Historical Materialism 19.2 - Historical Materialism

Historical Materialism 19.2 (2011) 3–31 brill.
nl/hima
‘Useless but True’:

Economic Crisis and the Peculiarities
of Economic Science*
Ben Finea and Dimitris Milonakisb

a
SOAS, University of London
bf@soas.ac.uk
b
University of Crete
milonakis@econ.soc.uoc.gr
Abstract
The recent economic crisis has brought to the fore another crisis that has been going on for many
years, that of (orthodox) economic theory. The latter failed to predict and, after the event, cannot
offer an explanation of why it happened. This article sketches out why this is the case and what
constitutes the crisis of economics. On this basis, the case is made for the revival of an
interdisciplinary political economy as the only way for offering an explanation of the workings
of the (capitalist) economy in general and of economic crises in particular.
Keywords
capitalism, crisis, economic theory, political economy
1. Introduction
It is a great honour and a privilege to have been awarded the Deutscher
Memorial-Prize for From Economics Imperialism to Freakonomics: The Shifting
Boundaries Between Economics and Other Social Sciences, not least because it
reflects the considered judgement of a set of highly-regarded Marxist scholars.
To be acclaimed by one’s peers is as good as it gets in the realm of scholarship
apart from seeing intellectual work exercise an influence on practice.
Unfortunately, socialism is not on the performativity-agenda, as opposed to its
understandable infatuation with finance. But we might anticipate future
studies of Marxism as ineffective performativity, not least as the latter’s chief
* Delivered as the Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial-Lecture, London, 12 November

2010. The Deutscher Prize was awarded for Fine and Milonakis 2009.
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011 DOI: 10.1163/156920611X573770
4 B. Fine, D. Milonakis / Historical Materialism 19.2 (2011) 3–31
inspiration is drawn from Michel Callon who perceives capitalism as non-

existent and a mere conceptual invention of radicals for their own ideological
purposes.1 For us, as such, the Deutscher award is also particularly rewarding
because it has been accompanied by the Gunnar Myrdal prize for our
marginally earlier volume, From Political Economy to Economics: Method, the
Social and the Historical in the Evolution of Economic Theory.2 This award
reflects the acceptance of our work by a different constituency, formally the
European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy (EAEPE), but
essentially heterodox economists, something we find particularly encouraging
and to which we will return.
This is only the third time that the award has gone to co-authors, previously
to Ian Gough and Len Doyle in 1992 and Paul Walton and Andrew Gamble
in 1972, so we seem to have beaten the twenty-year gap for co-authors by
three years. One of us recalls attending the Memorial-Lecture for Walton and
Gamble at the LSE almost forty years ago, as part of a large audience excited
with the prospects for Marxist political economy as the fault-lines in the post-
war boom had become apparent. Equally significantly though, their book,
From Alienation to Surplus Value, not least in its title, reflected what has since
proved to be something of a hiatus in Marxist political economy in terms of
the close attention to it across the social sciences. Significantly, the two authors
hailed from criminology and political science, respectively. And, whilst Marxist
political economy has been prominent in the Deutscher awards over the past
forty years, only three other ‘economists’ as such have been recipients,
Włodzimierz Brus, Bob Rowthorn, and Michael Lebowitz.3
The position of Marxist political economy within social science is a theme
to which we will also return. Its decline, if unevenly across disciplines and
topics, in the wake of the stagflation of the seventies and the subsequent
slowdown to today’s crisis, is a salutary warning that hard economic times are
not necessarily conducive to the prospects for Marxist political economy. To
assess these, though, we begin with a short overview of contemporary
capitalism, which is both the object of analysis of Marxism and, to some
degree at least, one of its determinants.
1. See Callon, Méadel and Rabeharisoa 2002 and Fine 2003 for a critique.
2. Milonakis and Fine 2009.
3. See <http://www.deutscherprize.org.uk/Past%20Recipients.htm> and its references to the
books for which prizes were awarded.
B. Fine, D. Milonakis / Historical Materialism 19.2 (2011) 3–31 5
2. From the crisis of capitalism . . .

Our starting point in the midst of crisis is a stunningly obvious but paradoxical
observation:4 that material conditions for capital-accumulation would appear
to have been extraordinarily favourable and even to have become increasingly
so more recently. Briefly listed and unduly over-generalising for brevity: the
capacity for productivity-increases arising out of a huge diversity and range of
application of new technologies; the decline in the strength and organisation
of working-class and progressive movements, especially across trade-unions,
political parties and anti-imperial struggles; huge increases in the global
labour-force through migration, the Chinese road to capitalism, and increasing
female labour-market participation; high levels of inter-imperialist cooperation
under the hegemony of the USA, not least with the collapse of the Soviet bloc;
and the triumph of neoliberalism, not least in the form of containment of the
social as well as the monetary wage. This paradox raises three questions for
Marxists: why slowdown, why crisis, and what rôle for class-struggle?
Our general method of approach to these questions, drawing on our own
interpretation of Marx’s political economy, is to emphasise the conditions
under which the accumulation and restructuring of capital takes place as a
whole, globally, in the production and circulation of (surplus-) value, and in
the social, political as well as the ideological arenas. This involves attention
to the structures, agencies, relations and processes of capital-accumulation,
and the historical forms in which they are unevenly combined and through
which power is exercised and conflict conducted. Marx’s Capital provides,
across its three volumes, the methodological and theoretical basis for such
investigation. But, at a more concrete and historically informed level than
such abstract posturing, our emphasis is upon the extent to which the past
forty years have been marked by the processes of ‘financialisation’.
This is a new concept in which Marxists have played a leading, if by far from
exclusive rôle, themselves displaying considerable disagreements in terms of
the nature and effect of financialisation. We cannot review the corresponding
literature here, but we can highlight the extent to which finance has become
distinctively prominent in the restructuring of capital in depth and breadth. It
has reduced overall levels of accumulation through the subordination of real
to fictitious capital, driving a wedge between the two; it has reduced the
efficacy of the restructuring of real capital; and it has been detrimental to the
social, political and ideological conditions under which accumulation has
proceeded.
4. For a fuller account of what follows, see Fine 2011, forthcoming.

The way of phrasing these propositions, let alone their meaning and validity,
is controversial. But this is not our concern here so much as emphasising how
financialisation is the key-factor in the slowdown over the past thirty years (as
opposed to some reductionist notion of the law of falling profitability, for
example) as well as in explaining the crisis, despite working-class acquiescence
and other favourable conditions for capitalism. And financialisation is crucial
in understanding both the cause and course of the crisis itself.
This is not, however, to put aside agencies other than finance in the processes
of restructuring. But industrial capital itself has been embroiled in the
speculative profit-making attached to financialisation (with more-or-less half
of the profits of non-financial corporations being made out of financial
dealings in the USA). And the state has played an active rôle in promoting
financialisation at the expense of, and as the form taken by, the accumulation
and restructuring of capital, not only through liberalising financial markets
and regulation but also through privatisation, commercialisation, and so on.
Such slavish devotion to the cause of finance is indicative of the shifting
nature of contemporary politics or, at least, its increasing flexibility in dealing
with the dysfunctions of financialisation. Underpinning this is the emergence
and/or strengthening of national- and international-financial élites. This works
not only through the pressure of the markets, rating agencies and so on, but
through the changing form and nature of politics itself as financialisation
displaces the location of decision-making to the vagaries of financial markets
and financiers. This is what has sustained what we call neoliberalism over the
past thirty years – the imperatives of finance with commitment to free markets
or not as a matter of more-or-less convenient mythology – without which
neoliberalism in practice seems incomprehensibly heterogeneous and has been
rejected as such by some progressive scholars for being a simple vernacular of
abuse and an incoherent descriptor of contemporary reality.
To the contrary, to sustain financialisation, the state has pressed, if unevenly,
for imposition of the classical aspects of neoliberalism, associated with
authoritarianism, privatisation, fiscal discipline and, in the context of
developing countries, the ‘Washington Consensus’. Equally, though, each of
these aspects is expendable in response to shifting requirements, not least in
the current crisis. Indeed, neoliberalism might best be seen as falling roughly
into two phases – the first as the shock-therapy associated with Reagan and
Thatcher, Latin America, and the Soviet bloc, and the second with the social
market, Third-Wayism and the post-Washington-consensus. This second phase
has been rationalised and promoted as a reaction against the first phase in light
of the latter’s horrendous dysfunctions beyond finance, but essentially is
concerned to keep financialisation going. As Stiglitz, pioneer of the post-
Washington consensus, so clearly puts it:5 ‘The left now understands markets,
and the role they can and should play in the economy . . . the new left is trying
to make markets work’. What this means is: how do we keep globalisation,
financialisation and capital-accumulation going? And, again, unduly
generalising, the more centre- rather than right-leaning political parties are
better able to deliver the imperatives of finance, as this is then the sole objective,
as opposed to authoritarianism. Irrespective of ideological form, the coalition-
government in the UK, PASOK in Greece, and so on make Thatcher seem like
a snatcher of sweets from the pram.
We will return to Stiglitz later, but observe for the moment what, at least for
him, the ‘new left’, as he calls it, has become. To the contrary, the crisis is
indicative of the strongest possible case for socialism and not just because a
bigger-than-ever crisis has hit. The simplest and single most telling aspect of
the crisis is that as observed by Naudé in commenting on a G-20 Summit:6
Many have already remarked on the fact that huge amounts of money have been
found at short notice to bail out banks, but that money to bail out the world’s
bottom billion can never be mobilised. Contrast, for instance, the $50 billion
agreed on for developing countries at the summit with the estimated $8.4 trillion
for bailing-out banks. As Oxfam recently remarked, the latter amount is sufficient
to end extreme poverty worldwide for 50 years.
As Homer Simpson might have pondered: Bail out the banks or eliminate
world-poverty for fifty years – hard choice! And this is just the tip of the
iceberg in terms of the mismatch between the productive capacities of
contemporary capitalism and its record of delivery, whether for the environment
or stability of food- and energy-prices, whilst there is, uniquely for this crisis,
a total absence of blame on the part of working people who must, nonetheless,
bear the costs. The implication of the need for alternatives is irrefutable. Yet
the very factors that have sustained neoliberalism for so long – in terms of
financialisation, the growing hegemony of finance, and the decline of
progressive opposition – also serve as major obstacles to the emergence of, and
struggle for, alternatives. This is, then, a crisis within, not of, neoliberalism,
which has already emerged, at least so far, strengthened from the crisis in
terms of the politics and policies of governance. Neoliberalism remains
everywhere, but its contradictory and shifting combination of ideology, policy
in practice and scholarship across time, place and issue needs to be carefully
5. Stiglitz 2008, p. 2. For critique of the continuing shenanigans of the World Bank, see
Bayliss, Fine and van Waeyenberge (eds.) 2011, forthcoming.
6. Naudé 2009.
unpicked. And it is to scholarship to which we now turn, and economics in

particular, for which we must carefully distinguish neoliberal economics from
the economics of neoliberalism. So what was the rôle of the economics-
profession in the current crisis and what are the likely effects of the crisis in the
way economists see the world?
3. . . . to the crisis of economic theory . . .

Generally, in science, when some rare event occurs which has a major impact,
a ‘black swan’, in Taleb’s terminology,7 which was not predicted by the current
state-of-the-art scientific tools, or some new evidence is discovered which
cannot be explained by these tools, representing an ‘anomaly’, in Kuhnian
terminology, then the scientific field may be shaken and new proposals, tools,
theories, etc. are put forward to explain the hitherto inexplicable event or new
evidence.
One could name countless examples from the history of science. Just a
couple will suffice. Take the example of oceanography. On New Year’s Day in
1995, the Draupner oil-rig radar-sensor in the North Sea recorded, for the
first time in history, a giant wave 26 metres in height which, until then,
according to all scientific knowledge based on the linear models in use, was
thought practically impossible. According to the bell-shaped curves derived
from this model, an unusual event, a so-to-speak freak-wave of, say, 30 metres
in height, could only occur once every 10,000 years. This new discovery caused
an upheaval in oceanography with some scientists turning to the strange world
of quantum-mechanics to find part of the explanation to the riddle of the
existence of monster waves.8 Similarly, when, back in the 1960s, neuroscientists
discovered that if some parts of the brain failed, then sometimes other parts
can take over their functions, the scientific community was shaken and a new
theory, neuroplasticity, was developed to cope with these new findings.9
Now, the recent economic crisis does represent a huge anomaly with respect
to all existing mainstream-theories. A huge wave has hit the world-economy, a
crisis that was thought impossible by (and still denied by some) mainstream-
economic theorising based mostly on mathematical modelling and the twin
assumptions of representative rational agents and the efficient-market
hypothesis.10 The Gaussian bell-shaped curves used by economists and based
7. Taleb 2007, pp. xvii–xviii.

8. Cf. Broad 2006; The Economist 2009; <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_wave>.
9. Doidge 2007.
10. For Buiter 2009, ‘This is the hypothesis that asset prices aggregate and fully reflect all
relevant fundamental information, and thus provide the proper signals for resource allocation.’
on these assumptions preclude the possibility of such an event taking place.

Not only was the crisis not predicted (nor could it have been by these models),
but, after the event, no explanation remains possible within mainstream-
neoclassical economics other than as what might be termed the inefficient-
market hypothesis. So, will there be a similar freak-wave effect in economic
science?
On top of the (epistemological) differences involved between these (natural)
sciences and economics, there is another big difference. All the events
mentioned above, which caused the upheaval in the respective sciences, refer
to newly-available evidence. What is remarkable, in the case of our scientific
field, is that the occurrence of big crises and deep recessions (unlike the freak-
waves of the deep ocean) are not a newly-observed phenomenon. As is well-
known, similar crises have hit the world-economy in the 1870s, the 1930s and
the 1970s. As for more-restricted financial crises, recent economic history is
full of such cases.11 Indeed, unlike the physical sciences, economics is
dominated by such rare and extreme events.12 What is astonishing is that the
sector most prone to such phenomena, viz. the financial sector, has until
recently, and to some extent even now, been considered by mainstream-
financial economists as the Mecca of rationality and market-efficiency.
In the past similar, significant events have proved to be the midwives of
important developments in economic science, like the birth of Keynes’s
General Theory following the Great Depression of the 1930s. Will something
similar happen this time around? Richard Posner of the University of Chicago
and, until recently, a staunch supporter of the neoliberal Chicago school, but
now turned Keynesian, thinks so. According to him, what is happening in
economics following the crisis is reminiscent of ‘what happened to cosmology
after Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe was expanding, and was
much larger than scientists believed. The profession fell into turmoil, with
some physicists sticking to existing theories, while others came up with the big
bang theory’.13
As Krugman has said, just before the crisis erupted economists ‘were
congratulating themselves over the success of their field’.14 After all, this
was the era of ‘great moderation’ – ‘the substantial decline in economic
11. No less than 139 banking and currency-crises have been identified between 1973 and
1997, that is, during the earlier phase of financialisation, as compared with ‘only’ 38 financial
crises during the so-called ‘golden age’ of regulated capitalism between 1945 and 1971 (cf.
Eichengreen and Bordo 2002). See also Wolf 2009, p. 31. The difference between these crises
and the most recent one is that they did not become global.
12. Taleb 2007.
13. Cassidy 2010a, p. 28.
14. Krugman 2009, p. 52.
volatility’ – that the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Ben Bernanke, has
partly attributed to ‘improved performance of macroeconomic policies’.15 This
was also the era of the emerging consensus in macroeconomics. A consensus
based on the most-horrendously unrealistic assumptions of the representative
agent holding rational expectations and the market-efficiency hypothesis. As
Greenspan himself has admitted, all of this collapsed in September 2008.
Before coming to current theoretical developments, let us first take a look
at what happened back in the thirties. Although the interwar-period was an
era of pluralism in economics, with different schools of thought using vastly
different types of organon and with different conceptual frameworks
flourishing, for the whole period until the 1929 Wall Street crash, the view
that was dominant within ‘neoclassical’ economics was that markets are
efficient, and, if left alone, they would tend to get back to full-employment
equilibrium. The result of these beliefs was that, after the 1929 crash,
the market was left on its own to cope with the consequences of the crisis. The
ensuing deepest crisis and depression of the twentieth century shook the
credibility of neoclassical theory and the belief in the self-regulating abilities
of the market almost beyond repair. This whole intellectual edifice collapsed
after the 1929 crash. Or so it seemed at the time.
The theoretical gap was filled by John Maynard Keynes’s General Theory.
This is one instance for which it can safely be said that the dramatic changes
in the economic sphere brought about significant changes in economic
thought. Keynes’s aim was to save capitalism from its own excesses, putting as
his central goal the achievement of full employment. Another reason why
Keynes’s work had the potential for a revolutionary-scientific paradigm-shift
à la Kuhn was that, despite its weaknesses, the changes it could potentially
bring about were changes from without, in the sense that it broke with
neoclassical economics in important and radical ways. Firstly, he got rid of
the individualistic, utilitarian overtones of neoclassical economics as well as
the representative individual. Secondly, he denounced the self-equilibrating
tendency of the economy through the concepts of ‘deficient demand’ and
‘unemployment equilibrium’. Third, he placed emphasis on the rôle of systemic
uncertainty. These are certainly radical innovations. But did they revolutionise
economics?
Although Keynes’s work did have a significant effect policy-wise, at least for
the period 1945–70, its revolutionary effects on economic science in the
longer run are more questionable, and certainly limited. As far as economic
policy is concerned, Keynes’s new ideas did gain considerable currency after
World-War Two. ‘The Beveridge Report of 1942 in Great Britain and the
15. Bernanke 2004.

Employment Act of 1946 in the United States provided blueprints for

government involvement in the macroeconomy along Keynesian lines’.16 For
a couple of decades after the publication of the General Theory, Keynesian
economics was considered work at the edge.17 Even then, however, Keynesian
economics was already something different from Keynes’s own economics. In
the longer term, however, and contrary to conventional wisdom, the impact
of Keynes’s economics on economic theory has been even more limited,
especially in relation to Keynes’s own methodology and theoretical frame.
For, just after Keynes’s book appeared, another process was set in motion. It
was associated with the increasing mathematisation, axiomatisation and
formalisation of economics which was boosted by the Great Depression and
also, as Mirowski has shown, by the War through the militarisation of scientific
research it brought about, leading to the development of advanced mathematical
tools, what later became known as operations-research, but also artificial
intelligence and information-theory. These were then applied to economics,
leading to a new economic methodology.18 Deduction and mathematical
modelling gradually gained the upper hand at the expense of other modes of
analysis and reasoning.
This process of formalisation and mathematisation has as a prerequisite the,
at least implicit, if putative, excision of the social and the historical element
from economic theorising, as manifested in the transition from political
economy to economics, leading to an almost brand-new scientific body totally
detached from its historical and social setting. In other words, the aim was the
construction of a universally-valid theoretical corpus irrespective of the social
and the historical. Nowhere is this detachment more apparent than in the
tendency of the financial sector nowadays to hire physics- and mathematics-
graduates, totally innocent of the actual workings of the economy, what the
Wall Street Journal reporter Scott Patterson has called in his recent book ‘the
quants’, where he describes ‘how the new breed of math whizzes conquered
Wall Street and nearly destroyed it’.19 As Greenspan himself has said in his
testimony in front of the US-Congress a month after the financial crash of
September 2008,
it was the failure to properly price such risky assets that precipitated the crisis. In
recent decades, a vast risk management and pricing system has evolved, combining
the best insights of mathematicians and finance experts supported by major
advances in computer and communications technology. . . . This modern risk
16. Hoover 2003, p. 412.

17. Colander, Holt and Rosser, Jr. 2004, p. 17.
18. Mirowski 2002; Boland 2006; Rizvi 2001, p. 217.
19. Patterson 2010.
management paradigm held sway for decades. The whole intellectual edifice
collapsed in the summer of last year.20
This process of formalisation has created a whole generation of so-called idiot

savants, scientists with excellent technical skills but without true knowledge of
the functioning of the economy. As Taleb puts it, these scholars ‘resemble
Locke’s definition of a madman: someone “reasoning correctly from erroneous
premises” ’.21 This problem was raised dramatically in a study by Klamer and
Colander of the five most-distinguished doctoral programmes in economics in
American universities, based upon questionnaires given to Ph.D.-candidates
to answer, and interviews with them. One of the conclusions of the research is
stunning. Of those questioned, only 3.4 per cent thought that knowledge
about the real economy was very important for success in the doctorate-
programme, while 57 per cent thought that excellence in mathematics to be
very important. In other words, the students thought that knowledge of
techniques and not of the real economy was the basic prerequisite for success
in their doctorate-programme.22
The sickness of modern economics has been the subject of increasing attack
by a series of leading mainstream-economists from before the crisis. Even
Milton Friedman deplored the way in which, ‘economics has become
increasingly an arcane branch of mathematics rather than dealing with
economic problems’.23 Similarly Buiter, writing after the crisis, talks about ‘the
unfortunate uselessness of most “state of the art” academic monetary
economics’,24 and, for Paul Krugman, ‘the economics profession went astray
because economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive looking
mathematics, for truth. . . . The central cause of the profession’s failure was the
desire for an all-encompassing, intellectually elegant approach that also gave
economists a chance to show off their mathematical prowess’.25
What is amazing is that these last words come from one of the main
practitioners of the economics he is criticising and after he had himself been
amply rewarded with a Nobel Prize for this. What is even more amazing is that
Krugman had already tried to make a mockery of this fatal tendency in
economics early on in 1978 when he wrote a sarcastic article entitled ‘The
Theory of Interstellar Trade’. In his abstract we read:
20. Greenspan 2008.

21. Taleb 2007, p. 283.
22. Klamer and Colander 1990.
23. Friedman 1999, p. 137.
24. Buiter 2009.
25. Krugman 2009, pp. 53–4.
This paper extends interplanetary trade theory to an interstellar setting. It is

chiefly concerned with the following question: how should interest charges on
goods in transit be computed when the goods travel at close to the speed of light?
This is a problem because the time taken in transit will appear less to an observer
travelling with the goods than to a stationary observer. A solution is derived from
economic theory, and two useless but true theorems are proved.26
‘Useless but true’: in these three words of Krugman can be found what is
essentially wrong with modern economics: it is all about theoretical exercises,
mostly taking a mathematical form, which may be valid mathematically,
although the analytical robustness of some of these models is also questionable,
but useless in any other sense and empty of any practical relevance. This is the
problem of formalism in economics, the triumph of form over substance.27
The seeds of the appearance and further development of this tendency
within economic science go back to the marginalist revolution. The explicit
attempt since then has been to transform economics into a ‘rigorous’ science
on a par with positive sciences and devoid of any normative statements
or value-judgments. This was done partly by borrowing tools and concepts
such as equilibrium and optimisation from the physical sciences, particularly,
to begin with, from static mechanics, and then subsequently from
thermodynamics. ‘The pure science of economics’, says Walras, one of the
protagonists of the marginalist revolution, ‘is a science that resembles
the physico-mathematical sciences in every respect’.28 And, what is more, ‘the
scholar has the right to pursue science for its own sake’, equating geometry
with economics in this respect.29
Such formalism did not become dominant within the profession until after
the Second World-War. It was given a new impetus by the works of Hicks’s
Value and Capital, and Samuelson’s Foundations of Economic Analysis,
culminating in the mathematical proof for the existence of equilibrium by
Arrow and Debreu in 1954.30 Since then, the Samuelsonian tool of constrained
optimisation borrowed from thermodynamics became the symbol of the new
26. Krugman 1978.

27. Blaug 1999; Blaug 2003.
28. Walras 1954, pp. 71–2.
29. As Mirowski (quoted in Rizvi 2001, p. 215) puts it, ‘In appropriating the formalisms of
mid-nineteenth-century energy physics and adapting them to the language of utility and prices,
the progenitors and their epigones adopted a certain world view, one that had to stress
the extreme near identity of physics and economics. Veering so close to becoming subsumed in
pure identity could be attractive only to a personality who was convinced of a far-reaching unity
of science, one necessarily founded on the bedrock of natural law external to all human
behaviour’.
30. Hicks 1939; Samuelson 1947; Arrow and Debreu 1954.
formalist era, accompanied by Americanisation and standardisation of the

discipline, a truly Fordist intellectualism in which you can have any economics
as long as it is neoclassical. Concomitant with this formalisation-process is
a newly-acquired self-confidence of the practitioners of this method which
was translated into a superiority-syndrome vis-à-vis the other social sciences,
as exemplified by the process of Gary-Becker-style Chicago economics-
imperialism, or, in other words, the process of colonisation of other social
sciences using the so-called ‘economic method’ to analyse all social phenomena.31
This process of formalisation and homogenisation of economics reached a
climax approaching near-total dominance in the 1970s. This was also the time
that heterodox approaches in economics made a more dynamic appearance
and heterodox institutions proliferated following the radicalisation brought
about by the Vietnam War, and the developments inside the profession.32
Following the formalist revolution of the 1950s, only those aspects of
Keynes’s thought which could be modelled were incorporated into what came
to be known as the ‘neoclassical synthesis’. The subsumption of Keynes’s
thought to the formalist revolution, starting with Hicks’s IS/LM-formulation33
just one year after the publication of Keynes’s General Theory, meant that all
novel and radical aspects of his thought were either left out altogether or else
reformulated in mathematical or diagrammatical form, beyond recognition.
This gave rise to what has variously been called ‘bastard Keynesianism’ by Joan
Robinson, or ‘hydraulic Keynesianism’.34 As Skidelsky puts it, ‘Keynes imposed
himself on the profession by a series of profound insights into human behaviour
which fitted the turbulence of his times. But these were never – could never
be – properly integrated into the core of the discipline, which expelled them
as soon as it conveniently could’.35 Substantively, then, Keynes could be
thought of as the first major victim of the formalist revolution. So much so,
that the one Keynesian school which adhered most closely to Keynes’s own
core-principles and concepts is nowadays classified as heterodox and suffers
the same fate from mainstream-economists as any other heterodox school.
This process of subsumption, which culminated in the ‘microfoundations
of macroeconomics’ project, coupled with the monetarist and, later on,
new classical counter-revolution in macroeconomics, propelled by the
stagflation-crisis of the 1970s, led within macroeconomics to the elimination
of Keynes’s economics and its transformation into the new Keynesianism of
31. Fine and Milonakis 2009.

32. Backhouse 2000, p. 151; Lee 2009.
33. Hicks 1967.
34. Coddington 1983.
35. Skidelsky 2009, p. 55.
microeconomic market-imperfections, and eventually to the almost-total

eclipse of macroeconomics as a distinct field vis-à-vis microeconomics.36 The
fate of Keynesianism was described vividly and ironically by Nobel laureate
Robert Lucas in 1980, when he remarked that ‘One cannot find good, over-
forty economists who identify themselves or their work as “Keynesian”. . . . At
research seminars, people don’t take Keynesian theorising seriously any more;
the audience starts to whisper and giggle to one another’.37 This is the
economics of the neoliberal era of Reagan and Thatcher, based on the twin
assumptions of rational expectations and the efficient-market hypothesis. It
signifies a return to the pre-Keynes era, the virtual world of the economist’s
imagination, inhabited by perfectly rational and egotistic human beings,
forming rational expectations about the future and exchanging their products
in perfectly competitive markets, a virtual world marred only by random
shocks and, of course, far-from-random government.
The same fate as Keynesianism faced any other attempt at providing a
different mode of analysis, so much so that, in our own day, anything that
cannot be modelled is not considered as economics and left out of consideration
altogether. This total lack of tolerance is another basic attribute of present-day
economics, alongside a frighteningly intellectually-barbaric treatment of the
history of economic thought and of methodology within the discipline. Not
only is mainstream-neoclassical economics intolerant of alternatives. It exhibits
the same indifference towards any criticism, even internal criticisms that derive
from within its own ranks. Some devastating such criticisms have been, for
example, the so-called Cambridge Capital-Controversy of the 1960s, which
brought into question the validity of the concept of aggregate capital; and the
Sonnenschein-Mantel-Debreu (SMD for short) impossibility-theorem developed
in the 1970s, which showed that aggregate excess-demands were arbitrary and
that there can be no determinateness of general equilibrium. All this led
Christopher Bliss to declare that ‘the near emptiness of general equilibrium
theory is a theorem of the theory’.38 What was the result? Mainstream-
economics simply carried on regardless, as if these critiques had never taken
place. As Rizvi puts it, ‘very few troublesome parts of the theory have been
thoroughly eliminated: social welfare functions, well-behaved aggregate
demands, and Nash equilibria remain prominent in the textbooks’.39 Thus,
whilst orthodoxy prides itself on its rigour and as a science, in part in light of
36. Rizvi 2003, p. 384.

37. Quoted in Kurz 2010, p. 13.
38. Quoted in Rizvi 2003, p. 385.
39. Rivzi 2003, p. 390.
its commitment to mathematical reasoning, that reasoning always takes second

place if its results are unpalatable.
Other causes of mainstream-arrogance and intransigence are the institutional
monopoly enjoyed by the élite of the profession over the positions in top
universities and academic journals, attracting the lion’s share of funding,
occupying central public positions and being awarded 90 per cent of Nobel
prizes in economics. In this respect, this year’s award of the Nobel prize is a
scandal. As Varoufakis puts it,
Imagine a world ravaged by a plague, and suppose that the year’s Nobel Prize for
Medicine is awarded to researchers whose whole career is based on the assumption
that plagues are impossible. The world would have been outraged. That is precisely
how we should feel about yesterday’s announcement of the recipients of the 2010
Nobel Prize. . . . Interestingly, these three fine mathematical economists have one
thing in common, other than their work on labor markets: in their voluminous
theoretical output on unemployment and the like, there is not a smidgeon of a
hint, of a mention, of an economic crisis which may boost unemployment in
every sector and for all types of workers. Not one!40
To this should be added the direct vested interests of many academics, especially
in the financial sector, a feature that was exacerbated during the
financialisation-era. Philip Mirowski asks:41
Does anyone care that Martin Feldstein was on the board of AIG in the run up
to its disastrous failure? Or that Paul Krugman once consulted for Enron (and got
radicalised after the New York Times made him foreswear such perks)? Is anyone
curious about the tangled history of funding and organisation of the Chicago
School of Economics? Does anyone care that Larry Summers worked for
numerous hedge funds and investment firms before they had to be rescued by an
administration that included . . . Larry Summers?
All of this Charles Ferguson highlights as ‘the convergence of academic

economics, Wall Street and political power’, not least through his stunning
film on the financial crisis and economists.42 Neoliberalism, financialisation
40. Varoufakis 2010. One of the laureates, Christopher Pissarides of the London School of
Economics, just a few days before the award was announced, in an article with Azariadis and
Ioannides on the Greek economy advocated the sale of all public enterprises to the private sector
and the reduction of the number of public employees by 400,000 by the year 2015; see Azariadis,
Ioannides and Pissarides 2010.
41. Mirowski 2010, p. 39.
42. Ferguson 2010, p. 3. A recent study has shown that, out of nineteen economists examined
‘who have played prominent and influential roles in recent public policy debates, . . . 13 . . . had
private financial affiliations indicative of some possible conflict of interest, but only 5 had clearly
and the growing power and influence of the financial sector that these have
brought about all played an important rôle in the latest developments in
economic science. Deep down, however, it is the very nature of the system and
the ideological need for its justification that lies behind this type of theory. As
Georg Lukács has said, ‘[t]he capitalist process of rationalisation based on
private economic calculation requires that every manifestation of life shall
exhibit [an] interaction between details which are subject to laws and a totality
ruled by chance. It presupposes a society so structured’.43 Hence the
conceptualisation of the current crisis as a chance-occurrence, a black swan,
that could not be predicted and, once there, cannot be explained other than as
a chance-occurrence intractable by scientific knowledge. In short, the interests
of the capitalist system, and of finance in particular, not only dominate
economic discourse, but the latter also dysfunctionally suffers the orthodoxy
that it deserves, the mindless pursuit of financial stability on the basis of
models of both the more-or-less-perfect-market hypothesis and of the more-
or-less perfectly-rational individual.
So what are the chances that this time it will be different as far as the impact
of the global crisis on economic science is concerned? The picture we have
drawn so far of the state of our science does not leave much room for optimism.
Despite some heavy criticism coming mostly, but not exclusively, from the
Keynesian and neo-Keynesian camps (including Krugman, Stiglitz, and
Skidelsky, but also the Chicago economist Richard Posner), the reactions so
far do not lend themselves to much optimism. For Chicago economists like
Eugene Fama (the main modern exponent of efficient-market theory) and
John Cochrane, it is business as usual. As Fama puts it,
We don’t know what causes recessions. Now I’m not a macroeconomist so I don’t
feel bad about that. (Laughs) We’ve never known. . . . Economics is not very good
at explaining swings in economic activity.44
Fama and mainstream-economics, then, cannot explain crises, so we might

just as well pretend that they do not exist. If this is not a direct confession of
the total intellectual bankruptcy of Chicago-style mainstream-economics,
then what is? And for Cochrane, talking after the crisis, ‘rational expectations
and efficient markets theories are both consistent with big price crashes. . . .
and publicly revealed their affiliations’ (Epstein and Carrick-Hagenbath 2010). This study has
led 300 economists to sign a letter (written by Epstein and Carrick-Hagenbath) to the President
of the American Economic Association, asking for a new professional code of ethics for
economists (cf. Epstein and Carrick-Hagenbath 2011).
43. Lukács 1990, quoted in Choonara 2010.
44. Cassidy 2010b.
What [the] efficient markets [hypothesis] says is that prices today contain the
available information about the future’.45 So all the information about the
future is available and yet crises are not just unpredictable from within this
model, they simply cannot happen, just like giant waves within the linear
models of wave-formation.
For others, at least willing to recognise that something more by way of
explanation is required, we need better models that would either take into
account market-imperfections like the ‘New Keynesians’,46 or market-dynamics
through the use of a ‘different type of mathematics’ or other sophisticated
models coming from engineering, computing or physics,47 much like what
happened in wave-theory and oceanography following the discovery of giant
waves and the adoption of models from quantum-mechanics. Thus, for Solow,
there are other traditions in economics which include ‘various market frictions
and imperfections like rigid prices and wages, asymmetries of information,
time lags, and so on’ which provide better ways of doing macroeconomics.48
A more genuine return to Keynes is the third escape-route. This is done
mostly by emphasising some aspect of Keynes’s economics which has been
totally forgotten by mainstream-economics. The aspect most commonly
chosen is radical uncertainty and the animal-spirits of capitalism associated
with it.49 This, especially in the case of Akerlof and Shiller, is associated with
the behavioural school in economics, which seeks the explanation of economic
phenomena by delving deeper into the psyche of individuals. The emphasis
here is laid on the psychological and even ‘irrational’ factors influencing
human behaviour, such as confidence, fairness, corruption, money-illusion,
etc., which are seen as the ‘ultimate drivers of the economy’.50 Of these factors,
only the rôle of confidence in the economy has anything to do with Keynes’s
work. The usual story is that uncertainty causes sharp changes in expectations
and confidence, which cause major changes in share-prices, bringing about
sharp alterations in consumption, investment and employment. What is not
explained, however, is the source of this uncertainty and the epistemological
foundations of such ‘irrational’ behaviour, both of which must be sought in
45. Cassidy 2010c.

46. Stiglitz 2009; Solow 2010.
47. Colander, Föllmer, Haas, Goldberg, Juselius, Kirman, Lux and Sloth 2009; Keen 2009,
p. 6.
48. Solow 2010. It is important to note here that Solow does not see microeconomics as the
foundation of macroeconomics, but just as a way of providing stories with which to inform
macroeconomics.
49. Skidelsky 2009; Akerlof and Shiller 2009.
50. Akerlof and Shiller 2009, pp. viii–ix.
the structural characteristics of the capitalist system which, however, are

systematically and suspiciously absent from all of these accounts.
Behavioural economics has been one of the main new research-projects
within mainstream-economics in recent years. Other new research-programmes
include (classical, behavioural, evolutionary) game-theory, experimental
economics, evolutionary economics, agent-based complexity-theory and
neuroeconomics. The appearance of these new research-programmes has led
commentators such as Colander and Davis to talk about the ‘death of
neoclassical economics’ and the transition from the era of neoclassical
dominance to mainstream pluralism.51 This transition was made possible,
according to Colander, Holt and Rosser,52 by new technology and especially
developments in computing which allowed for the use of more complex
models. And, although it was brought about by cumulative-evolutionary
changes rather than a sudden paradigm-shift, the end-result will be no less
revolutionary in its effects.
One common element in these new research-programmes is that they
all originate from fields outside of economics, such as mathematics (game-
theory), psychology (behavioural economics), neo-Darwinian biology
(evolutionary economics), neuroscience (neuroeconomics), while the
experimental method has long been applied in the natural and physical
sciences. This process of importation of methods and concepts from other
sciences has been called ‘inverse imperialism’, and has led Davis to the
conclusion that they represent ‘genuinely different approaches’.53 But does this
amount to true scientific pluralism? The answer is no. The reason is that,
despite their different outlooks, all of these approaches have two things in
common: first, their adherence to axiomatic model-building as their preferred
methodological approach and, second, their focus on the individual.54 Indeed
Colander, following Solow and Niehans, defines modern or, as he calls it,
‘New-Millennium Economics’, not in terms of its content but its method: ‘the
modeling approach to problems’, he says, ‘is the central problem of modern
economics’.55
All of the new research-programmes mentioned above then share a common
language, so to speak, which is none other than that of formalism. The
formalist revolution, then, reigns supreme, even in this supposedly post-
neoclassical, ‘mainstream-pluralist’ era, and, other differences apart, keeps
51. Colander 2000 (reprinted in Colander 2001); Davis 2006.

