaves in Greece and immigrant workers in modern

capitalist societies or blacks in South Africa, suggesting that citizen labourers
in Greece, like indigenous workers in capitalist Europe or white workers in
South Africa, may constitute a kind of ‘labour aristocracy’ united with their
exploiters against the ‘alien’ element. Even here, however, Greek slavery
appears less as a primary determinant than as a modication of another,
more central class struggle. Slavery re-emerges from the wings only in the
nal scene, the ‘decline’ of the Roman Empire. Now, according to Ste. Croix,
a fall in the slave supply and a resultant decline in the protability of
slave-exploitation compelled the propertied classes to tighten the screws
on free producers and to create new forms of exploitation which were
eventually to become the foundation of feudal serfdom. The intensied
exploitation of free producers in turn undermined the foundations of the
Empire. The decline of the Empire is, in fact, the only aspect of the historical
process in Greece and Rome which Ste. Croix actually explains with specic
reference to slavery (though not really slaves in class struggle) as the central
determining factor. Even in this case, as we shall see in the concluding
section, the process is intelligible only when slavery, both its rise and its
decline, is placed in the context of another, overarching class relation between
landlords and peasants.
As it is, if one were to read only Part II of Ste. Croix’s massive work, the
section in which by his own testimony he begins to apply his conceptual
categories to the explanation of actual historical processes, one might con-
clude that the truly ‘distinctive’ characteristic of the Greek world was not
slavery but, rather, a particular kind of free producing class and a particular
kind of class struggle between that class and its propertied compatriots. The
centrality of free producers and the importance of slavery are not, of course,
mutually exclusive. On the contrary, the two are inextricably related, and
their historical trajectories are closely intertwined. The question is whether
to accord explanatory priority to slavery is the most fruitful way of looking
at these historical trajectories, or whether it obscures as much as it reveals.
Slavery: ‘primordial fact’ or historical oddity?

To begin at the beginning: the question may come down to the origin of ‘slave
society’ and whether it is ‘primordial fact’ or historical rarity. To argue the
latter is already to look for a prior historical determinant. This may not require
us to abandon slavery, once established, as ‘distinctive feature’ or ‘dominant
mode of production’; but it does compel us to ask different questions than
are raised by formulae which take slavery as given. The proposition – as put
forward by Pierre Dockès (following in the tradition of his distinguished
compatriot Fustel de Coulanges)37 – that slavery is not simply one form of
exploitation but the ‘primordial’ form from which all others grow and toward
which they constantly tend has little explanatory value. The proposition is
rather empty, given the empirical rarity of large-scale chattel slavery as a
form of production, the widely diverse forms of surplus extraction that have
existed historically, and the great differences in their respective conditions
of emergence, maintenance, expansion, and decline. As an historical pro-
position, it is useless, even if, in some very broad sense, we could accept that
in the best (or worst) of all possible worlds, and without the constraints of
historical circumstance, all exploiters would prefer to have slaves. It would
be better to say, at the very most, that exploiters can, on the whole, be expected
to strive for the most complete and effective means of enhancing their
surplus – at least, the means most effective under the prevailing material,
social, and historical circumstances. It remains an open question what means
are most effective under what circumstances, and to what degree and in what
conditions exploiters can full their wishes in a context of class struggle, which
is never one-sided. And, of course, it still needs to be said that all systems
of exploitation are not equally in need of maximum surplus extraction – in
particular, the necessity for maximising surplus-value is uniquely typical
of the capitalist system with its pressures for accumulation and the self-
expansion of capital. Dockès acknowledges this problem, at least indirectly,
in his effective criticism of those who apply anachronistic notions of ‘prot-
ability’ to the judgement of slavery; but nonetheless takes far too much for
granted the inherent and universal preferability of slavery as a mode of
exploitation.
Ste. Croix takes slavery for granted in an apparently more conditional form.
He argues that slavery was the best means of extracting ‘the largest possible
surplus from the primary producers’ under the prevailing conditions.38
37
Finley 1980, p. 67.
38
Ste. Croix 1981, p. 40.
Underlying this proposition is a more fundamental and universal rule that

unfree labour and hired labour are the only ways of consistently achieving
a large surplus.39 Under the conditions prevailing in ancient Greece and Rome,
slavery was the best available means of extraction. His attempt to prove that
agricultural slavery was prevalent in classical Athens, for example, rests to a
great extent on his abstract assumption concerning the inherent superiority
of unfree labour, and the presumption that what is in principle superior must
be historically predominant.40
There were, according to Ste. Croix, three basic conditions that made
slavery the preferred form of exploitation: the prevailing level of technology
and productivity; ‘the poor supply of free, hired labour’; and the easy avail-
ability and cheapness of slaves.41 All this may be true,42 and his account at
least has the advantage of acknowledging in principle that the preferability
of slavery is in some way conditional on historical circumstances – though
the superiority of unfree labour in general is apparently absolute. Nevertheless,
his argument leaves the critical questions unanswered, and unasked, and
effectively still takes slavery too much for granted. The abstract principle that
unfree labour and hired labour are intrinsically more effective than other
modes of surplus appropriation – such as the extraction of rents, nes, taxes,
and labour services from ‘free’ producers – must be argued rather than merely
asserted; but, even if we were to accept it in the abstract, Ste. Croix provides
no adequate reason for concluding that these inherently superior forms have
been predominant in reality, and that we can take their existence for granted.
The tremendous and universal importance of rents, taxes, and labour
services extracted from peasant proprietors throughout history makes
it difcult to take seriously the dismissal of these forms as major sources
of wealth (as Ste. Croix so easily dismisses them in the case of Greece), 43
simply on the a priori grounds that they are in principle inferior types of
exploitation. And to use the unavailability of hired labour as an argument
to support and explain the prevalence of slavery is questionable in the
39
Ste. Croix 1981, p. 53.
40
In Wood 1983, I discuss this argument at greater length and examine in detail
Ste. Croix’s use of the textual evidence concerning both slavery and hired labour.
41
Ste. Croix 1981, p. 40.
42
For a different evaluation of slavery and its costs, see Hopkins 1978, p. 10 and
pp. 108–11.
43
See Wood 1983.
extreme. Quite apart from the fact that hired labour may not have been as
unimportant as Ste. Croix claims, even by his own testimony, (since it seems
to have been the typical form of harvest labour in Athens, and since the
harvest has always accounted for a substantial proportion of labour in
agrarian societies), the argument is profoundly ahistorical. Until the advent
of capitalism, wage-labour has never and nowhere been a predominant
form of exploitation. (It is worth noting here that Ste. Croix may have a
tendency to generalise from capitalism in several ways, perhaps treating
the capitalist drive for accumulation as his criterion for determining the
advantages of forms of surplus extraction and identifying their preferability
with protability – according to anachronistic principles of cost-accounting.)
Neither has large-scale slavery been common. What can it possibly mean, as
an historical proposition, to say that wage-labour is the chief alternative whose
absence proves or explains the presence of slavery? How do we account for
the massive surpluses produced and appropriated by landlords and states
in other civilisations with material cultures and state apparatuses more
lavish than those of Greece, in similar conditions of low productivity and yet
without either widespread slavery or hired labour?
Here, we encounter another difculty in Ste. Croix’s argument: the ten-
dency to lump chattel slavery together with other forms of unfree labour –
which, in his catalogue, includes various forms of debt-bondage and serfdom.
Surely, these forms differ from one another sufciently in critical respects
(for example, in some cases, producers remain in possession of the means of
production, while, in others, they themselves become chattel property) so
that their conditions of existence, as well as their relative advantages and
disadvantages, vary considerably in nature and degree? In any case, how
should we measure advantages and disadvantages? Are we entitled to give
as little weight as does Ste. Croix to the disadvantages of slavery – such
as the difculties and costs of supervision or the problems arising out of
the fact that the master’s investment is embodied not simply in means of
production or labour-time but in the very person of the slave?
Furthermore, to conate the various forms of unfree labour is to obscure
a truly fundamental question: why slavery and not other forms, and why
in Greece and Rome and nowhere else in the ancient world, or, for that
matter, in very few places at any time? Perhaps the answer is that the civic
status of Greek and Roman peasants and artisans made them unavailable as
dependent labourers and made necessary other forms of surplus extraction.

This, by itself, cannot prove that slavery predominated in production, if
we do not accept without question Ste. Croix’s rst premise about the
intrinsic superiority of unfree labour over free or his assumption that abstract
superiority means historical predominance. What such an argument would
suggest, however, is precisely that the importance of slavery depended upon
the condition of free producers, that the growth of slavery cannot be taken
for granted as predetermined by its inherently greater effectiveness as
a mode of exploitation and cannot be explained without rst accounting
for the special character of Greek and Roman peasants and their relations to
landlords.
There are, in fact, hints of doubt in Ste. Croix’s own argument. In at
least one place, for example, he suggests that, in the late Roman Empire,
when there was ‘a considerable increase in the exploitation of small free
producers, the use of slave labour in the strict sense was in principle less
necessary’.44 This statement would seem to run counter to the assumption
that slave labour as a mode of surplus extraction is in principle and funda-
mentally preferable to the exploitation of small free producers (rent-paying
peasants and craftsmen, not hired labourers). The suggestion now seems to
be that slavery is preferable only when free producers are not available for
exploitation.
Here is, at least, a hint of how the crucial question might be posed: why,
and under what conditions, did free producers cease to be readily available
for exploitation, how, and under what conditions, was their availability restored
and increased, and why did their exploitation take the particular forms
that it did? Put this way, as we shall see, the question also sheds a different
light on the ‘decline’ of the Roman Empire; for, then, the explanation no
longer hinges – as Ste. Croix’s account suggests – on the slave supply. The
suggestion that the availability of free producers for exploitation determines
the importance of slavery would seem to undermine the argument that the
decline of slavery and the rise of feudal forms were essentially determined
44
Ste. Croix 1981, p. 113. He makes a similar suggestion about the relationship
between the unavailability of free producers for exploitation and the rise of slavery
in Athens on p. 141.
by a decrease in the slave supply, an accompanying decline in the prot-

ability of slavery, and the consequent need to tighten the screws on free
producers. The whole sequence of causality changes when one ceases to take
slavery for granted and if one assumes that the rise and the very existence
of slavery need to be explained, and not simply its absence or decline.
Slavery was undoubtedly a lucrative means of surplus extraction for Greek
and Roman propertied classes. ‘Yet,’ writes M.I. Finley,
for all the advantages (or apparent advantages), slavery was a late and
relatively infrequent form of involuntary labour, in world history generally
and in ancient history in particular. Advantages and disadvantages are not
essences but historical attributes that come and go under changing social
and economic conditions.45
Even if all exploiters could be shown in principle to be striving for slavery,

it would still remain to explain under what conditions they can achieve it
and why Greece and Rome alone among ancient civilisations succeeded in
establishing it as a widespread form.
Even this, however, is not the most fruitful way to ask the question. If
the desirability of slavery is to be treated as an ‘historical attribute’, slavery
must also be conceived as a totality, a social form with specic conditions
of maintenance, requiring other social institutions as well as political and
ideological forms to sustain and reproduce it. One might conclude by ask-
ing not simply how Greek and Roman propertied classes succeeded in
establishing and maintaining such a rare though ‘advantageous’ form of
exploitation, but why they were compelled to adopt such a complicated
form, one that required, for example, not only periodic coercive acts of
appropriation but a continuously coercive supervision of production, as
well as an elaborate and expensive state apparatus to support it. It is not
surprising that an ancient agricultural authority like Columella in his De Re
Rustica (I.vii.4–7) should question the practicability of allowing slaves to work
agricultural land when the landlord is unable to supervise them directly (as
must have been frequently the case in ancient Greece and Rome where large
proprietors often owned several widely scattered holdings); in such cases, he
suggests, tenants are preferable. The increasing subjection of free producers
45
Finley 1980, p. 77.
in the later years of the Roman Empire, and its accompaniment by the
partial liberation of slaves who were placed in possession of land to be
exploited in serf-like dependence, do not testify only to the decreasing prot-
ability of slavery in conditions of declining supply, as Ste. Croix suggests,
nor simply to a decline (as Dockès argues) in the political and military powers
of the state. These developments may also signal a decreasing need on the
part of the propertied classes for an unwieldy form of exploitation and the
burdensome apparatus required to maintain it. The growing weakness, for
a variety of reasons, of the Roman imperial state was certainly a factor in
rendering slavery unworkable; but it is also arguable that this weakness was
itself conditioned by the state’s decreasing usefulness, indeed its positive
obtrusiveness, to a propertied class already in the process of establishing new
relations of exploitation and increasingly able to subject free producers to
conditions of personal dependence.
Slavery and the ‘decline’ of the Roman Empire

This brings us to the question of slavery in the ‘decline’ of the Roman Empire.
The ‘decline and fall’ of Rome are often associated, if not equated, with the
decline of slavery; and the dissolution of the Roman Empire is the one specic
historical process which historians have most systematically sought to explain
by reference to slavery. So it is perhaps here that we ought to look for
the ultimate vindication of the ‘slave society’ and the notion that slavery
provides the key to Greco-Roman history.
The central question seems to be: what factors led to the decline of slavery
and its replacement by other forms of labour and exploitation, notably serf-
dom? Various explanations have been offered. Max Weber emphasised
the decline of the slave trade as the Empire reached its limits. Marc Bloch
argued that a general decline in trade and the money economy was inimical
to slavery. Marxists have stressed the limitations on productivity inherent in
slavery and its effects on the development of productive forces.46 Ste. Croix’s
recent work has rened the Weberian analysis from a Marxist perspective
46
I have criticised the Marxist argument concerning the effects of slavery on the
development of productive forces in Wood 1981a, pp. 14–15, 19–20. [A better discus-
sion of this point appears in Wood 1988.]
by explaining why the decline in the slave supply was signicant, arguing
that various factors contributing to a decreasing slave supply reduced the
inherent protability of slavery and compelled landowners to tighten the
screws on free producers, thereby undermining the social, political, and
military foundations of the Empire. Each of these arguments can be faulted
on its own terms as an inadequate explanation of slavery’s decline. 47 The
more fundamental issue, however, is whether the question about Rome’s
decline has been correctly posed at all. Is it fruitful to focus our primary
attention on factors leading to the decline of slavery, or should this question
be subordinate to, or subsumed under, another question or set of questions?
Rodney Hilton, in Bond Men Made Free, has indirectly suggested why and
how our attention should be redirected:
. . . there seems little doubt that peasantries were the basis of the ancient
civilisations out of which most European feudal societies grew; and that the
class of slaves, though economically and culturally of great signicance at
certain times and in certain sectors of the ancient world, was numerically
inferior and of less permanent importance than the peasant producers.
In fact, viewed from the standpoint of this most numerous class of rural
society, the difference between late Roman and early medieval civilisation
may not have been all that easy to discern. 48
Viewed in this perspective, the rise and decline of Greco-Roman civilisation

– including the rise and decline of slavery ‘at certain times and in certain
sectors’ – might be seen as the history of peasantries, their changing relations
to landlords and to the state. The question of the decline of Rome and the
rise of feudalism could then be reformulated, again more inclusively, as
follows: what factors led to changes in the form and extent of peasant exploita-
tion, including – temporarily – its relative decline and partial replacement
by slave-exploitation, and its re-establishment in the new forms of medieval
serfdom? Related to and co-extensive with this question – and again more
inclusive than the issue of slavery – are other questions concerning changes
in the nature of appropriating classes and the state. This mode of analysis
among other things has the advantage of focussing on continuities rather
47
For criticisms of various arguments on the decline of slavery see, for example,
Dockès 1982, pp. 117–49.
48
Hilton 1973, p. 10.
than upon a radical break between the Roman Empire and what came after.
The myth of Rome’s decline and fall, whether viewed as a sudden
cataclysmic collapse or a gradual dissolution, has tended to make feudalism
appear out of nowhere (or, at best, out of the alien barbaric North). First,
Rome declines and falls in accordance with its inner logic and inadequacies,
then feudalism lls the void. What is needed instead is a vantage point from
which the continuities are clearly visible and which permits us to discern the
emergence of specically ‘feudal’ relations and institutions within the social
and institutional framework of Imperial Rome.
European feudalism was characterised by three essential features: the ‘par-
cellisation’ of the state and its replacement by a patchwork of jurisdictions
in which state functions were both vertically and horizontally fragmented;
a ‘parcellisation’ of the economy, contraction toward a ‘natural’ economy;
and, above all, a signicant growth of personal dependence, a condition of
serfdom which to an unprecedented degree bound formerly free producers
both to the land and to individual appropriators in a relationship of depen-
dence that was at once and inextricably economic and political. These three
features can be viewed as three aspects of a single phenomenon: a new mode
of surplus extraction constituted by a decentralised fusion of political and
economic power.49 This new form of exploitation took the shape of a juridical-
political relationship between producer and appropriator, so that each unit
of production and appropriation was at one and the same time a fragment
of the state, and the lord was both private exploiter and ruler at once.
The question of the transition from Imperial Rome to Western feudalism
should therefore focus on whatever there was in the logic of Roman social
relations that tended toward fragmentation of the state, the growth of a parcel-
lised unity of political and economic power, and the increasing personal
dependence of formerly free producers. The specic institutional forms assumed
by these new relationships – the forms of infeudation and subinfeudation,
vassalage, etc. – may owe a great deal to alien intrusions; but, even these,
together with the manorial system, have Roman antecedents and could not,
in any case, have been implanted if an appropriate matrix of social relations
had not already developed to receive them in Rome.50
49
See Anderson 1974, pp. 147–8, and Wood 1981b, pp. 86–9.
50
For a brief summary of the ambiguities in the evidence concerning the prove-
nance of specic feudal institutions, see Anderson 1974, pp. 130–1.
No explanation that gives primacy to slavery can bear the weight of all
these developments. Ste. Croix’s explanation of Rome’s decline, for example,
hardly even attempts to account for the processes of economic and political
parcellisation which constituted new forms of personal dependence and
exploitation, nor does his analysis of class struggle encompass class relations
that might have impelled such processes. If his focus on the slave supply and
slave protability is meant to explain these larger economic and political
tendencies, it is only in the very general sense that the declining protability
of slavery, according to his argument, led to an increasing burden on free
producers which made them increasingly unable to support the military
and administrative apparatus that had always rested on their backs. There
is too much ‘decline and fall’ in this, and not enough on-going historical
process to explain what came after. Apart from the fact that Ste. Croix may
be reversing cause and effect, his explanation is inadequate because it makes
the emergence of feudal dependence and parcellisation contingent upon the
(relatively late) decline in the availability of slaves with no explanation of the
long-term tendencies in these directions without which no decline in slave
supplies could have produced the specic relations of feudalism. So, among
other things, he cannot even consider the possibility that the supply of slaves
may have been affected by the demand for them, and that the reasons for the
change in demand should be sought in larger economic and political trends.51
Ste. Croix explicitly contrasts his own approach to M.I. Finley’s account
of slavery’s decline. Finley, Ste. Croix tells us, notes the decline of slavery
and the fact that it ‘requires explanation’; and he ‘comes very near to saying
something valuable, when he declares that “the key lies not with slaves but
with the free poor” . . .’.52 Unfortunately, Ste. Croix continues, Finley conceives
of the process ‘from a supercial point of view’ as simply a general trend
(quoting Finley), ‘a cumulative depression in the status of the lower classes
among the free citizens’.53 This formula conceals ‘the mainspring and essen-
tial character’ of the trend and its foundation in class exploitation.54 Finley fails,
therefore, to explain ‘the changeover . . . from slave production to what I would
call mainly serf production. . . . The “explanation” should be precisely the
51
Finley 1980, p. 86, and Finley 1973, p. 93.
52
Ste. Croix 1981, p. 462, quoting Finley 1973, p. 86.
53
Ste. Croix 1981, pp. 462–3, quoting Finley 1973, p. 87.
54
Ste. Croix 1981, p. 463.
other way round: it was because slavery was not now producing as great a
surplus as it did in Rome’s palmiest days that the propertied classes needed
to put more pressure on the free poor.’55
It can be argued, however, that Finley comes closer here than does Ste.
Croix to offering an explanation, or at least pointing us in the direction of one,
and that this explanation – for all Finley’s doubts about status and class –
has implicitly more to do with class struggle than does Ste. Croix’s account.
Ste. Croix reads Finley’s argument as if it merely describes a trend – a depres-
sion in the status of lower class free men – which is symptomatic but which
cannot explain the ‘changeover from slave production to serf-production’.
The argument can, however, be read quite differently. When Finley writes
that the decline of slavery ‘requires explanation’, he means that it must be
explained in terms of a prior and more inclusive development, ‘a structural
transformation within the society as a whole’.56 His remark that ‘the key lies
with the free poor’ does in fact help to explain the ‘changeover’, by suggesting
that the relations between the free poor and their wealthier compatriots
is the key to the ‘structural transformation’ of which the decline of slavery
is simply one aspect or consequence. Where Ste. Croix argues that because
slavery was not producing an adequate surplus, free producers had to be
more exploited, Finley seems to be arguing essentially that, because free
producers could now be more exploited, slavery was no longer so necessary.57
The difference between these two positions rests on a different evaluation
of slavery and its place in history: as we have seen, Finley makes no universal
assumptions about the inherent preferability of slavery as a mode of exploita-
tion or about its ‘primordial’ character. Instead, he treats the advantages of
slavery as historical attributes within a context of historical conditions – social,
economic, and political. He acknowledges the rarity of large-scale slavery
and its distinctiveness as an unusual social formation whose very existence
needs to be explained. Since he poses the question of slave society in terms
of the conditions that made it possible and/or necessary in the rst place,
demanding an explanation of its emergence and rise, he must also pose the
question of its decline in a different way. Finley consequently looks for more
55
Ibid.
56
Finley 1973, p. 86.
57
Finley 1973, p. 93.
inclusive factors which can explain the structural developments within

which slavery rose and declined. Although he fails perhaps to pursue his
own argument to its logical conclusion by referring unambiguously and
unapologetically to class exploitation and class struggle, there can be little
doubt that his explanation of these structural developments rests heavily on
the class relations between landlords and peasants. Explaining the emergence
of slave society, Finley writes
The peasantry had won their personal freedom and their tenure on the land
through struggle, in which they also won citizenship, membership in the
community, the polis. This in itself was something radically new in the world,
and it led in turn to the second remarkable innovation, a slave society.58
Finley acknowledges that the slave society, once established, ‘had its own
dynamic [and that] the conditions that led to its creation were not identical
with the conditions that led to its maintenance, expansion or decline’. 59
Nevertheless, he clearly sees the decline as in some sense a reversal of the
original process, a restoration of an older social formation in which landlords
and peasants confronted one another as exploiting and exploited classes.60
And, just as earlier struggles had consolidated the personal freedom and land
tenure of the peasantry by making them members of the civic community,
the process which increasingly deprived them of their freedom and made
them more available for exploitation and involuntary labour took the form
of their gradual extrusion from the civic community. Finley traces this process
to the very beginning of monarchical government in Rome, a gradual decline
in the political and military power of the citizen poor, and the increasingly
insupportable burden imposed upon them by the state.61
Finley’s account has several advantages over Ste. Croix’s. It need make
no ahistorical assumptions about the inherent exploitative superiority of
slavery. It need not assume that landed proprietors in classical antiquity
operated according to anachronistic principles of protability and compara-
tive cost-accounting (which in any case can be used by historians either for
58
Finley 1973, pp. 89–90. Although Finley here speaks of the polis, he seems to have
in mind the Roman state as well, see p. 89.
59
Finley 1973, p. 92.
60
For example, Finley 1973, p. 93.
61
Finley 1973, pp. 86–7.
or against the efciency of slavery), especially principles that probably

make sense only in conditions where the uniquely capitalist compulsions of
accumulation prevail and where the preferability of a mode of exploitation
is synonymous with its productivity.62 It encourages us to look for larger
and more inclusive structural transformations. And it can take account of
both the similarities between Greece and Rome when compared to other
ancient civilisations, and the differences between Greece and Rome, which
can be explained by divergences in the outcomes of class struggle between
Above all, Finley’s argument gives us a sense of historical process which
Ste. Croix’s lacks. Finley’s argument at least suggests an ongoing process, a
constant tension, not a sudden and one-sided tightening of screws by the
propertied classes, but a continuing and changing relationship marked by
struggles in which free producers resisted subjection with varying degrees
of success. In both Greece and Rome, the success of free producers was
sufcient substantially to restrict the options of the dominant classes; but
it did not, even temporarily, exempt all free producers altogether from
exploitation or completely remove from within the free population the ten-
sions and conicts that characterise exploitation and resistance to it. Such a
view of things forces us to consider from the outset the various factors that
determined the relative successes of these classes, and to assess the role of
slavery in that context.
Finley’s approach has a further – and perhaps unintended – advantage.
Paradoxically, although it is Ste. Croix who emphasises class struggle and
justly remarks on Finley’s tendency to avoid the concepts of class and exploita-
tion, it is Finley’s argument that, at least by implication, places its stress on
class struggle. Like Ste. Croix, Finley asks ‘what motivated the upper classes . . .
to change over from slave gangs to tied peasants?’,63 as if the explanation
were to be sought only in the intentions of the upper classes. For Ste. Croix,
however, these intentions and the factors affecting the need to change from
62
It is worth noting that Ste. Croix’s reply to Finley’s criticism of such ‘cost-account-
ing’ arguments addresses itself simply to whether slave exploitation was inefcient
and unprotable. He apparently fails to see that the issue is whether the question of
‘protability’ is relevant at all in the way he suggests and whether it is legitimate to
attribute these principles of comparative cost-accounting to the ancients themselves.
See Ste. Croix 1981, p. 462, n. 18.
63
Finley 1973, p. 85.
one mode of exploitation to another have little to do with the action and
resistance of exploited classes. Finley, in contrast, offers an explanation
that leaves more room for the struggles of producers. It is an explanation
much more compatible, for example, with the insight so fruitfully applied by
Robert Brenner to another great structural transformation, from feudalism to
capitalism.
The historical evolution or emergence of any given class structure is

not comprehensible as the mere product of a ruling-class choice and
imposition, but . . . represents the outcome of class conicts through which
the direct producers have, to a greater or lesser extent, succeeded in
restricting the form and extent of ruling-class access to surplus labour. . . .
Finally, even if an established pre-capitalist ruling (or propertied) class does
not maximise its surplus, there is generally no economic necessity for it
to be surpassed by more effective ‘surplus maximisers’ (more ‘suitable’
methods of labour control) [i.e. methods that maximise productivity and
protability, the need for which results from the pressures of accumulation
specic to capitalism – pressures that are the result not, the cause of
capitalist relations of production. – EMW].64
The decline of slavery, then, cannot be explained solely by reference to its

inherent advantages nor to considerations of protability that owe their logic
to a different set of property relations. The explanation must be sought
in particular structural and historical conditions which made slavery the
‘preferred’ form in specic times and places. Among these conditions, the
factor of class conict, which affected and restricted the ‘form and extent of
ruling-class access to surplus labour’, is critical. What complicates the issue
in the case of Greece and Rome is that the conicts in question encompass
two separate but interacting sets of class relations, not only those between
masters and slaves but also, and in the rst instance, those between rentier-
lords and free producers.
Despite Finley’s focus on relations between classes, it can be argued –
as Pierre Dockès maintains – that, in the end, class struggle in his account
‘gives way to a process in which slaves are totally passive and the peasants
unresponsive, and in which even the masters, the great landowners, seem to
64
Brenner 1977, pp. 59–60.
be bystanders rather than agents of the transition to dependence from

which they were to prot’.65 The process to which all classes succumbed in
Finley’s explanation, argues Dockès, is (in Finley’s own words) ‘the iron
law of absolutist bureaucracy that it grows both in numbers and in the
expensiveness of its life-style’.66 Dockès, instead, places the accent on class
struggle in the most literal sense, indeed class violence, and more particularly
on the struggles of slaves. In Finley’s perspective, he suggests, ‘slaves are
in some sense strangers to their own history, to the history of their living
conditions; their struggles are “tempests in a teapot”, said to be without
consequence. The cause of the end of slavery lies “elsewhere”, in relations
among the “other classes”’.67 Although Dockès stresses how important it
is to recognise, as Finley does, ‘that relations between masters and slaves
cannot be studied independently of the relations between large landowners
and free peasants’,68 for him, the primary and critical factor is slavery – indeed,
so much so that he places an inordinate burden of explanation on the overt
and sporadic outbreaks of violent slave revolt (which he nds everywhere,
often on the imsiest evidence). It was such struggles that, according to
Dockès, nally undermined the foundations of the Roman imperial state.
The primacy accorded by Dockès to slave revolts (which often leads him
to treat free producers as passive pawns in much the same way that he accuses
Finley of treating slaves) is partly conditioned by his original assumption
about the primordial nature of slavery as the primary form of exploitation
out of which all others grew and toward which they tend. His analysis
is further coloured by his political objective, which is to demonstrate the
parallels between, on the one hand, ancient slavery and Roman imperialism,
and on the other, capitalism and modern imperialism. Thus, the decline of
the Roman Empire and the rise of feudalism are seen not so much as a process
in which free producers were enserfed as a process in which slaves were
liberated. The struggles of slaves – the primordial and paradigmatic struggle
against exploitation – becomes an object lesson for all exploited classes.
The weaknesses of an argument based on the primordial and universal
character of slavery have already been noted. There will no doubt also be
65
Dockès 1982, pp. 201–2.
66
Dockès 1982, p. 202.
67
Dockès 1982, p. 203.
68
Ibid.
critics for whom Dockès, in his arguments against the impersonal deter-
minisms of ‘vulgar’ Marxism or Finley’s ‘iron law of absolutist bureaucracy’,
goes too far in the opposite direction toward an excessively ‘voluntaristic’
conception of class struggle. This is not the place to engage in theoretical
debates about the appropriate balance in historical explanation between
objective necessity and subjective agency. There is, in any case, more to
Dockès’s argument than class violence. Dockès does not, in fact, conceive of
the historical process of Rome’s decline and the rise of feudalism as simply
a contingent series of violent and ‘voluntaristic’ encounters between classes.
Rather, he attempts to identify an ‘internal dynamic’ inherent in Roman
relations of production, what might be called a ‘developmental logic’, that
explains not only the decline of slavery and its replacement by other forms
of exploitation but also the disintegration of the state. He rejects the simplistic
determinism of those versions of Marxism which conceptualise away the
problem of historical change by postulating a unilinear, progressive, and
virtually mechanical succession of modes of production. At the same time,
he rejects explanations that rely too heavily on contingent or external factors
(like the closing of long-distance trade routes) or on demographic patterns
which are notoriously unreliable since population factors can so often be
shown to have opposite effects in different contexts.69 Instead, without denying
the effects of external factors, he tries to decipher the logic of process within
the prevailing social relations. In this respect, his argument has something in
common with Robert Brenner ’s account of the origins of capitalism, which
has proved such a fruitful advance over other approaches. It is, then, in
Dockès’s attempt to identify this ‘internal dynamic’ or developmental logic
that the importance of his argument lies, whether or not we are satised with
his answer.
The developmental logic that Dockès is seeking is the logic of a slave system.
To summarise his argument very briey: slavery produces a tendency, which
it shares with capitalism, toward expropriation of small proprietors and a
concentration of property and labour-forces into ‘centrally managed large-
scale productive units’70 (i.e. slavery produces latifundia just as capitalist
relations of production produce factories). This, in turn, creates a need for a
69
For an example of such contradictory patterns, see Brenner 1976 and Brenner
1982. [These articles appeared later in Aston and Philpin (eds.) 1985.]
70
Dockès 1982, p. 226.
strong centralised state, especially to deal with the dangers created by large
numbers of exploited workers joined together. These processes, however,
contain certain contradictions. There is, of course, an inherent antagonism
between masters and slaves, which tends to express itself in resistance and
revolt; and, in Rome, the oppression of the free producers tended eventually
to lead them into an alliance with slaves. The defection of the peasantry in
Rome helped to undermine the foundations of the state. There is also an
inherent contradiction between the landlords’ collective need for a strong
centralised state and their individual antagonism to it as an obstacle to and
a drain upon their exploitative powers. The inherent antagonism between
landlord and state further undermines the state’s foundations. The collapse
of the imperial state in Rome was thus brought about by slave revolts,
eventually aided by peasant allies, together with the weak foundations of
the state in the propertied class; and this collapse, in turn, brought about
the destruction of slavery. In other words, it was not the decline of slavery
(for whatever reasons) that determined the disintegration of the imperial
state but rather the disintegration of the state, encouraged especially by slave
resistance, that determined the decline of slavery.
This is a strong argument. Even if we set aside Dockès’s probably excessive
emphasis on slave revolts, there still remains a ‘logic’ in his slave society
which might account for structural weaknesses, contradictions, and an impulse
toward disintegration. His emphasis on the state and the nature of its
relation to slavery, and his suggestion of a causal sequence in which the
collapse of the state precedes the destruction of slavery, are particularly
important. A few questions, however, immediately arise: if slavery produces
a natural tendency toward the concentration of property, what were the
factors that encouraged this tendency in Rome but not so much in Greece?
And why did the tendency appear to operate even in some parts of the Empire
where slavery was not an important factor? If the squeezing out of small
producers and the concentration of property in the hands of large land-
owners occurred in order to make possible the concentration of a labour-force
in ‘centrally managed large-scale production units’, how do we explain the
fact that large-scale landownership so often took the form of scattered smaller
holdings?71
71
See, for example, Duncan-Jones 1974, pp. 323–6, on the sizes of estates in Roman
The whole analogy between slavery and capitalism is especially problematic,

not least because slavery did not and could not have an ability – or a need –
to squeeze out other modes of production comparable to capitalism’s unprece-
dented tendency to do so. If capitalist relations of exploitation have promoted
the development of a particular system of production – factory production,
with a concentrated, integrated, and centrally controlled labour-force – it
is not at all clear that slavery carried with it a similar impulse toward lati-
fundial production. Capitalism encourages certain forms of production because
it creates unprecedented pressures for accumulation and competition, and
because the capitalist owns only the labour-power of the worker and only
for a xed period of time. Capitalism therefore typically responds to the pres-
sures of competition and accumulation by increasing labour productivity,
and this requires transformations in the organisation of the labour-process.
The resulting high productivity, within the competitive system, tends to drive
out less productive forms of labour. The same pressures of accumulation and
competition and the need to increase labour productivity are not present
in slavery – especially since the master owns the worker’s person and not
simply his labour-time.
Slavery may create pressures to concentrate property; but this is, arguably,
less because of its inherent superiority as a mode of production and exploitation
than because of its disadvantages, the need to compensate for its costs and
its shortcomings in competing with other forms of exploitation. So, for example,
a need may arise to consolidate holdings in order to employ slaves full-time,
by mixing crops etc., because the investment in their persons might otherwise
exceed the returns, a problem that does not arise with wage-labourers or
tenants. In this case, the question is not how a ‘primordial’ system of exploita-
tion, by its own inherent natural logic and superior strength, squeezes out
other forms of production, but, rather, how and under what specic historical
restrictions such a difcult mode of exploitation becomes the most eligible
one. It is also worth stressing that the ‘logic’ of slavery depended very much
on surrounding circumstances. For example, it might in certain conditions
adapt itself to prevailing forms of production rather than establish forms
Italy and the ‘two contrasting tendencies in large-scale Italian landownership’:

the aggregation of enormous single units, and the ownership of scattered smaller
holdings.
of its own which tended to drive out others. Especially in classical Athens,
under the constraints of the democracy, traditional forms of individual craft
production were never superseded by gang production, and slaves commonly
produced as individual craftsmen. Even the few known large enterprises
that employed many slaves under one roof never achieved anything like
the integrated labour-force and division of labour characteristic of the
modern factory but essentially brought together in juxtaposition a number
of individual craft producers.
The question raised by Dockès’s analysis of slavery and its internal dynamic
may point to another, more fundamental question: if there was a tendency
toward concentration of property and a consequent – and contradictory –
need for a strong centralised state, should that tendency be traced to the
logic of slavery at all or to some other, prior source? In other words, is the
developmental logic for which we are looking the distinctive logic of a slave
society at all?
It is true that the possibility of large-scale slave-utilisation, especially with
‘centrally managed large-scale production units’, presupposes landowner-
ship on a scale sufcient to require and make possible a large labour-force.
This is almost tautological, but it does not necessarily mean that the ten-
dency toward concentration is produced by slavery. Apart from the fact
that latifundial slavery was only one form of slave-utilisation, temporally
and geographically limited, it could just as easily be argued that the very
motivation to acquire a large force of slaves was preceded, and in some sense
caused, by a tendency toward concentration of property. Dockès does little
but assert – usually by analogy with capitalism – that the logic of slavery
was to drive out small producers and concentrate property, except to say that
the massive inux of slaves helped to ruin the independent small peasant in
Italy by making him unable to compete in the market not only with imported
goods but with produce from large Italian estates. Questions must, however,
be raised about the degree to which peasants depended on the market for
survival, especially markets in which they would be forced to compete with
large estates. Peasant production was largely subsistence farming, and the
markets in which they operated were essentially local ‘peasant’ markets in
which petty producers exchanged necessities with one another.72 Dockès may
72
Finley 1973, p. 107.
here again be imposing the logic of capitalism and capitalist competition

on Roman society. But, even granting that the logic of slavery encouraged
concentration of property, this logic presupposes the existence of large estates
and a prior process of concentration which slavery only aggravated.
At the same time, and paradoxically, the growth of slavery seems also to
presuppose a failure on the part of large landowners to reduce the peasantry
to dependence – that is, a failure to deny peasants access to the means of
subsistence and reproduction without being compelled to perform involun-
tary labour for others. Again, slavery rose and declined in inverse ratio to the
availability of free producers for exploitation. This would seem to suggest
that slavery might be most necessary precisely where peasants remained in
possession of the means of production. Is this true, and does it contradict our
earlier assumption that slave-utilisation and peasant expropriation go hand
in hand?
Large-scale landownership existed in various parts of the Roman Empire,
but large-scale slave-utilisation was not equally widespread. Slavery on a
large scale was primarily conned to the Western Empire, and especially to
Italy and Sicily. Large landownership was not so conned. For example,
Roman senators owned vast properties in the province of Africa (Pliny the
Elder claims that six men at one time owned half the province, see Natural
History, 18. 35.); yet slavery here seems to have been relatively unimportant.
Although landholdings in the East were never as great as in the West, there
were, nevertheless, substantial concentrations of land; and, here, forms of
exploitation other than slavery predominated.73 Especially in these areas,
surviving peasantries were not generally independent proprietors largely
free of exploitation by the rich, but often subject populations available for
various forms of exploitation by great landowners supported by the Roman
imperial apparatus.
The crucial variable in determining the spread of slavery seems to be not
only the amount of land available to large proprietors but the degree to which
free populations were subjected. Even Dockès writes that
. . . in the remainder of the empire [i.e. outside Sicily, and the western
provinces] . . . large estates were not dependent on slave-labour groups of
73
On the probable distribution of slavery and other forms of agricultural labour in
the Empire, see Jones 1973, pp. 792–4, and White 1970, pp. 411–12.
the classical type; instead, virtually the entire local population was sub-
jugated, which accounts for the fact that these regions (1) did not import
slaves, and/or (2) were hunting grounds for pirates and slave traders
supplying the West. 74
In other words, it is the fate of free producers that accounts for the growth
of slavery and not the reverse.
The speci c dynamics of class

The growth of slavery in Greece and Rome, then, seems to have depended
on a delicate balance between two contradictory tendencies: a concentration
of property in the hands of large landowners, and a resistance to expropriation
and/or subjugation – successful in varying degrees – on the part of small free
producers. Are we, then, looking at a ‘developmental logic’ in the relations
between landlords and peasants? And, if so, how might it account not only
for the development of slavery but also (directly, and not just through the
medium of slavery) for the contradictory tendencies toward state centralisa-
tion and political fragmentation, which Dockès rightly identies as central
to the logic of Roman history?
Greece and Rome are distinguishable from other ancient civilisations
not only by their utilisation of slaves in unprecedented ways and degrees,
but also by their distinctive relations between landlords and peasants and
between both these classes and the state. The typical ancient state was the
‘bureaucratic’ kingdom in which the state exercised substantial control over
the economy, property in land tended to be closely bound up with state
service, and peasant producers were subject to surplus extraction less in the
form of personal subjection to individual private proprietors than in the form
of collective subjugation to the appropriating, redistributive state and its
ruling aristocracy, especially through taxation and compulsory services.75
Classes confronted each other not simply as individual appropriators and
producers, or large and small proprietors, but collectively as appropriating
states and subject peasant villages. Although states of this kind, at least on
74
Dockès 1982, p. 54.
75
For a more detailed discussion of the contrast between these different forms of
state, see Wood 1981b, pp. 82–6.
a small scale, seem to have existed in Bronze Age Greece (as the archaeo-
logical remains of Mycenaean civilisation and the decipherment of Linear B
reveal), they completely disappeared and were replaced by new forms of
social and political organisation. Unfortunately, the process by which this
replacement occurred remains obscure.
What is important from our point of view is that, in Greece and Rome,
in the absence of this form of state and its characteristic relations between
ruling and subject groups, appropriators and producers confronted one
another more directly as individuals and as classes, as landlords and peasants,
not primarily as rulers and subjects. Private property developed more
autonomously and completely, separating itself more thoroughly from the
state. In other words, a new and distinctive dynamic of property and class
relations was differentiated out from the traditional relations of (appropriat-
ing) state and (producing) subjects. We have seen this specic dynamic at
work in the struggles over land, which were so central to Greco-Roman
history. Indeed, one might say that Greece and Rome were distinctive precisely
in the degree to which a differentiated dynamic of class conict was at work,
with a logic of its own.
New forms of state emerged out of these relations. The ancient ‘bureaucratic’
state had constituted a ruling body superimposed upon and appropriating
from subject communities of direct producers. Although such a form had
existed in Greece, both there and in Rome a new form of political organisation
emerged which combined landlords and peasants in one civic and military
community.76 The very notions of a civic community and citizenship, as distinct
from a superimposed state apparatus and rulership, were distinctively Greek
and Roman. The unity of appropriators and producers, rich and poor, embod-
ied in this new form of state was, as it were, a ‘harmony of opposites’ (to
adopt a concept beloved by the Greeks), imbued throughout with the ten-
sions and contradictions, the internal dynamic, of the conicts between and
within these two classes.
The special characteristics of these states are reected in the classics of
ancient political thought. When Plato, for example, attacked the democratic
76
This description does not, of course, apply equally to all parts of Greece. Sparta
and Crete are the most notable examples of Greek states in which the citizen com-
munity ruled over a subject population of producers.
polis of Athens, he did so by opposing to it a state-form which departed

radically from precisely those principles most unique and specic to the Greek
polis and which bore a striking resemblance in principle to certain non-Greek
states. In the Republic, Plato proposes a community of rulers superimposed
upon a ruled community of producers, primarily peasants, a state in which
producers are individually ‘free’ and in possession of property, not depen-
dent on wealthier private proprietors, but collectively subject to the ruling
community and compelled to transfer surplus labour to their non-producing
rulers. Political and military functions belong exclusively to the ruling class,
according to the traditional separation of military and farming classes which
Plato and Aristotle both admired.77 Plato, no doubt, drew inspiration from
the Greek states that most closely adhered to these principles – notably Sparta
and Crete; but it is likely that the model he had more specically in mind
was Egypt – or, at least, Egypt as the Greeks understood it.78
Other classical writers defended the supremacy of the dominant classes
in less radical and more specically Greco-Roman ways. In particular, the
doctrine of the ‘mixed constitution’ – which appears in Thucydides and in
Plato’s Laws and gures prominently in the writings of Aristotle, Polybius,
and Cicero – can be said to reect a uniquely Greek and Roman reality and
the special problems faced by a dominant class of private proprietors in a
state that incorporates rich and poor, appropriators and producers, into a
single civic and military community. In the idea of the ‘mixed constitution’,
rich and poor are respectively represented by ‘oligarchic’ and ‘democratic’
elements; and the predominance of the rich is achieved not by drawing a
clear and rigid division between a ruling apparatus and subject producers,
or between military and farming classes, but by tilting the constitutional bal-
ance toward oligarchic elements.79 The Roman Republic, with its aristocratic
senatorial government presiding over a free community of Roman citizens
consisting in large part of peasants – SPQR80 – can be said to represent the
77
Aristotle praises the separation of farming and ghting classes, which he attrib-
utes to Egypt and Crete: Politics, 1329 a–b.
78
See Wood and Wood 1978, pp. 168–9, for an argument suggesting that Egypt may
have served as a model for Plato’s Republic.
79
I owe this suggestion on the mixed constitution to Neal Wood. Also, see his dis-
cussion of Aristotle’s mixed ‘polity’ in Wood and Wood, pp. 243–4.
80
Senatus Populusque Romanus, the Senate and the Roman People, the emblem
of the Roman Republic.
‘mixed’ constitution in its most successful practical form. In both theory and
practice, then, the specic and differentiated dynamic of property and class
relations was woven directly into the fabric of Greek and Roman states in
unprecedented ways and degrees.
The developmental logic which Dockès seeks in slave society – the contra-
dictory logic which demands state centralisation but is, at the same time,
inimical to it – can be said to inhere not just in slavery but in the very nature
of private property and class. Private property and class exploitation require
coercive power to sustain them; and the appropriating powers of the indi-
vidual lord always depend in various ways and degrees on a collective
class power. Direct producers, even when exploited individually, never
confront their exploiters solely as individuals. Even peasant proprietors
who are relatively isolated in production tend to be organised in communal
groups, especially in village communities.81 Appropriators must nd ways of
counteracting the divisions within their own class, the intraclass conict which
results from private property and competition over land and limited sources
of surplus labour. It can also be argued that the balance of power between
appropriators and producers may be less one-sided in favour of the former
when petty producers are confronted by private appropriators, divided and
competing among themselves, rather than by a centralised ‘public’ appro-
priator. There is, therefore, always a tendency toward centralisation which
will permit individual exploiters to withstand resistance by producers and
to maintain their hold on property.
That tendency, however, is accompanied by countervailing forces. The
resistance of producers may itself act as a force against centralisation, as may
the intraclass conict within the ruling class. More particularly, to the extent
that the dominant class is not directly organised as an appropriating state –
in other words, to the extent that class and state are not co-extensive – they
will represent two separate and often competing powers. Until the advent of
capitalism, in which appropriators can rely on ‘economic’ modes of surplus
extraction which depend not on the coercive extraction of surplus but on
increasing the productivity of labour, the dominant class and the state must
81
See Brenner 1976, pp. 56–60, for an example of how village organisation can
function as a kind of peasant class organisation and affect the relationship between
confront each other, in varying degrees, as competing ‘extra-economic’ powers

of appropriation. Both landlords and state must rely on the application of
direct force to extract surplus from the same limited source, the same peasant
producers, one in the form of rent, the other in the form of tax (in this
context, a kind of centralised rent).
On the one hand, then, the antagonisms inherent in any exploitative
relationship may be quite enough to produce a compulsion toward political
centralisation. Where the state itself is the major direct appropriator, it is,
by denition, highly centralised. Where appropriation is based on private
property, the conditions for the maintenance of private property are likely
to include political centralisation. A need for political centralisation is not
exclusive to cases where there is a tendency toward large-scale production
units. On the other hand, the antagonisms and contradictions inherent in
private property, inter- and intraclass conict, and the antagonisms between
ruling class and state, are enough to produce a countervailing tendency toward
political fragmentation.
There is, then, a constant tension between political centralisation and
fragmentation, centripetal and centrifugal forces, inherent in the very nature
of private property and class relations; and the specic ‘logic’ of private
property and class operated, as it were, more purely and completely in Greece
and Rome than anywhere else in the ancient world. The rise and decline of
Greek and Roman states, and the rise and decline of slavery, can best be
understood within the framework of that logic (it is not a trivial point to
note, in the rst place, that chattel slavery, by denition, presupposes private
property), even while it is acknowledged that slavery had a logic of its own
which helped to shape the way that more inclusive logic worked itself out.
The rise and decline of the Roman Empire cannot be understood without
identifying the conditions that alternately promoted or obstructed one or
the other of the contradictory tendencies toward political centralisation and
fragmentation inherent in the relations between landlords and peasants.
Factors that have traditionally been cited in explaining the decline – a fall
in the slave supply, ‘barbarian’ invasions, etc. – were either effects as much
as causes, or had their particular effects because of these larger, ‘structural’
tendencies. For example, while barbarian raids were a recurring theme of
Roman imperial history, they became disastrous only when the Empire’s
inherent tendency toward disintegration was well advanced.
Even at the height of its centralisation, the Roman imperial state contained
the seeds of its own fragmentation. The burden of centralisation fell on
the peasantry whose ability to support it was limited. At the same time,
imperial ‘absolutism’ had developed in large part to counteract erce com-
petition and a self-defeating political ‘individualism’ within the aristocracy,
so that the state’s foundation in the ruling class was always fragile and
contradictory.82 More particularly, one might say that parcellisation was,
paradoxically, the very essence of Roman imperial administration. The
Romans (like the Hellenistic monarchies before them) undoubtedly borrowed
methods of administration from the bureaucratic traditions of the Eastern
kingdoms and to some extent allowed the old modes of political organisa-
tion and state-economy to survive in Egypt and the East. Nevertheless,
there had evolved a new pattern of imperial rule unique to the Greco-Roman
world and better suited to its class relations and to the level of development
of private property. The Romans (like the Hellenistic rulers) dominated
their empire largely by means of a ‘municipal’ system in which vast ter-
ritories and heterogeneous populations were administered through local
community organisations, with varying degrees and kinds of civic institu-
tions, local magistrates, councils, and assemblies. In a sense, the old Greek
polis-organisation – with all its municipal particularism – had been adopted
as a mode of imperial administration, imposed not only by making use of
already established cities but often by the establishment of new cities and
more particularly by the creation of rural ‘municipalities’. These imperial
municipalities were not, however, a means of establishing democratic self-
government, but on the contrary, a means of strengthening or even creating
Romanised local aristocracies (often supplemented by Roman senators) through
which the Roman state ruled. In fact, the Roman Empire was, to a great extent,
a confederation of local landed aristocracies.
The old ‘redistributive’ empires had typically ruled by means of a bureau-
cratic hierarchy descending from the monarch – in principle, owner of
land – to administrative districts governed by royal functionaries and s-
cal ofcials who extracted surplus labour from subject villages of peasant
82
The notion that the ‘absolute monarchy’ in Rome was the product of a kind of
intraclass conict is suggested, for example, by Matthias Gelzer in his classic studies
of the Roman nobility. See Seager 1975, p. 139.
producers.83 A new type of imperial hierarchy was created in the Hellenistic

state, more in keeping with the distinctive relations between property, class,
and state which had evolved in archaic and classical times. This hierarchy
descended from the monarch to the city, often the possessor of free land (the
monarch frequently transferred royal property to the polis) and dominated
by a local aristocracy of private landlords, who often had land grants from
the monarch. The latter mode of imperial rule was perfected by the Romans.
It was a form of empire especially well-suited to reect and enhance the
dominance of private property, both in Rome and in the provincial periphery.
In this, the Roman Empire was quite unlike the bureaucratic, redistributive
states whose very existence obstructed the full and autonomous development
of private property or a propertied class independent of the imperial bureau-
cracy. The Roman Empire had the effect of strengthening private property.
Thus, there was, in Rome, a unique synthesis of a strong imperial state
and strong private property, two distinct foci of power, based on a delicate
balance between a centralised state and a parcellised municipal rule.
The tendency toward fragmentation was thus built into the very structure
of the Roman state, not only in the particularism and divisiveness of private
property on which the state was based, but also in its parcellised mode of
administration. In the end, the tendencies toward fragmentation prevailed.
The disintegrating state had long since become an intolerable burden to
peasants and a dispensable nuisance to landlords. It left behind a network
of personal dependence binding peasants to landlord and land. The state
itself had helped to create this network when, in a period of crisis, measures
were enacted, most probably for scal purposes, tying many tenants to the
land and in the process creating a captive agricultural labour-force for the
landlords. No doubt it is also true that peasants often accepted dependence
on landlords in order to obtain protection – including protection from oppres-
sion by the state. At any rate, the tied colonate was a mode of exploitation
with clear advantages for the landlord; and it gradually absorbed slavery
itself, as many slaves were placed in possession of land to be exploited as
83
For a discussion of the new form of imperial administration which resulted
from ‘the meeting of the imperial idea with the form of the polis’ in the Hellenistic
state, and the inuence of this ‘meeting’ on the later form of the Roman Empire, see
Ehrenberg 1969, Part II, Chapters 2–3.
coloni or serfs. To explain the transition from antiquity to feudalism is to

explain the unique conditions in which, after several attempts by dynastic
monarchies to recentralise this fundamentally fragmented polity, landlords
were able for some time to maintain this parcellised power and to subject
peasants to personal dependence without the support of a centralised state.
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Oxford: Blackwell.
Peter Thomas
Philosophical Strategies: Althusser and Spinoza
Introduction1
Louis Althusser is chiey remembered today, when
he is remembered at all, as the progenitor and
leading exponent of structuralist Marxism, a curious
hybrid which ourished on the left bank of the
Seine in the 1960s and later enjoyed the status of an
exotic import in the left-wing Anglophone academy
in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Structuralist
Marxism was regarded as the convergence of two
independent ‘conjunctures’: on the one hand, the
‘structuralist’ movement, whose emergence in post-
Resistan ce French in tellectual life seemed to
offer the possibility of a powerfully unifying dis-
course across the ossied boundaries of the human
and social sciences; and on the other, those currents
within Western Marxism which were attempting to
renew Marxist theory in the space opened up by the
partial thaw of Stalinism following Khrushchev’s
1
I would like to thank Gary Maclennan, Paul Jones, Dan O’Neill, Martin Thomas,
Murray Kane, Melissa White, Ben Jones, Daniel Bensaïd, John Game and Sebastian
Budgen for encouraging remarks and suggestions on a previous version of this paper.
Ted Stolze, Gregory Elliott, Geoff Goshgarian, André Tosel and Warren Montag did
not allow positive references to their own work to blind them to the deciencies
of mine.