53. Davis 2006, p. 9.
54. Colander, Holt and Rosser, Jr. 2004, pp. 10–11, 17; Rizvi 2003, pp. 390–1.
55. Colander 2000, pp. 137–8; Solow 1997; Niehans 1990.
itself in line with it. Indicative of this is that, in their book, The Changing Face
of Economics, Colander et al. have interviewed eleven ‘cutting-edge economists’,
as they call them, coming mostly from the ranks of the ‘inside-the-mainstream’
heterodoxy-group.56 Nine of them do highly technical model-building work.
Generally, this is true for both pure-theory models and applied-policy models.
The old distinction between the science of economics (theoretical economics)
and the art of economics (applied economics) has disappeared under the
impact of the formalist dmodelling method. Indeed, modern economics is
defined by little else. This also applies to new fields of research such as
evolutionary game-theory and experimental economics which, in other
respects, may deviate from neoclassical economics, but not from the use of
highly technical model-building.57
What modern orthodox economists fail to understand is that what is at
fault is not some specific assumption or characteristic of the models used, but
the method of deductive-mathematical modelling itself. In addition to their
universalistic nature and lack of historical specificity, the method of
mathematical-deductive reasoning, as Lawson has shown, presupposes, first, a
closed system in which event-regularities or correlations, ‘that connect events
standing in causal sequence, in order to deduce that this event happened
because of, or followed from, that event’58 occur, and, second, the isolated-
individual agent.59 Because of the erroneous character of both of these
presuppositions as far as social and economic phenomena are concerned,
mathematical modelling is inappropriate as a leading, let alone an exclusive
tool for the analysis of such phenomena. To axiomatic model-building should
also be added another attribute which most (but not all) of these new
approaches share with neoclassical economics: methodological individualism
and the emphasis on the individual.60
Where does all this leave the issue of pluralism? It means that all approaches
and schools that do not accept technical model-building as their method of
analysis simply do not get a hearing and are left out of the picture altogether,
being considered unacceptable as scholarly economics. As Colander et al.
themselves admit, the élite of the profession is open-minded to new ideas, but
closed-minded to alternative methods and approaches. ‘If it’s not modeled, it’s
56. Colander, Holt and Rosser, Jr. 2004.

57. Colander, Holt and Rosser, Jr. 2004; Rizvi 2003, pp. 390–1. ‘Even experimental
economics, which is more inductive in nature, is nearly always testing a mathematical model’
(Ibid.).
58. Lawson 2009, p. 763.
59. Lawson 2003, Chapter 2; Lawson 2009.
60. The exceptions here are evolutionary economics and agent-based complexity-economics.
not economics’.61 This, however, is not true scientific pluralism, ‘a genuinely

pluralistic environment’, in Davis’s words,62 but rather what might be called
‘conditional’ or ‘pseudo-’ pluralism and, as such, is no pluralism at all.
Be that as it may, this transition has brought with it a move away from the
‘holy trinity’ of neoclassical economics – rationality, efficiency and equilibrium –
to a more eclectic holy trinity – purposeful behaviour, enlightened self-interest
and multiple equilibria.63 According to new findings coming from experimental
and behavioural economics, the famous homo economicus of the economist’s
imagination is passé. It has been shown experimentally and theoretically that
individual behaviour is subject to cognitive and emotional constraints, and
new, pro-social elements with regard to human behaviour, such as fairness,
reciprocity, altruism, etc., have forcefully entered the picture, making
individuals more humane and less like the robotic entities implied by homo
economicus.64
Probably the most important common denominator of these new findings
is that there is no such thing as a representative individual, and that individuals
are moulded by their social environment in decisive ways. One important
instance is a cross-cultural study, where the researchers found from their
behavioural model that people failed to act egotistically to maximise their
individual utility in all of the fifteen different small-scale societies examined.
According to the results of the experiment, people’s behaviour reflected their
cultural milieu.65 Even more astonishing are the results from some recent
experiments in brain-science, more specifically in neuroplastic research,
according to which the social milieu influences not just people’s perceptions
(i.e the human mind), but the brain itself.66 All of these findings point in one
direction: the social must take precedence over the individual, and the macro-
level over the micro-level. As Heilbroner and Milberg put it, ‘the recognition
of the inextricably social roots of all social behaviour leads to the view that
macrofoundations must precede microbehaviour, not the other way around’.67
Instead, we find that economics has either projected its preferred forms of
microbehaviour across the totality of social science and phenomena (as with
economics-imperialism) or, as with the new field of neuroeconomics, delved

62. Davis 2006, p. 9.
64. Frey and Benz 2004, pp. 68–75.
65. Henrich, Boyd, Bowles, Camerer, Fehr, Gintis and McElreath 2001.
66. Doidge 2007, pp. 287–311.
67. Heilbroner and Milberg 1995, p. 8.
into the brain itself to discover the key to human behaviour beyond the pursuit
of self-interest.
Why is this, and what is different from the 1930s when something did
happen in the form of the impact of Keynes’s work on economic policy and,
to a lesser extent, on economic theory? The differences lie mostly in the
prevailing socio-economic conditions, and the situation within the profession.
In the 1930s, when the West was plunged into the vagaries of the Great
Depression, the Soviet Union was a rapidly expanding economy. So the
Keynesian call for greater government-intervention in the economy fitted the
needs for pragmatism and of ‘the urgent political imperative to counter
communism’.68 Following the collapse of the Central- and Eastern-European
economies and the triumph of neoliberalism in the West, coupled with
the crisis of social movements, no such imperative exists any more. And,
within the profession, the interwar-period was characterised by a true scientific
pluralism of methods and approaches. Although neoclassicism was already
ascendant, it had not yet dominated the profession, with American
institutionalism being the dominant school in the United States. Economics
was a much more discursive and much less technique-based discipline.69
In sum, as far as the possible effects of the crisis on economic science are
concerned, the emerging picture is one in which the response to crisis ranges
from ‘business as usual’, to pleas for better models by changing some underlying
assumption or moving to more-dynamic ones, to delving deeper into the
human psyche. All in all, as Steve Keen puts it, although ‘the “irresistible
force” of the Global Financial Crisis is indeed immense, so too is the inertia of
the “immovable object” of economic belief ’. The twin pillars of this ‘immovable
object’ are, firstly, the focus on the individual, whether rational or otherwise,
and the model-building approach. The only hope for a truly alternative theory
lies with political economy that breaks away from both of these pillars. So
what does the future hold for political economy?70
4. . . . to political economy
As we have seen already, one reaction within economics from those at least
willing to recognise the need for something more by way of explanation, is
only to draw upon existing models of market-imperfections newly applied.
And the leading representative in this respect is Joseph Stiglitz, by virtue of
68. Skidelsky 2009, p. 103.

69. Hodgson 2009, p. 1211.
70. Keen 2009, p. 3.
both academic and non-academic rôles and his intellectual integrity. He

was sacked for his views from the World Bank whilst they continued to be
used for legitimising purposes (whilst policy, as opposed to scholarship
and ideology, hardens on Washington-consensus practice as if his trademark
post-Washington consensus never existed).71 We leave aside, though, Stiglitz’s
frequent misrepresentation of the history of economic thought, which
infuriates both those more radical and conservative alike, for everyone from
Adam Smith through Keynes and Hayek are forcibly fitted into his market-,
as informational, imperfections framework. Yet, in his presidential address to
the Eastern Economic Association, he advises that
There will be political battles ahead. Special interests will try to block many of the
reforms. The future of our nation will depend in no small measure on the outcome
of those battles.72
This is a vivid invitation to analyse special interests, power and conflict. Indeed,
Stiglitz claims to ‘understand the unbridled enthusiasm of special interests,
which found the arguments for deregulation profit enhancing’. Yet, he
immediately continues, ‘I am not so clear what motivated so many economists’.73
What is, however, clear is what he would have motivate their understanding,
namely attention to ‘irrationality’ and ‘intellectual inconsistency’, ‘highly
correlated movements in house prices’, ‘fat-tailed distributions’, ‘new
asymmetries of information’, ‘perverse incentives’, ‘banks too big to fail’,74
inducing the conclusion that ‘our financial system failed in its core missions –
allocating capital and managing risk’,75 leading to the previously cited
conclusion that ‘[t]he left now understands markets and the role markets
should and can play in the economy . . . the new left is trying to make markets
work’. This is not the stuff of political economy, other than as a point of
departure. And it might be observed that the balance of asymmetric information
within economics is all on the side of political and heterodox economists who
must command the orthodoxy, but not vice-versa. But power within the
discipline is totally the other way around. In short, vested interests and
ideology are not matters of asymmetric information and market-imperfections,
whether in the economy or within economics.
71. See Bayliss, Fine and van Waeyenberge (eds.) 2011, forthcoming.
72. Stiglitz 2009, p. 281.
73. Stiglitz 2009, p. 293.
74. All citations within Stiglitz 2009, p. 294.
75. Stiglitz 2009, p. 296.
It is, with apologies to Jane Austen, or indeed, her ghost-writer,76 a truth

universally acknowledged that a single economist in possession of a good
theory of market-imperfections must be in want of a crisis. But not for us, and
we respond to such pride and prejudice with three conclusions. Firstly,
whatever their prominence, the influence of the mainstream-dissidents on
policy has been negligible. Stiglitz, the most energetic, has been totally
ineffective in practice with, as remarked, his own closure between theory and
reality drawn towards observing the power of (financial) vested interests and
ideologies as decisive. We agree, but this begs the question of why his work
ends at this point rather than beginning there, as opposed to imperfectly
informed and coordinated individuals. Second, when the time does come for
more progressive closure, itself contingent upon the balance and strength of
forces, movements and organisations, such dissident economists are liable to
prove a constraining influence. Third, this suggests that the main task for
political economy today is to keep alternative traditions to the mainstream
alive, for their own sake, but also in anticipation of the deeper understandings
that will be required once too much finance in the world is recognised
practically as a problem of capitalism and not just of finance itself.
Given the bleak prospects for political economy within economics-science,
it is apposite to inquire whether heterodox economics and political economy
might prosper within the other social sciences, as opposed to within economics
itself. And we would emphasise that economics and economics-imperialism
have not gone uncontested across the social sciences. And two features have
marked the social sciences, other than economics, across the last two decades.
One is the retreat from the extremes of postmodernism – the preoccupation
with the subjective, the inventive, the self-constructing and de-constructed
individual, the focus on the meaning and interpretation of the world as
opposed to, or even in denial of, its material properties. In the first decades of
neoliberalism, postmodernism had a remarkable parallel existence with
mainstream-economics. They were totally incompatible with one another. We
have the optimising individual with given preferences over given goods, of
mainstream-economics; but the subjective, inventive, preoccupation with
meaning for postmodernism. We welcome this retreat from the extremes of
postmodernism, not because of its more-than-welcome critical examination of
concepts, but because of the need to attach such endeavours to the material
realities of contemporary capitalism.77
76. See BBC News 2010.

77. For this, and what follows in the context of a critique of ‘social capital’, see Fine 2010.
But the second feature around the social sciences in the last two decades has
been the retreat from the extremes of neoliberalism – although this is better
seen as the second phase of neoliberalism rather than as its demise. Making
imperfect markets work, and reforming institutions are its intellectual marker,
especially within economics, the better to make globalisation work. In contrast,
across the other social sciences, the reaction against the extremes of neoliberalism
in-and-of-itself as well as an agenda-setting device is well-illustrated by the rise
of globalisation as the most significant of concepts across the social sciences as
a focus for gaining a critical handle on the realities of contemporary capitalism.
Its literature, even the word itself, did not exist before 1990. And it was a
neoliberal idea: that the state was withering away, and that this is a good thing.
Subsequently, the academic literature has taken a different view. It has devoted
attention to specifying contemporary capitalism as a world-system; it has
acknowledged the continuing importance of the state; and it has not denied
globalisation, but argued that it is complex, with a diversity of outcomes across
place, time and aspect. So the rise of globalisation as a concept has demonstrated
the reaction against neoliberalism within the social sciences by rejecting
the original notion, at least, of the reality and desirability of the withering
away of the state. After all, neoliberalism has always been about the interventions
of the state to promote the interests of private capital, especially in its
internationalisation (with financialisation to the fore in the current period).
So there are reasons to be cheerful around the prospects for political
economy across the social sciences, although the exact content by topic and
discipline is variegated. But what of the stimulus of external events as a
potential source of brighter prospects for heterodox political economy? We
do not have the external pressures for progressive policy and corresponding
scholarship that arose with the Keynesian period, and, until the balance
of forces are more conducive to alternative forces, the best that can be hoped
for, as far as the economics-profession is concerned, is a move away from the
monolithic approach to economic science characteristic of mainstream-
economics, which fetishises model-building, towards a pluralism of methods
and approaches, and away from atomistic approaches towards more-systemic,
aggregative, dynamic, historically-specific and socially-embedded types of
analysis of capitalism.
Institutionally, heterodox economists and political economists can explore
ways of organising themselves in pursuit of this prime objective. In Europe,
we already have enough ‘Heterodox Political Economy Associations’, including
the European Association of Evolutionary Political Economy (EAEPE), the
Association for Heterodox Economics (AHE), the International Initiative for
Promoting Political Economy (IIPPE), the Post-Keynesian group and the
EuroMemorandum group. At the same time, the Heterodox Economics

Newsletter has more than 5,000 subscribers, while Real-World Economics
Review, a heterodox journal, has about 11,500 subscribers compared with the
17,000 members of the American Economic Association. Perhaps it is time to
think big and think global. Recently there has been a proposal by Edward
Fullbrook, editor of Real-World Economics Review, to form a World-Association
of Heterodox Economics along the lines of the American Economic
Association, with the parallel launching of three international journals and
one or more new prototype introductory-level books. In terms of numbers, we
could match the mainstream. Other than that, however, we only have the
power of ideas against their massive resources, their institutional monopoly
over positions in élite-institutions within academia, and their excessive political
power and involvement in influential policy-making bodies and institutions.
Thus, for such proposals to have any hope of success, they need to be backed
by a student-movement and academic teachers’ movement for the reform in
economics in line with the post-autistic movement of economics-students
that originated in France at the turn of the millennium.78
It will come as no surprise that our own view is that the problems of
methodology, realism, and so on that ought to plague the mainstream, as well
as incorporating the historical specificity of capitalism, can only be adequately
addressed through Marx’s value-theory as a starting-point. But this is itself
enriched through dialogue with other schools of thought and approaches,
with empirical evidence, and even by taking the mainstream as a point of
departure. For it is false to see the relationship between political economy and
(mainstream-) economics as one-dimensional with, for illustrative purposes,
general equilibrium at one base extreme and Marxism at the heavenly other
extreme. As it were, get value-theory, the transformation-problem, or the law
of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall correct and all else will fall into
place. We do not think so, important though these are in and of themselves
and in framing more complex and concrete analysis.
Nor is it even adequate to see the relationship between political economy
and economics as multidimensional, with monotonic improvement as we
move along the separate elements in a putatively progressive direction to
incorporate the real, the social, the historical, etc. For the relationship across
these dimensions is fractured, fluid and evolving both intellectually and in
relation to the real world, activism, ideology and policy-debates. This renders
simple dichotomies between political economy and the mainstream impossible
to pin down, with blurred boundaries between the two even if a huge
78. More on these organisations may be found by consulting Google.

amorphous mass of orthodoxy definitely lies on the wrong side of the borders.
But, by the same token, there is plenty of heterodoxy, at least in principle, that
straddles the border and is located on the side other than orthodoxy, so
extensive is the potential even for marginal but destructive deviations from it.
This suggests the need for a unity of purpose in criticising the mainstream and
in posing alternatives. For, if there is one thing as counterproductive as a
mainstream-economist, it is a political economist who knows he or she is right
and everybody else is wrong. So let those committed to political economy
learn from one another through friendly fire rather than perishing by it. For
yesterday’s philosophers are today’s economists. As Marx observed of them,
paraphrasing for modern times:79
Hitherto economists have had the solution of all riddles lying in their mathematical
models, and the stupid, exoteric world of finance had only to provide the data for
the roast pigeons of absolute-econometric knowledge and vast fortunes to fly into
it. Now economics has become mundane, and the most striking proof of this is
that economics itself has been drawn into the torment of the crisis, not only
externally but also internally. But, if constructing the future and settling
everything for all times are not our affair, it is all the more clear what we have to
accomplish at present: I am referring to ruthless criticism of all that exists, ruthless
both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of
being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be.
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Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
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Historical Materialism 19.2 (2011) 33–34 brill.nl/hima
Historical Materialism Limited Edition Artwork
Luibov Popova Untitled Textile Design on William Morris Wallpaper for

HM 2010 by David Mabb
The artist David Mabb has created an artwork especially for Historical
Materialism. Titled Luibov Popova Untitled Textile Design on William Morris
wallpaper for HM 2010, the print is issued in a run of 100. Mabb’s picture is
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over a section of William Morris wallpaper including Fruit, Willow Boughs,
Trellis, Brier Rabbit, Medway and Daisy. As a consequence of the different
wallpapers employed and the registration process, each work will be unique.
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Mabb regularly reworks the artistic imagery of Marxism to produce startling

new configurations. In this print he combines William Morris’s hand-made
34 Limited Edition Artwork / Historical Materialism 19.2 (2011) 33–34
natural imagery with the abstract machine aesthetics of the Russian

Constructivists. In their own time, Morris and Popova were thwarted by
economic realities; Morris’s designs proved too expensive for the working
people he wished to reach, while the fledgling USSR proved unable to support
the transformation of everyday life envisaged by Popova and her fellow
Constructivists. Mabb reanimates these remnants of Marxist history, fusing
the legacies in lively and beautiful images for our time.
David Mabb is a widely exhibited artist and Reader in Art at Goldsmiths,
University of London. He regularly exhibits at the Leo Kamen Gallery,
Toronto and in 2004 he curated William Morris “ministering to the swinish
luxury of the rich” at the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester. Recent
exhibitions include: The Decorating Business, Oakville Galleries, Ontario; The
Hall of the Modern, The Economist, London; Morris in Jaipur: The work of Art
in the Context of Hand-made Reproduction, Mandawa Haveli, Jaipur Heritage
International Festival, touring to The British Council Gallery, New Delhi; Art
into Everyday Life, Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius; and A Miniature
Retrospective and Rhythm 69, Jugendstilsenteret/Kunstmuseet Kube, Alesund,
Norway. During 2010 he exhibited The Morris Kitsch Archive at Delaware
Center for the Contemporary Arts.
Beyond Simple Fidelity to the Event:

The Limits of Alain Badiou’s Ontology
Panagiotis Sotiris
Department of Sociology, University of the Aegean, Mytilene
psot@soc.aegean.gr
Abstract*
This article attempts a Marxist critique of Alain Badiou’s positions. The importance of Badiou’s
ontology as an affirmation of the possibility of radical-historical novelty is stressed, but also its
limits. These limits have to do with Badiou’s abandonment of a dialectical-relational conception
of social reality, his refusal of any causal connection between social reality, political decision and
event, and the absence of a theory of ideology and hegemony in his work. Consequently, Badiou’s
notion of a ‘subtractive’ politics cannot be considered an answer to the open questions of
communist strategy, despite his endorsement of the ‘communist hypothesis’.
Keywords
Badiou, Marxism, dialectics, social theory, political subjectivity, communist politics
1. Introduction
Despite his long theoretical and political trajectory, from Sartre, to Althusser,
to militant Maoism and finally to his own highly idiosyncratic version of
ontology,1 it is only relatively recently that Alain Badiou’s work has drawn
widespread attention and made him one of the most influential radical thinkers
of our time. Badiou’s main preoccupations, the question of the event, the need
for militancy and the question of the political subject, respond to certain
aspects of the current historical conjuncture. His work can be seen as an
answer to the attempt at a complete closure of historical thinking that has
been an important aspect of the neoliberal imperative against the possibility of
* The writer wishes to thank Alberto Toscano and the anonymous referees of this article for
their suggestions and criticism.
1. For a general overview of Badiou’s theoretical and ideological trajectory, see Hallward
2003. In an autobiographical text, Badiou refers to Sartre, Lacan and Althusser as his philosoph-
ical masters (Badiou 2004b).
36 P. Sotiris / Historical Materialism 19.2 (2011) 35–59
any form of historical change. Although Badiou refuses the traditional notion
of possibility, since, for him, the event is what is ‘impossible’, what is not
included in the contours of a given situation, his work can still be read as
insisting on the possibility of new events and historical change. It can also be
seen as a theoretical intervention in the discussion of what meaning the
formation of collective subjects has today, especially in a time when mass-
movements and anticapitalist aspirations have returned.
Alain Badiou’s theoretical turn towards an ontology of the event has also
been seen as a response to the crisis of left-wing or generally radical politics in
the early eighties after the exhaustion of the revolutionary thrust of 1968 and
its aftermaths. It is the same feeling of crisis that can be traced as the background
to Althusser’s reformulation of an aleatory materialism of the contingent
encounter2 or to Foucault’s turn towards an ethics or aesthetic of the subject.3
In all cases, the underlying preoccupation is with the realisation that there
is no general tendency – in the sense of historical teleology or historical
mechanics – towards emancipation, and that the collective agents associated
with social emancipation – the French Communist Party, in the case of Althusser,
radical social and political movements, in the case of Foucault, the Maoist
movement in the case of Badiou – can enter periods of prolonged crisis.
This sense of historical crisis led Badiou to a rethinking of the very notion
of the event. On the one hand, the reference to the event pertains to May
1968, both as a violent break of historical continuity and as the bitter challenge
of dealing with its defeat and the question of its (im)possible repetition. On
the other hand, the event is a crucial question for any effort to rethink
emancipatory and transformative politics, since any such form of politics is
based on the premise that new events happen, that changes occur, that forms
alter. That is why we must stress, before proceeding to our points of criticism,
that Badiou’s theory of the event, which rejects any form of ontological
dualism, can be considered an important contribution to a materialist
conception of political practice, both in its negation of teleology and in its
affirmation of historical novelty. It also represents a certain break with idealism,
because Badiou rejects any subjective/objective dichotomy, treating the subject
as an essential aspect of the irruption of the event. Equally important is
Badiou’s rejection of the traditional notion of truth-as-subjective-stance and
his insistence on the truth of a situation as an ontological proposition: truth is
an actual possibility – or a potential exception – of the evental site itself.4 This
2. Althusser 2006.
3. Foucault 1984.
4. ‘Truths are materially produced in specific situations, and each begins from an event or
discovery that eludes the prevailing logic that structures and governs those situations.’ (Hallward
2003, p. xxv.)
P. Sotiris / Historical Materialism 19.2 (2011) 35–59 37
is in sharp contrast to what Badiou calls, in Platonic terms, doxa, or mere

opinion.5 If the truth of a situation includes the possibility of new events,
provided that we choose a position of fidelity to the event, political projects
can be based on true possibilities. This position resists current forms of ‘weak’
thinking that consider philosophy and social theory as able only to think
practices and discourses but not truths and major emancipatory-political
projects.6
These points represent the importance of Badiou’s ontology, its relevance
for any attempt to support philosophically radical politics today and to rethink
materialist philosophy in general and, consequently, the need to engage in
critical dialogue with his writings and interventions. The rest of this article will
attempt a criticism of certain aspects of Badiou’s positions from a Marxist
perspective, influenced by Althusser’s reformulation of materialist dialectics,
hoping to make clear that the limits and shortcomings of Badiou’s endeavour
lie at precisely the points at which he distances himself from such a
perspective.
2. The absent space of relations

We start with Badiou’s rejection of a relational theorisation of society. It is well
known that Badiou has insisted on the ‘Multiple’ (and not the ‘One’) as the
basis of ontology.7 According to Badiou, it is not possible to think of the social
totality as ‘One’, as the expression of a unitary-historical substance. In the
same way that a mathematical set is the result of a ‘count-as-one’ operation,
social forms are not to be considered as ‘One’. Social processes and political
sequences are the basis of social forms. This is a necessary refusal of any form
of historical metaphysics, and, indeed, one might say that this evocation of
multiplicity can be considered also as the basis of historical hope and optimism.
Social reality is always in excess of its actual-temporal configuration. However,
Badiou tends to underestimate the importance of exactly that aspect of social
reality which enables not only ‘count-as-one’ operations, but also different
societal configurations, namely social relations as dialectical contradictions. As
Peter Hallward has suggested, ‘the most basic axioms of Badiou’s ontology
presume that the elements of a situation can be adequately individuated and
5. ‘The vast majority of empirical political orientations have nothing to do with truth. We
know this. They organize a repulsive mixture of power and opinions.’ (Badiou 2003b, p. 70.) On
Badiou’s criticism of postmodern doxa, see also Žižek 1999, pp. 131–2.
6. Badiou designates this reference to discourses and bodies as ‘democratic materialism’, as
opposed to what he designates as ‘dialectical materialism’, which includes the reference to truth
(Badiou 2009a, pp. 1–4).
7. ‘[T]he one is not’ (Badiou 2005d, p. 23). On this point, see also Hallward 2005.
presented without inter-elemental relations of any kind.’8 This is based on

Badiou’s prioritisation, even as early as the 1970s, of scission and antagonism
over relation and mutual determination. This distancing from a thinking of
social contradictions as complex and uneven relations of antagonism and
mutual determination towards a more general notion of non-relational
political antagonism is evident in Badiou’s 1975 pamphlet, Théorie de la
contradiction. There, he insists that ‘yes, the contradiction is antagonistic, yes,
the workers’ revolt, which is the fire of this contradiction, is the very reason of
history’.9 This position is also exemplified in his statement in Theory of the
Subject that ‘Contradiction has no other mode of existence but scission’.10 In fact,
Badiou is using Lacan’s reference to the impossibility of sexual relations in the
strict sense as a corollary for the inexistence of class-relations: ‘There are no such
things as class relations’.11 This insistence on the priority of antagonism and
scission was also coupled with a negation of the capital-labour contradiction
in favour of a conception of the antagonism between the proletariat and the
bourgeois and imperialist world. ‘The true contrary of the proletariat is not the
bourgeoisie. It is the bourgeois world, imperialist society’.12 Badiou’s negation
of a dialectical/relational conception is also evident in Peut-on penser la
politique?,13 the work that marks the beginning of his turn towards a thinking
of the event. In it, Badiou insists that we have to do away with any notion of
the ‘labour of the negative’.14 This rejection of a dialectical conception of social
reality is also evident in the omission of any reference to relations in Being
and Event.
Compared to a ‘conciliatory’ conception of social relations and the
historicism of a conception of historical progress based on innate tendencies,
or the metaphysical evocation of a process of the self-alienation of a latent
substance, this emphasis is necessary, marking the efficacy of radical difference
and struggle. But one can find in the Marxist-theoretical tradition, beginning
with Marx’s own formulations in the sixth thesis on Feuerbach,15 a radically
8. Hallward 2004, p. 15.

9. Badiou 1975, p. 22. Equally important is his emphasis that the ‘resolution of a
contradiction demands that something disappears’ (Badiou 1975, p. 86).
10. Badiou 2009d, p. 14. ‘In concrete, militant philosophy, it is thus indispensable to
announce that there is only one law of the dialectic: One divided into two. Such is the principle
of observable facts and of action’ (ibid.).
11. Badiou 2009d, p. 127.
12. Badiou 2009d, p. 7.
13. Badiou 1985.
14. Badiou 1985, p. 84.
15. ‘Feuerbach resolves the essence of religion into the essence of man. But the essence of
man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In reality, it is the ensemble of the social
relations. Feuerbach, who does not enter upon a criticism of this real essence is hence obliged:
original conception of the primacy of relations in a novel form of social

ontology, an ‘ontology of relations’,16 that transcends traditional-philosophical
distinctions:
At bottom, ‘ensemble’, ‘social’ and ‘relations’ all say the same thing. The point is
to reject both of the positions (the realist and nominalist) between which
philosophers have generally been divided: the one arguing that the genus or
essence precedes the existence of individuals; the other that individuals are the
primary reality, from which universals are ‘abstracted’. For amazingly, neither of
these two positions is capable of thinking precisely what is essential in human
existence: the multiple and active relations which individuals establish with each
other (whether of language, labour, love, reproduction, domination, conflict
etc.), and the fact that it is these relations which define what they have in
common, the ‘genus’. They define this because they constitute it at each moment
in multiple forms. They thus provide the ‘only’ effective content of the notion of
essence applied to the human being (i.e. to human beings).17
Pierre Macherey has insisted that ‘social relations . . . constitute a multiplicity

non-totalisable a priori, because they form an “ensemble”, a totality of fact and
not of right, which is kept only by their encounter, an encounter that is not
fatally harmonious or convergent, but can take and more often takes violent
and conflictual forms’.18 And, again, Pierre Macherey has summarised this
conception in his reading of Spinoza by arguing that ‘only relations exist in the
proper sense’.19
That is why it is necessary to go back to Marx’s insistence on treating social
relations as dialectical contradictions. This is exemplified in the relational
conception of capital and labour, in the sense that it is the capital-relation, as
structural-social antagonism, that calls social classes into existence, which has
been a cornerstone of both the Marxist theory of value and the Marxist theory
of classes. This is a conception of social relations as forms of a complex interplay
of antagonism and mutual determination. In it, not only is it the relation of
the elements that produces social reality as such, but also each element is
actually formed within the contours of the relation. As Balibar has insisted, in
Marx’s conception, contradiction is
1) To abstract from the historical process and to define the religious sentiment regarded by itself,
and to presuppose an abstract – isolated – human individual; 2) The essence therefore can by
him only be regarded as ‘species’, as an inner ‘dumb’ generality which unites many individuals
only in a natural way.’ (Marx 2002.)
16. Balibar 1995, p. 30.
17. Balibar 1995, pp. 30–1.
18. Macherey 2008, pp. 151–2.
19. ‘N’existent à proprement parler que des relations’ (Macherey 1979, p. 218).
[n]ot a moral impossibility or a ‘contradiction in terms’, but what might be called

a real contradiction, equally distinct from both a purely formal contradiction
(abstract terms which exclude each other by definition), and a mere real opposition
(of external forces acting in opposite directions, where one can calculate the
outcome or the point of equilibrium).20
However, during the past few years, Badiou has made an effort to answer some
of these criticisms and to offer a more complex version of his ontology. Logics
of Worlds sets out to provide what Badiou calls a ‘greater logic’.21 He attempts
to answer the questions left open in Being and Event, especially the problem of
grounding his ontology mainly upon the situation-event couple. This left out
the question of the possible forms of appearance of the elements of a situation
and of theorising how one possible world emerges instead of another.
What the 1988 book did at the level of pure being – determining the ontological
type of truths and the abstract form of the subject that activates them – this book
aims to do at the level of being-there, or of appearing, or of worlds.22
Badiou is trying to present a much more complex theoretical perspective,

adding elements of a phenomenology to his ontology with the aim of including
the complexity and the dynamics within the contours of a given historical
situation. That is why he sets out to offer what he calls a ‘logic of appearing’ in
the sense of a ‘transcendental algebra’ that designates possible differences and
identities, what can appear and what cannot in a certain world.23 The operations
involved in this process of appearing and not appearing have to do with what
he calls the transcendental of a world or a situation, which assures the cohesion
of the being-there of a part of the world.24 The generic form of appearing of a
determinate multiple is an object.25 This appearing in the world also has a
retroactive effect on the multiple-being that supports it,26 leading to the
dialectic of being and appearing. Badiou was well aware that his conception of
an ontology of pure being made it practically impossible to think historical
change. The aim of his logic of the transcendental in Logics of Worlds is to
answer the question of the possibility of thinking in a world what does not
20. Balibar 1995, p. 102.

21. Badiou 2009a.
22. Badiou 2009a, p. 8.
23. Badiou 2009a, p. 118.
24. Badiou 2009a, p. 572.
25. ‘ “Object” is the name of the generic form of the appearing for a determinate multiple.’
(Badiou 2009a, p. 589.)
26. ‘Appearing in a world as an object retroactively affects the multiple-being which supports
this object.’ (Badiou 2009a, p. 575.)
appear within this world.27 This problematic indeed adds to Badiou’s schema
a degree of complexity absent from the original formulation of his ontology. It
also offers a possibility to think some sort of social determination and causal
relation between different worlds. The main problem is precisely that this level
of appearing is added to the level of multiple-being, and the insistence on the
sharp distinction between these levels undermines any attempt at reconfiguring
historical causality apart from very specific and limited historical conjunctures.
Moreover, he refuses to offer a theorisation of the relation between an appearing
and the pure multiplicity of being, leading again to a notion of radical
contingency. As Peter Hallward has noted,
Between the being of a pure multiplicity and an appearing as docile or insurgent

lies an abyss without mediation. The space that in other philosophies might
be filled by an account of material actualization or emergent self-realization (or
any number of alternatives) is one that Badiou, so far, prefers to consign to
contingency.28
It is true that in this revised ontological schema, Badiou includes the notion
of the relation. However, we are still far from a relational conception. This
specific relational constitution is at the level of appearing of a particular world,
not of ontology. ‘That is why we will give the name “logic” to the laws of the
relational network which determine the worldly appearing of multiple-being’.29
Badiou defines a relation between two objects as a function between two sets,
a function that creates neither existence nor difference.30 That is why he insists
on presenting relations as ontologically subordinate to the elements that relate
to each other.
A relation, within appearing, is necessarily subordinated to the transcendental

intensity of the apparents that it binds together. Being-there – and not relation –
makes the being of appearing. . . . [A] relation creates neither existence nor
difference.31
Furthermore, despite his many references to dialectics, he insists in Logics of

Worlds on refusing the notion of dialectical negation. On the contrary, he
insists on treating negation as logical (belonging to the level of appearing), not
27. Badiou 2009a, p. 122.

28. Hallward 2008, p. 118.
29. Badiou 2009a, p. 156.
30. Badiou 2009a, p. 576.
31. Badiou 2009a, p. 310.
ontological, as derivative and not primary, replacing it with the notion of the
reverse.
It’s remarkable that what will serve to sustain negation in the order of appearing
is the first consequence of the transcendental operations, and by no means an
initial given. Negation, in the extended and ‘positive’ form of the existence of the
reverse of a being, is a result. We can say that as soon as we are dealing with the
being of the being of being-there, that is with the being of appearing as bound to
the logic of a world, it follows that the reverse of a being exists, in the sense that
there exists a degree of appearance ‘contrary’ to its own.32
The result is that anyone looking for a more dialectical conception remains
unsatisfied, especially since Badiou insists that relations cannot fundamentally
affect the elements that enter into a relation with each other. Contrary to the
insistence of Althusser or Poulantzas33 that classes do not exist outside of the
class-struggle, an antagonistic relation between social classes is not, according
to Badiou, the basic condition of their existence, nor does the balance of forces
affect their form of social being. As Peter Hallward has noted:
Not only is relation thus conceived as little more than a variation on the
elementary relation of order (greater-than or lesser-than), there is no clear sense
that it can qualify, shape or otherwise affect the objects related. A relation of
struggle between two interests or classes, for instance, does not here play a
constituent role in their being or becoming so much as illustrate the relative
difference in their ‘intrinsic’ intensity or strength. Such relation always comes
after its terms.34
This leads us to another important contradiction in Badiou’s endeavour,

namely his refusal of any causal relation between social reality and political
decision and event. Peter Hallward has described this tendency as Badiou’s
insistence on the ‘difference between what people are and what people can
do’.35 He also stresses Badiou’s rejection of historical causality:
Badiou rejects any constituent relation between truths and historical or social
‘development’, along with any detailed notion of interaction between levels of
32. Badiou 2009a, p. 136. ‘[T]he reverse is indeed a logical category (and therefore relative
to the worldliness of beings); it is not an ontological category (linked to the intrinsic multiple
composition of beings, or, if you will, to the mathematical world).’ (Badiou 2009a, p. 152.)
33. Althusser 1973, pp. 29–30. Poulantzas 2008, p. 328.
34. Hallward 2008, p. 115.
35. Hallward 2004, p. 12. According to Jason Barker, ‘[f ]or Badiou (knowledge of ) capitalism
is unable to determine events, and so has no direct grasp on political processes.’ (Barker 2006,
p. xx.)
socio-historical causation – geographic, demographic, economic, technological,

etc. He refuses any constituent mediation between subjects and the individuals
they transform, between evental sites and the situations to which they belong,
between the occurring of events and the sites that they occupy.36
On the contrary, what we have is the insistence on the radically contingent

character of political choices. This is also made evident by Badiou’s refusal
to treat socio-economic analysis as an essential prerequisite of political
intervention.37 It is what Alberto Toscano has described as ‘Badiou’s hostility
to a communism based on any variety of socio-economic immanence’.38
And, although Logics of Worlds elaborates more on the question of the
emergence of events out of a given situation, historical causality and the
articulation of transformative-political practice on existing social relations (as
forms of historical causality) remain an open question. Despite the admission
of a greater degree of complexity, especially through notions such as the
appearing, the world and the body, this ontological schema remains, despite
the usual mathematical rigour, in the end descriptive. Given the elements of a
situation, we can see different ways of arranging, and different possibilities of
articulations including the non-appearance of a given possibility. What
determines these possibilities and impossibilities and the relation between
being and appearing remains within the limits of radical contingency. In a
way, the very strength of Badiou’s overall argument, his conception of an
endless possibility of new events, is also its weakness in the sense of the refusal
in advance of any form of relational determination and/or historical causality,
even in the sense of the ‘absent cause’ of structural causality.39
3. Antagonism and the subject

The refutation of the primacy of relations and of dialectical contradictions also
marks Badiou’s treatment of social antagonism and the subject. The theoretical
challenge for Marxism has not just been to present a theory of the antagonism
of political subjects, but a coherent theory of social and political dynamics
arising out of contradictory and over-determined social structures and
processes (as forms of ‘structural causality’) that offer the possibility of the
emergence of social subjects.
36. Hallward 2004, p. 13.

37. On Badiou’s disregard for socio-economic analysis, see Toscano 2004b; Hallward 2003,
pp. 279–84.
38. Toscano 2004a, p. 144.
39. For the notion of ‘structural causality’, see Althusser and Balibar 1990.
Badiou is right to emphasise that the proposition that ‘one divides into two’
marks the line of demarcation between a militant and a conciliatory point of
view.40 However, the main question facing any attempt to think a materialist
dialectic has been not only to theorise division and antagonism, but how to
think social cohesion, the ‘One’, as always traversed by contradictions and
conflicts that not only entail the possibility of rupture, but also provide its
only possibility of unstable unity.
Badiou has always been preoccupied with the notion of the subject, as a
result of both his engagement with communist forms of militancy and his
interest in the work of Lacan.41 Badiou’s emphasis has always been that the
crucial moment is that of the emergence of forms of political subjectivity.
Along with the emphasis on truth, fidelity to the event, and correct ‘naming’,
it attests to Badiou’s post-Leninism.42 Badiou’s conception of antagonism is
also based upon this conception of the subject. In its first formulation in
Theory of the Subject, it takes the form of an antagonism between the political
subject par excellence, namely the proletariat, and the current configuration of
an historical situation. Indeed, the very notion of a political subject, which, in
Badiou, is always the result of a material process related to an event and not
something ‘subjective’, is structured around the notion of the proletariat as the
transformation of the working class into a specific political subjectivity. With
this, Badiou is indeed renewing the thinking of the collective-political subject
and its constitution. It is also in line with the conception of the proletariat in
the early writings of Marx, as that which exceeds and confronts the total
configuration of capitalist social and political constitution. In the Introduction
to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx referred to the proletariat in
the following way:
[T]he formation of a class with radical chains, a class of civil society which is not
a class of civil society, an estate which is the dissolution of all estates, a sphere
which has a universal character by its universal suffering and claims no particular
right because no particular wrong but wrong generally is perpetrated against it; . . .
which does not stand in any one-sided antithesis to the consequences but in all-
round antithesis to the premises of the German state; a sphere, finally, which
cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from all other spheres of
40. Badiou 2005a, pp. 89–101.

41. In this sense, his pivotal work on the notion of the subject is indeed Theory of the Subject
(Badiou 1982; Badiou 2009d).
42. As early as 1977, Badiou insisted on referring to Maoism as post-Leninism. ‘That which
we name “Maoism” is less a final result than a task, a historical guideline. It is a question of
thinking and practicing post-Leninism’ (Badiou 2009d, p. 182).
society and thereby emancipating all other spheres of society[.] . . . This dissolution
of society as a particular estate is the proletariat.43
However, I think that the evolution of Marx’s thinking of capitalist social

relations and forms leads also to a much more complex theory of social and
political antagonism at the centre of capitalist relations of production, a theory
of the material matrix of antagonistic social practices and the agents of those
practices. It opens the way for a theory of the uneven and always over-
determined articulation of social antagonism. Productive relations determine,
in a non-linear way, the constant re-emergence of collective subjects in
conflicting social positions. These subjects are the result of those relations,
which they do not pre-exist, and are therefore mutually conditioned by social
antagonism. The constant re-emergence of collective subjects is also determined
by political antagonisms and the emergence of conflicting-ideological elements.
Following Althusser, we can say that this can lead both to the over-determination
of social contradictions and to specific forms of displacement. It can also
explain why the relation of force is always complex and uneven. For example,
after World-War Two, the general balance of forces was in favour of popular
movements, but, at the same time, was over-determined by the aspects of
bourgeois hegemony within the communist movement, leading to a crisis of
revolutionary strategy and eventually to the second defeat of the revolution in
the West. Revolutionary politics is not only about making a potentially
revolutionary subject realise its potential, display its strength and change the
given relations of force, but also about intervening in the complex articulation
of contradictions and antagonisms that create both the terrain of the struggle
and the possibility of the emergence of the revolutionary subject. It is through
the intervention in a relation that its terms are changed, with the intervention
and the change of the terms (including social and political subjects in the case
of social antagonism) being aspects of the same dialectical process. On the
contrary, Badiou, despite all of his insistence on the complexity of the processes
that lead to the division and antagonism between a genuine subject and the
situation from which it emerges, avoiding any reference to pre-constituted
social and political forces, in the end tends to underestimate this primacy of
the relation and to suggest that, in social and political antagonism, it is not the
relation that is primary, but the intrinsic force of each warring party.44 We can
say that Badiou remains within the contours of a logic of antagonism, whereas,
43. Marx 1975, p. 186.

44. Hallward 2008, p. 116.
in Marx, we can find a ‘logic of the contradiction’.45 As Balibar has suggested,

the condition for the development of a conflict is the
interiorisation of the relation itself, in such a way that the antagonistic terms
become the functions or bearers of this relation, the result being that we must see
class-relations as relations which the oppressed cannot avoid, unless they destroy
the relation of subjection itself, by this transforming themselves into individuals
other than the ones the existing relation ‘constitutes’.46
The problem here partly originates in the way in which Badiou treats the
notion of overdetermination. He refers positively to overdetermination as the
space of politics,47 but he treats it as the possibility of subjective-political
militancy and intervention.48 However, what is missing is exactly a conception
of overdetermination as the expression of the complexity of objective-causal
determination, of the historically specific and conjunctural condensation of
contradictions, of the possibility of displacements and/or ruptures and,
therefore, of the possibility of actually intervening politically in order to
change the balance of forces. Overdetermination, at least in its initial
theorisation by Althusser,49 referred to the possibility of a materialist conception
of political practice based on the complex, contradictory and, consequently,
open-to-change character of social reality, not simply to the possibility of
subjective intervention.
It is true that Badiou credits Althusser with opening the question of a
‘subjectivity without a subject’,50 but he insists that this designates a process of
thought that ‘balances over into the possible, and does so in accordance with
a partisanship, a prescription, that nothing guarantees, neither in the objective
order of the economy nor in the statist order of the subject, but which
nonetheless is capable of tracing a real trajectory in the situation.’51 Despite
the efforts by Badiou to distance his position from a subjectivist conception of
political subjectivity, I think that he is far from offering an adequate answer.
On the contrary, I think that we can still find in Althusser a highly original
conception of the ways in which particular collective ‘non-subjects’ emerge in
the over-determined terrain of the conjuncture, considered as a process without
45. Balibar 1997, p. 298.

46. Balibar 1997, p. 299.
47. ‘Overdetermination is in truth the political place’ (Badiou 2006a, p. 65).
48. ‘And it must indeed be said that overdetermination belongs to the subjective realm’.
(Ibid.).
49. For this, see Althusser 2005.
50. Badiou 2006a, p. 64.
51. Badiou 2006a, p. 66.
a subject. This position, combined with Lenin’s conception of the political

party as a knowledge-process, Gramsci’s conception of the party as a laboratory
of new forms of political intellectuality52 and Mao’s insistence on the limits of
political awareness within the terrain of the struggle and the need for constant
processes of self-criticism and self-correction, open up the possibility to truly
rethink questions of political subjectivity and agency in non-subjectivist ways.
Equally important is the absence of a theory of ideology in Badiou’s work.
This was evident even in the 1976 pamphlet on ideology,53 where Althusser’s
theory of ideology was treated as a mystification of the insurrectionary
potential of the proletarian world-view. It is true that he considers naming the
unpresented element of an evental site as the initial element of an intervention
that would lead to a new event,54 and, in Ethics, he returns to naming as a
problem, referring to forms of political ‘evil’ as false names of a situation,55 and
as the inability to articulate the truth of a situation, but we are far from a
theory of ideological practices as socially-necessary misrecognitions. In Logics
of Worlds, he introduces a categorisation of subjective positions vis-à-vis the
truth of a situation: fidelity, reaction, obscurantism, and offers four different
possibilities: production, denial, occultation and resurrection (second fidelity).
Although this description of subjective positions is fascinating as a metaphor
for what is indeed at stake in political practice, it nevertheless remains
formalistic compared with the possibility of a theory of the complex, uneven,
and always overdetermined articulation of politics and ideology offered by
both the Althusserian theory of ideology and Gramscian elaborations on the
complexity of hegemony. This absence of a theory of ideology and hegemony
and their contradictions can explain, as Alberto Toscano has demonstrated,
the problem Badiou has with theorising the possibility of reactionary-political
subjects.56 I think that a simple opposition between correct and false naming
52. See, for example, the following quotation from the Prison Notebooks: ‘One should stress
the importance and significance which, in the modern world, political parties have in the
elaboration and diffusion of conceptions of the world, because essentially what they do is to
work out the ethics and the politics corresponding to these conceptions and act as it were as their
historical “laboratory”. . . . The relation between theory and practice becomes even closer the
more the conception is vitally and radically innovatory and opposed to old ways of thinking. For
this reason one can say that the parties are the elaborators of new integral and totalitarian
intellectualities and the crucibles where the unification of theory and practice, understood as a
real historical process, takes place.’ (Gramsci 1971, p. 335, translation modified.) Hoare and
Smith use ‘intelligentsias’ instead of ‘intellectualities’, but I think that the latter is much closer to
the point. See also the French edition of the Cahiers de prison (Gramsci 1978, p. 187).
53. Badiou and Balmès 1976.
54. Badiou 2005d, p. 204.
55. Badiou 2001.
56. Toscano 2006.
of a situation cannot account for the complexity of ideological contradictions.

It cannot account for the possibility either of ideological domination or of the
emergence of antagonistic ideological practices, political discourses, and
‘knowledge-effects’ as a result of these struggles that prevent total ideological
closure. It is precisely such a conception that can account for both the potential
emergence of militant subjectivities as the contingent outcome of these
struggles and contradictions and the possibility of intervening in the terrain of
ideological class-struggle. Also missing is the very complexity of political
practice that the notion of hegemony suggests. Despite Badiou’s emphasis on
truth being at the same time singular and eternal, and his new emphasis on the
phenomenology of the appearing, we are still far from the complex articulation
of knowledge, political experimentation and social transformation within
emancipatory politics that the notion of hegemony entails.57
Consequently, Badiou’s thinking of the relation between the subject and the
situation tends to reproduce a rather idealist distinction between immanent
reality and the intervention of a – thinking – subject.58 This marks an important
contradiction in the thinking of Badiou. Badiou tries to think the possibility
of political subjectivity in an immanent, non-dualist mode, linking it to
the contours of a situation and the operations of fidelity and intervention.59
Thus, he avoids both the shortcomings of any identification of theoretical
antihumanism (the ‘death of man’) with a ‘death-of-the-subject’ position, and
the limits of Lacan’s thinking of the subject as an ‘empty’ structural position.60
However, there are aspects in his theory of subjectivisation which seem like a
more traditional dichotomy between subject and situation (or structure and
agency), with subjective decisions being at the origin of new political sequences.
This is exemplified in the way that Badiou stresses the importance of the
subject’s intervention and decision in the emergence of a new situation.61 On
the one hand, it would be unjust to accuse Badiou of decisionism,62 since he
insists that ‘[a] subject is not a result – any more than it is an origin’ and that
57. For a reading of Gramsci that stresses the theoretical complexity of the notion of
hegemony, see Thomas 2009.
58. ‘Thinking is sufficient to change the world: such is the ultimate distillation of Badiou’s
idealism.’ (Brassier 2006, p. 74.)
59. ‘[T]he subject, as local situated configuration, is neither the intervention nor the operator
of fidelity, but the advent of their Two, that is, the incorporation of the event into the situation
in the mode of a generic procedure.’ (Badiou 2005d, p. 393.)
60. On Lacan’s conception of the subject, see Lacan 1973; Žižek (ed.) 1998.
61. ‘A subject measures the newness of the situation to-come’ (Badiou 2005d, p. 406). ‘[I]t is
possible to give the following definition of a subject: that which decides an undecidable from the
standpoint of an indiscernible.’ (Badiou 2005d, p. 407.)
62. For an insistence on Badiou’s decisionism, see Žižek 1999, pp. 158–61. For a criticism of
Žižek’s position, see Power 2006.
it is ‘the local status of a procedure’,63 thus treating the subject as the effect of
material processes64 and avoiding the voluntarism of traditional decisionism.
On the other hand, the sharp dichotomy between the situation and the event,
the absence of any direct causal relation between the situation and the irruption
of the event, and the notion of subjective fidelity, can, indeed, at the end,
notwithstanding Badiou’s own precautions, over-emphasise the transformative
effects of subjective decisions. In this sense, we are still faced with radical
aporiae concerning the theory of the subject, rather than definite answers.
Badiou tends to reject a ‘programmatic’ conception of politics, which would
be based upon knowledge of the terrain of struggle, suggesting, instead, a
conception of the political intervention as a wager, where any knowledge is
possible only retroactively.
Intervention as a wager politicises a prepolitical situation by means of the

interpretation it proposes where the event is constructed . . . Therefore it is the
opposite of a savant and programmatic intervention. It does not pronounce what
must be done, but what would have been thought. This future-anterior is
constitutive, because it is in the intervention that this thought is confirmed both
in the intervening hypothesis and the direct agents of the situation.65
This is can be considered a reformulation of a materialist theory of the political

gesture, as the intervention that inaugurates a new political sequence and
marks the difference between the political and the pre-political. As an emphasis
on the possibility of radical politics in a time of crisis for revolutionary politics,
it is valuable. However, it seems like a pre-Marxist theory of politics, at least if
we consider politics inspired by Marxism as articulating the knowledge of
social relations and contradictions, the break with any form of ideological
misrecognition, the assessment of conjunctural dynamics, and the emergence
of political forms that intervene both at the level of political power-relations,
but also at the level of social relations of force. The fact that there are no
‘Archimedean points’ in the political struggle implies that it is necessary to
constantly rethink the situation and its dynamics, to always take into
consideration how the social and political forces entering the struggle are
transformed because of this participation in the struggle, to engage in practices
of self-criticism and correction. This, indeed, requires thinking in the future-
anterior, as Badiou suggests, and a need to never forget the open, contingent,
and even aleatory character of political practices. But it does not mean that it
63. Badiou 2005d, p. 392.

64. As Bosteels stresses: ‘The subject, finally, is a material process of making or doing, which
requires a putting to work of an event.’ (Bosteels 2002, p. 205.)
65. Badiou 1985, p. 107.
is impossible to combine participation in the struggle and knowledge of the

field of struggle, but also of the ways contradictory and antagonistic social
relations condition social forces.
4. Historical process and historical exception

Badiou always refers to exceptional historical events, and not to the long- or
medium-term historical processes or political projects that were at the basis of
these events. He insists on the originality of October 1917 as a political
sequence that created the possibility of a new situation, but not on the complex
and uneven articulation of political struggles, class-antagonisms and imperialist
conflicts that shaped Russian society, gave birth to Bolshevism as a political
current and created the very possibility of October 1917 as an event. Lenin’s
solitude in his thinking of the possibility of the ‘October-event’, his solitude
in the precise ‘naming’ of the situation, does not mean that ‘Red October’ was
simply an exception: it was an historical possibility, brought about both by the
condensation of contradictions in the imperialist chain and the emergence of
a revolutionary challenge to the crisis of Social Democracy (a challenge which
was itself part of the actual ‘objective balance of forces’). The same can account
for Badiou’s insistence more on the Cultural Revolution, and less on the whole
complex process of the Chinese Revolution.66 Even his reference to May 1968
takes the form of fidelity, rather than as a confrontation with the lack of a
revolutionary strategy which marked the 1970s.
The necessarily exceptional character of the event can be read in two ways.
One is to treat it as the possibility of new events, new social forms, new
political configurations, arising out of existing elements. This is indeed the
basis of revolutionary politics. However, it can also be read as a reference to
the radical contingency of historical change, in the sense of the complete
impossibility of thinking historical tendencies in advance. Although there have
been criticisms of the suggestion that Badiou treats the event as a miracle,67 the
problem of the articulation of the possibility of the event upon an actual
situation, the basis of any attempt at theorising the intelligibility of social
reality, remains open. Even the new emphasis on change in Logics of Worlds
does not lead to a re-appreciation of historical dialectics, but to a reaffirmation
66. Badiou 2010, pp. 156–67.

67. This was the reading suggested by Žižek in The Ticklish Subject (Žižek 1999). See also
Bensaïd 2004. For a criticism of this position, see Bosteels 2002. See also Hewlett’s comment
that ‘Badiou’s explanatory framework is in fact rather a static one which is not able to explain
transformation at all.’ (Hewlett 2004, p. 346.)
of the insistence on the event as exception and radical break, as the rise of
the new.68
This can also be seen in the emphasis Badiou places on the void, as that
which is subtracted from presentation and thus makes possible the intervention
that will bring forward the unpresented.69 As a reference to social reality’s
character as always open to transformation and change, it is a necessary
‘ontological’ assertion. But the question of an immanent potentiality for change
(social change as objective possibility), the main question facing political
philosophy from the Enlightenment onwards, remains open, since Badiou’s
answer does not help us to get out of the oscillation between the idealism of
the distinction between objective reality and subjective intervention and the
teleology of a dialectics of immanence and potentiality. It is true that the more
complex social ontology offered in Logics of Worlds includes reference to the
inexistent, as what is and at the same time is not in a certain world,70 marking
the possibility both of exclusion but also of emergence, but we are still far
from an answer.
No wonder that the corollary to the radical undecidability of politics is a
rather historicist or metaphysical belief in the trans-historical potential of
popular uprisings in all of human history. I refer here to Badiou’s notion of the
communist invariants introduced in his 1976 pamphlet on ideology.71
According to Badiou, communism (in the sense of egalitarian and anti-statist
aspirations) is not a singular-political project, but a universal characteristic of
all forms of popular struggle, a position to which he is still faithful.72
5. The limits of subtractive politics

This can also be seen to account for another lacuna in Badiou’s thinking of
political strategy. It is well known that Badiou’s politics, both in his writings
and in his engagement in L’Organisation Politique, has been a form of
68. On this point, see the way Slavoj Žižek opposes the notion of repetition in Deleuze
(Zizek 2007).
69. On Badiou’s treatment of the notion of the void, see Badiou 2005d, pp. 52–9. See also
the comments in Gillespie 2001.
70. ‘[G]iven an object in a world, there exists a single element of this object which inexists in
that world. It is this element that we call the proper inexistent of the object. It testifies, in the
sphere of appearance, for the contingency of being-there.’ (Badiou 2009a, p. 324.)
71. Badiou and Balmès 1976.
72. ‘From Spartacus to Mao . . ., from the Greek democratic insurrections to the worldwide
decade 1966–1976, it is and has been, in this sense, a question of communism.’ (Badiou 2003b,
p. 131.) See also the references to eternal truths in the Introduction to Logics of Worlds.
post-Maoist leftism73 with a strong emphasis on the refusal of traditional

party-building and his strong objection to trade-union activism and
participation in elections.74 I believe that this is precisely the result of his
emphasis on revolutionary change as an exceptional event, not ‘predicted’ or
‘prepared’ in advance, facilitated only by having roots in those social strata that
can be the vanguard of change, that is, the most dispossessed, oppressed and
exploited segments of the popular classes, that can indeed represent the excess
in the current social and political configuration. This thinking of the political
event rules out the possibility of actually intervening in the balance of forces,
changing the elements of the situation based on knowledge of the dynamics of
the situation, and making possible the emergence of radical change as a
material stake. On the contrary, Badiou’s thinking of the radical contingency
of the political act (or gesture) leads him to a dismissal of any form of political
representation:
We now know that the question is to get rid of a representative vision of politics.
The canonical statement by Lenin, according to which society is divided into
classes and that classes are represented by political parties is out of date. In its
essence this statement is homogenous to the parliamentary conception.75
This is a dismissal corollary to his refusal to think causal relations between

different instances of social totality. But this can be also read as a retrospective
dismissal of one of the most important theoretical reversals that Marx’s
intervention brought forward: the proposition that politics is not an
autonomous activity, but is conditioned by social relations of force.76 The
radical contingency inherent in transformative politics is not the result of the
absence of causality, but of the contradictory and ‘open’ character of social
determination. Forms of mass-political militancy and organisation (parties,
trade-unions, ‘social movements’ etc.) have not been simple reflections of
capitalist-parliamentary logic, but also forms of collective intervention that
bring forward the materiality of social antagonism.77
This raises important questions: How can we persuade ordinary people to
engage themselves, wholeheartedly, in revolutionary politics without rebuilding
their confidence in the possibility of collective struggle? How can we envisage
the possibility of a political movement that could initiate major political
73. On the notion of post-Maoism, see Bosteels 2005.

74. Organisation Politique 2001; Hallward 2002.
75. Badiou 1985, pp. 86–7.
76. On the relation between economics and politics, see Balibar 1997, pp. 26–39.
77. One should not forget that labour-parties, like the German SPD were the first mass-
parties in the strict sense.
sequences without thinking in terms of creating the organisational and political

forms of radical change, even if this means also intervening in the difficult
terrain of the political scene, including elections? How can we think the
possibility of revolutionary change without thinking the question of political
organisation as counter-hegemony and not just as collectivity?
As a result, Badiou’s conception of a politics at a distance from the state
would seem to be simultaneously a political maximalism and minimalism,
oscillating between fidelity to the possibility of change-as-radical-rupture, and
insistence on the impossibility of thinking the revolutionary subject as counter-
hegemonic alliance directed against the state. It is as if Badiou, at the same
time, tries to think politics and the limits of politics or the limits to politics.78
Part of the problem comes from the place Badiou accords to state in his
ontology. He treats the state, not as material apparatus or structure, particular
to different modes of production, but as a general meta-structure that
guarantees the ‘oneness’ of a particular historical situation.79 Badiou rejects the
classical-Marxist position, first formulated by Engels, that the state is the result
of an irreconcilable antagonism between social classes, and consequently the
conception of politics as an ‘assault against the State’.80 Instead, he insists
that ‘the State as such – which is to say the re-securing of the one over the
multiple of parts (or parties) – cannot be so easily attacked or destroyed’,81 and
he explicitly refers to the permanence of the state in post revolutionary
societies. Badiou seems to suggest that any effort to think the politics of social
change must choose between two alternatives: either we become ‘state-
revolutionaries’, entangled in the dialectics of terror and equality,82 or we limit
ourselves to a politics of local struggles, at a distance from the state, refusing
to create forms of counter-hegemonic representations and collective-political
projects aimed at taking power, and of patiently waiting to discern the
possibility of the event:
Rather than a warrior beneath the walls of the State, a political activist is a patient
watchman of the void instructed by the event[.] . . . There the activist constructs
the means to sound, if only for an instant, the site of the unpresentable, and the
means to be thenceforth faithful to the proper name that, afterwards, he or she
78. Kouvélakis 2000.

79. ‘The State is simply the necessary metastructure of every historico-social situation, which
is to say the law that guarantees that there is Oneness’ (Badiou 2005d, p. 105). On this, see also
Hallward 2003, pp. 95–100.
80. Badiou 2005d, p. 110.
81. Ibid.
82. Badiou 2006c, pp. 29–37.
will have been able to give to – or hear, one cannot decide – this non-place of
place, the void.83
There is no doubt that the mutation and collapse of ‘actually-existing’ socialism

makes necessary the restatement of the necessarily anti-statist character of any
emancipatory-political project. Badiou is right to insist that any form of
radical-political organisation must avoid the symmetry with the state-
apparatuses that have plagued the historical forms of ‘Leninist’ party-building,
although he is vague as to what might constitute the new ‘popular discipline’
he is suggesting.84 But I do not think that this must lead to an abandonment
of the thinking of both political organisation and of the question of political
power. The open challenge facing us is not to denounce the party-form, but to
rethink it and experiment with forms of collective organisation and political
representation and intellectuality that would avoid statist connotations. In the
same sense, the difficult question is not simply to dismiss any thinking about
taking power, but to reconceptualise a process of taking power that would
indeed create conditions for the re-initiation of a process of ‘withering away’
of the state. And these are not only theoretical questions, but also urgent
political exigencies. The open questions facing the attempts at genuinely left-
wing governance initiating processes of social transformation in Latin America
(Venezuela and Bolivia), the difficulties of the revolutionary process in Nepal,
the creation of revolutionary bases on the part of the Maoists in India, and, of
course, the continuing importance of the Zapatista experiment, all of these
attest to the actual urgency of questions of organisation, representation and
power.85 Compared with the impasse of a great part of the contemporary Left,
exemplified in the oscillation between the pragmatism of participation in
centre-left governments and simple anticapitalist verbalism, a politics at a
distance from the state, helping movements of resistance against capitalist
restructuring and neoliberal policies, has been more than necessary. But, at the
same time, it is still a politics within the contours of the crisis of left- or
communist strategy, not an exit from it.
And this can also be seen in Badiou’s own political practice. On the one
hand, we have Badiou as a political commentator, always ready to offer critical
answers to current questions, refusing to treat immigrants through the lenses
of a multicultural perspective, insisting on a politics of labour, criticising
Israel’s policies, resisting all forms of current racism, opposing US-imperialism,
83. Badiou 2005d, p. 111.

84. Badiou 2008a.
85. For a recent discussion of theoretical and political problems facing current discussions of
communist strategy and its relation to the state, see Bosteels 2010.
and defending the legacy of the unfinished revolutions of the twentieth

century.86 On the other hand, he does not offer any other prescriptions other
than a general call to collective action. What organisational form can a
subjective stance of fidelity take? How can we articulate social movements and
political forms of engagement? How can we think the possibility of politics
within, and, at the same time, against the state (in the sense described by
Poulantzas in State, Power and Socialism)?87 Badiou is far from offering answers
to these questions. There is no doubt that Badiou’s position is explicitly
anticapitalist. But it is not enough to actually initiate a recommencement of
emancipatory politics, precisely because his ‘minimal Marxism’88 of the refusal
of a relational and/or dialectical conception of society also leads him to a
‘minimal communism’ that defends equality and the end of exploitative and
oppressive social relations, but fails to actually define it as an historical
potentiality.
Badiou has recently insisted in defending what he terms the ‘Idea of
Communism’.89 The notion of the ‘Idea’, as defined in his Second Manifesto for
Philosophy, refers to the incorporation of an individual in a truth-process and
represents the position of subjective fidelity.90 It is the possibility of an
individual understanding that her participation in a singular political process
can also be an historical decision. It is also an insistence on the historical
possibility of new truths. At the same time, he insists that the actual balance
of forces is negative.91 That is why the question facing us today is not the
victory of the communist ‘Idea’, but to give a ‘vigorous subjective existence to
the communist hypothesis’,92 through a combination of thought-construction
and experimenting with singular, local struggles.93 We can say that the problem
86. On Badiou’s political interventions, see Badiou 2003a, Badiou 2004a, Badiou 2005b,
Badiou 2006b, Badiou 2007.
87. Poulantzas 1980.
88. On the notion of Badiou’s ‘minimal Marxism’, see Toscano 2008.
89. See Badiou 2010, Chapter 4.
90. Badiou 2009b.
91. ‘Revolutionaries are divided and only weakly organized, broad sectors of working-class
youth have fallen prey to nihilistic despair, the vast majority of intellectuals are servile.’ (Badiou
2010, p. 259.)
92. Badiou 2010, p. 260.
93. ‘By combining intellectual constructs, which are always global and universal, with
experiments of fragments of truths, which are local and singular, yet universally transmittable,
we can give new life to the communist hypothesis, or rather to the Idea of communism, in
individual consciousnesses.’ (Badiou 2010, p. 260.) ‘[I]t is not the victory of the hypothesis
which is at stake today, but the conditions of its existence. This is our task, during the reactionary
interlude that now prevails: through the combination of thought processes – always global, or
universal, in character – and political experience, always local or singular, yet transmissible, to
is that although Badiou defends the ‘communist hypothesis’ as an ideal of

emancipation and equality that can still be traced in current mass-movements,
whilst at the same time comprising a necessary form of subjective engagement,
he avoids defending what one might call the ‘revolutionary hypothesis’, the
rethinking of the possibility of a process of social transformation through the
conscious action of an organised social and political movement aiming at
social and political (counter-)hegemony. As a result, Badiou’s defence of
militant-political engagement and his plea for the articulation of universalising
thinking with the experimentation with local and singular struggles represent
necessary starting points for a possible recommencement of communist
politics, but many crucial questions remain unanswered.
What is missing is exactly a process of thinking through the complex
articulation of economics, politics and ideology that marks the originality of
the Marxist conception of political practice, a conception that at the same
time undermines the autonomy of the political, viewing the state as a result of
social antagonisms, and treats contradictions and antagonisms at the economic
level as political stakes, combining the effort to seize power with the struggle
to revolutionise social relations and forms and therefore create conditions for
the withering away of all forms of oppression. What is also missing is a thinking
through of the revolutionary party, not as apparatus or command-centre, but
as a collective process of transforming struggles and demands into political
projects and strategies, of overcoming divisions and forging alliances, of
articulating aspirations and counter-hegemonic collective representations as
ideological and theoretical demarcations, of producing concrete knowledge of
the terrain of this struggle. It is this interplay of the political and the social that
marks communist politics as revolutionäre Praxis, as the crucial step from the
(im)possibility of the event to the actuality of the communist-political project.
6. Conclusion
There is no doubt that Alain Badiou’s endeavour has been one of the most
original contributions to a materialist ontology of the political combined with
an important and eloquent criticism of all forms of sociopolitical inequality
and oppression. However, there are limits and shortcomings in this effort.
These limits, in my opinion, have to do Badiou’s distancing of himself from
Marx’s highly original conception of social relations as dialectical contradictions,
his insistence that overdetermination, and, consequently, politics belongs to
renew the existence of the communist hypothesis, in our conscience and on the ground.’ (Badiou
2008b, p. 42.)
the subjective realm, his refusal of any form of historical causality and his
conception of a ‘subtractive’ politics ‘at a distance from the state’. Badiou’s
vigorous attempt to present his schema in a more complex and dialectical
way in Logics of Worlds and his endorsement of the communist hypothesis
do not transcend these limits, which represent fundamental aspects of his
problematic.
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What Is Living and What Is Dead

in the Marxist Theory of History
Vivek Chibber
New York University
vivek.chibber@nyu.edu
Abstract
During the 1980s and 1990s, the debate on the Marxist theory of history centred largely around
the work of Robert Brenner’s property-relations-centred construal of it, and G.A. Cohen’s
attempt to revive the classical, determinist argument. This article examines two influential
arguments by Erik Wright and his colleagues, and by Alan Carling, which acknowledge important
weaknesses in Cohen’s work, but which also try to construct a more plausible version of his
theory. I show that the attempts to rescue Cohen are largely unsuccessful. And, to the extent that
they render the argument plausible, they do so at the cost of turning it, willy-nilly, into a kind of
class-struggle theory. I conclude that this spells the demise of the classical version of historical
materialism, but also observe that this does not leave us with a voluntaristic understanding of
history, as some of its defenders fear.
Keywords
Class, class-struggle, exploitation, mode of production, optimality-thesis, production-relations,
productive forces, social forms
Introduction
Over the past decade or so, the debate over the Marxist theory of history has
seemed to have run out of steam. This is not altogether surprising, given
the enormous energy that poured into the issue for around a quarter of a
century – no debate can last forever. On the other hand, lulls such as this can
be taken as an opportunity to take stock, as it were.1 This is especially true of
the debate on historical materialism, as this is an area where the protagonists
have striven to maintain clarity, and scrupulously followed the thread of one
1. I would like to thank Charles Post, Erik Wright and Robert Brenner for their extensive
comments on earlier versions of this paper, and also the Historical Materialism board. Special
thanks to Sebastian Budgen for persuading me to dust off the paper for publication. For a good
recent summing up of the debate since the 1990s, see Callinicos 2004.
V. Chibber / Historical Materialism 19.2 (2011) 60–91 61
another’s arguments. It is actually possible to chart the extent to which

particular propositions have withstood scrutiny, and contending arguments
held their ground successfully. Much of the credit for instilling this culture
into Marxist debates must go to G.A. Cohen, whose book Karl Marx’s Theory
of History: A Defence almost single-handedly elevated the quality of arguments
around the issue.2 Indeed, the recent publication of a new edition of his book
offers an opportune moment to see where the theory stands.3
Cohen’s book was not merely noteworthy for the clarity and force with
which it presented its case. It also had the distinction of resuscitating a version
of historical materialism that had, by the late 1970s, fallen into disrepute. This
was, of course, the canonical version of the theory – as elaborated by Engels in
the Anti-Dühring and popularised, above all, by Plekhanov at the turn of the
century – which pointed to human-productive forces as the engine which
drove history. For more than half of the twentieth century, canonical historical
materialism was taken as the natural interpretation of Marx’s rather elusive
claims to having a distinct theory of historical development. It had become
the common sense of official, as well as dissident, Marxism. It was only in the
1960s, partly under the influence of Maoism, partly in celebration of the
recent anticolonial movements, that this theory came under attack – not only
by the mainstream, but also by the New Left. Technological-determinist
historical materialism was now countered by a version which elevated class-
struggle to a position of primacy. The theorists who gained popularity within
the New Left – Althusser, Gramsci, Habermas and others – consistently
downplayed the importance of the productive forces, and elevated that of class
and class-struggle, as the heart of historical materialism. Hence, by the time
that Karl Marx’s Theory of History was released, the version of historical
materialism that it was enunciating had fallen decidedly out of favour with its
constituency.
The immediate effect of Cohen’s work was to breathe new life into canonical
historical materialism – an impressive achievement in itself. But the clarity
with which Cohen presented his case also had the effect, predictably, of
revealing the theory’s weaknesses. We will examine these in some detail
presently; for now, the point to note is that, given these apparent weaknesses,
canonical historical materialism did not reclaim its status as the natural
interpretation of the Marxist theory of history. On the contrary, the class-
struggle version of historical materialism received its own boost, primarily
through the work of historian Robert Brenner. At first, his challenge was
2. Cohen 1978.
3. Cohen 2002.
62 V. Chibber / Historical Materialism 19.2 (2011) 60–91
indirect. In a highly influential series of articles, Brenner developed an account

of the European transition from feudalism to capitalism that relied very little
on the explanatory mechanisms central to canonical historical materialism.4 It
was not the developmental requirements of the productive forces that drove
the transition, but, rather, the contingent outcomes of the struggle between
lord and peasant. Soon thereafter, Brenner issued a direct challenge to Cohen
and technological determinism in two pieces, arguing, not only that the theory
was unsound, but also that it may not even have been one to which Marx
subscribed in his later years.5 At the same time, a number of criticisms of
Cohen’s work appeared, further shaking confidence in the technological-
determinist version of historical materialism he had developed.6 So, by the
end of the 1980s, the debates on the theory of history began to coalesce
around two poles – canonical historical materialism and the class-struggle
version – each of which could claim some degree of fidelity to Marx’s scattered
comments on the subject, and each of which was grounded in carefully crafted
arguments.
In this essay, I propose to take stock of the more recent attempts to
manœuvre out of the deadlock between the different versions of historical
materialism – the attempts in question are by Alan Carling and the team of
Erik Wright, Andrew Levine and Elliott Sober.7 What makes both of these
works interesting is that they recognise Brenner and Cohen as the two
contending models of historical materialism, and both advance arguments
which are located in the Cohen-Brenner debate, either explicitly (Carling), or
implicitly (Wright, Levine and Sober). Both recognise the challenges posed to
the canonical version of historical materialism by Brenner, and strain to modify
the former so as to render it immune to the criticisms in question. In the case
of Carling, this is achieved by presenting what is claimed to be a fusion of the
two models, a genuine reconciliation; in the case of Wright, Levine and Sober,
what is offered is not so much a fusion as a weaker version of Cohen’s historical
materialism, one that is more modest in its claims, and, we are informed, able
to accommodate the criticisms levelled against it. I will argue that, while the
two rescue-attempts do achieve some measure of success, in the end, they
falter in one of two ways: either they simply fail to convince, or they end up
weakening the theory’s claims so much that it loses its distinctively Marxist
flavour. What this amounts to is a verdict in favour of the alternative, class-
struggle or property-relations based version of historical materialism.
4. These are contained in Ashton and Philpin (eds.) 1985.