72 Peter Thomas
‘secret speech’ of 1956. Structuralism had been hailed initially as a decisive

intellectual advance of potentially epochal dimensions (witness the famous
closing lines of Foucault’s The Order of Things). But it was almost as quickly
relegated to the dustbin of history, granted a lingering half-life as a pedagogical
prop used in introducing students to post-structuralism. A similar fate awaited
the work of Louis Althusser. The advent of Althusser’s ‘structuralist’ reading
of Marx and of some of the central categories of Marxist theory seemed, for
some at least, the necessary correlate at the level of high theory of the more
general structure of feeling and revolutionary optimism now referred to by
the title of ‘The Sixties’. But the Althusserian moment was soon eclipsed by
a combination of international political events, tragedy in the personal life of
its protagonist, and most importantly, a radical change in intellectual fashion.
As Gregory Elliott notes,
The alliance Althusser had sought in the early 1960s between Marxism and
avant-garde French theory unravelled after 1968 as the philosophies of desire
and power tributary to May drove high structuralism from the seminar
room. Althusserianism was thus doubly compromised – as a Marxism and
as a structuralism. 2
Having ‘hitched [his] Marxism to structuralism’s rising star’, it seemed that

Althusser’s thought was condemned to follow it into the archive of failed
projects.3 Althusserianism passed into the memories (sometimes with fond-
ness, more often, perhaps, with regret) of those Communists and New-Leftist
intellectuals who had ocked to its banner in its heyday, while some of
Althusser’s central texts, particularly the celebrated ‘Ideology and Ideological
State Apparatuses: Notes Towards an Investigation’, subsequently became
foundational texts in the post-1960s reformulation of the social sciences and
cultural studies.4
There was at least one Marxist theorist, however, for whom the equation
of the Althusserian tendency with structuralism was far from self-evident:
Louis Althusser himself. In his Éléments d’Autocritique of 1974 (published in
English in 1976 in the volume Essays in Self-Criticism), Althusser explicitly
2
Elliott 1987, p. 282.
3
Elliott 1987, p. 283.
4
The most comprehensive accounts of the fate of Althusser’s work can be found
in Kaplan and Sprinker 1993 and Elliott 1994.
Philosophical Strategies: Althusser and Spinoza 73
denied that he and his co-workers had been structuralists, and, in their defence,
offered an alternative intellectual afliation. He argued:
If we never were structuralists, we can now explain why: why we seemed

to be, even though we were not, why there came about this strange mis-
understanding on the basis of which books were written. We were guilty
of an equally powerful and compromising passion: we were Spinozists . . . with
very few exceptions our blessed critics, imbued with conviction and swayed
by fashion, never suspected any of this. They took the easy road: it was so
simple to join the crowd and shout ‘structuralism’! Structuralism was all
the rage, and you did not have to read about it in books to be able to talk
about it. But you have to read Spinoza and know that he exists: that he still
exists today. To recognize him, you must at least have heard of him.5
Gregory Elliott has voiced an obvious objection to this line of defence:

‘Admission of Spinozism does not automatically compel acquittal on the
count of structuralism, and it had been apparent some time before Althusser’s
confession’.6 Some critics, already enraged by the theoretical anti-humanism
of Althusser’s structuralist Marxism, in which human agency was reduced
to mere Träger of the relations of production, seemed to regard Althusser’s
declared admiration for one of the most rigorous determinists of the modern
philosophical tradition as merely adding insult to injury. So rather than
closing the case against Louis Althusser, his confession of Spinozism instead
resulted in his Marxism becoming doubly condemned – as both a struc-
turalism and as a Spinozism.
Yet, as Montag has noted, it is questionable whether this pronouncement
was an accurate remembrance of the forces which shaped the early Althusserian
project (specically, the texts For Marx and Reading Capital), or was rather,
‘nothing more than a retrospective construction, the very condition of which
was a renaissance in French Spinoza studies that took place at the end of the
sixties’.7 Montag points to the lack of any systematic and textually explicit
studies of Spinoza by Althusser and his colleagues in this period, arguing
that, even if it is true that the Althusserian school developed in a Spinozistic
environment, ‘they nevertheless did not produce any sustained work on
5
Althusser 1976, p. 132.
6
Elliott 1987, p. 183.
7
Montag 1998, pp. xi–xii.
74 Peter Thomas
Spinoza, certainly nothing resembling their “readings” of other philosophers’.8

Their interest in Spinoza remained vague and indeterminate during the period
when the Althusserian paradigm’s central features were elaborated, and it
was only later, in very different political and intellectual circumstances, that
it solidied into a denite line of research. Even then, it was not Althusser
who produced an extended study of Spinoza’s relevance to Marxism (his
published comments are limited to a chapter in Essays in Self-Criticism, and
several confessional passages from his autobiographical writings), but some
of his former students and colleagues (primarily, Balibar and Macherey), as
their own development led them in directions not entirely compatible with
the austere theoreticism for which the Althusserian moment is remembered.
Considerations on Western Marxism

Nevertheless, as Montag further notes, ‘Althusser’s assertion in Elements of
Self-Criticism that he, Balibar and Macherey “were Spinozists”, [was taken by
Perry Anderson] as conrmation of his worst suspicions concerning Althusser’s
reliance on pre-Marxist thought’.9 Anderson was one of Althusser’s few,
blessed critics who had indeed heard of Spinoza. In fact, in the epigraphs to
his celebrated and widely inuential study, Considerations on Western Marxism,
Anderson gave pride of place to the following juxtaposition of the views of
Lenin and Spinoza on the relationship of philosophy to political practice.
Correct revolutionary theory assumes nal shape only in close connection

with the practical activity of a truly mass and truly revolutionary movement.
LENIN
The multitude, and those of like passions with the multitude, I should
ask not to read my book; nay, I would rather that they should utterly neglect
it, than that they should misinterpret it after their wont. SPINOZA10
8
Montag 1998, p. xi. Montag’s comments should be understood as referring to
the exoteric doctrines of Althusser and his circle in this period (though he perhaps
underestimates the extent of the Spinozistic elements to be found even in these,
particularly Reading Capital). Within the general intellectual environment of this
group, Spinoza was an abiding and constant presence. Thanks are due to Gregory
Elliott for stressing this point.
9
Montag 1998, p. xi.
10
Anderson 1976, p. ix. The quotation from Lenin is from Left-Wing Communism –
An Infantile Disorder (Lenin 1950, p. 15); Spinoza’s is from the preface to the Tractatus
Theologico-Politicus (Spinoza 1951, p. 11). Several features should be briey noted here
As the argument of Considerations on Western Marxism made clear, Spinoza’s

statement was considered by Anderson to be a precursor of the esotericism,
élitism and removal from politics which he nominated as some of the dening
co-ordinates of Western Marxism as a whole. As he noted, without the slight-
est hint of irony, the ‘very surplus [of Western Marxist theorists’ works]
above the necessary minimum quotient of verbal complexity was the sign
of its divorce from any popular practice’.11 The fundamental cause of this
development, Anderson argued, had been the experience of Stalinism. With
as a corrective to Anderson’s implicit suggestion of Spinoza’s élitism and removal

from politics. First, the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (TTP) was a work dedicated to
combating the intellectual foundations of superstition (the dominant ideological
formation of Spinoza’s time and place, the Dutch Republic of the 1660s) by means of
a scrupulous examination of the meaning and history of scripture. Furthermore,
it was an intervention into a hostile political and theological climate (as Spinoza,
excommunicated from Amsterdam’s Jewish community and already regarded with
suspicion by the ‘liberal’ Christianity of the Netherlands, knew only too well), one
rapidly moving to the Right as the Calvinist orthodoxy and the House of Orange
mobilised a discontented populace against the republic of the liberal mercantile
bourgeoisie. Spinoza’s request that ‘those of like passions with the multitude’ should
not read his book (i.e. the multitude in the Netherlands in the 1660s, who were
rallying to the banner of reaction and religious orthodoxy) was less an élitist separa-
tion of intellectuals from ‘the masses’ than prudent advice to the orthodox among
his contemporaries that they were bound to be offended by his demolition of the
misinterpretations upon which their prejudices and régime of mystication were
founded. (Signicantly, despite, or perhaps because of, this ‘conjunctural’ role of the
multitude, the political theory of both the TTP and the later, post-restoration Tractatus
Politicus are suffused with an awareness that it is the power and imagination of
the multitude which determine the course of political events). Finally, the TTP was
also designed, in part, as a secular resolution to the ongoing Averroist controversy
concerning the proper relation between philosophy and theology which had marked
the emergence of modern Europe from the theocracy of the Middle Ages. Spinoza
was appealing to an audience of fellow philosophers, or potential philosophers, to
resolve this debate nally in the interests of the autonomy of reason, in much the
same way as Lenin’s Left-Wing Communism was, in part, an appeal to fellow communists
to adopt a political outlook appropriate to their own concrete political conditions.
The passage in full reads as follows: ‘To the rest of mankind I care not to commend
my treatise, for I cannot expect that it contains anything to please them: I know
how deeply rooted are the prejudices embraced under the name of religion; I am
aware that in the mind of the masses superstition is no less deeply rooted than fear;
I recognise that their constancy is mere obstinacy, and that they are led to praise
or blame by impulse rather then reason. Therefore the multitude, and those of
like passions with the multitude, I ask not to read my book; nay, I would rather that
they should utterly neglect it, than that they should misinterpret it after their wont.
They would gain no good themselves, and might prove a stumbling block to others,
whose philosophy is hampered by the belief that Reason is a mere handmaid to
Theology, and whom I seek in this work especially to benet’ (Spinoza 1951, p. 11).
For an excellent discussion of these and related themes, see Tosel 1997, particularly
pp. 150–6.
11
Anderson 1976, p. 54.
76 Peter Thomas
‘the failure of proletarian revolutions in the advanced zones of European

capitalism after the First World War’, the rise of a bureaucratic ruling élite
in the Soviet Union and the Stalinisation of the Comintern, the connection
of Marxist theory and revolutionary working-class practice, which had
characterised historical materialism in its classical phase, was severed. 12
Thereafter, Western Marxist theorists led a shadowy half-life on the edge of
the Communist parties, bullied, cajoled and disciplined by the apparatus
if they chose to remain within them (often resulting in a self-imposed
censorship and increasingly cryptic language), marginalised and isolated
from contact with the organisations of the working class if they opted for the
role of fellow-traveller or ‘friendly’ critic. Under these conditions, Western
Marxism began increasingly to turn towards both pre- and non-Marxist
philosophy, a shift symptomatic of these theorists’ distance from tasks of
direct political organisation (giving their thought an increasingly speculative
dimension, tending towards the history of philosophy) and working-class
culture (leading them to a closer relationship with contemporary bourgeois
culture and theory, rather than proletarian practice).
Anderson acknowledged that the turn to pre-Marxist philosophy, in par-
ticular, had lled a noticeable gap in the comprehensiveness of historical
materialism as an intellectual research programme. ‘Any creative development
of Marxist philosophy as such’, Anderson noted,
would inevitably have had to move through a reconsideration of the

complex cognitive history which Marx himself ignored or bypassed. The
existing starting-points within the work of Marx itself were too few and too
narrow for this not to be necessary.13
This acknowledgement, however, was accompanied by a cautionary note:
At the same time, the dangers involved in a prolonged recourse to pre-

Marxist philosophical traditions need no emphasis: the overwhelming weight
of idealist or religious motifs within them is well enough known. 14
If the explication and supplementation of the works of Marx were required,

Anderson seemed to suggest, these resources should be drawn from the
12
13
14
Ibid.
experience of class struggle as it has unfolded since Capital – not from the
formulations and arguments of philosophers whose thought lay on the wrong
side of Marx’s ‘Copernican revolution’.
When he turned to an explicit consideration of Althusser’s Spinozism,
Anderson found it to be a particular manifestation, if not the example par
excellence, of this general Western Marxism tendency of turning to pre-Marxist
philosophy in order ‘to legitimate, explicate or supplement the philosophy
of Marx himself’.15 ‘Less philologically explicit’ than other Western Marxist
attempts to read Marx in relation to Hegel, Kant etc., Anderson argued that
Althusser’s engagement with Spinoza was nevertheless ‘substantively the
most sweeping retroactive assimilation of all of a pre-Marxist philosophy into
Marxism’, ‘the most ambitious attempt to construct a prior philosophical
descent for Marx, and to develop abruptly new theoretical directions for
contemporary Marxism from it’.16
In order to support this judgement, Anderson had carefully noted the
scattered and often elliptical references to Spinoza in For Marx and Reading
Capital, which he here systematised and whose signicance he briey assessed.
The inuence of Spinoza on Althusser was found to be pervasive. Anderson
went so far as to argue that ‘nearly all the novel concepts and accents of
Althusser’s Marxism, apart from those imported from contemporary disci-
plines, were in fact directly drawn from Spinoza’.17 Despite the disclaimer
that Althusser had also been inuenced by contemporaneous currents in
non-Marxist philosophy and other academic disciplines (those thinkers and
thought-forms most often noted by Althusser’s critics and expositors, such
as Bachelard and developments in epistemology and the philosophy of
science, Lacan’s re-reading of Freud and psychoanalysis, and, of course, Lévi-
Strauss and the high-structuralist tradition itself), the Spinozistic inuences
on Althusser, outlined by Anderson, were, in fact, so comprehensive as to
leave very little in the Althusserian system which was not ‘directly drawn’,
‘taken straight’, ‘faithfully derived’ from Spinoza. Anderson nominated the
six following correspondences between the thought of Althusser and Spinoza:18
15
16
Anderson 1976, pp. 64–5.
17
18
The list of correspondences and supporting references occurs on pp. 64–5.
Unfortunately, space will not permit the full examination and explication which they
78 Peter Thomas
First, Anderson argued that Althusser’s ‘categorical distinction between

“objects of knowledge” and “real objects” was taken straight from Spinoza’s
famous separation of idea and ideatum’.19
Second, ‘the Althusserian “general essence of production”, common to both
thought and reality’, was regarded as ‘none other than a translation of the
Spinozan maxim ordo et connexio idearum rerum idem est, ac ordo et connexio
rerum (“The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and
connection of things”)’.20
Third, Anderson detected in Althusser’s controversial thesis of the self-
validating procedures of theoretical practice and consequent ‘radical elimi-
nation of the philosophical problem of the guarantees of knowledge or truth’
the inuence of ‘Spinoza’s dictum veritas norma sui et falsi’.21
deserve. Passages additional to those offered by Anderson will also be noted for the
interested reader. I have adopted the standard references for passages from the Ethics:
D = Denition, P = Proposition, Sch = Scholium, App = Appendix.
19
The relevant passages noted by Anderson are: Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 40;
Spinoza 1985, p. 12. Also important are EIIP6, EIIP7Sch.
20
Althusser 1977, p. 169; Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 216; EIIP7Sch. Althusser ’s
account of the process of abstraction in Marx in fact departs from Spinoza’s empha-
sis upon the symmetry of the orders within the attributes. For Althusser, in Reading
Capital, ‘“thought” is a peculiar real system, established on and articulated to the
real world of a given historical society’ (p. 42), but this articulation is one of uneven-
ness rather than identity. Signicantly, Althusser maintains that ‘Marx goes even
further [than Spinoza] and shows that this distinction [between idea and ideatum/
thought-concrete and real-concrete] involves not only these two objects, but also their
peculiar production processes’ (p. 41). See, in particular, the following argument:
‘While the production process of a given real object, a given real-concrete totality (e.g.,
a given historical nation) takes place entirely in the real and is carried out according
to the real order of real genesis (the order of succession of the moments of historical
genesis), the production process of the object of knowledge takes place entirely in
knowledge and is carried out according to a different order, in which the thought
categories which “reproduce” the real categories do not occupy the same place as they
do in the order of real historical genesis, but quite different places assigned them by
their function in the production process of the object of knowledge’ (p. 41) (Italics
in original; underlining mine). This divergence is important for two reasons, which
will become clearer later in this argument. First, it refutes Anderson’s thesis of the
identity of the concepts: Althusser himself points out that there is a signicant
difference between his (and Marx’s) concept and that of Spinoza. Second, because
Althusser clearly posits that Marx himself had already taken over concepts from
Spinoza and further developed them (even if unconsciously), it refutes Anderson’s
claim that Althusser’s deployment of Spinozistic themes was a novel and unwar-
ranted development in Marxist theory.
21
Althusser and Balibar 1970, pp. 59–60, EIIP43Sch. Also relevant are Spinoza 1985,
pp. 18–19, and the denition of an adequate idea in EIIDiv.
Fourth, ‘the central concept of ‘structural causality’ of a mode of produc-

tion in Reading Capital’ was judged to be ‘a secularized version of Spinoza’s
conception of God as a causa immanens’.22
Fifth, Anderson argued that ‘Althusser’s passionate attack on the ideolog-
ical illusions of immediate experience as opposed to the scientic knowledge
proper to theory alone, and on all notions of men or classes as conscious
subjects of history, instead of as involuntary “supports” of social relations,
was an exact reproduction of Spinoza’s denunciation of experientia vaga
as the source of all error, and his remorseless insistence that the archetypal
delusion was men’s belief that they were in any way free in their volition,
when in fact they were permanently governed by laws of which they were
unconscious’.23
Sixth, and nally, Anderson argued that the ‘implacable determinism’,
which had led Spinoza to argue that ‘Those who believe that a people, or
men divided over public business, can be induced to live by reason alone,
are dreaming of the poet’s golden age or a fairy tale’, had been adapted by
Althusser’s infamous thesis that ideology is ‘the very element and atmosphere
indispensable [to human societies’] historical respiration and life’.24
22
Althusser and Balibar 1970, pp. 187–9; EIP18.
23
Althusser 1977, pp. 232–5; Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 180; EIIP35. See also
Spinoza’s discussion of the consequences of human ignorance of the causes of things
in EIApp.
24
Althusser 1977, p. 232. Anderson incorrectly attributed the quote from Spinoza
to the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, rather than to the post-restoration Tractatus Politicus.
His failure to contextualise this argument politically and historically allowed him
to misrepresent it as a deep pessimism, rather than as an expression of the political
realism adopted by Spinoza in a period of reaction. After the fall of the Dutch repub-
lic, Spinoza composed the Tractatus Politicus as an attempt to analyse the different
forms of government, not as political theorists argued they ought to be, but as they
had been realised in concrete forms in human history. The passage in full reads
as follows: ‘We showed [in the Ethics] that reason can, indeed, do much to restrain
and moderate the passions, but we saw at the same time, that the road, which
reason herself points out, is very steep; so that such as persuade themselves, that the
multitude or men distracted by politics can ever be induced to live according to the
bare dictate of reason, must be dreaming of the poetic golden age, or of a stage-play’
(Spinoza 1951, p. 289). A full exposition of this passage, and a demonstration that
it in fact involves a valorisation of the imagination of the multitude rather than
a rationalist dismissal of it, would need to refer to at least the following passages:
the origin of inadequate ideas in EIApp, the three kinds of knowledge – imagination,
reason and intuitive knowledge – outlined in EIIP40Sch2, the denitions of truth and
falsity in EIIP41 and EIIP35, the denition of ‘the object of the idea constituting the
human mind’ as ‘the body’ in EIIP13 and the supporting proposition EIIP29Sch on
80 Peter Thomas
Just as Althusser had attempted to read the ‘symptomatic silences’ of Marx’s

‘problematic’, it appeared that Anderson had attuned his ear to the faint
echoes which resonated throughout Althusser’s own work.25 With the decline
of the popularity of the Althusserian paradigm in the English-speaking leftist
academy, which was well noticeable even before the publication of Considerations
on Western Marxism, and declining interest in Marxism in general, which
was soon to follow (particularly those ‘High Theoreticist’ variants which
claimed a privileged access to a ‘Truth’ denied to mere ‘lived experience’),
this assessment became for a long period the accepted account of the nature
and content of Althusser’s Spinozism.
Considerations on Western Marxism was one of the rst studies in Anglophone
Marxism to identify Althusser’s Spinozistic inspiration, a conclusion which
Anderson repeated in Arguments in English Marxism and in the editorial intro-
duction (ascribed to New Left Review, but presumably written, or contributed
to, by Anderson) to André Glucksmann’s ‘A Ventriloquist Structuralism’ in
the anthology Western Marxism: A Critical Reader.26 It was, and to some extent
continues to be, widely inuential on subsequent studies of Althusser within
Anglophone Marxism. Critics such as, on the one hand, Steven Smith, and,
on the other, E.P. Thompson, Terry Eagleton and Ellen Meiksins Wood, have
either reproduced Anderson’s arguments almost verbatim with little or
no further commentary, as in the former case, or briey mentioned the
importance of Spinoza for Althusser in passing, as in the latter.27 Gregory
Elliott’s The Detour of Theory contains some suggestive discussions of the
Spinoza/Althusser relationship and its relevance to historical materialism,
the mind’s confused knowledge of the body, and, nally, Spinoza’s observation that
although it was ‘the object of the idea constituting the human mind’, ‘no one’ – least
of all political theorists – ‘has yet determined what the body can do’ in EIIIP2Sch.
The reader interested in the evolution of Spinoza’s political thought is referred to the
book-length studies of Negri’s The Savage Anomaly and Balibar’s Spinoza and Politics
and Warren Montag’s Masses, Bodies, Power: Spinoza and his Contemporaries. Montag
has also provided an excellent short and accessible summary of the main themes in
his Preface to Balibar’s Spinoza and Politics.
25
The Althusserian notion of symptomatic reading itself bears an important
relation to Spinoza’s proposals for the unmystied interpretation of scripture in Chapter
7 of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, pp. 98–119. For an extended discussion of this
theme, see Montag 1993.
26
Anderson 1980, p. 125; New Left Review 1977, p. 275.
27
Smith 1984, pp. 72–3; Thompson 1978, p. 201; Eagleton 1991, p. 146; Meiksins
Wood 1986, p. 18.
but his assessment remains ambivalent with regard to the interpretation of

Considerations on Western Marxism. Two works stand out against the general
current of acceptance of Anderson’s judgement: Andrew Collier’s Scientic
Realism and Socialist Thought provides, among other interesting insights
into the enduring relevance of the questions raised by Althusser, a novel
treatment of Spinoza’s theory of composite bodies in relation to the Althusserian
theory of structural causality. And Christopher Norris, in one of the longest
and most signicant studies of Althusser’s afnities with Spinoza (Spinoza
and the Origins of Modern Critical Theory) provides a more sympathetic and
nuanced discussion.28 Despite these exceptions, Anderson’s account of
Althusser’s Spinozism became, due to a combination of his pre-eminence
among Anglophone Marxists, the novelty of his study in its time and the
characteristic condence of his presentation, an important pole of reference
for several generations of both theoretical and activist Marxists. The fact that
it assumed this importance, despite its brevity (scarcely two pages, and those
in a study whose main purpose was quite other than an examination of
Spinoza’s relation to Marxism), is an index of how totally marginal Spinoza
has been until recently not only to Marxism but to Anglophone intellectual
culture as a whole. The purpose of this study is to critically assess Anderson’s
judgement, in the hope that one of the obstacles which presently impedes
the more widespread engagement of Anglophone Marxism with the thought
of Spinoza will thereby be removed. It also attempts to offer an alternative
assessment of the nature of Althusser’s Spinozism, and in conclusion, to posit
some preliminary theses to be used in a future study of contemporary Marxist
Spinozisms.
Spinoza and pre-Althusserian Marxism

Recent research, however, has indicated that the three assumptions upon
which Anderson’s analysis rested – Spinoza’s externality to pre-Althusserian
Marxism, the notion that Althusser was offering Spinoza as a philosophical
ancestor for Marx, and that Althusser had directly transcribed certain cen-
tral propositions of Spinoza – are not as persuasive as was perhaps once
thought. Indeed, the last thirty years have witnessed a veritable renaissance
28
Collier 1989, particularly pp. 80–90; Norris 1991, particularly Chapter 1.
82 Peter Thomas
in scholarship and interest in Spinoza, comparable to the Spinozism of

German Romanticism and its aftermath, which followed the Pantheismusstreit
produced by Jacobi’s disclosure in 1787 that Lessing had considered himself
a Spinozist. Beginning in France in the late 1960s, studies by Marxists such
as Macherey, Balibar, Tosel and Negri, and more recently, Montag, have been
central to the transformation of the received image of Spinoza as a god-
intoxicated pantheist.29 In particular, these studies have made clear that
Anderson’s claim that Spinoza had been largely external to pre-Althusserian
Marxism can no longer be sustained, for two reasons. First, Marx himself had
read Spinoza passionately and had even gone so far as to transcribe passages
from Spinoza into his notebooks under the strange title ‘Spinoza’s Tractatus
Theologico Politicus by Karl Marx’. Anderson did, of course, acknowledge
this engagement, but immediately asserted that despite this, ‘there is little
sign that he was ever particularly inuenced by him. Only a handful of
references to Spinoza, of the most banal sort, can be found in Marx’s work’.30
Yet, as Yirmiyahu Yovel’s treatment in Spinoza and Other Heretics has demon-
strated (signicantly, because Yovel is not a Marxist seeking to justify a
Spinozist ‘deviation’), Marx’s engagement with Spinozistic themes extended
beyond his youth and explicit references and became an abiding inuence
on the works of his ‘maturity’.31 Similarly, Anderson was incorrect to argue
that Althusser was the rst signicant Marxist to be drawn to Spinoza, aside
from such gures as Plekhanov, Labriola and even Engels himself.32 As Montag
notes,
29
A review of these recent Marxist Spinozisms will appear in a future issue of
Historical Materialism.
30
Anderson 1976, p. 64. Among the less banal references by Marx is his ranking
of Spinoza as an ‘intensive philosopher ’, ‘a pure ideal ame of science’, and an
‘animating spirit of world-historical developments’ alongside Aristotle and Hegel
(Marx and Engels 1975, p. 496). Also important is Marx’s argument in his early Critique
of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State that ‘democracy is the essence of all political constitutions,
socialised man as a particular political constitution; it is related to other forms of
constitution as a genus to its various species’ (Marx 1974, p. 88). This is a perspec-
tive which remains the foundation of Marx’s political views throughout his work,
nowhere more so than in Capital, and which bears an important resemblance to
Spinoza’s analysis of the foundation of the different forms of government in the
Tractatus Politicus. The point is not to play off one list of references against another.
Rather, it is that Anderson’s brusque dismissal on the basis of explicit references to
Spinoza in Marx’s major works was issued before a thorough study had been made
of both ‘exoteric’ and ‘esoteric’ Spinozism in Marx’s entire oeuvre.
31
Yovel 1989, Vol. 2.
32
As Montag correctly notes, Anderson followed Colletti (a continental point of
a denitive account of [the history of Marxist detours through Spinoza]

remains to be written. In each succeeding period of crisis within Marxism,
usually occasioned by a stabilization and expansion of capitalism after an
economic and/or political crisis that was hailed as ‘nal’, in the 1890s, the
1920s, the 1970s and 1980s, prominent Marxists, many of whom (from
Thalheimer to Negri) do not t the prole of the Western Marxist painted
by Anderson, turned to Spinoza’s philosophy.33
Second, the presence of explicit references or not do not account for what
Pierre Macherey has referred to, in reference to Heidegger, Adorno and
Foucault, but undoubtedly with Spinoza in mind, as a thinker’s ‘philosophical
actuality’. Macherey has argued that
One can consider a philosophy to be living or present not only because

it constitutes a source of reference or an object of study and reection
but because its problems and some of its concepts, independently of
every explicit citation, nonetheless in the absence of their author continue
to accompany other forms of thought which, elaborated in new times . . .
propose to bring new developments to philosophical reection.34
In fact, this ‘philosophical actuality’ of Spinoza’s thought in certain previous

Marxisms, and the belief that Spinoza is an important resource for the
contemporary regeneration of Marxism, has been the central argument of
recent Marxist Spinozist scholarship, most notably in the studies of Macherey,
Balibar, Negri and Montag.
reference for the NLR at the time of the composition of Considerations on Western
Marxism) in his down-playing of this tradition (Montag 1998, p. x). The following
is Plekhanov’s account of his conversation with Engels in 1889 in London: ‘I had
the pleasure of spending almost a week in long discussions with him on various
practical and theoretical subjects. At one point our discussion turned to philosophy.
Engels strongly criticised what Stern rather imprecisely calls the “materialism in the
philosophy of nature”. “So for you”, I asked him, “old Spinoza was right when he
said that thought and extension were nothing but two attributes of one and the same
substance?” “Of course”, Engels replied, “old Spinoza was absolutely right” ’ (Colletti
1972, p. 72).
33
Montag 1998, p. ix.
34
Macherey 1998, p. 126.
84 Peter Thomas
‘Marx’s only direct ancestor’

Similarly, publications after the composition of Considerations on Western
Marxism cast doubt upon the assimilation of Althusser ’s Spinozism to a
general trend in Western Marxism to supplement Marxism with themes drawn
from pre-Marxist philosophy. Certainly, the often dramatic, rarely textually
specic (and sometimes contradictory) pronouncements ex cathedra regard-
ing Spinoza in For Marx and Reading Capital seem to suggest that Althusser
thought of Spinoza’s work as ‘a prior vantage-point from which to interpret
the meaning of Marx’s work itself’ in much the same way as had been done
by previous Western Marxist theorists in relation to Hegel. 35 For instance,
in Reading Capital, Althusser elaborated his notion of an ‘historical fact . . . as
a fact which causes a mutation in the existing structural relations’, as a prelude
to his denition of ‘philosophical events of historical scope’ as those ‘which cause
real mutations in the existing philosophical structural relations, in this case
the existing theoretical problematic’.36 As a paradigmatic example of such a
mutation, he then offered the case of Spinoza. He declared that
Spinoza’s philosophy introduced an unprecedented theoretical revolution

in the history of philosophy, probably the greatest philosophical revolution
of all time, insofar as we can regard Spinoza as Marx’s only direct ances-
tor, from the philosophical standpoint.37
Similarly, in For Marx (in the essay ‘On the Young Marx’), Althusser proposed
that, rather than sublating Hegel, as much of both classical and Western
Marxism had supposed, Marx had instead ‘retreated’ or ‘returned’ to real his-
tory in order to found a scientic discourse freed from ideological mystication.
Althusser drew the conclusion that science (Marxism) was not, therefore, the
‘truth’ of ideology (philosophy), but, rather, was an alternative thought-form
generated by returning to ‘the authentic objects which [were] (logically and
historically) prior to the ideology which has reected them and hemmed
them in’.38 As a part of his clarication of this thesis, he then proposed that
science can by no criteria be regarded as the truth of ideology in the Hegelian

sense. If we want a historical predecessor to Marx in this respect we
35
36
Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 102.
37
Ibid.
38
must appeal to Spinoza rather than Hegel. Spinoza established a relation

between the rst and the second kind of knowledge which, in its immedi-
acy (abstracting from the totality in God), presupposed precisely a radical
discontinuity. Although the second kind makes possible the understanding
of the rst, it is not its truth.39
Assertions like these, therefore, make Anderson’s conclusion – that behind

Althusser’s general (and rhetorical) assertions about Spinoza’s relation to
Marx was a developed and coherent argument which posited Spinoza, rather
than Hegel, as the philosophical ground from which to understand Marx –
understandable.40 Yet, shortly after Considerations on Western Marxism was
written, and shortly before it was published, Althusser’s Éléments d’Autocritique
(1974) appeared, in one of whose chapters Althusser offered a more complex
account of his reference to Spinoza. This is not to say that he claried the
specic substantive points of agreement or divergence between his thought
and Spinoza’s. As Anderson remarked in a footnote attached to his analysis
after this event, Althusser’s ‘account [of his relation to Spinoza] remains vague
and generic, characteristically lacking textual references and specic corre-
spondences’.41 Nor is it to claim that Althusser retracted his claim for the
relevance of Spinoza to the understanding of the genesis of Marxism. Even
more than the brief comments in Reading Capital and For Marx, the chapter
on Spinoza in Essays in Self Criticism makes large claims regarding the afnities
of Marx and Spinoza, and attempts to offer further arguments (schematically,
and in an undeveloped form) for Spinoza’s solitary preguration of Marx’s
thought. What Althusser did offer in this text, however, and which must
surely temper any judgement that he was simply following in a long line
of Western Marxist turns to pre-Marxist philosophy in order to ‘legitimate,
explicate or supplement the philosophy of Marx himself’, was an extended
meditation on his encounter with Spinoza, in philosophical, personal and
political terms. From this text, it can be seen, in retrospect, that the most
signicant feature of Althusser’s relation to Spinoza was less the substantive
39
40
Further declarations which seem to endorse Anderson’s interpretation can be
found in Althusser ’s discussion of the distinction between the object of knowledge
and the real object (Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 40), and the notion of structural
causality (Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 187).
41
86 Peter Thomas
claims he advanced regarding the afnity of Spinoza and Marx, than the
distinctive nature of the method of philosophical reading and activity he
claimed had informed this encounter. Rather than an explicator of Capital
avant la lettre, what Althusser found in Spinoza was instead a foil to facilitate
his understanding of Marx’s work and his own work’s relationship to it.
‘A detour . . . but with regard to another detour’

The rubric under which Althusser placed his engagement with Spinoza
was that of a detour, a term he used with a precise philosophical sense and
consciousness of its Marxist heritage. ‘Having for years banged our heads
against a wall of enigmatic texts and wretched commentaries on them’, he
remarked about the unresolved difculty of Marx’s mature work, ‘we had to
decide to step back and make a detour’.42 Two reasons were offered for this
decision. First, Hegel’s thought had itself been founded upon a detour: a
detour via Spinoza. Or, rather, Hegel had proposed certain interpretations
and solutions to problems posed by Spinoza, which had resulted in the
distinctive orientation of his own system, which in turn (suitably ‘inverted’
and ‘demystied’) had made possible Marx’s critical and materialist dialectic
(‘borrowed from the “most speculative” chapters of the Great Logic of Absolute
Idealism’).43 Returning to Spinoza, therefore, provided the opportunity to
examine those radical features of Spinoza’s thought (primarily, its anti-
teleology and anti-subjectivism) which had been submerged in the Hegelian
synthesis, only tentatively to reappear – so Althusser argued – in the work
of Marx. As Althusser stated at one point in his comments, ‘Spinoza allows
us to perceive Hegel’s mistake’.44
Thus far, it would appear that Althusser’s detour via Spinoza was consonant
with the Western Marxist urge to seek out a prior philosophical vantage point
for the purpose of understanding Marx, though the perceived philosophical
lineage on which this was based is such that it cannot easily be rejected
as an eclecticism diluting the purity of historical materialism with foreign
additions (as, for instance, Timpanaro’s supplementation of Marx with Leopardi
42
43
44
could be considered, although Anderson curiously regarded this case as a

possible exception to the Western Marxist tendency he condemned).45 However,
Althusser ’s second reason for this detour decisively departs from the
template, and furthermore, seems to me to be a much more signicant and
revealing account of the utility he found in reading Spinoza. For Althusser,
a philosophic detour was something more than his own idiosyncratic
solution to the general problem encountered by all who had attempted to
comprehend Marx: the singularity and complexity of his thought. On the
contrary, detours, or steps back, were essential to the practice of philosophy.
A philosophy, Althusser argued, ‘only exists in so far as it “works out”
its difference from other philosophies, from those which, by similarity or
contrast, help it to sense, perceive and grasp itself, so that it can take up its
own positions’.46 This description applied to no philosophy more than it
did to Marx’s, whose own experience in fact formed the inspiration and the
model for Althusser’s theory of a detour. ‘What else did Marx do’, Althusser
asked, ‘throughout his endless research, but go back to Hegel in order to
rid himself of Hegel and to nd his own way, what else but rediscover
Hegel in order to distinguish himself from Hegel and to dene himself?’47 To
emphasise this point, he further noted that ‘Marx . . . was not content with
making a single detour, via Hegel; he also constantly and explicitly, in his
insistent use of certain categories, measured himself against Aristotle, ‘that
great thinker of the Forms’.48
Althusser, therefore, proposed that, in order to understand this dynamic
which had animated Marx’s own philosophic practice – thereby entering into
the interior of his thought and becoming capable of developing it further
to meet the new challenges which had arisen in the twentieth century – it
was necessary to mimic (or more generously, reproduce) the philosophic
procedures and conditions by and under which it had been originally pro-
duced. As Althusser acknowledged, the adoption of this strategy of repetition
entailed taking certain risks. Marx’s own philosophic detours, particularly
via Hegel, had not occurred without a theoretical cost (the coquetting with
Hegelian phraseology which Althusser thought had misled subsequent
45
Anderson 1976, pp. 60 & 91.
46
47
Ibid.
48
Althusser 1976, pp. 133–4.
88 Peter Thomas
Marxists; the continuing re-emergence of Hegelian (ideological) concepts even

in Marx’s mature work; the always provisional status of the epistemological
break Althusser would propose in his later revision of the early theory’s
messianism). But it would only be possible to determine this cost, to under-
stand the price Marx had had to pay for his detours along with that now
risked by the Althusserian school, ‘by ourselves working on these detours’.
‘In our subjective history, and in the existing ideological and theoretical
conjuncture, this detour became a necessity’.49 Thus, the primary reason and
motivation for his and his co-workers’ ‘step back’:
We made a detour via Spinoza in order to improve our understanding of

Marx’s philosophy. To be precise: since Marx’s materialism forced us to think
out the meaning of the necessary detour via Hegel, we made the detour via
Spinoza in order to clarify our understanding of Marx’s detour via Hegel. A detour,
therefore; but with regard to another detour.50
Ironically, given Althusser’s reputation as the arch anti-Hegelian of the 1960s

(a perception which has become less tenable in recent years, with the publi-
cation of his early writings and their deep engagement with and critique of
the work of Hegel, rather than – like so many others – its mere rejection),
Althusser’s account of his detour via Spinoza seems performatively to conrm
the most Hegelian of philosophic procedures: the phenomenological attempt
to grasp the inner form of previous philosophies, as an element in under-
standing the organic relationships which composed them, recapitulating in
thought and in a condensed form the complex cognitive development which
formed the prehistory and conditions of possibility of continuing philosophical
practice. Like Hegel, Althusser attempted to ground this phenomenology
in history – that is, in the actual philosophic forms which had occurred in
previous epochs – by crafting a dense historical narrative which traced the
laborious and impeded emergence of what he proposed were the distinctive
features of Marx’s thought, a veritable Calvary of Marxist science; but also
similarly to Hegel, the importance of this condensed Bildungsroman, viewed
phenomenologically, was that it enabled Althusser’s thought to repeat and
internalise the signicant features of those previous forms, in such a way that
he would be able to realise their potentials in his own practice.
49
50
Ibid.
A further dimension of the strongly affective, personal and at the same

time directly political nature of Althusser’s reading of Spinoza is revealed by
remarks originally written for his autobiography, but only recently published
in English as a chapter in The New Spinoza. Althusser’s admiration for Spinoza
as a philosophical strategist is clear; in fact, it is perhaps not exaggerating
to say that above and beyond any particular substantive philosophic propo-
sition, what most attracted Althusser to Spinoza was the subtle polemical
strategy of the Ethics, a ‘revolutionary philosophical strategy’ which Althusser
curiously compared to Mao’s theory of guerrilla warfare.51 He said:
What also fascinated me in Spinoza was his philosophical strategy. . . .

Spinoza began with God! He began with God, and deep down inside
(I believe it, after the entire tradition of his worst enemies) he was (as were
da Costa and so many other Portuguese Jews of his time) an atheist.
A supreme strategy: he began by taking over the chief stronghold of his
adversary, or rather he established himself there as if he were his own
adversary, therefore not suspected of being the sworn adversary, and re-
disposed the theoretical fortress in such a way as to turn it completely
around, as one turns around cannons against the fortress’s own occupant. . . .
Generally this is not the way that a philosopher proceeds: they always
oppose from a certain exterior the forces of their theses, which are destined
to take over the domain protected and defended by previous theses, which
already occupy the terrain.52
Althusser further commented that his interpretation of the conjunctural

nature of Spinoza’s thought had a profound impact upon his conception of
the political tasks confronting his own philosophical practice. Spinoza had
given ‘one of the greatest lessons in heresy that the world had ever seen’, by
occupying orthodox theological positions so deeply that he had transformed
them into their opposite, and by outwitting the theologians on their own
ground of rigorous scriptural interpretation.53 Might it not then be possible,
Althusser seemed to muse, to effect a similar transformation of the reigning
orthodoxy of Stalinism, based as it was upon the near-scriptural status ascribed
to certain of Marx’s and Engels’s texts, and possessing its own distinctive
51
52
Althusser 1997, pp. 10–11.
53
90 Peter Thomas
hermeneutic of ‘diamat’?54 Again, it was not primarily a matter of arguing

that Spinoza was ‘Marx without a beard’, but, rather, of attempting to draw
inspiration from Spinoza in order to confront a set of contemporary problems
which seemed, at least to Althusser, to have been pregured in a previous
era, namely, the theological disputes of the late seventeenth century. As
Althusser revealingly reected, ‘no doubt this [Spinoza’s] strategy comforted
me in my personal philosophical and political strategy: to take over the Party
from inside its own positions . . . but what pretensions!’55
The political implications of these pretensions will shortly be examined.
For now, Althusser’s theory of a philosophic detour should alert us to the
possibility that something more dynamic had occurred in his engagement
with Spinoza than a mere transcription, as Anderson’s third assumption
suggested. As we have seen, Anderson argued that many of the main fea-
tures of the Althusserian synthesis were ‘directly drawn’, ‘taken straight’,
‘faithfully derived’ from Spinoza.56 This was undoubtedly the most serious
element in Anderson’s characterisation of the nature of Althusser’s relation-
ship to Spinoza, both in terms of its implicit and unargued assertions and
the effects its dismissive brevity have had on subsequent Anglophone Marxist
scholarship.57 Implicit in it were two questionable, unargued assertions: rst,
the assertion that Althusser’s Marxism was not in fact his Marxism at all,
but, instead, the recycling of the themes of pre-Marxist metaphysics, the direct
transposition of Spinoza’s thought into twentieth-century Western Marx-
ism. In other words, the Althusserian system’s origin lay in the thought of
Spinoza (and in Anderson’s unfortunate choice of metaphors, he came close
to accusing Althusser of a sometimes-acknowledged plagiarism). Following
on from this was the second implicit assertion that the political failings of
54
Althusser suggests such an interpretation in his autobiography, when he links
the appeal to Marx to the refusal of orthodoxy. Althusser 1994, p. 222.
55
Althusser 1997, p. 11, see also Althusser 1994, p. 222.
56
57
This brevity was perhaps unavoidable in a work whose main concern was with
themes other than Althusser’s Spinozism. Nevertheless, given the seriousness of his
assertions – particularly that Althusser had directly transcribed elements of Spinoza’s
thought – the absence of a full analysis of the nature and signicance of this rela-
tionship remains a glaring omission which Anderson has not rectied in a separate
and more extended study – despite asserting that ‘further study would have little
difculty in documenting’ the real extent and unity of the transposition of Spinoza’s
thought in Althusser ’s theoretical work (Anderson 1976, p. 66).
Althusser’s work could, therefore, be traced to its dependence upon Spinoza,

or that Spinoza was, in some suitably indeterminate sense (as in the best of
all slanders), ‘responsible’ for those same failings.58 The rst assertion makes
it impossible to think the specicity and conditions of possibility of the
Althusserian initiative, and to learn the political lessons which Althusser’s
detour via Spinoza holds for those concerned to restore the Marxist unity of
theory and practice; the second gave rise to a tendency to judge the relevance
and fertility of Spinoza for Marxism on the basis of the perceived failings or
successes of Althusser’s project. Given Althusserianism’s spectacular fall from
grace in the late 1970s, the equation, in most instances and except for those
previously noted, has been deleterious. Both resulted in Anderson endors-
ing, unintentionally and against the central thesis of Considerations on Western
Marxism,59 a theory of an ahistorical transfer of a philosophical essence
58
This may or may not have been the perspective behind Anderson’s characteri-
sation of Althusser ’s use of Spinoza; whatever his doubts about the relevance of
Spinoza’s metaphysics and political theory to twentieth-century Marxism, he has
expressed elsewhere admiration for the personal character of Spinoza (Anderson 1980,
p. 125). Nevertheless, his choice of metaphors had the predictable unfortunate effects
on the reputation of Spinoza among Anglophone Marxists. If Althusser = Spinoza,
then one can argue that Spinoza must bear at least some of the responsibility for
Althusser ’s errors as in, for example, the following comment of Simon Clarke. ‘In
this conception [the theory of Darstellung outlined in Reading Capital] the economic is
permanently present in the political and ideological realms, on the analogy of the
presence of the Freudian unconscious in the conscious as the “absent presence of a
present absence”. The economic, like Lacan’s unconscious, exists only in its effects. The
philosophical inspiration for this conception is not Marx but Spinoza. It is only by recourse
to the Spinozist conception of the relation between God and Substance, with the eco-
nomic taking the role of God and the political the role of Substance, that Althusser can nd
a place for the economic at all. Since it is only an act of faith that can establish the
determination, even in the last instance, of the economic once a secular, bourgeois,
conception of society is adopted, it is hardly surprising that Althusser ’s dominant
philosophical inspiration is that of metaphysical theology’ (Clarke 1980, pp. 84–5,
italics mine).
59
For the central thesis of Considerations on Western Marxism was that Western
Marxism’s philosophic detour was an effect of a complex political situation whose
cause was Stalinism and its reverberations throughout the international communist
and working-class movement. Anderson developed this analysis in great detail
and across an impressive range of theorists throughout this study. Yet, in his specic
analysis of Althusser ’s relation to Spinoza, he characterised that relationship in terms
which seemed to attribute the failings of the Althusserian system to the derisory effects
of reading Spinoza – not to the complicated (and compromised) nature of Althusser’s
manoeuvring within the heavily Stalinised PCF (a fact even more noticeable given
that Anderson elsewhere has offered one of the more balanced political assessments
of Althusser ’s relationship to Stalinism (Anderson 1980, pp. 100–30)). In the absence
of these necessary historical considerations, Anderson’s depiction of the nature of
92 Peter Thomas
from one thinker to another which has little in common with the tradition
inaugurated by The German Ideology. A properly Marxist intervention into
the eld of the history of ideas cannot be content to posit an essential (or
even virtual) identity between different thinkers on the basis of an apparent
homology between their concepts. Rather, if there is a remarkable similarity
between Althusser’s and Spinoza’s concepts, it behoves an historical-mate-
rialist study to explain the complex interaction of intellectual, historical, and
political causes which produced such an extraordinary event.
The return of the repressed

Warren Montag’s work is the necessary starting point for developing such
an explanation. In a guarded critique of Anderson’s suggestion that Althusser
simply and directly transcribed central elements of Spinoza’s thought, Montag
has sought to demonstrate that, instead, a more determined relationship
obtained, one founded not merely in a subjective contingency on Althusser’s
part, but, much more importantly, in the similarity – and singularity – of the
historical circumstances in which these two philosophies were produced.
Montag argues that
To speak of the inuence of Spinoza on Althusser is already to grant a

conceptual régime that both thinkers refused. The term ‘inuence’ does not
begin to capture the way in which an important part of Althusser ’s work
is itself Spinozist, constituting a theoretical project profoundly internal to
the conceptual space delimited by Spinoza’s works. Of course, as Althusser
himself has said, this taking of positions was never simply the result of
a personal choice. It was rather that something of Spinoza’s theoretical
struggle, modied by the relationship of theoretical forces that characterised
the latter half of the seventeenth century, repeated itself in the theoretical
conjuncture of 1960s France. This repetition, or return of the repressed,
signalled and continues to signal the existence of a conict to be analysed. 60
As Montag further argues, this repetition should not be understood in terms

of a simple reiteration of concepts. Rather, it was a repetition of conjunctural
Althusser’s relationship to Spinoza committed the classic error which Spinoza denounced
as the source of all errors: mistaking effects for causes.
60
Montag 1993, pp. 51–2.
features, or more exactly, the re-emergence of a distinctive philosophical and

political terrain, which allowed Althusser to attempt to ‘re-actualise’ signicant
elements of Spinoza’s thought. When this situation is acknowledged, Montag
argues, the Spinozistic themes in Reading Capital which were incomprehen-
sible to many critics become explicable as
not an interpretation of Spinoza but an intervention in the relationship

of forces that governs his text, taking the side of certain hypotheses against
others, pushing these hypotheses to extreme conclusions, towards the
dismantling of a theoretical apparatus in which the notions of transcen-
dence, immateriality or ideality are dominant. This intervention produces
a materialism so thoroughgoing that it remains for Althusser ’s critics, as for
Spinoza’s three hundred years earlier, illegible and unthinkable. 61
In more recent work, Montag has attempted to specify those features of

Spinoza’s thought which made it amenable to such a ‘re-actualisation’ or
‘re-deployment’. ‘Spinoza’s works’, Montag argues,
constitute a philosophy that never denitively closes upon itself, that is

never strictly identiable with a nite set of propositions or arguments that
would allow it to be categorised once and for all as ‘rationalist’ or even
‘materialist’.62
He emphasises that this ‘openness’ should not be understood as an indeter-

minacy or ambiguity of Spinoza’s thought, but, rather, as a function of the
central philosophical strategy of the Ethics – the operation of the Sive (in André
Tosel’s phrase), which was the foundation of Spinoza’s famous depiction of
the one substance as Deus sive Natura. ‘This philosophical slogan’, Montag
argues, ‘summarizes both the content and the form of Spinoza’s philosophy
in the very fact that it simultaneously afrms and denies that it afrms
the radical abolition of transcendence’. ‘The rst term is translated into and
then displaced by the second. God disappears into nature’63 – but such a
translation and displacement must necessarily always remain provisional.
Having abandoned all a priori transcendental guarantees, Spinoza’s denial
of transcendence can only become ‘actual’, Montag suggests, when it is
61
Montag 1993, p. 52.
62
Montag and Stolze (eds.) 1997, p. x.
63
Montag 1999, p. 4.
94 Peter Thomas
linked to the movements of the multitude which themselves seek to reassert

their immanent power (potentia) against the Power (potestas) of transcendent
authority. The 1960s witnessed such a moment, thus making possible the
re-emergence of Spinozistic themes in the Althusserian initiative. When those
conditions were eclipsed by the reaction of the 1980s and 1990s, materialist
philosophies of immanence such as Althusser’s and Spinoza’s necessarily
began to once more appear ‘illegible and unthinkable’.
This interpretation represents a real advance over that proposed in Con-
siderations on Western Marxism. By refusing a rhetoric of ‘origins’ or ‘inuence’
and, instead, seeking to comprehend the ‘actuality’ of Spinoza’s thought
in Althusser, Montag is able to move to a consideration of the substantive
problems with which both thinkers attempted to deal, rather than a formal-
ist dismissal of them. In particular, his treatment of Althusser’s Spinozism
is the site of the development of a sophisticated materialist theory of the
relations between thought-forms from different eras. In Benjaminian terms,
Montag’s analysis can be said to characterise Althusser’s Spinozism as a
seizing ‘hold of a memory’ when it ashed up at ‘a moment of danger’, the
forging of an alliance across the centuries with another thinker who had
attempted to remain a ‘heretic in the truth’, through which Althusser sought
to gain theoretical resources for his attempt to provide an immanent critique
of the reigning Stalinist orthodoxy in the PCF and the international Communist
movement.64 By emphasising that this alliance was no mere repetition, but a
development of a long-neglected materialist anti-transcendentalism, Montag
makes it possible to think the positive and politically enabling features of
Althusser’s Spinozism.
Nevertheless, it seems to me that, in at least one respect, Montag’s analysis
remains incomplete: namely, it does not open up the space to think that which
divides Althusser from Spinoza as much as that which unites them. Attempting
64
Benjamin 1970, p. 257. Althusser ’s Augustinian commitment to the PCF (and
his coquetting with Maoism) necessarily complicated and perhaps compromised
the genesis and effects of his critique. To note this political origin is to remember
Althusser ’s work as a concrete intervention into a concrete political conjuncture. This
is particularly important given, on the one hand, the still lingering Thompsonian
prejudice, perhaps more often thought in the general Marxist culture than stated in
scholarly studies, that Althusserianism was little more than Stalinism theorised as
ideology; and, on the other, the tendency to treat Althusser ’s categories as neutral
ahistorical techniques to be absorbed into the arsenal of bourgeois social science.
to think the differences between Althusser and Spinoza (sometimes, as we

shall see, within their apparent identity) is equally as important to the reassess-
ment of the Althusserian legacy as is defending his detour via Spinoza from
rash charges of heresy. This is because such a consideration allows us to think
both the positive and negative consequences of this detour, and, therefore,
the lessons it holds for contemporary attempts to reinvigorate historical mate-
rialism by means of similar methods. In order to open up this space, and as
a rst attempt to theorise one element of Althusser’s detour, I will therefore
propose the following thesis: rather than the direct transcription of Spinoza’s
thought asserted by Anderson, or the continuation and development pro-
posed by Montag, Althusser’s Spinozism can be characterised as involving
a very complicated transposition of the formal structures of Spinoza’s thought
onto the very different content of twentieth-century Marxist politics.65 If this
transposition allowed Althusser to make an important contribution to the
ongoing development of Marxist theory, it was not achieved, as Althusser
knew only too well, without taking certain risks, the price of which was
potentially negative political and theoretical consequences. In order to demon-
strate the feasibility of this thesis I will conclude by comparing two of
the central propositions of Spinoza’s and Althusser’s thought: Spinoza’s
equation of cause and effect implicit in his notion of God as an immanent
cause, and the Althusserian notion of ‘structural causality’. If, at rst glance,
Althusser’s notion appears to have sprung fully grown from the head of
Spinoza, this apparent similarity conceals deeper, historical and substantive,
discrepancies between the two thinkers which can only be comprehended
through developing a fully historicised account of the nature of their rela-
tionship and their concepts.66
65
Obviously, I am not suggesting that Althusser adopted the infamously difcult
mode of presentation of the Ethics (more geometrico). Rather, I am referring to Althusser’s
redeployment of elements of Spinoza’s philosophical strategy, primarily, the treatment
of the relations between concepts, between concepts and objects, and the ways of
transforming both of these. Clearly, this strictly philosophical thesis will require
modication when it is brought into relation with an explicit consideration of the
other elements of Althusser ’s detour (the historical and the political), which I hope
to attempt in a future study.
66
Space will not permit an analysis of the other, formally similar, notions of
Althusser and Spinoza which were nominated by Anderson. At least one pair of these,
however, should be noted as a fertile eld for further research: Spinoza’s theory of
the imagination and Althusser’s theory/theories of ideology. (Spinoza’s theory of the
96 Peter Thomas
Deus sive Natura

Spinoza scandalised the theological establishment of the seventeenth cen-
tury by asserting that God was ‘the immanent, not the transitive, cause of
all things’. 67 In the place of the transcendent creator of Judeo-Christian
orthodoxy, a God (the innite) conceived of as prior to and external to his
creations (the nite), Spinoza posited that there was only one substance (Deus
sive Natura), a being absolutely innite and self-caused (causa sui), consisting
of an innity of attributes68 – by which the intellect was able to perceive
the essence of substance – and modied into the different modes which
comprised the entities of the nite world. It made no sense to talk of an
omniscient, omnipotent, innite God, as both Jewish and Christian ortho-
doxy did, if God was then depicted as possessing attributes similar to those of
a human: a will, desire, and appetite, all signs of imperfection and limitation.
The only solution to this contradiction, Spinoza argued, was to conceive of
God as a true instead of false innite, as an absolutely innite being of innite
powers, on whom no limitation could be placed. Counterposing the innite,
conceived as an abstraction, to the concreteness of the nite, was the rst
(human, all too human) prejudice which needed to be overcome. As Althusser
recognised, Spinoza had overturned the theological certainties of his time by
pressing their own logic to a conclusion, until they were transformed into
imagination was in fact the subject of some of Althusser’s most specic and detailed
observations vis-à-vis his relation to Spinoza, particularly in the essay published in
The New Spinoza). A close examination of the relations of similarity and divergence
between these theories, and the historical causes for these relations, might help to
counter the still widespread prejudice that the Althusserian notion is nothing more
than poorly disguised Stalinism. Furthermore, attending to the development of the
relationship between imagination and superstition in Spinoza’s political texts might
help to clarify some of the ambiguities which I believe Althusser introduced into his
original treatment of the notion of ideology in ‘Marxism and Humanism’ by his later
revisions in the celebrated ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’.
67
EIP18.
68
It is important to note that Spinoza does not, as is often supposed, posit only
two attributes (thought and extension) of the one substance. As a ‘being absolutely
innite’, God necessarily consists of ‘an innity of attributes, of which each one
expresses an eternal and innite essence’ (EID6). Only two, thought and extension,
are treated in the Ethics, because it is, precisely, an ethics rather than a metaphysics
or encyclopaedic system. As Spinoza states in the Preface to Book II, ‘I pass now to
explaining those things which must necessarily follow from the essence of God, or
the innite and eternal being – not, indeed, all of them . . . but only those that
can lead us, by the hand, as it were, to the knowledge of the human mind and its
highest blessedness.’
something quite other than what the orthodoxy intended. Spinoza did not
regard himself as an atheist – his response to his critics was, in effect, the
famous maxim of Epicurus: ‘Impiety does not consist in destroying the gods
of the crowd but rather in ascribing to the gods the ideas of the crowd’. But
the consequences of what Althusser called Spinoza’s ‘unparalleled audacity’
was to prepare the way for a fully secularised conception of the universe,
a plane of immanence, in Deleuze’s phrase, which could be explained on
its own terms and without reference to a beyond which determined and
guided it.69
It was this argument, more than any other, which led to the reputation
of Spinozism during most of the eighteenth century as a most perdious
atheism. In the changed conjuncture of German romanticism and its after-
math, however, a different interpretation of Spinoza’s Deus sive Natura began
to gain ascendancy – for Novalis, Spinoza was the God-intoxicated man; for
Hegel, the problem with Spinoza was that far from his denying the divine,
‘with him there is too much God’.70 Yet Spinoza’s contemporaries recognised
his philosophy for what it was in its own conjuncture: an intervention against
the pretensions of the orthodox theology of the time to maintain the innite
as a beyond from which the nite world was derivative and to which it was
secondary. If the concept of God encompassed everything, then the term lost
all critical force to distinguish between states of corruption and perfection,
the nite and the innite, this world and a beyond – distinctions which were
absolutely crucial not only for defending the religious orthodoxy of the day
but also for maintaining the political status quo. As both Balibar and Negri
have recently stressed, this theological critique cannot be separated from its
political context: in the seventeenth century, theological disputes were directly
political. Deprived of a distinct status, Deus sive Natura soon became merely
Natura, a reduction which did not bode well for that other increasingly
dominant duality of the period, Monarch sive State. Spinoza’s critique of
traditional Judeo-Christian conceptions of God in the Ethics was in fact tied,
in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, to a critique of the foundations of theo-
cratic political institutions in the history of the Jewish people, and, in the
Tractatus Politicus, he extended and reworked this perspective into a critique
69
70
Hegel 1995, p. 282.
98 Peter Thomas
of all political formations which transferred the democratic power of the

multitude to a particular individual or class.
A further, crucial consequence of this proposition was that it led Spinoza
to reject abstract, mysticatory explanations of phenomena, in favour of
concrete knowledge of their determinants. If ‘Nature herself is the power
of God under another name, and our ignorance of the power of God is co-
extensive with our ignorance of Nature’, it followed that it was ‘absolute
folly, therefore, to ascribe an event to the power of God when we know
not its natural cause, which is the power of God’.71 Phenomena were to be
explained according to the order of causation which obtained in one of the
innite attributes, not through reference to an inexplicable and inscrutable
divinity who stood outside the order of nature. Spinoza put this thesis to
devastating use with regard to the nature and origin of prophecy and mira-
cles in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, and, at the same time, inaugurated
a materialist tradition of reading (continued in our own time by Althusser
and Derrida) which refuses a hermeneutics which would posit a text’s con-
ditions of intelligibility as exterior to its own material, discursive existence.
‘Knowledge . . . of the contents of Scripture,’ Spinoza argued, ‘must be sought
from Scripture alone, even as the knowledge of nature is sought from nature’,
rather than through deference to a supplementary interpretative tradition.72
The foundation of this attempt was to examine Scripture ‘in the light of its
history’, that is, to produce a rational account of the conditions of produc-
tion, dissemination and (often) corruption of a text whose historicity had
been made incomprehensible by its subsequent elevation to a divinely inspired
status – in much the same way that rational knowledge of nature and humans
within it had been obscured by the notion that the ultimate cause of their
being was separate from them.73 In short, Spinoza’s proposition that Deus
sive Natura was self-caused (causa sui) and innite demanded a rejection of
71
Spinoza 1951, p. 25.
72
Spinoza 1951, p. 100.
73
Spinoza 1951, p. 101. As André Tosel notes, ‘Spinoza thus establishes a parallel
between the Bible and Nature, but this analogy does not lend itself to operations
of a spiritualist kind. It is not Nature that becomes a text or a book; it is instead
texts and the Bible that become Nature, that is, natural objects open to a natural
interpretation. It is no longer a question of an analogy but of an explanation’ (Tosel
1997, p. 159).
all forms of falsifying abstraction, and a search by the intellect for concrete,
comprehensible and explicable reasons, considered sub specie aeternitatis.
‘A cause immanent in its effects . . . in the Spinozist sense

of the term’
Althusser’s notion of structural causality is, indeed, formally similar to this
Spinozist critique of a transcendental notion of causality. The general co-
ordinates of this notion are well known. While Spinoza’s immediate point of
reference was theology, Althusser’s was the two theories of causation of the
social totality which he argued had dominated previous Marxism. In Reading
Capital, he claimed that
classical philosophy . . . had two and only two systems of concepts with
which to think effectivity. The mechanistic system, Cartesian in origin, which
reduced causality to a transitive and analytical effectivity [and] the Leibnizian
concept of expression. 74
Those traditions within Marxism which he branded as ‘economist’ had, accord-

ing to Althusser, conceived of the determination of the superstructure by the
base/infrastructure in transitive terms. The crushing of the Left Opposition,
the rise of Stalin’s socialism in one country, and the institution of state-directed
production plans had been accompanied by the elevation of a strict notion
of economic determinism (based upon a distorted reading of the base and
superstructure metaphor) to a centrality and orthodox status it did not
possess during the period of classical historical materialism.75 Although
Althusser would not have accepted this foregoing narrative at any stage in
74
75
Space does not permit the full argument required by this assertion. Nor will I
attempt to arbitrate between those views which see Stalinist economism as a defor-
mation of a more sophisticated pre-Stalinist Marxism (as I do), and those, like the late
Althusser’s, which view it as the ‘posthumous revenge of the Second International’
(Althusser 1976, p. 89). I will simply note that, despite the bacchanalian fantasies of
the anti- and post-Marxist imaginary, a close reading of the texts of Marx, Engels,
Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky, Lukács and Gramsci (among others) reveals vulgar
economic determinism as less a fundamental tenet of Marxism, than a corruption
used to justify the forced labour camp called the USSR and the cretinisation of the
international communist movement in the interests of Soviet imperialism – a verita-
ble Deus ex Machina called upon to cover up state capitalism’s economic, political and
moral bankruptcy.
100 Peter Thomas
his philosophical and political evolution, it nevertheless seems to me that his

rejection of ‘economism’ is properly understood as a rejection of one of the
central ideological tenets of Stalinism, in favour of a model of causality which
acknowledged the much more complex process of determination between
the various practices which constituted the social whole. In economism, he
argued, the economy was posited as a rst cause which preceded and remained
separate from its effects in the determined superstructure, which were
then seen as derivative and epiphenomenal. He rejected this notion of social
causation as not only mechanistic and transitive, but also as a transcenden-
tal notion which, despite its seemingly secular orientation, was secretly
modelled on the properly theological conception of a God who exercised his
creative powers to bring the nite world into being.
On the other hand, just as economism relied upon mechanical – i.e. undi-
alectical, pre-Marxist – notions, Althusser argued that the alternative notion
of ‘expressivism’ had also resulted in a relapse to a pre-Marxist theory of
causation – in this instance, a Leibnizian-Hegelian model which posited the
determination of the particular by the universal, or an essence of the whole
which was expressed in each particular phenomenal form. Some critics
have seen in this particular critique a coded attack upon Stalinism similar
to that implicit in Althusser’s rejection of ‘economism’.76 Many more have
argued that the tendency Althusser had in his sights in this case was, in fact,
that of previous Western Marxism’s focus upon the notion of totality as an
alternative to Stalinist orthodoxy. Althusser’s characterisation of previous
Western Marxism’s notion of totality and dismissal of the interpretation of
the theory of commodity fetishism which derived from it (particularly as
it was developed in the founding text of that tradition, ‘Reication and
the Class Consciousness of the Proletariat’, the central essay of Lukács’s
History and Class Consciousness) is far from uncontentious. However, whether
correctly or not, Althusser argued that this expressivist model, although
distinct from (transitive) economism, in that it refused the notion of a privi-
leged rst cause outside the order of causation, was nevertheless complicit
with economism, insofar as it continued to posit a cause which remained
strictly separate from its effects, even as it entered into a dynamic relation-
ship with them.77 He argued that
76
See, in particular, Jameson 1981, pp. 37–8.
77
The difference between transitive-economist and spiritual-expressivist accounts
The Hegelian totality is the alienated development of a simple unity, of

a simple principle, itself a moment of the development of the Idea: so,
strictly speaking, it is the phenomenon, the self-manifestation of this
simple principle which persists in all its manifestations, and therefore
even in the alienation which prepares its restoration.78
Althusser’s theory of Marx’s epistemological break with Hegel required

him to reject such a model of causation as non-Marxist. His alternative,
following certain brief passages in Marx,79 was the notion of structural
causality, in which
the structure is immanent in its effects, a cause immanent in its effects

in the Spinozist sense of the term, . . . the whole existence of the structure
consists of its effects, in short . . . the structure, which is merely a specic
combination of its peculiar elements, is nothing outside its effects.80
of causation could be characterised in theological terms as the difference between

an Hebraic creatio ex nihilo and a neo-Platonic emanation – the two great rivals of
the early Christian church, which Althusser condemned as inadequate for the
comprehension of the distinctly secular object of modern society. At the same time,
however, I believe it remains to be determined by future research whether or not the
theory of structural causality does not itself run the risk of collapsing back into an
emanationist model, and thus whether Andrew Collier is correct to argue that ‘the
Spinozian conception of structural causality applied to society’ is indeed the only
foundation of ‘scientic politics’ (Collier 1989, p. 83).
78
Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 203. See also the following: ‘The Hegelia n
totality may be said to be endowed with a unity of a “spiritual” type in which each
element is pars totalis, and in which the visible spheres are merely the alienated and
restored unfolding of the said internal principle’ (Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 204).
79
The most signicant was the following suggestive description from the Grundrisse:
‘In all forms of society it is a determinate production and its relations which assign
every other production and its relations their rank and inuence. It is a general
illumination [Beleuchtung] in which all the other colours are plunged and which
modies their special tonalities. It is a special ether which denes the specic weight
of every existence arising in it’ (Marx 1973, pp. 106–7; quoted in Althusser and Balibar
1970, p. 187). It is important to note, as Althusser did, but as some of his followers
have not, that, in this instance, Marx was referring to the dominance in different
historic periods of specic forms of economic production i.e. agriculture, industry etc.
80
Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 189. Another example of the anti-transcendental
dimensions which had informed Althusser ’s thought can be found in the following:
The structure is not an essence outside the economic phenomena which
comes and alters their aspect, forms and relations and which is effective on
them as an absent cause, absent because it is outside them. The absence of the
cause in the structure’s ‘metonymic causality’ on its effects is not the fault of
the exteriority of the structure with respect to the economic phenomena; on the
contrary, it is the very form of the interiority of the structure, as a structure, in its
102 Peter Thomas
This notion was similar to an expressivist (Hegelian) account of the totality,

in that it focused upon the relationship of elements within the whole (rather
than the originary moment of economism), but distinct from it, due to its
rejection of a unied and unifying centre, maintaining its integrity through-
out its particular embodiments, and thus producing a symmetrical totality
in which the various elements were equivalent to one another as phenomena
proceeding from the totality’s essence. In place of such an essence, the notion
of structural causality posited the dynamic determination of all elements by
each other in a decentred ‘structure of structures’ (overdetermination), an
asymmetrical totality in which one element was dominant in any particular
conjuncture. This dominant element was determined by the economy, but,
unlike a strictly economist model, the economy was not necessarily itself the
dominant element.81 Wary of any collapse back into economism, Althusser
had further added, to the continuing perplexity of both his critics and pro-
ponents alike, that ‘the lonely hour of the last instance never comes’.82 In
effects. This implies therefore that the effects are not outside the structure, are
not a pre-existing object, element or space in which the structure arrives to
imprint its mark. (Althusser and Balibar 1970, pp. 188–9).
Also relevant in this regard is the notion of an ‘authorless theatre’ developed in
81
82
Althusser 1977, p. 113. The difculty of this seemingly contradictory qualication
can, perhaps, be lessened by noting both its conjunctural and substantive import. In
terms of the former, it is important to recognise that the notion that ‘the lonely hour
of the last instance never comes’ was an essentially polemical formulation. Having
rejected economism, but nevertheless refusing the symmetry of an expressivist model,
Althusser ’s notion assigned the economic the role of ‘determining dominance’; and
then, in a second move, in order to prevent the surreptitious restoration of econom-
ism, he had immediately stressed the complexity of this process of ‘determining
dominance’, as against the simple, transitive role played by the economy in an
economist model. See the following formulation: ‘the economic dialectic is never active
in the pure state; in History, these instances, the superstructures, etc. – are never seen
to step respectfully aside when their work is done or, when the time comes, as his
pure phenomena, to scatter before His Majesty the Economy as he strides along the
royal road of the Dialectic. From the rst moment to the last, the lonely hour of
the last instance never comes’ (Althusser 1977, p. 113). In substantive terms, if the
priority accorded to the economic in the notion of structural causality was less than
that posited by economism, it was still required to be more than in an expressivist
model of causation. It was less than economism, because the economy determined
not the social totality itself but its dominant element at any particular moment. Yet it
was also more than expressivism, because Althusser ’s repudiation of an essence or
centre which manifested itself in its various phenomena (and whose self-alienation
and self-restoration had been the driving force of the Hegelian totality) required him
to locate the totality’s displaced dynamism in one of its elements, namely, the
Spinozist terms, the economic gured as one of the elements or ‘attributes’