5. For the former, see Brenner 1986, and for the latter, Brenner 1989.
6. See, inter alia, Wright and Levine 1980; Katz 1989; Rigby 1987; Martin 1983.
7. The relevant works are Carling 1991; Carling 1993; Wright, Levine and Sober 1993.
The two components of historical materialism

That the two interpretations of historical materialism cluster around property-
relations and the propulsive development of the productive forces is not a
coincidence. In so doing, they draw upon two distinct components of the
theory itself. The Marxist theory of history in fact consists of two analytically
distinct sub-theories: one is a theory of social forms, and the other a theory of
transitions from one form to another. The former is primarily concerned with
individuating different types of social systems or modes of production; the
latter takes as its object the mechanisms by which history traverses across
modes of production. The theory of social forms is understandably taken as an
under-labourer of sorts to its more illustrious cousin: it serves to identify the
individual societal-types that have populated the historical record, analyses
their internal dynamics, and, finally, notes their sequence. Once this prepatory
labour is completed, the theory of historical transitions steps in to provide an
explanation for the overall sequence of modes of production that have been
identified. It is primarily devoted to explicating the mechanisms which kick
into play once a mode of production descends into its final crisis, and which
thus govern the consolidation of the new mode.
The theory of social forms

Marxists insist that history can be divided into discrete periods, or epochs, and
that each epoch has its own distinctive economic dynamics – or ‘laws of
motion’. The mechanisms that generate these different dynamics, and which
serve to mark off each epoch from the other, are the set of property-relations –
relations of production – prevalent at the time. Property-relations also form
the basis for class-relations.
The micro-dynamics of production-relations

At the micro-level, production-relations set what Brenner has called the ‘rules
of reproduction’ for individual agents. This they do by virtue of the fact that
property-relations, by definition, govern the distribution of productive assets
in a social order. The assets possessed by social agents determine the strategies
open to them for individual reproduction. As Erik Wright pithily remarks,
‘what you have determines what you have to do’ to make a living.8 This is a
quite powerful structural claim, namely that it is possible to predict, albeit at
a somewhat general level, the reproductive choices made by agents, on the
basis of the assets at their disposal. A rural producer with secure rights over his
8. Wright 2005.
land is likely to undertake a quite distinct economic strategy from that of a

producer who has been deprived of these rights, and so on.
Property-relations do not automatically generate class-relations. They do so
only when they assign power over assets unequally, so that one group of agents
can enforce claims on the productive activities of another.9 When the former
group can actually live on the claims it makes on the labour of the latter,
Marxists regard it as a relation of exploitation, and hence, a class-relation. The
fact that productive assets are distributed unequally means that one class can
exploit another; the precise enumeration of those rights will determine how the
one class exploits the other. So, for example, the fact that rural landlords under
feudalism enjoy superior, but not absolute, rights over land means that they
can claim some of their tenants’ labour as rent; but, because their claims are
not absolute, and peasants also have partial rights to the land through custom,
lords must wield the threat of physical force to realise their claims. This
contrasts with the rights of rural landlords under capitalism, who enjoy
exclusive rights over land; in this case, physical threats become redundant as
an enforcer of claims to rent, since eviction of peasants becomes a much more
realistic option. ‘Rent’ is thus common to both feudalism and capitalism, but
it is extracted through very different mechanisms in the two systems. A
particular kind of class-structure thus generates a corresponding régime of
exploitation.
When access to productive assets is distributed unequally, it not only locks
agents into an interdependent and exploitative relation, but, in doing so, it
ensures that the relation is fundamentally conflictual. The enforcement of
property-rights always brings with it some kind of political domination –
whether at the point of production, or at an institutional level, where property-
rights are secured. This domination – the forcible usurpation of a part of the
social product – in turn generates resistance from the producing classes. This,
in turn, requires that ruling classes secure their political domination over the
producers as a precondition for the latter’s exploitation – hence locking the
groups into an ongoing conflict. Although Marxists have been slow to recognise
this, the theory of social forms is committed to some kind of philosophical
anthropology – a minimal description of human nature – which must include
the assumption that agents have an interest in autonomy. Without the
commitment to autonomy as a basic human drive, it is impossible to justify
9. The element of coercion is, I think, necessary for any relation to be regarded a class-relation.
Purely voluntary transfers – donations, gifts, etc. – would not be considered exploitative. They
would count as class-relations only if it was discovered that their voluntary nature was an
ideological cover, and that they were systematic in their occurrence.
the idea – to which Marxists most certainly hold – that exploitation necessarily
generates resistance, and, through that, class-struggle.
Class-struggle plays a dual rôle in the theory of history. On the one hand, it
forms a fundamental axis of political conflict in any social formation.10 On the
other hand, it constitutes the means by which societies traverse from one set
of property-relations to another – it is the mechanism that drives history
forward. This should not be cause for surprise. Class-struggle concerns the
terms on which actors secure access to the means of production – the security
of their property-rights, the pitch and level of exploitation, etc. It is a natural
corollary of this that such struggles should also lead to changes in the basic
framework of property itself. This much Marxists have stressed throughout
the previous century. It is Brenner’s contribution to have argued, correctly,
I think, that, until the advent of capitalism, all previous transitions have been
unintended consequences of the defence of existing property-rights.11 Transitions
have, in turn, been catalysed by deep economic crises, during which, normal
means of surplus-extraction break down, suddenly heightening the level of
conflict between producer and rulers. The resolution to the crisis – the
re-emergence of stable surplus-extraction – need not issue in the form of new
property-relations, but it does create a window for such epochal shifts to come
about. Whether or not they occur is a contingent outcome of class-struggle.
The theory of transitions

The theory of social forms makes some fairly strong claims about the dynamics
internal to an historical epoch, and the mechanism by means of which new
social forms come about. What it has to say about transitions from one
social formation to another, however, is basically formal: that they will be
brought about by class-struggle. It has very little to say about the substantive
characteristics of the transition, and especially about the new social form. What
the new formation looks like, what its structural features will be, depends on
which class ultimately secures hegemony following a system-wide crisis.
10. This is a somewhat controversial claim, even among Marxists. Some have averred that
class-struggle ought not to be privileged above other kinds of conflict, while others maintain that
it occupies a unique space. For the purposes of this essay, it is not important which of the two is
correct. But note that, even for the defenders of the weaker claim, class-conflict may not be the
central conflict, but it must be within the set of conflicts which are deemed central to the
dynamics of a social formation. Marxists have to commit to the view that it is a fundamental
cleavage, if not the most important one.
11. Compare this with Paul Sweezy’s account of the rise of capitalism, in which lords make a
more-or-less conscious switch to new property-relations to garner higher revenues. See his
contribution to the famous Dobb-Sweezy debate, contained in Hilton (ed.) 1976.
Hence, the actual sequence of social forms cannot be predicted on the basis of
this theory alone, since it stresses the contingencies of class-struggle.
It is at this stage that the theory of transitions steps in. This component of
historical materialism is directed specifically at the moment of transition from
one mode of production to another. Its main function is to stipulate a set of
conditions which constrain the transition to a new mode of production.
Whichever set of production-relations emerges as the new dominant form –
whichever class establishes its rule – must, on this theory, exhibit certain
properties. In fact, according to the traditional theory, the successor-class is
really only constrained by one particular property: it must be a class that can
oversee the continued development of the productive forces. At any historical
juncture, this drastically narrows the range of candidates that can succeed a
crisis-ridden social formation. How narrow the constraints are depends upon
how stringently the conditions are taken to operate – how strongly the theory
is interpreted. In its weakest form, the theory simply predicts that the new
mode of production will preserve the level of development fostered by the
previous one; in its strongest form, it insists that the class that establishes its
rule will be the one suited to the most rapid development of the productive
forces. The debate on historical materialism is basically about just how strong
a claim the theory can defend.
The term ‘historical materialism’ has, over the course of the twentieth
century, loosely encompassed both of the theories just outlined. For most
Marxists of the Second International and after, there was a basic division of
labour between the two components. The theory of social forms was primarily
concerned with individuating different types of social systems or modes of
production – it would identify their distinct relations of production, show the
‘laws of motion’ and the forms of class-struggle specific to each such type, and
the manner in which the struggle between classes led to the demise of one
social order and the rise of the next. The theory of transitions served to explain
how the transitions across modes of production were non-arbitrary, in a very
specific sense: the mode of production that replaced the previous one was not
simply determined by the vagaries of class-struggle, but was constrained by the
functional requirements of the productive forces. These constraints are what
impart a certain logic to the course of history. It is not simply that history is
driven forward by the contingencies of class-struggle. The resolution to class-
conflicts at certain key-junctures – namely, when social formations descend
into crisis – is itself governed by the demands of the productive forces. The
class that wins, which establishes its rule, will be the one that conforms to
these demands. It follows that the classes which did win at key-points were the
ones most suited to this task. And this, finally, means that there is a fairly
strong determinism with regard to the trajectory of human history. If it were

to be ‘re-played’ from some initial starting-point, the observed path of
development would be relevantly similar, perhaps even identical, to the one
taken on this particular iteration. History is, in this sense, law-governed.12
What is at stake
We can now appreciate what is at stake in the debate surrounding historical
materialism. The central issue would appear to be, which of the two components
of historical materialism should bear the primary explanatory weight, the
theory of social forms, or the theory of transitions? This, in turn, would seem
to depend on just how narrow are the constraints imposed by the productive
forces on new production-relations. The stronger the constraints, the lesser the
rôle of class-struggle in explaining the movement from one historical epoch to
another.
At its strongest, the theory of transitions insists that the functional demands
of the productive forces are so strong that, when modes of production descend
into crisis, the range of possible-successor production-relations can be
narrowed down to just one – that set which is best for the further development
of the productive forces. As we shall see, this seems to be the interpretation
offered by Cohen. On Cohen’s stringently-canonical historical materialism,
once production-relations set A descends into a final crisis, the candidates for
successor production-relations are winnowed down to just one – set B, since
this is the one that is best-suited for further developing the productive forces.
Class-struggle is the mechanism which brings about the transition to B, but
the fact that B followed A was, in a sense, hard-wired into the system. The
explanation as to why mode of production B follows mode A need make no
reference to the details concerning class-struggle. The explanation of why B –
and not production-relations sets C or D – followed A has to do with the
virtuous effects of B for the productive forces. Note that, on this version of
historical materialism, each of the two components does its work in a distinct
dimension: the theory of social forms explains the dynamics within a social
form, while the transition-theory explains the movement from one social form
to another.
Now consider the consequences if we make the constraints less stringent. A
weaker claim for the transition-theory would be that the production-relations
that might replace the crisis-ridden ones are not those that are best for the
12. I do not wish for this to be taken as an invitation to a debate about laws in historical
development. I have simply tried to explain what Marxists mean when they say that there are
such ‘laws’.
productive forces’s future development, but simply those which are adequate
to the ongoing development of the productive forces – even if it is at a less-than-
maximal rate. Now, the potential-successor production-relations at particular
historical junctures will expand from one set to several sets. Note how this
affects the burden carried by each component of historical materialism.
Suppose that we are concerned with explaining the transition from social form
A to form B, just as in the previous paragraph. In the more demanding version
of transition-theory, also as outlined in the previous paragraph, B’s following
A was hard-wired into the system, since B was in fact the set of production-
relations best suited to the further development of the productive forces. But,
if we drop this assumption, then the potential successors to A now broadens
to include not only B, but also C and D, if both of these would also foster the
continued development of the productive forces – even if it is at rates that are
lower than those brought about by B. Now, class-struggle begins to loom large
as an explanation of which set of production-relations takes its place after the
demise of A. On this less-demanding version of the theory of transitions, the
set of production-relations that in fact ends up succeeding A will depend on
the facts about the class-struggle. It could be set B, but, depending on which
classes are the best-organised and manage to win over other classes, it could
also turn out to be set C or D. The functional requirements of the productive
forces now only explain the range of potential production-relations that can
succeed A; the one that actually succeeds A from within that range is to be
explained by class-struggle. The explanatory work of the class-struggle – and
hence, the theory of social forms – has dramatically expanded.
As we continue to weaken the constraints that transition-theory places on
the process of transition, the explanatory burden on the theory of social forms
increases commensurately. As we ratchet downward the demands that the
productive forces place on successor production-relations, the explanation for
which production-relations in fact replace the ones in decline will rely more
on details of the class-struggle, and less on the ‘law-like’ relation between the
productive forces and the production-relations. The range of possible ‘futures’
at any nodal point, which marks the switch from one social form to another,
increases dramatically; crucially, this means that historical materialism’s power
as a theory of the overall historical record also weakens. It can explain why
human history did turn out the way it did, post hoc; but it cannot make a
strong argument that it had to take the course that it in fact did. Had class-
movements and organisational dynamics been different, the sequence of social
formations might also have been different, and so, on that basis, the overall
trajectory of history.
These are the implications for historical materialism if the arguments in

support of a strong transition-theory cannot find secure warrant. The critical
point, then, is to examine if there is any reason to believe that the functional
requirements of the productive forces can exercise strong constraints on the
emergence of new production-relations, as history moves forward. In what
follows, we will examine what arguments have in fact been advanced – by
Cohen, Carling, and Wright, Levine and Sober – to shore up the canonical
version of historical materialism, which claims that the productive forces do
wield just such a power. Cohen and Carling try to shore up the most ambitious
version of the argument, in which the productive forces’ constraints on the
production-relations are at their narrowest. Wright, Levine and Sober,
recognising the difficulty of these arguments, respond by weakening the
claims, and by presenting an historical materialism with a less ambitious
theory of transitions. I shall show that Wright, Levine and Sober are right in
their pessimism regarding Cohen’s gambit – neither he, nor Carling, can make
a convincing case for the plausibility of canonical historical materialism. But
the remedy sought by Wright, Levine and Sober comes at a cost. Their less
ambitious version of historical materialism is certainly more plausible, but it is
one in which the explanatory weight shifts markedly away from transition-
theory, towards the theory of social forms. So, even though they advertise their
argument as a defensible version of canonical historical materialism, it is in
fact a version which cannot but rest its weight on the theory of social forms,
and not on transition-theory. In doing so, it is more plausibly an alternative to
canonical historical materialism, rather than its incarnation. What we are left
with, for all practical purposes, is a ‘class-struggle’ version of history.
Cohen’s canonical historical materialism
G.A. Cohen’s rigorous presentation of a canonical historical materialism has

generated a veritable avalanche of responses. Most of these have questioned
the defensibility of the theory as he develops it, and quite convincingly so.
I shall therefore describe his argument in summary-form, and quickly lay out
its weaknesses, since I do not say anything here that is especially novel. This
section is more in the way of a ground-clearing exercise, intended to lay the
foundation for the meat of the essay, i.e. an examination of the attempts by
Carling and Wright, Levine and Sober to salvage the theory.
It is to Cohen’s credit that he has enunciated, more clearly than anyone
before him, just what is entailed in canonical historical materialism. The
theory has conventionally been described as consisting of the following two

theses:
(i) The development-thesis: The productive forces have an autonomous

tendency to develop through history.13
The capacity to develop in this manner suggests a certain power that not only
stands independent of social structures and circumstances, but indeed stands
over them. As Cohen argues, the independent power of the productive forces
seems to be supported by the stylised fact that societal change rarely involves
a retrogression in the level of social-productive power. In fact, it appears that
social structures connected to production tend, on the whole, to be propitious
for the further development of the productive forces. From this, Cohen
suggests, we can hazard a further, stronger claim, viz.:
(ii) The primacy-thesis: The nature of the production-relations in a society is

explained by the level of its productive forces.
In Cohen’s construal, this claim involves a commitment to the presence of a

functional relation between the productive forces and the production-relations:
the latter are selected on the basis of their functionality for the further
development of the productive forces. Now, before proceeding to a discussion
of the fortunes of this theory, we should note that the primacy-thesis as
enunciated by Cohen needs amplification. As it stands, Cohen’s theory states
that the production-relations which emerge in the transition to a new mode of
production will be propitious for the further development of the productive
forces. But there may, at any time, be a variety of production-relations which
13. Cohen correctly observes that for the productive forces to have an autonomous tendency
to develop is not to be confused with the claim that the productive forces have a tendency to
develop autonomously. The latter construal can be taken to suggest that the productive forces
develop independently of the production-relations within which they are embedded. This is
impossible to maintain, since, as noted above, the structure of incentives for producers is set by
the production-relations within which they find themselves. The reproductive strategies that
they choose are thus responses to the production-relations, and it is these strategies that develop
the productive forces. In choosing the former claim, Cohen is arguing, not that the productive
forces develop autonomously of the production-relations, but, rather, that the production-
relations which endure do so because of their beneficial effect on the productive forces. The
productive forces thus develop because of the production-relations, but, if production-relations
were adopted which did not develop the productive forces, they would be discarded in favour of
more congenial ones. It is because of this power to select appropriate production-relations that
we can regard the productive forces as having an autonomous tendency to develop. See Cohen
1988, Chapter 5.
are capable of this function. It cannot be sufficient for canonical historical

materialism that the productive forces select, without further specification,
any one of these rival production-relations. As pointed out by Wright, Levine
and Sober, it would be irrational for social actors, on Cohen’s assumptions, to
choose production-relations that are anything less than the optimal for the
further development of the productive forces. Furthermore, it is insisted by
Cohen that the productive forces explain the actual production-relations in a
mode of production. And, if the selectional mechanism is not an optimising
one, then all it could explain is that the production-relations selected do not
fetter the productive forces; in other words, all that the productive forces could
confidently be said to select are any production-relations which do not further
fetter the productive forces. The theory could not explain why this set of
production-relations was in fact selected, which is in fact what it must do.14
Hence, we must add a third component to the theory:
(iii) The optimality-thesis: The production-relations selected by the productive

forces are the ones optimal for the further development of the latter.
So, canonical historical materialism asserts that the production-relations of

any mode of production endure because they are optimal for the further
development of the productive forces. Now, it follows that for this argument
to have bite, it is not enough to observe that the production-relations which
obtain with respect to a new mode of production are the best ones in the sense
just specified; it must also be shown that they were selected because they were
optimal, and not as a happy coincidence. This demands that the votaries of
canonical historical materialism adduce a mechanism capable of this sort of
discrimination. It requires the presence of some factor that serves to sift
through the existing set of possible production-relations, and selects the one
best suited for further developing the productive powers of society. In the
absence of some such mechanism, historical materialism would not have a
theory of history. It would merely have a manner of classifying the course
history has taken. It could only point out that history has developed in this
fashion, and not that it had to develop thus. Understandably, the debate on
canonical historical materialism since the publication of Cohen’s book has
largely focused on the plausibility of this assumption.
The selection of a thing on the basis of its functionality can rest on two
broad types of mechanisms: an intentional one, and what might be called a
14. See Cohen 1978, pp. 170–1. The significance of this point was first appreciated by Wright
and Levine 1980, and is amplified in Wright, Levine and Sober 1993, pp. 31–2.
Darwinian one. The former relies on the possibility of a conscious selection

made on the basis of the effects of the thing in question; the latter, on the
efficacy of a feedback-loop connecting the effects of the thing and the chances
for its reproduction, so that only those with the appropriate effect-generating
attributes survive over time. Intentional mechanisms can, in turn, be divided
into two kinds: a conspiratorial one, in which actors select institutions through
some kind of collective deliberation, and a non-conspiratorial one, in which
decisions are made individually, and aggregate into a social pattern. Certain
caricatures of classical Marxism have sometimes presented the transition to
socialism as the selection of new productive forces through a kind of working-
class conspiracy – a version of the former kind of intentional explanation. But,
while this may have a grain of plausibility as a forecast for conflict within
capitalism, it seems wildly outlandish as a general model for modal transitions.
Non-conspiratorial mechanisms, unlike their counterparts, usually take the
form of some kind of structural explanation, and are hence more plausible.
Actors are taken to have a set of preferences, and social institutions are selected
by them to the extent that they mesh with the preference-ordering. In this
case, the preference would be for institutions which optimally increase labour-
productivity.
Cohen offers an historical materialism that relies on a non-conspiratorial
intentional mechanism.15 In other words, he suggests that new production-
relations are selected by social agents on the basis of their productivity-
enhancing capacity, and that the choices are made individually.16 What is
15. This might appear as an odd assertion in light of the fact that Cohen has advertised
historical materialism as an instance of functional explanation, and these are often contrasted
with intentional explanations. Now, it is indisputable that Cohen does offer an intentional
version of his argument, once he is forced to unpack it. What is at stake, then, is whether this
means that he has abandoned his earlier commitment to the functional character of historical
materialism. I do not think anything of substance rides on the verdict to this question. If we
define functional explanations in such a fashion that they cannot advert to an intentional
mechanism in their defence, then, of course, we must conclude that Cohen, in relying on just
such a strategy, abandons the earlier commitment. This is Alan Carling’s verdict in Carling 1993,
p. 38. But if, instead, we allow that functional explanations may survive a causal rendering, then
his commitment to the former stands. Our verdict derives entirely from our definition of
functional explanations. But whatever we conclude on the matter, it carries no consequence for
the defensibility of the explanation itself.
16. Cohen 1988, pp. 89–92. In point of fact, Cohen does not say that actors actually choose
those production-relations which are optimal for the productive forces. What they in fact choose
is those production-relations which minimise their work-effort and thus maximise leisure, ceteris
paribus. It may be ventured, therefore, that what he offers is a version of a Darwinian mechanism,
in that, strictly speaking, the effect on the productive forces is, to the actors, secondary to the
effect on their work-leisure tradeoff. The effect on the productive forces just rides in the latter
and could vary independently of it. This is strictly correct, but, in the case of Cohen’s argument,
pedantic. It is certainly possible to imagine new production-relations which would decrease
implausible about this theory is not that it is impossible to imagine social

agents seeking to select from among social relations while using such a calculus;
rather, as critics have pointed out, what makes it difficult to accept is the
assumption that they will be able to do so in the manner specified. First, it is
hardly warranted to presume that a menu of options is ever presented to social
agents in the fashion required by Cohen’s theory, allowing them, not only to
simply choose from among its items, but also to reject one choice in favour of
another. In other words, agents have to be aware, not only of the possibility of
alternative production-relations, but also of their availability, and there is no
reason to assume that this will be the case. Moreover, once a set is adopted, it
will tend to generate interests in its defence, on grounds other than productivity-
maximising ones – like its effects on class-power. It follows that agents will
then organise in the defence of the less-productive production-relations, and
it is doubtful that the necessary power could consistently be mustered to
abandon one set just chosen in favour of another, suddenly more attractive
candidate, given the likely opposition.17
Cohen’s version of canonical historical materialism thus appears to flounder,
unable to bear the weight of the optimality-thesis. There are, on the face of it,
two means to salvage historical materialism in its canonical form. First, we
could try to adduce another type of mechanism capable of sustaining the
functional character of the production-relations and hence preserve the theory
in its present form; second, we could dilute the claims of the theory, so as to
render it more plausible, but also preserve its putative core. Alan Carling’s
work represents an effort at the former sort of enterprise, while Wright, Levine
and Sober present a theory which purports to accomplish the second, by
defending a weaker interpretation of the thesis about directionality. It is to
these efforts that we now turn.
Carling’s synthesis
Alan Carling has presented his version of historical materialism as not only
preserving the claim about the primacy of the productive forces, but also as a
synthesis of Brenner and Cohen. If successful, this effort can surely lay claim
work-time without developing the productive forces, simply from, say, increasing the monitoring
costs of the new ruling class, and hence making it easier for the labouring class to ‘slack’. But
Cohen clearly assumes that the minimisation is occurring through increasing labour-productivity.
In other words, this is taken as part of the preferences of the actors. Hence, in his theory, counter-
examples of the kind just offered are assumed away. To choose on the basis of effects on work-
time is just to choose on the basis of effects on productive forces. This may be wrong, of course,
but we are interested, for the moment, only in the details of his theory, not in its correctness.
17. See Carling 1993, pp. 39–40.
to having inaugurated the next stage in the Marxian research-agenda, as well

as having brought to an end one of the most important debates in recent years.
Carling’s argument proceeds in two steps: first, he provides a theory of capitalist
origins which, we are informed, seamlessly melds Cohen’s historical materialism
to Brenner’s; second, he offers a theory of capitalism’s spread which rides on
the presence of the very selectional mechanism which Cohen was unable to
adduce, and hence resuscitates canonical historical materialism.18
In Brenner’s explanation of the rise of capitalism, its occurrence in England,
as well as its non-occurrence in France and Eastern Europe, is attributed to the
diverging responses to the Black Death, which, in turn, were explained by the
different class-capacities of lords across regions. While the French lordly class
is unable to reverse peasant-proprietary rights over land, its counterpart east of
the Elbe is able to foist a new serfdom onto the peasant-producers. It is only
in England that the medieval pattern of economic growth is sundered by the
rise of new social-property relations, and this breakthrough, Brenner argues, is
made possible by the unique configuration of forces in the region: while lords
are unable to impose a new serfdom like their counterparts in eastern Germany,
they are also able to prevent the sorts of gains over the land made by French
peasants, thanks to the historical legacy of villeinage. English peasants are thus
able to escape the serfdom of their Eastern-European counterparts, but are
also unable to forestall the deepening of lordly rights over land, which eventuate
in the emergence of full-proprietary rights, and hence capitalism. The English
breakthrough is thus attributed to the fact that its lordly class was stronger
than the French, but weaker than the German; it was able to prevent the rise
of a free peasantry, but unable to drive its producers into general servitude.
Carling now submits that we can conceptualise the three cases as models,
as it were, of forms of feudal power: a ‘French’, ‘Polish’, and ‘English’ model.
Each one represents a different institutional form of feudalism, with
corresponding constellations of power and systems of organising surplus-
extraction. Assume two background-conditions: first, that, in any region
marked by different forms of feudalism, such as the model-ones just mentioned,
there is an enduring political decentralisation, which ensures a corresponding
permanence of variation in feudal forms; second, that the region is subjected
to the recurring cycle of demographic booms and busts that typified medieval-
European development. Each period of demographic collapse also weakens
existing ownership-structures and hence creates the opportunity for a
transmutation of property-relations, or of types within those relations. In a
18. Both arguments can be found in Carling 1993, although the synthesis of Brenner and
Cohen is fully developed in Carling 1991.
region marked by heterogeneous feudal forms, Carling argues, the collapse

occasioned by the demographic cycle and the class-struggle over the
re-establishment of lordly control allows for a range of possible resolutions,
from the preservation of the existing forms, to a change in their frequency, to
the transition of one of them to a new mode of production. Among the three,
Carling argues, the ‘English’ variant of feudalism is the most propitious for an
eventual transmutation into capitalism.
So long as there is an ‘English’ feudalism within the variants, and so long as
the demographic cycle continues, there will, at some point, be a breakthrough
from an English type of feudalism to capitalism. Once this initial transition is
successful, the second component of Carling’s theory swings into action.
Recall that the weakness of Cohen’s theory is that it is unable to inspire
confidence that there exists some mechanism that selects the production-
relations optimal for developing the productive forces. Carling now argues
that it is possible to imagine the presence of a Darwinian mechanism that
selects for the kind of production-relations that canonical historical materialism
requires. And this mechanism is inter-societal competition. This competition
can, it appears, take two forms: a direct economic one, such as under conditions
where capitalism enters precapitalist regions through trade or direct investment;
or, more directly, as military engagement. Societies with greater productive
efficiency are more successful in mobilising resources for war, and therefore,
over the long run, more apt to enjoy military success over rival, and less
productive, societies. Carling is somewhat opaque on this matter, but,
presumably, conquest is to be followed by a forcible imposition of the victors’
production-relations, which alter the old régime in a fashion more congenial
to growth.19 The forward-march of the productive forces thus proceeds, in this
theory, through the competition between societies endowed with different
types of production-relations.
Carling illustrates his argument by using the transition to capitalism as an
example. The assumption appears to be that this simply lays out a logic that
can be generalised to other cases of transition in history. In any geographical
zone which contains multiple units of economic systems, when a shift to
a new set of production-relations occurs in one of the units, a competitive
battle is set between it and the units with older, less-productive sets of
19. I infer this from other, more parenthetical remarks Carling makes, since he is frustratingly
vague on just how inter-societal competition conduces to replacing arthritic production-relations
with ones more congenial to growth. For example, there is nothing in his argument to exclude
the possibility that such replacement occurs through an extermination of the older production-
relations, along with the people who form their relata. This would be a direct – albeit sickening –
parallel to the story in natural selection. See Carling 1993.
production-relations – and the newer production-relations end up displacing

their rivals. But, if we pause for a moment, it would seem apparent that this
whole argument is biased by the case that has been chosen as its exemplar – the
rise and spread of capitalist production-relations. It is easy to believe that an
economic unit in which capitalism dominates will win out in its competition
with other units, because the difference in productivity between capitalism
and precapitalist modes of production is simply unprecedented. With a
difference this large, of course, capitalist production-relations will tend to
spread into other zones. But will this logic work when the competition is at
an earlier stage of history, where the difference in the level of the forces of
production was not as dramatic?
Carling is surprisingly vague on what the mechanism is that can serve to
transmit new, more congenial production-relations across the terrain of
stagnating productive forces, but it appears that the two most likely candidates
are, first, their simple imposition through military conflict; and second,
through some kind of demonstration-effect. As to the first, its success depends
on the fulfilment of two conditions: first, the society with efficiency-inducing
production-relations must be expected to win out over its less-productive
rivals, and second, the conquerors must be expected to successfully force or
induce their vanquished subjects to adopt the new production-relations.
Perhaps, when the conflict is between capitalist and feudal economies, we can
expect that, as the conflict continues, the dynamic efficiency of capitalism will
generate resources so much greater than those of the feudal one that military
success will follow. But, when the conflict is between forms of non-capitalist
class-societies, this does not seem warranted.
As Carling himself admits, there is really no reason to expect that, in military
conflicts, societies with productivity-enhancing production-relations will
consistently defeat those with arthritic ones. Apart from the vagaries of war,
the outcomes of which frequently depend on tactics, ideology, political
organisation, etc., there is in fact no reason to expect that the greater efficiency
of the new production-relations will raise the chances of success. What is more
important in such circumstances is not the efficiency of raising new resources,
but, rather, the quantum actually raised. As Carling notes, ‘a large and
lumbering empire at a low technical level might nevertheless concentrate its
forces sufficiently to overcome a small but nimble competitor at a higher
technical level’.20 But if this is true, then the case for such competition acting
as a transmission-mechanism for new production-relations is, to say the least,
considerably weakened. What war selects for most directly, is, not surprisingly,
20. Carling 1993, p. 51.

military capacity. Since such capacity is the composite outcome of a host of

factors, only one of which is productive efficiency, it cannot be expected to
select consistently in favour of the latter. But, even if societies at greater
technical levels are able to secure military victory, it is an entirely different
matter to expect that, in the postbellum-scenario, they will also be able to
impose their new production-relations on the losers. Such transformations of
the productive structure presume a capacity on the part of the victors that far
exceeds the power required to simply win in war. It presumes a state-capacity,
and a class-capacity, that beggars belief.
The problem of class-capacity and interests also undermines the case for a
second route to the imposition of new, optimal production-relations – through
a kind of demonstration-effect of better ones. It is possible to believe that
rulers will note, and even be impressed by, more-productive economies
elsewhere. It is not so easy to believe, however, that they will be so impressed
as to initiate a transformation of their own production-systems. In the first
place, since the rival economic systems rest on different production-relations,
a transition to those production-relations will involve the dismantling of the
very social relations on the basis of which these rulers maintain their power.
The likelihood of their doing so will, we can expect, be quite low. Moreover,
even if they are so inclined, it is a stretch to assume that they will, a) have the
capacity to transform the existing production-relations, and b) transform
them in the intended direction. The historical record does not lack examples
of transformations that have yielded a result very different from that which
was intended.
Carling appears aware, painfully so, that the theory of competitive selection
that he offers is in danger of being buried under a mountain of caveats.
‘Perhaps’, he submits, ‘all that can be said is that history exhibits a bias imparted
by competitive primacy; a bias weaker than a tendency but considerably
stronger than nothing at all’.21 Perhaps, but this would seem a far cry from the
canonical historical materialism that Cohen has excavated, and which Carling
so admirably tries to defend. If there is a law-like relation between the
productive forces and the production-relations which govern historical
development, it has become awfully weak – at best imbuing it, as Carling
notes, with a bias, rather than a powerful drive. The production-relations that
take their place after periods of transition cannot be expected to have been
selected by the functional requirements of the productive forces. Instead, there
would appear to be several sets of production-relations compatible with a
given level of the productive forces. It cannot be prejudged as to which ones
21. Ibid.
will win out, even through a competitive struggle between economic systems –
unless we are taking as our example the transition to capitalism. But the point
is that the direction in which this transition was resolved does not seem to be
generalisable to other instances. And, until it can be, we cannot claim to have
found a mechanism that can save Cohen’s optimality-thesis.22
Wright, Levine and Sober’s reconstructed historical materialism

If the productive forces are not successful at selecting the production-relations
optimal for a continuing development of the productive forces, then must the
Marxian commitment to a theory of historical development also be discarded?
In a series of articles subsequently collected into a book, Erik Wright, Andrew
Levine and Elliott Sober valiantly argue that it need not. Historical materialism
in its stronger form, as embodied in the optimality-thesis, may not be
defensible; a more nuanced and concessive historical materialism, however,
can retain the core of what canonical historical materialism tries to defend,
while offloading its more embarrassing baggage. Wright, Levine and Sober
take the core-motivation behind Cohen’s project to be a defence of the
directionality of history, generated endogenously through the dynamic
between the productive forces and the production-relations. If properly
reconstructed, they argue, these core-components of the theory can still be
defended. History can still be viewed as being driven through the development
of the productive forces, and the direction of this development can still be
regarded as being toward greater-and-greater productive power.
Abandoning the optimality-thesis

At the heart of Wright, Levine and Sober’s reconstruction of historical
materialism is the abandonment of the optimality-thesis. They agree, indeed
they were among the first to argue, that it cannot be assumed that there exists
any mechanism which can serve to select those production-relations optimal
for a further development of the productive forces.23 But, if the productive
22. Carling’s views have evolved since his early work. For his more recent position, see Carling
2006; Carling 2009.
23. See Wright and Levine 1980. This article was in fact the first to highlight the centrality of
the optimality-thesis for Cohen’s theory. Cohen himself did not call attention to it in his book,
although he was apparently aware of its importance. In fact, this early article was clearly more
critical of Cohen than the later incarnations. The change seems to have come around the time of
Wright’s engagement with Giddens’s work, and his defence of Marxism against the latter’s
critique. This was the first time Wright unveiled his ‘sticky-downward’ version of directionality,
which has since, well, stuck. See Wright 1983.
forces lack this capacity, then in what sense does Marxism have a theory of
history? What are the limits to the contingency that is now imported into the
theory? Wright, Levine and Sober argue that, while transitions to new modes
of production do become less predictable, there are still appreciable limits to
the possible variety of outcomes – it is not that ‘anything goes’. In particular,
while it is now possible for a larger variety of production-relations to be likely
candidates for selection, it is nonetheless also true, they argue, that the new
set will be one which, minimally, preserves the existing level of technical
development. So long as new production-relations are more likely to preserve
the existing level of development than they are to allow its regression, the
aggregate outcome will be that the productive forces’s development will be
‘sticky downwards’. This is not to say that they will never regress; such instances
of regression, however, will be historically rare, and it will be far more typical
that the productive forces will continue to advance, or, at worst, remain
stationary.
In this version of historical materialism, the theory of social forms occupies
a much more prominent position than in the version enunciated by Cohen.
Instead of there being one set of production-relations compatible with the
productive forces during a period of transition, there now emerge a range of
such sets. Which of these actually takes its place as a successor will depend on
the details of the struggle between social classes. So the explanatory burden,
when we try to apprehend the actual sequence of social formations, has already
shifted away from the theory of transitions in its classical form. The reason this
should be seen as a version of canonical historical materialism, and why it
could be seen as an interesting one, is two-fold: first, the range of production-
relations that is the ‘menu’ of options at a given juncture is still limited; it is
not the case that, once we jettison the optimality-thesis, ‘everything is possible
at every juncture’.24 Second, the limits on the range of candidates from which
a new set of production-relations will be selected are such that, whichever
production-relations take their place, they will preserve the ‘law-like’ relation
between the productive forces and the production-relations – that relation
being, of course, that the production-relations must be compatible with the
further development of the productive forces.25 This preserves what Wright,
Levine and Sober take to be the central motivation for historical materialism,
the idea that history has a clear direction, from lower to higher levels of
productivity.
24. Wright, Levine and Sober 1993, p. 90.

In the new incarnation of historical materialism, the impulse for a

continuous development of the productive forces is appreciably weaker than
in Cohen’s canonical historical materialism. It may now be possible for there
to be long expanses of history in which there is not steady technological
progress. Even in transitions to new modes of production, all that is required
is that the new set of production-relations be of a sort that resolves the problem
of incompatibility which generated the crisis. Despite this considerable
latitude, the authors argue that the theory still retains its commitment to a
directionality in history, since the following conditions obtain:
(i) The probability of remaining stationary is greater than that of regressing.

(ii) There exists some alternative set of production-relations more conducive to
developing the productive forces.
(iii) The probability of moving to this new set of production-relations is greater
than regressing.26
If these conditions obtain, then the direction of history will be from less-
productive to more-productive productive forces. And, so long as this obtains,
there also exists a determinate limit to the variety of new modes of production
possible at any given level of the productive forces; if such a limit obtains, then
the abandonment of the primacy-thesis does not imply that ‘anything goes’.
Wright, Levine and Sober are tantalisingly brief in their discussion of the new
theory, as well as in their comparison of the new product to the older one. To
appreciate the burden of the new and weaker historical materialism, it is thus
of some interest to tease out its implications.
From weak historical materialism to minimalist historical materialism

To begin, we may note that there is now an ambiguity as to the precise claim
being advanced with regard to the productive forces. Once we abandon the
optimality-thesis, there emerge two possible ‘curves’ of history’s developmental
trajectory. Weak historical materialism: the production-relations that obtain at
any given time do so because they are conducive – though not necessarily
optimal – to the ongoing development of the productive forces. Minimalist
historical materialism: the production-relations that obtain at any given time
do so because, minimally, they maintain the existing level of development of
the productive forces, even if they do not systematically develop them
further.

Weak historical materialism is the stronger of the two, of course, because it

sustains a forward-thrust for the productive forces, and, in doing so, insists
that the latter exercise a significant constraint on the menu from which new
production-relations are selected. Minimalist historical materialism endorses a
much weaker claim, namely, that the property for which the productive forces
select the production-relations is the latter’s ability to sustain the former’s level
of development. What the production-relations do, then, is prevent a regression
of the productive forces. But, precisely because of its weaker ambitions, this
minimalist historical materialism runs the danger of being of less – and perhaps
of little – interest. Whether it is of interest is a theme to which I shall return
presently. I should first like to examine whether there is enough muscle in
Wright, Levine and Sober’s theory to defend weak historical materialism over
minimalist historical materialism.
Wright, Levine and Sober do not offer any compelling reason to expect that
weak historical materialism will be more likely to be true than minimalist
historical materialism. Consider their arguments for the developmental
prospects of the productive forces. The two core-reasons adduced for why we
should expect a cumulative tendency toward development are as follows: first,
while all agents may not have an interest in advancing productivity, few agents
will benefit from its consistent reduction; second, while there will be no
pervasive social interest in reducing productivity, there is good reason to
assume that there will always be agents with an interest in increasing it.
Increasing productivity allows for the decrease of toil, and since all agents have
an interest in decreasing their own toil, they can be expected to retain new
innovations whencesoever they find them.27 Society’s productive capacity will
therefore certainly be sticky downward, and, depending on the force of the
second mechanism, have a bias toward development.
But it is precisely the force of the second mechanism that we must call into
question. It is true that agents have an interest in reducing toil, and hence in
increasing productivity. But the interest in reducing toil has also to be weighed
against other interests, which agents may regard as no less important. There is
first the issue of who benefits from the fruits of the toil. The presence of an
effectively organised lordly class, or an overweening monarchical state, may
serve to usurp enough of the new product to render the positive incentive
offered by the latter neutral. This would not only be so with regard to the
welfare-effects of their extractions, but also because of the added oppression
flowing from the increased political and military presence of the extractors.
27. Wright, Levine and Sober 1993, p. 81. Note that this claim is at the micro-level. There
may be agents who have an interest in preventing reductions in the toil of others, and hence who
could have an interest in the reduction of toil socially.
This kind of increased presence would ‘overflow’ into other dimensions, like
freedom and autonomy, which, on historical materialism’s own assumptions,
form part of the core-preferences of human agents – no less than the desire to
decrease toil. Even if we ignore such externalities, there could, and often are,
other, more direct, odious effects of new innovations, like added risks, which
producers may not be willing to take on.
Not only is there no reason to believe that agents, upon considering their
net effects, will adopt new innovations in their own work-régimes; there is
good reason to believe that there may be agents with an active interest in
preventing the adoption of such technologies by others. This is most obvious in
the case of ruling classes, who have a direct interest, for example, in preventing
the adoption of technologies that might increase the autonomy of producers,
or increase their own monitoring costs, etc. Wright, Levine and Sober gloss
over this issue by pitching their argument at the level of the agent, while
abstracting matters from the social structures in which the agents are placed.
It is certainly true that agents will be inclined to adopt innovations that reduce
their own toil, since any such reduction is in their material interest. However,
in a class-society, the reduction in toil for one group may very well increase
labour-effort for others; it could very well destabilise the process of surplus-
extraction if it results in greater power for the immediate producers. Hence, it
is entirely possible that rulers will prefer a social order that is less productive,
as long as it promises their stable reproduction.
The upshot of all this is that, absent an appropriate environment, comprised
most crucially by the type of property-relations in place, there is simply no
reason to assume that the net impact of new innovations on agents’ interests
will be such as to facilitate the consistent acceptance of new innovations. Note
that what is at stake here is not the adoption of new technologies by particular
individuals, but, rather, the presence of a mechanism that allows their spread
throughout society at large. It is for this reason that Brenner, and some of his
defenders, have insisted that absent a compulsion to innovate, producers will
opt for more conservative strategies, focused more on protecting existing levels
of welfare, as against taking the kinds of risks required for increasing it. If the
trajectory of historical development depends on the net effects of the two
mechanisms adduced by Wright, Levine and Sober, in particular on the effects
of the second, then there is scant warrant for accepting weak historical
materialism over minimalist historical materialism.
If minimalist historical materialism is the version that Wright, Levine and
Sober’s reconstruction can support, then what we are left with is not a theory
that predicts an ongoing-upward ascent of the productive forces, but one in
which the productive forces are seen to simply resist regression – their level of
development tends to be ‘sticky downwards’. But, if this is the case, then the
theory must admit to the possibility of long periods of historical stagnation –
periods of ‘steady-state’ reproduction of the productive forces.28 This need not
occur only within a mode of production. There is every reason to expect that,
in transitions to new modes of production, non-developmental production-
relations will happily combine with the productive forces, so long as they do
not force a regression upon the latter.29
The implications of a minimalist historical materialism

Now, there are two conclusions that may follow from a slide into minimalist
historical materialism. First, it may be admitted that the more powerful claims
about the constraints imposed by the theory of transitions cannot be sustained,
and that the menu of options at a given juncture in history is quite large. In
other words, the demise of canonical historical materialism could simply
be embraced. This certainly makes the theory more plausible, but it has
implications that cascade into other regions of historical materialism. Consider
what it means for the ambition to explain historical development as an artefact
of the ‘law-like’ relation between the productive forces and the production-
relations. In Cohen’s theory, part of the appeal of his claims came from the
clearly identifiable rôle that the productive forces play in historical development.
While there are other, growth-impeding factors in society which interact with
the effects of the productive forces, the latter can be confidently assumed to be
causally superior, as it were – they will have the capacity to dominate and
overcome the effects of the other mechanisms, so that the net effect will be
toward development. Cohen’s theory is, in this respect, a direct avatar of the
monist tradition of historical materialism encoded by the First International.
To admit of the possibility that production-relations might emerge which
only preserve the existing level of the productive forces – or which might even
reverse them somewhat, such as might accord with the interests of the new
ruling classes – removes this monism in favour of a more pluralist view of
causation in historical development. While the productive forces (barely)
retain their capacity toward an upward ascent, the realisation of this capacity
is now contingent upon its interaction with other mechanisms in society, and
the net outcome need not necessarily be in favour of growth.30 But if this is

29. Wright, Levine and Sober seem to recognise this possibility. See Wright, Levine and Sober
1993, pp. 37–9.
30. See the discussion of the Asiatic mode of production in Wright, Levine and Sober 1993,
p. 52, n. 11.
true, then it is hard to see why the actual course of history should be explained
by the ‘dialectic’ between the productive forces and the production-relations.
This duo now does exercise a constraint, but it is so wide as to make its
explanatory pay-off rather more meagre. The explanatory work in any concrete
analysis of historical transitions will be done, not by the causal influence of the
functional needs of the productive forces, but by the course of events as driven
by class-struggle.
A second reaction to the possible slide into minimalist historical materialism
is to claim the following: while it is indeed true that a modal crisis may not
trigger the emergence and consolidation of new, growth-enhancing production-
relations, this cannot remain an indefinite state of affairs. Sooner or later, a
class with the appropriate interests will also develop the requisite capacity.
Even more, we may presume that with each iteration of the cycle, this
probability increases, especially if the level of the productive forces is marginally
greater in each cycle.31 Hence, while the productive forces may not themselves
generate new, more-appropriate production-relations, they do serve to put
these latter on the agenda. In this case, the productive forces would still
be relevant explanatory factors in the event that new production-relations are
adopted, precisely because it was their prior development that created the
possibility for the rise of the new production-relations.
This is an argument that would parallel another argument Wright, Levine
and Sober endorse for the rise of the welfare-state. Marxists have traditionally
argued that the welfare-state is the product of class-struggle, in particular, the
growing organisational power of the working class. Their mainstream-critics
have rejected this argument, pointing out that other, non-class factors have
played a crucial rôle, a fact unjustifiably ignored by Marxists. Wright, Levine
and Sober point out that there are two dimensions to the rise of the welfare-
state, which need to be distinguished – the fact of its rise, and the variations
in its form, timing, etc. The fact that the welfare-state arose only within
capitalism, and, more specifically, the fact that it arose when it did within the
broad history of capitalism, is explained by the logic of class and class-struggle.
But the actual timing of welfare-legislation, and the varieties of such states,
may not be directly explained through class-struggle, as Marxists traditionally
tried to argue. It was the development of large working-class movements
in industrial countries which put this kind of state on the agenda; once it was
on the slate, the precise timing of its adoption, and well as the precise
institutional design it embodied, can be explained by other factors, to which
31. Erik Wright suggested this to me in comments to a paper I wrote some years ago.
non-Marxian analyses frequently allude: geopolitics, bureaucratic manœuvres,

other movements, etc.
This is the sense in which the productive forces would also operate as a
cause for the emergence of new, more propitious production-relations. In both
cases, one set of causes – the productive forces in the case of epochal transitions,
and working-class movements in the case of the welfare-state – puts new
developments on the agenda, while another set selects the particular thing
from the items on the agenda. Hence, in both cases, the former set of causes
retain explanatory relevance.
I should like to suggest that the parallel drawn is false. The force of Wright,
Levine and Sober’s argument here turns on the meaning attached to ‘putting
something on the agenda’. On their construal, it is taken to mean that the
causal agent serves as a structural cause of the outcome. In cases which embody
structural causation, the basic (structural-) causative factor is not the trigger
for the event being generated; nevertheless, an increase in the weight of the
structural cause serves to increase the likelihood of the predicted outcome.
Once the magnitude of the structural cause reaches a certain threshold-level,
it radically increases the likelihood that some trigger will bring about the
predicted outcome.
The relevance of working-class movements to the formation of welfare-
states is a successful example of structural causation. Note that, in order for
this to work, there needs to be present some mechanism which links the
structural cause – the power of the working class – to the outcome. And this
link is provided by the class-interests of the workers: given that workers have an
interest in the formation of a state which decommodifies labour-power,
insulates workers from market-fluctuations, socialises household-labour, etc.,
an increasing index of their associational power renders it more likely that that
power will be used to alter existing states toward the provision of welfare. The
actual chain of events leading to the formation of a welfare-state – by electoral
victories, enlightened bureaucratic reform, civil war, etc. – can be regarded as
beside the point. They are relevant to explaining not the fact of a welfare-state,
but its timing, particular form, and such. For explanations as to why the
welfare-states arose in the first place, all we need to know is the fact of working-
class power, and that of their interests in such states.
Now, it is not at all clear that a mechanism exists to connect the productive
forces as a structural cause with some putative triggers, which might bring
about transitions that embody the productive forces’s ‘law-like’ relation with
the production-relations. In other words, it is not possible to show that
increasing levels of the productive forces are a structural cause of the rise of
new production-relations. Consider again what the structure of the argument
needs to be: as the level of the productive forces gradually increases over time,
crises in the mode of production will be resolved in a way that makes it
more likely that a new, more congenial set of production-relations will be
established. This is, in structure, much like the case of working-class power
and the welfare-state: if the causal factor is increasing in magnitude, it increases
the chances of the kind of outcome predicted by the theory. But there is a
difference – while there is a clear mechanism in the case examined above,
which links the putative cause to its effects, it is impossible to discern a
corresponding link in the case of the productive forces. Why, in other words,
should increases in the productive forces render a new, congenial set of
production-relations more likely?
If we were to hazard a thorough symmetry with the case of the welfare-state,
the argument would have to presume an interest on the part of social actors for
new production-relations, as well as an increase in their capacity to do so.
Given this interest in new production-relations, a growth in social actors’
capacity will be used to hasten the emergence of new production-relations.
But I have already argued that, while it is true that social agents have an interest
in increased productivity, ceteris paribus, it can be, and typically is, smothered
by other interests threatened by the externalities accompanying better-
productive forces. There is, therefore, no reason to assume that the class-
situation of historical actors will include an interest in this sort of development.
Furthermore, even if such an interest does exist, there is no reason to believe
that more powerful productive forces will increase the capacity of the relevant
actors in the necessary direction. It is true that better productivity will increase
the social surplus, and hence will generate greater resources. But the distribution
of these resources cannot be taken for granted. It may just as easily flow toward
social actors with a strong interest in the reproduction of the existing order.
Hence an increase in the technical level of the productive forces will have no
determinate effect on the likelihood of new production-relations replacing the
crisis-ridden ones. It is difficult to see how this can be prejudged. If the
divergences between this case and the case of the welfare-state is as explained,
then the option of regarding the productive forces as a structural cause behind
new production-relations is not available to Wright, Levine and Sober. And, if
it cannot count as a structural cause, then to say that it puts new production-
relations ‘on the agenda’ in the sense that working-class power put the welfare-
state ‘on the agenda’ is misleading.
Hesperus is Phosphorus! Or, minimalist historical materialism is a class-struggle

theory!
Let us take stock. I have argued that, if Wright, Levine and Sober reject the
optimality-thesis, as they must if they are to salvage historical materialism,
then there are two interpretations of historical materialism available to them:
weak historical materialism, which asserts that the progression of the
production-relations in history is such that they facilitate the further
development of the productive forces, albeit not at an optimal level; and
minimalist historical materialism, which reverts simply to the assertion that
the progression of the production-relations is such that the productive forces
just do not regress. In their exposition of the new version of historical
materialism, Wright, Levine and Sober hint that the second of the two weak
versions may be the one that they will have to settle upon. It has been the
burden of my argument that, indeed, this is the version that they must accept.
On their own assumptions, it is difficult to sustain a thesis arguing for the
continual development of the productive forces through history. There is no
mechanism available that could serve to consistently select growth-enhancing
production-relations, even if these latter need not be optimal. Further, agents
may, in fact, have it in their interests to sacrifice growth-enhancing production-
relations for ones which are biased toward other interests, like stability or
political power. What remains, then, is a theory which argues that what is law-
governed in the observed course of history is merely that the production-
relations across epochs will be such that they prevent a regression in the level
of the productive forces.
The implications are far-reaching. Minimalist historical materialism is
certainly plausible as a theory of historical development. But its explanatory
power is considerably weakened for understanding the actual sequence of
social forms observed in history. This sequence cannot now be explained by
the functional needs of the productive forces. Recall that, as the set of
permissible production-relations widens so that the number of candidates
increases, the functional requirements of the productive forces recede as the
mechanism that selects for new production-relations. If the production-
relations of kind B are the ones that follow the production-relations of kind A,
then it cannot be assumed that this was because of suitability to the needs of
the productive forces. For there will also be production-relations of kind C, D,
E, etc., that conform to the requirements of preserving the existing level of the
productive forces. The fact that it was B that followed A, and not one of the
other sets, will have to be explained by some recourse to other factors – most
likely, the class-struggle. As I suggested earlier, as the potential candidates for
new production-relations increase in number, the explanatory contribution of

the productive forces decreases.
But this just amounts to saying that, as the demands on canonical historical
materialism are softened, as they are by Wright, Levine and Sober, the theory
cannot but place greater weight on the explanatory rôle of class-struggle in
explaining the actual course of historical development. In other words, as the
theory is weakened, it veers toward becoming a theory of history based on
class-struggle. The cost of making the theory more plausible is that it starts to look
more and more like a class-struggle theory of history.
Note that this does not mean that the productive forces now are rendered
irrelevant to the theory. It is that the nature of their rôle now shifts. In the
strongest version of the theory, as developed by Cohen through the optimality-
thesis, the productive forces select for the particular production-relations that
replace the ones that have fallen into crisis. But as the theory is weakened, it
cannot be assumed that the productive forces enjoy this kind of power. They
must settle, as it were, for one among a list of production-relations, all of
which have in common the needed property – which, in minimal historical
materialism, amounts to the property of preventing a regression to lower levels
of productivity. What the productive forces are doing now is not selecting for
a particular set of production-relations, but, rather, selecting against those
which would induce a regression in the level of the productive forces. The
selectional rôle of the productive forces switched from selecting for a particular
set of production-relations to selecting against a class of production-relations.
The productive forces now set the (rather wide) limit on the range of potential
production-relations that will replace the existing, decrepit ones, while the
selection from within the permissible range of production-relations will be
decided by class-struggle.
Conclusion
Historical materialism has always been marked by a kind of division of labour

between its two components, the theory of social forms, and the theory of
transitions. The debate within the Marxian tradition has been about the
specific domain of each in relation to the other. In the canonical version of
historical materialism, it was the theory of transitions which reigned supreme –
history was taken to have been driven by a law-like relation between the
productive forces and the relations of production. As human societies moved
from one mode of production to another, the economic structure which served
as the foundation for production and distribution was able to endure only so
long as it remained optimal for ongoing technological progress. In this theory,

the remit of the theory of social forms was quite limited: it was primarily to
show how the prevailing production-relations generated the characteristic
‘laws of motion’ of that mode of production, and the class-struggle that was
related to them. The explanatory function of the theory of social forms was
basically confined to dynamics within social formations. The task of explaining
why the movement from one social form to another turned out the way it
did – that was the job of the theory of transitions. The reason for this dominance
of the theory of transitions was that, during transitions from one mode to
another, the outcome of the class-struggle was ‘wired’ into the system by the
functional requirements of the productive forces. The game was fixed so that
only one set of production-relations could possibly win.
The challenge for defenders of canonical historical materialism has been to
adduce a mechanism that might account for the productive forces having such
powers to select production-relations. What I have tried to show in this article
is that Carling and Wright, Levine and Sober fail in their attempts to shore up
canonical historical materialism. On the other hand, as they steadily weaken
the claims that can be made on behalf of the productive forces, they end up
expanding the explanatory rôle of the class-struggle – the main component of
the theory of social forms. Recall that canonical historical materialism has to
commit to the view that the functional requirements of the productive forces
so constrain the production-relations that they winnow the range of candidates
down to a very small band – perhaps even down to a single set. The explanatory
weight of the productive forces is directly related to the force of its constraints
on the selection of production-relations. Carling is unable to show that
military conflict can act as an appropriate selectional mechanism. Wright,
Levine and Sober, for their part, are forced to take a weak historical materialism
as their starting-point, but, even here, I argued that weak historical materialism
must give way to a minimalist historical materialism. With this, the constraints
exercised by the productive forces must widen even further. And with each
widening of constraints, the explanatory rôle of the class-struggle increases.
Hence, by its own logic, the search for a defensible historical materialism has
led to a reversal of the balance between the theory of transitions and the theory
of social forms. Somewhat perversely, the ambition to defend canonical
historical materialism has so weakened its claims that its rival theory has
emerged as a more natural and robust choice.
Hence, Marx’s dictum, that ‘all history hitherto is the history of class-
struggle’, is the more defensible version of historical materialism. This
emphatically does not mean that the productive forces have no causal rôle in
the theory of history. The functional requirements of the productive forces are
still non-trivial – they do induce agents to reject production-relations that

would force a significant regression in technological levels. Hence, they do
impose some constraints on the range of potential production-relations during
transitions from one mode of production to another. The point is that this
constraint is now weak enough as to seldom figure in explanations of historical
transitions. The reason for this is simple: no theory of history – none, in any
case, of which I am aware – claims that significant regressions of the productive
forces are just as likely as their preservation. To the contrary, the fact that
history is marked by an overarching aggregation of technical knowledge, and
that a regression from higher to lower levels is rare, is central to two of the
most widely-regarded non-Marxian theories of history, viz. those developed
by Ernest Gellner and Michael Mann.32 Hence, when we set out to explain
why production-relations set A was followed by set B, the contrast-class against
which B’s emergence is considered will be set C, which would also have
maintained the level of the productive forces, and not sets G and H, which
would have forced a significant regression. But, precisely because these are
rarely the contrast-class, the regression-inhibiting power of the productive
forces will seldom figure in the explanation for why B followed A. We will rely,
instead, on the vicissitudes of the class-struggle.
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Explanation and the Theory of History, London: Verso.
Settling Accounts with Liberalism: On the Work

of Domenico Losurdo
Stefano G. Azzarà
University of Urbino
s.azzara@uniurb.it
Abstract
Liberalism is currently the hegemonic world-view, capable of dictating its terms even to the very
movements that antagonise it. But does the history of liberalism really coincide with that of
modern democracy? In two of his recent works, Liberalism: A Counter-History and The Language
of Empire, Domenico Losurdo demonstrates that this is not the case. At its origin, liberalism was
not a universalistic defence of the individual’s freedom. On the contrary, it represented a demand
for wresting complete self-government of civil society from the monarch. However, given that
each society is traversed by deep differences and bitter conflicts, the emancipation from absolute
power turned into the possibility for the strongest individuals and social forces to exercise an
unprecedented absolute power over subaltern classes and ‘inferior races’. It was only after the
confrontation and clash with the demands of radicalism and socialism and two world-wars that
liberal thought was forced to make peace with the principles of democracy. However,
contemporary liberalism seems to have forgotten its own most-recent achievements and to have
returned to its eighteenth-century form: will modern democracy survive this involution?
Keywords
liberalism, slavery, colonialism, radicalism, democracy, universalism
Introduction
Domenico Losurdo can be regarded as one of the most important contemporary
Italian philosophers of Marxist orientation. He is Professor of the History of
Philosophy at the University of Urbino and an internationally acclaimed
Hegel scholar, presiding over the Internationale Gesellschaft Hegel-Marx für
dialektisches Denken. His research has focused on German idealism, including
right-wing philosophers such as Nietzsche and Heidegger. Of equal importance
has been his engagement with the classical theorists of the workers’ movement,
such as Marx and Lenin, Gramsci and Lukács, in a labour of reconstruction of
historical materialism that has spanned the past thirty years. The critique of
liberalism is an important aspect of his current work. In many essays of the
S. G. Azzarà / Historical Materialism 19.2 (2011) 92–112 93
past decade, Losurdo has developed an anti-conformist critique of the history

of the liberal movement that refers to its main theorists as much as to the
concrete developments and political choices of the societies and states that
define themselves as liberal. The result is a great fresco incorporating a close
comparison of the revolutionary and the conservative wings of liberalism over
the centuries, which places in question the foundations of traditional
historiography and reveals the difficult process of the construction of modern
democracy. This critique has been developed in particular in the two books
that constitute the focus of attention of this article.
Liberal hegemony and the need for a counter-history

The Italian publication of Losurdo’s Controstoria del liberalismo spurred a lively
debate. Recently continued in Il linguaggio dell’Impero, at first sight Losurdo’s
counter-history might look like a ‘Black Book of Liberalism’.1 This was indeed
the way in which it was understood by many liberal critics who shy away from
open confrontation.2
Its real impact, however, is much wider than the list of crimes and mischief
documented by Stéphane Courtois et al., authors of the Black Book of
Communism. Its intention is also very different.
Undoubtedly, liberalism is nowadays the largely dominant world-view. Its
advocates have declared victory over all the different kinds of social conflicts that
have affected the West and the rest of the world for the past few centuries.
First, the property-owning class managed to oppose and co-opt the
European aristocracy and become dominant. Then it had the upper-hand over
the emerging movement of subaltern classes and their radical demands for
changes in social and international relations. This international conflict lasted
for a long time and became entangled with different forms of antagonism.
After the defeat of the socialist faction, ‘liberal democracy’ – its legal codes
grounded in private property and individual rights, the separation of powers
and the formalisation of conflict in representative government – was explicitly
defended as the ultimate outcome of history, the final achievement of a
multiplicity of social and political experiments over the course of human
history. Similarly, the history of the process of liberation of the colonies appears
1. Petrucciani 2005.
2. Examples of the liberal critiques of Losurdo’s book can be found in Cofrancesco 2005
and 2006; Morelli 2005; Bassani 2006; Lattieri 2006. For more sympathetic, albeit reductive,
liberal-socialist readings, see Gravagnuolo 2005 and Bedeschi 2005 (the author is an ex-Marxist
scholar of Galvano Della Volpe). See also a Catholic interpretation, in Pellicciari 2005–6. Finally,
for a more academic reading, see d’Orsi 2005.
94 S. G. Azzarà / Historical Materialism 19.2 (2011) 92–112
to clash with an objective tendency to re-colonise, which is indicative of the

liberal resolve to affirm liberal-global interests by forcedly exporting its
‘democratic’-political institutions under US-leadership.
In this context, it is hardly surprising that liberalism enjoys a solid ideological
hegemony. If socio-political conflicts are also a battle of ideas and theories,
a defeat at this level of the struggle represents an integral defeat: in the period
of the establishment of modern democracy and the emancipation from
colonialism, world-views that served as an alternative to liberalism were at the
forefront of conceptual developments and new artistic expression. Today, they
either no longer exist or, where they do, have little real effect.
What do the words ‘terrorism’, ‘fundamentalism’, ‘anti-Americanism’ and
‘anti-Zionism’ mean to the contemporary Left? The victory of liberalism is
also measured in terms of how deeply it was able to penetrate and restructure
antagonistic world-views, whether explicitly or, more often, surreptitiously,
whilst providing the whole of society and the subaltern classes with ideas with
which to perceive and understand reality, refashioning their vocabulary
according to liberalism’s own ‘lexicon’.3 In the last few decades, we have also
been witness to a revision of the interpretative paradigms of contemporary
history. So pervasive was this revision that it changed the collective imaginary
and asserted a drastic transformation of politics, social relations of power and
relations between nations. The world-wars, especially the second, were
interpreted and experienced by the anti-fascist front as a ‘social and democratic
revolution of global scope’ that brought ‘legitimacy to the revolutionary
tradition as a whole’,4 reinforcing a positive assessment of the chain of
revolutionary events running from the French Revolution to the upheavals of
the 1900s. Initially, this assessment also applied to the USSR as the latter was
part of the Anglo-American alliance against Nazism and its influence on
Western-political systems and civil societies was on the rise.
Today, in an epochal ‘historiographical and cultural turn’, ‘the historical
cycle from 1789 to 1917’,5 popular democracies and subsequent movements
of liberation from colonialism are being targeted and reinterpreted through
the category of ‘international civil war’.6 This concept, proposed by Ernst
Nolte, sharply distinguishes the Western (or Atlantic) revolutionary liberal
and democratic lineage from the ‘totalitarian’ one of Jacobin-Bolshevik
origins.7
3. Losurdo 2007, pp. ix–x.

4. Losurdo 1996b, pp. 9–11.
5. Losurdo 1996b, pp. 6–7.
6. Losurdo 1996b, p. 20. Cf. Losurdo 1996b, pp. 93ff. and Chapter III.
7. Losurdo 1996b, p. 13.
Losurdo, in Hegelian fashion, remarks about this apotheosis of liberalism –

which demands that one sign up to the principles of liberalism as a minimum
requirement for access to public discourse – that what is noted is not necessarily
known.8 His Counter-History does not aim to be an epoché of this hegemony,
but takes it seriously and questions liberalism with respect to its foundations
in, and its self-identification with, the centrality of the individual and the
history of modern freedom. After all, what does this liberalism which has
witnessed the rise of its foremost interpreters into the contemporary cultural
and political establishment actually consist of ? In recent decades, liberalism
underwent a process of involution with respect to the position it used to hold
during the twentieth century. In its current ‘neo-liberal’ mode, it is carrying
out a ‘massive purge of elements of democracy, and social democracy in
particular, from “liberal-democratic” societies’,9 thus discarding ‘everything
that the prolonged struggles of workers and people’ had introduced into
liberalism. Whilst doing so, it is also recovering many of the positions that
were typical of nineteenth-century liberalism. Instead of presenting a
periodisation and categorisation of the different tendencies underlying such a
trend, Losurdo immediately strikes at the heart of the question. Since its
origins, liberalism has been threatened by an inherent contradiction. Whilst
undoubtedly it has developed the concepts of the individual and freedom, it
seems incapable of conceiving them within the framework of a real universalism.
This contradiction can first be seen in the socio-political context of ‘liberal’
countries that from their early days witnessed theoretical debates about
freedom and were harshly confronted by the problems posed to the friends of
liberty by the presence of colonised peoples and the concrete institution of
slavery.
Slavery and genocide in the history of liberalism

A comparative appreciation of liberalism at the level of theory and political
practice10 cannot ignore its systematic entanglement with slavery and even
genocide.11 Following the uprisings against Spanish domination, Holland was
the first country to proclaim itself a ‘liberal’ order. The United Provinces
relaunched colonial expansion and engaged in intense competition with Spain
8. ‘Das Bekannte überhaupt ist darum, weil es bekannt ist, nicht erkannt’ (G.W.F. Hegel,
Phänomenologie des Geistes, Vorrede).
9. Losurdo 1994, p. 19.
10. On the programmatic use of this methodology of historical investigation, see Losurdo
1996b, pp. 33–5.
11. See Losurdo 2005, pp. 16ff.; Losurdo 2011, pp. 15ff.
over the control of the slave-trade. The same phenomenon occurred in England
after the Glorious Revolution, when, in the name of the freedom of civil
society and the interests of the individual, the political power of landowners
was established, placing rigorous limitations on the absolute powers of the
sovereign. The first move in foreign policy was to take the asiento away from
Spain and acquire the monopoly over the trade in black slaves, who were
destined for the mother country and the American colonies. Proto-liberal
England also distinguished itself by the harshness used in its subjugation of
Ireland, responding to the resistance of the local populations with systematic
oppression and massacre.12 At the level of domestic policy, this new liberal
England engaged in the promotion of primitive accumulation and the
development of industry, showing no hesitation in persecuting dispossessed
peasants and turning them into cheap labour by means of legislation that
punished vagrancy with imprisonment. In the 1800s, beggars and indigenous
populations in England were still persecuted to such an extent that they were
deprived of personal freedoms and confined to horrific workhouses, institutions
of forced labour.13 Finally, in the United States these contradictions were most
blatant.14 The United States emerged out of an act of rebellion that broke up
the unity between the liberal party and the Anglo-Saxon world, at a time when
the latter had already proclaimed itself the champion of liberty and of the
primacy of the individual, entrusted with the mission of exporting these values
to the rest of the globe where tyranny, war and oppression abounded. Colonial
powers rebelled in the name of a more accomplished liberalism, which entailed
emancipation from the despotism of the mother country and the constitution
of an entirely new, republican order founded on the representation of
individuals who were free by nature. However, the institutions of the American
republic were able to coexist with the most brutal form of slavery for over
a century, and only came to abolish it as a result of a bloody war that left
behind a persistent ‘ideology of white supremacy’15 and forms of hateful
discrimination that are yet to be overcome.16 The human nature of the
colonised people of colour was under question from the beginning of Western-
colonial expansionism. They tended to be seen as wild and dangerous beasts
whose subjugation or annihilation was not worthy of a raised eyebrow. In
12. See Losurdo 2005, pp. 21, 116–17; Losurdo 2011, pp. 19, 115–17. On the ferocious
English domination of Ireland and Scotland, see Losurdo 1996b, pp. 48–51, 71–2.
13. See Losurdo 2005, pp. 68ff., 117–20, 123ff., 180ff.; Losurdo 2011, pp. 67ff., 117–20,
123ff.
14. See Losurdo 2005, pp. 9ff.; Losurdo 2011, pp. 7ff.
15. Losurdo 1996b, p. 23.
16. See Losurdo 1996b, p. 62.
North America in particular, the celebration of the freedom of the colonist

and the civilising rôle of Christianity and the Anglo-Saxon race went hand in
hand with the genocide of Indian nations: the extermination of these infidel
savages did not seem to represent any kind of contradiction.
Losurdo suggests that these were not degenerations or empirical deviations
from otherwise-noble ideals. These practices were fully self-conscious, justified
and even theorised by the main exponens of liberal theory.17 Grotius had
already lent full legitimacy to the enslavement and extermination of pagans
and of the peoples of colonised countries who rebelled against the sovereign
and God. The ‘just war’ waged against them turned them into the victor’s
legitimate property, as a theoretical tradition from Aristotle onwards claimed.
John Locke, the main theoretician of liberalism and of the limits of sovereign
power, not only had economic interests in the slave-trade, but also affirmed
the absolute power of the master over the men-commodities he owns, a power
that grants him absolute discretion over their sale as much as their death.
Locke also participated in the drafting of the constitutional provision that
sanctioned slavery in Carolina. In Locke, Losurdo finds a shift towards
commodity-slavery along racial lines that follows a period when the borders
between slavery and its different manifestations (servitus perfecta/servitus
imperfecta), including wage-labour, were still blurred. Locke notoriously
justified the colonists’ right to expropriate the Indians of their land and of all
rights of ownership on the grounds that they are incapable of labouring, and
thus of making land profitable. This claim recurs in nearly every political
figure and intellectual who collaborated in the founding of the republic of the
United States, and among those who supported it: from the Founding Fathers
to Calhoun and beyond, the exaltation of individual and social freedom
against political power, and the hatred of the political slavery that had been
abolished in the Western hemisphere but was still present in monarchical
Europe, coexisted with a vindication of the natural legitimacy and necessity of
racial slavery.
According to Losurdo, these positions would be inexplicable without an
appreciation of the history and moral sensibility of their times: the refusal of
enslavement and genocide and the recognition of the fully-fledged humanity
of colonised people is already present in the debate that followed the conquest
of America (from Las Casas to Montaigne), with which both Locke and the
Founding Fathers were largely familiar.18
17. See Losurdo 2005, pp. 22–8, 32–6, 42–6; Losurdo 2011, pp. 22–7, 30–4, 40–4.
18. See Losurdo 2005, pp. 34, 310; Losurdo 2011, pp. 32–3, 314–15.
By the standards of the moral sensibility that was emerging in this period,
liberalism seems to take a leap backwards; unsurprisingly, a number of writers
perceived this contradiction at the time and subverted the assumption of
liberal theory and its ‘phenomenology of power’,19 in which the conflict
between freedom and slavery merely coincided with that between state and
civil society. Their hope was that a centralised political power – the crown,
government or church – could limit the unbridled exercise of power over
human property enjoyed by civil society and its strongest representatives since
the emancipation from absolutism, through despotic measures if necessary.
This was the case during the American Civil War, when those who defended
slavery in the South accused Lincoln of absolutist despotism and liberticidal
Jacobinism.20
State-power and civil society: liberalism as a ‘Herrenvolk democracy’

This brings us to the most brutal ‘paradox’ of liberalism in Losurdo’s
reconstruction.21 The question is not whether, in its early stages, liberalism
could not free itself from a pre-modern legacy. As Losurdo claims, ‘slavery
does not persist despite the success of the three liberal revolutions; on the
contrary, it reaches its highest development as a result of this success’.22 Rather
than signalling an unfinished stage of liberalism or its confutation, slavery was
a basic tenet and condition of existence of early-liberal societies. There is an
inevitable ‘connection between the permanence and reinforcement of the
institution of slavery on the one hand and the power of the organs of
representation on the other’.23
In Losurdo’s opinion, liberal civil society won out over absolutism under
extremely uneven conditions characterised by unequal social relations of
power, culture and property. In Anglo-Saxon societies there were masters and
servants, owners and slaves, peasants and wage-labourers. The break unleashed
interests and egoisms that were already widespread in society and made a
different horizontal conflict that had previously been contained more
prominent, whereby the dominant groups that had defeated absolutism no
longer tolerated any political tutelage and were free to defend existing power-
relations over other groups, sometimes using cruel forms of oppression.
19. See Losurdo 1996a, passim.

20. See Losurdo 2005, p. 8; Losurdo 2011, p. 6. Cf. Losurdo 1996b, pp. 33, 54–6, 142.
21. See Losurdo 2005, pp. 37–42; Losurdo 2011, pp. 35–40.
22. Losurdo 2005, p. 37. The three liberal revolutions are the Dutch, English and American.
23. Losurdo 2005, p. 39.
‘The rise of liberalism and the spread of the commodity of slavery based on
race were born out of a twin birth’, because the rhetoric of ‘liberty’ and of the
‘self-government of civil society’ became linked to the ‘existence of an
unprecedented absolute power’.24 This power was exceptionally brutal to slaves
and also readily exercised upon the subaltern classes of the metropolis. The
latter were dehumanised and seen as in need of tutelage; their freedom and
civil, economic and social rights – not to mention their political rights – were
hardly recognised and guaranteed, as Losurdo demonstrates in his Democrazia
o bonapartismo.25 Even some members of the ruling classes ended up suffering
the oppression of this power when they did not completely adapt to the
dominant order of property and race.26
In the Anglo-Saxon world, the severe contradiction between this situation
and liberal ideals was resolved through a double process of ‘externalisation’ of
the negative. The proud liberal self-consciousness of England repelled slavery
from the sacred soil of its free island, as a form of contamination. Excluded
‘amongst us’, slavery was confined to places where it was still needed: distant
colonies where the border between civility and barbarism was blurred and the
state of nature still reigned.27
This spatial separation of the spheres of freedom and slavery was
unacceptable for the American settlers. They claimed that with their
independence they had picked up the flag of freedom that a tyrannical England
had thrown in the mud. In this new liberal country, civil society felt on a par
with English civil society and could not tolerate being excluded from the
‘community of the free’28 and assimilated to the blacks, so these two spheres
had to be redefined in racial terms: skin-colour marked the border between
freedom and slavery. Whilst the industrialised North tried to externalise this
crude reality again and confine it to the rural South, the South could never
uproot racial slavery. On the contrary, it explicitly defended it as a ‘positive
good’,29 so much so that slavery facilitated the development of a tendency
towards egalitarian relations within white communities in the States. The clash
of these different ‘liberal’ platforms led to the American Civil War, and its
outcome forced liberalism into a U-turn and repudiation of this institution, in
a slow and uneven ‘general condemnation’.30
24. Losurdo 2005, p. 42.