(alongside ideology, politics, culture etc.) gathered together underneath
the umbrella of the ‘one substance’ of the mode of production (but in asym-
metrical relation to those other elements, unlike the symmetry of Spinoza’s
attributes). Or, in phrases more Althusserian: rather than viewing society as
being determined by a single element (the economy), or as a self-alienating
and self-restoring totality which subsumed its parts within its (spiritual) unity,
the Althusserian notion of structural causality posited that society was a
decentred structure in dominance, subject to the contradictions, uneven
development and overdetermination of each of the relatively autonomous
elements within it, and it was this process itself – the structural interaction
of each of the elements upon each other and upon the whole – which was
the cause of the social totality. The social totality was an effect of a cause,
which was none other than the totality’s own self-production, or, as Althusser
sometimes phrased it, an ‘absent cause’, discernible only in its effects.83
economic. The unresolved ambiguity of this central feature of Althusser ’s theory

played a not insignicant role in the unravelling of the Althusserian paradigm, often
in the direction of abandoning the claim of the economy’s role in determining
the dominant element of any particular formation, and which then often led to
the elimination of the adjective in the phrase ‘relative autonomy’ to produce the
‘pluralism’ Althusser explicitly repudiated. See Althusser 1977, pp. 201–2.
83
Although this phrase was sometimes used by Althusser in relation to the theory
of structural causality, it seems to me to have remained a rhetorical ourish rather
than a developed category (for Althusser ’s own comments on the curious conditions
surrounding the production of this concept in the Capital reading group of 1964–5
at the École normale supérieure, see Althusser 1994, pp. 208–9, 352–3). Despite some
suggestive remarks in Essays in Self-Criticism and related writings, Althusser failed
to clarify the precise nature of the relationship between his notion of an ‘absent
cause’ and Spinoza’s causa immanens. Many of Althusser ’s Anglophone commenta-
tors, however, present ‘Spinoza’s idea of the “absent cause”’ (Jameson 1981, p. 35: cf.
Jay 1984, p. 409) as a verity. It is important to note two points. First, for Spinoza, ‘God
is the immanent, not the transitive, cause of all things’ (EIP18). He is not an absent
cause, but a cause pervasively present throughout its effects. To speak of an absent
cause in Spinoza is either to neglect the fact that particular entities are modications
within the one substance (and therefore that the cause of their being is not separate
from them, as the term ‘absent’ implies), or implicitly to restore a transitive notion of
causation, in which a once-present entity is subsequently absent (God as a catalyst
who disappears into his creations once the order of causation is set in motion, rather
than a prime mover eternally separate). But, for Spinoza, the identity of cause and
effect is immediate, eternal and innite. Second, as Althusser used this phrase, and
as his commentators appear to have understood it, it seems to me to involve a conation
of the notion of structural causality (present throughout the social totality, a cause
only discernible in its effects [eine Beleuchtung]) with the related but distinct Althusserian
notion of a ‘symptomatic reading’. Symptomatic reading’s emphasis on explaining
104 Peter Thomas
In short, just as Spinoza had done, Althusser arraigned his opponents with
unjustiably positing the cause of social phenomena (either the economy or
the essence of the social totality) as existing apart from its effects. The notion
of structural causality expressed a vision of society as a decentred structure
of structures, subject to the overdetermination and uneven development of
each of the structures within it, in which (paraphrasing Derrida) ‘there was
nothing outside of the social totality’ – that is, no privileged agent or essence
which was either prior to, distinct from, or exterior to the society which
they produced. Similarly, just as Spinoza’s refusal to locate the cause of nite
entities in an other-worldly beyond enabled him to attempt rationally to
understand the interrelationship of parts within the whole, without reference
to an unknown and unknowable ultimate guarantee, the notion of structural
causality sought to provide explanations for the phenomena of social life
according to thoroughly immanent criteria. It was an attempt to grasp the
self-productive complexity of society as a totality, without reference to either
a prime mover or spiritual essence which stood unaffected outside of that
production process.
Partial and limited totalities

Yet, despite these similarities, there remain important differences between
Althusser’s and Spinoza’s critiques. First, and most obviously, they sought
to explain different objects. Spinoza’s Deus sive Natura, or one substance,
encompassed everything under the sun (and some more), as they were always
and everywhere, viewed sub specie aeternitatis. The one substance was ‘deter-
mined to act by itself alone’,84 or, as Spinoza argued in Proposition 17 of Book
I of the Ethics, ‘God acts from the laws of his nature alone, and is compelled
by no one’.85 A social totality, on the other hand, is an ensemble of human
practices, and, as such, is an historically specic formation. Furthermore, it
(rather than resolving or effacing) a text’s contradictions, and on the determinant

absence (and therefore presence) of certain themes in a thinker ’s problematic is a
genuine case of an ‘absent cause’, of a cause absent from its effects, i.e. the text’s
material form. Structural causality’s ‘absent cause’, on the other hand, only makes
sense insofar as it is understood as continuing Althusser ’s polemic against transitive
models of social causation. Taken on its own, it contradicts his claim for the presence
of the social totality’s cause in the dynamic of its elements’ interrelationships.
84
EIDvii.
85
EIP17.
is subject to external determinations, both from previous societies whose

formations continue to exert practical force (‘the weight of all the dead
generations’), and by the limits placed upon human practices by their inter-
action with and interpenetration by other natural, non-human, forces. Spinoza
rejected the notion that human society was a ‘dominion within a dominion’,
in which ‘man disturbs, rather than follows, the order of Nature’, ‘determined
only by himself’,86 because he was polemicising against the view that man
was an autonomous subject endowed with a will which suspended the
laws of nature. Yet there is another, equally Spinozist, sense in which a social
totality must be thought of as a ‘totality within a totality’. A social totality,
or human society, is a limited subset of the genuinely innite and eternal
totality of Natura, i.e. it is a nite modication within the one substance, and
as such, must be viewed sub specie durationis. As a nite modication, it is
not sufcient unto itself; it ‘is in another through which it is also conceived’,87
and, unlike Spinoza’s self-caused one substance, its existence is not identical
with its essence88 nor is it necessary,89 but historically conditioned and con-
tingent. Stated simply, a social totality is a partial totality, which derives
its being from, and whose comprehension therefore requires reference
to, another, more inclusive totality. These totalities are not merely different
in terms of appearance; they are objects of a qualitatively different type. One
is a genuinely innite totality, in its essence unbounded by any particular
determination; the other is, by denition, restricted to human practices as
they are constituted in social formations. In a strict sense, they are incom-
mensurable. Properties discerned in one cannot automatically be attributed
to the other, nor can they be explained by reference to the same criteria.
This qualitative difference of the totalities – which Althusser and Spinoza
sought to comprehend – produced a second divergence in their thought: the
different consequences of their critiques. I have already noted Althusser’s
declared admiration for Spinoza’s philosophical strategy, and his attempt to
draw inspiration from Spinoza’s polemic with the theologians for his own
intervention in debates over the cause of the social totality. ‘I was fascinated
by this unparalleled audacity’, Althusser wrote of Spinoza’s transformation
86
EIIIPref.
87
EIDv.
88
EIDi.
89
EIP11.
106 Peter Thomas
of his opponents’ theses by pressing their own logic to an extreme.90 Just as

Spinoza had dissolved cause into effect, the notion of structural causality
attempted to abandon a transcendental notion of the social totality’s cause
in favour of an account in which there was nothing outside of the social
totality. Yet, because of the historical distance separating their critiques, and
because these totalities are incommensurable, Althusser’s employment of
formally similar philosophical procedures did not yield the same results.
Arguably, in analysing a social totality as if it were of the same type as
Spinoza’s one substance (in effect, conating these two distinct totalities
and the methods of analysis proper to each), the Althusserian notion of
structural causality ran the risk of producing effects which, in the specic
conditions of the late twentieth century, were very different from those
which Spinoza’s critique had produced in its own particular conjuncture. I
am referring here to the ‘confused knowledges’ which gured prominently
in the decomposition of the original Althusserian moment, and which formed
the basis for many of the hostile critiques of Althusser’s own work, such as
Hindess and Hirst or E.P. Thompson. These can not simply be attributed to
external determinations, or, in Spinoza’s terms, ‘unfortuitious encounters’:
acts of misreading or misinterpretation, renegacy and apostasy of large
sections of an erstwhile Marxisant generation, overdetermination by chang-
ing political conjunctures.91 They also possessed intellectual conditions of
possibility, or, in non-transcendental terms, they were effects whose causes
must be searched for among the elements of the original Althusserian syn-
thesis itself. This is not to argue, in Hegelian fashion, that these developments
should be regarded as the ‘truth of’ the Althusserian system. Rather, it is
to follow Althusser himself when, in a Spinozist reversal of the Hegelian
90
91
A full account of these confused knowledge s should include not only the
well-known move towards a nebulous post-Marxism by some former Althusserians
(most notably, Hindess and Hirst, Laclau and Mouffe), nor only the role played by
the Althusserian formation in the more general transitional process of Marxism
to postmodernism in the academy, but also the fate of the reception of Althusser in
the wider intellectual and political culture, particularly as a complex element in the
complex and uneven world-wide process of Communist parties’ de-Stalinisation
throughout the 1970s and early 1980s. The role of Althusserianism in this last pro-
cess is a feature which remains under-explored in recent assessments of the Althus-
serian legacy. An important political discussion of the reception of Althusser ’s
work in Australia and its journey from oppositional political formation to academic
orthodoxy can be found in Althofer 1999.
telos, he argued that ‘the truth of a philosophy lies entirely in its effects’.92 If
the potentially negative consequences which I shall outline remained only
potential in Althusser’s own work, and are therefore, as Michael Sprinker
noted, ‘outcomes for which Althusser cannot be held solely responsible’, it
remains an historical fact that they were developments which ‘his writings
did certainly help to license’, whether these were based upon a faithful read-
ing of the original texts or not.93 Two important potential consequences
of Spinoza’s and Althusser’s critiques can be contrasted in support of this
contention that Althusser’s and Spinoza’s respective totalities are incom-
mensurable. If they appear to repeat well-known objections to Althusser’s
thought, it is hoped that their ‘theoretical’ rather than ‘polemical’ treatment
will allow a more balanced judgement and understanding of the causes
and effects of both Althusser’s work and that of his (more or less faithful)
followers. Further, it is hoped that they will furnish preliminary theses
for future research into the legitimate and illegitimate possible modes of
appropriation of Spinoza by contemporary Marxism.
First, because Spinoza’s Deus sive Natura was an innite totality, its power
was not exhausted by enumerating the various phenomena perceivable by
the human intellect. In other words, it was not the sum of its parts. Human
practices, like all nite entities, were particular nite modications of the one
substance, conceived through one of its different attributes, dependent upon
the one substance for their Being. But Deus sive Natura’s integrity and potency
derived not from these modications, but from itself as the cause of itself
[causa sui]. A social totality, on the other hand, does not possess the same
type of objectivity, nor the same relationship to the phenomena which occur
within it. It possesses no being independent of the particular humans prac-
tices which occur within it, nor does it continue to exist, once those practices
themselves have ceased to exist – in a strict sense, it is the sum total of
its parts. To posit a social totality as bearing to its parts the same causal
relationship as that of Spinoza’s one substance to its modications risks
92
Althusser 1997, p. 4. Montag makes the same point in relation to the Tractatus
Theologico-Politicus: ‘As Spinoza remarked of Scripture, a text is to be judged sacred
or profane, good or evil, not by virtue of what it says, or even its truth, but by
its power to move people to mutual love and support. A philosophical work is
thus always an intervention in a concrete situation and is to be judged by the effects
it produces in this situation.’ (Montag 1998, p. xi).
93
Sprinker 1995, p. 203.
108 Peter Thomas
effacing this important distinction. It disregards the specic ontology

appropriate to a social totality and establishes it as a natural formation
in-and-for-itself, i.e. as possessing a being independent from the human activ-
ities which occur within it. This, in effect, was one of the central objections
raised by Althusser’s opponents to his vision of a structure of structures in
which humans were the mere Träger of structural determinations. In polemi-
cising against ‘organicist’ notions of human agency, it seemed to some critics
that Althusser had, instead, naturalised the social totality. It was no longer a
consequence of human practices, but an objective structure which preceded,
determined and existed independently of them. From the emphasis of pre-
vious Marxism on the social totality being a Kampfplatz of contradictory class
interests, capitalism now seemed to have become a thing, a great Leviathan
brooding over a world which could expect no delivery from its potentate’s
régime.
Second, Spinoza’s refusal to regard the cause of the one substance as
separate from its effects (as did the notion a creator) required him to refute
the complementary notion that there remained potentials of God’s power
yet to be actualised (providence, or a divine plan). Such a notion supposes
a limitation upon God’s power, or a deciency in his being, 94 a situation which
is inconceivable for an absolutely innite being whose essence coincides with
his existence.95 Deus sive Natura was already given in its innity. As Spinoza
argued in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, ‘nature . . . always observes laws
and rules which involve eternal necessity and truth, although they may not
all be known to us, and therefore she keeps a xed and immutable order’.96
It was this proposition which enabled Spinoza to attempt rationally to under-
stand the necessary order of determinations which obtained within the
one substance, viewing them as if from the standpoint of eternity [sub specie
aeternitatis], rather than by taking ‘refuge in the will of God, that is, the
sanctuary of ignorance’.97 The attempt to comprehend a social totality, on the
94
EIApp: ‘if God acts for the sake of an end, he necessarily wants something which
he lacks’.
95
EIDi: ‘By cause of itself I understand that whose essence involves existence, or
that whose nature cannot be conceived except as existing.’ EIP11: ‘God, or a substance
consisting of innite attributes, each of which expresses eternal and innite essence,
necessarily exists.’
96
Spinoza 1951, p. 83.
97
EIApp.
other hand, cannot assume any such plenitude of being. A social totality is
necessarily incomplete, subject to further development and transformation
by the human practices which comprise it, which may possibly, but not
necessarily, involve the realisation of still dormant potentials. Furthermore,
because ‘reection on the forms of human life . . . begins post festum’,98 the
concept of a social totality must always be provisional. Future social forma-
tions, comprising different practices and relationships, may make possible
conceptions of the social whole radically at odds with those produced in our
own epoch, not only in terms of its content, but also of its structure. This is
another way of saying that, because the concept of a social totality is one
of those ‘forms of thought which are socially valid, and therefore objective,
for the relations of production belonging to this historically determined
mode of social production’,99 it necessarily is modelled, in our own time,
on the practices of a capitalist mode of production and its social relations.
To efface this concrete determinant by analysing the social totality as if it
were Spinoza’s one substance, however, risks positing, as having a validity
for social totalities in general, both contents and a structure which are specic
to capitalist social relations and their comprehension in the notion of a
(capitalist) social totality. The nite secretly becomes the model for the innite,
in much the same way as Spinoza argued had been done by the notion that
the divine possessed the human features of an appetite, will and desire. In
effect, these were the charges brought by many of Althusser’s critics: that
he was covertly projecting the historically specic features of capitalism
onto the notion of a social totality in general (particularly in relation to one
interpretation of his theory of the eternity of ideology), and that the social
totality had become a self-contained, unfractured plane of self-afrming,
mutually reinforcing elements and levels to which there was literally
no exterior, not even socialism. ‘The bourgeoisie can be overthrown; the
ascendancy of structural causality is without term’, in the words of Gregory
Elliott’s succinct summary – which left some critics questioning if even the
rst possibility would be realised.100
98
Marx 1976, p. 168.
99
Marx 1976, p. 169.
100
Elliott 1987, pp. 174–5.
110 Peter Thomas
Conclusion
The conclusion to be drawn from this brief consideration of the differences
between Althusser ’s and Spinoza’s critiques is not the restoration of the
Andersonian thesis that Marxists must vigilantly guard against the corruption
of their creed by foreign elements drawn from pre-Marxian metaphysics.
Rather, it is that attempts to reinvigorate contemporary historical material-
ism by drawing upon elements of previous philosophies (or, equally, the
attempt to judge such efforts) will only be successful if they are undertaken
with a full and vigilant consciousness of the historical determinateness of
thought and philosophy. This is merely to restate a thesis which has always
been the foundation of the Marxist approach to the history of ideas, succinctly
encapsulated in a maxim of Fredric Jameson: ‘Always historicise!’
As I have previously noted, one of the distinguishing features of the Marxist
Spinozisms subsequent to and in part inspired by Althusser ’s (such as
Macherey’s, Balibar’s, Negri’s, Tosel’s, Montag’s and others collected in the
volume The New Spinoza) has been precisely such an attempt to produce a
more historically satisfying account of our contemporary relation to Spinoza’s
thought. An assessment of these works and their success in avoiding the
negative consequences which I have argued accompanied Althusser’s detour
via Spinoza will form the subject of a future study. I have dealt at such
length in this study with Anderson’s judgement of the nature of Althusser’s
Spinozism, however, in order to open the space necessary for a fuller and
unprejudiced engagement with these works and Spinoza’s thought more
generally. Given the richness of these works and their exploration of some
of the fundamental philosophical concepts of the Marxist tradition, I believe
that such an engagement is one of the pressing tasks for Anglophone Marxism,
in both its theoretical and activist forms. Whatever the errors or failings in
his initial attempt, Althusser should be remembered as the gure who more
than any other made these researches possible, which is, nally, to recover
another ‘effect’ or ‘truth’ of the Althusserian moment as an important resource
for the contemporary revitalisation of Marxism.
References
Althofer, Jayson 1999, ‘Activist and Theoretical Marxisms: Early Receptions of Althusser
in Australia’, Overland, 155: 56–61.
Althusser, Louis 1976, Essays in Self Criticism, London: NLB.
Althusser, Louis 1977, For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster, London: NLB.
Althusser, Louis 1994, The Future Lasts a Long Time, trans. Richard Veasey, London:
Vintage.
Althusser, Louis 1997, ‘The Only Materialist Tradition, Part 1: Spinoza’, in Montag
and Stolze (eds.) 1997.
Althusser, Louis and Étienne Balibar 1970, Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster, London:
NLB.
Anderson, Perry 1976, Considerations on Western Marxism, London: NLB.
Anderson, Perry 1980, Arguments Within English Marxism, London: Verso.
Balibar, Étienne 1998, Spinoza and Politics, trans. Peter Snowden, London: Verso.
Benjamin, Walter 1970, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, Glasgow: Fontana.
Clarke, Simon, Terry Lovell, et al. (eds.) 1980, One-Dimensional Marxism: Althusser and
the Politics of Culture, London: Allison & Busby.
Colletti, Lucio 1972, From Rousseau to Lenin, trans. John Merrington and Judith White,
London: NLB.
Collier, Andrew 1989, Scientic Realism and Socialist Thought, Hemel Hempstead:
Harvester Wheatsheaf.
Eagleton, Terry 1991, Ideology, London: Verso.
Elliott, Gregory 1987, The Detour of Theory, London: Verso.
Elliott, Gregory (ed.) 1994, Althusser: A Critical Reader, Oxford: Blackwell.
Foucault, Michel 1970, The Order of Things, New York: Vintage.
Hegel, Georg W.F. 1995, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, trans. E.S. Haldane, Lincoln:
Nebraska University Press.
Jameson, Fredric 1981, The Political Unconscious, London: Methuen.
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Kaplan, E. Ann and Michael Sprinker (eds.) 1993, The Althusserian Legacy, London:
Verso.
112 Peter Thomas
Lenin, Vladimir I. 1950, ‘Left-Wing’ Communism, an Infantile Disorder, Moscow: Foreign

Languages Press.
Lenin, Vladimir I.1961, Philosophical Notebooks, Moscow: Foreign Languages Press.
Macherey, Pierre 1998, In a Materialist Way: Selected Essays, edited by Warren Montag,
trans. Ted Stolze, London: Verso.
Marx, Karl 1973, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
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Harmondsworth: Penguin.
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or Intervention?’, in Kaplan & Sprinker (eds.) 1993.
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Verso.
Montag, Warren & Ted Stolze (eds.) 1997, The New Spinoza, Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press.
Negri, Antonio 1991, The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza’s Metaphysics and Politics,
trans. Michael Hardt, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press.
New Left Review (eds.) 1977, Western Marxism: A Critical Reader, London: Verso.
Norris, Christopher 1991, Spinoza and the Origins of Modern Critical Theory, Oxford:
Blackwell.
Smith, Steven B. 1984, Reading Althusser: An Essay on Structural Marxism, Ithaca: Cornell
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Spinoza, Volume 1, Edwin Curley (trans. and ed.), Princeton: Princeton University
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Sprinker, Michael 1995, ‘The Legacies of Althusser ’, Yale French Studies, 88: 201–25.
Thompson, Edward P. 1978, The Poverty of Theory & Other Essays, London: Merlin.
Tosel, André 1997, ‘Superstition and Reading’, in Montag and Stolze (eds.) 1997.
Wood, Ellen Meiksins 1986, The Retreat from Class: A New True Socialism, London: Verso.
Yovel, Yirmiyahu 1989, Spinoza and Other Heretics, Princeton: Princeton University
Press.
Richard B. Day
Pavel V. Maksakovsky:
The Marxist Theory of the Cycle1
In 1929, the Communist Academy published 3,100

copies of The Capitalist Cycle: An Essay on the Marxist
Theory of the Cycle. The author was Pavel V. Maksakov-
sky. His book was published posthumously, for
Maksakovsky had died on 2 November 1928. At the
time of his death, he was twenty-eight years old.
The Library of Congress has a copy of his book,
which is date-stamped 14 March 1930. It is not clear
whether any other copies still exist. Apart from one
article, which appe ared in 1928 in the journal
Bol’shevik, I know of no further published work by
this author.2 His name and his work have been all
but lost. He appears in none of the standard ency-
clopaedias; there seems to be no trace of him on the
Internet; and apart from my own book on Soviet
economic theory from 1917–39,3 I am not aware of
any secondary source that mentions him, including
The History of the Political Economy of Capitalism,
published by Leningrad University in 1989.4
1
For his critical help with this project, I am indebted to DusÏ an Pokorný of the
University of Toronto.
2
Maksakovsky 1928.
3
Day 1981, pp. 130, 133–6, 233, 236.
4
Demin 1989. Michael David-Fox has written a major study of the Institute of Red

116 Richard B. Day
Nevertheless, The Capitalist Cycle is one of the most erudite publications

in Marxist economic theory to appear in the Soviet Union during the rst
two decades after 1917. Maksakovsky’s interpretation of Capital and Theories
of Surplus Value surpassed the efforts of almost all of his better-known Soviet
contemporaries, with the single possible exception of E.A. Preobrazhensky.
Like Preobrazhensky, Maksakovsky was a dialectician who studied Marx rather
than merely quoting him. Not only did he explore Marx’s work ‘from the
inside’, but he was equally familiar with the publications of many other
leading economists of his day. His footnotes reveal a knowledge of M.I.
Tugan-Baranovsky, Otto Bauer, Karl Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg and Rudolf
Hilferding; he commented frequently on important Russian economists
of the 1920s, such as N.D. Kondrat’ev, S.A. Pervushin, V.A. Bazarov and
N. Osinsky; he was also thoroughly familiar with path-breaking Western
literature on the business cycle, including the work of Gustav Cassel, Mentor
Bouniatian, Paul Mombert, Arthur Spiethoff and Wilhelm Roepke. In short,
Maksakovsky was a scholar and an intellectual – just the sort of Bolshevik
who almost certainly would have been purged, like Preobrazhensky, in the
1930s.5
Besides being an impressive scholar, Maksakovsky was also the proto-
type of a Marxist revolutionary. What we know of his biography reads in
parts like a Sergei Eisenstein lm, or the heroic Soviet ction of the 1920s.
He was born in 1900 in the factory town of Ilevo, located in the guberniya
of Nizhegorod in the Volga River basin. His father and three brothers were
metalworkers, but, from 1912–16, the family returned to the land after the
factory where they had been employed closed down. In 1916, they moved to
Yekaterinoslav, in south-central Ukraine. Here, his brothers became involved
in strike activity, which might have contributed to his political education.
When the Ukrainian Rada declared independence in June 1917, Maksakovsky
was recruited into Bolshevik-inspired underground work and joined the party
Professors, where Maksakovsky worked. He did not encounter Maksakovsky in his

research. See David-Fox 1997. The same is true of another careful study of the Institute
by Behrendt 1997.
5
Maksakovsky’s emphasis on the role of consumer demand would have been
enough to cause him ‘political’ difculties as the ve-year plan began (Maksakovsky
1929, pp. 64–7).
On Pavel V. Maksakovsky 117
in 1918. Forced into hiding by an arrest warrant, he resumed party work and
served as a volunteer with the Red Army when it reached Yekatorinoslav
early in 1919. He briey attended a party school in the Ukraine, but then
returned to the Red Army. He fought at Yekatorinoslav and later worked
in the underground in the Poltava region. In October 1919, he was taken
prisoner by Denikin’s forces and sentenced to execution as a ‘Bolshevist
commissar and spy’. After convincing the soldiers who were escorting him
to defect to the Bolsheviks, he eluded the death sentence and survived
to ght against the anarchist forces of Nestor Makhno, serving briey as
chairman of a military-revolutionary committee. Following a bout of typhus,
in 1920 he was sent to Sverdlovsk, in Ukraine, where he worked as instruc-
tor in a party school until 1924. He subsequently taught at the Plekhanov
Institute of the National Economy, and, in 1925, he was invited to join the
Institute of Red Professors. Illness prevented him from delivering a projected
course on Marxism at the Communist Academy, but, in the autumn of 1927,
he participated in a seminar at the Institute of Red Professors dealing with
Marxist economic theory. The notes from that seminar became The Capitalist
Cycle: An Essay on the Marxist Theory of the Cycle.
The most obvious gap in this sparse biographical information (which comes
from the introduction to the book) is just where and when Maksakovsky had
the opportunity for rigorous study of economics and the Marxist classics. No
mention is made of any formal training, which probably implies that his
knowledge of Marx was self-taught during his years as a party instructor.
Whatever the case, there is no doubt that he made a striking impression upon
his colleagues at the Institute of Red Professors. The leader of the seminar
that he attended was A. Mendel’son. In a brief foreword to The Capitalist
Cycle, Mendel’son indicated that the manuscript was unnished and that he,
as editor, did take it upon himself to make minor changes. Although he also
hinted at some critical reservations, his preface concluded with warm praise:
The work is written so clearly, and with such talent, that it demonstrates
comrade Maksakovsky’s ability to reach such an elevated theoretical level
as to make even his errors interesting and instructive. The high theoretical
tone, the militant revolutionary spirit that permeates this profoundly
theoretical work, and its excellent form – all of these attributes lead us to
include The Capitalist Cycle among the very best books written in recent
118 Richard B. Day
times concerning questions of the general theory of reproduction. In the

person of comrade Maksakovsky, who died so young, we have lost a
formidable Marxist theoretical force.6
The most outstanding feature of Maksakovsky’s book is his exemplary grasp

of Marx’s dialectical method and its implications for the logical movement
of Capital. Like Hegel, Marx regarded the abstract category as a view of the
part that presupposes the concept of the whole. In A Contribution to the Critique
of Political Economy, Marx wrote that ‘The concrete concept is concrete because
it is a synthesis of many determinations, thus representing the unity of diverse
aspects. It appears therefore in reasoning as a summing up, a result, and not
as the starting point, although it is the real point of origin . . .’ Exchange-
value is an abstraction from ‘an already existing concrete organic whole’.7
Labour, as one of the most abstract categories of political economy, does
not exist ‘as such’ or ‘sans phrase’ but is always a product of historical con-
ditions and acquires validity ‘only for and within the framework of these
conditions’.8
Marx’s point was as old as Aristotle’s Politics or Plato’s Republic: the whole
is logically and historically prior to the parts. In Marx’s view, the proper
method of political economy is to move from the existence of the whole to
the parts, and then to discover logically how the parts, in their interaction,
continuously and spontaneously reconstitute the whole. The whole that
strives to form capitalist society is capital itself, with each capital aiming for
its own universality. But, in terms of dialectic, each capital is merely for-itself,
and the objective whole of capitalist society can never rise to the level of a
self-determining universal. For Hegel, the entire movement of history is swept
up into the self-consciousness of Spirit, which, in The Philosophy of Right,
knows both the categories of political economy and the institutions of the
market to be its own objectications. The system of needs is an objectication
of the same Spirit that is expressed in the laws of the state, which in turn
afrm the ethical signicance of private property and the market. Hegelian
Spirit becomes in-and-for-itself as concrete totality.
6
Maksakovsky 1929, p. 6.
7
Marx 1970, p. 206.
8
Marx 1970, p. 210; See also Marx 1963, p. 93.
For Marx, the story has no such happy ending: in capitalist society there is
no self-conscious Reason that maintains the integrity of the whole; instead, the
laws of the market operate like the laws of nature. The whole is law-governed,
but the ‘reason’ that is expressed in market laws is always articulated after
the fact: ‘In capitalist society, . . . where social reason always asserts itself
only post festum, great disturbances may and must constantly occur.’9 In the
form of machinery, capital is the objectication of both living labour and
the ‘scientic idea’, but individual labourers are subordinate to ‘the objective
unity of the machinery’. In the Grundrisse, Marx says the totality of labour is
‘not the work of the individual worker’: social or combined labour is always
merely in-itself because it is co-ordinated externally by alien forces.10 Abstract
labour will become concrete when individual labourers (a) self-consciously
co-ordinate their efforts ex ante, through a plan, and (b) appropriate for them-
selves the reason that is objectied in xed capital. Then, each individual,
as one of the associated producers, will determine his own role in the self-
determining whole: self-conscious reason will inform individual actions,
and social labour will be the self-conscious ‘combination of labour as subject
as well as object’.11 A concrete whole will require conscious reintegration
of living labour with embodied labour; and socialisation of the means of
production will be the condition for the self-determined social labour of the
associated producers, who will nally become both the actors and the authors
of their own historical drama.12
It is with this dialectic of the whole and the parts, moving in the direction
of revolution and social planning, that Pavel Maksakovsky begins his analy-
sis of the capitalist cycle. He tells us that ‘The capitalist economy is split
into countless capitals, and the system has no single subject – it is not a
consciously established teleological whole . . .’13 At the same time, he writes:
. . . Despite its apparent incoherence, the capitalist economy, like any

other, represents a single whole that is composed of closely connected, inter-
acting parts. The complex of individual capitals manifests from within itself
a number of objective moments that oppose each other as the expressions
9
Marx 1957, p. 315.
10
Marx 1973, p. 470.
11
Marx 1973, p. 471.
12
Marx 1963, p. 98.
13
120 Richard B. Day
of an irreversible, conditioning law. From the close interaction of these

individual capitals arises the movement of social capital as a whole, which
in turn dissolves into these distinct circuits as its constituent links. 14
Social capital is objectively a whole, but not subjectively. It periodically

dissolves into an abstract disarray because its ‘reason’ is foreign to each indi-
vidual capital. The law of value, articulating that reason as the requirement
of proportional reproduction, afrms its ‘right’ only after disproportionali-
ties have already matured in the form of a cyclical crisis.15 As Marx said
in Grundrisse, a universal self-co-ordinating capital is a ‘non-thing’.16 Each
capital confronts other capitals as alien to itself, and in their ‘reciprocal
repulsion’ all of them are held together by the law of value, acting through
the ultimate force of cyclical crises. The result is what Hegel called a ‘bad
innity’; that is, an endless cyclical movement that is never transcended in
universal self-determination.17 Marx’s summary of this movement describes
the thematic contradictions that are the starting point for Maksakovsky’s The
Capitalist Cycle:
. . . Competition is . . . the inner nature of capital, . . . appearing in and realised

as the reciprocal interaction of many capitals with one another, the inner
tendency as external necessity. (Capital exists and can only exist as many
capitals, and its self-determination therefore appears as their reciprocal
interaction with one another.) Capital is just as much the constant positing
as the suspension of proportionate production. The existing proportion always
has to be suspended by the creation of surplus values and the increase of
productive forces. But this demand, that production should be expanded
simultaneously and at once in the same proportion, makes external demands
upon capital that in no way arise out of itself; at the same time, the
14
Maksakovsky 1929, p. 47
15
16
Marx 1973, p. 421.
17
In Poverty of Philosophy, Marx comments: ‘The production relations of every
society form a whole.’ (Marx 1963, p. 93). He adds: ‘In practical life we nd not only
competition, monopoly and the antagonism between them, but also the synthesis of
the two, which is not a formula, but a movement. Monopoly produces competition,
competition produces monopoly. Monopolies are made from competition; competi-
tors become monopolists. . . . The synthesis is of such a character that monopoly can
only maintain itself by continually entering into the struggle of competition.’ (Marx
1963, p. 128)
departure from the given proportion in one branch of production drives all
of them out of it, and in unequal proportions.18
Circulating in the form of commodities, individual capitals may or may

not nd each other in the proportions needed for expanded reproduction.
Marx says this ‘inner necessity of moments which belong together, and their
indifferent, independent existence towards one another, are already a foun-
dation of contradictions’.19 Maksakovsky’s intention is to demonstrate how
the possibility of crisis becomes an objective necessity through the dispro-
portionalities of expanded reproduction. Capitalism is a system of moving
contradictions. Maksakovsky gives us a dynamic picture of these contradic-
tions as they manifest themselves through law-governed interactions.
Georg Lukács once remarked that bourgeois thought could not even
contemplate the dialectical movement of history, for to do so would be to
acknowledge a future beyond capitalism. According to Lukács, bourgeois
economists reason in terms of general equilibrium because the ‘ultimate
barrier to the economic thought of the bourgeoisie is the crisis’.20 Looking
at recent developments in economic theory, Maksakovsky acknowledged
that this conceptual inability to deal with crisis had given way to a new
concentration on the theory of the conjuncture. He understood this term
to encompass both broad movements of the capitalist system over time and
also the intersection of economic forces that dene conditions at any given
moment.21 Gustav Cassel proposed that the theory of the conjuncture should
regard all uctuations of capitalism as ‘normal’ and look for ways to contain
them within the existing social order. If capitalism were conceived in dynamic
terms, crises would be ideologically and semantically neutralised; if adequate
18
Marx 1973, p. 414. In Theories of Surplus Value, II, Marx added: ‘. . . [A]lthough
the proportion of capital employed in individual spheres is equalised by a continuous
process, the continuity of this process itself presupposes the constant disproportion
which it has continuously, often violently, to even out.’ (Marx, 1975, p. 492).
19
Marx 1973, p. 415.
20
Lukács 1971, p. 105.
21
Maksakovsky dened the conjuncture as ‘the form of expression of the activity
of all the categories of the capitalist economy in their interpenetration and mutual
inuence – an activity that is objectied in the cyclical dynamic of the capitalist whole.
The conjuncture includes the activity of both the fundamental categories and of more
partial categories that are distributed on the axes of the former, in circumstances where
it is precisely the activity of the partial categories that impart to the conjuncture its
empirical, “corporal” existence.’ (Maksakovsky 1929, p. 22)
122 Richard B. Day
market prognoses could be made, they might also be neutralised in fact.

Maksakovsky saw the political rationale of the new theories in an attempt to
establish ‘organised capitalism’. He summarised the ambitions of Western
conjuncture theorists this way:
. . . Every capitalist will have the ability to anticipate in advance the con-
sequences of his economic activities and consciously avoid both errors of
judgement and excessive enthusiasm. The powerful [institutional] levers
of the capitalist system – the state, trusts and so forth – are to become
equally powerful levers for implementing a deliberate conjunctural policy
in the interests of the national economy. The aggregate effect of these
co-ordinating efforts is to lead to ‘moderation’ of the conjuncture, to curtail
its amplitude and overcome its specic phenomenon – the crisis – which is
regarded as a blight on an otherwise ‘wholesome’ system. 22
To Maksakovsky, the newly fashionable talk of conjuncture theory showed

that bourgeois economists were moving beyond abstract mathematical
ideals of equilibrium and theoretical models of comparative statics. In that
respect, they appeared to be catching up with Marxism. However, there
remained fundamental methodological differences. Bourgeois writers began
with empirical data and then attempted inductively to formulate a theory.
Cassel wrote that he intended to ‘proceed from the concrete to the abstract’,
looking rst at data on industrial production and then turning to other data
concerning prices, incomes and capital markets, hoping to nd their inter-
connections.23 Maksakovsky replied that ‘The theory of the conjuncture must
be constructed mainly deductively.’24 This did not mean ignoring empirical
indicators; it did mean that their signicance could only be grasped in terms
of fundamental laws.
Cassel’s focus on the so-called ‘concrete’ evidence was itself an ‘abstraction’,
a one-sided xation on surface phenomena.25 Marx, in contrast, had employed
an ‘abstract-analytical method’, a dialectical method, which theoretically
grasped capitalism in its ‘pure form’ and then used the reproduction models
to explain the inner forces of contradiction that ultimately determined the
22
23
24
25
surface phenomena. 26 Marx’s analysis moved through different levels of

abstraction, from the simplest categories to the more complex, exploring and
explaining laws and contradictions at each level and ultimately arriving at
comprehension of the whole as the true concrete concept. The existence of
capitalism at any given moment was explained by the dialectical logic that
formed its materially objectied contradictions. The whole movement was
what determined the parts, whereas bourgeois conjuncture theorists thought
knowledge of the parts could explain and then regulate the whole. For
Maksakovsky, the real challenge for a theory of the conjuncture was to move
from the contradictory reason that formed capitalism to its specic mani-
festations in time and space: that is, from its inherent logical dynamic to the
historical surface of the objectied system.
Strictly speaking, Maksakovsky should be interpreted as an Hegelian
Marxist. He avoided the materialistic reductionism of the Second International
and followed Marx in treating the law of value, together with all the subor-
dinate laws of the capitalist mode of production, as expressions of the ‘spirit’
(or ‘reason’) of the system, which dialectically imposes spontaneous cyclical
order.27 If this was taken to be the immanent truth of Marx’s method, then it
followed that capitalism resembled a moving picture whose truth could never
be apprehended in the statistical ‘photographs’ of bourgeois theory.28 The true
object of conjunctural analysis was the ‘logically worked out economic body of
capitalism as a whole’.29 ‘Thus the problem of the conjuncture, the problem
of the specic form of capitalism’s dynamic, is above all the problem of the
developed activity of the law-governed character of the capitalist economy.’30
The principle of dialectical movement was fundamental for Marx, yet
in Maksakovsky’s day some of the best-known exponents of Marxism were
curiously attracted to the concept of equilibrium. Marx occasionally used the
term ‘equilibrium’ in a cognitive sense (although he spoke more frequently
of economic ‘proportionality’), but his followers often gave the appearance
of speaking of equilibrium in a normative sense. Karl Kautsky anticipated
26
27
Karl Kautsky, in contrast, proposed to explain capitalism in terms of a Darwinian
economic evolution and the historical movement of ‘things’. See Salvadori 1979,
p. 26.
28
29
Maksakovsky 1929, p. 21 (my italics).
30
Ibid. (my italics).
124 Richard B. Day
that capitalist evolution might issue in a higher stage of ‘ultra-imperialism’,

which might avoid the catastrophes of imperialist wars; Rudolf Hilferding
theorised a condition of ‘organised capitalism’ as an abstract and ideal –
but politically unattainable – alternative to cyclical economic crises; and
Nikolai Bukharin – one of the most inuential Bolshevik intellectuals, with
numerous adherents in the Institute of Red Professors – even proposed a
comprehensive Marxist sociology oriented upon the concepts of equilibrium
and disequilibrium between a social ‘system’ and its natural environment.
In Bukharin’s view, simple reproduction represented ‘stable equilibrium
between society and nature’; expanded reproduction involved ‘unstable
equilibrium with positive indication’. 31 For Maksakovsky, this tendency to
hypostatise equilibrium was antithetical to Marxism and represented an
incomprehensible misreading of Capital. In real capitalism, he remarked, ‘there
is nothing that is static’.32 His primary motivation in The Capitalist Cycle was
to restore Marxist dialectics to economic theory.
Although it may seem paradoxical, even the undertaking to work on a
theory of the cycle was a surprising anomaly in the Soviet Union. The
most active Soviet economists in the 1920s were either reecting upon the
possibilities of planning or else preoccupied with the political implications
of day-to-day developments in the capitalist countries. The only serious
debates over cycle theory were provoked by N.D. Kondrat’ev, author of the
famous theory of ‘long waves’ and by far the most inuential ‘bourgeois’
conjuncture theorist in the Soviet Union. Kondrat’ev’s view of economic
methodology provided an important foil that helped to focus Maksakovsky’s
thoughts. Kondrat’ev differentiated between essential economic categories,
which could be conceived outside of time, and their dynamic movement,
which occurred within time.33 With regard to movement in time, he followed
Alfred Marshall and referred to conceptually distinct levels of equilibrium,
dened in terms of different periods for the adjustment of market forces.34
The long-term period was captured in the statistical trend-line, about which
shorter-term cyclical deviations could be plotted and measured.
31
Bukharin 1969, p. 119. Compare Maksakovsky 1929, pp. 93–6. For a critical
analysis of Bukharin’s methodology, see Day 1976a and my introduction in Day 1982.
32
33
Maksakovsky 1929, p. 23. See also Kondrat’ev 1924, p. 350.
34
Kondrat’ev and Oparin 1928, pp. 57–60. See also Kondrat’ev 1991.
By treating the trend-line as capitalism’s long-term ‘moving equilibrium’,

Kondrat’ev enraged Marxist critics who understood him to imply that
capitalism would last forever, regardless of cycles.35 However, Maksakovsky
was also concerned with another issue; that is, the ‘metaphysical’ distinction
between static categories and their movement. In his analysis, the fundamental
categories contained movement within themselves, for they were inherently
contradictory. Marx analysed the categories ‘at high levels of abstraction’,
but he never detached them from their law-governed movement. 36 In
Maksakovsky’s words,
It is the study of each category, as a component part of an intricate com-

plex of interactions, which makes it possible to follow the developed
activity of the whole complex. This is what reveals the dynamism that
is emphasised in each category. Even a high level of abstraction never
paralyses that dynamism . . . [W]hat emerges before us is a single system of
laws, which are interwoven and, as they reveal themselves, express the
developed contradictions of the capitalist economy in its real movement.
These laws are what determine the specic form of movement. 37
For Marx, the concept of equilibrium described an actual state of affairs only
for a eeting moment immediately following a crisis: ‘The crises are always
but momentary and forcible solutions of the existing contradictions. They are
violent eruptions which for a time restore the disturbed equilibrium.’38 However,
the moment one set of disproportionalities was resolved, a new set emerged:
‘the proportionality of the individual branches of production springs as a
continual process from disproportionality’.39 Capitalism was inconceivable
apart from the endless rupturing of input-output relations between inter-
dependent branches of the market economy – not to mention production and
consumer demand – and the resulting inability of capital to move smoothly
through the necessary phases of its reproduction.
The Capitalist Cycle is a study of the law-governed movement of capital
through the sequential and logically connected stages of expanded repro-
duction. As Maksakovsky conceives it, a correct theory of the conjuncture
35
For an outline of Kondrat’ev’s theory and the debates it provoked, see Day 1976b.
36
37
Maksakovsky 1929, p. 21. See also Maksakovsky 1928.
38
Marx 1962, p. 244. See also Maksakovsky 1929, p. 80.
39
Marx 1962, p. 251.
126 Richard B. Day
must begin where Marx left off. Marx provided all of the elements for such
a theory; he discerned the salient categories of commodity, use-value, exchange-
value, price of production, market price, rate of prot, etc.; and by abstracting
from the more complex categories, he also – in principle – explained reproduc-
tion with the schemes in Volume II of Capital. The remaining task was to add
back into the reproduction schemes the higher categories from which Marx
abstracted. Maksakovsky does this by dividing his book into three chapters.
The rst deals with issues of economic methodology, some of which we have
been considering here; the second – which I have translated – explores the
‘depths’ of capitalist economy in the contradictory movement of production
and reproduction, both in physical and in value terms; the third turns to what
Maksakovsky calls the ‘dancing shadows at the ghostly heights of the money
market’.40 Since the phenomena of money, credit, and nancial markets are
treated as having ‘quantitative’ rather than ‘qualitative’ importance – that is,
they reect and amplify but do not themselves cause the cycle – no essential
harm is done to Maksakovsky’s exposition by translating only the second
chapter.
The theoretical elegance of Maksakovsky’s thought will speak for itself.
One of his most striking conclusions is that the price system, which arti-
culates and imposes what Marx called capitalism’s ‘social reason’, is in
fact a totally misleading guide for expanded reproduction. Today’s prices –
leaving aside, for the moment, speculation – are always a kind of ‘snapshot’
of the consequences of past actions, some recent, some extending back over
the entire cycle to the time when xed capital was originally devalued and
the post-crisis renewal began. But, if capitalism is, in its very nature, a system
of movement, then today’s prices – whenever today happens to be – will
at best be a problematic basis upon which to determine future production.
If all capitalists accumulate in response to the immediate incentive of
today’s rising market prices, then, Maksakovsky argues, they will all even-
tually face the unforeseeable consequences of their individual actions in
the recurrent social catastrophe of overproduction, unemployment and
crisis. As Maksakovsky put it, the ‘language’ of the market and market prices
contradicts the ‘language’ of production. The rst speaks in the present; the
40
Maksakovsky 1929, p. 21; See also p. 23.
second objectively summarises the past and projects the future. In a concrete
whole, social reason would speak another language entirely: the language
of a plan, determined by the associated producers. From this perspective,
the idea of ‘organised capitalism’ was more than an idea; it was the ideal
anticipation of an objectively necessary form of social self-organisation that
lay beyond capitalism, in which the immediacy of the market would give
way to the self-mediation of a socialist community.41
The historical stages from simple commodity production, to industrial
capitalism, to socialist planning, were demarcated for Maksakovsky by the
expansion of xed capital as technologically objectied reason. In Hegel’s
early work, Spirit rst rationally appropriates nature through language,
‘as the name-giving power’,42 then through the tools of manual labour,
and then through self-acting machinery, whose organising force is objectied
consciousness.43 Marx followed Hegel in speaking of modern, ‘self-acting’
technologies as
products of human industry; natural material transformed into organs of

human will over nature, or of human participation in nature. They are organs
of the human brain, created by the human hand; the power of knowledge,
objectied. The development of xed capital indicates to what degree
general social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what
degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come
under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accord-
ance with it.44
One of the more striking features of Maksakovsky’s theory is the centrality

of successive technological revolutions, an emphasis that he shared with
Kondrat’ev but for different reasons. In Kondrat’ev’s case, technology advances
solely in response to objective forces of competition. Maksakovsky agrees
that the nal, dening characteristic of each cycle is movement to a new level
of technology. But, for him, there is a higher rational meaning to material
contradictions: that is, the advance of reason itself in the direction of social
planning. The law of value negates old technology through moral-technical
41
42
Hegel 1983, p. 89.
43
Hegel 1983, p. 121.
44
Marx 1973, p. 706.
128 Richard B. Day
wear, and new technology incorporates the ‘lessons’ of each cyclical depres-
sion45 when ‘the “spirit” of value’ abandons obsolescent xed capital.46
This larger movement of historical reason embraces particular cycles and
ultimately lays down the condition that ‘the only way out is to pass to the
next level of technology’.47 ‘Thus, the beginning of a new cycle is a new
technological level, which is “created” by the law of value in its capitalist
form and causes a new “cyclical” stage of capitalism to unfold.’48 Beyond this
spontaneous activity of the law of value, in its capitalist form, lies socialist
planning and the ultimate ability to determine the objectications of social
labour through rational foresight.
In contrast, Maksakovsky sees the capitalist cycle being immediately deter-
mined by the effects of past actions, articulated through today’s market prices.
Bourgeois exponents of rational markets and ‘rational expectations’ will not
be impressed by Maksakovsky’s method, his argument, or his conclusion.
It is true, even in the context of a market, that future expectations must
be added to the effects of past decisions in order to have a comprehensive
picture of what drives capital accumulation. However, it must also be empha-
sised that Maksakovsky’s argument does incorporate ‘rational’ expectations:
the difference is that they are the expectations of history, not of individual
market actors. His point is that individual expectations, even if taken in
their totality, can never be rational so long as they are formed by the imme-
diacy of market prices, which continuously contradict the logical necessity
inherent in the law of value.
It is one thing, however, to criticise the irrationality of the price system,
another to assume that planning will necessarily achieve the triumph of
reason. Conspicuous by its absence from Maksakovsky’s work is any com-
mentary on the laws of planning or the political institutions required to
insure social self-determination. The starting point of The Capitalist Cycle is
the observation that capitalism is not a ‘consciously established teleological
whole’;49 throughout all of the ensuing argument there lurks the Hegelian
conviction (transmitted through Marx’s Capital) that the total movement
45
46
Maksakovsky 1929, p. 90. See also p. 96.
47
Maksakovsky 1929, p. 89. See also p. 97.
48
49
of history does have both a telos and a logos. This conviction imparted
a powerful logic to Maksakovsky’s critique of capitalism, but it may also
have occluded his insight into the catastrophic potential of totally centralised
planning. Writing on the eve of the First Five-Year Plan, Maksakovsky expressed
no presentiment of the technical complexities involved in producing tens
of millions of products according to a single plan; nor did he anticipate the
political-ethical dilemmas involved in deciding what to produce and how,
once the mechanism of market prices had been set aside. Had fatal illness
not intervened, he might have turned to these issues in exciting ways. On
the other hand, the very incisiveness of his reason would almost certainly
have led him afoul of Stalinism.
In both its achievements and its limitations, Maksakovsky’s work expresses
what he himself called ‘the spirit of the time’.50 To understand the apparent
‘stabilisation’ of capitalism in the 1920s, and to relate capitalism’s new
‘organisational forms’ to the Leninist theory of imperialism as ‘dying’ capi-
talism – these were matters not merely of theoretical interest, but also of ‘direct
practical importance for the revolutionary struggle of the Western proletariat
and for the existence of our soviet system’.51 By comparison with Maksakovsky’s
time, our own seems – as Max Weber would say – disenchanted and devoid
of clear ‘spiritual’ purpose. Soviet-style state-‘socialism’ has collapsed; and
globalised capitalism proliferates new technologies at the same time as nance
capital strives to escape the previous connes of its physical embodiment,
endlessly multiplying what Maksakovsky called its ‘dancing shadows at the
ghostly heights of the money market’.52
In these circumstances, we should not expect the laws of capitalism to
‘speak’ today just as they did to Maksakovsky. An economy characterised by
‘high technology’, interventionist states, technocratic monetary authorities, a
vastly expanded service industry and electronically mediated ‘globalisation’,
can hardly be expected to conform perfectly to the movement that Maksakovsky
saw in an earlier stage of industrial capitalism, which was determined by
heavy manufacturing. Nevertheless, the speculative excesses of the dot.com
bubble, together with the multi-billion dollar write-offs of the telecom and
50
51
Ibid.
52
130 Richard B. Day
bre-optic giants, make it perfectly clear that the ‘new economy’ still contains
the logical contradictions of the ‘old’. Capital accumulation still determines
the cycle, and the cycle still asserts its tyranny over those who would escape
from the laws of capitalist reproduction. If there remains truth to be found
in Marx’s dialectic, we might better understand today’s afictions by recon-
sidering Maksakovsky’s account of their logical and historical origins.
References
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i kon’yunktury’, Sotsialisticheskoe Khozyaistvo, 2.
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‘Nauka’.
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lated by John Rothschild, London: NLB.
Pavel V. Maksakovsky1
The General Theory of the Cycle
The problem of real reproduction2

We have [. . .] said that the problem of the con-
juncture is directly associated with the problem of
social reproduction. The theory of the conjuncture,
accordingly, continues the theory of reproduction
and represents its nal chapter.3 These are two suc-
cessive stages in the elaboration of a single problem:
the movement of the capitalist system as a whole.
In terms of its fundamental principles, Marx solved
the problem of the movement of the capitalist whole.
First, he demonstrated the close connection of
every individual capital with the vast multitude
of others that condition its existence. The capitalist
economy is split into countless capitals, and the
system has no single subject – it is not a consciously
established teleological whole, although the existence
and development of this intricate complex does
1
[Except where otherwise indicated, footnotes and textual insertions in square
brackets are the translator’s.]
2
[Maksakovsky leaves monetary phenomena to the next chapter of his book, which
is not translated here.]
3
[The ‘the theory of reproduction’ refers to the reproduction schemes in Capital, II;
the ‘theory of the conjuncture’ refers to ‘real’ reproduction.]

134 Pavel V. Maksakovsky
display the presence and operation of several objective laws. Every category
in the Marxist system of economics is [theoretically embraced by laws]4
that are logically derived through abstraction from the real movement of
the entire capitalist complex. Having established in Volume I [of Capital] the
fundamental laws that constitute the system’s foundation, and having shown
the inevitable connection between capitalist ‘atoms’ and the principles involved,
in Volume II Marx gave a more concrete picture of how this connection is
realised and the interdependence that results.
Every industrial capital exists simultaneously in three parallel stages through
which it moves continuously. One part assumes the monetary form and
confronts the world of commodities, which becomes the next form of its
embodiment. This is the circuit of money capital. Another part of the same
capital, consisting of means of production, is subject to the action of living
human labour and ‘creates the mystery’ of growth on the part of value that
has been advanced [as wages]. This is the circuit of productive capital. The
third part, taking the form of commodities that strive to be transformed
into money, represents the circuit of commodity capital. Each of these stages
presupposes, as its necessary condition, an intimate connection between
all the separate capitals; to be more exact, each stage is a result of this con-
nection.5 Thus any individual capital, in all the phases of its circulation, directly
merges with the movement of other capitals to form the market circuit. It
is through a seeming chaos of ‘fortuitous’ encounters between commodities
and money that the real movement of the capitalist economy occurs. Only in
the productive phase is capital ‘autonomous’, but this independence is also
deeply conditioned. Insofar as the continuous ow of capitalist production
is determined by the ‘normal’ movement of the whole complex of capitals
in their ‘circulation’ phases, which, in turn, furnish productive capital with
4
[Maksakovsky’s text says ‘Every category . . . is a theoretically known law . . .’
Since a category cannot be a law, I have substituted the formulation in square
brackets.]
5
[In Capital, II, Marx writes: ‘The actual circuit of industrial capital in its con-
tinuity is . . . the unity of all its three circuits. But it can be such a unity only if all the
different parts of capital can go through the successive stages of the circuit, can pass
from one phase, from one functional form to another, so that the industrial capital,
being the whole of all these parts, exists simultaneously in its various phases and
functions and thus describes all three circuits at the same time. The succession [das
Nacheinander] of these parts is here governed by their co-existence [das Nebeneinander]’
(Marx 1957, p. 103).]
The General Theory of the Cycle 135
its objectied and human elements, the very possibility of growth on the part
of advanced value is determined by the coexistence and unique combination
of the entire complex of individual capitals. Thus, despite its apparent inco-
herence, the capitalist economy, like any other, represents a single whole
that is composed of closely connected, interacting parts. The complex of
individual capitals manifests from within itself a number of objective moments
that oppose each other as the expressions of an irreversible, conditioning law.
From the close interaction of these individual capitals arises the movement
of social capital as a whole, which in turn dissolves into these distinct circuits
as its constituent links.
Having established the concept of social capital and its circulation, Marx
pointed to the existence of a denite coherence in the movement of social
capital through all of its phases. Above all, there is a perfectly clear spatial
pattern connecting the multitude of enterprises that constitute separate
rungs on the ladder of production. However, ‘the spatial coexistence that
determines continuity of production only exists thanks to the movement of
capital’s parts as they successively pass through their different stages. Spatial
coexistence is itself merely the result of a sequence in terms of time.’6
It follows that for a ‘normal’ ow of social circulation to occur, it is not
enough for the coal industry to exist together with a metallurgical industry
and an enormous number of other industries, all of which are connected
by market links between branches. This condition merely guarantees the
formal possibility of social capital’s transition from one phase to the next. It
is also necessary for all phases of every individual capital to follow one
another sequentially, without interruption or delay. This requirement is
no less important, and its disruption represents a phenomenon unique to a
capitalist economy. ‘The rst metamorphosis of one capital must correspond
to the second metamorphosis of the other – says Marx – the departure of
one capital from the production process must correspond to the return to
the production process of another capital.’7 Any delay disrupts the complex
mechanism of social circulation. ‘Thus . . . for example, if a commodity cannot
6
Marx 1957, p. 103. [For convenience, I give page references to English-language
editions listed at the end of this essay. Where there are minor differences between the
Russian and English translations, I often follow the Russian text used by Maksakovsky.]
7
Marx 1975, pp. 510–11.
be sold and the movement C’ – M’ is interrupted for one part, then the
circulation of this part is interrupted and it is not replaced by the means of
its reproduction; the succeeding parts, which emerge from the process of
production in the form of C’, nd the change of their functions blocked by
their predecessors. If such a condition lasts for some time, production
contracts and the whole process comes to a halt. Every stoppage in the sequence
of movements by the parts leads to disorder in their spatial coexistence; every
stoppage in one stage brings with it interruption of the whole circulation . . .’8
At this stage of the analysis, Marx already establishes the inevitability
of interruptions in social reproduction and the ensuing crisis, which, for
present purposes, arises from discontinuities in the sequence whereby
capitals move through their successive phases.9 This inevitability appears
much more clearly in the following stage – the theory of social reproduction.
Beginning with the fact of capital’s uninterrupted circulation, law-governed
relationships make themselves felt between the separate parts of social
production. These relationships are conditions for the uninterrupted devel-
opment of the system, and their disruption is reected in the inevitable
suspension of social circulation.
The problem that had to be resolved is this: ‘How is the capital that is
consumed in production replaced, in terms of value, out of the annual
product (out of C’ – P.M.),10 and how does the movement of this replacement
relate to consumption of surplus-value by the capitalists and of wages by the
8
Marx 1957, p. 103.
9
[Maksakovsky’s reference to ‘inevitability’ is not really appropriate at this
stage, as he subsequently makes clear. Discussing ‘the falling apart of purchase and
sale’, Marx dealt only with ‘the general possibility of crisis’: ‘The general, abstract
possibility of crisis denotes no more than the most abstract form of crisis, without
content, without a compelling motivating factor. Sale and purchase may fall apart.
They thus represent potential crisis and their coincidence always remains a critical
factor for the commodity. The transition from one to the other may, however, proceed
smoothly. The most abstract form of crisis (and therefore the formal possibility
of crisis) is thus the metamorphosis of the commodity itself; the contradiction of
exchange-value and use-value, and furthermore of money and commodity, comprised
within the unity of the commodity, exists in metamorphosis only as an involved
movement. The factors which turn this possibility of crisis into [an actual] crisis are
not contained in this form itself; it only implies that the framework for a crisis exists’
(Marx 1975, p. 509. See also pp. 513–14).]
10
[The initials P.M. occur frequently in the translation and indicate insertions by
Maksakovsky.]
labourers?’11 This formulation of the problem embraced reproduction of

the materially objectied framework of capitalist production, both in its
necessary value relationships and in its corresponding natural form (with-
out which capital cannot grow in value); it also included reproduction of
capitalist relationships themselves – that is, reproduction of the class of
capitalists on the one hand, and the working class on the other.
Marx solved this problem of the uninterrupted development of the
capitalist whole on both a constant and an expanding scale. The key was
to subdivide social production under two headings: production of means
of production (Department I), and production of means of consumption
(Department II). The solution involved ascertaining denite value relations
between the separate functional components of both Departments. For
simple reproduction, this basic ‘proportionality’ was expressed in the
formula v 1+s1=c 2; for expanded reproduction, it was v 1+s1>c 2. In the rst
case [simple reproduction], if the newly created value in Department I
were less than the constant capital of Department II, then the latter could
not fully assume the natural form that was needed in order for it to function
productively; in the opposite circumstance, a certain portion of the income
of Department I could not be consumed. In the second case (expanded repro-
duction), ‘all the new variable capital of Department I, and that Department’s
portion of surplus-value subject to non-productive consumption, must be
equal to the new constant capital of Department II’.12 Disruption of these
conditions would inevitably cause overproduction, an interruption in cir-
culation and a crisis.
Together with these basic relations, in the course of his analysis, Marx
also unveiled a number of more limited ‘proportionalities’. To begin with,
there must be a certain relationship between the scale of production of
life’s necessities and of luxury items: ‘the v that is laid out in the production
of luxuries is equal in value (assuming simple reproduction – P.M.) to a
corresponding portion of s, produced in the form of necessities of life,
and hence must be smaller than the whole of this s’.13 For analysis of the con-
juncture, enormous importance attaches to a second partial proportionality
11
Marx, Capital, II, p. 393.
12
Bukharin 1972, p. 159 [For the Russian edition see Bukharin 1928, p. 10.]
13
Marx 1957, p. 408.
revealed by Marx – between the xed capital that wears out each year and the
newly applied xed capital. In simple reproduction, ‘a xed component part of
constant capital II, which is reconverted into money to the full extent of its
value and therefore must be renewed each year in natura (section 1), should
be equal to the annual depreciation of the other component part of constant
capital II, which continues to function in its old natural form’.14
These ‘proportionalities’ further subdivide into more particular ones
between separate branches of production. In their totality they determine
the possibility of uninterrupted movement of the capitalist system, or its
‘moving equilibrium’, when the scale of production is either constant or
expanding. But such a state of ‘moving equilibrium’ is merely a theoretically
conceivable state of affairs, not only for capitalist production as a whole, but
also for each of its individual branches at any particular time. Hence, the
analysis of simple and expanded reproduction provided by Marx is not
adequate for representing the real course of capitalist reproduction as it occurs
at any given moment.15 In both value and physical terms, Marx established a
network of lawful relations that permeate the moving system and determine
the very possibility of this complex movement. Nevertheless, at this stage of
the analysis he abstracted from the inevitable disruptions of these ‘propor-
tionalities’. He based his analysis on the following postulates: 1) exchange
of commodities according to their value; 2) unchanging values for the
component parts of productive capital; 3) absence of growth in the organic
composition of capital; 4) exclusion of the inuence of credit (both on the
14
Marx 1957, p. 464. [Marx is noting that different elements of xed capital have
different life spans and that xed capital depreciates over an extended period. This
means that some capitalists are continuously setting aside a portion of current
revenues in depreciation accounts, anticipating the time when future physical replace-
ment becomes necessary. If some capitalists take money capital out of circulation, and
these savings are not offset by other capitalists’ investments of previously accumu-
lated money capital, ‘There would be a crisis – a crisis in production – in spite of
reproduction on an unchanging scale.’ (Marx 1957, p. 467). See the analysis of expanded
reproduction in Chapter 21 of Capital, II. For a discussion, see Day 1979–80.]
15
[Like Marx, Maksakovsky will use the theoretical concept of equilibrium to explain
real disequilibrium, or disproportionality. For Marx, real ‘equilibrium’ is a moment in
the immediate wake of a crisis (Marx 1962, p. 244). Although Marx used the schemes
of proportionate reproduction to demonstrate the abstract theory of non-cyclical
growth, he said that in real reproduction ‘the proportionality of the individual branches
of production springs as a general process from disproportionality’ (Marx 1962,
p. 251). A similar comment occurs in Marx 1973, p. 414]
reproduction process and on monetary circulation); 5) exclusion of foreign

trade. These postulates by no means imply, however, that Marx operated
with an ‘imponderable’ quantity, that he ‘poked his cane in the mist’ – to use
Rosa Luxemburg’s phrase – as someone else might do in similar circum-
stances. The subject of Marx’s analysis was real capitalism. In his theory
of social reproduction, he provided a general ‘model’ of the movement of
the capitalist whole – but it remained a ‘model’. He discovered the laws that
represent the foundation of the movement of real reproduction, but he described
the activities of these laws and relations in their pure, constitutive form. This
is the real basis of the ‘moving equilibrium’ of the capitalist system and its
turbulent changes. However, at this stage the real mechanism of realising
these changes, which required that a number of complicating moments be
included, was not yet provided. Marx conducted the entire analysis of real
reproduction at a certain level of abstraction. He resolved the problem in
terms of its principles and its content. Such an approach is both the specic
achievement of Marxism and the fundamental condition that enables Marxist
analysis to penetrate the secret depths of the laws of the capitalist system.16
General resolution of the problem, however, is not the same as a com-
prehensive analysis of the real course of capitalist reproduction. It is not
possible to depict capitalism’s pattern of development within the limitations
of a smoothly rising curve.17 When the problem of reproduction is posed that
abstractly, the cyclical pattern of capitalist reproduction cannot be revealed.
For that purpose, one needs to advance to the next and nal stage of a more
concrete analysis, while remaining within the context of the abstract method.
Thus, a transition must occur from general resolution of the problem of social
reproduction to the real pattern of this process. Above all, this transition
must include: 1) extensive action of the law of value and the resulting prices;
16
It is characteristic of bourgeois economists to try to make their investigations
more productive in the area of the conjuncture by means of a Marxist approach
to solving the problem. ‘If we are building a theory of conjunctural uctuations, it is
clear that an abstractly constructed scheme of the national economy in conditions
of dynamic equilibrium helps us greatly to discover the mechanism and causes of
conjunctural uctuations, as well as the mechanism and causes of deviations from
the path of smooth evolution of the economy, in order that we might thus create an
abstract theory of the conjuncture.’ (Kondrat’ev 1924, p. 372)
17
[The reference is to Kondrat’evs graph of capitalism’s long-term trend line, which
was intended to represent the system’s ‘moving equilibrium’ in real reproduction.]
2) growth of the organic composition of capital, which is connected with

the fully developed activity of capitalist competition; 3) the role of credit.
The ‘cause’ of cyclical movement must be found precisely in the fully devel-
oped activity of the mechanism of real reproduction, which is revealed
by including the foregoing factors that Marx left out of his general theory
of reproduction. As Marx says elsewhere, the cyclical movement can be
understood ‘only in the real movement of capitalist production, competition,
and credit’.
This real movement is inseparable from continuous rupturing of all the
‘proportionalities’ of social reproduction. In reality, the latter only exist in the
form of a law-governed tendency and manifest themselves continuously
through a system of obstacles. However, the disruptions to which these
proportionalities are subject also have limits. Were it otherwise, the associa-
tion of capitalists would dissolve into its constituent elements, and the social
circulation would become impossible. The real path of capitalist production
lies between these extremes. It excludes any nal equilibrium of mutually
adjusted elements of production, for this condition is incompatible with
the real development of capitalism; at the same time, it also excludes any
minute-to-minute threat of the system’s collapse. To be precise, the pattern
of the capitalist system’s development is characterised by a cyclical dynamic,
involving successive intervals of ‘peaceful prosperity’ and periodic crisis.
Thus, the cyclical movement of capitalist reproduction entails continuous
disruptions of all the ‘proportions’ of reproduction: v1+s1 is not equal to c2 ,
if we look at this lawful requirement within the context of simple repro-
duction; and the new v of Department I, together with that portion of s
going to non-productive consumption, is not equal to the new c of Depart-
ment II in conditions of expanded reproduction. For these reasons, the
proportion is disrupted between the wearing out of xed capital and its
annual renovation; the relation between production of necessities and
production of luxuries is also disrupted, and so forth.
There are several logical steps in the transition from the general theory
of reproduction to the theory of the conjuncture and the real course of
reproduction. The rst step is translation of pure value relations into the
form of the price of production. Because Marx studied social reproduction
at a level of abstraction that did not yet include the fully developed activity
of capitalist competition, surplus-value was not yet transformed into the
average prot.18 Distribution of productive forces between branches was

taken to mean distribution of labour, while ‘equilibrium’ between the separate
branches of production was achieved through exchange according to values.
Hence, the rst modication to be introduced is the establishment of
‘pure’ capitalist ‘equilibrium’, dened by ‘proportionality’ in the distribution
of capitals. Because ‘equilibrium’ of capitals, when their organic compositions
differ, means disruption of the ‘equilibrium’ of labour, it follows that the
quantitative relations between Departments I and II, together with the relations
between their separate parts, must be changed. If we take the formula of
expanded reproduction,19 the price of production in Department I will be
higher than value (approximately 125 and 120), while in Department II it will
be lower (approximately 125 and 133);20 to achieve a new ‘equilibrium’ will
require a correspondingly larger magnitude of value in Department II by
comparison with I. With the original relationships, Department I would make
an excessive demand upon the products of II, and underproduction would
be revealed – or a disruption of reproduction. This is the rst modication
in the analysis.
Let us proceed. By means of a purely mathematical operation, we have
introduced ‘equilibrium’ of capitals in place of the ‘equilibrium’ of labour.
In reality, this process occurs through the far-reaching activity of capitalist
18
[When different capitals have different organic compositions, the average rate of
prot results from reallocations of surplus-value. The ‘price’ that incorporates the
social average rate of prot is the ‘price of production’, a conceptual axis around
which market prices move: ‘Price is therefore distinguished from value . . . because the
latter appears as the law of the motions which the former runs through. But the two
are constantly different and never balance out, or balance only coincidentally and
exceptionally. The price of a commodity constantly stands above or below the value
of the commodity, and the value of the commodity exists only in this up-and-down
movement of commodity prices. Supply and demand constantly determine the prices
of commodities; [they] never balance, or only coincidentally . . .’ (Marx 1973, pp. 137–8.
See also p. 140: ‘Because labour time as the measure of value exists only as an
ideal, it cannot serve as the matter of price-comparisons . . . Price as distinct from
value is necessarily money price.’ This distinction between market price and value
(price of production) will play the central role in Maksakovsky’s exposition of the
cyclical dynamic of ‘real’ capitalism and its relation to the ‘abstract’ conditions of
equilibrium.]
19
I 4000c + 1000v + 1000s = 6000
II 1500c + 750v + 750s = 3000
20
These conclusions are approximately correct for the totals of Departments I and
II because in Department I, as a rule, the organic composition of capital is higher than
in Department II.
competition, which, at a certain stage of capitalism’s history, transforms

surplus-value into the average prot and, correspondingly, value into the
price of production.21 Having completed this ‘historical’ act, capitalist com-
petition remains as the irreplaceable instrument of its endless ‘repetition’.
Adjustment of the separate parts of social production to one another, and
the tendency to re-establish the ‘proportions’ that are continuously being
disrupted, takes place through the mechanism of capitalist competition.
There does not exist any average condition of production under capitalism;
no ‘moving equilibrium’ ever is, or ever will be, achieved in reality. Not
only in the expansion, but even in the period of depression there is no
such ‘average’ state of affairs. At each stage of reproduction, development
inevitably involves overcoming constant disproportions. The tendency towards
equilibrium is never one hundred per cent realised: it cannot be expressed
exactly in xed proportions of production, nor can it appear in reality ‘except
through the constant neutralisation of a constant disharmony’.22 The instru-
ment for restoring the disrupted relationship is capitalist competition in all
of its various manifestations. Thus, the second step in the transition from the
general theory of reproduction to the theory of the conjuncture is inclusion
of the mechanism of capitalist competition.
We shall examine the movement of capitalist competition from two per-
spectives: 1) by equating the whole of social capital with its circulating part;
2) by including the role of xed capital. This is exactly the methodological
approach that Marx took in analysing the nature of circulating capital in the
general analysis of reproduction. This approach helps us to discover the
specic ‘conditions’ that lie at the basis of cycles.
In the rst case, the object of the analysis is real capitalism, but with
signicantly reduced anarchy. Curtailment of anarchy results from the fact
that we omit xed capital along with differences in the organic composition.
In turn, this presupposes signicant levelling of labour productivity in
the various branches and enterprises so that, for the sake of clarity, we can
abstract completely from such productivity differences. The result is that
‘proportionalities’ of production are disrupted not so much by changes in
21
‘The price of production is . . . the external . . . form of commodity values, the
form that the commodity takes in the process of competition’ (Marx 1962, p. 194).
22
Marx 1975, p. 529.
the magnitude of values – the prices of production – as through ‘errors’ in

the market adjustment between separate units of capitalist production.
Accordingly, the activity of capitalist competition will also be weakened,
for it depends directly upon the quantity and complexity of the factors that
determine the reproduction process.
In these conditions – that is, when we equate social capital with its
circulating part – no cycle can arise. The obvious reason is the lack of any
corresponding ‘range’ of disruption in the ‘proportions’ of reproduction. The
peculiarity of circulating capital – and this is why it is a special category –
is that the value it represents ‘is entirely transferred to the product, passes
with it through the two metamorphoses in the sphere of circulation, and, by
virtue of this continuous renewal, always remains incorporated in the process
of production.’23 Its total magnitude is renewed with each turnover of capital
and reappears, with no change, both in the production process and as
commodity capital. Hence, there is no possibility of protracted, long drawn-
out disruptions. Each branch of production experiences complete and
thorough control of the market with each turnover of capital and even
during each of its phases. Any deviation from ‘proportionality’ makes itself
known immediately in the form of a deviation of market prices from prices
of production, or from values. The mechanism of competition is then
immediately activated, leading to a ow of capital into the given branch
when prices rise, or, conversely, to an outow of capital and a refusal to
accumulate in other branches, where market prices fall below the instrument
by which they are measured [the price of production]. The laws of ‘equi-
librium’ (value and the price of production), which are at the basis of all
reproduction ‘proportions’, ‘regulate’ social production in every phase of the
circulation of its component parts.
In these conditions, a serious, prolonged disruption of social reproduction
is impossible. The law of value rules social production ‘with an iron hand’.
Market value (the market price of production) determines the relation of
‘demand’ and ‘supply’ on the market. The same factors that give birth to
capitalist competition are strictly ‘ruled’ by it, as demand and supply are
23
Marx 1957, p. 165. [‘Circulating capital’ refers to elements that must be replaced
in each period of production. ‘Fixed capital’ refers to elements that are amortised over
their entire lifetime and, apart from technological renovation imposed by a crisis, are
physically replaced only after several periods of production.]
themselves altered through the pressure of prices on the corresponding

ow of capitals.24 In this way, when we equate social capital with its cir-
culating part, general overproduction and a cycle are impossible. Waves of
expansion and contraction, if one might speak in such terms, can develop
into nothing more than eeting disruptions that are easily surmounted.
Accordingly, the internal antagonisms of the system’s relations of distribu-
tion cannot adequately come to the surface. The internal ‘organic’ conditions
for a cycle and a crisis are not present.
Thus, having taken a second step away from the general theory of repro-
duction (our starting point), we still have not encountered a cycle. ‘Circulating’
capitalism – if such a system could really exist – would not know of any
cyclical pattern in the reproduction process. An historical illustration can
be found by reference to early capitalism, which was characterised by the
quantitative preponderance of circulating capital and, for that reason, never
knew any ‘organic’ crises.
The cyclical character of capitalist development makes itself felt only at
a third stage of transition to real reproduction – when we include the role
of xed capital. The unique circulation of xed capital, or the inevitability
of its massive renovation at a single stroke due to periodic changes in the
technology of production – this is the basic condition for the ‘manifestation’
of a cycle. Specic waves of capitalist competition develop because of a mas-
sive renovation of xed capital, which disrupts both the ‘harmony’ between
market ‘demand’ and ‘supply’ and ‘proportionality’ in the distribution of
capitals. The result is overcapitalisation, with social production growing
more rapidly than effective demand. Crashes occur and are repeated peri-
odically. They mature dialectically when the regulating inuence of the
laws of ‘equilibrium’ is postponed through a prolonged detachment of
prices from the price of production and value. Let us now turn to a detailed
examination of this process.
24
In a typical short excerpt, Marx considers competition in Volume III of Capital.
‘Supply and demand determine the market price, and so does the market price, and
the market value in the further analysis, determine supply and demand.’ ‘For instance,
if the demand, and consequently the market price, fall, capital will be withdrawn
from this branch, thus causing supply to shrink’ (Marx, 1962, p. 187).
The theory of cyclical expansion.

The maturing of overproduction
‘Developed capitalism is characterised by the ever-growing role of xed
capital. Fixed capital is the axis around which the production process revolves.
The magnitude of the value of circulating capital is determined by the scale
of production, and the scale of production is determined by the magnitude
of xed capital’, says Marx.25 Fixed capital becomes an ever-growing part of
productive capital. Thus, the character of the turnover of xed capital must
be of decisive importance for the dynamic of a capitalist economy.
The peculiarity of xed capital, which distinguishes it as a separate part
of productive capital, is the fact that if ‘the transformation of its value into
money keeps pace with the conversion into money of the commodity which
is the carrier of its value,’ then ‘its reconversion from the money form into a
use-form proceeds separately from the reconversion of the commodities into
other elements of their production and is determined by its own period of
reproduction, that is, by the time during which the instruments of labour
wear out and must be replaced by others of the same kind.’26
Does this peculiarity, on its own, explain the existence of a cycle that
is connected with disruption of the ‘proportions’ of social reproduction?
By no means. Replacement of xed capital is the most important of the
moments that constitute social ‘proportionality’. Marx formulated this
‘proportionality’ as an equality between the annually renewed part of xed
capital and the annual wear of its functioning part. The signicance of
this ‘proportionality’ for social ‘equilibrium’ is enormous. It is only, let
us say, in circumstances where one group of capitalists of Department II are
converting the accumulated value of wear of xed capital into the natural
form of xed capital, while another group, thanks to Department I, are
acquiring it as their amortisation fund, that the ‘proportionality’ of v1 + s1
and c2 is possible in accordance with the formulae: v1 + 1/2 s = c2; v1 + 1/2 s >
c2 ; and v1 + 1/2 s < c2.
Thus, after including the division of productive capital into its xed and
circulating parts, and having at the same time presupposed its ‘normal’ annual
25
[Maksakovsky’s reference is to p. 138 of the 1923 Russian translation of Capital,
II. The passage does not occur in the English translation that I am using.]
26
Marx 1957, p. 163.
replacement, we still shall not have general overproduction, much less a

cycle. In reality, however, such smooth replacement will not occur. In its pure
form, the ‘proportionality’ that we are discussing represents a postulate of
the abstract theory of social reproduction. It is disrupted by technological
revolutions in production, which are the initial preconditions for a massive
replacement of xed capital all at once; otherwise, a signicant part of the
capitalists would be deprived of the opportunity to full their capitalist
function. The evenly progressing development of a capitalist economy is
replaced by its cyclical development. Here is what Marx has to say in this
regard: ‘As the value and the durability of the applied xed capital grow
with the development of the capitalist mode of production, so the lifetime
of industry and of industrial capital lengthens in each particular eld of
investment to a period of many years, say ten years on an average. Whereas
the development of xed capital extends the length of this life on the one
hand, it is shortened on the other by continuous revolutions in the means of
production, which likewise incessantly gain momentum with the development
of the capitalist mode of production. This involves a change in the means of
production and their constant replacement, because they are subject to moral
depreciation long before they expire physically . . . The cycle of interconnected
turnovers, embracing a number of years in which capital is held fast by
its xed constituent part, furnishes a material basis for the periodic crises.
During this cycle, business undergoes successive periods of depression, medium
activity, precipitancy, crisis. True, periods in which capital is invested differ
greatly and far from coincide in time. But a crisis always forms the starting point
of large new investments of capital. Therefore, from the point of view of society
as a whole, they more or less provide a new material basis for the next
turnover cycle.’27 Here, Marx provided a comprehensive answer to the ques-
tion of the causes of the premature wearing out of xed capital – its moral
wear.28 This involves continuous revolutions in the means of production.
In developed capitalism, the impulse for applying new, more advanced
methods of production is usually provided by a crisis. In the accompanying
27
Marx 1957, pp. 185–6.
28
[‘Moral wear’ refers to technological obsolescence: the ‘reason’ embodied in
existing xed capital gives way to a higher objectication in more advanced forms of
machinery.]
circumstance of falling prices, moral wear becomes an exceptional force and

is ‘the starting point of large new investments of capital’ and of a change in
the existing technological structure. Despite the fact that physical wear
is, in large measure, an essential precondition of moral wear, it is precisely
the latter that determines, above all, the need for a massive replacement
of xed capital. Insofar as technological growth is a direct condition for,
and a consequence of, the development of capitalist production, the more
developed is the latter, the greater is the possible scale of moral wear, and
the greater too is the importance that it assumes as the initial condition for
the cycle.
Therefore, the rupture of ‘proportionality’ – between the xed capital that
is wearing out each year and the part that is being replaced – represents the
visible cause of disturbance in the smooth course of capitalist reproduction
and is also the force that determines its cyclical pattern. Let us examine the
concrete development of this process.
The period that directly follows a crisis is characterised by a low utilisation
rate for xed capital. Elements of xed capital depart from the productive
sphere more rapidly than they are replaced by corresponding new units.
Thus, despite the presence of expanded reproduction, the scale of production
steadily declines.29 In the closing years of the ensuing depression, the oppo-
site tendency begins to grow. Capitalism has within its grasp – because of
concentration and centralisation – sufcient resources to replace morally (and
physically) depleted equipment with new units that are more technologically
advanced. This process usually involves additional capital investments. The
absorptive capacity of the market grows through an expansion of productive
demand and through a certain increase in personal consumption.
Depression passes over into expansion from the moment when the growing
production reaches the ‘maximum’ point of the previous rising wave. Cassel
writes: ‘As soon as production regains the peak of the previous high con-
juncture, then, experience suggests, every depression is fully overcome and
the national economy enters a new period of high conjuncture.’30 The coefcient
29
[Some investments in new xed capital continue – there are elements of expanded
reproduction in particular rms and branches – but they are outweighed by current
accumulations of money capital.]
30
Cassel 1925, p. 65. [The Swedish economist Gustav Cassel is best known for work
on international monetary problems after the First World War and for his theories of
of growth and the application of new xed capital in production begin to

surpass the rate of wear and tear.31 The increased output of xed capital is
able not only to plug the gaping hole of moral-physical wear, but also to
achieve a progressive increase of social production. We can take this increase
of production, beyond the previously established record, to be the begin-
ning of a new expansion, whose way is prepared by a preceding interval of
recovery that corresponds to the unfolding process of xed-capital renewal.
The pattern of the conjunctural cycle corresponds more closely to a four-
phase than to a three-phase scheme: 1) depression (the rst period), charac-
terised by a prevailing tendency towards contraction of production rather
than expansion; 2) recovery, characterised by prevalence of the opposite ten-
dencies and by a smooth process of reproduction (this phase comes closest
to the theoretical concept of equilibrium between the component elements of
production as a whole); 3) prosperity – the maximal expansion of production,
together with the highest level of prices, but also bringing the rst signs of
emerging overproduction in the form of a slowdown in the turnover of cap-
ital and a tightening of credit (disruption of the fundamental ‘proportions’,
or growth of disproportions); 4) crisis, representing a many-sided form of the
outbreak of contradictions and, at the same time, the lever with which to
overcome them.
The mechanism of expansion and the way in which it occurs present a
complicated picture. It involves a process of rapid growth in the separate
branches of social production, which also affect each other. The peculiar
feature of expanded reproduction in this period, as we have seen, is that
it entails gradual rupture of all the proportions of reproduction, which are
connected with the rapid development of production. The starting point of
the expansion, its concrete and dening condition, is the massive renovation
of physically and morally exhausted xed capital as a direct result of the
price and interest. He associated the cycle with a declining share of entrepreneurial
income during the expansion, causing slower savings and capital formation at the
same time as the share of capital goods in the total social product is increasing.
His Theoretische Sozialökonomie (Leipzig, 1918) was translated into English by Joseph
McCabe and published by T.F. Unwin in 1923 as The Theory of Social Economy. Another
translation, by S.L. Barron, was published by Harcourt, Brace in 1932. Cassel’s work
is briey summarised in Hutchison 1966, pp. 245–50.]
31
[New expenditures on xed capital exceed current depreciation in the form of
money capital.]
crisis. The massive character of this process is explained by the unfavourable

relationship between demand and supply during the depression. Supply, as
a rule, exceeds demand. Therefore, market prices are lower than the prices
of production – or values. The capitals that have been advanced can yield
a prot only if production costs are signicantly reduced. Leaving aside
the case of monopoly, this is possible only through improvement of the
technical composition of the capital in use. Application of new technologies
occurs by means of competition and is the normal response of those capital-
ists who have the ability to survive. The remaining capitals, which are not
capable of such ‘renovation’, either die out or are ‘held in reserve’ over a
period of years until the next expansion.32
Once it has begun, the process of renewing xed capital signies the ‘birth’
of rising demand for Department I’s production. This demand comes both
from within Department I and from II. The branches of Department I begin
to recover. The recovery and ensuing expansion embrace production of both
materials and elements of xed capital. Growth of xed capital is reected
in the increased production of circulating capital, whose magnitude is
determined by the volume of xed capital in use and by the fact that, in the
subsequent production links of Departments I and II, it often takes the form
of xed capital. Thus, all the branches that produce means of production
undergo expansion.
However, because of the high organic composition of the capital it
uses, Department I is not immediately able to expand in accordance with the
rapidly increasing tempo of demand. As long as expansion occurs through
restoring the existing equipment to full utilisation, things go more or less
well. However, the steadily growing demand quickly exceeds these limits.
Then the recovery passes over into a high conjuncture. Demand begins to
exceed supply. The market conjuncture is expressed in rising market prices.
The effort to overcome the unfavourable effect of low market prices on prots
during the post-crisis period, by raising the organic composition of capital,
is now objectied in a rising price level for the products of Department I.
Rising market prices break out of the regulating zone of values. ‘When
32
[Technologically outmoded capitals might return to production when higher
market prices restore their ability to yield a prot. Until then, they represent a ‘reserve’
of unused production capacity.]
additional capital – writes Marx – is produced at a very rapid rate, and

its reconversion into productive capital increases the demand for all the
elements of the latter to such an extent that actual production cannot keep
pace with it, this brings about a rise in the prices of all commodities that enter
into the formation of capital.’33 Prices rise for steel, lumber, cement and other
materials for xed capital. This rise in prices is not a result of speculation –
it expresses the underproduction of products and the impossibility, at any
particular moment, of fully satisfying the growing demand of the direct
consumers.
Expanded production of means of production, in turn, cannot but be reected
in the growth of branches in Department II. The connecting link between
them is the rise of personal consumption. ‘The limits of consumption are
extended by the exertions of the reproduction process itself,’ says Marx.
‘On the one hand this increases the consumption of revenue on the part
of labourers and capitalists; on the other hand, tension in the process of
reproduction corresponds with an exertion of productive consumption.’34
Therefore, growth of productive consumption during the expansion is nor-
mally accompanied by increasing consumer demand on the part of both
workers and industrial capitalists. The incomes of these two main classes
depend directly on the conjuncture.35 The incomes of money capitalists are
considerably less dependent; and the incomes of ‘intermediate classes’ – of
free professionals, the intelligentsia who are not involved in production,
bureaucrats, etc. – show almost no dependence at all.36 The dynamic of wages
33
Marx 1975, p. 494.
34
Marx 1962, p. 471.
35
[Inuenced by Rosa Luxemburg’s The Accumulation of Capital, many Soviet econ-
omists believed that capitalism entails a tendency toward chronic underconsumption.
Others, inuenced by Rudolf Hilferding’s Finance Capital, saw consumption as a
function of the reproduction of capital. Maksakovsky considered Luxemburg’s view
to be a non-dialectical simplication of Capital. A footnote in an earlier chapter of his
book commented on the ‘incorrectness’ of Luxemburg’s methodology in relating
realisation to demand originating in non-capitalist markets. This approach, said
Maksakovsky, would make it impossible to discern ‘the moving forces of the cyclical
dynamic’. I examine these issues at length in Day 1981.]
36
See the indices provided in Cassel 1925, pp. 75–80. See also Marx 1962, p. 479:
‘The incomes of the unproductive classes and of those who live on xed incomes
remain in the main stationary during the ination of prices which goes hand in
hand with over-production and over-speculation. Hence their consuming capacity
diminishes relatively, and with it their ability to replace that portion of the total
reproduction which would normally enter into their consumption. Even when their
demand remains nominally the same, it decreases in reality.’ [If Maksakovsky were
is of central importance for the increase of production in Department II.

Statistical data on the movement of wages establish a regular pattern of
increase in a period of expansion and decline in a depression. This applies
to all branches, even including agriculture (one part of which reects the
general conjunctural movement). The basic cause for the increase is the growing
shortage of labour-power that occurs with the expansion of Departments I
and II, despite the fact that the reserve army is recruited back into production.
Labour-power experiences the ‘fate’ of all commodities during the period of
expansion – it sells at a price higher than its value. However, the nominal
indices do not reect the real level. Because of the rising general price index
for consumption, the real content of wages grows much more slowly than
their monetary expression. All economists are aware of this. Together with
the relative rise of wages, their total also grows absolutely. The limits of the
consumer market grow not only due to the relative increase of consuming
capacity on the part of every worker, but also because of the number of
workers who are participating in production.
The increase of consumer demand, resulting from the expansion of
production, in turn nds expression in the growth of branches in Department
II. Here too, the pressure of demand has a signicant effect on prices, which
begin to rise. New enterprises are erected, and old ones are expanded. This
is the source of still more new demand for means of production and, above
all, for the materials needed for xed capital. Hence, the rising wave spreads
by way of an increase of consumer demand in the branches of Department
II and returns to Department I in the form of still more demand for equip-
ment. Being reected once again in rising production and in the associated
increase of the number of employed workers and their wages, the expanding
wave is objectied in a further expansion of Department II, and so on. In this
way there takes place a feverish growth of production during the stage of
expansion, and social production races ahead – until it encounters a shortage
of effective demand.
How does this shortage of effective demand arise? At rst glance, such
a possibility seems to be excluded because the increase of social production,
being reected in the growth of incomes, itself appears to create the
dealing with modern capitalist economies, he would at some point have to pay more
heed to the possible counter-cyclical effects of incomes generated in the service
sector. At the time, services were of minor importance.]
necessary base of effective demand. Increased opportunities for additional

capitalisation are matched by a rise in the total volume and level of wages.
But the whole ‘secret’ lies in the fact that, rst, the increased capitalisation
during the expansion can easily become detached from the base of effec-
tive demand, for the volume of prots, realised by capitalists during the
expansion, has no direct dependence on the growth of working class incomes.
Whereas the latter are strictly limited by the customary standard of living –
by the law of value of labour-power, which cannot be infringed within the
limits of capitalist economy – the only limits to the former are competition
and the level of technological development. Both of these inuential moments
have a positive effect in the period of expansion, and the mass of realised
surplus-value far exceeds the limits associated with the average prot. This
creates a potential for the base of personal effective demand to lag behind.
‘Disharmony’ appears in the form of increased capitalisation that inevitably
outpaces demand. Second, the massive upsurge of social production rests
not only upon capitalisation of newly realised surplus-value, but also upon
consolidation of all the nancial resources of society, which are redistributed
through credit and thus assume a productive form. The result is to amplify
still further the threat of a rupture. Third, the remarkable rise of wages begins
in the second half of the expansion, during the so-called high conjuncture,
when there is already evidence of a decline in the share of the capitalists
(or of entrepreneurial income), due to difculties on the part of capital in
passing through its ‘circulation’ phases, and also due to the rising costs of
production associated with higher wages and higher prices for materials.
The fourth important moment determining a lag in the base of consumer
demand is ‘inadequate’ growth of consumption on the part of the capitalist
class itself. Kautsky’s example shows that in order to preserve social ‘equi-
librium’, with an unchanging organic composition of capital, consumption by
the working class must grow by 44% over ve years, that of the capitalists
by 71%.37 Therefore, the rate of increase of capitalist consumption must be
higher than that of the workers. This cannot occur in reality. There are objec-
tive obstacles to expansion of non-productive demand by the capitalists such
as the need for greater capitalisation, which is dictated not only by the attempt
37
Kautsky 1924, p. 445.
to maximise prots but also by the objective laws of capitalist competition.

Here we have the fourth item in the list of ‘causes’ that lead to rupture of the
‘equilibrium’ between production and consumption.
The fth important condition for a ‘rupture’ is a rise in the organic compo-
sition of capital. Increase of production is accompanied during the expansion
not only by extensive growth, but also, as part of the effort to maximise prots,
by a rising organic composition of capital. Although this rise is slower
than during the pre-expansion period, it does contribute to a decline of the
working-class share in the values being produced. This is a specic expres-
sion of the growth of labour productivity in circumstances where labour is
organised by capital. Productivity growth, in turn, brings about a fall in the
value of labour-power and a relative increase in the commodities available
for mass consumption. A relative narrowing of the consumption base takes
place during the expansion; moreover, taking into account the elevated level
of market prices (in Department II), this narrowing occurs at a faster pace
than would be required by the changing conditions for ‘moving equilibrium’.
Consumption by capitalists, as we have seen, shows the same tendency
towards relative contraction. As a result, in the concrete conditions of a rise
in the organic composition of capital during the expansion, we nd one
of the ‘conditions’ for the rupture of ‘equilibrium’ between production and
consumption.
However, decline of the working-class share in the aggregate product
does not entail a necessary rupture between production and consumption. If
that were the case, capitalism would be in a condition of permanent crisis, for
in all stages of the cycle the organic composition grows at one tempo or
another. For this reason, Marxist economics rejects the view of Rodbertus,
who attributed the cause of a capitalist crisis to this perfectly normal fact.
The whole issue has to do with the concrete conditions that prevail during
the period of expansion, when: 1) narrowing of the consumption base is
accompanied by the massive character of expanded production; 2) this
expansion is ‘oriented’ not upon the price of production and value, which
would ensure receipt of a ‘proper’ average prot, but rather upon the elevated
market price, which, instead of expressing the ‘proportions’ of social produc-
tion, is associated with a unique phenomenon – that is, the impossibility of
production growing at the same rate as demand when the latter is amplied
by a massive renovation of capital. If we were to presuppose exchange in
terms of values, that is, if we were to exclude these ‘abnormal’ conditions,

then the rise of the organic composition of capital would not disrupt the
elements of social ‘equilibrium’. At any given moment, the volume of effec-
tive demand would ‘harmoniously’ correspond to the volume of social
production.
Contrary to the assertion of Tugan, a more rapid growth of the productive
market, as an expression of spontaneous capitalist industrialisation, does not
at all imply that consumer demand diminishes in importance.38 The consumer
market, both before and during industrialisation, is the nal condition for
‘realisation’ of all the processes of reproduction. As consumer demand
falls in terms of value, the effectiveness of each of its units grows in direct
proportion to the relative decline of consumption’s share in the total value.39
If, for example, the relation of social c to v were 5:1, then, looking at the
matter schematically, one could say that each consumption unit would
support the weight of ve production units and would serve as the nal con-
dition for their economic realisation. Production of means of consumption
has developed on the basis of consumer demand insofar as the product passes
through a number of stages while being worked up. Thus, Department II
divides into a number of branches that are more or less closely connected
with each other. The presence of consumer demand is further objectied
in an even larger scale of production in Department I. A broadly developed
production apparatus, for the supply of means of production, depends upon
the consumer goods branches, which, in turn, receive equipment from
other specialised capital-producing branches. As a result of the complexity
of materials and types of xed capital, which correspond to the existing
technological practices and methods of production, and thanks also to the
massive character of this production, which occurs for the same reasons,
38
[The reference is to the Russian economist Mikhail Tugan-Baranovsky, who argued
that investment expands until all available capital funds are exhausted, at which
time disproportions emerge between different branches and between production and
consumption, causing a new period of stagnation and depression. See Promyshlennye
krizisy v sovremennoi Anglii, republished in French as Les Crises industrielles en Angleterre,
Paris, 1913. Rosa Luxemburg comments on Tugan’s relation to Marxism in Chapter
23 of The Accumulation of Capital. A brief summary of Tugan’s work can be found in
Hutchinson 1966, pp. 377–9. See also http://cepa.newschool.edu/het/essays/cycle/
overinvestment.htm]
39
[Maksakovsky is not referring to Keynesian ‘effective demand’, but to the rela-
tion between demand for consumer goods and the xed capital that it presupposes.]
Department I comprises an enormous number of branches of production with

a complex technical division of labour, a greater number of preliminary
production stages, and a much closer association and interdependence of the
separate links of the production process than is the case in Department II.
The connection of social production with the consumer market makes itself
felt directly through the branches of Department II. This Department can only
expand when the consumption base grows. Hence, when we speak of a fall
in the share of personal consumption, we must not forget that it still grows
absolutely. Moreover, its absolute growth during the expansion is a direct
‘cause’ of the rising wave in the branches of Department II. Here it is objectied
in an increase of production, and the latter is only possible when there is
supplementary demand for the production of Department I, which also
expands in turn. It must not be forgotten, of course, that the general impetus
for the entire expansionary process comes from the massive renovation
of xed capital, which itself results from the crisis. However, the scale of
production in the branches of Department II is not absolutely dependent on
the existing volume of consumer demand. These branches can increase demand
by reducing the value of commodities through raising labour productivity.
Then the price level declines and, provided there is no corresponding drop
in wages, there will be an increase of consumer demand, which then will
also support production of means of consumption on a broader scale. How-
ever, this kind of phenomenon does not characterise the entire period
of expansion. The prices of all products, taken together, rise rather than
fall. Orienting itself upon these high prices, which do not represent social
‘equilibrium’, Department II, just like I, expands at a faster tempo than is the
case with consumer demand over the course of the expansion as a whole.
The result is that disproportions mature and erupt in the market.
The rise of the organic composition of capital in Department II, which
accompanies the general growth of production, increases demand from that
Department for the production of Department I. On this basis, the branches
that produce means of production are able to expand rapidly, indeed, at
a much more rapid tempo than is the case in Department II. The growth
of consumer demand can be compared to throwing a stone into the water,
causing ripples to spread continuously outward. The further the ripples
spread, the further removed from consumption are the production branches
that are affected. Hence, the greatest growth during the phase of expansion
is in branches that produce means of production, and among them, in the

branches producing materials that go into xed capital. As we have seen, this
occurs in the rst place because the production process in the branches
of Department I involves a greater number of interconnected branches
and enterprises than in Department II. The rising wave, whose source is the
growth of consumer demand, ows at each sector of the consumption front
through one or two enterprises that are closely connected by production
dependencies. For instance, to satisfy the worker’s need for clothing rst
involves demand for nished garments and then for more textile production.
The suppliers who serve the needs of the worker are numerous, but they do
not move in a body. They do not respond like a vast number of production
links in a single chain; instead, they resemble separate, loosely associated
production circles.
Things are different in Department I, which serves as the preparatory
stage for consumer goods production. Here, production is organised like a
complex, self-contained column, with a great number of enterprises being
interconnected both horizontally and vertically. Thus, the expansionary wave
of consumer demand, already extending outwards as it reaches this point,
dictates the need for a distinctly larger scale of production growth. Being
expressed concretely in the demand for machines, it not only embraces
the machinery front horizontally, but is also transmitted vertically to the
raw material bases of the machinery industry: to steel, coal, ore, lumber,
cement, and a whole number of other branches that are connected with, and
cannot be separated from, the machinery industry. Typically, the greatest
expansion occurs not in the machinery industry itself, which is ‘responding’
to the directive from Department II (and through it, to consumer demand),
but rather in iron and steel, the main materials for production of xed
capital. This occurs because demand for one or another type of machine calls
forth not just the demand of the machine-producing industry for steel, but
also expansion of xed capital in general; for instance, construction of a new
railway network, of railway equipment, etc. This particular feature of growth
in Department I is also the basic condition that explains why the widening
wave of expansion is most apparent in a sharp leap of the production index
in Department I.
Moreover, since the rate of growth of the organic composition of capital
is higher here than the social average, an enormous pressure of productive
demand develops within Department I, for which consumer demand and

even the productive demand of II serve merely as the rst impulse. These
interdependent branches of Department I become each other’s best customers.
The rippling sound of personal consumption grows into a dramatically inten-
sifying rumble in the branches that produce xed capital and the necessary
materials. Here, there are no norms of expansion to give direct ‘instructions’,
for the control of consumer demand is far away and there are much greater
prots being realised. Thus, the rising wave, which originates in the growth
of consumer demand, ‘gives birth’ within the limits of Department I to
an internal, ‘autonomous’ self-expanding wave, which, in conditions of high
prices, high prots, and a constantly unsatised market, will inevitably
lead to massive overproduction. The social system increasingly resembles
an inverted, truncated cone, with a relatively shrinking base in the form
of consumer demand to support a rapidly expanding production of the
elements of xed capital.
In the course of this analysis, we have abstracted from the sequence of
interaction between the elements that give birth to the expansion. The initial
moment, we know, is the massive renovation of xed capital that drives
Department I to recovery and expansion, thus leading to the increase of
consumer demand and output in Department II. The growth of consumer
demand appears as a function, or a consequence, of expanding production.
However, this does not alter in any way the objective fact that consumer
demand is the principal foundation that ‘supports’ capitalist production. Such
a role for consumer demand is determined by the fact that: 1) production of
means of production is a complex and far-reaching preparatory process
for production of means of consumption; 2) the consumer demand of most
people uctuates very little, being determined by the strict laws of capital-
ism’s relations of distribution – while at the same time there are no such
restrictive conditions on the expanding scale of production. Starting from this
fact, it is perfectly correct, in methodological terms, to specify the moment
of consumption as the ultimate condition in determining the ‘equilibrium’ of
the social system, and then to conduct the analysis in terms of disturbances
in the sequence of activities on the part of the concrete factors involved in
capitalist expansion.40
40
[When Maksakovsky’s book appeared, these remarks would have indirectly
Let us now return to the concrete course of the cycle. We have seen that
the expansionary wave, spreading through the branches of Departments I
and II, leads to a massive increase of production. This increase depends
upon two moments: 1) the fact that ‘normally’ functioning capitalists receive
not only the average prot, but also super-prots; 2) the fact that effective
demand grows more rapidly than the possibilities for satisfying it. As a result,
market prices for the social product are higher than prices of production.
Here we have the primary source of super-prots. Although production costs
are rising, most market prices rise even more quickly. Every capitalist puts
more into expanding production. This explains the massive capitalisations,
which at a certain point lead to general overproduction. The level of market
prices rises especially quickly in the branches of Department I. The reason
is, rst, that the pressure of demand is greatest here, and the same is true of
the super-prot received as the difference between the market price and the
price of production. Secondly, the organic composition of capital rises more
quickly here, being connected with receipt of a large, differential super-prot,
representing the difference between social average costs and the individual
costs of production. These are the moments that support the massive tempo
of supplementary capitalisations, leaving far behind the corresponding
phenomena in Department II. However, the possibilities for expansion of
production in branches producing means of production are not limited by
the mass of prot being realised. Capitalist competition also diverts in this
direction a large part of the newly formed capitals that are owing from
all the spheres of social production and circulation. Then – and this is an
important moment – most of the monetary accumulation of society also ows
here, as it is redistributed through credit and takes the form of means of pro-
duction. Existing branches of production grow, and new ones are created.
Construction of railway networks led this process in the nineteenth century.
In the twentieth century, the electrical industry has moved to the forefront
along with the branches that serve it.41
Thus, the process of disrupting the ‘proportionality’ of social reproduc-
tion takes place because of prices that become detached from prices of
lent support to Bukharin’s criticism of Stalinist industrialisation. See Bukharin 1982,

pp. 301–30.]
41
Cassel 1925, p. 116.
production – or values. The disharmony intensies both in the relation

between social production and consumer demand, and in terms of the scale
of production in Departments I and II. More rapid growth of the produc-
tion apparatus in Department I, as compared with II, must inevitably nd
expression in overproduction of means of production, which then makes
the initial disproportionality even more acute. It follows that the period of
expansion is also the period in which overproduction matures and becomes apparent
in the market. In the real course of capitalist reproduction, the expansion can
lead to no other outcome than a crisis.
Marx formulates the inevitability of overproduction this way: overproduction
can occur because the market and production are two separate moments,
creating the possibility ‘that the expansion of one does not correspond with
the expansion of the other; that the limits of the market are not extended
rapidly enough for production, or that new markets – new extensions of
the market – may be rapidly outpaced by production, so that the expanded
market becomes just as much a barrier as the narrower market was formerly’.42
Referring to the maturation of this process, Spiethoff divides the expan-
sion into four stages. The rst stage involves the use of existing equipment.
The second occurs when the catalyst of high prots creates new enterprises
because market demand exceeds supply. In this connection there develops
a widespread demand within production itself. Productive consumption
grows at a rapid tempo, but ‘initially the products of this expansionary process
of reproduction do not appear as a counter-balance . . . to demand. This
happens in the third stage, when new production establishments appear not
only as bearers of demand, but also as bearers of supply; at the same time, a
period begins when high prices must soon come under threat. The nal period
is the complete opposite of the second. The products of feverishly expanded
production are thrown onto the market when the corresponding volume of
demand is lacking. The onset of this condition has decisive signicance.’43
42
Marx 1975, p. 525.
43
Spiethoff, excerpt from an article in the collection Problema rynka i krizisov, pp.
258–9. [Arthur Spiethoff, like Tugan, borrowed from Marx. His theory was similar to
Maksakovsky’s insofar as he located the origins of over-production in the difculty
of foreseeing the cumulative effect of decisions taken by individual capitalists in
response to market and cartel prices. For a summary of Spiethoff’s contribution, see
Hutchison 1966, pp. 379–83. See also http://cepa.newschool.edu/het/proles/
spiethoff.htm]
Here we have a perfectly correct division of the expansion into a series of

stages. Decisive importance belongs to the third stage, when newly created
capitalist enterprises come forth as ‘bearers of supply’. The massive character
of this supply, which is conditioned by high prots and by the conditions
that create those prots, intensies due to other circumstances. Not being
subject to direct control by the consumer market, this Department develops
enormous demand from within production in response to its own ‘local’
conditions. ‘Thanks, on the one hand, to lack of direct contact with the nal
consumer, and, on the other hand, to close mutual ties between toolmakers
– writes Bouniatian – there emerges an articial mutual stimulus for branches
of industry that are interconnected through productive consumption of each
other’s products: expansion of one branch not only promotes development
of other branches that depend upon it, but also frequently creates among
them consumers of its own products. What occurs in these branches is . . .
something analogous to the mutual drafting of friendly promissory notes
in a credit economy, when in both cases there is absolutely no real economic
foundation.’44
This system of mutual orders, which ensures excellent sales by enterprises
while construction is underway, leaves them face to face with a sharp
contraction of market demand as soon as they have nished equipping one
another. On the one hand, existing enterprises no longer pose a demand
for equipment – thus narrowing the market – while on the other hand, they
also become new suppliers themselves, thus overburdening the already
contracting market. This ‘local’ tendency becomes particularly widespread
during the rise of the organic composition of capital – which expands the
basis of productive consumption – and with the development of joint-stock
companies. The higher the organic composition of capital, the more intensive
is mutual servicing in production, and the longer is the interval of time
required for new enterprises to move from their ‘conrmation’ to their role
44
Bouniatian, Ekonomicheskie krizisy, p. 65. See also Mombert 1924, p. 135: ‘Certain
factories, in the last decades of the 19th century, expanded and conducted their affairs
on the basis of credits provided to them by machine-building plants.’ [Mentor Bouniatian
wrote several books on business cycles, including Les crises économiques, essai de mor-
phologie et théorie des crises économiques périodiques, et de théorie de la conjoncture économique,
translated from Russian and published in Paris in 1922. I do not have the Russian
text used by Maksakovsky.]
as agents of supply. Joint-stock companies also create a more exible form of

mutual supply, organising ‘daughter’ and ‘granddaughter’ rms, one of whose
objectives is to ensure an extensive market for the joint-stock company that
fathered these offspring. Thus, the more developed capitalism becomes, the
more obvious and imposing must overproduction also become.45
Let us now look more closely at the emergence of overproduction. For the
sake of a more concrete analysis, we shall divide Department I into three
groups: the rst produces raw materials (mining, the branches of ferrous
metallurgy, and so forth); the second produces xed capital for Department
I; the third produces xed capital for Department II.
Growth of demand from Department II calls forth expansion in the third
group. However, this is possible only if there is growth in the second group,
which, in turn, requires growth of production in the rst group. Here we
have a basic node of dependencies and mutual conditioning in production.
Insofar as the organic composition rises as we move from the third group
to the rst, and because the rst group is the supplier of basic materials,
without which no process of expansion is conceivable elsewhere, it follows
that the greatest strain of demand will be felt precisely in the rst group,
where it cannot possibly be satised quickly. This is what explains the step-
like pattern of price increases. While rising insignicantly in Department II,
they grow all the more rapidly as we move from the third group to the
rst group in Department I. Therefore, the further a branch is removed from
direct consumer demand, the greater are both the demands it faces and its
corresponding scale of new capitalisations.46 Consequently, the main lever
of social overproduction is found in the branches that supply materials for
production of xed capital.47
Because of their chain-like connections, overproduction in these branches
includes overproduction in the other branches of Department I. If there
is overproduction of iron, it includes overproduction of iron ore and coal;
it also presupposes overproduction of machines, for the increasing over-
production of iron would not be possible without its growing consumption.
45
This is obscured by the action of other factors, which will be discussed in the
following chapter. [The reference is to credit and nancial markets.]
46
In the present context, this issue can only be presented schematically.
47
[Maksakovsky is looking backward into the production process. Markets also
look forward, but he leaves speculation to the following chapter.]
‘There cannot, therefore, be any question of the [underproduction] of those