25. See Losurdo 1993, pp. 21ff.
26. See Losurdo 2005, pp. 97–102; Losurdo 2011, pp. 97–102.
27. Cited in Losurdo 2005, p. 50; Losurdo 2011, p. 48.
28. Losurdo 2005, p. 51; Losurdo 2011, p. 49.
Given these premises, from their foundation to the end of the nineteenth
century the United States can hardly be regarded as a ‘liberal’ country in the
contemporary sense of the term. They were ruled by a rigid separation of the
population into closed groups, each of which was subject to different legislation
and a different order of rights and duties: the conditions of whites, free blacks
and slaves were so different that one could almost call it a caste-system. For
Losurdo and other authors, such as Van den Berghe and Fredrickson, its most
apt definition is ‘Herrenvolk democracy’: ‘a democracy which applied exclusively
to the master race’.31 This democracy operates through a movement that pivots
on the axis of a distinction between a superior white race and the black race.
Given the increase of land available as a result of the expropriation of the
Native Americans during the advance towards the Western frontier, the
discrimination against blacks and their reduction to human property also
facilitated the development of a tendency towards egalitarian relations, even
though these were not free from contradictions and conflicts based on class
and status, within the community of free whites.32 ‘The members of an
aristocracy of class or race tended to celebrate themselves as peers’33 and the
‘manifest inequality imposed on the excluded was the other aspect of the
relationship of parity established between those who enjoyed the power to
exclude inferiors’.34
A similar argument might apply to the British Empire, where an intermediate
caste of serfs was growing between the castes of free whites and black slaves,
who were mainly confined to the colonies. This growing caste was made up of
whites whose ‘freedoms’ were incomparable to those of their masters. Given
the limitations and duties to which they were subjected, they could not be
defined as free. This ‘inferior race’35 was deprived of modern freedom, or
negative freedom, and, as eugenic and social Darwinism was being developed,
some authors came to regard it as a real ‘livestock’ breeding race36 that, from
the mid-nineteenth century onwards, also included wage-labour and the vast
realm of the poor forced to beg. Clearly, the right to vote could not be granted
to this ‘infant multitude’37 lacking in culture and political discernment. ‘A sort
31. Losurdo 2005, pp. 107, 333; Losurdo 2011, pp. 107, 321. Cf. Van den Berghe 1994;
Fredrickson 1981.
32. See Losurdo 1993, pp. 36–8. On the complex evolution of the American constitution
and domestic social relations, see Losurdo 1996b, pp. 56–7 and Losurdo 1994, pp. 69ff.
33. Losurdo 2005, pp. 107–8; Losurdo 2011, p. 107. Cf. Losurdo 1996b, pp. 76–7.
34. Losurdo 2005, pp. 107–8.
35. Losurdo 1993, p. 44. Cf. Losurdo 1994, pp. 24–6; here the terms of ‘liberal racialisation’
of the ‘subclasses of society’ and the ‘losers in life’ are defined.
36. See Losurdo 2005, pp. 114–16, 212–15; Losurdo 2011, pp. 113–15, 213–17.
37. Losurdo 1993, p. 42.
of social apartheid seems to correspond to the racial apartheid’,38 whilst the

Irish population and the peoples of subjugated India take the place of blacks
and Indians. Tocqueville had already noted how in Britain an ‘aristocratic
conception of liberty’ prevailed:39 a liberty that was the privilege of the
property-owning class. Up to a point, ‘even the society which emerged in
England from the Glorious Revolution was configured as a sort of master-race
democracy’,40 with the difference that the white subaltern-classes ‘continued
to be separated from this superior class or caste by a gap similar to the one
found in a racial State’.41
A glance at international relations shows a similar phenomenon. Throughout
the centuries, the Western colonial expansionism of liberal countries resulted
in a ‘master-race democracy on a planetary scale’.42 On the one side was the
demand for freedom of movement of the great powers who had the right to
obtain resources, markets, raw materials and even a ‘living-space’ outside the
borders of their so-called civilised world. On the other side were the ‘virgin’
territories, the empty cradles of colonial land, whose population enjoyed no
recognition. They could not determine themselves or claim any right because
they lived in barbarous conditions. They could be treated according to the
most hard-and-fast paedagogical dictatorship, and their enslavement or
exploitation did not violate the principle of freedom. When they opposed an
illegitimate resistance to the providential march of liberal civility, even their
extermination became a just act. In this case, the close dialectics of inclusion
and exclusion that animates liberal theory and practice is clear: the relaunch of
colonial expansionism systematically corresponded to a social-imperialist
nationalisation of the masses which entailed the gradual inclusion of the
metropolitan subaltern classes, who were easily decapitated at the ideological
level (consider the appreciation of colonialism showed by some trends within
European socialism) and co-opted into the circle of the ‘master-race’, albeit in
a subaltern position.43 In many respects, this dialectical mechanism of
‘extension of citizenship in the capitalist metropolis and the projection of the
process of racialisation to the outside’44 led, in the aftermath of World-War
Two, to the reabsorption of the Jews and the State of Israel, previously seen as

40. Losurdo 2005, p. 124; Losurdo 2011, p. 124. Cf. Losurdo 1998, pp. 19ff.
41. Losurdo 2005, p. 124.
42. Losurdo 2005, pp. 216ff.; Losurdo 2011, pp. 219ff.
43. See Losurdo 2005, pp. 223–4; Losurdo 2011, pp. 226–7. In Losurdo 1996b, p. 106,
Rhodes is cited as saying: ‘if you want to avoid civil war’, that is, if you want to neutralise the
agitation of the workers’ and socialist movements, ‘you must become imperialists’.
44. Losurdo 1993, p. 78.
an extraneous and dangerous body in the midst of the Western community of

free peoples. This move also intensified the discrimination against Muslim and
Arab peoples who were guilty of not accepting their assigned rôle in the new
international semi-colonial order.45
Towards a redefinition of liberalism

In view of this argument, the concept of liberalism seems in need of drastic
revision. Rather than a category of the spirit, liberalism is a political movement
that emerged out of a historically determined situation, and has its basis in a
given social environment and its power-relations. As Losurdo explains, in this
political framework, the word ‘liberal’ emerged in opposition to the word
‘servile’, which described the followers of monarchical absolutism. But it also
emerged in opposition to the subaltern classes forced to lead a life that could
not be properly called human by the need for work, and in opposition to the
‘condition of servility’ in a strict sense, as the condition of the ‘plebs’.46 This
reflected a social configuration where the ‘well-off and wealthy’ enjoyed a
better education, were well-versed in the liberal arts and had no need to take
up manual labour, and so became aware of their own difference from ‘the
masses of people and their vulgarity’.47 ‘Liberals’ originally designates the
educated property-owning classes with their special interests. The term
‘emerged from a proud self-designation that was at the same time a political,
social and even ethnic connotation’ (in relation to the subalterns and especially
colonised people).48 It is a ‘movement and a party that tended to gather
together people with a “liberal education” who were authentically free and
have the privilege of being free, the “elected class”, the well-off ’.49
Here, Losurdo laments the inadequacy of the categories of traditional
historiography, and claims that the line between liberalism and conservatism,
or reaction, is blurred. Was there a clear difference between the positions of
nineteenth-century liberalism and those of Friedrich Nietzsche, a philosopher
renowned for his ferocious anti-liberalism? In the course of the evolution of
45. On the complex relations of integration and discrimination between the West and
Judaism, until the ‘Final Solution’, see Losurdo 1999c, passim; on the recuperation of Judaism
and the State of Israel within the framework of the sacred space of civilisation, see Losurdo 2007,
Chapter IV, ‘Antisemitismo’, pp. 114–52, and Chapter V, ‘Antisionismo’, pp. 153–86. On the
discrimination against the Arabs, see Chapter VI, ‘Filo-islamismo’, pp. 187–243.
46. Losurdo 2005, pp. 239–42; Losurdo 2011, pp. 242–6.
47. Losurdo 2005, pp. 240–1.
48. Losurdo 2005, p. 242.
49. Ibid.
his theory, Nietzsche was deeply motivated to write a ‘militant critique and
denunciation of the revolution and of modernity’50 in the form of a critique
and denunciation of the processes of democratisation that they had initiated.
His was a contestation of massification and homogenisation; in the name of
‘instrumental’ reason51 and principles of equality inherent to humanism and
modern ‘optimism’52 revolution and modernity had burnt the soil beneath the
genius’s feet, and hampered exceptional individuals, superior castes, and the
few fortunate examples who are worthy of the name of man and whose greater
mission is the production of culture, arts, and literature. Nietzsche’s criticism
was consonant with the parallel liberal denunciation of the radicalism spread
by the French Revolution, and with the defence of the privileges of property
and culture found in authors like Tocqueville and Constant.53 In the last phase
of his conscious life, Nietzsche came to posit, against the rebellion of subaltern
classes and modern wage-slaves, whose only reason to live was work and the
burden of social reproduction, the foundation of a ‘party of life’54 and
‘aristocratic radicalism’: the party of the well-to-do and the powerful who
neither felt guilty about their hierarchical rank nor were ashamed to reinstate
its ‘natural’ legitimacy. The Dionysian appeal to the superman, the Hellenising
fantasies of a ‘reintroduction of slavery’ in Europe and the positivist and
eugenic ‘breeding’ of a race of servants separated from one of masters signalled
the need to recognise a political programme that could ‘drastically radicalise’
the liberal positions that had been calling for the open subjugation of the
masses and the colonised peoples.55
Nietzsche invited the ruling classes to leave all reservations and moral
inhibitions behind, as these belonged to the Christian herd and universal
rationalism, and to respond to the challenge of the subaltern classes and
inferior races by waging a total war, by means of political Caesarism rather
than through compromise and consensus-democracy. In this, Nietzsche – and,
in many respects, Heidegger after him56 – was actually warning and defiantly
challenging the cowardly and ‘degenerated’ liberalism of his times.
50. Losurdo 2002, p. 900. Cf. Losurdo 1991, pp. 119ff.

51. See Losurdo 2002, pp. 1070ff. The critique of ‘calculating reason’ or the ‘hubris of reason’
would later be a Leitmotiv of Heidegger’s critique of modernity. See Losurdo 1991, pp. 22–3,
113–19, 154 and passim.
52. Losurdo 2002, p. 7.
54. Cited in Losurdo 2002, pp. 366–7.
55. Losurdo 2002, pp. 412, 651, 442.
56. See Losurdo 1991, pp. 89ff. On the affinities and differences between Nietzsche’s and
Heidegger’s ‘radical anti-modernism’, see Losurdo 1991, pp. 196ff. In Heidegger, the ‘criticism
Losurdo goes back to the core of the apparent paradox of liberalism and
reveals it to be traversed by a constitutive laceration between drives to
‘emancipation’57 and violent ‘dis-emancipation’. He had already effectively
adopted these two categories in his research on the constitution of modern
democracy. In other words, liberalism was the movement of emancipation of
both aristocracy and property-owners from the tutelage of a higher sovereign-
power and the imposition on the latter of a constitution that was agreed by
them. This emancipation did not involve the social totality: in fact, without
the exclusion of subaltern groups, popular classes, servants, slaves, and
colonised people, it would not have been possible, as it finally granted free
men a clear separation from the common people; prior to that, their shared
subjugation to the sovereign, which flattened society, had been an obstacle to
their freedom. As far as subaltern groups were concerned, one could speak of
a dis-emancipation, because the freedom of action of higher interests no longer
subjected to any constraints, whether political, cultural or religious, came to
rest on their subjugation. This entailed the ‘autonomization of the property of
those who already enjoyed recognition, of those who aspired to form themselves
into the community or caste of freemen’,58 and thus formed a ‘civil society’.
Civil society, far from being a neutral territory, ‘could in turn become the
hegemonic field of the bourgeoisie or the landed aristocracy and emerged
from a compromise between these two classes’.59
In Losurdo’s opinion, liberalism coincided with a reconfiguration of power-
relations that was founded on a clear separation between the recognised and
the unrecognised, rather than the limitation of power as such.60 On the one
hand, social relations amongst the recognised, emancipated from the absolute
power of the monarch, were increasingly free and egalitarian, and guided by a
proud individualistic affirmation of the group’s autonomy that abhorred any
constraint, whether issued by equals or by the higher power of the state. The
state was assigned the task of policing, but denied any right of intervention
that might lead to an equalisation of social disequilibrium in the sphere of civil
society. The unrecognised, on the other hand, did not gain any new liberal
right, whether civil or political, and the old power came to exercise new forms
of domination that were equally oppressive, resulting in ‘reification’61 or
of the revolutionary tradition’ is said to have found its highest expression: Losurdo 1996b,
pp. 32–3.
59. Losurdo 2005, p. 316.
60. See Losurdo 2005, pp. 180ff.; Losurdo 2011, pp. 181ff. Cf. Losurdo 1993, pp. 24–6.
‘un-specification on natural grounds’.62 But liberal consciousness did not even

perceive the fate of these social groups as a problem because its own power
rested on a drastic differentiation between a ‘sacred space’63 of equals, the
well-to-do who recognised one another and developed liberal relationships
amongst themselves, and a ‘profane space’ that was beastly and intrinsically
lacerated by conflict and negativity, where the question of freedom was not
even raised. Hic sunt leones: whoever belonged to this group, whether manual
labourer, serf, peasant, woman, Indian, black, coolie, Chinese, rogue-state,
Arab or, today, the cheap immigrant-workforce, could no longer be said to be
free, either by right, or in practice.
For this reason, liberal theory did not problematise the ‘clauses of exclusion’64
that keep a vast mass of subalterns identified at the social, national or racial
level outside of the realm of freedom. For the same reason, in European
countries, and even in England, it was possible, for a long time, to resist and
openly vindicate the ‘census-restriction’65 on suffrage. Safeguarding the divide
between the sacred and uncontaminated space and the profane space was an
absolute priority. Any attempt at destroying it, or even redefining it by forcing
its borders and opening it to the inclusion of social and ethnic dis-emancipated
social groups, would be an undue intervention of extrinsic social issues into
the political sphere66 and entail a crisis of the ruling order which had to be
carefully prevented. The demands of those excluded from the universalisation
of liberal freedom receive no recognition: all of the movements and struggles
for inclusion and the rights of modern citizenship had to be crushed with an
iron fist. They were seen as an illegitimate attack on the freedom of the only
subjectivity that liberalism knows, that of the property-owning white man. To
this purpose, the very theory that had so carefully imposed limits on the field
of intervention of political power by expelling it from the private sphere and
affirming the principle of sovereignty of civil society and the individual was
also perfectly capable of pushing for the opposite agenda. When confronted
with the ‘dead wood’67 of the ‘redskins’ and colonised people, it could easily
theorise and practice total war and genocide, exercise the purchase and selling
of slaves and black ‘human tools’, and lead the ruthless extirpation of the
62. Losurdo 1996b, p. 67.

64. Losurdo 1998, p. 19.
66. See Losurdo 2005, pp. 186ff.; Losurdo 2011, p. 188. On the separation between the
sacred space of civility and the profane realm of barbarism, see Losurdo 1996b, pp. 174–8, where
this attitude is shown to be rooted in Western culture since the times of classical-Greek
philosophy.
67. Losurdo 1999a, p. 13. Cf. Losurdo 1996b, pp. 205ff., pp. 251ff.
Jewish ‘pathogenic element’.68 The main liberal thinkers and ruling classes
always show a readiness to face the state of exception by means of a suspension
of the rule of law and the establishment of a strong personal and despotic
power, even by invoking ‘Caesarism’ and ‘dictatorship’.69 The questioning of
slavery legitimated the bloody conflict of the American Civil War. The
uprisings of subaltern peoples in Europe during the nineteenth century were
faced with a military and police repression that violated both political and
private freedoms, as well as numerous coups d’état theorised or practised by the
forces of liberalism in order to bring the revolutionary crises to a halt.70 Even
a conflict between nations that belong to the sacred space, as the experience of
the two world-wars demonstrated, called for the need of a total or totalitarian71
regimentation of civil society. This regimentation did not stop at the suspension
of rights and the introduction of measures such as deportation72 and
concentration-camps: in defiance of any presumed liberal ‘individualism’ it
relied on the enthusiastic celebration of the ‘Gemeinschaft’73 and the ‘destiny’74
of the motherland by inciting the organicist fusion of the social whole in a
‘total mobilisation’.75 An enlargement of the sacred space could only occur by
means of a selective co-optation from above operated by the ruling classes,
rather than an autonomous pressure from below carried out by excluded social
groups or subjugated nationalities.76 This significant crack in the liberal
movement would determine its evolutionary leap. The ruling classes gradually
opened the doors of freedom when they no longer had a choice, or when it
was necessary to consolidate the body of the nation or even find the lost unity
of the white people against non-Western barbarism. In these cases, the
inclusion of subaltern classes occurred passively through the development of a
68. Losurdo 1999a, p. 15. On the different forms of discrimination against Jews in Western
history, ‘anti-Judaism’, ‘Judeophobia’ and ‘anti-semitism’, see Losurdo 1999b, passim, where
Poliakov’s thesis on ‘eternal anti-semitism’ is criticised.
69. See Losurdo 2005, pp. 248ff.; Losurdo 2011, pp. 251ff. Cf. Losurdo 1993, pp. 66ff.,
97–116, 172ff.
70. See Losurdo 1993, pp. 35, 91–5, 157.
71. Losurdo criticises the wholly ideological meaning of the term ‘totalitarianism’, first used
in the Truman Doctrine to assimilate Nazism and Communism against liberal democracy, and
refers the genesis of total institutions to the colonial history of the West and liberal countries: see
Losurdo 1996b, pp. 188ff., and, in general, Losurdo 1998, passim.
72. See Losurdo 1996b, pp. 183–4.
73. Losurdo 1991, p. 41. The key-notion of all organicist and anti-modern theories is that of
‘community’, born out of liberal rhetoric: Gentz translates as ‘Gemeinschaft’ the ‘partnership’
defended by Burke in his Reflections on the Revolution in France: see Losurdo 1991, pp. 191–3.
74. Losurdo 1991, p. 4.
75. Losurdo 1991, p. 40. See Losurdo 1993, p. 165.
76. On the ‘radical’ pressure from below, see Losurdo 2005, p. 167; Losurdo 2011, p. 168.
On the evolution of liberalism, see Losurdo 2005, pp. 277–81; Losurdo 2011, pp. 280–5.
‘new mode of political and social control’, the Bonapartism that allowed
leaders to charismatically lead the masses.77
Other majority-electoral mechanisms were put in place in order to
undermine the autonomy of socialist and radical parties and to preventively
neutralise the formation of a popular majority.78 This movement of ‘passive
emancipation’ was also often associated with the revival of colonial expansionism
and fratricidal wars between liberal countries in moments of crisis when the
international borders of the sacred space were questioned. Emancipation then
turned into forms of aggressive and chauvinist nationalism, or an unbridled
‘pathos of the West and civilisation’79 that glorifies war and its rituals of
‘proximity to death’80 as an instrument of unification of the national community
(and in this, many liberal thinkers were largely in agreement with the
philosopher who was close to national socialism, Heidegger).81 This pathos fed
on fundamentalist war-myths of origins and produced conspiracy-theories
and delirious naturalistic, psychopathological and even racist visions of the
conflict between states:82 the ideology of imperialist nationalism was realised
through the drastic dis-emancipation and subjugation of other people and
countries, whose belonging to the sacred space was disputed and denied time
after time.
In conclusion, when seen in the perspective of historical revision, liberalism
seems to arise as the ‘self-consciousness of a class of owners of slaves or
servants’,83 who, at the outset of capitalism, demanded ‘self-government and
the quiet enjoyment of one’s property (including slaves and servants) against
the monarchical despotism of central powers, and for it to be sanctioned
by the rule of law’.84 Contrary to the common thesis of the liberal apologists,
Losurdo claims that liberalism is primarily ‘the theoretical tradition that most
rigorously circumscribed a restricted sacred realm’.85 Within this realm, which
is the result of a legacy that since the Old Testament was strongly rooted in the
ideology of Western culture, what matters most is not ‘the celebration of
freedom or the individual’ as such, but the ‘celebration of that community of
free individuals who define the sacred realm’ and who are increasingly distinct
from those who are relegated to the profane space.86
77. Losurdo 1993, p. 60.

78. See Losurdo 1993, pp. 55ff., 196ff.
79. Losurdo 1991, p. 68.
80. Losurdo 1991, p. 10.
84. Losurdo 2005, p. 305.
85. Ibid.
86. Ibid.
The limits and merits of liberalism: towards modern democracy

At this stage we can begin to see how disparate themes running through the
whole of Losurdo’s research come to intersect. Rather than a Manichean
doctrine or ideological polemic, Losurdo’s analysis is a comprehensive attempt
to conceptually understand history and politics. Despite its ruthlessness, the
dissection of the real movements underlying liberalism does not lead Losurdo
to misunderstand and criminalise this trend. His comparative work does not
lead one to reject its ‘merits’,87 originality and progressive characteristics.
Although, in some cases, it is presented as a reactionary movement, a rebellion
based on class, nationalist and racist egoisms against any control and limitation
from higher powers, which takes it upon itself to regulate the whole of society,
liberalism cannot simply be reduced to that.
The liberal tradition shows an ‘extraordinary flexibility,88 an ability to
modernise and defeat all of its adversaries. It has also shown a great sense of
realism in the epistemological recognition of the intrinsically contradictory
nature of social reality expressed in the ‘competition between individuals in
the market for the development of the wealth of society and the productive
forces’.89 In fact, more than any other tradition, liberalism theorised the
‘decisive problem of the limitation of power’.90 ‘The conquest of the self-
government by civil society had a genuine revolutionary significance’91 and
must be understood as a progressive trend in itself. ‘Freed from an arbitrary
power, the members of the class that seized power reciprocally safeguarded
their freedoms and respected their rules with the establishment of a
constitutional state and the advent of the liberal rule of law’,92 thus creating an
order that had not previously existed, and that was a crucial achievement for
society as a whole. This constituted one of the highest points of human history:
any political trend that addresses the question of overcoming liberalism cannot
leave aside the concomitant task of inheriting its achievements, something
that twentieth-century communism was unable to do. Despite the objections
of Losurdo’s critics, in the Counter-History and the texts of the same period,
one can find a consistent recognition of the ‘real strong points’93 of liberalism,
consonant with Losurdo’s philosophical approach to history.

89. Losurdo 2005, p. 339.
90. Ibid.
92. Losurdo 2005, p. 339.
First of all, Losurdo contests the idea of a ‘linear’94 evolution of liberalism

from a rough and unfinished pre-history, in which clauses of exclusion are
justified, to a fully accomplished modernity where generalised liberal freedom
triumphs. This apologetic account is decisively refuted by historical analysis.
The history from Locke to the democratic liberalism of the twentieth century
(which, in any case, is only a part of liberalism at a particular historical
moment) is discontinuous and fragmented into a contradictory succession of
progressive and regressive movements, an inextricable ‘web’ of pushes, leaps
towards emancipation, and equally drastic fall-backs into dis-emancipation.
Liberalism has often come to theorise and realise a widening of the sphere of
rights and freedom that hitherto excluded subaltern groups and races, but was
also often capable, when faced with historical contingencies and states of
exception, to return to ‘pure liberalism, not to be confused with democratic
liberalism’.95 During the first half of the twentieth century, attempts were
made to backtrack on the emancipation of the excluded that had been achieved
by the pressure of the working classes towards full social inclusion, and by the
movements for national liberation of colonised people. This attempt followed
the experience of colonialism and led from imperialist total war to the total
institutions of the twentieth century, when liberalism was so compromised
that it became the main agent of the so-called ‘Thirty-Years War’.96
Secondly, Losurdo claims that the idea of a ‘spontaneous development of
liberalism towards democracy’97 – argued, amongst others, by Norberto
Bobbio – is wrong.98 Far from a process of immanent evolution that slowly led
it to free itself of the clauses of exclusion that had characterised its beginnings,
liberalism univocally evolved through a clash with the outside, with the other,
and with social and political reality. Rather than the coherent unfolding of an
idea, it was a dramatic clash with the harshness of objectivity. From its
historically-determinate social genesis, liberal theory seems to suffer from the
inevitable inability of thinking the universal. The gap between sacred and
profane is constitutive of its epistemological status and makes it impossible for
liberalism to fully appreciate rights and freedoms; these are solely seen as
partial, no longer as privileges, but still exclusively belonging to those who
enjoy the recognition of the members of a community of freemen. In fact,
Losurdo accuses liberalism of ‘completely ignoring the figure of the modern
94. Losurdo 1993, pp. 34–5.

95. Losurdo 1994, pp. 38–9. Cf. Losurdo 1993, pp. 101ff., 130ff., 162ff.
96. Losurdo 1998, p. 36. For a discussion of this category, see Losurdo 1996b, pp. 135ff.
97. Losurdo 1993, p. 46.
98. See Bobbio 1984.
individual as an autonomous subject of rights’.99 Liberals’ hostile attitude to

the French Revolution and their aversion to the general principles it upheld
demonstrated how liberalism had not comprehended the universal concept of
man in its concreteness. However, the foundation for a real appreciation of
human freedom can only be the latter. One might say that liberalism contains
the form of universality as an exigency with no content, because it lacks its
bearer, that subject which is the human as such. Only when ‘contaminated by
the struggles of the democratic and socialist movement’, in a confrontation
with negativity and the actual presence of the excluded and their demands,
was the liberal tradition forced to open up its doors.100
Therefore, the objective dialectics inscribed in reality led liberalism to an
inner separation resolved in the form of ‘democratic’ liberalism. This dialectics
confronted liberalism on the one hand with the political and social radicalism
of the French Revolution and socialism, on the other hand with the struggles
for emancipation of colonised people. ‘The development of liberalism in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is explained, in the first instance, by the
struggle waged by the bipedal machines of the metropolis, on the one hand,
and slaves and colonial populations or populations of colonial origin, on the
other’.101 Losurdo consistently defends this thesis and develops it in order to
show how the building of modern democracy was not even conceivable
without the eruption of the autonomous movement of subaltern classes and
that of ‘barbaric’ peoples on the world-political scene.102 The definition of
modern democracy cannot be abstracted from the achievement of economic
and social rights and the principles of people’s self-determination. These two
revolutionary movements are parallel and intersect at their highest moments,
succeeding, for the first time, in thinking the universal concept of humanity
and practice it in its integrity. All of the principles that were compressed in the
ideological form of liberalism finally assumed a truly universal scope.
‘Contemporary democracy presupposed the overcoming of three great
discriminations (of race, census and gender) still alive and in force on the eve
of October 1917’.103 The struggle for the autonomous emancipation of
subaltern classes and of the underdogs of the colonies against the liberal clauses
of exclusion was primarily a ‘struggle for recognition’104 to achieve equal
99. Losurdo 1993, p. 48.

100. Losurdo 1994, p. 17.
103. Losurdo 1998, p. 30.
104. Losurdo 1991, p. 186.
dignity as people and eventually became the most authentic actualisation of

liberalism and the premise for democracy.
Conclusion
Here, we can trace some conclusions for this excursus, which aimed to place
the dogmatic self-consciousness of triumphant liberalism into question, and
to provide a preliminary introduction to the work of Domenico Losurdo.
Ideology-critique often runs a great risk: that of indulging in an attitude of
abstract and indeterminate negation, incapable of seeing things dialectically,
and thus of grasping the elements of truth present in the position under
critique. This is not the lesson of historical materialism. From Marx onwards,
historical materialism has taught us to walk the fine line between the critique
of modernity and the recognition of its legitimacy, that is, of the clear progress
that modernity and capitalism have signified with respect to feudalism and its
underdevelopment and villeinage. Marxian studies too often forget this lesson,
and the desire to subject to critique degenerates into a demonisation,
criminalisation and, ultimately, a subaltern misunderstanding of the object of
study, be it liberal theory or capitalist society as a whole. This signals an
unresolved relation to history that inevitably results in unsophisticated and
scientifically irrelevant analyses. A dialectical approach, as suggested by
Gramsci, is, on the other hand, fully endorsed by Losurdo, as he never sets out
to present a moralistic denunciation of liberalism as an ideological perversion
and an antechamber of terror, but aims to comprehend its genesis
materialistically, with its objective reasons and limits. It is therefore not a
matter of destroying the philosophical foundations of liberal thought in order
to go back to what preceded it. If anything, the historical premises of the
troubled evolution of liberalism and its current involution need to be
understood. The danger of detaching liberalism from democracy and returning
to eighteenth-century positions that were brutally proprietary is clear and
present. In such a scenario, modern democracy would be condemned to suffer
from a seemingly interminable illness.
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guerra», Turin: Bollati Boringhieri.
—— 1993, Democrazia o bonapartismo. Trionfo e decadenza del suffragio universale [Democracy
and Bonapartism: Triumph and Decadence of Universal Suffrage], Turin: Bollati
Boringhieri.
—— 1994, La Seconda Repubblica. Liberismo, federalismo, postfascismo [The Second Republic.
Liberalism, Federalism, Post-Fascism], Turin: Bollati Boringhieri.
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Filosofici.
—— 1996b, Il revisionismo storico. Problemi e miti [Historical Revisionism: Problems and
Myths], Rome/Bari: Laterza.
—— 1998, Il peccato originale del Novecento [The Original Sin of the Twentieth Century],
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Indian in the History of the West], Giano. Pace ambiente problemi globali, 33: 103–56.
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Anti-Semitism], I viaggi di Erodoto, 13, 38/39: 139–60.
—— 1999c, ‘La crisi del processo di emancipazione degli ebrei: per un’analisi comparata’ [The
Crisis of the Process of the Emancipation of the Jews: a Comparative Analysis], in Nel nome
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Mulino.
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The Aristocratic Rebel: Intellectual Biography and Critical Assessment], Turin: Bollati
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Lexicon of American Ideology], Rome/Bari: Laterza.
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Van den Berghe, Pierre L. 1994, Race and Racism: A Comparative Perspective, New York: Wiley.
Marx, Lenin and Pashukanis on Self-Determination:

Response to Robert Knox
Bill Bowring
Birkbeck College
b.bowring@bbk.ac.uk
Abstract
This response to Robert Knox’s very kind and constructive review1 of my 2008 book The
Degradation of the International Legal Order?: The Rehabilitation of Law and the Possibility of
Politics gives me the opportunity not only to answer some of his criticisms, but also, on the basis
of my own reflections since 2008, to fill in some gaps. Indeed, to revise a number of my
arguments. First, I restate my attempt at a materialist account of human rights. Next I explain
why, for me, the right of peoples to self-determination is absolutely central to a materialist
understanding of human rights; and also fill a serious gap in my own account in the book. This
leads me not only to a reply to Robert Knox on the question of ‘indeterminacy’ in international
law, but also to a disagreement with him on the use or misuse of the language of self-determination.
My fourth section returns to our very different evaluations of the significance and meaning of
the work of Yevgeny Pashukanis, and what, for me, is Pashukanis’s misunderstanding, for
reasons consistent with his general theoretical trajectory, of Marx and Lenin on the Irish
question. Finally, I present an outline of a re-evaluation of Marx’s principled position on
self-determination.
Keywords
Robert Knox, Bill Bowring, human rights, international law, self-determination, indeterminacy,
Pashukanis, revolutions, anticolonial struggles
My book on international law and human rights appeared in 2008.2 I have

been very fortunate indeed, in that several reviewers have taken it seriously.3
Robert Knox, who is himself a rising star of international legal theory, has
provided a second searching and thoughtful critique which reflects a continuing
and fruitful engagement between us – the first was on his Law and Disorder
1. Knox 2010.
2. Bowring 2008a.
3. See also Shaw 2009; Feldman 2008; Harvey 2008.
114 B. Bowring / Historical Materialism 19.2 (2011) 113–127
blog.4 I am therefore particularly grateful to the editors of Historical Materialism

for this opportunity to respond to him.
Symptomatic of the care with which Knox has read my book is his ready
identification5 of my central project, which is a ‘substantive account of human
rights’. This is intended by me to be a thoroughly materialist account of
human rights, eliminating any reference to the transcendent or to any reliance
on ‘human nature’, and located firmly in history, time and space.
A materialist account of human rights

A central element of my project is the identification, itself nothing new, of
three generations of human rights, each with its inception in the revolutionary
events of the 1780s, of the years following 1917 and, especially, of the great
anticolonial struggles of the post-World-War II period. Each of these inspiring
revolutionary events and the rights associated with them – the civil and
political rights of the French Revolution, the social and economic rights of the
Russian Revolution, and the third-generation rights, crowned by the right of
peoples to self-determination, and anticolonial struggles – make available to
succeeding generations a ‘symbolic capital’ upon which each may draw. In
this way, the rights in question, at first glance no more than forms of words,
mere rhetoric, acquire material force when mobilised in struggle. This is what
I mean by ‘. . . their proper status as always scandalous, the product of, and
constantly reanimated by, human struggle.’6
I further maintain that human rights are not at all like civil and criminal
law, which, in various forms, have existed (like religion) for as long as human
civilisation, and which are to be found in codified or customary forms. There
is a continuing debate, to which I have not yet contributed, as to whether
constitutional law is also the product of defining historical moments and
struggles. I have myself taught English constitutional law in the light of the
relations between England and Ireland: the defining moments of English
constitutional development map well onto the bloody attempts of England to
colonise Ireland, and it is no accident that the presiding genius of constitutional
theory in England was A.V. Dicey, a fervent opponent of Home Rule, and an
energetic Unionist.
International law also has a special status, with serious arguments, drawn
from English positivism and international-relations ‘realism’, as to whether
4. Knox 2008.
5. Knox 2010, p. 194.
6. Bowring 2008a, p. 112, as cited in Knox 2010, p. 194.
B. Bowring / Historical Materialism 19.2 (2011) 113–127 115
there is any such thing. It is my contention that the international law to which
Martti Koskenniemi referred as the ‘gentle civilizer of nations’7 or for an
imagined and reactionary version of which Carl Schmitt had such nostalgia,8
and of which the USSR had throughout its existence such a rigidly positivist
account9, was thoroughly transformed in the post-World-War II period. The
creation of the United Nations by the victorious powers – all the permanent
members of the Security Council with the exception of China were colonial
powers at the time – was almost immediately subverted and transformed by
the bloody and tumultuous anticolonial struggles. This is why I refer, in my
first chapter, to the right of peoples to self-determination as the revolutionary
kernel of international law.
It is my case that the working-out of struggles for this right dominates the
international agenda to this day. My examples in the book, drawn from
practical experience, of the Kurds and the Chechens, are but two of a myriad
all over the planet.
Much of my book – incidentally, the sequence of chapters was re-ordered,
and chapters were in the process of being added and removed until a late
stage – is devoted not only to a working-out of my theses in relation to current
events, but also to responses to some of the most cogent opposing positions,
especially those of Habermas; of the postmodernists, especially Douzinas; and
of Badiou and Žižek, upon whose work I first drew for its powerful attacks on
contemporary human-rights discourse. Knox is, however, quite right in noting
my sympathy with Badiou’s political challenge, alongside and despite his
complex ontology, in respect of which I do have reservations – for example, I
reject Badiou’s critique of Spinoza, a topic for further work.
International law and self-determination

My disagreements with Knox begin where he explains my position on
international law, and introduces my critique of Miéville and Pashukanis. My
account of self-determination begins with Lenin’s profound and detailed
polemic with Rosa Luxemburg and others, in a series of extended articles
written before World-War I.10 In short, Lenin’s principled position, put into
practice by him following 1917, and the subject-matter of his final struggle
with Stalin as graphically analysed by the late Moshe Lewin, is for me very
7. Koskenniemi 2001.
8. Schmitt 2003; Schmitt 2007.
9. Bowring 2008b.
10. See Löwy 1976, pp. 96–8, for a resounding defence of Lenin’s position.
much alive. That is why my title, The Degradation of the International Legal
Order? has a question mark – and why it is followed by a pointer to the
‘rehabilitation of law’ and the ‘possibility of politics’. It is not the principles
concerned which could be said to have undergone a process of degradation,
but the real achievements of struggle in transforming international law.
Rather than lumping together the ‘active struggle of the USSR and the
Third World’, as Knox suggests,11 I show, in Chapter 1 of my book, and my
chapter in Susan Marks’s 2008 collection, how the USSR played a thoroughly
contradictory, indeed schizophrenic rôle after Lenin’s death. On the one
hand, self-determination movements were ruthlessly repressed both within
the USSR and its sphere of interest; on the other, huge diplomatic and
material resources were directed to the anticolonial and national-liberation
movements – and to the real struggle to elevate the right of peoples to self-
determination to the status of a right in international law in the United-
Nations human-rights covenants, in 1960, 1966 and 1970.
What was missing from my book and from my Susan Marks chapter was
Issa Shivji’s splendid critique of Soviet practice. I had most certainly read this
in 1992, but had forgotten it by 2007.
Shivji is one of the most radical African specialists in law and the constitution.
His Concept of Human Rights in Africa12 is a fine exposé of the malign influence
of Western individualised human rights in Africa. In his 1991 contribution to
William Twining’s Aberdeen collection13 he was perfectly clear that the
comprehensive theorisation of the ‘right to self-determination’ was carried out
by Lenin, and was put into practice in the 1918 Declaration of Rights of the
Working and Exploited People14 which proclaimed the complete independence
of Finland, evacuation of troops from Persia, and freedom of self-determination
for Armenia. Self-determination only appeared in the UN-Charter (as a
principle, not a right) at the insistence of the Soviet delegation.15
As for its application in Africa, Shivji refers to an important passage from
the October 1917 Decree on Peace, drafted by Lenin.16
In accordance with the sense of justice of democrats in general, and of the working
class in particular, the government conceives the annexation of seizure of foreign
lands to mean every incorporation of a small or weak nation into large or powerful
11. Knox 2010, p. 196.