articles whose overproduction is already implied because they enter as an
element, raw material, auxiliary material or means of production, into those
articles . . . whose positive overproduction is precisely the fact to be explained.’48
It follows that ‘universal’ overproduction, in turn, is fundamentally ‘partial’
overproduction.49 There cannot exist a state of affairs in which overproduc-
tion (or underproduction) embraces all branches. It is also true that not
all partial overproduction becomes ‘general’; otherwise, capitalism would
never escape from a condition of permanent crisis. The general character of
overproduction emerges only when partial overproduction nds its ultimate
expression in an outbreak of contradictions between social production and
consumption. It affects particular branches and involves, say, overproduction
of iron and woven cloth. However, overproduction of woven cloth already
entails overproduction of machinery, and the latter already presupposes
overproduction of iron. Therefore, social overproduction occurs, above all,
in the overproduction of iron and steel – the most basic materials of xed
capital – upon which both Departments ‘labour’ as they accommodate and
inuence each other in the process of reproduction.
48
Marx 1975, p. 530 [There is a type-setting error in Maksakovsky’s quotation. His
text refers to ‘overproduction’, whereas Marx speaks of ‘underproduction’. I have
made the change to correspond with Marx’s comment.]
49
[Marx was disputing the view that only partial overproduction is possible,
not a general glut of markets: ‘The relativity of over-production . . . is expressed
in this way: There is no universal over-production, because if over-production
were universal, all spheres of production would retain the same relation to one
another . . . ’ (Marx 1975, p. 530). ‘This explanation of over-production in one eld by
under-production in another eld therefore means merely that if production were
proportionate, there would be no over-production . . . Or, in even more abstract form:
There would be no over-production in one place, if over-production took place to the
same extent everywhere’ (Marx 1975, p. 532). Marx replies that this argument abstracts
from money and assumes that every sale is simultaneously a purchase, as in barter.
But capitalist exchanges are not barter exchanges: ‘This whole subterfuge then rests
on abstracting from money and from the fact that we are not concerned with an
exchange of products, but with the circulation of commodities, an essential part of
which is the separation of purchase and sale’ (Marx 1975 pp. 532–3). The mediation
of exchange by money creates the possibility of crises, but Maksakovsky is here
dealing with the necessity of crises, which he associates with overproduction of means
of production. This kind of overproduction is both caused by, and is the cause of,
a high level of demand for xed capital from Department II, which entails the
upward deviation of market prices from values and promotes overcapitalisation in
Department I. For Maksakovsky, partial disproportions of physical production are the
material counterpart of the contradictory movement of prices and values, and it is
the spontaneously uneven movement of the whole reproduction of social capital that
is objectied in the disproportionalities of the parts.]
Thus, it is not at all necessary that there be differential overproduction of

every branch in relation to all the others.50 A capitalist crisis is prepared by
partial overproduction; this is the fundamental cause, and it includes over-
production at the earlier stages, which is transmitted, through the linkages
of production, to the branches that depend on production of basic materials.
Hence, there is overproduction in the branches of Department II. These
branches are the agents that ferment and hasten overproduction in the
main branches of Department I insofar as they consume more means of
production and are themselves dependent in their overproduction on the
overproduction of means of production. Emergence of their overproduction
is also connected with more workers being employed, who thus pose additional
demand for means of consumption. What we have here is a dialectical
interaction.
It follows that Cassel and a number of other economists are mistaken
when they regard a crisis as the result of overproduction of means of
production, as distinct from the smooth ow of production of means of
consumption. This smooth ow is possible only based on exchange according
to values (prices of production). During the period of expansion, this
condition does not apply either in Department I or in II. The resulting process,
whereby prices rise differentially and become detached from values, is the
general precondition for overcapitalisation in both Departments. Existence
of ‘overcapitalisation’ in II is most clearly revealed when it turns out to be
impossible for Department I to sell all of its output, a condition which then
results in a reduction of the number of employed workers and a corresponding
drop in consumer demand. But this moment is quantitative in character; it
only deepens the already existing disharmony between Department II and
its market – a disharmony that develops parallel to the growth of disguised
50
In concrete conditions, this often does occur. Overproduction of coal is included
in overproduction of iron, but this does not exclude differential overproduction of
coal in relation to iron when its production exceeds the demand coming from ferrous
metallurgy and other branches. [Maksakovsky is paraphrasing Marx: ‘For example,
although sufcient coal must have been produced in order to keep going all those
industries into which coal enters as a necessary condition of production, and there-
fore the over-production of coal is implied in the over-production of iron, yarn, etc. (even
if coal was produced only in proportion to the production of iron and yarn [etc.])
it is also possible that more coal was produced than was required even for the over-
production of iron, yarn, etc. This is not only possible, but very probable’ (Marx 1975,
p. 531).]
overproduction in Department I – all on the general basis of prices that are

temporarily detached from values. In the forefront of overproduction stands
Department I, or more precisely, those branches of I that constitute the
central axes of the entire social production apparatus. They represent the peak
of the ‘overproduction’ pyramid because here the fundamental ‘cause’ of
overproduction – the detachment of market prices from values – is expressed
most forcefully both in quantitative terms and by virtue of the special cen-
tral position that these branches hold in production. The overproduction that
is revealed in the market essentially signies an excess of industrial capital
in strictly determined forms. A part of the social production apparatus and
of commodity capital turns out to be redundant. ‘As a result of delayed returns
(in the form of money, P.M.), glutted markets, or fallen prices,’ writes Marx,
‘a superabundance of industrial capital becomes available, but in a form in
which it cannot perform its functions. There are huge quantities of commodity
capital, but they cannot be sold. There are huge quantities of xed capital,
but they are largely idle due to stagnant reproduction.’51 ‘Overproduction of
capital is never anything more than overproduction of means of production
– of means of labour and necessities of life – which may serve as capital.’52
Social ‘equilibrium’ is restored through massive destruction of industrial
capital in the two forms of productive and commodity capital. An excess of
industrial capital in the third form, money, cannot be represented here because
every expression of this excess is connected with a transition out of its indus-
trial status and into the form of loan capital.53
The next question of interest is whether the whole assortment of the social
product becomes equally impossible to sell at the moment when the crisis
erupts.
The clearest expression of overproduction occurs in production of means
of production. Here its character is absolute. At the instant when overpro-
duction breaks out, no reduction in prices can bring any perceptible increase
of sales. The reason lies in the very nature of productive consumption. The
absorptive capacity of the consumer market, in contrast, is determined by
two factors: the size of incomes, and the price level for consumer goods. This
51
Marx 1962, p. 471.
52
Marx 1962, p. 250.
53
[Maksakovsky deals with this transition in the next chapter, ‘The Role of Credit
in the Conjuncture’, which is not translated here.]
absorptive capacity is enormously elastic and expands in inverse proportion

to the level of prices. ‘If the means of subsistence were cheaper, or money
wages higher, the labourers would buy more of them, and a greater “social
need” would arise for the given assortment of commodities . . .’54 Here we
have one of the reasons why overproduction in Department II is less perva-
sive. However, productive consumption cannot increase during this period.
Once commodities cannot be sold, enterprises stop expanding, and demand
falls for means of production. The reduction of prices to the level of values
has no apparent inuence on the sale of means of production. At the moment
when the crisis appears, the overproduction of many means of production
will be absolute. ‘After the end of a period of expansion that has lasted for
several years, demand for them (items of productive consumption, P.M.)
is satised – both the demand that was unfullled after the period of depres-
sion and that which subsequently grew up. From this point on there is no
need to ll any gaps, only to compensate for the wearing out of such goods
and gradually to increase their quantity in correspondence with the growth
of the economy.’55 In reality, exactly the opposite occurs. The initial plugging
of ‘gaps’ is inseparable from a steady increase of production that is now being
thrown onto the market. The consequence is that overproduction appears all
the more forcefully in the market for means of production.
The market expression of overproduction is a decisive excess of supply
over demand at the given price level. Insofar as the price level has risen in
all branches of production, the nal result is to arrest sales of all commodi-
ties. Because ‘crises are usually preceded by a general ination in prices of
all articles of capitalist production,’ ‘all of them therefore cause a glut in
the market at the prices they had prior to the crash. The market can absorb
a larger volume of commodities at falling prices, at prices that have fallen
below their price of production, than it could absorb at their former market
prices.’56 Thus, overproduction prevails not only with high market prices, but
even with prices of production. Capitalism is incapable of forestalling the
crisis through a corresponding reduction in the prices of all products.57 Such
a measure contradicts the very nature of the self-expansion of values, yet
54
Marx 1962, p. 185.
55
Spiethoff in Problemy rynka i krizisov, p. 260.
56
Marx 1975, p. 505.
57
[Capitalists will not voluntarily accept prices below the price of production.]
the general glut in social reproduction makes it unavoidable. Whatever the

reduction in prices, however, the redundant means of production still cannot
be used. When the turnover of all capitals has been impeded, nothing can
raise productive demand. On the contrary, each capital already has excessive
means of production on hand, which in turn are responsible for the excess
of commodities now being thrown onto the market.
At this point, we have to answer an important theoretical question: What
is the origin of the total sum of surplus-value that all capitalists realise in the
form of super-prots during the expansion? At rst sight, this phenomenon
seems to contradict the law of value and surplus-value. Given the law of
average prot, receipt of super-prot by one capitalist implies less than the
average rate for others. Society’s fund of surplus-value is strictly determined.
The very formation of an average prot excludes any one-sided (upward)
deviation from the norm. Yet, during the period of expansion we have to
deal with just such an irrational event. This means that we must totally
rule out any possibility of saying that the super-prot of one capitalist
is a redistribution to his advantage from the prot of another capitalist,
who operates with a below-average rate. Whence comes this excess of
surplus-value? Obviously, the source of this surplus cannot be found in
the period of high conjuncture, when the bias of prots is uniformly in one
direction. Nor can it be located outside the capitalist system – Marx’s method
excludes that possibility.58 There is no way to solve the problem if one looks
at capitalist production solely in the period of expansion. The complete
capitalist ‘history’ is a full cycle, which includes all of its stages. High prots
during the expansion are essentially nothing more than the realisation of
surplus-value that was created, but not fully realised, at the time of the
depression, for in that period, as a general rule, prices fall below the price of
production due to the unfavourable relation between demand and supply.
The downward deviation of market prices during the period of depression
is compensated by an upward deviation during the expansion. Over the
58
[The implied reference is to Rosa Luxemburg, who argued that expanded
reproduction continually presupposes new sources of demand in ‘third-party’, or
non-capitalist, markets. This was the central theme of Luxemburg’s account of impe-
rialist expansion. Marx, in contrast, worked with a model of ‘pure capitalism’ – the
reproduction schemes – in which all expenditures and incomes originate explicitly in
capitalist production. See Luxemburg 1963, also Day 1979–80.]
course of the cycle, the average corresponds to values, if we abstract from

possible changes of the latter. ‘In this way, the market prices that have deviated
from market values adjust themselves and yield an average that corresponds
to market values, as deviations from the latter cancel each other as plus
and minus.’59 Therefore, the surplus prot received during the expansion is
surplus-value that was created, but not fully realised, during the depression.60
Let us now draw some conclusions. We have examined concretely the
mechanism of expansion as it occurs through a complex interaction of a
number of economic factors. The axis about which the activities of these
factors are distributed was the massive renovation of xed capital, which is
associated with reproduction as it proceeds concretely. It was precisely this
massive renovation that gave birth at once, because of the crisis, to a rising
tendency in the course of reproduction. During the expansion, the growing
character of social production was clear. However, this growth of the entire
social system ended at a certain stage in a crash. Consequently, in the activ-
ities resulting from expansionary forces there were moments that organically
disrupted the ‘moving equilibrium’ of the growing social system.
What were these moments? When we equated productive capital with its
circulating part, we ruled out any possibility of general overproduction. If
we include xed capital, but presuppose its smooth replacement from year
to year according to the formula of ‘equilibrium’ between the parts that
are wearing out and those that are being replaced, we still do not encounter
any general overproduction. 61 It is only when we introduce the moment
59
Marx 1962, p. 186. [Marx makes the further comment that ‘If supply and demand
coincide, the market-price of commodities corresponds to their price of production,
i.e. their price then appears to be regulated by the immanent laws of capitalist
production, independently of competition, since the uctuations of supply and demand
explain nothing but deviations of market-prices from prices of production. These
deviations mutually balance one another, so that in the course of certain longer
periods the average market-prices equal the prices of production’ (Marx 1962, p. 349).
Maksakovsky will now argue that the deviations mentioned by Marx are not random;
they are uniquely determined by the different phases in the cycle of capital’s repro-
duction. The total sum of prices corresponds to the total of values, but only in the
course of an entire cycle, never at any particular moment.]
60
[This argument might be said to anticipate Schumpeter’s insight to the effect that
monopolistic pricing enables strong rms, in periods of expansion, to accumulate the
resources needed to nance recoveries and survive the gales of ‘creative destruction
(Schumpeter 1962, pp. 81–106).]
61
[Total new investments in xed capital would equal total current depreciation in
the form of money capital.]
of disruption of this ‘proportionality’, by taking into account the sudden

massive renewal of xed capital, that we disclose the cyclical character of
capitalist reproduction. In the rst case we have no ‘condition’ that would
explain a prolonged departure of the system from ‘equilibrium’; in the second
case, that condition is obvious.
The distinguishing outward sign of a ‘non-cyclical’ condition was the
absence of one specic condition of market competition. Market ‘demand’ and
‘supply’ did not long deviate from each other. Any excess of ‘demand’ over
‘supply’, being accompanied by rising market prices, brought with it a rapid
inow of new capital into the given branch. The tendency to restore the
disturbed ‘equilibrium’ set in without any particular delay. Nevertheless,
things change quite abruptly as soon as we include the sudden, large-scale
renovation of xed capital. In circumstances of progressively growing demand,
‘equilibrium’ can be preserved only with a speedy and massive expansion of
production. However, that possibility is excluded. Whatever capitalism’s
capacity for signicant expansion might be, it is not able ‘suddenly’ to sat-
isfy the massive demand that results from moral wear of existing equipment.
As a result, the available supply of commodities lags behind the growing
demand, and the tendency towards ‘equilibrium’ comes to a halt. It is not
possible to ‘rectify’ production speedily as the disruptions occur. On the
contrary, the further the expansion develops, the more aggregate supply lags
behind demand, and the greater is the detachment of market prices from
values, or from the prices of production. The ongoing process of redistrib-
uting capitals is unable to eliminate these disruptions because society, at
this particular moment, does not possess sufcient productive forces with
which to satisfy the current demand. Despite the signicant growth of its
technical-production apparatus, capitalist society proves unable, in timely
fashion, to satisfy its own need for elements of productive capital and for
means of consumption. The system as a whole becomes exhausted under
the burden of underproduction. However, this does not mean that individual
capitalist ‘atoms’ face any strict limitations. On the contrary, they all realise
super-prots as they ‘toil’ vigorously to expand the system. Prices for nished
products manage to rise more rapidly than those for the materials and
semi-fabricates that enter into the costs of production. The increase of
market prices exceeds the increase in costs of production. As time passes,
capitalist society eventually nds within itself sufcient forces to satisfy
fully the existing demand. However, this very process is also inescapably
connected with the maturation of a crisis.
A strange phenomenon occurs. Demand, being the other dimension of
expanding production, permanently exceeds supply over the whole period of
the expansion. When, after the most strenuous production efforts, capitalism
completely satises its own demand for items of productive and personal
consumption, a periodic crash must unavoidably follow. This fact requires
us to reect upon the nature of market competition and the extent to which
the market relation of ‘demand’ and ‘supply’, which directly determines the
scale of expanding production, is an accurate expression of the system’s
conditions of ‘equilibrium’. With a smoothly advancing replacement of xed
capital, the market ‘equilibrium’ of demand and supply would correspond to
the fundamental ‘equilibrium’ of individual branches and of the entire social
system as a whole. In concrete terms, if ‘supply and demand never equal one
another in any given case, their deviations from the condition of equality
follow one another in such a way – the result of a deviation in one direction
is that it calls forth a deviation in the opposite direction – that there is a
complete equilibrium between supply and demand when the whole is viewed
over a long enough period, but only as an average of past uctuations, and
only as the continuous movement of their contradiction. In this way market
prices, which have deviated from market values, equalise themselves and
yield an average that conforms with market value.’62 Thus, market divergences
of demand and supply have a short-term and sporadic character. Market
relations do not enter into long-term contradiction with the ‘proportionality’
of social production. Their theoretically conceivable ‘equilibrium’ corresponds
to the ‘equilibrium’ of the fundamental elements of the social system.
Things are quite different, however, in the context of the real relations that
prevail during the expansion. Here, market ‘equilibrium’ irrationally fails to
answer the needs of ‘equilibrium’ of the social system. The very nature of
market equilibrium changes dramatically. At the beginning of the expansion,
the continuous excess of demand over supply more or less correctly reected
the need for a corresponding re-allocation of capitals. The price increase on
products from Department I, exceeding that in II, expressed the need for
62
Marx 1962, p. 186.
an intensive production effort in I in order to preserve the ‘equilibrium’ of

the growing system. However, capitalist production is unable to satisfy fully
both its own productive requirements and personal demand immediately
upon their appearance. The ‘decit’ of production in relation to consumption
steadily increases. This fact is expressed in market terms by further deviations
of demand from supply, accompanied by a further rise in prices. In the
language of the market, the ‘disproportion’ grows. However, production
has already ‘laboured’ long to ll the breach, rapidly expanding existing
enterprises and branches and building new ones. In turn, inter-branch
competition – the lever of ‘equilibrium’ between the component parts of
the system – is at work ‘everywhere’. Capital ows into production from
other spheres together with a steady stream of surplus-value. Nevertheless,
during the rst and the second parts of the expansion, the condition of
underproduction not only persists but also steadily intensies.63
Capitalist society has sufcient potential capital at its disposal, but it
is not able quickly to give it the productive form of functioning means of
production. On the contrary, the ow of this capital into production ini-
tially signies a multiplication of social purchasing power and thus a growing
impossibility of fully satisfying it at this particular moment.64 The high
technical composition, which every capital must adopt at the given stage of
development as it ‘craves’ to function productively, is the principal obstacle
to speedy satisfaction of demand. Consequently, it is no surprise that it
is not a shortage of M or a delay in the movement C’ – M’ that determines
the prolonged rupture of ‘equilibrium’ during the expansion, but rather the
difculties that stand in the way of a timely conversion of M into C, or the
lack of identity between the available money capital (and surplus-value) and
its ability to function productively. From the point of view of the ‘normal’
transformation of capital values, what we have here is an irrational contra-
diction between the distinct forms that capital assumes. The productive form
assumes overwhelming importance, and the whole period of the expansion
is a unique expression of its predominance over the money form. The partners
63
The reference is to Spiethoff’s stages of the expansion.
64
[Note the anticipation of the Keynesian ‘multiplier ’. Much of the Keynesian
analysis, including the relation between intended savings and intended investments,
is already apparent in Maksakovsky’s exposition.]
in this ‘salto mortale’65 exchange places. The symbol of capitalist wealth becomes
functioning means of production.
Such a state of affairs cannot long endure. The difculties of converting
M into C are gradually overcome, and the system moves toward restoration
of its disrupted production ‘equilibrium’. The greater is the divergence of
‘demand’ from ‘supply’ in a particular branch, the more intensive is the
process of capitalisation. The scale of newly created enterprises also anticipates
further growth of market demand. At a certain stage in the development
of this process, the production ‘equilibrium’ of the system is restored. Society
has at its disposal a production apparatus that is able to satisfy the existing
productive and consumer demand. However, only an insignicant part of that
apparatus has completed the nal stage of construction and been transformed
from a ‘bearer of demand’ into a ‘subject of supply’. The larger part still
represents productive capital that is ‘asleep’ – that is, it exists in the form of
a ‘consumer’ but not yet as a ‘producer’. For this reason, market competition
is unable to reect the current growth of productive capital that is in the
preparatory stage on its way to becoming functional. Demand still exceeds
supply, and the level of prices remains higher than the prices of production.
If, in the language of production (including its preparatory stages), ‘equilib-
rium’ is ‘almost’ established, in the language of the market, underproduction
continues to grow. The market mirror (‘demand’ and ‘supply’) ceases to reect
what is happening in production.
Until the newly created production apparatus actually begins to operate,
the market links of capitalist competition cannot reect the results of inter-
branch competition of capitals, which rebalances the system. One might
provisionally speak of a developing contradiction between branches, which
could not exist if there were a smooth process of replacing xed capital. The
concept of market ‘equilibrium’ enters into contradiction with the concept of
the system’s ‘equilibrium’. That which, in the language of the market, signies
underproduction, in the language of production represents near completion
of the process of establishing ‘equilibrium’. That which, in the language of
the market, becomes ‘equilibrium’ – that is to say, when supply catches up
with demand – in the language of the system will signify fully developed
‘overproduction’. Supply catches up with demand in the market only when
65
[‘Deadly leap’ or ‘dangerous undertaking’]
the newly built factories and plants become ‘subjects of supply’ – when
they throw their production onto the market. However, this will inevitably
mean overproduction. The scale of capitalisation, being oriented on market
indicators, will inevitably exceed the required norm of expansion in produc-
tion. Overproduction becomes even more apparent when the massive delivery
of commodities to the market coincides, at the end of the preparatory work,
with a reduction of demand for elements of equipment on the part of the
newly ‘nished’ enterprises.
As we said previously, the protracted lack of correspondence between
supply and demand is associated with an equally protracted conict between
market prices and prices of production. In this latter conict, market prices
prevail up to the end of the expansion. They are the actual regulator that
‘manages’ the movement of capitals. The market mechanism, which envelops
the wealth of the capitalist, escapes from its ‘subordination’ to value and
develops its own internal momentum. By guaranteeing super-prots, it
creates pressures for massive additional capitalisations up to the very end of
the expansion. As construction of the necessary production enterprises
approaches completion, this ‘super-capitalisation’ then results in the produc-
tion of ‘overproduction’. High prices are transformed at a certain stage of the
expansion into a false and irrational indicator. The emerging overproduction
achieves a ‘balance’ of ‘demand’ and ‘supply’, but only ‘for an instant’. This
‘balancing’ does not become a market expression of the ‘proportionality’
of social production; instead, it is merely a brief moment (an ‘instant’) in a
sharp decline of market prices, as they pass through the regulating zone of
value in their downward movement and express a dialectically maturing
overproduction that is breaking through to the system’s surface.
Therefore: 1) the massive renovation of xed capital ‘gives birth’ to the
expansion phase of capitalist reproduction; 2) insofar as growth of social
demand exceeds the possibilities for a correspondingly rapid increase of
production, the entire period of expansion unfolds in the context of, and in
response to, a rising level of prices and thus of prots; 3) the impossibility
of a rapid expansion (corresponding to demand) is determined not by a
shortage of money capital or a low level of technology, but rather, on the
one hand, by the high level of capital’s technical composition – which rep-
resents a further addition to productive demand – and, on the other hand,
by the lengthening period required for capital construction; 4) at a certain
stage in development of the expansion, when the process of equipping

new enterprises draws to a close, the market indicators (prices, prots)
cease to express the elements of production ‘equilibrium’ and acquire an
irrational character, so that the emerging ‘equilibrium’ of the social system
does not and cannot nd expression in a declining tendency on the part
of prices, or their return to the ‘bosom’ of value in the prices of production;
5) the volume of additional capitalisation, which is connected with these
events, crosses through the stage of ‘equilibrium’ and at once leads social
production out of the condition of ‘underproduction’ and into that of
‘overproduction’ in the main branches, which then grows over into a crisis.
In the growth of the expansion – which is also the growth of overproduc-
tion – the character of the law of value’s activity in the capitalist epoch is
reected as if in a mirror. In a simple commodity economy (and also in a
capitalist economy, if we assume that xed capital is evenly replaced), value
‘regulates’ production and, with each deviation of prices, manages to ‘cope’
with the task. However, the capitalist tendency toward restoration of the
disturbed ‘equilibrium’ is different: value can win out only after a prolonged
interval of time following the moment of ‘disruption’, an interval that embraces
several years of expansion. The activity of the law of value – or prices of
production – is expressed in a pronounced change of the conjuncture and
in the succession of its distinct phases. The actually occurring production
process is subordinated like never before to the law of value – in the nal
analysis. Never before was its subordination to this law, which constitutes the
basis of the social system, so complete. The dening pattern of capitalist
development is the clearest expression of this ‘subordination’. It is the
result of interaction between the law of value and is the principal factor in
the disruption of ‘equilibrium’ – namely, the sudden, massive renewal of
xed capital and the ensuing excess of social production over market demand.
It is on this basis that there arise such specic market phenomena as the high
level of prices during the stage of expansion. The whole reproduction process
actually takes place around an axis of rising market prices that neither reect
nor correspond to changing value magnitudes. On the contrary, market prices
can even move in a direction opposite to changes in the prices of production.
The magnitude of value (prices of production) can decline in branches where
technologically advanced capital is widely used, yet prices continue to rise.
The result is that the various production ‘proportionalities’ of the system are
disrupted. Department I grows, in disguised forms, more quickly than II.

The slower development of c in Department II inevitably leads to the
impossibility of v1 + s1 fully exchanging its natural form for the money form.
Hence, there is overproduction of means of production. A prolonged disruption
of exchange according to values – or prices of production – is identical with
a greater or lesser disruption of all reproduction proportions in general. This
means overproduction of means of production, the inevitable overproduc-
tion of items that workers consume, etc. The appearance of disparities in the
assortment of commodities being produced causes the overproduction to
become still more acute.
On its own, disruption of any one of these value relationships would
interrupt the ‘normal’ course of reproduction in one way or another and, in
certain circumstances, lead the system into a crisis. That kind of disruption,
however, would have only a sporadic character. The ‘pace-setter’ of periodic
disturbances, which inevitably end in a crisis, is disproportionality be-
tween the part of xed capital that wears out each year and the part being
replaced. In the real conditions of reproduction, this is the fundamental
proportionality. Its disturbance, originating with the results of a crisis
(or with technological change), typically becomes the starting point for
disruption of all other proportionalities. If the causes of disturbance in
this fundamental ‘proportionality’ were to disappear, capitalist anarchy
would be deprived of its highest form of expression – the cycle. But that
would also require sociological preconditions that could never appear in
a capitalist economy. ‘An organised society within an antagonistic form’ – or
ultra-imperialism – would no longer have a cycle.66 In that case, the repro-
duction process would essentially proceed in conformity with the abstract
schemes of simple and expanded reproduction.
66
[Karl Kautsky used the term ‘ultra-imperialism’ to anticipate international
co-ordination of capitals in avoidance of imperialist wars. Rudolf Hilferding spoke
of ‘organised capitalism’ to theorise a phase of capitalist development involving
elimination of cyclical crises through universal cartelisation (Hilferding, 1981, p. 234).
Hilferding regarded this outcome as theoretically conceivable, but practically and
politically impossible (pp. 296–7). The issue of ‘organised capitalism’ played a
central role in Soviet debates during the 1920s over Nikolai Bukharin’s theory of ‘state
capitalism’ and post-war capitalist ‘stabilisation’. For Hilferding’s views and their
reinterpretation by Bukharin see Day 1981, pp. 21–39.]
It is not value relations that determine the growth of individual branches

during the expansion, but market prices. At rst sight, this would seem to
imply a process of disruptions that would affect capitalism even more than
a periodic crisis. This would certainly be true if prices deviated randomly
in individual branches. In that case, exceptionally acute disproportions
would arise because expansion of production in some branches would be
accompanied by contraction in others. However, that kind of situation does
not occur in reality; during an expansion, prices deviate in one direction –
upwards. In these circumstances, much of the growth of society’s production
apparatus actually does correspond to the ‘proportionalities’ of expanded
reproduction. However, this by no means mitigates the severity of over-
production. The degree of overproduction is determined not by the absolute
expansion of production, but rather by the evenness of the expansion and
the extent to which it is co-ordinated with consumer demand. Relatively
minor overproduction can lead to a crisis if there is not sufcient absorptive
capacity in the consumer market, whereas a much larger expansion – when
growth of all the moments of reproduction is properly co-ordinated – will
only mean ‘prosperity’.
Nevertheless, the consumer market generally grows less during an ex-
pansion than total production (and begins to contract at the rst sign of
difculty in sales), while, in terms of production relations, the main branches
of Department I also grow much more quickly than Department II. It is
perfectly clear, therefore, that the crisis reveals both a full-edged dispro-
portion between Departments I and II and a more general disproportion
between social production and consumer demand, which nds expression
through overproduction in Department II. The direct cause of this ‘inated’
growth is the greater departure of prices from the price of production for the
output of Department I than is the case in II.
However, even in the case of a uniform departure of market prices from
the price of production, social production still could not maintain the ‘equil-
ibrium’ of its parts, contrary to the claim of Hilferding. ‘If the prices of all
commodities were to rise by 10 percent or 100 percent,’ he writes, ‘their
exchange relationship would remain unchanged. The rise in prices would
then have no effect upon production; there would be no redistribution of
capital among the various branches of production and no change in the
proportional relations. If production is carried on in the proper proportions (as
was shown in the schema presented earlier) these relations need not change
and no disruption need occur.’67
Hilferding would be correct only it we assume that a uniform rise in prices
reects a corresponding change in values and the price of production. In that
case, reproduction proportions would remain undisturbed. However, he is
referring to the period of expansion, when prices rise above values, and in
that context he is mistaken. Leaving aside the question of whether ‘relative
exchange relations’ are preserved between branches when prices rise by the
same percentage, let us note that Hilferding’s fundamental methodological
error is that he conceives of the ‘proportionality’ of the system in terms of
an ‘equilibrium’ within production that leaves out the role of consumer
demand. With this starting point, it is easy to come to the supercial con-
clusion that a uniform rise of the prices of commodities in Departments I
and II will not disrupt the ‘proportions’ of reproduction. However, a ‘local’
equilibrium of Departments I and II, detached from consumer demand, does
not exist in reality. Consumption of income by workers and capitalists is the
most important condition for social realisation; that is, for the different parts
of the production whole to assume the forms necessary for them to function
productively. If the rate of growth of incomes does not keep pace with the
scale of social production, overproduction inevitably results.
‘Harmony’ between production and consumer demand exists only so long
as commodities exchange according to prices of production, or values. Any
upward deviation of market prices from prices of production, even if it occurs
uniformly, means a dislocation of these conditions. Despite the fact that a
general price rise includes labour-power, the rate of increase of working-class
incomes and of non-productive consumption of surplus-value lags behind
the potential for capitalist production to expand. That potential is ‘created’
by a favourable market conjuncture. The productive body of capitalism
avoids becoming distended only when the ‘iron rod’ of the law of value
exerts direct pressure on the ‘proportions’ of its parts. A uniform upward
deviation of prices, which (let us assume) did not create a disproportion
between Departments I and II, would inevitably provide the impulse for such
67
Hilferding 1981, p. 261. [The ‘schema’ to which Hilferding refers are Marx’s
models of reproduction.]
an expansion of production as would outstrip the rise in working-class income,

for the latter is strictly limited in capitalism’s antagonistic conditions of
distribution and in the presence of the reserve army. At the current stage
of technology, capitalist production is literally ‘bursting’ with overproduc-
tion. It is pointless even to raise the issue of whether overproduction, in
the aforementioned circumstances, would be sufcient to grow over into a
cyclical crisis, for absolutely articial conditions are being assumed; for
instance, that there is neither any disproportion between Departments I
and II nor the related issue of the massive renovation of xed capital. The
contradiction between capitalism’s production capacity and its relations
of distribution exists as a fact and is revealed in the form of partial or uni-
versal overproduction. For that reason Hilferding, with his theory of a
‘local’ equilibrium occurring within production, is incorrect. He has not
considered all the moments in the transition from the abstract theory of
social reproduction to the analysis of the real process. When analysing real
reproduction, Hilferding and Tugan both treat personal consumption as
a simple function of production with no independent signicance, either
qualitatively or quantitatively. They do not understand that the law of value,
which is the foundation of proportionality in social reproduction, is at
the same time the law of ‘proportionality’ between social production and
consumer demand. A lag in the regulating activity of value, expressed in a
prolonged upward deviation of the market price from the price of produc-
tion, prepares the way for an outbreak of contradictions between capitalism’s
relations of distribution and its capacity for rapid expansion on the basis of
capitalisation of surplus-value. The concrete expression of this contradiction
is the way in which consumer demand grows more slowly than the devel-
opment of production. We have already examined how this process occurs.
This is the central moment of overproduction and thus of the cycle. It would
be impossible to provide a theoretical explanation of the real course of
capitalist reproduction without considering this contradiction. Hilferding’s
fundamental error is methodological; it involves his failure to clarify fully the
activity of the law of value within the comprehensive linkages of capitalist
reproduction.
Direct involvement of the law of value, in its role as ‘regulator’, is associ-
ated with a contradiction between production and consumption that has
already erupted in the market. Through the fall in prices, value works towards
‘equilibrium’ of all the elements of production on a new basis. The crisis

is a deformed expression of the victory of the tendency toward ‘equilibrium’
over the ‘self-repelling’ forces of capitalist anarchy. The battleeld for their
struggle is the social turnover process, including the unity of its phases of
production and circulation. ‘If they (the phases of production and circula-
tion, P.M.) were only separate, without being a unity – writes Marx – then
their unity could not be established by force and there could be no crisis. If
they were only a unity, without being separate, then no violent separation
would be possible without implying a crisis. Crisis represents the forcible estab-
lishment of unity between moments that have become independent, and the enforced
separation from one another of moments that are essentially a unity.’68
Here Marx brilliantly characterised the essence of a crisis. He revealed its
dialectical nature. The process of production and circulation represents the
unity of the turnover of capital. Nevertheless, this unity is not monolithic –
it is an anarchic sum of the autonomous parts of the social whole. The
crisis expresses mutual alienation of these moments, the familiar struggle
of individual and separate capitals against the social conditions of their
turnover. However, if the crisis were merely a condensed expression of this
struggle and nothing more, continued existence of a social whole would be
impossible. The already existing ‘autonomous’ and ‘anti-social’ tendencies of
individual capitals would be reinforced; and because every phase of each
capital’s turnover depends directly upon the passage of other capitals through
their own successive phases, if these tendencies prevailed even briey they
would cause the social system’s deformation and disintegration into its most
basic elements, which cannot exist unless they are closely interconnected. The
reason why mature contradictions erupt into a crisis is precisely so that they
may be overcome. The presence of forces that overcome contradictions is
demonstrated by the fact that the system continues to exist. The crisis forcibly
creates a unity ‘between moments that have become independent’, thus
guaranteeing a new stage of development. This aspect of the crisis expresses
the activity of the laws of equilibrium – of the law of value, which, through
a sharp drop in prices, strictly curtails both the redundant production apparatus and
the excess of commodity capital that has been created by extraordinary capitalisation
68
Marx 1975, p. 513.
on the basis of high prices that are detached from value, or from the price of
production. By performing this surgical operation, value drives the social
system toward ‘equilibrium’ of its parts without ever achieving ‘nal per-
fection’ in its work.
The drop in production is accompanied by a further reduction in demand,
which then must be expressed in further production cuts. Taking its general
impetus from the moment of crisis, the process of establishing ‘equilibrium’
now embraces a whole period of reproduction known as the depression. Here
the ‘philosophy of the epoch’ is not to promote growth of the productive
forces, but rather to work out new quantitative foundations for a social
‘equilibrium’ based on changing technology, which is entering the next stage
of its development. Initially taking the form of a downward spiral of production,
the depression prepares all the elements for new record-breaking growth,
which is realised during the ensuing stage of expansion.
Thus, the cyclical ‘gure’ of capitalist reproduction – R. Luxemburg’s
term – expresses the characteristic activity of the law of value (‘transmitted’
through prices of production) in the capitalist epoch. The specically capitalist
expression of this activity involves loss of the ability to manage the system
directly through the dynamic of prices, except in the nal instance. The more
protracted is the action of factors that cause price to deviate from value – or
from the price of production – the more serious is the disruption and the
more urgent the form of overcoming those deviations. Instead of prices
frequently moving up and down about their resultant norm, as in the period
of ‘non-cyclical’ capitalism, in developed capitalism we nd long-term
movements of prices (and prots) that are the natural precondition for
‘super-capitalisations’. Short-term uctuations in the scale of production,
around the resultant average in each branch, are replaced by catastrophic
movement of the entire social system, which, over long periods, races far
‘ahead’ of the ‘moving equilibrium’ of its own overall growth. Partial devi-
ations, the ripples of capitalist anarchy, are replaced by sharply dened
conjunctural waves. Having lost the ability to overcome the system’s current
difculties, the law of value now asserts itself through acute, periodic
ruptures of the high conjuncture. Growth of capitalist anarchy, reaching
its culmination in the cycle, coincides with an increase of the force with
which the fundamental laws of the system must act. If this were not the
case, ourishing anarchy would long ago have devoured the foundations
of ‘equilibrium’, the economic ligaments would have been severed, the

production apparatus would have disintegrated into a heap of materially
objectied wreckage, and the system would have ceased to exist.
The urgency with which the laws of ‘equilibrium’ operate is obvious and
is manifested in the crisis. However, the actual activity of these laws – and
their forcefulness – is due to factors that disrupt exchange according to
value, or prices of production. The greater is the pressure exerted by those
factors, the greater is the activity of the forces that hold things together. If
the forces of alienation were not present, there would also be no forces
of spontaneous organisation. These are two sides of the same coin. Thus,
whatever the determining importance of the massive renovation of xed
capital in generating the cycle, this factor – being the basic disintegrative
force – is merely a condition and circumstance of the activity of the law of
value. The cyclical dynamic of capitalism, like the simple uctuating move-
ments of its less developed elements in an earlier historical period, is a result
of the characteristic activity of the law of value, which draws from the disruptions
of price formation, whether they be long or short in duration, the immanent strength
needed to transcend those same disruptions. Insofar as transcendence at one
‘moment’ is connected with inevitable rupture at the next ‘moment’, the
conditions that evoke the activity of the law of value are continuously
reproduced. We see this clearly seen in the course of the depression, which
concretely expresses the law of value’s ‘levelling’ effect on capitalist produc-
tion when it jumps its rails. The depression, in turn, inevitably grows over
into a new periodic disruption.
The theory of depression.The self-development of the cycle

The fact that the law of value comes onto the scene and begins to operate
during the crisis by no means implies that the system will rapidly move
to a condition of ‘equilibrium’. Just as the disproportionality of social
production takes time to emerge, so it takes time to overcome that dispro-
portionality. These are two aspects of a single process, which, taken together,
are the principle content of the cycle. The time required to complete them
is measured by the cycle’s length. Expansion and overproduction develop
in stages, and the same is true, during the depression, of the fall in social
production towards the condition of ‘equilibrium’. Decline from the previous
height, which occurs in the crisis, ‘then gives way to a slow but steady reverse
movement in the form of interaction between the different economic spheres.
The fall in the rate of prot and in the compensation for labour puts pres-
sure on consumption, which contracts and causes prices to fall, while the
continuing fall in prices curtails output. Limitations on production further
decrease both compensation for labour and the rate of prot, etc., etc. The
result is a “vicious circle” in which interaction between different areas of
economic life sustains and intensies the tendency towards depression.’69
This is an excellent characterisation of the course of the depression. The
moving principle of the depressive tendency is the same as in the expan-
sion – the contradiction between production and consumption and their
dialectical interaction. Whereas the period of expansion sees these moments
interacting on a widening basis, determined by the upward movement of
prices for all commodities, including labour-power, the depression involves
the same process in reverse and is determined by the downward movement
of prices. However, the result of the interaction between these two factors is
different in the two periods. During the expansion, the productive forces
surged forward as they ‘took the bit in their teeth’ and temporarily escaped
supervision by value, whereas the depression presents a more ‘peaceful’
picture, in which the system gradually returns to the ‘stall’ of equilibrium
between its parts and experiences signicant atrophy of the productive forces.
The dening characteristic of depression is the contraction of output.
‘Depression is a period in which the need for material means of production
is less than in the preceding period of high conjuncture,’ says Cassel.70
The fall in output, dictated by low prices and prots, is associated with
reduction in the number of employed workers and the wages they receive.
This condition provokes continuous cuts in production, and so on. Theo-
retically, one might imagine this process going on endlessly, right up to the
full destruction of capitalism’s production apparatus, but this is would
only seem to be the case at rst glance. The fall of social production creates
other tendencies that bring the process to a halt. First, the drop in total wages
simultaneously means a rise in the purchasing power of each wage unit as
69
Spiethoff in Problema rynka i krizisov, p. 269.
70
Cassel 1925, p. 63.
the consumer price index falls. The fall in the index (from prices above value
to the other extreme of prices below value) exceeds the reduction in the
payment for labour because the latter is subject to a strict norm imposed by
the value of labour-power. Consequently, consumer demand ‘stabilises’ at a
certain stage and (if we abstract from further partial drops in production)
can begin to show a rising trend. At a certain stage, this trend brings the
‘retreat’ in Department II to a halt. A second factor involves annual population
growth, increased buying power on the part of those with ‘xed’ incomes,
which do not depend on the conjuncture, etc. Generally speaking, the
disproportionality between Department II and consumer demand is less acute
than between Departments I and II. The ‘scissors’ in II can be closed more
easily and more quickly.
Things are much more complex when it comes to the branches of Department
I. Because of acute overproduction at the moment of crisis, on the one hand,
and the almost complete collapse of productive demand at the beginning of
the depression, on the other hand, a sharply declining index of production
prevails in I, especially in iron and steel production. The circulation of
capital values contracts, and the whole process slows. A signicant
portion of xed capital stands idle. With the low prices that prevail on
the productive market, the only way out is to reduce costs of production
either by raising the productivity of labour or through the concentration
of capital. In these conditions, the effectiveness of existing demand can
grow, and demand can even increase absolutely. We have already mentioned
that an unchanged volume of consumer demand can entail a signicantly
greater scale of social production in proportion to the rise in the organic
composition of capital.
Thus, the only way out is to pass to the next level of technology. This process
occurs during the depression and involves two characteristic phases. Because
reduced demand means that it is not possible for the whole production
apparatus to operate, the laws of competition drive backward enterprises,
which can only produce commodities at high prices, out of business. Only
select facilities remain in operation, which are able to recoup their costs of
production and acquire a prot even when prices have fallen. This means
that the volume of socially necessary labour changes, costs of production
decline, and the possibility emerges for realisation of prot despite the
low price level. Existing social demand is satised by the enterprises that
operate with the most up-to-date technology, and the measure of value
(market value) falls signicantly.
Declining market value is accompanied by a change in the relation between
market demand and supply. Consider an example: previously, with a mar-
ket value of 15 rubles, supply sharply exceeded demand, the market was
overowing, the actual price was 12 rubles, there was too much produced,
sales were difcult, and it was impossible to realise prot. With a fall of
market value (or the market price of production) by 3 rubles to 12, the
functioning capital receives a ‘legitimate’ prot. Abstracting for the moment
from any increase of supply, which is another expression of rising labour
productivity, we would have an established ‘equilibrium’ of social production.
Thus: 1) a sudden reduction of demand, resulting from the turn in the cycle,
leads to a curtailment of the xed capital in productive use; 2) production’s
centre of gravity moves to the best-equipped enterprises, whose technical
conditions begin to determine the magnitude of value; 3) the reduced value
(price of production) ensures an average prot and, given the lower price
level, now ‘takes control’ of market competition, altering the relation of
demand to supply and pushing it toward ‘equilibrium’. The specic phenome-
non of detachment of market indicators from the ‘equilibrium’ conditions of
the system, a state of affairs that arose in the period of prosperity, is now
provisionally overcome. This rst phase in the transition of social produc-
tion to the next level of technology results from the intensifying struggle for
survival within the production apparatus as it faces the harsh context of
sharply reduced demand.
Liquidating social ‘disproportionality’, this phase immediately sets in
motion the fundamental catalysts for a new quantitative ‘equilibrium’. The
equipment that is taken out of use ceases to be a material embodiment of
capital. At any given moment, capitalist relations are only compatible with
a material-technical environment that is capable of supporting them, that
is, guaranteeing their expanded reproduction. The ‘spirit’ of value, which
penetrates these relations, temporarily or even permanently abandons those
elements of production that cannot yield prots when prices have fallen.
‘Insofar as the reproduction process is checked and the labour process is
restricted or in some instances is completely stopped, real capital is destroyed,’
writes Marx. ‘Machinery that is not used is not capital . . . Use-values, including
newly produced machines, which lie idle or are not completed – all of these
are destruction of capital . . . Their use-value and their exchange-value go to

the devil.’71 This is what accounts for the enormous moral wear of capital in
the period of depression.
When the leading capitalist enterprises replace their entire production
apparatus, this does not yet signify return of the system to its ‘normal’ con-
dition. Through great losses it has liquidated the acute disproportionality of
its parts, but the scale of production has also been curtailed; consumer demand,
as the guarantee of renewed expansion, grows only weakly; prices continue
to show a falling tendency; the rate of prot is modest. Accordingly, during
the rst stage of the technological renovation of society, or in the rst part of
the depression, we still do not have a ‘normal’ condition of reproduction,
only rough ‘elements’ of equilibrium without any external indications of the
system’s growth. Up to this point, further development is still inconceivable.
The rst stage of technological advance then ‘gives birth’ to the second.
The law of value, by changing its evaluations, has inicted moral wear on a
large part of the functioning xed capital. A number of capitalist enterprises
perish, while others, which are more viable, change the technical design of
their capital. Gaining strength from the concentration and centralisation of
existing money capital, they generate additional demand for elements of pro-
ductive capital. This demand is objectied through expansion of production
in Department I, which, through a number of links, passes along demand for
the entire social product. ‘The existing stagnation in production has prepared
the way for its further expansion within capitalistic limits,’ writes Marx.72
Depression dialectically grows over into expansion – which is connected with
emergence of overproduction, which, in turn, will pass through a crisis into
depression, and so on, until reaching capitalist ‘innity’.73 ‘The same vicious
circle will be described once more under expanded conditions of production
(the stage of cyclical expansion, P.M.), with an expanded market and increased
productive forces.’74 A high conjuncture owes its existence to depression in
the same way as the latter is the inevitable consequence of a high conjunc-
ture. Thus, it is perfectly clear that there is no point to the kind of analysis
71
Marx 1975, pp. 495–6.
72
Marx 1962, p. 250.
73
[The reference is to Hegel’s ‘bad innity’, meaning capital’s inability to function
as a self-determining social whole.]
74
Marx 1962, p. 250.
that takes as its starting point merely external indicators of the development
of the conjunctural process and, beginning with these supercial phenomena,
attempts to ‘extract’ a theory. In this case, formalism and schematism sub-
stitute for an understanding of the dialectical complexity of a process that
cannot be squeezed into schemes, however ‘subtle’ they may be.
The very fact of an acute drop in prices creates in itself the basic conditions
for depression to grow over into expansion. ‘A large part of the nominal
capital of society, i.e., of the exchange-value of the existing capital, is once
and for all destroyed,’ writes Marx, ‘although this very destruction, since it
does not affect the use-value, may very much expedite the new reproduction.’75
Through its work of demolition, capital reduces the scale of production in
terms of value. However, not all use-value perishes. The unsold commodity,
losing a signicant part of its exchange-value in present conditions, does
not lose, to the same degree, its use-value. A unit of exchange-value, given
the general reduction of prices, now generally represents a larger quantity
of use-values. This process is most evident in branches of Department I,
whose output has met with sharply reduced demand. As soon as the system
approaches a general ‘equilibrium’ of its parts, the tendency towards ‘reno-
vation’ of xed capital becomes evident. Acceleration of this tendency is
strongly encouraged by the fact that enterprises, with their reduced prots
or with the additional cash funds at their disposal, can purchase sharply
discounted means of production.76
The capitalists lost some of the exchange-value of their capitals, but the
magnitude of their effective demand also signicantly increased. Naturally,
because prices have fallen unevenly, not all capitalists are equally able to
exploit this circumstance. Nevertheless, cheap means of production and cheap
labour, in one way or another, promote the recovery of enterprises. In face
of the moral and physical wear dictated by capitalist competition, it is easier
for enterprises to adjust to the changed technological conditions when they
75
Marx 1975, p. 496.
76
‘Low prices for the instruments of labour facilitate the opening of new enter-
prises, and the low rate of prot makes it necessary to regard as protable even
those branches of production that did not merit any attention during the period of
prosperity. Thus, new enterprises grow up, and with them new market demand. A
further increase of demand for these products is added to the demand already caused
by the “technical” and “moral” wear of the instruments of labour that were installed
when industry was ourishing. Ultimately, this means that a new industrial expan-
sion begins.’ (O. Bauer in Problema rynka i krizisov, p. 89.)
operate in a market where prices for means of production have declined. The
dialectical contradiction that is lodged in the commodity, its dual nature, together
with moral and physical wear, is the most important cause of the growing
over of depression into the stage of expansion.
Consequently, the fundamental moments of the transition from depression
to expansion may be described as follows: ‘In the condition of depression
almost the entire existing equipment suddenly turns out to be morally
depleted . . . The way to a new, prolonged recovery can only be found on the
basis of a major increase of labour productivity. The latter is not only posited,
but is also made technically possible by the mechanism of the capitalist
crisis. The least powerful capitalists are bankrupt, or nearly bankrupt; their
enterprises can be bought up for a song by the magnates who dominate
their particular branch of production . . . Backward factories are liquidated,
the better ones are quickly reconstructed according to the latest word in
science . . . the organisation of production is rationalised with the utmost
thoroughness. As a result, the productivity of labour grows so much that
it turns out to be possible to run production protably not only without
raising prices, but even with the reduced prices that were established at the
outset of the depression.’77
What is the character of reproduction in the period of depression? The
author of the preceding quotation, V.A. Bazarov, holds that depression is char-
acterised by simple reproduction: ‘Depression is a system of static equilibrium,
which stabilises a capitalist economy temporarily at the existing level and
within the limits of an unchanging volume of physical production.’78 Closely
connected with this statement is Bazarov’s next contention: if, ‘at the crest of
the (rising – P.M.) wave, overproduction develops’, then depression can also
be regarded as relative underproduction, which is overcome at the beginning
of the ‘recovery’.79
These two related assertions are completely incorrect. Depression is not
‘a system of static equilibrium’, for capitalism knows neither any such
stationary condition nor its attribute of simple reproduction. Not one of the
stages of the cycle can be conceived in terms of the laws of simple repro-
77
Bazarov 1926, p. 95.
78
Bazarov 1926, p. 96.
79
Bazarov 1926, p. 113.
duction; in the period both of expansion and of depression, the capitalist

system experiences a condition of expanded reproduction.80
Marx established two kinds of indicators to characterise the type of repro-
duction: 1) value relations between the separate parts of the social whole;
2) the physical volume of production. However, this by no means implies
that there is a necessary correspondence between these two indicators at
every stage of the cycle’s movement. They correspond only in the stage of
expansion. A smoothly rising curve, with no sharp breaks or zigzags, is the
ideal type of capitalist development that underpins the Marxist theory of
expanded reproduction. In reality, no such capitalism exists. Nevertheless,
growth does occur during the period of expansion, both in the scale of
production and in terms of the value relations characterising expanded
reproduction: v1 + s1 > c2, even though there are deviations from the ‘norm’.
All the economic processes develop around the axis of expanded reproduc-
tion and are accompanied by massive capitalisation of surplus-value.
The period of depression preserves this fundamental characteristic. Here
too, v1 + s1 is not equal to c2, the realised surplus-value that is being partially
capitalised. Even if the majority of enterprises do not participate in this ongo-
ing capitalisation, it still occurs in the social system as a whole. In any other
circumstances, production of means of production would have to be cut back
to an extraordinary degree.
Marx says that the scale of simple reproduction in I is such that it pre-
supposes expanded reproduction in II: given the level of development of
production of means of production, if there were no increasing sales,
Department I would more than satisfy the needs of social production in terms
of repairs and ‘normal’ amortisation.81 Where can these surpluses be sold?
80
[Several Soviet writers agreed with Bazarov that depression should be interpreted
in terms of Marx’s scheme of simple reproduction. According to Bazarov, crises are
precipitated by monetary phenomena, and depression might become chronic because
recovery depends on technological changes that are never automatic. See Bazarov
1927.]
81
Marx 1975, pp. 480–1. [Maksakovsky is referring to the following passage: ‘Even
if the total capital employed in machine-building were only large enough to replace
the annual wear and tear of machinery, it would produce much more machinery each
year than required, since in part the wear and tear exists nominally [as depreciation
accounts], and in reality it only has to be replaced in kind after a certain number of
years. The capital thus employed, therefore yields annually a mass of machinery which
is available for new capital investments and anticipates these new capital investments.
For example, the factory of the machine-builder begins production, say, this year. He
There is some growth on the part of new enterprises set up during the
depression, but most important is the technological reconstruction of existing
enterprises. During the period of depression, there is virtually no normal
amortisation. Replacement of worn out equipment involves massive new
expenditures of money capital, whose general sum far exceeds the amorti-
sation fund. Normal replacement is inseparable from additional purchases
of equipment because of the higher technical design of new xed capital
and the rising technical composition of output. Circulation of xed-capital
values continuously merges with circulation of newly ‘attracted’ money
capital, which is trying for the rst time to assume the form of productive
capital. However, the result of this joint circulation is not yet reected in any
‘physical expansion of production’. On the contrary, in the rst period of
depression, moral-technical wear proceeded much more quickly than the
amortisation process plus supplementary capitalisation, meaning that the
scale of actual production contracted. Even so, the fact remains that new
capitalisations – expanded reproduction, or a certain value relationship of
v1 +s1 to c2 – did occur.
The second period of the depression is characterised by the fact that the
amortisation-expansion process outweighs moral-technical wear. Even in
this period, however, the process of expanded reproduction could not result
in signicant growth of the resulting commodities, as compared with the
previous period (of the depression). The reason is that growing purchases of
means of production do not yet entail a rapid increase of production. During
the expansion, the contradiction between the time when new xed capital
was purchased and the time when it began to function had the effect of
aggravating production. During the depression, the same contradiction makes
it impossible for the current processes of supplementary capitalisation to
supplies £12,000 worth of machinery during the year. If he were merely to replace
the machinery produced by him [assuming it lasts for twelve years], he would only
have to produce machinery worth £1,000 in each of the eleven following years
and even this annual production would not be annually consumed. An even smaller
part of his production would be used if he invested the whole of his capital. A
continuous expansion of production in the branches of industry which use these
machines is required in order to keep his capital employed and merely to reproduce
it annually. (An even greater expansion is required if he himself accumulates.) Thus
even the mere reproduction of the capital invested in this sphere requires continuous
accumulation in the remaining spheres of production.’]
result in a rapid increase of the mass of circulating commodities available

for personal and productive consumption. When this disguised process
becomes sufciently apparent on the market, bringing with it a new wave of
expansion, then we shall have the growing over of depression into the phase
of expansion. The forces that mature in the period of depression, involving
the concealed processes of supplementary capitalisations, are connected with
the transition of social production to a new technological level. At a certain
stage, those forces begin to negate the very existence of the depression.
It follows that depression represents a special condition of capitalist
reproduction, distinguished by the social system’s transition to the next level
of technological development. For depression, as for the period of expansion,
the characteristic state of affairs remains expanded reproduction. Were it
otherwise, it would be impossible to explain the transformation of depression
into expansion. But since the ‘main’ task was, above all, to replace instru-
ments of labour that were worn out in the moral-technical sense with new
instruments of a higher technical construction, the continuing process of
expanded reproduction could not immediately take the form of a massive
growth of the productive and the consumer markets. Insofar as expanded
reproduction completed the task of transferring the social system onto a new
technical path, one might say that it had an intensive character and could
not simultaneously result in massive expansion of the physical scale of pro-
duction. By contrast, once the expansion unfolds mainly on the basis of a
new level of technology, incorporating the ‘lessons’ of the depression, then
reproduction assumes an extensive character and nds expression, above all,
in growth of society’s production apparatus. Since it is not generally possible
to draw a clear line between the periods of expansion and depression, the
proposed distinctions are conditional in nature and emphasise the prevalence
of one tendency over another, which operates less forcefully. These two patterns
of development are dictated by the unique ‘tasks’ of the two periods of the
cycle; they distinguish reproduction during the period of expansion from
reproduction in the depression; they are superimposed on the fundamental
pattern of expanded reproduction, or the requirement that v1 + s1 > c2, which
is connected with the process of accumulation both in Department I and in
II. As for the mass of inactive and expiring enterprises, from the viewpoint
of the reproduction of capitalist relations they represent scrap metal that the
‘spirit’ of value has abandoned, either temporarily or for good.
The moment of crisis, likewise, is not a phenomenon of simple reproduc-

tion. In this case, the prevailing tendency is more likely to be in the direction
of contracting reproduction. The essential fact is that a cyclical crisis cannot
be strictly classied in accordance with one or another type of reproduction.
Its character is much too ‘eeting’. A revolutionary crisis is another matter.
In that case, the contraction of reproduction is obvious. Its symptoms nd
mature expression in the crash of the system. However, a cyclical crisis implies
‘stabilisation’ of production in the near future and restructuring of the
system’s ranks so that the productive forces may develop further within
the limits of capitalist organisation. The formal indications of diminished
reproduction, which are of eeting signicance, are more of a ‘memento mori’82
for capitalism than an actually realised type of reproduction. Nevertheless,
pending a nal answer to the direct question [of whether revolution is at
hand], we can regard the crisis as a phenomenon of curtailed reproduction.83
Thus, we have seen that the period of depression grows over into expansion;
and the latter, through overproduction and crisis, turns again into depression.
Even a single rotation of the cycle gives birth from within to the forces that
provide for its continuous repetition. ‘Just as the heavenly bodies, once thrown
into a certain denite motion, always repeat it, so it is with social production
as soon as it is once thrown into this alternating movement of expansion and
contraction. Effects, in their turn, become causes, and the varying phases of the
whole process, which always reproduces its own conditions, take on the form of
periodicity.’84 In another place, Marx posed the problem of the cycle’s self-
development more concretely: ‘The industrial cycle is of such a nature that
the same circuit must periodically reproduce itself, once the rst impulse has
been given. During a period of slack, production sinks below the level that
it had attained in the preceding cycle and for which the technical basis has
now been laid. In the phase of prosperity, the middle period, it continues to
develop on this basis. In the period of overproduction and speculation, the
82
[‘A reminder of mortality’.]
83
[Maksakovsky is alluding to the debate over capitalist ‘stabilisation’. By 1925
Bukharin thought that capitalism was becoming stabilised and no further revolutions
were immediately pending in the West. The issue of ‘stabilisation’ played a central
role in Bukharin’s political downfall. See Day 1981, Chapters 3–5. Maksakovsky played
no direct role in this debate.]
84
Marx 1961, p. 633.
productive forces are strained to the utmost and go beyond the capitalistic
limits of the production process.’85
The basic mechanism involved in the self-development of the cycle is value,
with its numerous drive belts. The inevitability of expansion growing over
into crisis results from the character of the capitalist system’s ‘regulation’
when it is under pressure from the massive renovation of xed capital.
This factor, deriving from the uneven progress of technology in a capitalist
economy, gives birth to the unique waves of market competition that cause
long deviations of market price from the price of production and thus alter
the ‘proportions’ between parts of the developing system. The result of an
outbreak of generalised overproduction in the market is a crisis, which signies
conclusively that the laws of ‘equilibrium’ have asserted their ‘right’, thus
driving the social system towards restoration of the disturbed ‘proportion-
ality’ of its parts.86 The ‘disproportionality’ that has broken out, both within
production and between production and consumer demand, is surmounted
by an adjustment of values during the post-crisis period of depression. The
diminished magnitude of value (expressed in the market price of production)
changes the relationship between market demand and supply and once more
attracts market prices to its own level and diminishes their uctuations. This
process, which is associated with enormous moral-technical depreciation,
represents transition of the productive forces to the next level of technological
development within the limits (for the time being) of capitalism. Capitalism
has already become impossible on the old technological basis – it is unable
to ‘create’ its own internal demand and has completed one of the orderly
stages of its history. A new level has been reached in the development of
labour productivity, which becomes the basis for the ongoing reproduction
of capitalist relations.
Thus, the beginning of a new cycle is a new technological level, which is
‘created’ by the law of value in its capitalist form and causes a new ‘cyclical’
stage of development to unfold. This is how the periodically maturing conict,
between the materially embodied process of production and the antagonistic
framework of capitalism, is resolved. A change in the quantitative nature of
value, in its measurement, while the qualitative form remains constant, creates
85
Marx 1962, pp. 477–8.
86
[The analogy is with the role of law in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.]
the turning point from depression to expansion. The impulse comes from the
fall of market prices below the price of production during the post-crisis
period, a situation that is impossible to overcome simply through redistrib-
ution of capitals because it prevails in all the branches of production. Given
the inability of competition to rectify the disturbed relation, the only way
out becomes creation of a new focus for ‘equilibrium’ – that is, a new, lower
level of values. On the basis of this new level, both the materially embodied
proportions of production and the relative signicance of each branch take
shape differently. The catalyst for a new ‘equilibrium’ is technological growth,
which is inevitably objectied in a rise of the social average organic compo-
sition of capital and thus increases the relative signicance of the productive
market. This is the origin of the massive increase of demand for elements of
productive capital, which then initiates a new cycle and leads the system
inevitably to expansion, crisis, depression, etc.
It follows that the ‘cause’ of the cycle’s self-development lies in the mech-
anism of the law of value, with its capitalistic transmission through the price
of production, which ‘automatically’ resolves the unfolding contradictions of
capitalist society so that the most developed anarchy of economic growth assumes
the form of cyclical, law-governed regularity. The periodically recurring impulses
that emanate from the law of value – a unique perpetuum mobile87 – impose a
necessary unity upon the anarchic whole of capitalism’s dispersed ‘parts’ and
bind them together as the complex ‘molecules’ of an economic totality. The
condition for such unity is continuous disunity. An endless struggle takes
place between these two principles of capitalism. Its form of expression is
the wave-like history of capitalist development, wherein each cycle is the
completed phenomenon that results from this struggle – until ‘spontaneity’
once again emerges victorious in this permanent one-on-one combat. The
‘alienating’ forces of capitalism, being rooted in the antagonism between its
relations of production and distribution, at a certain stage ‘devour’ the forces
of ‘attraction’, thus posing the problem of replacing capitalism with the next
social formation, wherein the absence of anarchy will also be associated with
elimination of the cyclical lawfulness of the reproduction process.
87
[Perpetual motion machine.]
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Marx, Karl 1961, Capital, Volume I, Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House.
Marx, Karl 1962, Capital, Volume III, Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House.
Marx, Karl 1973, Grundrisse, translated with a foreword by Martin Nicolaus, New
York: Vintage.
Marx, Karl 1975 [1968], Theories of Surplus-Value, Part II, Moscow: Progress Publishers.
Mombert, Paul 1924, Vvedenie v izuchenie kon’yunktury i krizisov, Moscow.
Mombert, Paul 1921, Einfuhrung in das Studium der Konjunktur, Leipzig.
Schumpeter, Joseph A. 1962 [1942], Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, New York:
Harper.
Spiethoff, Arthur [no date], (An article in an edited collection [title unknown]), Problema
rynka i krizisov: Moscow [publisher unknown].
Tugan-Baranovsky, Mikhail 1913, Les crises industrielles en Angleterre, Paris: M. Giard

& É. Brière.
INTERVENTION
Neil Davidson
Stalinism, ‘Nation Theory’ and Scottish History:
A Reply to John Foster1
Introduction
The Origins of Scottish Nationhood was an attempt to
resolve two problems, one of history and the other
of contemporary politics. The historical problem
was the apparent failure of the Scottish nation to
conform to the modernist conception of nationhood,
in which national consciousness rst develops
during the transition to either capitalism (in classical
Marxism) or industrialisation (in classical sociology).
If Scotland was a nation in 1057 or 1320, as is so
often claimed, then it must either be an exceptional
case, or the designation must also be extended to
England, France, or any other unied kingdom of
the medieval period. Since general theories abhor
exceptions, we must conclude either that modernism
is wrong, or – my preferred alternative – that Scotland
achieved nationhood, not in the Dark Ages or the
medieval period, but after the Treaty of Union with
England, after the dissolution of the late-feudal state
into Britain.2
1
Foster 2002.
2
Contrary to what Foster says, I am not so immodest as to claim ‘to be the rst

196 Neil Davidson
One attraction of the latter, admittedly counter-intuitive proposition is

that it offers an explanation for the second problem: why Scottish nationalism
has failed, for more than thirty years, to win more than minority support,
even under the Thatcher and Major régimes. (Indeed, the SNP have never
subsequently repeated the percentage of the poll they achieved in the
general election of October 1974.) Why, in other words, were most Scots
able to display high levels of both Scottish national consciousness and British
nationalism. If a Scottish nation only came into existence after the construction
of the British state, and if the formation of this Scottish national consciousness
was historically inseparable from the formation of British national
consciousness, then for Scots, particularly working-class Scots, ‘Britishness’
may have taken political priority, because it was at the level of the British
state that crucial class battles had always been fought out.
John Foster once argued that there were ve main ‘theoretical problems
posed by Scotland’s history as a nation’: the origins of Scottish nationality;
the end of Scottish statehood; the survival of Scottish nationality; the duality
of Scottish and English national allegiances; and the timing of demands for
greater Scottish self-government. 3 As can be seen from the summary above,
my book deals with the rst four. Given that I disagree with the solutions
which Foster has proposed to these problems, I turned to his review expect-
ing to meet an unfavourable critical response. In this, at least, I was not
disappointed. I was disappointed, however, to nd that Foster had, for the
most part, chosen not to engage with what I had actually written, but to
dismiss my argument, a priori, on theoretical grounds. Foster ignores most of
my material on Scotland, except for issues concerning Scottish economic
history – issues which are important in their own right, but peripheral to this
discussion.4 Indeed, most of his review is a critique of the general positions
[Marxist] to write comprehensively on Scottish history’ (Foster 2002, p. 259), since I

am obviously aware of the work of Calder, Carter, Hunter, Keirnan and Young, in
addition to his own. My only claim is that I am the rst to make a comprehensive
case for Scottish nationhood being formed after the Union. See Davidson 2000, p. 6.
3
Foster 1989, pp. 35–6.
4
As I note in the rst very rst paragraph of the Preface, The Origins Of Scottish
Nationhood began as the last chapter of a larger work on the bourgeois revolution
in Scotland. That work provides a more appropriate setting for discussion of the
economic aspects of Scottish development. See Davidson forthcoming. There is a
summary of the argument in Davidson 1999a.
Intervention 197
set out in my rst two chapters. Foster tells us that Marxism is not wrong
over the origin and class content of nationhood – I have simply failed to
understand it properly: Marxism apparently posits no necessary connection
between nationhood and capitalism, or indeed any mode of production.5
I do not intend to repeat my arguments about either nationhood in
general or Scottish nationhood in particular, since they are set out at length
in Origins and space is short. I want to focus instead on two issues. First, the
arguments with which Foster seeks to challenge my understanding of Scottish
history. Second, the theoretical assumptions which Foster himself brings to
this debate (since these raise issues of concern, not only to socialists based
in Scotland like Foster and myself, but to the Left more generally).
Some peculiarities of Scottish development

Foster has consistently argued that Scottish nationhood is a product of feudal,
not capitalist development. 6 He nevertheless claims (perhaps as a fall-back
position) that I underestimate the extent of agrarian capitalist development
in Scotland before 1707.7 His substantive critique begins with a simple mistake:
5
My misunderstanding is shared by, amongst others, a historian from an earlier
generation than Foster, but one similarly associated with the Communist Party of
Great Britain, Eric Hobsbawm: ‘The basic characteristics of the modern nation and
everything connected with it is its modernity. This is now well understood . . .’
Hobsbawm 1990, p. 14 and Chapter 1, ‘The Nation as Novelty: From Revolution to
Liberalism’, more generally. As this suggests, my view of the nation is not simply
derived from sociologists like Gellner, as Foster insinuates, but from an entire
modernist tradition, of which Marxism is part. It is worth noting that, in every
other respect, Hobsbawm shares the same Popular Front-inspired view of contem-
porary nationalism as Foster himself; rejecting ‘separatism’ of the national movements
within Britain on the one hand, while accepting the need to identify with working-
class ‘patriotism’ on the other. See, respectively, Hobsbawm 1977 and Hobsbawm
1983.
6
Foster 1973, p. 9; Foster 1975, p. 142; Foster 1980, p. 56; Foster 1989, p. 35. See also
Foster and Woolfson 1986, pp. 57–8.
7
Foster 2002, pp. 267–9. I do not, however, believe that ‘[p]rior to the Union there
was no Scottish capitalism’, simply that, unlike in England during the same period,
capitalism was not the dominant mode of production. Foster ’s carelessness with
what I have actually written does not stop here. It is not true that I dismiss ‘[t]he legal
system and the ministry [of the Church of Scotland] as quasi-feudal corporations’
(Foster 2002, p. 268). I certainly describe the former in these terms (and offer evidence
as to why this was the case), but make a point of stating that, because of this, ‘it was
left to religion to incubate a protonational consciousness’ and that the kirk was ‘the
only institution over which the plebeians exercised any democratic control’ (Davidson
2000, pp. 61, 62).
198 Neil Davidson
One of Davidson’s proofs for the non-capitalist character of Lowland Scottish

society prior to 1707 is the incorporation of feudal land payments into the
Act of Union. He does not examine the origin of these payments. When
did they begin? The fteenth century. At this point they represented a
historically extremely early attempt to monetarise land-holding and bring
it legally into line with the property requirements of Roman-based law.8
‘Why on earth should this be happening in barbaric Scotland?’, he asks,

apparently confusing my argument with that of Hugh Trevor Roper. I do
not in fact refer, anywhere in the book, to the incorporation of feudal land
payments, but leaving that aside for the moment, what was feuing and why
does Foster think it so important?
Feuing took place as follows. The feudal superior would grant a charter
conferring perpetual heritable possession to the feuar (frequently a tenant)
in return for a large initial down payment and payment thereafter of a xed
annual sum. Even after land had been feued out, however, the legal rights
of the superior over his domains (his heritable jurisdiction) remained in place,
so that even those peasants who were no longer tenants could not completely
escape his authority. It is the incorporation of the heritable jurisdictions, which
were specically retained under Section 20 of the Treaty of Union, to which
I refer in the book.9 These powers they conveyed extended, in some cases, to
the death penalty, and I know of one case where this was carried out (by
drowning) as late as 1679. Nor were they simply a superstructural phenom-
enon: the baron and regnal courts through which power was exercised also
served as the means by which the lords oversaw the process of agricultural
production. In 1707, jurisdictions of this kind existed nowhere else in western
Europe, either because they had been destroyed by bourgeois revolution (as
in the United Netherlands and England), or had been subsumed into those
of the absolutist state (as in France or Spain). In short, they represented the
legal embodiment of feudal social relations in the Scottish countryside. Their
preservation was one of the inducements through which the capitalist English
ruling class gained the acquiescence of their feudal Scottish counterparts
in the Treaty of Union, by reassuring them there no intention of initiating
8
Foster 2002, p. 268.
9
Davidson 2000, pp. 55–6.
Intervention 199
bourgeois revolution from above as the Cromwellian régime had done in

the 1650s.
Given that these social relations prevailed in Scotland at and beyond the
point of Union, it is difcult to take seriously the claim that ‘rural social struc-
tures’ were ‘transformed’ during the fteenth century by ‘Scotland’s position
as a supplier of wool to the proto-capitalist textile industries of Flanders and
Italy’, a process supposedly resulting in ‘agricultural defeudalisation’.10 Mere
growth in the extent of a feudal economy does not necessarily translate into
a change in its nature. Scottish sales of wool to areas of capitalist production
in Flanders and northern Italy during the fteenth century did not make the
Scottish economy capitalist, any more than Prussian sales of grain to areas
of capitalist production in Holland during the sixteenth century made the
Prussian economy capitalist. The issue is surely the nature of productive
relations in Scotland and Prussia, not in the areas to which they sold their
commodities. Foster, in any case, exaggerates the importance of Scottish wool
exports. It is true that these were originally equal to those of England, but,
as Isabel Guy has shown, the performance of the industry was not sustained
after 1460. Decline occurred in four stages: ‘1460–1475, a period of unsteady
prosperity; 1476–1533, a gradual decline; 1534–1542, an apparent upsurge;
but from 1543 until the end of the century, a dramatic and irreversible slump’.
The last stage ultimately heralded a period of ‘long-term contraction’, which
might have mattered less if the trade in woven cloth – a manufactured good
rather than a raw material – had kept pace with that of England. But whereas
Scottish wool exports were generally around 20% of the English, cloth exports
were only around 2%.11
More important than the fortunes of the wool industry, however, is the fact
that it was not, in any case, the key to the feuing movement. The timing is
all wrong. As Foster himself notes, feuing as a method for disposing of land
had been taking place on the lands of that greatest of medieval landowners,
the Catholic church, since the fourteenth century. The process was encouraged
more widely, however, by an Act of the Scottish Parliament of 1458, the very
point at which the decline of the wool industry began. Out of the 3061 feu
charters of church lands granted by the 1580s, only 106 were granted before
10
Foster 2002, p. 269.
11
Guy 1986, pp. 63–4, 69–72.
200 Neil Davidson
1500 and, even excluding all cases where the date is uncertain, a minimum
of 1562, or over half, were granted after the Reformation of 1560, which
suggests where the real impetus behind the movement lay.12
The feudal lords needed to increase their immediate disposable income,
but were restricted by the physical limits of what could be appropriated from
their tenants; many were therefore tempted into changing the nature of
occupancy on their lands. It occurred to at least some of the nobility, how-
ever, that they need not stop at feuing their own lands, but progress to those
of the church, whose annual revenue in 1560 was nearly £400,000, ten times
those of the crown, and divided up between a mere 3,000 clergy (out of
a population of 800,000).13 The church began to appear, not merely as a
contributor to their nancial difculties, but as a potential solution. Yet, there
was urgency to such considerations. The example of the Reformation in
England, where clerical abuses had been one of the justications for the
assault on the church, led to pressure for self-regulation in Scotland. Three
councils – in 1549, 1552 and 1559 – passed statutes seeking to curb the activ-
ities of the unregenerate clergy. The greater lords feared that an internally
reformed church might provide them with less excuse to seize its assets while
simultaneously challenging their existing exploitation of church ofces. The
lesser lords had always resented paying tiends (i.e. tithes) which they could
not afford to a church which they did not control, and some of them at
least were prepared to follow the magnates, if only to remove these nancial
burdens.
Here is at least one motivation (although scarcely the only one) behind the
Scottish Reformation. Walter Makey is surely correct to write of the outcome,
that: ‘These changes made signicant adjustments in the structure of feudal
Scotland without undermining its foundations; blood was drained out of the
rst estate and transfused into the second.’14 The only area where feuing left
any permanent residue of independent yeoman farmers was in the south
west, base for the Covenanting revolt against the absolutist Stuart monarchy
between 1660 and 1688. The heroism of the later Covenanters is unques-
tionable, but their regional isolation tells it own story about the failure of
12
Sanderson 1982, p. 65.
13
Donaldson 1965, p. 133.
14
Makey 1979, p. 2.
Intervention 201
a rural capitalist class to develop across Scotland as a whole before the

eighteenth century.
Foster overestimates the extent of Scottish development before 1746 only
to underestimate it afterwards ‘Davidson says that Scotland was industri-
alised from outside – by the sudden access of its merchant elite to the most
advanced technology from England.’15 My purpose in Chapter 10, to which
Foster alludes, was not primarily to discuss the economic transformation of
Scotland, although my ‘claim’ as to its ‘suddenness’ is supported elsewhere
in the book by gures showing the sharp upward trajectory, from the
mid-eighteenth century, of output in coal, linen and tobacco, and in income
from rent in land.16 It was, rather, to show the material conditions which
permitted new forms of national and class consciousness to arise, and it
is in this context that the theory of combined and uneven development
is of crucial signicance. To reduce it, as Foster does, to the mere acquisition
of advanced technology – a commonplace of orthodox ‘developmental’
economics à la Gerschenkron – reveals his continuing inability to come to
terms with Trotsky’s contribution to Marxism. Trotsky’s point, developed in
relation to Tsarist Russia, but also relevant to Scotland after 1746, was that
economically backward countries do not have to plod through the succes-
sive ‘stages’ of development beloved of both the Second International and
Stalinism, but can leap over entire transitional stages. What is transformed
is not simply the technology employed by workers but the social relations
within which it is operated, with all that implies for ideology, culture and
politics.
By playing down the formidable development of capitalism in Scotland
after 1746, Foster has no explanation for the greater industrial militancy
of Scottish over English workers in the Scottish General Strike of 1820.
This event, which involved over 60,000 workers, was absolutely decisive in
shaping the Scottish working-class movement of the nineteenth century, yet
it has been largely ignored by Scottish labour historians.17 Foster ignores it
too: I will suggest some reasons why this may be the case below.
15
Foster 2002, p. 269.
16
Davidson 2000, pp. 92–4, 170–1.
17
See Davidson 2000, Chapter 10 and Whatley 2000, pp, 307–27. My own argument
about the specicity of Scottish working-class development in the early nineteenth
century, and its comparability with that of Russia a hundred years later, is in fact
202 Neil Davidson
Imagined continuities
Foster begins his critique by objecting to my methodology:
Immediately, however, it is important to stress that [Davidson’s approach]

is not the only Marxist approach to the national question. Marx’s own posi-
tion was decisively different. The hallmark of this alternative tradition is
precisely its dialectical approach to the historical process, one that does not
abstract class or nation in a mechanical, or sociological, way.18
He opposes my attempt to identify nations with particular characteristics

and specic historical times: ‘[Davidson] uses sociological rather than dialec-
tical denitions of class and nation, and unilaterally links national identity
to capitalism.’19 I have no idea what ‘sociological’ means here, except that
it is something that Foster dislikes. (He also nds me guilty of ‘prioritising
sociologically-derived denitions’).20 In fact, my work is only sociological
in the sense that I am dealing with a particular form of consciousness and,
as Valentin Voloshinov once noted: ‘The only possible objective denition of
consciousness is a sociological one.’21 It is true, however, that I unilaterally
link national identity to capitalism.
Denition and periodisation are the basis of any scientic enquiry. In Origins,
I invited those historians of Scotland who reject my denition of nation (and
related terms) to present their alternatives, on the grounds that they must
presumably have some prior conception of what a nation is in order to be
able to say that Scotland was one in, say, 1320.22 No one has yet replied, but
Foster effectively absolves them (and himself) from so doing by the simple
expedient of saying that the nation is in a constant process of change over
time and that any attempt to dene it is a sociological imposition on the
dialectical uidity of the historical process. Since both Foster and I consider
similar to that which Foster makes about the Clydeside working class in the early
twentieth century. I think my dates t better, if only because the Clyde experience
was not restricted to Scotland, but comparable to that of Belfast and Shefeld. Compare
Davidson 2000, pp. 167–86 with Foster 1993, pp. 156–9.
18
Foster 2002, p. 262.
19
Foster 2002, p. 270.
20
Foster 2002, p. 265.
21
Voloshinov p. 13. Presumably, our contradictory interpretation of the term
‘sociological’ is an example of the ‘multi-accentuality of the sign’.
22
Davidson 2000, pp. 3, 6.
Intervention 203
ourselves to be working within broadly Leninist categories, it might be useful

to see what this most unjustly maligned of revolutionaries has to say on the
subject.
In his discussion of imperialism, Lenin noted ‘the conditional and relative
value of all denitions in general, which can never embrace all the concate-
nations of a phenomenon in its full development’ – before going on to list
what he regarded as the ve main features of the phenomenon in question.23
He made similar remarks in relation to periodisation.
Here, of course, as everywhere in Nature and society, the lines of division

are conventional and variable, relative, not absolute. We take the most
outstanding and striking historical events only approximately as milestones
in important historical movements. 24
Appropriately enough, Lenin is discussing the period, which he dates between

1789–1871, during which nationalism played a generally progressive political
role as part of the bourgeois revolutions.
In order to clarify this point, let us take an analogy from political economy.
If we dene capitalism simply as the exchange of commodities on the market,
or as a factor of production, then we could argue, with the Austrian neo-
marginalists, that it has existed since the beginning of class society.25 In this
connection, Marx commented that:
The bourgeois economy thus supplies the key to the ancient, etc. But not
at all in the manner of those economists who smudge over all historical
differences and see bourgeois relations in all forms of society. One can
understand tribute, tithe, etc., if one is acquainted with ground rent. But
one must not identify them. 26
If we dene capitalism on the basis of competitive accumulation based on

generalised wage-labour, however, then a different picture emerges. Capital,
as a set of social relations subordinate to those of feudalism, can be detected
in Flanders or the Italian city-states of the thirteenth century. Capitalism can
23
Lenin 1964e, p. 266.
24
Lenin 1964d, p. 146.
25
See, for example, references to ‘the achievements of ancient capitalism’ during a
discussion of the Roman Empire in Weber 1998 , p. 355.
26
Marx 1973, p. 105.
204 Neil Davidson
be seen as the dominant mode of production across specic state territories

with the emergence of the Dutch and English nation-states in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries. The capitalist system only emerges on a global
scale after 1848. This is not to impose some schematic series of stages on
historical development, it simply acknowledges that, at a particular point in
world history, something changed, and, in order to identify the nature of that
change, we need to draw distinctions between the periods before and after.
To do otherwise not only makes it extremely difcult even to say what we
are talking about (which, I suspect, is partly the point), but reduces Marxist
theory to a condence trick, and the theoretician to a shyster who can produce
suitably ‘dialectical’ denitions in conformity with the tactical requirements
of the moment – an abiding characteristic of the Stalinism which still forms
the basis of Foster’s theoretical assumptions.
It is even unclear whether Foster is claiming (in a manner analogous
to ‘those economists who smudge over all historical differences and see
bourgeois relations in all forms of society’) that nationhood is associated with
every mode of production, or just that that it can be associated with any mode
of production. Foster claims to have traced the genealogy of this purportedly
‘dialectical’ approach, in which nations appear everywhere and anywhere in
history, back to Marx and Engels themselves in:
. . . their correspondence from the 1860s and 70s, in Grundrisse and in Marx’s
Ethnological Notebooks of 1881–2 which formed the basis for Engels’s Origin
of the State, Private Property and the Family. It was this perspective that was
taken forward by Lenin in his critiques of Bauer, Luxemburg and Stalin and
further developed by the Soviet ethnographers of the 1960s, most notably
by Yuri Bromley.27
‘Unfortunately none of this literature is referred to by Davidson.’ There is,

however, a good reason why this literature is not referred to by Davidson:
the works by Marx, Engels and Lenin do not take the positions claimed
for them by Foster, and the ideological content of those by Bromley and his
colleagues makes their scientic value considerably less than Foster claims.
Marx certainly believed that there were indeed some aspects of our nature,
our species-being, which were unchanging, including the need to co-operate
27
Foster 2002, pp. 265–6.
Intervention 205
with other human beings in the production and reproduction of social

life. 28 There is no evidence that he thought a propensity to form nation-states
was among them. Foster informs us that Marx never saw t ‘to draw an
indelible line between nationality in the modern era of capitalism and what
went before’.29 At one level, this seems to be correct. As James writes: ‘We
should recall that Marx and Engels used the word “nation” to apply to poli-
ties, from the Phoenician tribes to the still-to-be-unied land of imperially
connected principalities, margraviates, and bishoprics called “Germany”’30
But these usages reect a lack of rigour in applying the term ‘nation’, not a
worked out theoretical position.31
Foster writes that, in the Grundrisse, Marx is primarily concerned with ‘the
fundamental importance of social entities larger than the family for human
development’:
On them depended the creation of a socially dynamic division of labour.

Like instrumental language, such social entities, bonded by specic cultural
identities provided ‘the rst precondition for the appropriation of the
objective conditions of life’.32
The section from which Foster quotes (‘The Chapter On Capital’), in fact,
traces the alternative routes through which pre-capitalist property relations –
‘Asiatic, Slavonic, ancient classical, Germanic’ – emerged from the original
clan communities. The basis for all of them is the settling of migratory clans
on specic sites where the community is subsequently modied by biology
and environment: ‘This naturally arisen clan community, or, if one will, pas-
toral society, is the rst presupposition – the communality of blood, language,
customs – for the appropriation of the objective conditions of their life, and of their
life’s reproducing and objectifying activity’. What on earth has this to do with
nationhood? Foster’s language becomes noticeably cloudy at this point in the
argument – as well it might. Is he really saying that ‘social groups larger than
the family’ which arose during the tribal stage of development are related to
28
Geras 1983, pp. 61–116.
29
Foster 2002, p. 266.
30
James 1991, p. 16.
31
I discuss this briey in relation to Engels in Davidson 2001, where, incidentally,
I also criticise the article by Nimni with which Foster implies I am in agreement.
32
Foster 2002, p. 266.
206 Neil Davidson
contemporary nations? Human groups have always developed collective

forms of identity, but labelling them all as ‘national’ is an anachronistic pro-
cedure made possible by Foster’s refusal to dene what a nation is. Marx
himself points out the problem with such claims for continuity only pages
later in the Grundrisse:
The survival of the commune as such in the old mode requires the
reproduction of its members in the presupposed objective conditions.
Production itself, the advance of population (this too belongs with
production), necessarily suspends these conditions little by little; destroys
them instead of reproducing them, etc., and with that, the communal
system declines and falls, together with the property relations on which it
was based. . . . Not only do the objective conditions change in the act of reproduction,
e.g. the village becomes a town, the wilderness a cleared eld, etc., but the producers
change, too, in that they bring out new qualities in themselves, develop themselves
in production, transform themselves, develop new powers and ideas, new modes of
intercourse, new needs and new language. The older and more traditional the
mode of production itself – and this lasts a long time in agriculture; even
more in the oriental supplementation of agriculture with manufactures –
i.e. the longer the real process of appropriation remains constant, the
more constant will be the old forms of property and hence the community
generally.33
In other words, Marx sees the initial – for want of a better word – ‘ethnic’
formations dissolve as the division of labour becomes more complex, and
nothing in the Ethnographic Notebooks contradicts this view.34
A position which sees nationhood arising under any form of class society,
and not only capitalism, does not, however, necessarily involve arguing that
nationhood will continue under socialism. It could be claimed that the nation
is an institution (like the family) which is a product of the transition to class
33
Marx 1973, pp. 495, 472, 486, 494. My italics.
34
In his monumental study of their politics, Hal Draper lists, in order of importance,
the types of writing by Marx and Engels, starting with the rst and most important,
‘[b]ooks and major essays that were published under the control of the writer, with
the usual opportunity for correction, revision, etc.’, and nishing, sixth and least
signicant, with ‘[p]rivate notes, notebooks and workbooks’. Draper includes even
as important a work as the Grundrisse in this category: the Ethnographic Notebooks fall
somewhere below the last named in terms of how seriously they must be taken as
part of the oeuvre. Draper 1978, pp. 3–4
Intervention 207
society, rather than any specic form of class society, and will dissolve with
the last form of class society, which happens to be capitalism. Foster opts for
primordialism, claiming support from, of all places, the Manifesto. Apparently,
‘the workers have no country’, really means that the workers should have a
country, that they would have one had they not been excluded from owner-
ship by the bourgeoisie, and that they will have a country if they can lead
the other social classes against the rulers: ‘Marx and Engels are not claiming
that nations will themselves disappear when the proletariat is victorious.
What is set to disappear is the hostility between them.’35 Let us concede that
this is one possible interpretation of what Marx and Engels believed at this
stage in their development. But their development did not stop at this stage.
In particular, their views on the state did not remain as they were in 1848.
In 1848, Marx and Engels argued for the proletariat to seize control of the
existing state and ‘wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie . . .
centralise all production in the hands of the state, i.e. of the proletariat
organised as a ruling class’ and only in the future (‘in the course of devel-
opment’) after a period in which, having ‘swept away the conditions for the
existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally’, will we have ‘an
association, in which the free development of each is the condition of the free
development of all.’36 The change in attitude to the state indicated by the
Paris Commune – ‘the political form at last discovered under which to work
out the economical emancipation of labour’ – is decisive here.37 The shift from
conquering to destroying the state also has implications for the ‘nation’ prex,
as can be seen from the Critique of the Gotha Programme, which has, I believe,
rather more signicance for us than the jottings from other writers recorded
or summarised in the Ethnographic Notebooks. Marx attacks the collapse of the
German Worker’s Party into ‘the narrowest national viewpoint’ associated
with Lassalle:
It is perfectly self-evident that in order to be at all capable of struggle the

working class must organise itself as a class at home and that the domestic
sphere must be the immediate arena for its struggle. To this extent its class
struggle is national, not in content, but as the Communist Manifesto says,
35
Foster 2002, p. 263.
36
Marx and Engels 1973a, pp. 86–7.
37
Marx 1974b, p. 212.
208 Neil Davidson
‘in form’. . . . And to what is the internationalism of the German Worker’s

party reduced? To the consciousness that the result of their efforts ‘will
be the international brotherhood of peoples’ – a phrase borrowed from the
bourgeois League of Peace and Freedom and which is intended to pass
as an equivalent for the international struggle against the ruling class and
their governments. Not a word, therefore, of the international role of the
working class!38
Lenin inherited these positions, and therefore does not provide support
for Foster’s genealogy either.39 He saw the duty of socialists to defend the
equality of nations, by opposing oppressor nationalisms (like the Great Russian
in Poland or the Great British in Ireland) and supporting the rights of the
oppressed. This remains the case today, although, clearly, not every nation
can be neatly divided into oppressed or oppressor – Scotland being a case
in point.40 Beyond this, however, he saw the demand for equality, not as an
end in itself, but as a means of overcoming the divisions between nations
and, ultimately, their existence: ‘And at the same time, it is their [i.e. the
Russian proletariat’s] task, in the interests of a successful struggle against all
and every kind of nationalism among all nations, to preserve the unity of the
proletarian struggle and the proletarian organisations, amalgamating these
organisations into a close-knit international association, despite bourgeois
strivings for national exclusiveness.’41
In this context, Foster completely misrepresents ‘Critical Remarks On the
National Question’.42 Lenin does not refer to the nation as such, but about
38
Marx 1974b, p. 350.
39
Lenin, in line with most of the Second International, stressed both the centrality
role of national movements in the transition from feudalism to capitalism, and the
functionality of the nation-state form for capital. See Lenin 1964b, pp. 396–7. For the
general background see Harman 1992, pp. 19–33.
40
As Seth notes, ‘the historical cultural, linguistic and other dimensions of nation-
hood were relegated to a secondary position by Lenin’s theory, as against the all
important question of determining which nations were oppressed and which were
oppressors (it will be noted that to speak of nations as oppressed and oppressing
is already to treat them as a “given”)’. The difculty is that Lenin did not allow ‘that
a choice between one or the other might be necessary, because both socialist and
nationalist consciousness were “determinate” – they did not, even where nationalism
was anti-imperialist, necessarily form a continuum in which progress from the
former to the latter was a smooth transition.’ Seth 1992, pp. 124, 126.
41
Lenin 1964b, pp. 453–4.
42
Foster 2001, p. 6. As does Bromley 1977, p. 65. But note also this other quote from
Intervention 209
each nation containing a proletarian culture, in addition to a bourgeois culture

and a clerical culture: ‘we take from each national culture only its democratic
and socialist elements; we take them only and absolutely in opposition to the
bourgeois culture and bourgeois nationalism of each nation’. What Lenin
is saying is that object of the socialist movement is not to preserve the
‘proletarian’ aspects of that culture but to create an international culture
drawn from all these cases: ‘The slogan of working-class democracy is
not “national culture” but the international culture of democracy and the
world-wide working class movement.’43 Take one more example, although
others could be cited. In ‘The Discussion on Self-Determination Summed
Up’, he describes the purpose of overcoming the inequality between nations
as not the perpetuation of their existence, but ‘the practical elimination of
even the slightest national friction and the least national mistrust for the
accelerated drawing together and fusion of nations that will be completed
when the state withers away.’44 Later, in the same article, he writes of ‘the
common goal’ being ‘the closest association and eventual amalgamation of all
nations’.45 In short, there is nothing in the classical Marxist tradition which
can be enlisted to support the notion of theoretical continuity between Marx
and Bromley.
In fact, it is the latter who is the real source of Foster’s position. According
to Bromley:
Ethnos (in the narrow sense of the term) can be dened as a rm aggregate
of people, historically established on a given territory, possessing in common
relatively stable particularities of language and culture, and also recognis-
ing their unity and difference from other formations (self awareness) and
expressing this in a self appointed name. 46
Lenin: ‘Proletarian culture, must be the logical development of the store of knowledge
mankind has developed under the yoke of capitalist, landowner and bureaucratic
society.’ Lenin 1964b, pp. 453–4. For the full passage, from ‘The Tasks of the Youth
Leagues’, see Lenin 1964g, p. 287.
43
Lenin 1964a, p. 24.
44
Lenin 1964f, p. 325. Lenin’s italics.
45
Lenin 1964f, p. 346. Lenin’s italics.
46
Bromley, quoted in Dragadze 1980, p. 162. The rst thing to note is that there is
nothing remotely Marxist about this denition. And, given Foster’s hostility to – one
feels that this prex is unavoidable – ‘bourgeois’ sociology, it is interesting that Bromley
et al. were welcomed by the doyen of Western sociologists for demonstrating the
supposedly continuing vitality of Soviet intellectual life. (See Gellner 1980.) Gellner
210 Neil Davidson
Two implications ow from this denition. The rst is that ethnos denes
human difference: ‘And when we speak, for example, about the French ethnos-
people, it always implies that it has denite features distinguishing it from
all other peoples and that this difference is consolidated through everyday
ethnic consciousness.’47 The second is that ethnos transcends historical time:
‘The Ukrainian ethnos, for instance, existed under feudalism and capitalism,
and continues to exist under socialism.’48 But neither of these implications
should cause concern:
The fact that today the peoples of the USSR have a socialist culture that
is common to all of them in content does not lead to the disappearance of
the national forms of culture. On the contrary, this culture harmoniously
combines with national cultures, with progressive national traditions that
have further developed under the conditions of Soviet reality and are
gradually becoming the attitudes of all the Soviet people.49
Presumably, no-one reading the above passage will imagine that Bromley in
any way represented a dissident trend in the Soviet academy. His views
reected the dominant ideology of the Russian ruling class.50 In fact, as Banks
notes, his work ‘was an attempt to tackle an obvious problem within the
Soviet Union head on’. That problem was the continued existence of national
consciousness among the non-Russian population of the USSR and of Russian
was quite right to see an afnity between Western sociologists and their Soviet counter-
parts. Compare, for example, Bromley’s denition of ‘ethnos’ above with the denition
of ‘an ethnic community’ by the British political scientist, Anthony Smith, as ‘a
collective proper name, a myth of common ancestry, shared historical memories, one
or more differentiating elements of common culture, an association with a specic
“homeland”, and a sense of solidarity for signicant sectors of the population’. See
Smith 1991, p. 21. Foster’s discussion of Smith is deeply confused. He writes: ‘Smith
sought to link ethnicity to national consciousness in terms of a myth of common
ancestry or kinship and a common position within an international division of labour.
Such characteristics are, however, “virtually impossible to nd today and have been
since before the rise of capitalism”. Davidson nds only one of Smith’s criteria relevant:
that of “shared identity”, which mirrors the subjective denition of Seton-Watson.’
See Foster 2002, p. 259. Foster is confusing Smith’s argument (ethnicity as a myth of
common ancestry) with mine (ethnicity can be either be biological kinship, occupational
location or social identity). See Davidson 1999, pp. 5–12. The argument is summarised
in Davidson 2000, pp. 9–10.
47
Bromley 1980, p. 153.
48
Bromley 1977, p. 15. See also Bromley 1980, p. 155.
49
Bromley 1977, p. 64.
50
In 1982, Pravda reported an announcement by Yuri Andropov to the effect that
national distinctions would outlast class distinctions. See Pravda 1982.
Intervention 211
nationalism at the level of state. As Banks explains: ‘Ethnos theory provides

a bridging mechanism, by positing a stable core which runs through all the
historical stages any society will undergo.’51
But Bromley’s work was also intended to solve another problem. As Banks
puts it: ‘Under Stalin, the claims of any constituent parts of the Soviet Union
to political independence were ruthlessly suppressed.’ Even those which had
expressed no open nationalist ambitions were treated as potential threats
to the unity of the state. Consequently, varying methods, ranging from
mass deportations, in the case of the Crimean Tartars, to the dilution of
‘ethnic’ administrative areas with ‘ethnic’ Russians, as in the case of the
Buryats in 1937.52 These were the perfect conditions for transforming national
consciousness into nationalism. Naked oppression tended to be replaced after
1953 with what Suny calls ‘a deeply contradictory policy’ involving ‘on the
one hand, nourish[ing] the cultural uniqueness of distinct peoples and thereby
increas[ing] ethnic solidarity and national consciousness in the non-Russian
republics, and on the other, by requiring conformity to an imposed political
order frustrated full articulation of a national agenda’. Economic modernisation
‘produced the possibility of communication and interaction, repression and
reproduction of cultural practices, that made nationality more articulate and
nationalism the most potent expression of denied ambitions’.53 Given the
fantasies propagated by Bromley (and repeated by Foster), there is a certain
grim satisfaction in the fact that death blow to the USSR was delivered
by the revolt of the very oppressed nationalities who were supposed to
have found their freedom in socialist ‘ethnos’.54 The continued existence of
nationalism in the USSR (and under the other Stalinist régimes) was not a
proof that nationhood has no necessary connection with specic modes of
production, but an index of how far from socialism and, indeed, identical
with capitalism these societies were.
Even if we accept that nations will not continue to exist under socialism,
however, is it not possible that nationalism may play some role in the struggle
for socialism? Foster thinks so, and invokes Voloshinov:
51
Banks 1996, pp. 22–3.
52
Banks 1996, p. 23.
53
Suny 1991, p. 113.
54
Suny describes the confusion which reigned at the annual conference of Soviet
ethnographers following the attempted coup of August 1991 and the subsequent col-
lapse of the USSR. Suny 1991, pp. 111–12.
212 Neil Davidson
Voloshinov argued for an analysis of language in a way that actively and

materially reected the balance of class forces at a particular moment.
Language represented a constant dialectic between inherited meanings and
their polemical redenition in terms of the real, concrete unfolding of the
contradictions of class society. In the long-term there could never be, for
Voloshinov, any unilateral, static enforcement of one interpretation. Unfor-
tunately, Davidson himself does not adopt Voloshinov’s approach.55
There are, however, two theoretical problems with the use Foster makes of
his work. The rst is indicated in a statement by Foster’s colleague, Charles
Woolfson, in his pioneering study of Voloshinov and his school. Summarising
his conclusion on the multi-accentuality of the sign, Woolfson writes: ‘Each
word, therefore, can have a multiplicity of meanings’.56 This is true – but each
word does not therefore have a innite multiplicity of meanings. As Callinicos
writes, ‘the term “nation” preserves in all its usages the same sense, referring
to a community bound to a unied state and transcending class antagonisms’.57
And this leads us to the second problem. Voloshinov refers to words, not
things, but the nation is not just a word whose meaning can be disputed, but
the typical form of consciousness which arises from the material reality of
the nation-state form. As Zizek has pointed out: ‘consciousness (ideological
appearance) is also an “objective” social fact with an activity of its own . . . bour-
geois “fetishistic” consciousness is not simply an “illusion” masking social
processes, but a mode of organisation of the very social being, crucial to the
actual process of social (re)production’.58
This, I think, brings to the heat of the problem with Foster’s (non)-denition
of a nation. On the one hand, a nation-state is a territorially-bounded political
entity; on the other, national consciousness is a form of collective group self-
identication which may or may not correspond to an existing nation-state,
but which would be unthinkable without the existence of nation-states. ‘The
nation’, however, is a metaphysical concept, and Foster uses it in the same
mystied way as the bourgeois revolutionaries who rst used it as a political
slogan. ‘Transformation or submergence [of a nation] will depend on how far,
55
Foster 2002, p. 270.
56
Woolfson 1977, p. 234.
57
Callinicos 1985, p. 162.
58
Zizek 2000, p. 173.
Intervention 213
within the pre-existing nationally-bounded political economy a revolutionary

class emerges that is capable of leading this process and dening new, more
progressive universal values.’59 This statement describe an aspect of some, a
small minority, of the early bourgeois revolutions (were ‘progressive universal
values’ really hegemonic in the Italian Risorgimento, German Unication or
the Meiji Restoration?), but it simply ignores the differences between them
and proletarian revolutions.
The bourgeoisie has to win allies because, as a minority class, it has never
been in a position to take power on its own behalf. It cannot achieve hegemony
over these allies simply with abstract doctrines of equality, nor can it openly
proclaim that the overthrow of the ancien régime will in fact result in new
forms of economic inequality: the nation is the ideological means by which
the different class interests opposed to feudal absolutism were temporarily
reconciled. The working class does not need to conceal its real aims in this
way. What has confused the issue, once again, is the politics of Stalinism.
As with his use of Marx and Lenin to bolster Bromley, Foster is using
Voloshinov to give some theoretical substance to the real source of his position,
the Bulgarian Stalinist Georgii Dimitrov. In this case, what all the talk about
dialectical subtlety effectively amounts to is a defence of the Popular Front,
launched by Dimitrov in his keynote speech as General Secretary of the Com-
munist International to the Seventh World Congress in August 1935.60 In this,
we learn of the need to recapture national revolutionary traditions from the
Right and take seriously the patriotic feelings of the working class:
National forms of the proletarian class struggle and of the labour movement
in the individual countries are in no contradiction to proletarian inter-
nationalism; on the contrary, it is precisely in these forms that the inter-
national interests of the proletariat can be successfully defended. 61
59
Foster 2002, p. 266.
60
Voloshinov died in a Stalinist labour camp around the same time that Dimitrov
was making this apologia for Russian foreign policy. His work was written at a
ferociously high level of abstraction – perhaps in a vain attempt to throw the heresy
hunters off his track – but even so, to claim that it has anything in common with the
politics of the bureaucratic ruling class which sent him to his death is quite grotesque.
61
Dimitrov, pp. 69–72. Dimitrov attempts to enlist Lenin in his support with a
decontextualised quotation from ‘On the National Pride of the Great-Russians’ (in
much the same way as Bromley does with the same article and ‘The Tasks of the
Youth Leagues’, and Foster does with ‘Critical Remarks on the National Question’).
See Lenin 1964c, pp. 103–4.
214 Neil Davidson
It is important to understand that, although the Popular Front is often treated

as a return to sanity after the madness of the Third Period, in many respects,
it simply represented an equally disastrous mirror image of the earlier
strategy. If the Third Period involved an isolationist sectarianism towards
other parties of the Left, the Popular Front involved a promiscuous embrace
of bourgeois parties for essentially electoral purposes. The latter strategy
remained central to the Communist parties, at least in the West, from the
1930s until their demise after 1989, to disastrous effect, as the outcomes in
France and Spain in the 1930s and Chile in the 1970s conrm. Scotland was
no exception, although, here, it led to factory closures rather than torture
chambers.
Yet Foster wants to carry on with the same failed strategy. ‘Faced with
the challenges posed by such entities as the European Union, Davidson’s
approach threatens to abandon anything that is progressive and democratic
to chauvinist and nationalist misuse.’62 The proper response to this type of
claim has been well made by David Harvey:
. . . too frequently the response [of the Left] is an overly simplistic argument
that runs along the following lines: ‘because NAFTA and Maastricht are
pro-capitalist we ght them by defending the nation state against supra-
national governance’. . . . The Left must learn to ght capital at both spatial
scales simultaneously. But, in so doing, it must also learn to co-ordinate
potentially contradictory politics within itself at the different spatial scales
for it is often the case in hierarchical spatial systems (and ecological prob-
lems frequently pose this dilemma) that what makes good political sense
at one scale does not make good politics at another (the realisation of, say,
automobile production in Europe may mean plant closures in Oxford or
Turin). Withdrawing to the nation state as the exclusive strategic site of
class organisation and struggle is to court failure (as well as to irt with
nationalism and all that entails).63
But the problems of the Popular Front in Scotland are not just hypothetical.
For virtually as long as Foster has been writing about Scotland, attempts to
save jobs have taken the form of ‘broad’ coalitions, invariably led by the
62
Foster 2002, p. 270.
63
Harvey 2000, pp. 50–1.
Intervention 215
Scottish Trade Union Congress (STUC). These have been described by one
friendly critic as consisting of ‘trade unionists, clergymen, artists, politicians
of various hue, thinkers, councillors, professionals, and the rest’.64 They
inevitably refused to consider industrial action and focused instead on
‘mobilising Scottish public opinion’ on the one hand (unnecessarily, since, in
most cases, it was already in sympathy with the threatened workers) and
attempting to ‘persuade’ the government to intervene (pointlessly, since it
was usually in complete agreement with the employers). Of these campaigns,
only the rst at Upper Clyde Shipbuilders achieved any kind of success, and
that because it was accompanied by a militant occupation which took place
in the context of the great upturn in British working-class struggle of the
early 1970s. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that even this struggle only
succeeded in saving half of the jobs at UCS, at least partly because the mil-
itancy of the workforce was diverted into CPGB-inspired attempts to build
an ‘anti-monopoly alliance’ and the irrelevant slogan of a Scottish Convention.65
The later campaigns – Singer at Clydebank, the Carron Iron Works, British
Leyland at Bathgate, the Corpach paper mill, the Invergordon smelter, Linwood,
Caterpillar, Ravenscraig – took place in a period of defeat and contributed
to extending it by their failure. As Keith Aitken writes:
Retrospection yields the dispiriting, and somehow surprising, realisation

that almost none of the eighties issue coalitions achieved their primary objec-
tives. They did not save Caterpillar or Ravenscraig. They did not change
government policy on health, devolution or the economy.66
It was not until the Timex workers in Dundee fought back in 1993 that this
strategy was effectively challenged, and not until the victory of the Glacier
RPB workers in Glasgow during 1996 that the cycle of disaster was broken,
although there is still no sign that the STUC have learned any lessons from
the experience.
Foster claims that, ‘the Origins of Scottish Nationhood is unlikely to convince
many of those who support an independent Scotland, and this is because it
does not engage with those moments in history which many Scots see as
64
Aitken 1997, p. 292.
65
Foster and Woolfson 1986, pp. 219–23.
66
Aitken 1997, p. 295.
216 Neil Davidson
dening what is progressive, democratic and collective in their culture’.67

What are these moments?
For most nations, the individual bourgeois revolutions are central to radical
traditions. For Scottish socialists, however, the Scottish bourgeois revolution
cannot occupy the same place that comparable events do for socialists in
England and France – or even in Italy and the USA. On the one hand, unlike
1642 in England or 1792 in France, at no point in the Scottish revolution
were popular interventions decisive in shaping the outcome. The key turning
points do not involve the revolutionary crowd storming Edinburgh Castle or
a levée-en-masse overwhelming Royalist armies against all odds, but deals
struck in snuff-lled rooms off Edinburgh High Street and Royal troops
hunting down defeated peasants across Culloden Moor. On the other hand,
unlike 1870 in Italy or 1871 in Germany, the end result was not the establish-
ment of a modern nation-state, but the dismantling of its foundations and
their absorption into a new state dominated by a historic enemy. Whichever
way the matter is approached, both ‘the people’ and ‘the nation’ are absent.
As a result, the moments of Scottish radicalism are few and far between.
The War of Independence is one: when the Scottish contingents of the
Communist Party of Great Britain marched on May Day 1938, they carried
pictures of William Wallace and Robert the Bruce, not to mention Calgacus.68
Unlike the English Peasant Revolt of 1381, however, the War of Independence
incorporated plebeian discontent into the service of the native ruling class
and defused the revolt from below. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that
the General Strike of 1820 does feature heavily in such a heavily nationalist
tradition of revolt. Even though it reects well on the Scottish working class
(where was the English General Strike?), it was too much part of an all-British
movement of radical reform to be assimilated. Scottish radicals at the time
did not simply rely on imagery of William Wallace, but of Magna Carta
and the Bill of Rights – the English tradition of radicalism which offered
them, as it had their bourgeoisie beforehand, a substitute for their own absent
history of radicalism.
67
Foster 2002, p. 270.
68
See the report in the Scots Independent 1938. Calgacus was the quasi-mythical
leader whom Tacitus claims led the Picts to glorious defeat against the Romans at
Mons Gropious in 87 AD.
Intervention 217
Interestingly, Foster and Woolfson once understood that the working class
in Scotland had to overcome the claims of ‘Scottishness’ to operate on a British
political level:
[The United Kingdom state] established a common labour market. At the

same time it sought to use pre-existing national identities to split the new
proletariat. Consequently, those who wished to end or limit exploitation
had to make it their rst endeavour to bridge this national diversity, and
to create a single ‘labour’ identity. In doing so they drew both upon the
experience of the immediate struggles and the pre-existing progressive
and radical elements within each national culture. It was not, therefore,
spontaneously but only as the result of sharp struggle that the national unity
of a ‘British’ trade union movement was achieved. 69
Two comments are necessary here. First, the constant reiteration of ‘pre-
existing national identities’ (‘the Scottish people’, etc.) within the working-
class movement is still potentially as great a threat to the unity of the British
working class now as it was at the moment of formation. Second, that the
ideological results of the formation of the British working class involved
a loss in internationalist perspective, as well as a gain in organisational
coherence. If this is true of Britishness, it is doubly so of ‘Scottishness’. In
their great, if awed work, The Many-Headed Hydra, Linebaugh and Rediker
have noted that; ‘The years 1790–1792 were a revolutionary moment. Egalitarian,
multi-ethnic conceptions of humanity had not evolved in isolation, but rather
through solidarity and connection, within and among social movements and
individuals’. They cite as one example: ‘The friendship of Olaudah Equiano
and Thomas and Lydia Hardy proved that Atlantic combinations – African
and Scot, Englishwoman and African American man – were powerful and
of historic signicance.’ With the triumph of the counter-revolution across
the Atlantic – a movement in which the authors rightly identify the dissem-
ination of racism as central – these bonds began to dissolve:
Organisations such as the L[ondon].C[orresponding].S[ociety] would

eventually make their peace with the nation, as the working class became
national, English. With the rise of pan-Africanism, the people in exile became
69
Foster and Woolfson 1986, p. 59. For an attempt ‘to use pre-existing national
identities to split the new proletariat’ by Sir Walter Scott, see Davidson 2000, p. 199.
218 Neil Davidson
a noble race in exile. The three friends became unthinkable within ethnic
and nationalistic historiography. . . . What began as repression thus evolved
into mutually exclusive narratives that have hidden our history.70
Something of the internationalism that was lost with the formation of national
labour movements is currently being rebuilt in double-sided rejection of
the market order. On the one hand, inter-national trade union solidarity is
being reforged. Early in 2001, for example, there were strikes in Belgium and
Spain, and mass rallies in Portugal and Germany against the General Motors
decision to shut down car production at Luton. On the other, the wave of
demonstrations against the institutions of global capital in Seattle, Washington,
Melbourne, Millau, Prague, Davos, Quebec, Genoa and Barcelona show the
rebirth of a movement which sees international capitalism as the enemy and
organises on an international basis to oppose it. At a historical moment like
this, the response of socialists must surely be better than trying to conne
these new activists in the box (or as I would have it, the prison) of their own
nations? We have far more to learn from the activities of contemporary French
workers and students than we have from a largely mythical Scottish past.
Conclusion
Towards the end of his review Foster makes the following criticism of my
work:
Davidson’s own approach lacks the subtlety need to capture the structured
unevenness that has marked the development of Scotland’s industrial econ-
omy. It is this that provides much of the supercial plausibility for the
nationalist case.71
Leaving aside the important-sounding but meaningless notion of ‘structured

unevenness’ (which national economy has ever industrialised ‘evenly’?), what
I think this means is: ‘Scottish workers think that the industrial decline of
their nation is the result of subordination to England. They are wrong, but,
because they are congenitally incapable of sustaining an internationalist view-
70
Linebaugh and Rediker 2000, p. 352. See Davidson 2000, p. 45, for a reference to
an earlier version of this argument by the same authors.
71
Foster 2002, p. 270.
Intervention 219
point, all we can do is wearily unfurl our “progressive” national banners

once again over the usual gaggle of dissident Tories, kirk ministers and STUC
ofcials, and hope that new labour shows mercy.’ A more patronising and
potentially disastrous strategy would be hard to imagine in the current
climate. For nationalists to advocate nationalism is one thing, but for social-
ists to accommodate to it because they believe that the working class can
only be won by pandering to an aspect of their existing reformist consciousness
is quite another. It is this attitude, actually more dangerous than outright
nationalism, which I criticise in the ‘Afterword’. Foster presumably thinks
that I am referring to somebody else. I am not. De te fabula narratur.
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REVIEWS
The Origins of Postmodernity

PERRY ANDERSON
London: Verso, 1998
The Jamesonian Unconscious:

The Aesthetics of Marxist Theory
CLINT BURNHAM
Durham, NC.: Duke University Press, 1995
The Success and Failure of Fredric Jameson:

Writing, the Sublime, and the Dialectic of Critique
STEVEN HELMLING
New York: State University of New York Press, 2001
Fredric Jameson: Marxism, Hermeneutics, Postmodernism

SEAN HOMER
Cambridge: Polity, 1998
Fredric Jameson
ADAM ROBERTS
London: Routledge, 2000
The Marxian Hermeneutics of Fredric Jameson

CHRISTOPHER WISE
New York: Peter Lang, 1995
Reviewed by IAN BUCHANAN
Reading Jameson Dogmatically

From the title, it might be thought that this review is going to complain that the
books surveyed here are not sufciently critical, that they are somehow too dogmatic
– meaning ‘slavish’ – in their approach. But, in fact, my complaint is going to be
the very opposite: in my view, these six commentaries on Fredric Jameson’s work
are not sufciently dogmatic in attitude. The critical and the dogmatic are not the
structural opposites they may seem to be; indeed, properly speaking, these terms