12. Shivji 1989.
13. Shivji 1991.
14. Lenin 1918, pp. 423–5.
15. Shivji 1991, p. 34.
16. Lenin 1917, p. 250.
state without the precisely, clearly, and voluntarily expressed consent and wish of
that nation, irrespective of the time when such forcible incorporation took place,
irrespective also of the degree of development or backwardness of the nation
forcibly annexed to the given state, or forcibly retained within its borders, and
irrespective, finally, of whether this nation is in Europe or in distant, overseas
countries.
Lenin, therefore, was for self-determination everywhere, including the Russian

Empire and, indeed, the whole of Europe. I have no doubt he would have
supported the Basques, the Kurds, the Chechens, and the Palestinians – as
well as the Irish.
Shivji argues, quite correctly, that Soviet practice following World-War II
was consistently to apply only one aspect of Lenin’s proposition, that is,
formation of states by formerly colonised people – but otherwise resolutely to
uphold, in the most conservative manner, the doctrines of territorial integrity,
state-sovereignty and non-intervention. This is the rigid positivism to which I
refer in my chapter for Susan Marks’s collection.17
For Lenin, however, self-determination was a continuing right, and could
be invoked at any time by an oppressed nation even within a sovereign state.
Shivji continued: ‘the problem in Africa has been precisely that the existing
states have not treated nations and minorities under them democratically,
hence their fear that the recognition of this “right” will lead to secession.’18
Shivji applied this analysis to Ethiopia/Eritrea and to Southern Sudan. He
argued forcefully that state-practice in Africa had isolated and absolutised only
one element in the right, the element of anticolonialism. This had ‘robbed the
right of self-determination of its fundamental defining characteristic, anti-
imperialism.’19 He concluded:
. . . the right to self-determination is a collective right. It is a continuing right, ‘a

right that keeps its validity even after a people has chosen a certain form of
government or a certain international status’.20 The right-holders in the right to
self-determination are dominated/exploited people and oppressed nations,
nationalities, national groups and minorities identifiable specifically in each
concrete situation.21
17. See Bowring 2008b.

18. Shivji 1991, p. 35.
19. Shivji 1991, p. 37.
20. See Cassese 1979, p. 150.
21. Shivji 1991, p. 43.
It was only a shame that Makau wa Mutua in his passionate 1995 article ‘Why
Redraw the Map of Africa?’22 did not refer – in his Section III, entitled ‘The
National Question and Self-Determination: Prospects for Alternative
Formulae’,23 to Shivji’s work at all, but only to the much-more conservative
and orthodox account by Abdullahi An-Na’im in Shivji’s own collection, also
published in 1991.24
The absence of indeterminacy?

Furthermore, Knox takes me to task for neglecting the debate on ‘legal
indeterminacy’.25 To which, in part, I plead guilty. The ‘indeterminacy-thesis’
holds that ‘in any given case – legal argument can serve to justify any outcome’.
Knox cites Koskenniemi, as arguing that ‘the law constantly oscillates between
the two mutually opposed poles of sovereignty and world order.’
In fact, at the page cited by Knox,26 Koskenniemi explains that there are
two ways of arguing about order and obligation in international law. The first
‘traces them down to justice, common interests, progress . . . anterior or
superior to State behaviour. . . . Another argument bases order and obligation
on State behaviour, will or interest[.]’ Which may not be quite the same
thing.
My own take on this thesis, which I have put to Koskenniemi himself – he
seemed to agree – is that writing, as he does, from the twin perspectives of
scholar and practitioner, indeterminacy properly applies to the process of
international litigation. As he puts it, ‘[t]he politics of international law is
what competent international lawyers do. And competence is the ability to use
grammar in order to generate meaning by doing things in argument’27 (his
emphasis). Thus, the lawyers on each side of a case, and the judge(s), have in
common their membership of an epistemic community, users of the language
that must be used in order to participate in the process at all. Both sides
advance the most convincing – and competent – argument they can. And the
outcome is wholly indeterminate – the case can go either way. Otherwise,
there would be no point in litigating. Koskenniemi also pointed out that ‘the
other ambition in From Apology to Utopia looked beyond description. It was
to provide resources for the use of international law’s professional vocabulary
22. Wa Mutua 1995.

23. Wa Mutua 1995, p. 1150.
24. An-Na’im 1991, pp. 101–2.
25. Knox 2010, p. 197.
26. Koskenniemi 2005, p. 59.
for critical or emancipatory causes.’28 I have no problem with either of these

propositions. The first describes what I do when I and my colleagues argue a
case at the European Court of Human Rights. The second is what I try to do
in my own book, on the basis of a thoroughly materialist and historicised
account of international law – and its revolutionary kernel. As Koskenniemi
himself freely admits, he is not a Marxist. But he combines the experience of
practice with a fine critical scepticism as to international law. And it is no
surprise to me that competent scholars of international law are well able to
argue a position which is the opposite of the one I take. For me, the historical
outcome will be determined by politics, not by doctrine; and for that very
reason is entirely indeterminate. We do not know which side will win.
Immediately following his criticism as to indeterminacy, Knox charges me
with silence as to the invocation of self-determination by various imperialist
powers.29 He cites the 2008 Russia-Georgia War, and states that Russia
invaded Georgia ‘under the rationale (amongst others) of defending the right
to self-determination of Abkhazia’s ethnic Russians’. This is simply not the
case.30 It is now firmly established31 that Georgia started the conflict by
attacking Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia, which is part of Georgian
territory, but broke away in 1991. Russia’s response was a brutal counter-
attack in defence of its own peacekeepers and the many Ossetians who hold
Russian citizenship. Abkhazia was not the issue.
However, in my view, the Abkhazian people most certainly have a right to
self-determination. Its people are Circassians, against whom the Russian
Empire committed genocide in the 1800s. The Circassians will be making this
point forcefully at the Russians’ Winter Olympics at Sochi, the site of the
massacres. The Abkhaz language is quite unrelated to Georgian; Abkhazia had
a long history as a kingdom and a principality, and had autonomous status
within the USSR. The Abkhazians committed ethnic cleansing against the
Georgian population of Abkhazia; but their claim to self-determination still
has merit. Like every form of words – of discourse – the phrase ‘the right to
self-determination’ can be picked up and abused by any party to a conflict.
But I maintain that its origins are to be found in Marx and Engels, as I show
below; and it was developed as an integral part of revolutionary Marxism by

29. Knox 2010, p. 199.
30. Bowring 2010, forthcoming.
31. Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Conflict in Georgia 2009. The
IIFFMCG was established by a decision of the Council of the European Union of 2 December
2008.
V.I. Lenin, and played the crucial rôle in the development of international law
after WWII.
The Pashukanis debate

However, as with his Law and Disorder review,32 the nub of Knox’s critique
concerns Yevgeny Pashukanis. Knox rightly reproaches me for ignoring
Yevgeny Pashukanis’s important text ‘Lenin and Problems of Law’.33 According
to Knox, in Law and Disorder, ‘This is the main text in which Pashukanis
attempts to outline a specifically Marxist approach to legal strategy. For this
reason I have always found it rather odd that it is never mentioned in the
contemporary debates.’ I admit that I had not read it; but I have now.
In my book, I argued that Pashukanis missed the significance of self-
determination.34 Indeed, I asserted that ‘Pasukanis was incapable of recognising
the significance of self-determination for international law’35 – that is, its
significance for the imperialist and colonial systems. Knox answered me, in his
Law and Disorder review, as follows: ‘. . . Pashukanis takes self-determination
seriously.’ By this he means that in the final part, Part V, of ‘Lenin and Problems
of Law’36 Pashukanis does indeed discuss self-determination, and this I had
missed – so I am very grateful to Knox, and pay tribute to his scholarship.
In his Law and Disorder review, Knox concurred with Pashukanis’s account
that, for Lenin, the demand for the right of nations to self-determination was
an ‘“abstract”, “negative” demand of formal equal rights’, and that, in the
context of Russian absolutism, this abstract formal equality of right was a
revolutionary demand. Knox then turned to Pashukanis’s argument ‘that this
right though is ultimately limited precisely because it remains within a legal,
and therefore capitalist framework, therefore in a new concrete conjuncture’:
This was a new stage, a new situation, a new and higher level of struggle. And new
priorities corresponded to it. The bourgeois-democratic stage had passed, and
with it the formal legal demand for national self-determination – characteristic
of this stage – lost its former significance. The slogan ‘overthrow the rule of
the bourgeoisie on a world scale and set up the international dictatorship of
the proletariat’ became the immediate practical slogan. Does this mean that
national self-determination lost all significance; that it could be replaced with
the ‘self-determination of the proletariat’? Certainly not. This would have been
32. Knox 2008.

33. Pashukanis 1980.
34. Bowring 2008a, pp. 28–30.
35. Bowring 2008a, p. 29.
36. Pashukanis 1980, pp. 156–62.
to ignore the presence of backward countries which had not passed through the
stage of bourgeois-democratic national revolutions. The communist proletariat
of advanced countries had to support these movements; with all its strength it
had to struggle so that the accumulation of centuries of ill will and the distrust
by backward people of the dominant nations – and of the proletariat of these
nations – was overcome as quickly as possible. It was impossible to achieve
this goal without proclaiming and conducting in practice the right of national
self-determination. Moreover, even for a socialist society moving towards the
elimination of classes the question of national self-determination still remains
a real one, since although based on economics, socialism by no means consists
solely of economics.37
We should recall what Pashukanis said a few pages earlier. He reported that
Lenin’s opponents – especially Rosa Luxemburg –had argued against the ‘right
to self-determination’ ‘under the pretext that “in essence” no “self-
determination” could exist under capitalism, and that under socialism it was
not necessary.’38 Lenin’s position as stated in 1916, correctly reported by
Pashukanis, was that ‘[t]he dispute is related to one of the forms of political
oppression, namely, the forceful domination of one nation by the state of
another nation. This is simply an attempt to avoid political questions.’39 But
Pashukanis went on to state that no one apart from him had noted that
Luxemburg’s position amounted to a ‘complete rejection of the legal form’.40
Pashukanis then cited a longer passage from Lenin’s 1914 major work on
The Right of Nations to Self-Determination.41
By the way, it is not difficult to see why, from a Social-Democratic point of view,
the right to ‘self-determination’ means neither federation nor autonomy (although,
speaking in the abstract, both come under the category of ‘self-determination’).
The right to federation is simply meaningless, since federation implies a bilateral
contract. It goes without saying that Marxists cannot include the defence of
federalism in general in their programme. As far as autonomy is concerned,
Marxists defend, not the ‘right’ to autonomy, but autonomy itself, as a general
universal principle of a democratic state with a mixed national composition, and
a great variety of geographical and other conditions. Consequently, the recognition
of the ‘right of nations to autonomy’ is as absurd as that of the ‘right of nations
to federation’.
37. Pashukanis 1980, pp. 162–3.

38. Pashukanis 1980, pp. 156–7.
39. Lenin 1916, p. 321.
40. Pashukanis 1980, p. 158.
41. Lenin 1914, p. 441.
The effect of this citation, out of context, is to render wholly obscure that
which is actually quite clear.
Ignoring Marx and Lenin on Ireland?

It appears to me that Pashukanis took this passage completely out of context.
It is actually one of Lenin’s footnotes to Chapter 8 of the work in question,
‘The Utopian Karl Marx and the Practical Rosa Luxemburg’. Lenin was
attacking Luxemburg’s position that to call for Polish independence is ‘utopia’.
She asked, ironically as she thought: why not raise the same demand for
Ireland? This led Lenin straight to Marx’s highly principled stand on Ireland.
At first, prior to the 1860s, Marx had thought that Ireland ‘would not be
liberated by the national movement of the oppressed nation, but by the
working-class movement of the oppressor nation.’ Lenin pointed out:
However, it so happened that the English working class fell under the influence
of the liberals for a fairly long time, became an appendage to the liberals, and by
adopting a liberal-labour policy left itself leaderless. The bourgeois liberation
movement in Ireland grew stronger and assumed revolutionary forms. Marx
reconsidered his view and corrected it.
Lenin cited the following passage. In his letter to Engels on 2 November

1867, Marx wrote:
The Fenian trial in Manchester was exactly as was to be expected. You will have
seen what a scandal ‘our people’ have caused in the Reform League. I sought by
every means at my disposal to incite the English workers to demonstrate in favour
of Fenianism. . . . I once believed the separation of Ireland from England to be
impossible. I now regard it as inevitable, although Federation may follow upon
separation.42
The trial in question was that of the ‘Manchester martyrs’ – William Philip
Allen, Michael Larkin, and Michael O’Brien – who were members of the Irish
Republican Brotherhood. The men were executed after having been found
guilty of the murder of a police-officer during an escape that took place close
to Manchester city-centre in 1867.43
42. Marx 1867, p. 451.

43. McGee 2005, p. 36.
That is, Marx was, in the words of the contemporary UK Terrorism Act of
2006, ‘glorifying terrorism’, and terrorism committed by bourgeois nationalists
at that. He would now face a stiff sentence.
Once Pashukanis’s quotation is placed in context, it is plain that Pashukanis
had wholly misunderstood both Lenin and Marx. And, influenced as he is by
Pashukanis, Knox has also, it appears to me, misunderstood. The issue at stake
between Lenin and Luxemburg was, as I point out in my book and chapter,
whether the component-parts of the Russian Empire should have the right to
self-determination and to break away to form new sovereign nations.
Luxemburg was convinced that the Empire should be preserved, and was as
opposed to Polish liberation as she was to Irish liberation.
In my book, I show in detail how Lenin put his theory into practice
immediately following the Bolshevik victory, supporting the independence of
Finland, the three Baltic states – Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania – and Poland. His
last struggle was with Stalin: Lenin on principle supported Georgian
independence, even under a Menshevik government – Stalin was totally
opposed.44 Lenin’s creativity was key to the struggles of the national-liberation
movements after World-War II.45
Karl Marx on self-determination

I have to revise in another respect the position maintained in my book, as to
Lenin’s rôle as progenitor of the ‘right of nations to self-determination’. I note
that Marx himself used the term ‘self-determination’ on at least two occasions,
in a political rather than a philosophical context. In his letter of 20 November
1865 to Hermann Jung,46 Marx referred, under the heading ‘International
Politics’, to ‘[t]he need to eliminate Muscovite influence in Europe by applying
the right of self-determination of nations, and the re-establishment of Poland
upon a democratic and social basis’. Furthermore, in a speech on Poland
delivered on 24 March 1875,47 he declared:
What are the reasons for this special interest of the workers’ party in the fate of
Poland? First of all, of course, sympathy for a subjugated people which, with its
incessant and heroic struggle against its oppressors, has proven its historic right
to national autonomy and self-determination. It is not in the least a contradiction
that the international workers’ party strives for the creation of the Polish nation.
44. Bowring 2008a, pp. 18–20.

45. Bowring 2008a, pp. 32–5.
46. Marx 1865, p. 200.
47. Marx and Engels 1875, p. 55.
No doubt, Pashukanis would have sought to put a different spin on that

passage.
The Afro-American Marxist scholar August Nimtz has addressed the ‘myth’
of Marx’s Eurocentrism, as he describes it.48 He shows how, from 1870
onwards, Marx and Engels ceased to expect the rebirth of a revolutionary
movement in England, following the demise of the Chartists. Instead, they
turned to Russia as the revolutionary vanguard. This was ‘an overwhelmingly
peasant country that had only one foot in Europe, and not the Europe that the
Eurocentric charge refers to, that is, its most developed western flank.’49
But as early as 1849, they urged that:
Only a world war can break old England, as only this can provide the Chartists,
the party of the organized English workers, with the conditions for a successful
rising against their powerful oppressors. Only when the Chartists head the
English government will the social revolution pass from the sphere of utopia to
that of reality. But any European war in which England is involved is a world
war, waged in Canada and Italy, in the East Indies and Prussia, in Africa and on
the Danube.50
Nimtz shows how Marx and Engels reversed their earlier position and gave
support to religious-led Arab resistance to French imperialism in Algeria in
1857; expressed strong sympathy for the Sepoy Mutiny against Britain in
India in 1857–9; and by 1861 wrote, as the US Civil War loomed, that
US-expansion into Texas and what is now Arizona and New Mexico, brought
with it slavery and the rule of the slaveholders.51 At the same time, they were
quite clear that the ‘booty of British imperialism’ had begun to corrupt and
compromise the English proletariat.52
Pranav Jani, in turn, focuses on Marx’s response to the 1857 revolt in
British India.53 He maintains that ‘under the impact of the Revolt, Marx’s
articles increasingly turned from an exclusive focus on the British bourgeoisie
to theorise the self-activity and struggle of the colonised Indians’.54 Jani seeks
to show how Marx’s historical-materialist methodology allowed him to
transcend weak formulations and prejudices to achieve a more complex
understanding of the relation between coloniser and colonised, in much the
48. Nimtz 2002.

49. Nimtz 2002, p. 66.
50. Marx 1849, p. 213.
51. Nimtz 2002, pp. 68–9.
52. Nimtz 2002, p. 71.
53. Jani 2002.
54. Jani 2002, p. 82.
same way as the Paris Commune forced him to re-assess his theory of the
state.55 For Jani, Marx was thereby transformed from a ‘mere observer’ of the
anticolonial struggle to an active participant in the ideological struggle over
the meaning of the Revolt. This enabled him also to refute racist representations
of Indian violence in the British press ‘by drawing a sharp division between
the violence of the oppressed and that of the oppressor and dialectically linking
the two.’56 Jani concludes that if Eurocentrism makes Western Europe the
centre of the globe, then the Marx he presents is not Eurocentric.
And Marx is the progenitor of the revolutionary sense of self-determination
which I celebrate in my book.
Knox cites Rajagopal with approval.57 Yet I am perplexed by Rajagopal’s
contribution to the collection International Law and the Third World: Reshaping
Justice.58 He at any rate acknowledges (drawing on Morsink)59 that Britain
engaged in intense manoeuvring during the drafting of the UN’s Universal
Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 to prevent Soviet pressure from extending
the effect of the right to self-determination to the colonies.60 This did not
happen until 1966, following a tremendous diplomatic effort by the USSR
and its allies. On the following page, however, he cites Michael Ignatieff, of all
people, as authority for the utterly false proposition that the idea of self-
determination was the result of the anticolonial revolt against empire.61 It was
the other way round entirely: the right to self-determination as developed by
Lenin became the rallying-cry of the colonial revolt.
In the same collection, Vasuki Nesiah, in a flood of unbridled idealism,
seeks to persuade us that self-determination has failed – as a discourse. He
declares that ‘the failure of self-determination discourse is partly grounded in
the invocation of “self-determination” as a trans-historical signifier – a timeless
ground for the post-colonial imagination.’62 Whatever that means . . .
Conclusion
It will have been noted that Knox’s careful critique has required me to revise
my own position in a number of respects. He has pointed out serious gaps in
55. Jani 2002, p. 83.

56. Jani 2002, pp. 90–1.
57. Knox 2010, p. 204.
58. Falk, Rajagopal and Stevens (eds.) 2008.
59. Morsink 1999.
60. Rajagopal 2008, p. 65.
61. Rajagopal 2008, p. 66.
62. Nesiah 2008, p. 214.
my account, and has spurred me to carry out further investigation. However,

to my project of ‘revolutionary conservatism’, he would be inclined to a type
of ‘principled opportunism’. I am not sure I agree. Yet, in his final paragraph,63
he is kind enough to describe my book as ‘an excellent contribution to the
growing debate on Marxist approaches to international law’. That gives me
every reason to look forward to fruitful collaboration with one of the most
talented Marxist scholars of the new generation.
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Intent, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
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Bartolovich and Lazarus (eds.) 2002.
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2008.
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of Law and the Possibility of Politics by Bill Bowring’, Law and Society Review, 43, 3: 722–4.
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—— 1991, ‘The Right of Peoples to Self-Determination: an African Perspective’, in Issues of
Self-Determination, edited by William Twining, Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press.
—— (ed.) 1991, State and Constitution: An African Debate on Democracy, Harare: SAPES
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Journal of International Law, 16: 1113–76.
Review-Articles
Walter Benjamin’s Archive: Images, Texts, Signs, Ursula Marx, Gudrun Schwarz, Michael
Schwarz, Erdmut Wizisla, Translated by Esther Leslie, London: Verso, 2007
Walter Benjamin, Esther Leslie, London: Reaktion Books, 2007
Benjamin Handbuch. Leben-Werk-Wirkung, Burkhardt Lindner (ed.), Stuttgart: Verlag J.B.

Metzler, 2006
Abstract
We are used to classifying different thinkers according to their general orientation: progressive
or conservative, revolutionary or nostalgic of the past, materialist or idealist. Walter Benjamin
does not fit into these categories. He is a revolutionary critic of the ideologies of progress, a
materialist theologian, and his nostalgia for the past is at the service of his Marxist dreams for the
future. It is therefore not surprising that so many different and conflicting readings of his work
have developed since his death, some trying to bring him back into the usual frames of thinking,
others trying to recruit him for the newest philosophical fads, and many simply damning him as
ridden with contradictions and therefore an intellectual failure. But there are also some happy
exceptions: those who try to take into account the irreducible singularity of his intellectual
and political endeavours. These three books, quite different in object and method – a collection
of documents from his archives, a biography, and a ‘Benjamin Handbook’ – belong to these
exceptions.
Keywords
Marxism, messianism, materialism, theology, progress, utopia
Images of Benjamin
We are used to classifying different thinkers according to their general orientation:
progressive or conservative, revolutionary or nostalgic for the past, materialist or idealist.
Walter Benjamin does not fit into these categories. He is a revolutionary critic of the
ideologies of progress, a materialist theologian, and his nostalgia for the past is at the service
of his Marxist dreams for the future. It is therefore not surprising that so many different
and conflicting readings of his work have developed since his death, some trying to restore
him within the usual frames of thinking, others trying to recruit him for the newest
philosophical fads, and many simply damning him as ridden with contradictions and
therefore an intellectual failure. But there are also some happy exceptions: those who try to
take into account the irreducible singularity of his intellectual and political endeavours.
There are many astonishing prophetic statements to be found in Benjamin’s works. We
are going to discuss some of them. But he could also err in his predictions, for instance on
130 Review-Articles / Historical Materialism 19.2 (2011) 129–136
the future of his own writings. In April 1934, Benjamin wrote to Karl Thieme – a now
largely forgotten theologian – thanking him for mentioning his work in an article; he
added the following sad comment: ‘For someone whose writings are as dispersed as mine,
and for whom the conditions of the day no longer allow the illusion that they will be
gathered together again one day, it is a genuine acknowledgment to hear of a reader here
and there, who has been able to make himself at home in my scraps of writing, in some way
or another’.1 Well, some seventy years later, not only have all his writings been carefully
and patiently gathered together and published in their original language, but most of them
have been also translated into French, English, Italian, Spanish and Japanese (amongst
other languages). Not to mention the enormous – and growing – mountain of secondary
literature, interpretations and commentaries.
How to explain the interest, nay, the fascination of so many people with his life and
works? It has certainly to do with the singularity of his writing, the beauty and intensity of
his enigmatic style, the tragic end of his road; but it may also be that his ferocious critique
of the illusions of ‘progress’ can be better understood in our day. In any case, the obsession
of the public with Walter Benjamin is so great that specialists have now collected and
published not only his articles and manuscripts, but literally all the scraps of paper in his
archives. I am referring, of course, to the book Walter Benjamin’s Archive. A brief survey of
its chapters may give an idea of how deep this archaeological research on the ruined remains
of Benjamin’s citadel has gone (the titles are quotations from Benjamin): 1) ‘Tree of
consciousness’: his activity as an archivist of his own writings. 2) ‘Scrappy Paperwork’: all
sorts of dispersed scraps, bits and pieces of paper with some written inscription. 3) ‘From
Small to Smallest Details’: samples of his micrographic writing. 4) ‘Physiognomy of the
Thing World’: his collection of photos of old Russian toys. 5) ‘Opinions et Pensées’: words
and expressions of his son Stephan as a child. 6) ‘Daintiest Quarters’: his note- and address-
books. 7) ‘Travel Scenes’: his postcard collection with scenes from Tuscany and the
Balearics. 8) ‘A Bow Being Bent’: his procedures for the organisation of knowledge.
9) ‘Constellations’: graphic forms for the presentation of ideas. 10) ‘Rag Picking’: the
Arcades Project as ‘rubbish-collection’. 11) ‘Past Turned Space’: Germaine Krull’s
photographs of the Parisian arcades. 12) ‘Hard Nuts to Crack’: word-games and brainteasers.
13) ‘Sibyls’: eight reproductions of Sibyls from the cathedral of Siena (with hardly any clue
as to their meaning for the collector).
Are these items interesting? Certainly! Do they reveal something about Benjamin’s
character? Probably. Do they give us significant elements to understand his writings?
I doubt it . . . It is very amusing to see the facsimile-reproduction of a sheet with an
advertisement for San Pellegrino mineral-water, containing one of Benjamin’s most subtle
definitions of aura. And it is even more ironic to find out that his famous definition of
revolution – humanity snatching the emergency-brake in the train of world-history – is
written on the reverse of calculations on the price of a lunch: Mitagessen: 0,50, 1,80, 1,70.
But how much do these amusing discoveries help us to understand his concepts of aura and
revolution?
It is true that Germaine Krull’s photographs permit us to see how the arcades looked
during the years when Benjamin visited them; and the images of the Russian toys are part-
and-parcel of his essay on the topic. But what should one make of the postcards from Ibiza,
1. Quoted in Leslie 2007, p. 146.

Review-Articles / Historical Materialism 19.2 (2011) 129–136 131
or the Sybils from Siena? The lullaby-drawing on the effects of hashish – ‘Sleep, my little
Sheep Sleep’ – is very intriguing, it may perhaps be an illuminating complement to his
writings under the same drug; the same does not necessarily hold for other graphic forms
collected here. A complete list of all addresses in Benjamin’s Parisian notebook would be a
significant research-item, but the facsimile of one page with a few addresses under the letter
‘S’ is just a curiosity (I have been told that there exists a facsimile of the address-book, for
the pleasure of Benjamin fetishists). And the same applies to much of the interesting items
reproduced in this book . . .
It should be said, however, that at least in one of the sections there is a direct relation
between the presentation of Benjamin’s procedures, his ways of collecting, classifying and
ordering materials, and the content: the chapter on the ‘rag-picker’ and the Arcades Project.
What it describes and documents is precisely the meaning of the project: the author as
rag-picker wishes to collect the refuse of history, the materialist historian is the one that
picks up everything that has been ‘crushed underfoot’, discarded, torn into pieces. The
revolutionary meaning of the Arcades Project is intimately linked with the method
Benjamin proposes: the collection and appropriation of rags.
Much of the interest in Benjamin is certainly nourished by his tragic life-story, the life
of a ‘man in dark times’ (Hannah Arendt) who spent his last years in a precarious exile, and
committed suicide in September 1940 to escape from the Gestapo. Thus the multiplication
of biographies, of which Esther Leslie’s can be counted amongst the best. Unlike previous
works, she was able to use the archive-material made available during the last few years –
including the volume reviewed above, which she translated into English, and used
extensively in her own research. In fact, the most important new source is Benjamin’s
correspondence, finally published in an unabridged, complete and uncensored version by
Suhrkamp Verlag. Her book is not, strictly speaking, an intellectual biography: Benjamin’s
works are mentioned, of course, but not systematically discussed, with a few exceptions.
Since she had already published a – remarkable – book on his thought, Walter Benjamin:
Overpowering Conformism (2000), the aim, this time, was rather to deal with his life and
with the multiple facts of his personality: not only his political and cultural interests, but
also his erotic and financial troubles, and his idiosyncratic obsessions with graphology,
children’s books, etc. The book is very readable, in spite of some not-very-helpful chapter-
titles – except for the dates, they don’t tell us much about his life: ‘Making a Mark, 1917–
24’, ‘Books after Books, 1925–9’, ‘Man of Letters, 1930–2’, ‘Noms de Plume, 1933–7’,
‘Writer’s Block, 1938–40’ . . .
The one piece of Benjamin’s writing that Leslie does analyse in detail is the essay on
‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility’, perhaps his best-known
and most discussed writing. She analyses carefully the text itself, with all its ambiguities,
as well as various interpretations, emphasising its surprising conclusion: the essay seems to
celebrate modern technology – mainly cinema – but ‘the epilogue . . . reversed the optimistic
current – all the potential credited to art in the age of technology evaporated before the
techo-mysticism and class violence of the National Socialists. In the essay’s coda Benjamin
determined that fascists . . . too participated in technological modernity’ (p. 164).
Unlike other biographers – for example, Werner Fuld and Rainer Rochlitz – Leslie is
interested in and sympathetic to Benjamin’s political views. She points to the importance
of his meeting with the young Latvian Bolshevik Asja Lacis in 1924, which gave him,
according to a letter to Scholem, ‘intensive insight into the actuality of a radical communism’;
she also refers to the astonishing insights of his Moscow diaries, written during his visit in
December 1926 – ‘the restoration’ had begun in the USSR and ‘militant communism’ was
being suspended – or of his letters to Fritz Lieb in 1937, criticising the policies of the
French Popular Front: ‘the leadership has managed within two years to rob their workers
of the elementary basis of their instinctive activity: that infallible sense of when and under
which circumstances a legal action must turn into an illegal, an illegal into a violent one’.
However, her discussion of Benjamin’s amazing essay on surrealism (1929) is not quite
satisfactory; she emphasises Benjamin’s criticism of the surrealists, while the main aspect of
the article is the importance of surrealism from a communist viewpoint, the viewpoint of
revolutionary pessimism. This is clearly stated in a phrase from Benjamin’s article which
she quotes, but does not discuss:
Surrealism has come ever closer to the communist answer. And that means
pessimism all along the line. Absolutely. Mistrust in the fate of literature, mistrust
in the fate of freedom, mistrust in the fate of humanity, but three times mistrust
in all reconciliation: between classes, between nations, between individuals.
And unlimited trust only in I.G. Farben and the peaceful perfection of the
Luftwaffe.2
Benjamin borrowed the concept of communist pessimism – obviously against the grain of
official Soviet, wildly-optimistic, discourse – from Pierre Naville’s book La Révolution et les
intellectuels (1928), which he describes as an ‘excellent’ work. Former editor of the journal
La Révolution surréaliste, and militant of the French Communist Party, Naville had just
joined, in those years, the Trotskyist Left Opposition, of which he would become one of
the main leaders. This ‘revolutionary pessimism’ enabled Benjamin to foresee – intuitively,
but with an astonishing acuity – the catastrophes awaiting Europe, perfectly summarised in
the ironic phrase on ‘unlimited trust’. Obviously, even he, the most pessimistic of all, could
not predict the destructions that the Luftwaffe was to wreak on the cities and civilian
population of Europe; nor that I.G. Farben would, barely a dozen years later, distinguish
itself by employing forced labour from the concentration-camps by the tens of thousands.
However, uniquely among Marxist thinkers and leaders of those years, Benjamin had a
premonition of the monstrous disasters to which a crisis-ridden bourgeois civilisation could
give birth.
This essay, as well as the contemporary book, One Way Street (1928) document a decisive
aspect of Benjamin’s thought: he is one of the few Marxists, in those years, to attempt a
radical break with the ideology of inevitable and linear progress. As he would later write in
the Arcades Project, his aim is to emancipate historical materialism from the bourgeois idea
of progress and of all ‘bourgeois habits of thought’.
Leslie discusses Benjamin’s increasing distance from the Soviet (Stalinist) brand of
Communism during the thirties, a process which culminates after the German-Soviet pact
of 1939, in his ‘Theses On the Concept of History’; written when it was ‘midnight in the
century’ (the title of a novel by Victor Serge), they constitute, as Leslie aptly summarises,
‘Benjamin’s reckoning with Social Democracy, Stalinism and bourgeois thought, none of
which were able to prevent the disaster of fascism’. In her conclusion, after surveying some
2. Benjamin 1978, p. 191.