224 Ian Buchanan
are incommensurable, belonging as they do to unrelated paradigms of reading. For

instance, it makes no sense to speak of a critical reading of the Bible, it can only be
read dogmatically, because the only thing that counts is the truth; likewise, it makes
no sense to speak of a dogmatic reading of a newspaper, it can only be read critically
because it does not pretend to offer truth, rather it claims to furnish facts. Things
are not always so black and white, the proper approach to be taken is not always so
obviously signalled as it is in the two examples given. Theoretical works such as
Jameson’s offer an admixture of facts and truths which perhaps suggests that one’s
style of reading should be similarly heterogeneous, a little dogmatic and a little
critical, or perhaps a little dogmatic and a lot critical, or whatever other permutation
one might come up with. But, of course, such an option is not available: that they
are mutually exclusive means one has to decide between reading dogmatically or
critically.
Today, however, the active need to make this choice has been all but forgotten,
so redundant has it become. The practical effect of the current hegemony of critical
theory is that the decision to read critically has the quality of a ‘forced choice’ (to use
Zizek’s useful term). One is free to choose to read either dogmatically or critically,
but only insofar as it is understood that the dogmatic is the proscribed negative of
the critical and not an afrmative option in its own right. Yet, as anyone with even a
passing uency in Hegelese could see, the very constancy implicit in this singular
choice is, in its own way, dogmatic. Hence the necessity of Adorno’s attempt to cre-
ate a kind of negative dialectics capable of the self-examination needed to interrogate
the inner dogma the critical approach more or less helplessly produces insofar as
it intransigently refuses all other options. Ironically, without this self-reection, it is
critical theory that winds up being dogmatic in the ‘bad’ sense it attributes to the
term, because it is blind to its own doctrine. But what is at stake here is not so much
the heroic rescue of some long-lost or repressed alternative way of reading as the
recognition that it never in fact disappeared. This leaves us free to ‘negate the
negation’ that the dogmatic has long endured and explore its newly perceived
positive dimension.
The difference between these two modes of reading, as Zizek has explained with
respect to Marx and Freud (and Lacan), is this: whereas the critical reading permits
one to falsify the master discourse, the dogmatic reading does not. Since
Marx and Freud opened up a new theoretical eld which sets the very
criteria of veracity, their words cannot be put to the test the same way
one is allowed to question the statements of their followers; if there is
something to be refuted in their texts, this [sic] are simple statements
which precede the ‘epistemological break’, i.e., which do not belong under
Reviews 225
the eld opened up by the founder’s discovery (Freud’s writing prior to

the discovery of the unconscious for example).1
In effect, the work of Marx and Freud is sacred in the sense of being the horizon of
truth itself. Consequently, developing their work further effectively means bringing
to light insights ‘the founders “produced without knowing what they produced”’.2
In order that this not be mistaken as simply an instance of Zizek’s idiosyncratically
perverse approach to all things, let me just mention that Gilles Deleuze takes
precisely the same position as Zizek on this issue: ‘You have to take the work as a
whole, to try and follow rather than judge it, see where it branches out in different
directions, where it gets bogged down, moves forward, makes a breakthrough;
you have to accept it, welcome it, as a whole. Otherwise you just won’t understand it
at all.’3 Both Deleuze and Zizek are of the view that the dogmatic approach is more
productive than the critical approach.
To read Jameson dogmatically would be to read him as a founder of discourse
(to use Foucault’s very useful description of Freud, Marx and Nietzsche), that is,
someone whose thought comes to us in the form of a system which we can inhabit
and deploy for our own perhaps quite different purposes. Contrary to what is pop-
ularly believed about the dogmatic view, it is very far from being blinkered and
accommodating: in fact, insofar as its basic demand is that a system of thought be
capable of accommodating every possible question, it is utterly ruthless – very few
attempts to produce a system of thought can satisfy this particular imperative.
No one has yet approached Jameson’s work in this way and, for that reason, his
work remains, to my mind at least, both incompletely understood and woefully
under-utilised. Jameson is presented time and again as an authoritative reader and
interpreter of others, but never as an originator of a system of thought or concepts
in his own right. Sadly, not one of these six books reviewed here make any attempt
to alter this peculiar pattern. One reason for this, I suspect, is that it has not been
sufciently recognised that sorting out theories is, in fact, a theoretical problem and
not a self-evident procedure functionally equivalent to sorting apples and pears. But
this is not the only reason. As I read them, each of these commentaries is awed – in
their very make-up – because of their (never avowed) unwillingness to suppose, let
alone confront, that which is essentially Jamesonian.
1
Zizek 2001, p. 100.
2
Ibid.
3
Deleuze 1995, p. 85 (my emphasis). In this respect, it is worth adding Deleuze and Guattari’s
infamous slogan ‘don’t ask what it means, ask how it works’ is also precisely dogmatic in its
orientation.
226 Ian Buchanan
Symptomatically, Jameson’s own solution to the problem of sorting out theories,

the largely underrated notion of the metacommentary, easily one his of most important
contributions to contemporary critical theory, rates scarcely a footnote in ve out of
these six books – the exception is Sean Homer who devotes a couple of pages to it,
but nevertheless fails to grasp it as a concept that solves a very particular problem
(pp. 31–5). For Homer, metacommentary is a foretaste of (but, strangely, not a theoretical
precursor to) the hermeneutic mechanism outlined in The Political Unconscious. Burnham
states that it is ‘the cornerstone to the architecture of Jameson’s technique (or perhaps,
to postmodernise the metaphor, the gift-shop of his Frank Gehry-designed hotel
of techniques)’ (p. 108), which, if anything, trivialises it. Cornerstone can usually
be taken to mean that which holds a structure together, which is precisely how I
would characterise it, but to equate it with a gift shop is to read it as ornamental,
that is, structurally inessential. For the rest, evidently, it is entirely nugatory, just
another speed-bump on the road to nowhere. I put it like this, because a concept like
metacommentary could only fail to be recognised as central to the Jamesonian
enterprise to the extent that the existence of a Jamesonian enterprise had itself gone
unrecognised.
But, here, the problem is even more rudimentary; searching for the distinctly
Jamesonian does not even seem to be on anyone’s specic agenda. One could blame
this on the contemporary distaste for totalisation, I suppose, since it is impossible to
properly adduce originality in the absence of this prior gesture; but, surely, the last
place one would expect this particular species of intellectual malaise to surface is in
a book on Jameson! My point is that to fail to see that there is some distinctly Jamesonian
way of doing things, a Jameson-system in effect, is to deprive his work of direction
and purpose, and thus transform it into what Foucault derisively called commentary
(the structural opposite of what a founder of discourse produces). This failing, too,
means that Jameson’s originality could not even be detected, much less presented,
except in the sheerly local terms of being an original reader of this or that theorist or
theory.
On the evidence of these six books, there are an abundance of schemes one
can resort to in order to avoid getting too close to what I suggest it is instructive to
call ‘the Jamesonian Thing’. The most persistent – and, as I noted above, the most
surprising – is the failure to totalise, where totalising would mean, as a minimum,
attempting to apprehend Jameson’s work ‘as a whole’; more generally, it would mean
determining the relation between this properly abstracted whole and the historical
milieu in which it was produced. So pervasive is this failing, as it were, it can serve
duty here as our touchstone, as that conspicuously present absence (like the hole in
the ag that serves as Zizek’s touchstone in Tarrying with the Negative) which connects
Reviews 227
these six attempts to portray Jameson, an absence that is conspicuous by virtue of the
fact that it is not present in the object of the studies. Jameson decidedly does totalise!
I might also have used the notion of style as my touchstone here, because it is the
subject of almost obsessive interest in each of these commentaries (even the usually
level-headed Anderson is moved to make some rather breathless assertions on this
score – ‘magnesium ares in a night sky’ being among the most colourful) but, as I
will try to show, my impression is that style is deployed as a ‘dishonoured repre-
sentative’ (to use Deleuze and Guattari’s useful notion): that is, it is execrated in order
to paper over a more shocking abyss, namely the failure to totalise. We might go so
far as to say style is the alibi for getting Jameson wrong.
The failure to totalise has two main inections, which we might protably categorise
as ‘weak’ and ‘strong’: the ‘weak’ inection is the one which takes the position that
Jameson’s work is too vast to be effectively mapped (the claim that his work is
‘too difcult’ to be mapped is a subset of this category, but of an utterly inferior kind);
the ‘strong’ inection is the one which takes the position that Jameson is wrong-
headed in his insistence on this strategy (the claim that totalisation is strictly speaking
impossible in the postmodern era could be classed as a subset of this category, but of
a superior variety). It is only Perry Anderson who escapes indictment on this charge,
though it must be said that his species of totalising, which is not Jameson’s, is not
without its problems, as I will show presently. In every other case, though, even in
those instances when totalisation is not rejected outright (as in Burnham, where it
is nevertheless severely compromised and curtailed), totalisation proves to be the
central impediment to a clear understanding of Jameson’s work. Evidently, there
is something excessive about this concept that even admiring commentators (it
may even be what these commentators admire in his work!) simply cannot swallow,
consequently, it sticks in their craw like some indigestible stone and far from pro-
ducing a little pearl of wisdom, turns septic and corrupts the whole.
To begin with the exception, I would say the problem with Anderson’s form of
totalising is that it seems to be striving toward some kind of an alchemy which would
see Jameson’s theory turned into a work of art. Here, his claim that Charles Olson’s
poem The Kingshers ‘could virtually be read as a brevet for Jameson’s achievement’
(p. 75) has to be taken at its word, the implication being that Jameson’s work achieves
with theory what Olson had already accomplished with poetry two decades earlier.
The nal page of Anderson’s book, which dissolves Jameson into a poem thus has
the same sinister and retroactive implications as the stunning last page of Doctorow’s
Loon Lake. One realises, perhaps only then, the full implication of the fact that the title
of Anderson’s book, The Origins of Postmodernity, makes no mention of its ostensible
object, namely Fredric Jameson: this is not a book about Jameson, it is a book about
228 Ian Buchanan
the fate of one word, ‘postmodernity’, which for a complicated set of reasons, expertly
explicated by Anderson, has come to be inextricably connected to Jameson’s name.4
His boldest claim, then, is that Jameson’s notion of postmodernism subsumes all the
previous versions and transforms it into a leftist concept of great power. ‘Henceforward,
one great vision commands the eld, setting the terms of theoretical opposition in the
most striking way imaginable’ (p. 66).
Here, we nally get a glimpse of the true point of this book – in demonstrating
that, thanks to Jameson, postmodernism is really a leftist term, Anderson’s most fun-
damental goal is realised: the redemption of the Left itself.
This has been a discursive victory gained against all the political odds,
in a period of neo-liberal hegemony when every familiar landmark of the
Left appeared to sink beneath the waves of a tidal reaction. It was won,
undoubtedly, because the cognitive mapping of the contemporary world
it offered caught so unforgettably – at once lyrically and caustically –
the imaginative structures and lived experience of the time, and their
boundary conditions. (p. 66)
As I said, it is not really a book about Jameson, so much as a determinate placing of

Jameson within intellectual history, a case of giving credit where credit is due, you
might say, but not an authentic attempt at exegesis. Anderson’s book is an example
of a false or perverted totalisation: it identies Jameson so closely with (but) one of
his conceptual inventions, it turns that concept into a metonym for Jameson’s work
‘as a whole’.
As Deleuze says, we only ever get the philosophy we deserve because our answers
are only as good as our questions. If we want to specify where Anderson goes wrong
and botches his totalisation, we have to examine his key questions. Straightaway,
it is obvious that Anderson did not ever set himself the task of adducing Jameson’s
project (to use Sartre’s term for what I have referred to above as the Jamesonian
Thing): his only question is what enabled Jameson to produce so complete a theory
of postmodernism and deliver it ‘virtually at a stroke’ (p. 51)? Anderson gives the
presentation of this concept the status of what Badiou calls a ‘Truth-Event’ – in other
words, the fact that Anderson emphasises so strongly the inaugural scene of this
concept, Jameson’s 1982 lecture ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’ given at
4
From this perspective, the extremely interesting and detailed history of this incredibly
freighted term – postmodernism – functions like a vortex: it swallows Jameson whole. Anderson’s
claim, his gambit, is that it is only against this background that ‘the peculiar stamp of Jameson’s
contribution emerge[s] in full relief’ (p. vii). Doubtless this is true, but that nevertheless reduces
Jameson’s work to the status of a footnote, albeit a bloated one, in the history of some other
thing.
Reviews 229
the Whitney Museum for Contemporary Arts, is in itself noteworthy.5 In its obsessive
repetition, it perhaps betrays that Anderson is himself investing heavily in this moment,
indeed in this notion of postmodernism, which lends weight to my claim that his
ultimate purpose is soteriological (pp. 47–55).
Foucault may have thought the twentieth century might one day be known as
Deleuzian; but if Anderson has anything to do with it, it will be known as Jamesonian.
The retroactive effect of this hypostatisation is clear. As I have complained already,
what it does is subordinate Jameson to this one concept. Through this particular
optic, it looks as if Jameson’s career was initially a kind of fumbling around until this
concept was invented and, then, a long series of justications and exploitations of it
afterwards. There is, of course, more than a grain of truth in this picture: for it can
readily enough be shown that Jameson has always been working on producing some
concept adequate to the representational demands of our age; but that is not all he
has worked on. The bigger problem with this depiction of Jameson as hero of the
Left is that it effectively transforms Jameson’s work into a metonym for the Left in
general, making it a model and prototype for things to come and thereby, ‘at a stroke’,
neutralising its agonistic force.
Given all this hyperbole, Anderson’s critique of Jameson, placed at the end of the
book, has the slap-in-the-face effect of a bubble burst. One feels that it was all a lie,
that Jameson never really was that great thing Anderson made him out to be because
his work was always riven by a fault line, his failure to deliver a fully worked out
political platform to go along with his aesthetic one. For Anderson, Jameson’s
comparative neglect of Gramsci – practically the only Marxist of consequence Jameson
has not treated at length (though one could add Lefebvre’s name to this list too, since
Jameson acknowledges a debt to him, but has not produced an extended essay on his
work to match those he has produced on the others he lists as among his teachers,
including Lukács, Benjamin, Sartre and Barthes) – is instructive because it points to
an entire domain of work in the Marxist canon which Jameson has, for the most part,
either overlooked or deliberately bypassed. In this latter case, his neglect can perhaps
be read more strongly as a consigning to the dustbin of this body of work. Here, we
get a glimpse of what is at stake for Anderson in writing this book, because his
response is: ‘Who can say that his intuition [is] wrong?’ (p. 131). In other words, the
slap in the face is not merely that Jameson’s work is beset by a deep-seated fault, but
that, inasmuch as Jameson represents the best face of Marxism today, leftist thinking
in general is similarly beset.
5
It is perhaps worth noting, in this respect, that, according to Jameson himself, this was
not the rst presentation of this paper. In a private conversation, he told me that, so far as he
could remember, before this Whitney talk Anderson emphasises, he had already presented it at
a conference in Germany. This does not belie Anderson’s presentation of it as an ‘inaugural’.
230 Ian Buchanan
Like Anderson, though somewhat more soberly, Sean Homer justies his mono-
graph on Jameson by stipulating him as saviour of the Left.
Jameson’s oeuvre presents one of the most sustained and unequivocal

arguments for Marxism’s continuing relevance to the eld of cultural
politics today. His achievement is once again to remind us that the much
heralded ‘death of Marxism’ is somewhat premature. (p. 6)
What sets Homer’s book apart is the fact that it is the only one in the strong category
of rejecting the very enterprise of totalisation. Unfortunately, his rationale for doing
so actually stems more from the weak category; that is to say, he rejects Jameson’s
notion of totalisation because he himself is unable to perform it with similar or even
comparable adroitness. The book is badly marred by an utterly wrong-headed cru-
sade against totalisation, which, given how consistently it misrecognises totalisation’s
goals as its faults, can only be described as a case of tilting at windmills. It does not
even have the dignity of a mad chase à la Ahab, because Homer’s white whale does
not exist; it is quite simply a gment of his own devising.
Nowhere is this Quixotic impulse more glaring than in the following passage: ‘The
proposition that modernism and postmodernism are distinct in their social position
and function facilitates an acute analysis of postmodern culture but at the same time,
I contend, leads to an overly homogeneous theory’ (p. 127). In other words, on this
view, the very moment that totalisation – that is, postmodernism, which many
forget is precisely an attempt at totalisation, irrespective of who uses it – realises its
purpose and renders possible a certain ‘acute analysis’, it somehow cancels out these
very gains by virtue of enabling this ‘acute analysis’. Homer ’s point, I think, is the
quite reasonable one that we have to be prudent in our usage of metanarratives
because they can blind us to essential details, or, just as signicantly, lead us to
misperceive them as something they are not. This reading is correlated by Homer ’s
oddly indignant assertion that, contrary to Jameson’s own view of things, post-
modernism is not a global cultural dominant (p. 111). I am not referring here to
Homer’s quibbling hair-splitting over whether this is the third or fourth machine age,
since he himself admits that it does nothing to discredit Jameson if this is in fact the
fourth age and not, as he claimed, the third. Rather, I am referring to the claim that
postmodernism is strictly a Western phenomenon; because the implication here, which
needs to be set right, is that Jameson has somehow neglected the plight of the Third
World precisely by emphasising a phenomenon from which it would seem excluded.
In a sense, this critique is right, albeit for the wrong reasons. That it is right, or at
least contains a grain or two of truth, is borne out by Jameson’s recent uptake of the
term ‘globalisation’, and his subsequent down-playing (if not outright abandonment)
of ‘postmodernism’. Jameson theorises globalisation precisely as Americanisation (the
Reviews 231
American way of life being the US’s most potent export, in Jameson’s view). 6 The
standard critique of his notion of postmodernism – that it is exclusively an American
experience (which is something Jameson always acknowledged in his formulation,
and use of it, anyway) – is thus turned around in Hegelian fashion and put to good
use. For it is precisely the implications of its American origins that need to be faced
up to. Homer ’s critique is wrong, though, inasmuch as it reasons that the exclusion
of the Third World from postmodernism means that it is not the global dominant
Jameson says it is. As Jameson argues in his work on globalisation, postmodernism
is global just because one can no longer opt out. Simply put, there is no way for the
poor nations to alter their economic conditions on their own: de-linking is not a option;
indeed, it would in fact impoverish them further (which should not be taken to
mean that any linkage which is provided, via the IMF etc., is in itself ‘positive’).
Therefore, postmodernism, fully understood, means precisely coming to grips with
the deplorable existence of the excluded as the price paid by the poorer nations for
the lifestyle enjoyed by the richer ones, which, obviously enough, disavow this cost
at every opportunity.
The point not to be missed here (as Zizek would put it) – the one which Homer,
in fact, misses – is that it is only from this totalised perspective that the full plight
of the Third World can, in fact, be represented and understood. Since one can
only specify the Third World as ‘the excluded’ from a global perspective, the aim of
theory should be to attain precisely this perspective, yet it is this very viewpoint that
Homer would cancel out. Effectively, though, what he would stamp out in Jameson’s
work is that which has earned him the title of most important cultural critic writing
in English today (p. 1); or, to put it another way, the very reason Jameson is, for
Homer, worth writing a book about is what must be the most determinedly contained.
Indeed, because of the exceedingly odd and contradictory way he deals with it, I am
compelled to conclude that the notion of totalisation is somehow a cathected one for
Homer. For instance, one reads a few pages on from the complaint that Jameson’s
notion of postmodernism is overly homogeneous the exact opposite complaint:
now his theory is too heterogeneous because it adopts only a very select part of
Lefebvre’s theorisation of space and not the whole edice tout court (pp. 142–6). There
is something of the order of the ‘missed encounter ’ here: both extreme misreadings
can be interpreted as ways of avoiding the Real Jameson, which would then be located
in the so-called ‘absent centre’ of his book.
If one takes Homer at his word, then Jameson (however impossibly) is either too
homogeneous or too heterogeneous. A properly homogeneous theory would, of
6
Cf. Jameson 1998; Jameson 2000.
232 Ian Buchanan
course, erase all difference between itself and its other, which Jameson’s plainly does
not do; whereas a completely heterogeneous one would be an exercise in solipsism,
which Jameson’s can hardly be accused of being. Nevertheless, Homer ’s critical
strategy is to oscillate between these two extremes: he taxes Jameson with being
overly homogeneous here, before turning around and, almost in the same breath,
taxing him with being too heterogeneous – not elsewhere, but in the same place.
For instance, he says, ‘Jameson’s reading is at once too selective and too generalised’
(p. 164). The rst error here is to think that these are opposite processes; the second,
and more important, error is to see them as needless excesses. In fact, one can only
generalise by being selective, by nding the one thing capable of embodying the
whole; and, by the same token, the process of selectivity itself only becomes meaningful
against the background of a comprehensive generalisation. In other words, Jameson’s
normal procedure is depicted as excessive through a misprision of its constitutive
elements (generalisation and selection) as homogenising and heterogenising. That his
own reading of Jameson is similarly wrought by generalisation and selection seems
to have escaped his notice.
On the evidence of Homer ’s book and the next one to be considered here, Adam
Roberts’s, which is similarly designed for undergraduate use, one has to say that
Jameson’s oeuvre frankly does not lend itself it to this kind of reduction. Or, at least,
one would say this if one believed the object can be blamed for the poor quality of
the commentary, as Roberts seems to think is the case. Consequently, I am afraid to
have to say that this book must be placed in a weaker subset of the weak category.
It has to be said, too, that it inspires no condence when an author takes great pains
to stress how difcult their topic is. One understands that this is meant as an ironic
gesture which will soon enough be proven unfounded: the topic will in the end show
itself susceptible to analysis, but only after one has located the source of difculty,
hypostatised it and thereby cleared it away. The gesture thus creates the academic
writing’s equivalent of suspense. In Roberts’s case, though, there is no such moment
of overcoming.
To begin with, Roberts botches his totalisation of Jameson’s oeuvre by deciding to
exclude any consideration of his book on Sartre. His rationale is that the focus of his
study is Jameson’s key ideas, and, though he does not say as much, one has to assume
that this means the Sartre book contributed no such ideas in his view. However, it is
not this exclusion by itself that makes this a genuine botch – though, to my mind,
it is sufcient – but the perverse (by which I mean self-contradictory) way in which
it is prefaced by a discussion of the pivotal inuence of Sartre on Jameson (p. 3).
Not only that: it contradicts his own methodological premise, stated a few pages
later, that the only way to clarify key ideas is to situate them in the context in which
they were produced (a Sartrean procedure Jameson himself makes extensive
Reviews 233
use of!), by which he means tracing the intellectual lineage of Jameson’s ideas
(p. 5). This being the case, how could Jameson’s very rst book, his PhD no less,
plausibly be ignored? This standpoint is so ill-conceived that I am sure I do not
even need to enumerate key ideas of Jameson’s that owe their beginning s in
Sartre to point out its wrong-headedness. Just for the record, though, I will offer up
one such key idea – I would have thought an unignorable one – taken from that book:
style. The irony here is not merely that the very difculty Roberts has with Jameson’s
work is attributed to his reputedly difcult style; nor that this very difculty, if that
is what it is, is justied in advance by this theorisation of style; but the fact that in
this very discussion of style, Roberts may well have found the vocabulary he
obviously needed to dissolve precisely this obstacle to his understanding.
Speaking of the concept of the political unconscious, Roberts boldly declares that
‘the reader will look in vain for any denition of this presumably central concept
in Jameson’s book, which may or may not be seen as a good thing’ (p. 74). The
glib, but not altogether inaccurate reply, would be that The Political Unconscious taken
as a whole, is the denition of this concept – a very precise denition, to be sure,
encompassing a panoply of nuances and permutations, but containing nothing
inessential or extraneous. A more exact reply would point out that Jameson describes
the political unconscious as a doctrine (hence the unfashionable appropriateness
of reading it in a dogmatic fashion); it is not a thing, as such, which can be dened,
but, rather, a model of and for a specic type of action, of a determinate hermeneutic
variety. And that doctrine is very precisely one of metacommentary – thus, if one
wanted to cite a denition of the political unconscious, one could scarcely do better
than to quote the following:
Interpretation is here construed as an essential allegorical act, which

consists in rewriting a given text in terms of a particular interpretive
master code. The identication of the latter will then lead to an evaluation
of such codes or, in other words, of the ‘methods’ or approaches current in
American literary and cultural study. Their juxtaposition with a dialectical
or totalizing, properly Marxist ideal of understa nding will be used
to demonstrate the structural limitations of the other interpretive codes,
and in particular to show the ‘local’ ways in which they construct their
objects of study and the ‘strategies of containment’ whereby they are able
to project the illusion that their readings are somehow complete and
self-sufcient.7
7
Jameson 1981, p. 10.
234 Ian Buchanan
However, the truly damning matter, I feel, is the fact that, in Roberts’s own book, the
reader looks in vain for any denition of this undoubtedly central concept. That is to
say, even if it were true that Jameson nowhere denes his notion of ‘the political
unconscious’, then would it not be precisely the job of the exegetical commentary to
compensate this lack via interpretation?
I suspect that it is true that Jameson’s work lends itself very poorly to the kinds of
reductive demands that textbooks like those in the Routledge Critical Thinkers series
requires; thus Roberts may be forgiven for his blunt-edged treatment of the key ideas
he set himself the task of extracting. But I do not believe that all that is objectionable
in this book is attributable to the inhospitable nature of the textbook form. Haste has
also played a not inconsiderable hand – a fact that impresses itself nowhere more
forcefully than in the slipshod way in which facts are dealt with. For instance, the
director of The Perfumed Nightmare (the subject of a chapter in The Geopolitical Aesthetic),
Kidlat Tahimik, is interchangeably described as Filipino (p. 143) and Indonesian
(p. 150); Walter Benjamin’s date of birth oscillates between 1892 (p. 15) and 1882
(p. 27); the date of publication of The Political Unconscious shifts between 1980
(p. 15) and 1981 (p. 2); the date of publication of The Geopolitical Aesthetic is similarly
unstable, since it alternates between 1992 (p. 5) and 1994 (p. 139); and Dispatches is
inaccurately described as Michael Herr ’s ‘memoir of his time ghting’ (p. 132) in
Vietnam.
Essent ially motivated by the same problem as Roberts’s book, namely the
obdurate difculty of Jameson’s style, Helmling’s take is much more sophisticated
and, initially at least, a lot more promising. Still, though, one encounters the same
tiresome resistance to one of the core tenets of Jameson’s thought, namely totalisation.
Helmling, who takes the narrowest view of them all, connes himself to what he
terms the successes and failures of Jameson’s style, refusing even to be so bold as to
focus on Jameson’s style as a whole. His not terribly convincing rationale is that ‘the
success/failure problem agitates virtually every sentence Jameson writes’ (p. 2) and
can therefore be used to generalise the way he grapples with the dialectic itself. His
basic claim, then, is that the success/failure problem is Jameson’s ‘constant subtext,
preoccupation, even “self-consciousness”, for it is the question of critical ambition
itself: what can critique (that is, effort like Jameson’s own) do or be in our period?’
(p. 2). Now, if this means simply that – as one would expect – Jameson worries
a great deal about how he can best go about making his point, then it is scarcely
interesting, save in the most banal biographical way; if, rather, it is supposed to point
up a crucial feature of Jameson’s epistemology, then one wants to be shown how and
where in fact it is operative in Jameson’s oeuvre, and this is singularly lacking.
We are soon given notice that – as we feared! – it is precisely style as a problem of
self-expression, as it were, rather than epistemology, that is going to be Helmling’s
Reviews 235
preoccupation; for, a few sentences further on, we nd this stunning summation
of his book’s forlorn goal: ‘It is my premise here that Jameson’s importance as a
culture-critic is less in his (supposed) conclusions or arguments than in the subtle
and complicated mediations of writing itself’ (p. 3). Therefore, no attempt is made
to determine the nature of Jameson’s conceptual system because, in Helmling’s
estimation, this is somehow less important than the sentences he writes (as though
the sentences did not owe their importance or interest to their very conceptual system
they expound). More to the point, no attempt is made to determine the nature of
Jameson’s conceptual system via an interrogation of the sentences he writes. That is
to say, one could be persuaded to accept as justied so minimal an ambition as
Helmling’s focus on the issue of the comparative success and failure of Jameson’s
sentences if it were properly motivated, by which I mean making a Jamesonian point.
As bleak as I nd his position to be, it would not have been all bad if it were at
least legible as a reiteration of one of the core tenets of metacommentary, that
content ‘does not need to be treated or interpreted because it is itself already essentially and
immediately meaningful, meaningful as gestures in situation are meaningful, as sentences
in a conversation.’8 Taking this on board, one might experiment with the idea that
Jameson’s concepts can be treated as the always-already interpreted content of his
forms, but one would still need to delineate the precise matrices of these forms and
that (again) is something Helmling does not do.
Jameson offers a precedent for this manoeuvre in his book on Adorno. There, he
suggests that the stirring anthropological content in Negative Dialectics is what Adorno
had to talk himself into in order to write vivid sentences. 9 The point, however, is
not that the content is unimportant for its own sake, but, on the contrary, that it
is precisely what was required to develop that particular form. Putting it more
directly, Jameson suggests that it can be viewed as the price a concept has to pay
to get itself said in the rst place.10 Once we have grasped the concept for itself,
though, following a dialectical logic of reading, we can ask why did it have to be
presented in that way? For Jameson, because content is essentially social and
historical experience put into words, it is always already concrete, or, to put it
another way, always already interpreted by the form itself. This does not mean
that experience is self-evident or immediately available to the untrained eye;
indeed, it is precisely its lack of self-evidence that calls for what is (on this construc-
tion) mistakenly known as interpretation in the rst place; but it does mean that it is
some kind of an originary experience which we must endeavour to unveil. Criticism,
8
Jameson 1988, p. 14 (italics in original). See also Jameson 1971, p. 403.
9
Jameson 1990, p. 68. See also Zizek 2001, p. 85.
10
Jameson 1990, p. 7.
236 Ian Buchanan
therefore, is not so much a matter of interpretation (where that would mean the deci-
phering of an alien code), as the laying bare, or the revealing in place, of the original
experience demanding that form.
The rst methodological consequence of this viewpoint is, of course, the suspension
or bracketing of the distinction between form and content – now, ‘depending on the
progress of the interpretive work and the stage at which it has arrived, either term
can be translated into the other: thus every layer of content proves, as Schiller implies,
to be but a form in disguise’. By the same token, however, it is also ‘just as true to
say that form is really only the projection of content and of the inner logic of the
latter’.11 This is why content no longer needs to be interpreted as such. Rather, it stands
in need of a kind of restoration; its original message, which is to say, the original
experience itself before being put into words, distorted in response to the multiple
demands of history as censor, has to be recovered by unlocking the logic of the
censorship itself. This amounts to treating the content of the form as a necessary
distortion of its true, ‘inner form’, and the question we must therefore ask is not
‘what does it mean?’, which would imply that the content somehow stands for
what it really means in a symbolic manner, and that all we have to do to recover that
meaning is decipher its coded logic of substitution, but rather, ‘why did it have to be
distorted in this way?’ In contradistinction, this entails inquiring after the singular
logic of censorship which demanded this particular codication of the content.
At rst glance, the difference between these two operations might seem supercial;
after all, both presuppose that the content does not immediately disclose its true
meaning. In fact, the difference is neither subtle nor slight: the rst mode of reading,
presumes that the coding of the text’s true meaning is arbitrary and playful, whereas
the second mode of reading presumes that coding is vital and necessary.
The second methodological consequence of this viewpoint is that Jameson needs
some notion of a writerly unconscious to account for the peculiar production of the
sentences an author is seemingly compelled to produce. He nds an answer to his
needs in Lévi-Strauss’s notion of the savage mind (pensée sauvage). The principle virtue
of this somewhat ambiguous concept, insofar as Jameson is concerned, is its ability
to treat ‘preconscious material’ in a systemic manner, without having thereby to reduce
its complexity or range of associations to some ultimate determining instance (such
as a neurosis). What it theorises, in effect, is a kind of artistic compulsion to repeat
that leads a poet – indeed any artist – consistently to choose one kind of word or
image over another from the enormous reservoir of possible items. This compulsion
is both the artist’s friend and enemy: it is what gives the work its peculiarity; but it
11
Jameson 1971, p. 403.
Reviews 237
is also what must be transcended, in a sense, if the work is not to turn out to be a
mere guration of a neurosis (as Deleuze says, we do not make art with our neuroses).
This compulsion or pensée sauvage is identical to the artist’s unique syntax, or what
Zizek calls their matrix. Content, on this view, is selected according to the demands,
both formal and, as it were, libidinal, of form. In Wallace Stevens’s work, this is
evidenced by his use of place names.
In Stevens, the place-name will be at one and the same time the very locus
and occasion for a production of images: quasi-Flaubertian bovarysme, the
daydream about the exotic place, the free association on Java, Tehentepec,
Key West, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Yucatan, Carolina, and so forth – and
the emergence of another level of systematicity in language itself (the
generation of place-names out of each other, their association now as a
proper vocabulary eld, behind which a deeper system is concealed and
active).12
That deeper system is the exoticism of the Third World. The point, though, is not to
accuse him of Orientalism (though it should not thereby be seen to excuse him of it
either), but to show the degree to which the exoticism of the Third World is, in some
way, structurally required by the work itself. As Jameson reads him, the so-called
Third-World material in Stevens’s work (his casual references to Java and so forth)
is not merely the private fantasy of someone who did not travel all that much but
nevertheless longed for alterity – although it is certainly that too.13 It is, rather, the
means by which the work attains closure. Put simply, the everyday imagery in
Stevens, which constantly risks falling into a dreary realism, is saved from banality
by its juxtaposition with otherness, ‘Java tea’ being more intriguing to the stied
minds of consumer society than ‘tea’ on its own (a fact a poet so well acquainted with
advertising as Stevens could hardly escape noticing). In the end, though, not even
this infusion of exoticism was sufcient to the needs of Stevens’s poetry. Thus, as
Jameson concludes, Stevens is one of those artists who, at the end of the great period
of creativity we call modernism, found himself no longer able to resolve the formal
problems his work presented by sheerly formal means. His devices came to require
that extra motivation which only a theory of poetry can supply.
It would be very interesting indeed to approach Jameson’s sentences in this
way and ask what distortions and compromises have been forced upon him? (Such
a question is of course pregured by the even earlier book on Sartre, the one
which Roberts saw t to dismiss.) Jameson himself names what is undoubtedly the
12
13
238 Ian Buchanan
most potent form of compromise facing all critics, the impossibility of presenting
a concept in full – if, by concept, we mean the experience of thinking that, then
concepts have to be provoked in others, rather than simply presented, in order to be
realised fully for-themselves. Disappointingly, Helming does not take either of these
courses, nor indeed do any of the commentators under consideration here. Instead,
Helmling’s work dissolves into a weak tirade against ‘difculty’. I must say that I
nd this trope of Jameson criticism something of a mystery – even if it were true that
Jameson’s style is inordinately difcult, why, as a commentator of his work, would
you admit this?
But this is not the only strange admission the author shares with us. He also
admits, almost as a badge of honour (though perhaps it is just a defence), that he has
not seen most of the lms Jameson refers to in The Geopolitical Aesthetic. He thus admits
that it is possible that the lms Jameson writes about are as interesting and exciting
as he says they are, although, obviously, Jameson’s account is not so persuasive as to
actually move him to seek out these (in some instances) admittedly difcult to obtain
lms for himself (p. 129). This inertia, by implication, is his judgement on Jameson’s
success as a lm critic; more to the point, however, it is the only kind of judgement
he can make. Insofar as Helmling is concerned, one does not have to actually see the
lms Jameson writes about in order to make judgements about the way he writes
about them. And, as absurd as it sounds, this is, in fact, precisely consistent with his
operating premise, because, if one decides that it is the sheer sentences themselves
that are of interest, then neither their actual content, nor the way that content is formed
(structurally, conceptually, theoretically) can be taken into consideration. In other
words, it is not mere caprice, or quirky affectation: the very structure of his argument
precludes him from engaging with the actual content of Jameson’s sentences.
This strategy is so obviously self-limiting it is hard to see how Helmling persuaded
himself he could structure an entire monograph around it. If we take just this one
example of his remarks about the shortcomings of The Geopolitical Aesthetic, the
precise nature of this limitation should become clear. After christening the principal
interpretive thrust of The Geopolitical Aesthetic ‘the rhetoric of paranoia’ (that this is
another example of Jameson being misidentied with the object of his critique we
shall pass over in silence, except to note that it is of a piece with the misidentication
of him as a postmodernist), Helmling then suggests that it incurs a particular danger
of its own:
Jameson’s account of the exciting ‘new’ realisms emerging in Third World

lm risk sounding uncomfortably like the dreary old ‘socialist realism’ of
yesteryear, not to mention its First World Hollywood variants, in which
‘realism’ doubly calls for quotation marks. (p. 129)
Reviews 239
Here, we see that the object of Helmling’s critical interest is only what Jameson
manages to make Third-World lm sound like; its failing is thus that of poor
advertising copy – it does not make us (Helmling) want to see the lms; worse, it
makes them sound like something we (Helmling) would nd dreary. What is absent
here, which, as I have already said, is precisely what he cannot engage with, is the
relation between Jameson’s commentary and the object of his commentary; thus, the
success and failure at issue can only ever be rhetorical, in the emptiest of senses.
The problem is not merely that Helmling does not trouble himself to do what is,
after all, a pretty elementary kind of research, namely watching a couple of movies
– albeit obscure, hard to get, or just plain old passé, movies. Rather, the problem
is that his fundamental question prevents him from coming to grips with what
it is that Jameson does as a critic, which is to try to conceive as systematically as
possible where and how particular cultural objects t into the world-historical. By
bracketing as rigorously as he does the actual content of Jameson’s sentences, a
content that is necessarily born of a certain conceptual relation to an object, Helmling
prevents himself from determining the reason why Jameson’s sentences are constructed
the way they are; in the end, the very quarry he thought he was after, namely Jameson’s
sentences, is what eludes him the most assuredly. He thus fails to heed the basic
lesson of totalisation, the lesson that Jameson teaches over and over again in
everything he writes: that the particular only comes into view against the background
of the general. The specicity of Jameson’s style can only be ‘rendered visible’ (to use
that phrase of Klee’s Deleuze was so fond of borrowing) insofar as the necessity
that governs it is determined – the comparative success and failure of Jameson’s
sentences is measurable only with respect to the aim of his project. So, for Helmling
to exclude from the outset any consideration of Jameson’s conceptual system, is to
make impossible his own project.
Now, as I have shown, Jameson himself offers at least two ways one could go about
determining the inner necessity of a theorist’s sentences – either by detecting a logic
of censorship, or by imagining a savage mind at work. In either case, what one
eventually ends up having to come to grips with, which is to say, suppose and then
try to esh out, is the political unconscious itself, or better yet, the Jamesonian
unconscious. And, so, we come to the suggestively titled book by Clint Burnham, The
Jamesonian Unconscious. Yet, as it turns out, Burnham would better have titled his
work ‘Jameson and Cinema’, because the Jamesonian unconscious is the one
thing he decides he does not want to talk about (p. 27). This exclusion creates a
spectre which haunts the text, like the proverbial ‘weight of the dead’. As such, the
incongruous title can only be read as an uncanny return of the repressed. So, while
it is true that Burnham’s book does, by restricting itself to Jameson’s work on
cinema, seem to offer, somewhat anomalously, an example of how totalisation can
240 Ian Buchanan
effectively be limited – or, to put it another way, an instance of turning a failure to

totalise into an adequate totalisation – it is nevertheless still another instance of a
missed encounter.
What I feel I must take issue with, since it cuts to the heart of my own Jamesonian
Thing, is Burnham’s claim that it is ‘useless’ to try to abstract Jameson’s concepts
(Jameson-isms, he calls them) because ‘it is as impossible to “represent” Jameson’s
technique as it is for his own work to represent Marxism’ (p. 71). Here, we nd
something he initially owned was his representational problem, that is, the problem
he had nding the means of adequately representing the core tenets of Jameson’s
work, turned into a ‘negation of the negation’ and, in the process, elevated to the
status of an axiom. There is a world of difference between saying ‘I found it difcult,
from the very start, to construct in good faith some representational-analytical account,
or even “inventory”’ (p. xiv), and stating that any such endeavour is a priori im-
possible. It is precisely this shift from ‘I had difculty’ to ‘it is impossible’ that must
be challenged. Burnham might as well have said Jameson’s work is an instance of
Hegel’s notorious ‘night when all cows are black’, since the effect would be the
same: it renders indistinguishable the concept and its mode of presentation, those
infamous dialectical sentences, thus divesting them not merely of their proper
content, but their intention as well. Paradoxically enough, in so doing, he renders
moot his own exhortation to attend to the reexes and coils of these sentences, for
what are we supposed to be looking out for if not concepts buried amidst elegant
sentences?
Thus, we must attend to the reexes in Burnham’s own sentences, because, on the
one hand, he claims that the more he thought and read about Jameson the less
certain he was that he knew what ‘the political unconscious’ (or any other of Jameson’s
concepts) was – that is to say, the more he came to know them, the less cleanly could
he grasp their ontology; on the other hand, he freely draws on the work of Zizek and
Bourdieu and others as conceptual reservoirs – as though, the less he focuses on their
work, the more cleanly he is able to grasp their concepts. Here, the problem is the
age-old philosophical problem of immersion in the empirical, what Zizek calls (after
Hegel) ‘the night of the world’. The error is to conclude that what has slipped from
view never existed in the rst place, an error we can readily enough agree is an error
on the basis of the way Zizek and Bourdieu are deployed. If concepts do not exist in
Jameson, then why should they exist in Zizek or Bourdieu, whose own sentences are
at least as dialectical, dense and perhaps, in their own way, elegant too, as Jameson’s?
The solution to ‘knowing too much’ (to borrow Zizek’s appropriation of Hitchcock)
is not to try to know less by disavowing one’s knowledge, but to try to know more
by abstracting concepts (this would be my Deleuzian translation of Zizek’s ‘the wound
Reviews 241
is healed only by the spear that smote you’). So, instead of saying that ‘the political
unconscious’ lacks a clear ontology, making it useless to try and represent its eidetic
core, it would be better, in my Deleuze-tinted view, to nd the means of cutting
through the layers of rhetoric and discover the concept lodged within.
One way of doing this is to examine, from the opposite side of the fence, as it were,
what are usually taken to be Jameson’s misreadings, or worse still, misrepresenta-
tions, of other critics’ positions. Instead of complaining about his misprisions (or
delighting in them, as some critics of exceptionally bad faith have done), it is more
interesting to try to determine why he should twist things around in the way he does.
In other words, one should follow the Jamesonian edict and try to gure out the logic
of distortion at work, a manoeuvre that has the advantage of clarifying at least one
of the means Jameson utilises to produce concepts, namely appropriation. Such a
manoeuvre would have saved Christopher Wise much hand-wringing and kept in
check the moralising tone which blemishes what is otherwise such an interesting book.
The thrust of The Marxian Hermeneutics of Fredric Jameson can be summed-up by
saying that it does not think Jameson’s totalisations are total enough. In Wise’s view,
they are incomplete because they lack a divine dimension – God. Thus, Wise brings
us full circle by showing that one can also botch a totalisation by wishing for what
is not there.
Wise’s polemic against Jameson is built on a felt need to defend Northrop Frye
from what he sees as Jameson’s too brutal glossing of his brand of myth criticism;
the subtext of this particular defence, we come to underst and, is a defence
against Jameson’s secularising tendency. The crucial claim here is that Jameson is
hypocritical (Wise does not use this word, but his implication is clear) to critique ‘the
notion of continuity in myth-critical and religious discourse’ because his totalisation
of social life relies on the same or similar notion of continuity. This leads Wise to claim
that ‘the rejection of mythic continuity in Frye can only seem idiosyncratic on Jameson’s
part, even according to the theoretical logic of his own hermeneutic system’. Then,
we get the real kicker in the form of a type of protest which Zizek has analysed under
the rubric of ‘theft of enjoyment’, because from here Wise goes on to say that it is
as if Jameson is suggesting that, because he himself does not appreciate or

embrace any religious or ‘mythic’ forms of community ritual, they cannot
have any real validity for the billions of people globally who are unable to
rouse themselves from their hallucinatory slumber. (pp. 42–3)
In other words, there is no real repudiation of Jameson’s critique of myth criticism

here, just a half-hearted assertion that totalisation and mythic continuity are the
same, coupled with a pathetic lament that Jameson is not more religious than he
242 Ian Buchanan
is. Here, to my mind, what would have been more useful is an inquiry into the
rationale, explicitly given or not, underpinning Jameson’s apparent deformation
of Frye.
If, in the foregoing, I have chosen not to emphasise, indeed to not even delineate,
the positive aspects of the six books considered here, that should not be taken to mean
that in my opinion none were to be had. On the contrary, each one offers much food
for thought, and, indeed, were they not as stimulating as they are, I would hardly
have been moved to complain so long and loud. But, that said, it does strike me
as curious, and this is the point I have been trying to make throughout, that the one
feature of Jameson’s work that might conceivably stand for the whole is the very
thing that is attacked, misapprehended, eschewed, distorted and lamented by the
very ones who were surely inspired by that very same very thing – namely Jameson’s
awesome ability to totalise, to bring together disparate material and show how it is
motivated by one and the same force. What I have tried to show, by concentrating
on the negatives, is the ways in which an avoidance of this issue corrupts whatever
picture of Jameson one might hope to contrive in its absence. It cannot simply be
disposed of, nor should it be. Totalisation, as Jameson does it, is not simply the tour-
de-force display of erudition and interpretation of one of the great synthesising minds
of our time, but the stubborn attempt to bring into view that which is in urgent need
of critical attention, namely our wilful blindness to the interconnected nature of global
capitalism, to the fact that our enjoyment of postmodern culture’s various – frequently
exhilarating – offerings, always comes at a price that someone, if not always us, has
to pay. I cannot but feel that the incessant complaining about the difculty of Jameson’s
style and the shrill asseverations against totalisation are both symptoms of what
may come to dene the postmodern condition: the inability to read in any way except
critically. We have lost the dogmatic dimension.
References
Deleuze, Gilles 1995, Negotiations: 1972–1990, trans Martin Joughin, New York: Columbia
University Press.
Jameson, Fredric 2000a, ‘Globalization and Strategy’, New Left Review, II, 4: 49–68.
Jameson, Fredric 1998, ‘Notes on Globalization as a Philosophical Issue’, in The Cultures

of Globalization, edited by Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi, Durham, NC.: Duke
University Press.
Jameson, Fredric 1988, The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971–1986. Volume 1: Situations
of Theory, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Reviews 243
Jameson, Fredric 1990, Late Marxism: Adorno, or, The Persistence of the Dialectic, London:
Verso.
Jameson, Fredric 1984, ‘Wallace Stevens’, New Orleans Review, 11, 1: 10–19.
Jameson, Fredric 1981, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act,
London: Routledge.
Jameson, Fredric 1971, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of

Literature, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Zizek, Slavoj 2001, Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out, Revised
Edition, London: Routledge.
Perry Anderson: The Merciless Laboratory of History
GREGORY ELLIOTT
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998
Reviewed by SIMON BROMLEY
Politics and History After the Fall
Introduction
Perry Anderson’s writing has, for a long time, occupied a central place in the Marxist
culture of the Anglophone world. Indeed, Anderson’s oeuvre constitutes a major
expression – perhaps, if one includes his guiding hand as long-time editor of the
New Left Review, the major expression – of the development of this region of Marxist
culture since the end of the Second World War.1 The claim that Anderson is ‘one of
the foremost contemporary Marxist thinkers’, Gregory Elliott rightly says, ‘would
command common consent’.2 The fortunes of Anderson’s Marxism are, therefore, of
interest beyond the details of his particular career, which, in any case, represents
unnished business. But what are the appropriate terms of evaluation? For Anderson,
as for Elliott, the relevant criteria are those established by Marx and the tradition
of classical Marxism: namely, that Marxism is both a theory of history, specically,
a theory of capitalist society; and that it simultaneously serves as a guide to an
emancipatory socialist politics, socialism being understood as the determina te
negation of the alienation and exploitation inherent under capitalism. This is surely
to be welcomed, for, as Alan Carling has well said, ‘any account which is to count
plausibly as Marxist must contain both a theory of society and a politics of emanci-
pation in an intrinsic relationship with each other’.3 Whatever the precise nature of
the relations between the politics and the theory, the two stand or fall together: it is
the actual possibility of a socialist future that licenses the theoretical characterisation
of capitalism as a realm of exploitation and alienation; if the theoretical apprehension
of present reality and future possibilities is in error, then a known alternative cannot
be made; and, if the putative alternative is either inconceivable or unreachable, the
critique lacks force.
1
For an important survey of the wider eld of Marxist culture, see Therborn 1996.
2
Elliott 1998, p. xi.
3
Carling 1997, p. 769. See also Wright 1993 and Therborn 1996.

246 Simon Bromley
Evaluated in thes e term s, the exact status of Ande rson’s contribution to

contemporary Marxist culture is, in fact, very difcult to pin down. But any attempt
to do so must now start with Elliott’s ne and meticulous study: ‘The work of an
independent Marxist, Perry Anderson: The Merciless Laboratory of History aims to deliver
an immanent critique, measuring the “performance” of Anderson’s Marxism against
its “prediction”, in its own attempts “to approximate to a general truth of the time”’.4
This ambition carefully circumscribes the compass of Elliott’s work, which is only
reasonable, given the near polymathic range of Anderson’s writing, to say nothing
of its unnished, incomplete character. Understandably, Elliott is not concerned to
evaluate Anderson’s contributions across the range of areas where they might be
argued to have much to offer – in the debates over the origins of capitalist development
in Europe, for example, or in the eld of comparative historical sociology. But, far
from this specic focus being a limitation, it precisely denes the importance of
Perry Anderson to a Marxist audience. In what amounts to a major effort of politically
engaged and informed political and intellectual history, Elliott seeks to evaluate
Anderson’s work at full-stretch, against its contribution to a specically Marxist
culture and politics for the Left.
In some respects, Anderson has already offered his own judgement on these
matters: nothing less than a sober and honest admission of defeat. Since the
early 1990s, Anderson has been arguing that the regnant capitalist order and its
accompanying liberal hegemony are at the zenith of their power, ruling virtually
unchallenged across the globe, while socialism has suffered a series of historical defeats.
Launching the new series of the New Left Review at the start of 2000, Anderson pointed
to a ‘radical discontinuity in the culture of the Left, as it – or if it – renews itself’. ‘The
only starting-point for a realistic Left today’, Anderson averred,
is a lucid registration of historical defeat. Capital has comprehensively

beaten back all threats to its rule, the bases of whose power – above all, the
pressures of competition – were persistently under-estimated by the socialist
movement. . . . Whatever limitations persist to its practice, neo-liberalism
as a set of principles rules undivided across the globe: the most successful
ideology in world history.5
However, Anderson has not – as yet – drawn from these political defeats of socialism
any specic conclusions regarding the theoretical component of Marxism – the
theory of historical materialism. Always sparse and formulaic at the best of times,
Anderson’s comments on historical materialism have asymptotically tended to zero.
4
Elliott 1998, p. xvi.
5
Anderson 2000, pp. 16, 17.
Reviews 247
Yet, if various socialist challenges to the rule of capital have ended in failure, as
Anderson contends, are these to be understood as simply political defeats or do they
also cast a searching light on the ability of Marxism both to interpret the workings
of its adversary and to reckon the possibilities of a socialist future? Elliott ends by
saying that ‘Andersonian Marxism has hitherto deferred a reckoning’, suggesting that
‘maybe its time has come’.6
As these concluding remarks suggest, Perry Anderson does not itself presume to
offer a reckoning of Anderson’s Marxism, though it furnishes many of the requisite
materials for such a verdict: it is, as Elliott says, an ‘immanent critique’, seeking to
evaluate Anderson’s writing against Marxist criteria. Yet, as both Anderson and Elliott
would be the rst to acknowledge, an immanent critique must work with something,
and a more external reckoning cannot be wholly divorced from an essentially inter-
nal judgement. The principal reason for this, of course, is that the very criteria that
frame Marxism’s claims are couched in general and open terms. The desiderata of
a critical Marxism cannot and were not designed to insulate historical materialism
from scrutiny from without. Marxist contributions to history and politics have always
to stake their claims in the eld of rival theories of history, competing conceptions
and accounts of capitalism, as well as alternative denitions of, and strategies for,
socialist politics.
Within this eld of ideological and practical contestation, Marxism has dened itself
as ‘not just any theoretical corpus’ (Therborn), not merely an abstract unity of theory
and practice but one embodied in the actual historical process: its specicity rests on
the claim that it has provided the leading role, both theoretically and practically, in
the internal opposition to capitalist modernity. Göran Therborn expresses this Marxist
self-condence as follows:
Marxism defended modernity with a view to another, more fully developed

modernity. Marxism was the theory of this dialectic of modernity, as well
as its practice. . . . As a distinctive cognitive perspective in the modern
world [Marxism] is surpassed in social signicance – in terms of numbers
of adherents – only by the great world religions. As a modern pole of
identity, it is outdistanced only by nationalism. Marxism acquired its very
special historical importance by becoming, from the 1880s till the 1970s, the
main intellectual culture of two major social movements of the dialectics
of modernity: the labour movement and the anti-colonial movement. In
neither case was Marxism without important rivals, nor was its diffusion
universal, even, or without defeats. But none of its competitors had a
6
Elliott 1998, p. 244.
248 Simon Bromley
comparable reach and persistence. . . . The scientic claims and self-condence

of Marxists . . . rested upon the assumption that the critique was, so to speak,
already inherent in reality.7
One of the many reasons for engaging with Anderson’s Marxism is that it held
rm to one particular expression of this self-condence. Indeed, since postcolonial
nationalism could not remotely claim to be building a socialist future, and since social
democracy had expressly repudiated Marxism, identication with the Communist
world was the only viable option for someone seeking to ground Marxism in the
realities of twentieth-century politics. Now, after the fall of Communism and the
further retreat of social democracy, perhaps the central question for Anderson’s
Marxism, as for any other, is the extent to which the Marxist critique was and remains
inherent in reality, representing what Marx and Engels once called the real movement
of things? How far are its claims to represent the most cogent theory of history,
and specically the most compelling account of capitalist modernity available for
any socialist politics that seeks a radical break with the existing order, rationally and
practically grounded? These questions – the place of Marxism within the general
culture of a ‘realistic Left’ – are surely the hard issues forced upon us by ‘a lucid
registration of historical defeat’.
The components of Anderson’s Marxism

The constant and animating purpose of Anderson’s Marxism, Elliott persuasively
argues, was the search for a revolutionary socialist strategy in the West, a politics that
would supplement and complement the socialism inaugurated by the Bolshevik
revolution in the East.8 And Elliott is also convincing on the importance of the
‘East’/‘West’ contrast in Anderson’s thinking, evidenced in his attempt, as it were,
to cross Lenin with Gramsci. But perhaps of equal importance is the fact that, from
the early 1960s onwards, Anderson’s conception of revolutionary socialist politics
conformed to the communist vision of Marx and Engels. Socialism was conceived
7
Therborn 1996, pp. 60, 73–4, 80.
8
The evolution of the ‘sources and components’ of Anderson’s Marxism described by Elliott
would not change this fundamental orientation. Elliott gives a capsule summary of these changes
in the following terms:
the ‘sources and components’ of Andersonian theory . . . were Sartrean and Gramscian
Marxism, Italian Communism, and Deutscherism. Italian Communism would be
rejected and supplanted – rst by Guevarism, then by Maoism, and nally by
Trotskyism. Sartre and Gramsci would be joined by Althusser and Colletti, and Western
Marxism generally counterbalanced and corrected by classical Marxism. A form of
Deutscherism would persist, despite Mandelian amendments in the 1970s. However,
only fairly late in the day was a sui generis national tradition, as opposed to the
attempt to create one by the domestication of Western Marxism, assimilated into
Anderson’s own synthesis: the British school of Marxist historiography. (p. 32)
Reviews 249
of as the determinate negation of the alienation and exploitation inherent in the

capitalist mode of production and its characteristic state forms, it involved the
replacement of market co-ordination by planning, the abolition of private property
in the means of production, and a social movement beyond the sphere of bourgeois
right to proletarian democracy; and it was to be achieved, above all, by a conscious,
collective project of the labour movement, guided by the systematic understanding
of past and present possibilities of historical transformation provided by historical
materialism, oriented towards building a known future founded on communist
principles of social organisation.
The clearest statement of this credo was given in probably Anderson’s most engaged
and passionate text, Arguments Within English Marxism, and it is worth stating at some
length. Having distinguished those forms of individual and collective agency which
more or less reproduce the ruling social order, Anderson says:
Finally, there are those collective projects which have sought to render
their initiators authors of their collective mode of existence as a whole, in
a conscious programme aimed at creating or remodelling whole social
structures. There are isolated premonitions of this phenomenon, in political
colonization, religious heterodoxy or literary utopia, in earlier centuries: but
essentially this kind of agency is very recent indeed. On a major scale, the
very notion of it scarcely predates the Enlightenment. The American and
French Revolutions are the rst historical gurations of collective agency
in this, decisive sense. Originating as largely spontaneous explosions and
ending with politico-juridical reconstructions, however, they still remain at
a great distance from the manifestation of a full popular agency desiring
and creating new social conditions of life for itself. It is the modern labour
movement that has really given birth to this quite new conception of
historical change; and it is with the advent of what its founders called
scientic socialism that, in effect, for the rst time collective projects of social
transformation were married to systematic efforts to understand the processes
of past and present, to produce a premeditated future. The Russian Revolution
is in this respect the inaugural incarnation of a new kind of history, founded
on an unprecedented form of agency. Notoriously, the results of the great
cycle of upheavals it initiated have to date been far from those expected at
their outset. But the alteration of the potential of historical action, in the
course of the 20th century, remains irreversible. 9
9
250 Simon Bromley
Certainly, like Deutscher, Anderson always held that the social order founded by this
‘inaugural incarnation of a new kind of history’ might be reversed. The restoration
of capitalism within the USSR was always an historical possibility. Rather, it was the
potential for this kind of collective agency in history that he held to be irreversible.
The linking of the politics of the labour movement with the theory of history and
capitalism laid down by Marx and Engels made possible a new kind of history, a
history capable of producing a socialist future – the Bolshevik Revolution was an
actual instance of this unity of politics and theory. The importance of the Bolshevik
Revolution, then, was that it vouchsafed this central claim of Marx and Engels’s
communism, it showed that this potential was a real historical possibility, not merely
a utopian dream. According to Anderson, the Soviet order – including its inter-
national extensions that resulted from the Red Army and further peasant revolutions
– was post-capitalist, the Bolshevik’s had made a socialist revolution; the task now
was to devise a socialist strategy for the West.
Elliott is not alone in nding certain tensions here. Alex Callinicos has pointed
out that Trotsky’s characterisation of the Soviet order in The Revolution Betrayed as a
degenerated workers’ state had already sundered ‘any connection between socialism
and the self-emancipation of the working class’.10 In a ne discussion of Anderson’s
essay on ‘Trotsky’s Interpretation of Stalinism’, Elliott shows how Anderson in effect
employs a ‘historical-sociology-by-analogy’ to support the claim that the Soviet order
was in some sense post-capitalist, concluding that while this procedure ‘fully accords
with the Bolshevik tradition, before and after October, there would seem to be less
warrant for it in Marx and Engels themselves’.11 However, the importance of this point
goes beyond the question of how precisely to characterise the politics and econom-
ics of the Soviet social order in Marxist terms, since, even if Stalinism represented a
discontinuity with the Bolshevik Revolution – a counter-revolution leading back to
state capitalism – the actuality of a new kind of agency, represented above all in the
soviets, is endorsed by Anderson’s Trotskyist critics such as Callinicos. But for the
contingent failure of the revolution in Germany, socialism might have had a future.12
We have seen that Anderson’s conception of socialism is faithful to that of Marx
and Engels’s, linking it to the possibility of a novel kind of collective human agency,
an agency that is required not only for the making of a revolution against capital but
10
11
Elliott 1998, p. 157. Noting that Sartre had already aligned the position of the PCF with the
standpoint of the French proletariat, Elliott notes that Anderson would later effect a further
substitution of the USSR ‘as locum tenens for party and class’ Elliott 1998, p. 30.
12
For this reason, Paul Blackledge’s recent discussion in these pages, while correctly identi-
fying Anderson’s Deutscherite deviations, misses the point – unless he wishes also to argue that
October 1917 was not a proletarian revolution at all – that events in Germany were irrelevant.
But, in the latter case, the notion of a distinctly Marxist politics becomes even more utopian.
Reviews 251
also for the continued reproduction of a socialist and ultimately communist order.
There are several different arguments that might be disentangled in the passage on
agency just quoted but perhaps the most important is this. Anderson attempts to
escape the apparent political contradictions between his account of the Bolshevik
Revolution as socialist with his sober recognition of the character of the Soviet order
– as Callinicos says of Trotsky’s original diagnosis, ‘according to which the workers
were still the ruling class of a state which denied them all political power’13 – by
separating the unanticipated outcomes of the Bolshevik Revolution, as well as ‘the
great cycle of upheavals it initiated’, from the irreversible ‘alteration of the potential
of historical action’.
The means by which this separation is effected is presented as a matter of denition:
‘By denition, it is intentional reach rather than involuntary result that distinguishes
one form of agency from another’.14 But denitions rarely settle anything and this
case is no different. The whole point of the third and nal kind of agency, by Anderson’s
own account, is that it aims to close the gap between conscious, collective agency, on
the one side, and determinate social outcomes, on the other. In the absence of a close
relation between goals and outcomes, a clear relation between intentions and made
results, the very existence or possibility of the nal kind of agency is moot, since it
is part of the very intention of this agency to master the historical process. That is to
say, in Anderson’s words:
The whole purpose of historical materialism, after all, has precisely been
to give men and women the means with which to exercise a real popular
self-determination for the rst time in history. This is, exactly, the objective of
a socialist revolution, whose aim is to inaugurate the transition from what
Marx called the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom. 15
But, if the results, notoriously or otherwise, ‘have to date been far from those expected
at their outset’, then what warrant is there for the claim that the politics of the labour
movement and specically the Bolshevik Revolution imply an irreversible ‘alteration
of the potential of historical action’?
In short, unless the Soviet social order (or, at least, the Bolshevik Revolution) was
socialist, the possibility of socialist agency as conceived by Marx and Engels remains
merely theoretical, perhaps even potentially utopian in precisely the sense derided
13
14
Anderson 1980, p. 20. In his essay on Fukuyama, Anderson continues this line of reason-
ing: ‘No political movement ever realizes exactly what it sets out to achieve, and no social theory
ever foresees just what goes on to occur’, Anderson 1992, p. 374. Of course, but Anderson still
does not seem able directly to confront the quite different challenges this truth poses to Marxian
socialism, on the one hand, and liberalism, on the other.
15
252 Simon Bromley
by the founders of historical materialism. (Of course, this is exactly what liberal
critics of Marxism have always maintained, as Anderson was somewhat belatedly to
recognise.) On the surface, Anderson’s judgement on these matters has not altered
substantially with the fall of historical Communism. That is to say, the collapse
of Communism and the restoration of capitalism have not changed Anderson’s
assessment of the character of the Eastern bloc – he still describes it as ‘the third
of the planet’ that ‘had broken with capitalism’ – and it remains, therefore, the sole
(temporarily?) vanquished instance of the historical actuality of socialist agency.
In the rst third of the twentieth century, Anderson contends, ‘no other body of
theory . . . came near to the twofold successes, of anticipation [of capitalist crisis] and
accomplishment [of socialist construction under Stalin] of the socialist tradition’.16
Moreover, in the same essay, ‘The Ends of History’, Anderson maintained that the
four bases of the classical conception of socialism – a historical projection about the
socialisation of the productive forces; the social movement of the collective labourer;
the political objective that the associated producers plan the social product; and the
ethical ideal of equality – ‘have not simply dried up’. The future of socialism – if,
indeed, it has one – will certainly be different from its past, and Anderson concluded
his meditation on Fukuyama by suggesting that ‘the destiny of socialism might after
all prove closer to that of its historical rival, liberalism’, in that it may yet be redeemed
from its apparent exhaustion by adopting elements of its opponent’s programme in
order to master new circumstances.17
Nevertheless, for all these qualications it is this underlying continuity of per-
spective which sustains Anderson’s defence of an ‘uncompromising realism’ against
what he describes as the dominant responses on the Left: either an adaptation of goals
in order to accommodate capitalism, ‘capitalism has come to stay, we must make
our peace with it’; or a self-deceiving consolation, the ‘natural human tendency to try
and nd silver linings’.18 Characteristically, Anderson notes but does not discuss
‘a third possible reaction to the turn of the time, that is neither accommodation nor
consolation: namely, resignation – in other words, a lucid recognition of the nature
and triumph of the system, without either adaptation or self-deception, but also
without any belief in the chance of an alternative to it’.19 Apparently, what stands
between the public Anderson and bitter resignation is the continuity in his insistence
16
17
18
Anderson 2000, pp. 13, 14.
19
Anderson 2000, p. 13, n. 5. Anderson’s only comment on this is that: ‘A bitter conclusion of
this kind is, however, rarely articulated as a public position’. Given the discrepancy Elliott doc-
uments between Anderson’s public and private pronouncements on Marxism, is there a clue
here to his real thinking? Time may tell.
Reviews 253
that the break with capitalism inaugurated by the Bolshevik Revolution represented
an irreversible potential for a ‘new kind of history, founded on an unprecedented
form of agency’, combined with the belief that the vanquishing of international
socialism by the capitalist international has not cancelled the cogency of that original
judgement. But how cogent was the original judgement? Can the theory continue to
escape the verdict of history?
Deferring a reckoning
In his writings prior to the fall of Communism, Anderson described historical
materialism as an archimedean standpoint, a theoretical corpus that was at best
‘incomplete’ and at worst ‘imperfect’, but he never offered an independent vindica-
tion of its theoretical claims.20 Recognising that the cogency of Marxism as a critique
of capitalism presupposed the plausibility of a socialist alternative,21 Anderson plumped
for October 1917 as the mainstay of his Marxism. Since the socialist alternative
was actual, there was little need for a theoretical defence. As we have seen, in an
attenuated form, this remains the basis of Anderson’s position. Neither the general
historical-materialist theory of history, nor the specic account of capitalism devel-
oped in Capital, nor discussions of the contours of a feasible form of socialist economy
and popular democracy receive sustained attention anywhere in Anderson’s work.
Elliott provides some clues as to why this may be so, for the fact is that Anderson’s
private judgement of Marxism was dramatically at odds with his public description
of it as ‘incomplete’ or, later, ‘imperfect’.
Thus in the Decennial Report on the NLR (surveying the period 1962–74), Anderson
wrote:
. . . in effect Marxism, a century after Capital, still remained largely a system

of vacuums. The immense gap between the potential of historical materi-
alism as an explanation of the world and of history, and the actual use made
of it to date, meant that there was a virtually indenite series of problems
still to be resolved or even explored for any candidate to the title of a Marxist
journal. . . .
No determinate theory of the road to a revolutionary socialist strategy in
the West, of the mechanisms of imperialism in the underdeveloped South,
20
The most sustained discussion, in Arguments, is primarily an exposition, drawing heavily
on the impressive reconstruction of Therborn 1976.
21
Cf. Wright: ‘The Marxist emancipatory ideal, the theory of history and Marxist class analy-
sis all depend in one way or another on the plausibility of socialism as an alternative to capi-
talism’, 1983, p. 21.
254 Simon Bromley
or of the nature and future of the Communist states in the East, has yet
even been broached in the review.22
Moreover, in so far as Anderson has expressed his admiration for Capital, it is for
the development and exemplication of the concept of ‘mode of production’, the
‘primordial function’ of which was ‘to think the diversity of socio-economic forms and
epochs – to give us the means of differentiating one major type of historical structure
from another’.23 On Marx’s account of the capitalist economy itself, its theorisation,
mechanisms and tendencies, Anderson has had nothing to say. In his published
writings, Elliott notes, Anderson maintained a ‘silence on Marx’s economics proper’:
‘With historical materialism thus qualied, scientic socialism logically undergoes
signicant modulation’.24
Yet, if this could be said – at least in the semi-clandestine world of the NLR –
in the mid-1970s, then when did it become appropriate to say that ‘there are no
longer any signicant oppositions – that is, systematic rival outlooks – within the
thought-world of the West’?25 And, in the light of this, do not the extravagant claims
for the ‘unprecedented form of agency’ exemplied by October 1917 look ‘more than
faintly absurd’?26 And, at the very least, surely after the fall of Communism several
obvious questions must rmly press themselves onto the Left’s agenda?
If the Soviet order was socialist, then why did the new universal history of
international socialism prove unequal to the struggle against the international
order of capital? The closest Anderson has come to an answer is that the Left
‘persistently under-estimated’ the bases of capitalist power, ‘above all, the pressures
of competition’. (True or not, this is scarcely more than a liberal platitude.) If socialism
must compete with an inherently dynamic capitalist order and recognise the inevitable
complexity of any viable post-capitalist, democratic order, then can this be squared
with the rather simple conception of agency and planning found in the communist
tradition? And, if a more complex, differentiated account of socialist agency is
called for, what is the place in it for the central socialist value of collective self-
determination, for planning?
22
Quoted in Elliott 1998, p. 93.
23
24
Elliott 1998, p. 136.
25
26
Commenting on the debate between Thompson and Anderson on questions of agency,
Anthony Giddens pointed out that:
Modern society is a fertile environment for the development of organizations, and
for the formation of social movements, the latter as well as the former involved with
the deepened historicity [the use of the consciousness of history to make history]
of the modern period. To associate this primarily with the labour movement is,
however, more than faintly absurd. Rather than being the prime vehicle of such a
process, the labour movement is only one example of the near universalization in
the modern era of the principle that ‘history may be used to make history. (Giddens
1987, p. 223)
Reviews 255
The latter question is crucial, since one of the strengths of Anderson’s Marxism has
been a clear insistence that the aspiration to collective self-determination embodied
in the plan is a dening and differentiating feature of the communist tradition. Elliott
points out that, for Anderson:
Central planning was no programmatic optional extra of socialism, since it

was designed not merely to secure allocative efciency and equity but to
institute collective social agency. Just as capitalism was ‘a coherent totality
– a global mode of human existence which embraces all the diverse
activities and institutions of a society and reveals the same organizing
principles in each of them’ – so too a socialist society would be an expressive
totality, but a disalienated one.27
Yet the difculty of conceiving a disalienated social order that also realises a
substantial degree of individual autonomy and democracy poses an acute problem
for any conception of socialism, like Anderson’s, that wishes to distinguish it sharply
from liberalism and the tradition of social democracy by focusing on the plan.
Traditionally, socialist critics of liberal capitalism have raised four main charges: that
it is inefcient, anarchic, unjust and appeals to a narrow conception of self-interest.
Now, while there is a real and continuing debate about the feasibility of efcient
alternatives to capitalist property arrangements and markets, it is at least clear that
traditional conceptions of a planned economy were hopelessly mistaken both in their
understanding of capitalism and their capacity to guide alternative mechanisms of
allocation. With the collapse of the argument for planning from efciency, many have
shifted ground to arguing that the value of the plan is that it supersedes the anarchy
of the capitalist division of labour. Whether or not this is true,28 why should social
outcomes be condemned just because they are unplanned?29 Is there an independent
27
Elliott 1998, pp. 2–3. That Anderson took this value extremely seriously is evident from
some of his earliest writings. Commenting on social democracy in Sweden (from where Elliott
is quoting Anderson), he also wrote:
Transparency is one of the crucial dening characteristics of socialism: a community
in which all the multiple mediations between our public and private existence are
visible, where each social event can be seen right back to its source, and legible human
intentions read everywhere on the face of the world. . . . The plan decodes the vast,
interlocking, impenetrable, inspissated economy and ascribes a lucid meaning to
every one of the myriad cryptic gestures which compose it. It renders the entire work-
force transparent to itself as engaged in one task. (Quoted in Elliott, pp. 3 and 247,
n. 7)
28
I say this because it is not at all clear that a disalienated economy of any serious complex-
ity – that is, one involving advanced forces of production and hence a high degree of speciali-
sation in the production and use of knowledge – is even a coherent possibility. If this is right
(and I think it is), this is not an argument for capitalism but it is a potentially fatal argument
against all forms of planning thus far conceived in the socialist tradition.
29
In sharp contrast, in a thoughtful reection on the lessons of the Soviet experience, Gerry
Cohen has argued that the value of collective self-determination is purely an instrumental, deriv-
ative one: it is valuable in so far as it is necessary to realise other values such as individual
256 Simon Bromley
argument for the value of collective self-determination or is its justication pri-

marily instrumental? And, if it is the latter, the complaint that market outcomes are
problematic just because they are anarchic lacks foundation. What would be left of
the traditional critique are the arguments that capitalist outcomes, particularly the
material inequalities generated, are unjust and rely on motivation by means of an
impersonal cash nexus. Both of these charges surely stand but they do not dene a
clear break between liberal and socialist critiques of capitalism.30
In fact, rather than offering an independent defence of the values of collective self-
determination, Anderson follows many others in changing the terms of the evalua-
tion at this point, looking to environmental constraints, in conjunction with material
inequalities, as the basis on which to indict capitalism. The foundations for the renewal
of socialism are no longer located in the internal contradictions of the capitalist mode
but, rather, in the limits of external nature and the failure (rather than the ability) of
capitalism to develop the forces of production on a universal basis. But is there
any more warrant for believing that the real challenges of the environment are
any more amenable to relatively centralised means of utilising knowledge than the
organisation of economic life itself? Why cannot a regulated capitalism, supplemented
by elements of public control, cope? There has been a long history of socialist claims
that capitalism cannot deliver, say, rising living standards, minimal public standards
of welfare, etc., that only planning can deliver these essentially non-market outcomes,
and, yet, a combination of social regulation and direct public provision – within an
overall order that is both capitalist and liberal democratic – has as good a record as
might be reasonably expected from an order with a signicantly higher degree of
central co-ordination and control. Unless it is linked to genuinely new explorations
of how to socialise the market and move beyond the limits of social democracy,
sapient invocations of environmental catastrophe and social polarisation count for
very little.
For a Marxist (scientic socialist) politics, however, there is a still more basic difculty
with this line of argument. Surreptitiously, the whole basis of the classical Marxist
indictment of capitalism has been inverted: in the original schema, internal contra-
autonomy, equality, community and democracy: ‘Individual self-direction . . . may have value
per se, but collective self-direction does not’, 1995, p. 260. To be sure, this is a liberal conclusion,
but it can scarcely be countered simply by asserting the independent value of collective self-
determination. Cohen goes on to point out that collective self-determination ‘is not the same
thing as democracy, for a democracy can decide that some things should not be subject to
collective purpose. . . . A dictator can plan, a democracy can decide not to’, pp. 260–1.
30
Rather, this line of argument leads to the conclusion recently made by Andrew Gamble
against Francis Fukuyama: ‘the titanic struggle between capitalism and socialism in the twentieth
century was not part of history at all, merely the working out of the principles which had already
been established as the guiding principles of the modern era’, Gamble 2000, p. 33. In Arguments,
Anderson had himself agreed with Thompson that Marx and Engels left no authentic commu-
nist moral theory.
Reviews 257
dictions, linked to antagonistic class interests, laid the basis for a specic, concrete
social agency – the collective labourer – to inaugurate a revolutionary change in the
organisation of production, while the overcoming of scarcity through the material
abundance generated by the development of the productive forces weakened the
necessity for exploitative class relations; in the new model, external limits, linked to
general, abstract human interests, lay the basis for a project whose scope is largely
indeterminate; and the impossibility of escaping scarcity renders socialist equality a
moral imperative. This may not quite amount to the utopian socialism decried by
Marx and Engels, but neither is it what they had in mind by the real movement of
things. 31
And what if the Soviet order was not socialist? What if the enchantment with
October 1917 represented no more than the implicit teleology that a modern society
was either capitalist or socialist? What if the Soviet model was nothing more than its
liberal critics always said it was: an especially authoritarian and statist variant of
revolution from above in relatively undeveloped, peripheral social formations? One
does not have to subscribe to the alternative Trotskyist tradition, represented by Alex
Callinicos’s The Revenge of History for example, which characterised the Eastern bloc
as a particularly militarised form of state capitalism, to see that the degree to which
the Soviet order vindicated the vision of the founders of historical materialism was
always questionable. Outside of a teleological Marxism, non-capitalist does not have
to mean post-capitalist. But whether seen as state-capitalist, or as non-capitalist-
but-not-post-capitalist, if the Bolsheviks did not make a socialist revolution, then the
actual status of Marxism as a unity of theory and practice had precious little empir-
ical basis in twentieth-century world politics – it would remain merely a theoretical
unity of theory and practice and, in reality and by the standards of classical Marxism,
that would not be a unity at all. Perhaps its time is yet to come.
Conclusions
There is, I think, a common source of Anderson’s refusal to explicitly acknowledge
the tensions in his position, notwithstanding his laudable and sober recognition of
contemporary realities. One of the great strengths of Anderson’s Marxism – I suspect
part of its seductive quality – is its combination of a faithful defence of the commu-
nist tradition with a condent ability to write about political history in epochal terms:
in both senses, politics has always been in command. But both elements are now
31
With his customary clarity, Gerry Cohen has explicitly recognised this predicament and con-
cluded that Marxism alone does not contain the intellectual and moral resources with which to
address it. See Cohen 1995.
258 Simon Bromley
seriously in question. Despite the steady movement from existential humanism,

through various varieties of Western Marxism to Althusser, Colletti and beyond,
Anderson never ceased to formulate his arguments in bold, totalising terms, happy
to employ ‘capital’, ‘capitalism’, ‘socialism’ and the like as unitary terms, as if
expressive totalities really did stalk the evolution of human history. For all Anderson’s
stirring and, in my view, essentially sound defence of Althusser against Thompson,
he never really took the lesson to heart.32 Anderson never explored the possibility that
contemporary history might be better understood in terms of complex patterns of
interaction among elements of different modes of production, never contemplated
that notions like ‘the rule of capital’ denote a complex set of rights and powers, and
accordingly never entertained that political choices might not be best understood
in terms of an epochal opposition between capitalism and socialism. Outside of a
teleology of expressive totalities, can any sense be made of such contrasts? I doubt
it. And if the theory of historical materialism does not deliver an epochal account of
historical possibilities, let alone trajectories, then what is left?
Certainly, one agrees with Erik Wright that:
on virtually any construal of the problem, emancipation requires funda-

mental reorientations of the use of society’s material resources, surplus
and time. Such projects, therefore, inevitably involve in a central way class
politics – political struggles over property relations and control of the social
surplus.33
It is also possible to explore ways in which the private ownership of capital and
the functioning of markets can be constrained, supplemented and, perhaps, in some
respects replaced by democratic forms of ownership, alternative mechanisms of
allocation and socialised control over some dimensions of property rights. To say that
these arguments cannot sensibly be formulated in terms of an epochal confrontation
between capitalism and socialism is emphatically not to endorse the ‘simple dropping
of the subject of property regimes altogether ’.34 Rather, it is to take the subject of
property régimes altogether more seriously, as real economic mechanisms requiring
detailed study and detailed alternative proposals, than the rather strident, yet ulti-
mately empty, talk of the ‘rule of capital’ and the ‘defeat of socialism’ allow.
32
Of course, formally Anderson recognised this in his historical work and the insight plays a
limited role in the argument of Lineages of the Absolutist State (1974) and a greater role still in
Passages From Antiquity to Feudalism (1974). It is all the more curious, then, that it does not gure
in his political and programmatic statements.
33
Wright 1993, p. 28.
34
Reviews 259
And what of communism? For Marx and Engels, historical materialism qua theory
of (capitalist) history and a communist, materialist philosophical anthropology went
together. But it is clear that the materialist appeal to production in each case is quite
different and that one can separate the two. If a more restricted, less totalising
historical materialism can be salvaged (as I believe it can), is there anything to be
rescued of a distinctively Marxist philosophical anthropology? Does Marxism possess
a home-grown moral theory, that is an ethical and political basis that is something
more than a claim to full liberal ideals; and what now is the status of its central
value of collective self-determination?
Short of resignation, whatever way one reckons October 1917 and all that followed
from it, the case for what Anderson dismisses as ‘accommodation’ is altogether more
serious than the rhetoric of ‘uncompromising realism’ might suggest. Whether the
socialist challenge to capital’s rule has been defeated in the sense portrayed by Anderson
is certainly questionable, since it presupposes a Marxian conception of socialism,
and even if the Bolshevik Revolution was socialist, I have tried to suggest that the
coherence of that conception has now been seriously called into question. If the
Bolsheviks did not make a socialist revolution, the fall of Communism is of lesser
moment; and the achievements of non-Marxist, reformist socialism in radically
modifying liberal capitalism in the direction of a social democracy might be cast in
a much more positive light. 35 If it is defeat all round (as it must be on a Marxian
conception of socialism), then it is even more important to confront directly the
question of what intellectual and political resources Marxism might still bring to the
renewal of the socialist tradition.
Anderson’s Marxism kept faith with a central, dening element of the communist
tradition but his resolute subordination of questions of theoretical evaluation to the
exigencies of political judgement served to delay a (public) reckoning with historical
materialism long beyond the point at which any political gains outweighed the
theoretical costs. Alongside a searching investigation of the travails of contemporary
capitalism and its manifest apologists, an equally thorough day of reckoning for the
theoretical resources of Marxism is surely long overdue. It is not the least of the many
merits of Elliott’s thorough and scrupulous investigation that it comprehensively
marshals the internal evidence, cumulatively and sympathetically mounting a case
which points up the need for this more ‘external’ assessment.
35
I have not explored this possibility above, since it presupposes a non-Marxist conception of
socialism. For such an evaluation, see, for example, Sassoon 1996.
260 Simon Bromley
References
Anderson, Perry 1974, Passages From Antiquity to Feudalism, London: Verso.
Anderson, Perry 1974, Lineages of the Absolutist State, London: Verso.
Anderson, Perry 1980, Arguments Within English Marxism, London: Verso.
Anderson, Perry 1992, ‘The Ends of History’, in A Zone of Engagement, London: Verso.
Anderson, Perry 2000, ‘Renewals’, New Left Review, II, 1: 5–24.
Blackledge, Paul 2000, ‘Perry Anderson and the Ends of History’, Historical Materialism,
7: 199–219.
Callinicos, Alex 1991, The Revenge of History: Marxism and the East European Revolutions,
Cambridge: Polity Press.
Carling, Alan 1997, ‘Analytical and Essential Marxism’, Political Studies, 45: 768–83.
Cohen, Gerald A. 1995, Self-Ownership, Freedom and Equality, Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.
Gamble, Andrew 2000, Politics and Fate, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Giddens, Anthony 1987, ‘Out of the Orrery: E.P. Thompson on Consciousness and
History’, in Social Theory and Modern Sociology, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Sassoon, Donald 1996, One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in the
Twentieth Century, London: I.B. Tauris.
Therborn, Göran 1976, Science, Class and Society, London: Verso.
Therborn, Göran 1996, ‘Dialectics of Modernity: On Critical Theory and the Legacy
of Twentieth-Century Marxism’, New Left Review, I, 215: 59–81.
Wright, Erik Olin 1993, ‘Class Analysis, History and Emancipation’, New Left Review,
I, 202: 15–35.
Le Siècle de Sartre
BERNARD-HENRI LÉVY
Paris: Grasset, 2000
Reviewed by IAN H. BIRCHALL
The Kiss of Death: Bernard-Henri Lévy Recuperates Sartre

Bernard-Henr i Lévy has written a substantial book on Sartre, whose 663 pages
contain much detail about the history and intellectual life of the twentieth century.
That he should have done so may seem surprising. Lévy, born in 1948, a student of
Louis Althusser, was inactive in 1968, but in the early 1970s became one of the
bright young things of French Maoism and the author of a not unintelligent study of
guerrilla warfare in Bangladesh. 1 In 1976, he jumped ship and proclaimed the
existence of a fresh grouping of intellectuals, the so-called nouveaux philosophes (new
philosophers). This was largely a publicity stunt for the Grasset publishing house,
which employed Lévy; the actual philosophy was not at all new, a rag-bag of Cold-
War clichés – Lévy rejected Maoism, Stalinism and the very idea of socialism. With a
combination of industry and self-promotion, Lévy has kept himself in the public eye,
producing over twenty-ve volumes in the last quarter century. Politically, Lévy
reected a rightward reaction as the post-1968 revolutionary wave subsided; he seemed
to repudiate all that the young revolutionaries who had befriended Sartre stood for.
Yet the book is not wholly unfair, nor is it entirely without merit. Lévy leaps with
commendable alacrity over the frontiers between literature, philosophy and politics
– only someone with contempt for the boundaries of academic disciplines can begin
to grasp the totality of Sartre.
Moreover, the book is to a very considerable extent sympathetic to Sartre (it
will undoubtedly encourage many to reread Sartre, or to read him for the rst time).
A trend-watcher like Lévy undoubtedly has a sense of which way the tide is
moving. Sartre has suffered a relative eclipse since his death in 1980;2 Lévy’s book
may herald a return to fashionable status for his subject. And, if that is the case, surely
1
Lévy 1973. This is far from run-of-the-mill Maoism; Lévy keeps his distance from Stalinism
and Chinese foreign policy, and frequently draws on the Trotskyist Tariq Ali’s writings on
Pakistan.
2
With one of Sartre’s magnitude, the term ‘relative’ must be stressed – since 1975, the British
Library has acquired some 375 titles by or about Sartre.

262 Ian H. Birchall
it should be welcomed by someone such as myself, who was rst drawn towards
left-wing politics by reading Sartre some forty-ve years ago, and who has remained
an affectionate admirer ever since. Is it not churlish and sectarian to nd fault with
Levy’s efforts?
On closer inspection, the gift-horse’s mouth reveals an alarming number of cracked
teeth. Lévy legitimately criticises Sartre for never checking his quotations or their
sources (p. 288); ostensibly his own book is a work of serious scholarship, virtually
every page bearing at least one footnote. Yet, equally, there is scarcely a page without
an unsupported assertion, let alone some vast ponticating generalisation which we
are required to accept on the basis of Lévy’s personal authority.
Lévy has certainly read Sartre extensively. But does he know the work quite as well
as would he have us believe? He refers to the ‘two thousand three hundred pages’
of L’Idiot de la famille (p. 445). Volumes One and Two actually amount to some 2,136
pages; but has Lévy not noticed the 665 pages of the slender third volume (1972),
where Sartre develops a historical analysis of nineteenth-century literature? In claiming,
rather implausibly, that Sartre lost interest in his works as soon as he had nished
writing them, Lévy refers to an interview with Jacques Chancel3 in which he refused
to speak about L’Idiot. The fact that Sartre gave other interviews on L’Idiot (and on
virtually all his other works)4 is simply elided (p. 289).
He cites a passage from the Cahiers pour une morale which he states has been ‘quoted
and commented on’ by Jeannette Colombel (pp. 568–9). Unfortunately, Colombel’s
book5 was published in 1981, two years before the Cahiers, and relies on extracts pub-
lished in a journal. We are left wondering whether Lévy has read the Cahiers in their
entirety. And he is eccentric, to say the least, in his understanding of passages he has
read. He cites Sartre’s observation that most collaborators were bourgeois, whereas
‘all workers and almost all peasants were resisters’,6 and proceeds to attribute this to
the belief that ‘the earth does not lie’, accusing Sartre of some kind of Pétainist cult
of the soil (p. 540). In fact, Sartre was making a far more obvious remark, namely that
it was the less privileged classes who suffered most from Nazi policies (the rst decree
of General von Stutnitz after taking Paris banned strikes and imposed a wage-freeze).
He swallows the tired old story that Jean Genet was ‘crushed’ by reading Saint
Genet, ‘reduced to nothing and effectively ceasing to write’ (p. 136), when the chrono-
logy in Edmund White’s authoritative biography shows that Genet’s six years of
3
As so often in this book, no reference is given. On the basis of Boulé 1992, p. 7, I assume
this is the Radioscopie interview of 7 February 1973.
4
See the extensive bibliography in Boulé 1992, pp. 239–44.
5
Colombel 1981, p. 139.
6
Sartre 1949a, p. 45.
Reviews 263
infertile depression began in 1948, over three years before the publication of Sartre’s
work.7
Lévy is no more fortunate in the sweeping generalisations about intellectual and
political history with which he strews his work. The French syndicalist Georges Sorel,
he proclaims, creates a ‘Lenin-Mussolini axis’ (p. 141). Actually, there are just two
references to Sorel in the whole of Lenin’s works – one to note that he was an anarchist
critic of Marx,8 and one to call him a ‘notorious muddler ’.9 Lévy seems to believe that
Hegel was unknown in France before the 1930s, ignoring the work of Augusto Véra,
Renan, Taine, Jaurès, etc. (p. 544).10
He cites the Algerian settler Communist Fernand Iveton, executed for supporting
the FLN (p. 86) – but spells his name Yveton, showing himself unfamiliar with Jean-
Luc Einaudi’s important study of the question.11 And it seems gratuitous to invoke
Balzac’s retour des personnages (a quite different and more complex phenomenon) to
explain the obvious point that the same characters reappear in the three volumes
of Les Chemins de la liberté (p. 128). Each of these items is in itself trivial, and worthy
of note only to a pedant; accumulated together, they cast serious doubts on Lévy’s
scholarship.
The book does contain many interesting observations and some judgement s
which are stimulating, if perverse. There is an exemplary section on Sartre’s rôle
during the German Occupation (pp. 367–86), in which Lévy refutes the ignorant attacks
made by the likes of Gilbert Joseph from the safety of posterity. Of course, Sartre
made certain compromises with the anti-semitic Vichy state – a state machine is
not like South African oranges, something that can be taken or boycotted at one’s
discretion. Sartre was no Resistance hero, but his actions in Socialisme ou liberté and
in writing Les Mouches were honest and creditable, and not without risk, bearing
comparison with those of most of his contemporaries.
Lévy shows a revealing admiration for his subject – Sartre, whose lecture in Brazil
turned into a street demonstration; Sartre, whose international prestige was compa-
rable in its day only to de Gaulle’s; Sartre médiatique, who used the press to win an
ever wider audience (pp. 32, 33, 93). It is impossible to resist the impression that Lévy
feels a certain jealousy for Sartre, who – perhaps precisely because he did not try so
hard – achieved a greater success than Lévy could ever aspire to (one wonders how
many thousands will turn up for Lévy’s funeral).
7
White 1993, pp. xxiii, 389–91, 437–9.
8
Lenin 1964, p. 91.
9
Lenin 1962, p. 292.
10
Kelly 1992, pp. 6–28.
11
Einaudi 1986.
264 Ian H. Birchall
Yet he is burdened by the virulent anti-communism which has been his stock-
in-trade ever since 1976. How can he combine this with his admiration for Sartre,
whose political commitments – often wise, sometimes grotesquely unwise – were an
integral part of his intellectual development?
Lévy’s solution is disappointingly simplistic – ‘there are two Sartres’ (p. 459).
Disappointing, because it evades the more interesting concept of internal contradic-
tion, rejected because it would sound too . . . dialectical? Disappointing because it is
profoundly un-Sartrean. For Sartre, we are never double. We constantly face choices
in which we must come down on one side or the other, and which commit our entire
future. We are the accumulation of our past acts, which we cannot sort into two
convenient columns. As Sartre wrote about Lukács, who repudiated his own past:
‘I would even if need be accept such a catastrophic disavowal, but for a honest writer
this could lead only to silence.’12
A good part of the book is devoted to Lévy dealing with the ‘bad’ Sartre, settling
accounts with Sartre’s various political judgements and misjudgements. Like a circus
clown, he repeatedly falls at on his face.
His methodology is crude and simplistic: ‘Stalin was in Lenin. Lenin was in
Marx’ (p. 476). But if Marxism is a monolithic bloc, there can be no distinction between
the worst excesses of Stalinist manipulation and brutality, and some of the coura-
geous anti-Stalinist Marxists who crossed Sartre’s path at various times – Daniel
Guérin, Colette Audry or Pierre Naville.13
Moreover, history apparently proceeds by the transmission of ideas, without any
regard for the material circumstances in which the ideas developed. Whatever one’s
judgement on Marx, Lenin or Stalin, it would seem bizarre to ignore the context
of the First World War, the Russian Revolution, the ensuing civil war, and the
subsequent isolation of Soviet Russia.
Lévy is happy to do just that. He assures us, in his customary tone of papal infal-
libility, that ‘there is no good Leninism. It was the Revolution as such which was
perverse and criminal’ (p. 498). The proof? On 9 August 1918, Lenin sent a telegram
urging ‘a campaign of ruthless mass terror against the kulaks, priests and white guards;
suspects to be shut up in a detention camp outside the city’.14 Apparently, this is
already the Gulag, so there is no need to consider the circumstances – a kulak rising
in Penza when British and Japanese armies were already on Russian territory. ‘Good
Leninism’ would presumably have been total non-resistance in the face of violent
aggression. One wonders if Lévy would propose a similar policy to, say, Ariel Sharon.
In La Barbarie à visage humain, Lévy insisted ‘I am neither a painter nor a musician
12
Sartre 1949b.
13
Cf. Birchall 1989.
14
Lenin 1966, p. 489.
Reviews 265
nor a poet. I am a philosopher ’,15 thus conrming my suspicion that philosophers are
people who are too idle to become historians.
This idleness becomes manifest when he deals with the specics of Sartre’s
political evolution. It is undoubtedly true that Sartre, especially between 1952 and
1956, defended the indefensible in Russian society. But his motivation was not the
totalitarian mentality which Lévy attributes to him (pp. 393, 587, 628), but a much
more complex set of tactical considerations.
Sartre is accused of approving the Stalinist trials in Eastern Europe, and of remain-
ing silent about the Slansky Trial (pp. 99, 432). Lévy is apparently unaware that Sartre’s
journal, Les Temps modernes, carried a series of articles16 denouncing the Slansky Trial
as clearly rigged and overtly anti-semitic. Moreover, Sartre took personal responsi-
bility for these articles in a reply to François Mauriac.17
Some accusations lapse into pure absurdity. Sartre is criticised because, in an
interview in January 1980, he stated: ‘I don’t consider that the USSR is a fascist
country’ (p. 444). It is no capitulation to Stalinism to preserve an elementary respect
for terminology, and to insist that, however great the barbarities of Russian society,
the concrete historical circumstances which produced it were very different from those
that engendered European fascism. Elsewhere, Lévy is not so cavalier about vocabu-
lary; another of Sartre’s misdeeds was to have applied the term ‘genocide’ to the
bombing of Vietnam (p. 494); clearly, the dropping of more bombs than those used
in the whole course of World War II was not sufcient to justify the word.
It is certainly possible to accuse Sartre of selective indignation, of denouncing crimes
committed by Western imperialism while ignoring the same offences in the Eastern
bloc. But Lévy – who believes that anti-Americanism is ‘one of the emblems of the
extreme Right’ (p. 433) – is so much more selective in his judgements that he cannot
develop any effective critique of Sartre.
So, Sartre is accused of believing, on insufcient evidence, the claims made by
Russian propaganda that the USA was using bacteriological warfare in Korea (p. 471).
Lévy is quick to defend the injured party, the insulted Americans, yet apparently feels
far less indignation at the actual record of the USA in Asia – from nuclear weapons
against Japan to napalm and Agent Orange in Vietnam.
As for Sartre’s denunciation of the Russian invasion of Hungary, it cannot satisfy
Lévy, for it is too ‘moderate’, ‘almost prudent’, creating a ‘painful impression’ that
Sartre was distinguishing himself from the Right (p. 439). Yet Lévy makes no men-
tion of the simultaneous Franco-British invasion of Suez. One presumes that he is
15
Lévy 1977, p. 10.
16
Péju 1953.
17
Sartre 1953.
266 Ian H. Birchall
quite happy to see a condemnation of Hungary that makes no mention of Suez, while
the reverse would be damned as contemptible.
The same intellectual dishonesty becomes apparent when Lévy begins to list his
own heroes. He champions Socialisme ou barbarie (pp. 489, 492–5), whose prominent
member Claude Lefort polemicised with Sartre in the 1950s. But the Socialisme ou
barbarie presented by Lévy is a caricature of the real thing, which had, at least in
its earlier years, rm roots in the Marxist tradition; in its stress on the alienation of
workers in the process of production, it championed a position which would be
anathema to Lévy, namely the increasing similarity between the exploitative and
oppressive régimes of both blocs.18 Whether through ignorance or embarrassment,
Lévy has nothing to say about this.
Lévy commends Koestler, Silone19 and Jaspers as the founders of the Congress for
Cultural Freedom (pp. 498–9); there is no mention of that body’s nancial links with
the CIA. Silone and Koestler were, of course, prominent contributors to the highly
inuential book The God that Failed (1950). Another contributor, unmentioned by Lévy,
was the American writer Richard Wright. Wright’s article, on the misadventures of a
young black radical who joined the US Communist Party, had previously appeared
in identical form in Les Temps modernes20 – another fact that might be a trie incon-
venient for Lévy’s analysis.
And what are we to make of the following?
The PCF still has an inuence on a large part of the working class. We
must be able to win to our cause elements who today are following the
Stalinists . . . We cannot adopt a purely negative attitude towards the PCF.
We shall get nowhere if we seem more concerned with criticising Stalinism
than with defending the working class. The threat of reaction is still there
and in practice we shall often have to work alongside Communists.21
If Sartre had written it – as well he might – it would doubtless have been cited
as evidence of his opportunism and double standards. In fact, the passage comes
from a letter by Victor Serge – who is lauded by Lévy (pp. 497, 499) for his lucid
condemnation of Stalinism. Lévy would have been wiser to omit Serge from the
argument – his intransigent commitment to revolutionary socialism throughout his
life contrasts rather too visibly with intellectuals of the Lévy mould.
18
Cf. Gottraux 1997.
19
We must assume that at the time of writing Lévy knew nothing of recent allegations about
Silone’s rôle as a fascist informer.
20
Wright 1949, pp. 1–45.
21
Letter of 1946 to René Lefeuvre in Serge 1984, pp. 123–5.
Reviews 267
Lévy’s approach leaves no room for any understanding of the tactical element
in Sartre’s politics, for an appreciation of the way in which his position shifted,
sometimes subtly, in terms of the concrete conjuncture. For Lévy, Communism is quite
simply ‘this Sartrean passion for at least thirty years’ (p. 11).
Sartre’s attraction to the Communist Party in the post-war period had, in fact,
quite different roots. As he put it in Qu’est-ce que la littérature?; ‘The majority of the
proletariat, enclosed by a single party, encircled by a propaganda which isolates it,
forms a closed society, without doors or windows. There is only one means of access,
a very narrow one, the Communist Party.’22 The crucial fact about the Communist
Party for Sartre was not its doctrine nor its link to Russia, but the fact that it had the
votes of some ve million workers and, through the CGT union federation, led the
best organised section of the working class. Lévy, whose brief irtation with Marxism
was based on a combination of Althusserian philosophy and romantic Third Worldism,
clearly never realised that Marxism had something to do with the working class.
Sartre’s alignment with the USSR – misguided and indeed dishonest as it was on
occasion – was motivated by Karl Liebknecht’s principle that for revolutionaries ‘the
main enemy is at home’. In a world divided into warring blocs, both of them guilty
of aggression, brutality and repression, Sartre insisted that his rst priority was to
attack the crimes committed on his own side.
As for ‘Les communistes et la paix’, which Lévy sees as one of Sartre’s ‘claims
to infamy’ (p. 296), it was written at the height of the Cold War, when some at least
in France and the USA would have liked to see the French Communist Party banned
(presumably with the installation of a repressive right-wing régime to enforce the
ban). Such things did, after all, happen elsewhere in this period. For Sartre – who
aligned himself with the Communists ‘arguing on the basis of my principles and not
theirs’ 23 – the defence of working-class organisation, however distorted its leadership,
was paramount. Of course Sartre’s tactics may have been mistaken, but Lévy is wholly
unequipped to discuss the issue, since he is incapable of seeing the question in
tactical terms.
Lévy’s blanket dismissal of all variants of Marxism means that problems within
Marxism are a closed book to him. The concept of the ‘fused group’ is dismissed as
just a legitimation for an anti-semitic lynch mob (p. 324); but Sartre argues that ‘the
essential character of the fused group is the sudden resurrection of freedom’,24 some-
thing scarcely applicable to a racist rabble. Sartre is denounced for arguing mass
democracy must be based on unanimity (p. 451); in fact, Sartre is simply describing
22
Sartre 1948, p. 277.
23
Sartre 1964, p. 168.
24
Sartre 1960, p. 425.
268 Ian H. Birchall
the reality of what happens in a strike. The action is futile if half the workers scab;
hence trade-union democracy requires the acceptance of majority decisions, and, where
necessary, the use of pickets to enforce this. Lévy, who has obviously never been
within half a mile of a strike, can scarcely be expected to grasp the argument.25
What, then, of the ‘good Sartre’? Lévy’s argument here is the ipside of his anti-
communist diatribes; Sartre is commended for being a ‘blatant pessimist’ (p. 179).
Pessimism has long been Lévy’s stock-in-trade. As he puts it here:
We can understand nothing of the totalitarianisms which have covered the

twentieth century in blood, and above all we can understand nothing of the
terrible fascination they have exercised on the peoples of the world, if we
forget that their leaders have always presented themselves as people who,
before putting the world to re and sword, before exterminating Jews, kulaks,
bourgeois and other ‘lice’ or ‘noxious insects’ guilty only of the crime of
having been born, had as their rst project to give birth to a new man and,
consequently, a better world. (p. 318)
Optimism is thus the root of all evil; ‘it is when he is an optimist that Heidegger
becomes a Nazi’ (p. 216).
Now, if Lévy wishes to dismiss all attempts at social amelioration as inherently
totalitarian and thus to make himself totally incapable of understanding the complex
dynamics of human history, that is, I suppose, his inalienable civil right. But when
he attempts to recruit the dead Sartre (or more precisely, a half of the corpse) to his
cause, he stands accused of gross intellectual dishonesty.
Sartre was seen by the more supercial conservative thinkers of the 1940s and 1950s
as a pessimist because he denied the existence of God and engaged in rather colour-
ful descriptions of the less cheerful aspects of human life. But, to any serious student
of Sartre’s thought, it is clear that what characterises it above all is a vigorous and
indeed scandalous optimism. Sartre acknowledged this in L’Existentialisme est un
humanisme, saying of his critics: ‘I wonder if their grievance [against existentialism]
is not its pessimism but its optimism. Is not what really frightens them in the
doctrine . . . the fact that it leaves a possibility of choice to man?’26
The most fundamental assertion of Sartrean philosophy is that we are condemned
to be free – free in all circumstances. Even with a gun held against my head, I can
choose to resist – and die. Since we are free, we make the world – there are no
external obstacles other than those we determine by the choice of our own projects.
We are responsible for the word as it is – and free to make it other if we so choose.
25
Sartre 1964, pp. 372–6.
26
Sartre 1966, p. 15.
Reviews 269
No ‘human nature’, no ‘economic climate’, compels us to leave things as they are. All
Sartre’s moral, and subsequently political, thought, ows from this basic indisputably
optimistic premise.
Lévy attempts to deal with this inconvenient but self-evident reality by parodying
his teacher Althusser’s discovery of an ‘epistemological break’ in Marx, and nding
a similar division between the ‘young Sartre’ and the later leftist (pp. 221, 317–18).
The ‘rst Sartre’, we are told, ‘is a thinker of the Tragic’ (p. 326). The ‘break’, appar-
ently, comes with Bariona, the play Sartre wrote at Christmas 1940 in a German
prisoner-of-war camp (pp. 516–18); from this point on, he became ‘an optimist, a
historicist, messianic, in short, a progressive’ (p. 521).
Optimism, for Lévy, is closely linked to humanism, and here he makes it quite
explicit that he still agrees with his old teacher Althusser in regarding humanism as
the enemy, and, in particular, as the root of Stalinism. It is the desire to overcome
alienation, to replace bad men by good, that is at the heart of the Leninist project
(p. 229). Certainly, the word ‘humanism’ has so many connotations that it is virtually
useless, and Sartre was perhaps unwise to insist that existentialism was a ‘human-
ism’. But at least Sartre rooted his humanism in the rebellion of the oppressed: as he
put it, ‘the claim “We too are human beings” is at the foundation of every revolu-
tion’.27 It is only the complete disjunction of theory and practice in Althusser that
makes it possible for a conservative pessimist like Lévy to claim his heritage – a point
that any remaining acionados of Althusser might well ponder.
For Sartre, there is no abstract human essence; human beings exist in situation. he
quite rightly points out in Réexions sur la question juive that, in a world where anti-
semitism exists, a Jew cannot simply walk away from his or her Jewishness. 28 But,
in the same work, Sartre also envisages a socialist future in which racial divisions
would become meaningless 29 – a universalism which Lévy grotesquely describes as
‘preparing, though by other means, a world without Jews’ (p. 404), thus equating the
anti-racist and the Nazi. It is a historical fact that anti-semitism bred Zionism, and
Lévy seems quite happy that it should go on doing so.
At times, Lévy distorts the whole course of Sartre’s development, and at one point,
at least, he crosses the line between sloppiness and deliberate falsication. He claims
that at the end of his life Sartre believed that L’Être et le néant ‘was worthless’ (p. 567),
giving a reference to the lm Sartre par lui-même. The statement appears nowhere in
the lmscript; indeed, Sartre repeatedly defends L’Être et le néant. Lévy then cites
remarks which he claims show that Sartre repudiated his initial belief in freedom
27
Sartre 1949a, pp. 188–9.
28
Sartre 1954, pp. 134–48.
29
Sartre 1954, pp. 178–85.
270 Ian H. Birchall
(ibid.). There is no such statement on the cited page, but, on another page, Sartre
states unambiguously, ‘I have always remained faithful to the notion of freedom’,
while recognising that some of his early formulations about total freedom were
‘absurd’.30 There is no ‘break’ in Sartre, but, rather, a constant renement of the notion
of freedom, a constant effort to understand that human freedom is exercised in con-
crete historical circumstances, summed up in Engels’s formulation, endorsed by Sartre,
that31 ‘Men make their history themselves, only they do so in a given environment
which conditions it’.32 That took Sartre into the sphere of history, where Lévy could
not follow him.
For Lévy, opposition to totalitarianism is linked to ‘antinaturalism’, derived from
Judaeo-Christian sources, which preserves a ‘distance’ between man and the world
(p. 423). Again, he tries to conscript Sartre as a supporter. His account is selective
and misleading. Sartre hated owers and had no truck with the notion that Nature
was benevolent; that did not imply a collapse into classic pessimism. Lévy should
ponder Sartre’s remarks on the question of earthquakes. 33 Earthquakes, for Sartre, are
a human creation; a purely meaningless movement of matter becomes a catastrophe
only when it comes up against the human project of building a city. In an epoch when
‘natural’ disasters are becoming ever more common, it is well to be reminded that
earthquakes are ‘caused’ by shoddy building and the pursuit of quick prots. To
understand the increasingly complex dialectic of human activity and nature, we need
a little more than Biblical clichés.
To reinforce his claim that Sartre’s thought has a pessimistic side, Lévy invokes a
‘little known, very strange’ text, Sartre’s 1962 comments on Tarkovsky’s lm The
Childhood of Ivan (p. 354). Since the text in question appears in Situations VII it is bizarre
to describe it as ‘little known’. Moreover, Lévy, as always, quotes selectively, as can
be seen from the following paragraph, in which the words quoted are italicised:
Human society progresses towards its ends, the living will achieve these
ends by their own strength, and nonetheless this little corpse, this tiny piece
of straw swept aside by history, remains like an unanswered question, which
compromises nothing, but which reveals everything in a new light: history
is tragic. Hegel said so. And Marx too, who added that it always progresses
by its worst side. But recently we have scarcely said this any more, we
insisted on progress, forgetting the losses that nothing can compensate.34
30
Astruc & Contat 1977, pp. 75, 97.
31
Sartre 1960, p. 60.
32
Marx & Engels 1956, p. 549.
33
Sartre 1943, pp. 42–4.
34
Sartre 1965, p. 340.
Reviews 271
Others have perhaps neglected this text because it is in essence saying nothing
different from what Sartre says throughout his work. Human progress is real and a
worthy goal, but the individual losses and sacrices incurred in the process are equally
real, and cannot be swallowed up in some abstract Stalinist schema of inevitability.
It is a theme that recurs from Morts sans sépulture to the Critique de la raison dialectique.
If Lévy cannot understand this notion, then the tragedy is his.
Lévy is undoubtedly right to sense that there is a new audience for Sartre. A gen-
eration is emerging which was still in primary school when the Berlin Wall fell. The
evils it perceives – poverty, inequality, corruption, gridlock – are the product of the
‘free market’, not of totalitarianism. In an age of globalisation, Sartre’s insistence that
‘man is responsible for all men’35 acquires a new relevance. The ‘new philosophers’
now appear as quaint and dated as their contemporaries, the New Romantics.36 But
Sartre may yet offer inspiration to a century other than his own.
References
Astruc, Alexandre and Michel Contat 1977, Sartre par lui-même, Paris: Gallimard.
Birchall, Ian 1989, ‘Sartre and Gauchisme’, Journal of European Studies, 19, 1989: 21–53.
Boulé, Jean-Pierre 1992, Sartre médiatique, Paris: Minard.
Colombel, Jeannette 1981, Sartre ou le parti de vivre, Paris: Grasset.
Einaudi, Jean-Luc 1986, Pour l’exemple: l’affaire Fernand Iveton, Paris: L’Harmattan.
Gottraux, Philippe 1997, Socialisme ou Barbarie, Lausanne: Payot.
Kelly, Michael 1992, Hegel in France, Birmingham: Birmingham Modern Languages

Publications.
Lenin, Vladimir 1962, Collected Works, Volume 19, Moscow: Foreign Languages
Publishing House.
Lenin, Vladimir 1964, Collected Works, Volume 21, Moscow: Progress Publishers.
Lenin, Vladimir 1966, Collected Works, Volume 26, Moscow: Progress Publishers.
Lévy, Bernard-Henri 1973, Bangla Desh: nationalisme dans la révolution, Paris: Maspero.
Lévy, Bernard-Henri 1977, La Barbarie à visage humain, Paris: Grasset.
35
Sartre 1966, p. 24.
36
On a recent visit to Paris, I observed that the second-hand bookshops are full of cast-off
copies of books by Lévy and Glucksmann, just as in the late 1970s they were full of books about
1968.
272 Ian H. Birchall
Marx, Karl & Friedrich Engels 1956, Selected Correspondence, Moscow: Foreign Languages
Publishing House.
Péju, Marcel 1953, ‘Hier et aujourd’hui – le sens du procès Slansky’, Les Temps
modernes, 90, May: 1775–90; 91, June: 2009–23; 92, July: 139–64.
Sartre, Jean-Paul 1943, L’Être et le néant, Paris: Gallimard.
Sartre, Jean-Paul 1948, Situations II, Paris: Gallimard.
Sartre, Jean-Paul 1949a, Situations III, Paris: Gallimard.
Sartre, Jean-Paul 1949b, ‘Pour Lukács la terre ne tourne plus’, Combat, 3 February.
Sartre, Jean-Paul 1953, ‘Réponse à M. Mauriac’, L’Observateur, 19 March: 7.
Sartre, Jean-Paul 1954, Réexions sur la question juive, Paris: Gallimard.
Sartre, Jean-Paul 1960, Critique de la raison dialectique, Paris: Gallimard.
Sartre, Jean-Paul 1964, Situations VI, Paris: Gallimard.
Sartre, Jean-Paul 1965, Situations VII, Paris: Gallimard.
Sartre, Jean-Paul 1966, L’Existentialisme est un humanisme, Paris: Editions Nagel.
Serge, Victor 1984, 16 Fusillés à Moscou, Paris: Spartacus.
White, Edmund 1993, Genet, London: Chatto & Windus.
Wright, Richard 1949, ‘J’ai essayé d’être communiste’, Les Temps modernes, 45, July:
1–45.
Notes on Contributors
Giovanni Arrighi is Professor of Sociology at The Johns Hopkins University. He is

the author of The Long Twentieth Century. Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times
(1994) and co-author of Chaos and Governance in the Modern World System (1999).
arrighi@jhu.edu
Ian Birchall is a longstanding member of the Socialist Workers’ Party. His most recent
book was The Spectre of Babeuf (Macmillan 1997), he is currently working on a book
to be called Sartre Against Stalinism.
Simon Bromley is Senior Lecturer in the Politics Discipline at the Faculty of Social
Sciences at the Open University, currently working on critical analyses of the
contemporary international system and the politics of global governance.
sinonb@msn.com
Ian Buchanan is a Senior Lecturer in the School of English at the University of Tasmania.
He is the author of Deleuzism (Duke 2000) and Michel de Certeau (Sage 2000). Currently
he is editing a collection of Fredric Jameson’s interviews. I.Buchanan@utas.edu.au
Neil Davidson is a part-time tutor/counsellor with the Open University in Scotland

and a full-time civil servant with the Scottish Executive. He is the Secretary of the
Socialist Worker Platform in the Scottish Socialist Party and a activist in the Public
and Commercial Services Union. Neil is the author of The Origins of Scottish Nationhood
and a forthcoming study of the bourgeois revolution in Scotland.
Neil.Davidson@scotland.gsi.gov.uk
Richard B. Day is professor of political economy at the University of Toronto, Canada.

He has published in numerous journals and is the author of Leon Trotsky and the Politics
of Economic Isolation, The ‘Crisis’ and the ‘Crash’: Soviet Studies of the West (1917–1939),
and Cold War Capitalism: The View from Moscow. He is translator and editor of N.I.
Bukharin, Selected Writings on the State and the Transition to Socialism, and E.A.
Preobrazhensky, The Decline of Capitalism. He is co-editor of Democratic Theory and
Technological Society and is currently co-editing Globalization and Political Ethics.
rbday@utm.utoronto.ca

274 Notes on Contributors
Peter Thomas is a doctoral candidate at the University of Queensland, Australia. His

doctoral dissertation concerns the relationship between Greek and Marxist philoso-
phy, with particular emphasis upon the theory of commodity fetishism.
thomas_p_au@yahoo.com.au
Ellen Meiksins Wood’s most recent book is The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View
(Verso, 2002). ewood@yorku.ca

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Giovanni Arrighi

Historical Materialism, volume 10:3 (3–16)

where the administrative force to guarantee exploitation is highest’.9 As a

Moreover, the very globalisation of capital’s networks of production and

It is hard to question that the disappearance of the Second World makes

the price of labour is comparatively high and the administrative force

in the context of Arrighi’s cyclical argument it is impossible to recognize

In The Geometry of Imperialism, published six years later, I carried this

direction antithetical to the one foreseen and advocated by Marx, I argued,

migrations) and ‘voice’ (struggles against exploitation, exclusion and oppres-

source of instability and self-destructiveness than similar attempts by its

Finally, while the overall North-South divide has remained remarkably

Wallerstein, Immanuel 1995, ‘Response: Declining States, Declining Rights?’, International

Few historians would hesitate to single out slavery

Historical Materialism, volume 10:3 (17–69)

economies, and, in particular, the degree to which production rested on

Master and slave vs. landlord and peasant

of personal dependence – slavery, serfdom, debt-bondage. Thus, both the

by slave-gangs, made possible by enormous accumulations of property, never

those between propertied classes and free producers. If primacy must be

alongside a local labour-force inadequate to the demands of the ‘incipient

the existing bureaucracy and became pensioners or sinecurists of the tax

expropriation possible. ‘Roman peasant soldiers,’ as Keith Hopkins puts

‘Slave society’, ‘slave economy’, ‘slave mode of production’

human history): ‘. . . an institutionalised system of large-scale employment of

divisions paled before the more essential opposition between citizens, or

became general in the Roman Empire’.23 Consequently, he continues, ‘. . . it

Slavery as the key to Greco-Roman history?

In Finley’s case, slavery is not the ‘primordial fact’ in relation to which

both as an interpretation of Marx and as a principle of historical explana-

the direct producers. The existence or non-existence of exploitation, the

means and institutions to sustain and enforce it and to overcome, suppress,

an analogy between slaves in Greece and immigrant workers in modern

Slavery: ‘primordial fact’ or historical oddity?

Underlying this proposition is a more fundamental and universal rule that

dependent labourers and made necessary other forms of surplus extraction.

by a decrease in the slave supply, an accompanying decline in the prot-

Even if all exploiters could be shown in principle to be striving for slavery,

Slavery and the ‘decline’ of the Roman Empire

Viewed in this perspective, the rise and decline of Greco-Roman civilisation

inclusive factors which can explain the structural developments within

or against the efciency of slavery), especially principles that probably

The historical evolution or emergence of any given class structure is

The decline of slavery, then, cannot be explained solely by reference to its

be bystanders rather than agents of the transition to dependence from

The whole analogy between slavery and capitalism is especially problematic,

Italy and the ‘two contrasting tendencies in large-scale Italian landownership’:

here again be imposing the logic of capitalism and capitalist competition

The speci c dynamics of class

polis of Athens, he did so by opposing to it a state-form which departed

confront each other, in varying degrees, as competing ‘extra-economic’ powers

producers.83 A new type of imperial hierarchy was created in the Hellenistic

coloni or serfs. To explain the transition from antiquity to feudalism is to

Brenner, Robert 1976, ‘Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in

Dockès, Pierre 1982, Medieval Slavery and Liberation, London: Methuen.

Jones, A.H.M. 1973, The Late Roman Empire, Oxford: Blackwell.

Marx, Karl 1971, Capital, Volume III, Moscow: Progress Publishers.

Seager, Robin 1975, The Roman Nobility, Oxford: Blackwell.

White, K.D. 1970, Roman Farming, London: Thames and Hudson.

Historical Materialism, volume 10:3 (71–113)

‘secret speech’ of 1956. Structuralism had been hailed initially as a decisive

Having ‘hitched [his] Marxism to structuralism’s rising star’, it seemed that

If we never were structuralists, we can now explain why: why we seemed

Gregory Elliott has voiced an obvious objection to this line of defence:

by a decrease in the slave supply, an accompanying decline in the prot-

or against the efciency of slavery), especially principles that probably

The speci c dynamics of class

Correct revolutionary theory assumes nal shape only in close connection

a denitive account of [the history of Marxist detours through Spinoza]

To speak of the inuence of Spinoza on Althusser is already to grant a

constitute a philosophy that never denitively closes upon itself, that is

Spinozist terms, the economic gured as one of the elements or ‘attributes’

effacing this important distinction. It disregards the specic ontology