of the various interpretations of his life and work, she argues, with keen insight, that ‘his
writings envision a world not condemned to repeat its mistakes . . . a world in which the
political subject still has recourse to revolutionary praxis, unlike the disempowering theory
of a Habermas’ (p. 232).
Among the innumerable attempts to propose a synthetic view of Benjamin’s life and
works, one of the most ambitious and interesting is the recent Benjamin Handbuch, an
impressive collection of contributions by sixty of the best German-speaking specialists. In
his preface, Burkhardt Lindner, the organiser of the collection – with the help of two
colleagues, Thomas Küpper and Timo Skrandies – justifies the Handbook by the existence,
in recent years, of a critical edition of all of Benjamin’s existing writings, as well as of his
correspondence – the Gesammelte Schriften published by Suhrkamp Verlag in Frankfurt –
and by the need for a presentation that tries to cover the diversity of his philosophical,
political and literary interests. Lindner insists that the book does not propose a specific
image of Benjamin: the different contributions are not only diverse, but sometimes
contradictory; what they have in common is simply a willingness to take seriously his
stature as a philosopher, and not simply a literary essayist; this is probably a polemical barb
against Hannah Arendt, who considered Benjamin not as a philosopher, but as a homme
de lettres.
In its presentation of Benjamin’s writings, the Handbuch does not follow the criteria of
the Gesammelte Schriften, which separated, in distinct volumes, the pieces that appeared
during his lifetime from those which remained unpublished: a distinction, comments
Lindner, that was not at all taken into account by the reception of his œuvre. While one
can easily agree with him on this issue, his rejection of a chronological order seems to me
much more questionable. The reason offered is that such an order would wrongly give the
impression of a ‘progress’ in his thinking. Again, one can agree that the concept of ‘progress’
is inadequate; there exists nevertheless in the chronological sequence of his writings a
movement, sometimes in opposed directions – a passage from theology to materialism, a
return to theology without abandoning materialism – sometimes in the form of intellectual
experiments taken to their ultimate conclusion, and then abandoned; in other words, a
process which is not disconnected from historical events, but which is lost from sight if one
renounces chronology.
After the first section, ‘Life, Work, Influence’, which surveys the present state of the
publication of Benjamin’s collected works, and proposes a very interesting account of their
reception (by Küpper and Skrandes), and following a section entitled ‘Intellectual
Friendships’, dealing with his links with Gershom Scholem, Bertolt Brecht and the
Frankfurt School, most of the book discusses, under the general title ‘Analysis’, the writings
themselves, classed by themes, in four great parts: ‘Messianism, Aesthetics, Politics’,
‘Literary critique, avant-garde, media, journalism’, ‘Literary analysis and author-images’,
‘Philosophy of language and autobiographical writings’. It seems to me that these thematic
regroupings are quite arbitrary and heterogeneous; not to mention the fact that many of
Benjamin’s writings concern several topics and cannot be reduced to a single one. But these
artificial distinctions are the price to be paid for renouncing the chronological option.
In spite of this reservation, one must acknowledge the great quality of the whole, and of
the majority of the individual contributions. Since it would be impossible to discuss all
sixty papers, I will pick up on only a few, using as a guiding thread the issue – of central
importance in Benjamin’s thought – of the relation between theology and politics. No
other issue has provoked so many polemics in the reception of his work, with conflicting
views trying to ‘purge’ Benjamin’s philosophy of some irritating element: for some, religion,
for others, materialism.
One can start with his ‘intellectual friendship’ with Gershom Scholem, as remarkably
studied by Stéphane Mosès. Since their first conversations in Switzerland during the First
World-War, which turned around the concepts of revelation, redemption and justice, until
their exchanges during their final meeting in Paris (February 1938), this issue never ceased
to occupy them. Scholem could never accept his friend’s turn toward communism, which
he considered, in a letter from 1931, as a ‘regrettable confusion between religion and
politics’. During their last conversations in Paris, Benjamin defended himself arguing –
according to Scholem’s memories – that his method consisted in ‘transferring metaphysical
and theological forms of thought into the Marxist perspective’, thus assuring them a
powerful vitality in a modern context.
Most of Benjamin’s writings on religion and politics are discussed in the chapter
‘Messianism, Aesthetics and Politics’, where, luckily, they are presented in chronological
order. Under the title ‘Writings on Youth’, Thomas Regehly examines some works
from the years 1912–15, beginning with the ‘Dialogue on the Religiosity of the Present’
(1912) – in my view, a striking example of Benjamin’s revolutionary-romantic critique of
modern civilisation. Unfortunately, his analysis of the documents contains some obvious
mistakes; according to Regehly, for Benjamin ‘social religion – “socialism as religion” – is
not an alternative, because it has “lost its metaphysical seriousness”’. Now, what Benjamin
says is quite different: modern social action, that suppressed the gods and transformed
everything into an affair of civilisation, ‘such as electric light’, has ‘lost its metaphysical
seriousness’; ‘socialism as religion’ presents itself precisely as an alternative to this ‘civilised’
and disenchanted modern social action, which has replaced the ‘heroic-revolutionary
efforts’ of the past by the pitiful ‘crab-like march’ of evolution and progress. Regehly
misses the point of this essay, which documents Benjamin’s precocious support for socialist
ideas, interpreted within a religious and revolutionary perspective, critical of civilisation
and progress.
In his discussion of the following document, ‘On the Life of Students’ (1914) Regehly
correctly mentions Benjamin’s critique of the ideology of progress in the name of utopian
images. But he fails to quote the next passage, were Benjamin explains, with the help of two
examples, what he understands by utopische Bilder: ‘the messianic kingdom and the French-
revolutionary idea’. This detail is essential, because it permits us to see, already in 1914, the
appearance of the constellation between messianism and revolution – as an alternative to
historicist evolutionism – that will become a central tenet in his reflections on history.
Regehly also mentions, en passant, as a proof of Benjamin’s rejection of socialism his
critique of Marx in the fragment from 1921, ‘Capitalism as Religion’. Now, as Uwe Steiner
shows in his very suggestive analysis of this difficult but fascinating text, Benjamin’s critique
of Marx – that he will abandon only after 1924 – is inspired by the libertarian – and
religious – socialism of the German-Jewish anarchist Gustav Landauer. The fragment,
which presents capitalism as a merciless religion leading humanity to ‘the house of despair’,
is directly inspired by Max Weber, but goes well beyond the ‘value-neutral’ arguments of
the sociologist, in the direction of a radical anticapitalism.
At the same time (1921) Benjamin wrote another enigmatic piece, the ‘Theological-
Political Fragment’ – a title given it by Adorno. Werner Hamacher’s interpretation
proposed in the Handbook seems questionable to me. In a first moment, he shows, quite
accurately, that Benjamin’s effort to separate messianism from history, by insisting that the
kingdom of God ‘is not the telos of historical dynamics’, is a polemical answer to Hermann
Cohen’s neo-Kantian theories. But I cannot follow Hamacher when he pretends that the
fragment should be called ‘Political-Atheological’, because, for Benjamin, ‘the theological
concepts are useless for political praxis’: this corresponds neither to the letter nor the spirit
of the fragment. If theological concepts are ‘useless’, why does Benjamin conclude his
fragment by referring to profane action as favourable to the coming of the messianic era?
After a long detour through Plato, Aristotle and Kant, which is not obviously of much help
in understanding this document, Hamacher attributes to Benjamin – without any textual
basis – the idea of an eternal distancing of the messianic times.
After the essay ‘Critique of Violence’ (1921), whose political-theological conclusion –
the revolutionary general strike as an expression of a ‘divine violence’ – is accurately
described by Axel Honneth, and the doctoral thesis – refused by the University of
Frankfurt – on the German-baroque Trauerspiel, discussed by Bettine Menke, theology
seems to disappear from Benjamin’s writings. It will return, several years later, in some
fragments of the Arcades Project, set to paper at the end of the 1930s. In his remarkable
study of this strange and massive unfinished manuscript, Irving Wohlfarth shows how
Benjamin tries, against his best – albeit opposed – friends, Scholem and Brecht, to hold
together theology and historical materialism; a comment by Adorno is the best definition
of Benjamin’s attempt: ‘to mobilise, in an anonymous way, the force of the theological
experience for the profane’.
It is above all in Benjamin’s last writing, his testament in a certain sense, the ‘Theses On
the Concept of History’ (1940), that theology, and its relationship to politics, becomes
again a central issue. In a brilliant exegesis of this complex piece, which was to exercise a
considerable posthumous influence, Jeanne-Marie Gagnebin proposes the following
hypothesis: theology is here the model of another conception of time, permitting us to
simultaneously think a critical historiography and a revolutionary practice. What interests
Benjamin is not ‘religion’ as such, but the explosive force of the theological – messianism
and the remembrance of past victims – against historicist conformism. Benjamin defined,
in the Arcades Project (specifically the section on the theory of progress) the relation of his
thought to theology as similar to that of the blotter to ink: it is soaked with it, but nothing
of what has been written remains. Thus, the theological dwarf hidden inside the puppet
called ‘historical materialism’ described in ‘Theses on the Concept of History’: theology
must remain invisible.
Jeanne-Marie Gagnebin’s interpretation is quite persuasive; but one has to take into
account the following paradox: the ink does not disappear, its traces are visible in the
blotter, as well as in the paper where the ink-pen had written something. Similarly, theology –
i.e. messianism – is not hidden in the ‘Theses’ from 1940, but is visible, from one end of
the text to the other.
None of Benjamin’s multiple heterodox and idiosyncratic ideas have provoked as much
incomprehension and perplexity as this attempt to combine Marxism and theology. And
yet, a few decades later, what in 1940 had been merely an intuition was to become a major
historical phenomenon, supported by hundreds of thousands: Latin-American liberation-
theology, condemned by the Holy Office (Cardinal Ratzinger!) of the Catholic Church
for its ‘indiscriminate’ use of Marxism . . . Of course, the Latin-American theology is
Christian and not Jewish, and its specific concepts are different from those of Benjamin’s
document – even if a critical distance with respect to the ideologies of ‘progress’ and
‘development’ is also present in the writings of Gustavo Gutierrez or Leonardo Boff;
moreover, the historical context of Latin America since the 1970s is very different from
Europe in 1940. However, the association of theology and Marxism Benjamin dreamt of
has turned out, in the light of historical experience, to be not merely possible and fruitful,
but a powerful stimulant for social struggles.
Reviewed by Michael Löwy

CNRS, Paris
michael.lowy@orange.fr
References
Benjamin, Walter 1978 [1929], ‘Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligensia’,
in Reflections, translated by Edmund Jephcott, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Leslie, Esther 2000, Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism, London: Pluto Press.
—— 2007, Walter Benjamin, London: Reaktion Books.
William Faulkner: An Economy of Complex Words, Richard Godden, Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 2007
Abstract
This review-essay explores the theoretical and methodological innovations of Richard Godden’s
William Faulkner, arguing that it makes a signal contribution to historical materialism in literary
studies. The article focuses on Godden’s concept of ‘generative structure’, and relates the term to
earlier usages by Aglietta and Jameson. After summarising the close readings of Faulkner’s texts
performed by Godden, the article suggests an expanded rôle for biography in making the linkages
between economy, psyche and text which form the basis of Godden’s analysis.
Keywords
régime of accumulation; generative structure; master-slave dialectic; free indirect style
How are we to practise historical materialism in literary studies today? In this book, Richard
Godden suggests some answers by combining Marxist, psychoanalytical, and semiotic
approaches to create a powerfully interdisciplinary methodology, along with a tightly-
focused argument which is brought to bear on a central problem, that of ‘generative
contradiction’ (p. 119).
Economic relations, Godden argues, are the disguised form of social relations of
domination, coercion, and contract. These social relations are ‘a cause of what stories can
and cannot be told’, meaning that ‘economic structures may be read as the generative
source of fictional forms’ (p. 2). The economy generating Faulkner’s later fictional forms
was the New Deal, and, more specifically, the ‘Agricultural Adjustment Program’ (1933–
8). Under this programme, Southern landowners were given federal money to restrict
cotton-production in a bid to raise farm-prices. Landowners kept the greater portion of this
capital for themselves and paid a wage to former sharecroppers to plough the crop under.
The result was the creation of a new ‘regime of accumulation’, in which sharecroppers (who
formerly received a ‘share’ of the value of the crop nominated by the landlord) were ‘made
over into cash workers’ (p. 61).
Godden’s major influence here is Michel Aglietta’s A Theory of Capitalist Regulation
(1976). He shares Aglietta’s sense of capitalism, not just as a ‘social system’ regulated
towards ‘the continuous reproduction of social relations’, but as a structure whose basic
morphology is continually threatened by crises or ‘ruptures’.1 Such ruptures force the
system to adapt by creating a new ‘regime of accumulation’, a set of social practices sufficient
to ensure that surplus-value goes on increasing, ‘under the stable constraints of the most
general norms’.2 Drawing on historical work by Jonathan M. Wiener and Gavin Wright,
Godden describes how the South under the New Deal changed shape, responding to the
crisis of the Depression by shifting from its long-term dependence on surplus black labour
to a new reliance on Northern capital.3 In the process, black labour was finally removed
from its pre-modern condition of vassalage, as impoverished workers were forced into
out-migration.
1. Aglietta 2000, p. 19.

2. Aglietta 2000, p. 69.
3. See Wiener 1979 and Wright 1986.
The next component of Godden’s argument extends the central insight of his previous
book, Fictions of Labor (1997), which developed the implicitly Hegelian critique of the
master-slave dialectic in Eugene Genovese’s Roll Jordan, Roll.4 Under both plantation-
slavery and the sharecropping system, the white master was dependent on the black body
he dominated and exploited. While the slave or sharecropper found ‘in the work of his
hands the substance of his lord’, the slave or sharecropper literally gave substance through
that work to the white landowner (p. 44). Southern whites depended on blacks for their
very being, a contradiction they both recognised and disavowed. But, in the New-Deal
period and during the renewed Great Migration provoked by World-War II, the corporeal
presence of black people was progressively attenuated. Whites could not quite grasp the loss
of their integral blackness, or admit it to themselves as black labour relocated and Northern
capital flooded in.
For Godden, the necessary corollary to the generative economic structure of the New-
Deal economy is its psychic structure, one of self-division and ambivalence. Faulkner lived
in a world of ‘divided things (split referents)’ – landlords who took government hand-outs;
former vassals who upped sticks and left for Memphis or Chicago (p. 6). The New Deal
also generated a contradiction within a Southern owning class now made up of both
labour-lords who want to keep ‘their’ blacks in place, and land-lords who wanted
sharecroppers to make way for federal subsidies. But the structural transformation of the
owning class by the New Deal also led to a questioning of ‘white male authority’, a
‘loosening of ethnic restraints’, and a ‘threat to sexual categories’ (p. 117). Category-
collapse provided imaginative space to tackle structural contradiction. Faulkner countered
‘incipient structural loss’, Godden argues, by telling stories which imagine a range of
intimate bonds between black and white men, a homoerotic vision so taboo that it can be
easily denied.
In Godden’s analysis, ‘structure’ is grasped in a third sense, as the pattern of formal
elements in Faulkner’s texts. Just as the white self divides between the desire to retain black
bodies and the desire to be rid of them, language splits, its meanings multiplying under the
Southern economy’s contradictory pressures. Among these signal effects in Faulkner’s texts
are extravagant metaphors and torturous puns, forms of linguistic contradiction where
likeness is entertained alongside difference, setting up effects of cognitive dissonance. These
effects are pursued here through forensically close readings of The Hamlet (1940), Go
Down, Moses (1942), and A Fable (1954). Godden thus practices the immanent critique
called for by Fredric Jameson, who urges that ‘our discovery of a text’s symbolic efficacity
must be oriented by a formal description which seeks to grasp it as a determinant structure
of still properly formal contradictions’.5 As we shall see, Godden takes seriously Jameson’s
further point: that, because they are riven by contradictions, texts carry an ‘immense charge
of anxiety and libidinal investment’.6
Godden is uncompromising in his insistence that generative economic structure must be
read out of the text itself, rather than wheeled in as ‘historical context’, to which the text
stands merely as illustration or symptom. He pursues readings which unpack the multiple
meanings compressed into Faulkner’s language, ‘subsemantic whisperings latent in a
4. See Godden 1997 and Genovese 1974.

5. Jameson 1981, p. 77.
6. Jameson 1981, p. 80.
ramifying resemblance’ (p. 16). His method is to amplify these whisperings – at the
admitted risk of ‘exaggerating’ (p. 48) or sounding ‘strained’ (p. 49) – so as to hear history
re-sounding in the echo-chamber of the text. The signal distinction of Godden’s analysis is
the wealth of hermeneutic resources it deploys from Paul Ricœur, Paul de Man, and
Michael Riffaterre, among others – a salutary richness in a period of de rigueur demonstrations
of theoretical competence and contextual information-gathering in which close reading has
become a dying craft, more honoured in the breach than in the observance.7 To follow this
book’s argument closely thus requires a finely tuned ear, as well as some familiarity with
Faulkner’s texts, filled as they are with ‘luminous innuendo’ (p. 52). This is not so much
close reading as intense listening, likely to alienate the determinedly tone-deaf.
It is difficult to convey the full import of Godden’s readings of Faulkner’s texts, which
derive their weight and power from a dual strategy: an insistent probing of textual details
which produces an extended field of signification, and a boiling down of plot-elements in
a kind of reductio ad absurdum that reveals the novels’ stark narrative-core. The Hamlet’s
story begins in Mississippi in 1887, when Flem Snopes arrives for work as a clerk in Will
Varner’s store at Frenchman’s Bend, wearing a ‘brand new white shirt’ marked with ‘his
own particular soiling groove’. Godden builds his interpretative case from the historical
resonances of the single word, ‘soiling’. While an established critical tradition sees Snopes
as the straightforward personification of capitalism – calculating, mercenary, materialistic,
fixated on market-opportunity – Godden points out that he comes from sharecropper-
stock, from rented fields and ‘a coercive, credit-led labor regime’ (p. 24). These antecedents
cling to him, just as his skin ‘soils’ his white shirt. Furthermore, his father, Ab, was a barn-
burner, a form of protest at landed-class domination associated with a ‘disaffected black
tenantry’ (p. 15). Flem’s pretentious black tie resembles Ab’s club-foot, a dissonant image
which Godden loops back in time to recover a radical past of labour-insurrection, even as
the present moment tips towards the hegemony of the capitalist market. ‘Soiling’ is
therefore one of the ‘complex words’ of Godden’s title, with its nod to William Empson’s
The Structure of Complex Words (1951), words which signify within a textual economy and
derive accretions of meaning from the literal economy ‘outside’ the text.
The crucial aspect of Faulkner’s story is that it is narrated from the point of view not of
Snopes, but of the former-sharecropper-turned-sewing-machine-salesman, Ratliff. To
Ratliff, Varner’s horse-drawn buggies connote Varner’s daughter, Eula, who rides in them
and provides potential access, via courtship and matrimony, to his property. Ratliff
associates the buggies with the excremental, equine odour of the stable, and the textual
metaphors which proliferate from this association figure Eula as both vagina and anus, ‘the
earth’s orifice’ (p. 27). While Eula represents land as both property and elemental filth, Ike
Snopes’s sexual congress with a cow grants him ‘access’ to his ‘true love’, the soil (p. 52).
Meanwhile, Mink Snopes’s bull grazes the Bend’s pastures in militant defiance of private
property. All three figures represent the revivifying energy of a ‘residual social structure’, a
peasantry not wholly dominated by the merchant-capitalist class (p. 55). The peasantry
represents what Ferdinand Braudel calls ‘the lowest stratum of the non-economy, the soil
into which capitalism thrusts its roots, but which it can never really penetrate’ (p. 29). Its
‘seed, milk, and earth’ counter the ‘semen, shit, and coin’ of the money-economy, whose
7. See Ricœur 1978; De Man 1979; Riffaterre 1980.

pricing mechanisms nevertheless inflict a ‘perverse stain’, as when Snopes barters sex with
a black field-hand for some lard from his store (p. 30).
But all this turns out to be sheer ideology, ‘a story that will ease [Ratliff’s] own sense of
having betrayed his class of origin’, while allowing him to ‘seve[r] his own awkward and
increasingly archaic’ ties to the tenantry (p. 31). In order to appease his conscience, Ratliff
tells himself that he represents ‘the better face of the coercive economy’ and turns
‘subsistence producers bound by debt to the ground’ into sexualised, bucolic fantasy
(p. 36). For Godden, what can be recuperated is not Ratliff ’s nostalgia for the pre-market
economy but Snopes’s unstable, insurrectionary force. He is less ‘capital’s epitome’ than a
resentful iconoclast, grubbing his way up from, and out of, the sharecropping system
(p. 41). His actions bespeak not capitalist hegemony, but resignation ‘in the face of the
insufferability of the available social options’ (p. 41).
The central premise of Godden’s argument is that ‘a radical restructuring of labor
necessarily forces to prominence archaic and perhaps resistant features of the system it
displaces’ (p. 61). He goes on to read the disruptive effects of New-Deal restructuring in
‘The Fire and the Hearth’, a story from Go Down, Moses in which the reveries of the white
landlord, Roth Edmunds, turn his black tenant, Lucas Beauchamp, into a troubling
revenant. Roth’s father, Zack, took Lucas’s wife, Molly, as his own, to nurse the infant
Roth, compounding the miscegenated blood-line binding black and white families. Lucas
is minded to kill Zack, but the master-slave dialectic links them so intimately that he
cannot achieve an act that will amount to self-slaughter. Lucas stays on as the ‘archaic
tenant of a modernizing land lord’, refusing the machines and chemicals which are in the
process of cementing the new régime of accumulation in the form of agribusiness (p. 71).
Roth comes to a partial recognition of his own hybrid nature as the white child of a black
home, beginning to acknowledge that ‘the physical labors of the rural working class
materialise the substance and wealth of those who own the land’ (p. 81). But, like Ratliff,
he sentimentalises that knowledge, perfecting the safely manageable image of Lucas as a
peasant bound by blood and sweat to the natal soil.
Faulkner’s free, indirect style, mixing the voices of white narrator and black character,
allows him to ‘move between racialized subject positions’, performing an ‘authorial shuffle’
in which the cathected black body is both cast out and retained (pp. 76, 77). This shuffle is
performed most elaborately in ‘Pantaloon in Black’, another story from Go Down, Moses,
by the figure of the black wage-earner Rider, who is both a ‘labor radical’ (p. 96) and sexual
athlete, the black phallus as white fetish. Godden argues that Faulkner ‘mask[s] himself as
black as a prelude to casting the black from himself ’ – ‘Rider’, in a Faulknerian pun, is the
‘writer’ (p. 106). Faulkner’s excited identification with Rider’s tumescence indicates the
extent to which he has discovered his own psychic investment in blackness, at the very
moment when the black body is displaced by New-Deal restructuring and the imminent
war-time mobilisation of black labour in 1940–1. ‘What greater loss to an owning class’,
Godden asks, ‘than the loss of that body whose labor substantiates the class body of those
who own?’ (p. 112). To desire the black phallus is ‘to desire the labour through which it
stands and glimpse a consolatory fiction of amity between male bodies’ (p. 112).
The starkest version of this consolatory fiction is unearthed from ‘The Bear’, whose
protagonist, Ike McCaslin, obsessively reads the ledgers from his family’s plantation in
search of evidence for his grandfather’s incestuous miscegenation. Buried in the ledgers,
beneath this all-too-familiar and tellable story of the perfidy of the planter-class, is an
occulted and less-relatable tale, which Godden reconstructs in collaboration with another
Faulkner scholar, Noel Polk. McCaslin’s father, Buck, had an incestuous homosexual
relationship with his brother, Buddy; after the death of their father, the brothers domicile
their slaves in the master’s house and live together in a log-cabin built with their own
labour. Buck then purchases a slave, Percival Brownlee, who serves as his sexual partner
before escaping to become a male prostitute to the Union-troops in the Civil War. Ike’s
fixation upon his grandfather’s heterosexual incest is an attempt to displace and refuse
more profound and disturbing ‘interethnic intimacies’, his father’s ‘desire for a bound man’
bearing the tacit recognition that his own property and substance is ‘the work of abjected
hands’ (p. 148). By telling this story, Faulkner can both repudiate and retain the black male
body ‘as an object of deniable desire’ at the very moment of out-migration, when ‘black
bodies are seen to depart’ from their accustomed place (p. 132).
Godden concludes by reading A Fable’s tale of a mutiny among American and British
soldiers fighting in France in World-War I as an allegory of the militarisation of the
American economy in the post-World-War-II period. Again, Godden builds his contextual
argument from densely-assembled textual particulars. The corporal at the ‘focal point (and
origin) of the serially organized panic’ is a ‘black Jew’, a figure of ‘opacity, disorder,
boundary-collapse, and slippage’, both alien from, and essential to, the project of paranoid
self-definition that creates what C. Wright Mills called the ‘permanent arms economy’
(p. 164). With federal funds dispersed geographically to create a national-security state, the
South emerged as the major beneficiary of this economy, completing its long-delayed
process of modernisation. Another régime of accumulation emerges, a ‘machine for making
death and money’ (p. 195). By 1954, with the movement of black labour from plantation
to factory consolidated and the civil-rights movement underway, black has definitively
broken from white: ‘Faulkner’s lost thing was lost and gone, separated from the white
owning class by a decade of economic transition’ (p. 196).
An Economy of Complex Words shows how a basic contradiction in the social relations
underpinning economic practices can run so deep as to become structural, a part of the
material conditions by which everyday life is carried on. Godden’s achievement is to
demonstrate how such structures ‘generate’ contradictions which embed themselves in
both the collective psyche, and in the multilayered texts that issue from a psyche as
apparently idiosyncratic as that of William Faulkner. What elevates Godden’s work far
above both conventional literary exegeses and ‘cultural-studies’ approaches is the feeling he
demonstrates for both the historical weight of words – their traceable derivation from a
closely-specified context – and for the figural play of language – the linguistic mutations
performed by equally specifiable instances of tropes such as metaphor, synecdoche, ellipsis,
chiasmus, and allegory. Godden’s unmatched facility with the terms of grammar, rhetoric
and semiotics means that he is able to detect what others simply miss, picking up meanings
which lie, in Raymond Williams’s words, ‘on the very edge of semantic availability’.8 In
this, he combines a rigorous historical-materialist methodology with the hermeneutic
sophistication associated with poststructuralists such as Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida.
Godden insists on difficulty because the material of the text is difficult. Dense, occluded
and resistant, the text is haunted by its own revenants, by cancelled hopes, repressed wishes,
and contradictory desires. I hope to have demonstrated at least something of the scope and
8. As cited in Godden 2007, p. 118.

power of Godden’s analysis. My one demurral concerns biography, perhaps the least
fashionable (but most popular) form of literary criticism.
Godden tends to take it as read that Faulkner was an ‘apprentice to a planter economy’
(p. 132), that he identified so closely with the Southern landowning class as to act as ‘its
contemporary and historian’ (p. 5). But the method, which generally steers clear of the
intentional fallacy, does not permit such biographical certainties. Godden asks whether
Faulkner’s interest in Lucas’s story turns on his own commitment to ‘an archaic regime of
accumulation’, one that might ‘resist modernity’ and so prevent the trauma of ‘the black
separated, the black in motion, the black urbanized’ (p. 75). He answers that we cannot
know what Faulkner’s authorial intentions were because he adopted a free, indirect
narration which allows for no interpretive ‘finality’ (p. 75). There is thus a disparity between
the fully-fledged, historicised body of Rider, and the oddly anonymous, place-less figure of
the author, ‘Faulkner’. We need to know in more biographical detail the extent of Faulkner’s
identification with capital in order to fully appreciate his psychic investments in labour.
Another paradox of Godden’s argument is that it posits a sharply defined generative
structure – the Agricultural Adjustment Program – which ‘yields disconcerting levels of
textual undecibability’ (p. 75). This is unproblematic when it comes to purely textual
ambiguity: Faulkner’s text both mourns the separation of black from white and disavows
that any separation has taken place, until the permanent arms-economy makes the breach
final. But, because of the biographical lacuna identified above, textual ambiguities cannot
be traced to ambivalences in Faulkner’s own mind. The lacuna becomes particularly
problematic when the utopian potentialities of the text are concerned. The value Godden
wants to attach to a ‘residual social structure’ of ‘subsistence’ and ‘use-value’, to ‘non-
monetary modes of exchange’ is necessarily uncertain (p. 55). The same can be said for the
extent to which labour (ploughing) as the exercise of independent consciousness is
potentially liberating, or populist revolt (barn-burning) potentially emancipatory. These
are latent themes recoverable from Faulkner’s text, but it is not clear whether Faulkner’s
premodern, archaic class-location made him, at some level, an anticapitalist; or whether he
finally threw his lot in with modernisation and agribusiness and produced a set of elegiacs
which falsified and obscured the restructuring of the South. ‘Split subjects and divided
objects’ provide plentiful hermeneutic resources for opening up the text, but they tend to
divorce Godden from the kind of directly articulated politics for which, on the lower
frequencies, his argument seems to yearn (p. 74).
The concept that links economic structure and literary text in Godden’s analysis is the
psyche, a space of repressed desires whose origins ultimately lie in economic interest, and
whose topography is recoverable from the encrypted traces it leaves in the signifying
substance of words. But the link back to economic structure from the text can only be
made, it seems to me, if the psyche is posited alongside the biographical record, a record
which has itself to be interpreted, but which is nonetheless crucial in suggesting how
economic power and interest take psychological form. My sense is that, without this
additional form of mediation, the analysis risks becoming over-immersed in the purely
psychic life of power, rather than being directed equally at power understood economically
and politically. The complexities of régimes of accumulation as generative structures
(Agricultural Adjustment Program; permanent arms-economy) tend to be displaced by
what they generate (the text).
Having read An Economy of Complex Words one wants to know more about how central
the AAP was to the Southern neo-plantation economy, and more about Faulkner’s own
recognition of its effects in his correspondence, essays, and journals. Such evidence might
substantiate Faulkner’s ‘concer[n]’ with the New Deal’s ‘reformation of labor and its
ruination as it was forced out of the forms into which “dependency” and an archaic regime
of accumulation . . . had cast it’ (p. 40). It would be fascinating to know, not just how the
Southern owning-class resolved its contradictory need to keep blacks on the land, and to
turn them into mobile wage-earners, but how Faulkner himself sensed and responded to
that dilemma. One also wants to know how the ‘forcing-out’ affected white sharecroppers,
and whether their plight had any affinity with that of black-migrant labour – whether, that
is, the less-successful Snopeses sensed, or resisted, the possibility of common experience or
common cause with their black counterparts, and whether that recognition or disavowal
took narrative form in the work of other Southern writers.
These caveats aside, it seems to me that Godden’s concept of generative structure is of
vital interest to anyone wishing to develop a genuinely-historical materialism within the
field of literary studies. Among the effects by which a landmark-study might be known are
that it provides the basis for a new methodology, while provoking a fresh set of research-
questions. Measured by these criteria, An Economy of Complex Words is such a work.
Reviewed by Andrew Lawson

Leeds Metropolitan University, United Kingdom
a.lawson@leedsmet.ac.uk
References
Aglietta, Michel 2000 [1976], A Theory of Capitalist Regulation: The U.S. Experience, translated
by David Fernbach, London: Verso.
De Man, Paul 1979, Allegories of Reading: Figural Landscape in Rousseau, Rilke, and Proust, New
Haven: Yale University Press.
Genovese, Eugene D. 1974, Roll, Jordan Roll: The World the Slaves Made, New York: Pantheon
Books.
Godden, Richard 1997, Fictions of Labor: William Faulkner and the South’s Long Revolution,
—— 2007, William Faulkner: An Economy of Complex Words, Princeton: Princeton University
Press.
Jameson, Fredric 1981, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, London:
Methuen.
Ricœur, Paul 1978, ‘The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling’, Critical
Inquiry, 5, 1: 143–59.
Riffaterre, Michael 1980 [1978], Semiotics of Poetry, London: Methuen.
Wiener, Jonathan M. 1979, ‘Class Structure and Economic Development in the American
South, 1865–1955’, American Historical Review, 84, 4: 970–92.
Wright, Gavin 1986, Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy Since the Civil
War, New York: Basic Books.
Capital as Power: A Study of Order and Creorder, Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler,
London: Routledge, 2009.
Abstract
Nitzan and Bichler’s Capital as Power suggests that conventional theories of capitalism, Marxist
and liberal alike, are unable to answer the question: what is capital? They argue that the basic
units of Marxist economics, abstract labour and value, are unobservable and immeasurable, and
hence ‘non-existent’ and ‘fictitious’. Against Marxists, they argue that capital is not an ‘economic’
entity, but a symbolic quantification of power.
This review contends that what Nitzan and Bichler present as a critique of Marxism as such
pivots on an incomprehension of dialectical thinking, and thus misses the mark. Furthermore,
this absence in their readings of Marx is strictly correlative to the limits of their own theory-
building. Capital as Power simply inverts the vulgar economism it finds in Marxist theories,
presenting us with a theory in which capital is financial rather than productive, and symbolic
rather than material. In doing so, it reproduces the one-sidedness it criticises, while discarding
the possibility of analysing capitalism dialectically as a totality consisting of contradictory, but
mutually presupposing, moments.
Keywords
Nitzan and Bichler, capital, power, Marx, dialectics
Capital is power. It is around this simple proposition that political economists Nitzan and
Bichler build their most ambitious book to date, the four-hundred page long Capital as
Power. This book can be read as a clarification and elaboration of the theoretical
presupposition at the centrepiece of their previous productions, especially the excellent The
Global Political Economy of Israel of 2002.1 In a dazzling outburst of ambition and
dissatisfaction with existing theories of capital, the first part of Capital as Power attempts to
clear the ground for a new theory through the rejection of neoclassical as well as Marxist
economics. While intertwined with the arguments of the first half, their own theory of
capital-as-power takes centre-stage in the second half of the book. Conceptualising capital
in terms of ownership rather than production, the basic subject-matter is not economics as
such, but capital – capital understood as a question of organised and quantified power.
In order to demonstrate the obsolescence of neoclassical and Marxist approaches to
capital, Nitzan and Bichler engage in criticisms of an impressive range of theories. On
account of the sheer number of readings that form the base of their argument, their
criticisms are more engaged, detailed and informed than most exchanges between
neoclassical and Marxist economists themselves. In short, they have read their enemies.
Certainly they have, but how, and how well? This question with regards to Marxism, and
1. In 2005, Nitzan and Bichler alleged that their Global Political Economy of Israel had been
plagiarised by the Retort Collective in their successful analysis/manifesto on ‘military neo-
liberalism’, Afflicted Powers (Retort Collective 2005). Nitzan and Bichler have published their
extensive and well-documented complaints on their website <http://bnarchives.yorku.ca/>.
While Nitzan and Bichler’s complaint seems technically valid – Retort does rely on unreferenced
passages from their book – the essayistic style of Afflicted Powers could warrant a plea for
largesse.

in particular the Marxian dialectic, will structure the review at hand, leaving their instructive
discussions of neoclassical economics to one side. As will be argued, Nitzan and Bichler fail
to exhibit an understanding of the dialectic at play in Marx’s Capital. This focus, however,
is not to be understood as the Marxologist’s defence of the ‘true’ Marx, but, rather, as a way
to throw light upon Nitzan and Bichler’s theory of capital itself, on its wants and merits.
Thus, the assessment of Capital as Power will take a detour through the analysis of its
method and epistemology, in an attempt to offer a critique of the structuring ideas of the
book. In doing so, this review will try to practise the form of in-depth methodological
analysis it finds lacking in Nitzan and Bichler’s reading of Marx. Through this analysis,
I will argue that Nitzan and Bichler’s inability or unwillingness to engage with Marx’s
dialectical method marks the limits of their own approach. Specifically, their critiques of
non-dialectical Marxist theories of value and capital remain stuck in a positivist or empiricist
framework, which their own theory does not respect, and which the Hegelian Marx had
more convincingly overcome – or sublated – a hundred and fifty years ago. I will thus argue
that the poverty of their critiques of questionable Marxisms is an index of the limits of their
own theory-building.
Capital as power
Before we depart on the discussion and analysis of Nitzan and Bichler’s problematic
relationship to Marx, it is useful to sketch out the basic tenets of their theory of capital. At
the very root, the authors follow the American economist and social critic Thorstein Veblen
in defining capital as a power to incapacitate, to decide over the use of things, or rather to
decide not to use a thing. They illuminate this point by referring to the origins of the word
‘private’ in the Latin privatus, restricted, and to the verb privare, to deprive (p. 228). Thus,
the defining characteristic of capital is not related to production and the extraction of
surplus-value, but directly to private property itself, which is nothing but the power to
deprive. ‘The most important feature of private ownership is not that it enables those who
own, but that it disables those who do not’ (ibid.). Capital as defined qua private property
is thus not a mode of production, but an institution of exclusion. This means that capital
must be defined as a form of organised power separate from production, which is merely
under the control of capital qua ownership. In this way, Nitzan and Bichler oppose two
general ‘entities’: on the one hand humane society, and, on the other, capitalist ‘creorder’,
denoting ‘a paradoxical fusion between being and becoming’ of the capitalist system,
imposing itself on society (p. 18). The former follows no preset pattern, and thus cannot be
theorised; it is a mostly latent and invisible potentiality, which occasionally erupts ‘often
without warning, to challenge and sometimes threaten the institutions of capitalist power’
(p. 21). Nitzan and Bichler more-or-less leave considerations of what we could call class-
struggle at that remark, and proceed to what can be theorised, namely ‘the dynamic order
of those who rule’, the capitalist creorder (ibid.). In effect, private property, which, for
Marx, is a presupposition of capital (necessary, but not sufficient), for Nitzan and Bicher
becomes capital-as-such, while the sine qua non of capital – the extraction of surplus-value
through exploitation – becomes external to the concept of capital itself. The concept of
capital is thus on the side of ownership, rather than what dynamically relates ownership
and non-ownership.
Since capital is understood in terms of property, the source of the dynamic of the
capitalist creorder is sought on the plane of the distribution, rather than of the production,
of wealth. What, however, is found on this plane is simply a number of concrete, empirical
capitalist actors, and the question of the dynamic of capital thus becomes one of the logic
of those in possession of capital. In short: as property-ownership relations are the privileged
nexus of the theory of capital, of capital understood as a ‘creorder’, questions of wage-
labour, exploitation and class-struggle are disregarded. Hence Nitzan and Bichler
understand modern industry to be subordinated to the ends of business-enterprises, which
have only one interest: the accumulation of pecuniary wealth (p. 220). This statement,
seemingly close to Marxism, is not simply taken to mean that production is ruled by the
profit-motive. Rather, it is used as a lever to suggest that capital must be understood from
the viewpoint of the business-investor, for whom capital ‘has long been stripped of any
physical characteristics’ (p. 231). Thus, Nitzan and Bichler suggest that we leave behind
production-centred theories of capital, and understand it as the business-investor does, as
‘a pecuniary capitalization of earning capacity’ expressed not in equipment or physical wealth,
but in terms of expected future earnings (ibid.).
Before we can introduce their reasons for not pursuing a theory of capitalist production,
it is useful to look at their idea of capitalisation as capitalism’s specific difference from other
modes of private-property power.
Capitalisation as the commodification of power

The concept of capitalisation is absolutely central to Nitzan and Bichler’s understanding of
contemporary capital. In fact, Nitzan and Bichler argue, stressing the importance of the
development of the discounting-principle by neoclassical economists Irving Fisher and
Frank Fetter, capitalisation is a general principle or algorithm that is used to determine the
price of all pecuniary assets understood as claims on earnings. In other words, capitalisation
is the algorithm which gives claims to future earnings a price in the present, i.e., makes it
possible to price an asset on the basis of its projected turnover rather than its present value.
With this logic, bonds, shares, stocks, mortgages, bank-accounts, personal loans and real-
estate ownership all become vendible income-streams (p. 156). Unlike commodities that
are circulated, and whose value is calculated in a backward-looking accounting of inputs,
capitalisation is severed from this circulation, since it is purely symbolic and forward-
looking. For Nitzan and Bichler, the analysis of capital as a material-productive apparatus
thus becomes redundant (p. 260). Capital is ‘in itself ’ simply ‘a symbolic representation of
power’, ‘neither a material object nor a social relationship embedded in material entities’
(p. 7). Accordingly, they suggest that the analysis must start with finance. ‘All capital is
finance, and only finance’ (p. 262). Capital is a symbolic architecture of social power,
‘a mode of power’ rather than a mode of production (p. 263).
As the unit of capital, price is not a productive or utilitarian quantity, but a ‘power
magnitude’, the unit with which capitalism is ordered (p. 307). Capitalisation is the
algorithm that generates and organises the price of capital, and, as such, it is the ‘universal
symbol of capital’ (p. 270). More precisely, capitalisation is the procedure through which
capitalist power is commodified on the stock- and bond-markets, the algorithm of the
commodification of power (p. 311), which produces a price from expected earnings, risk-
perception, hype and the expected rate of return. Thus, capitalisation is strictly a forward-
looking question of how property can be capitalised, how power to deprive can be enhanced.
Hence, it neither relates to the productivity of a fixed asset, nor to the abstract labour
embodied in any asset, but to the power of a corporation’s owners:
For the capitalist, the real thing is the nominal capitalization of future earnings.
This capitalization is not ‘connected’ to reality; it is the reality. And what matters
in that reality is not production and consumption, but power. (p. 182.)
As the reality of capitalists, capitalisation can be understood as ‘the universal creed of

capitalism’ operating according to the nominal reality of power in ‘the capitalist nomos’
(p. 8). Capital as a whole is thus the creed and norms of those who own capitalisable assets.
‘The “science of finance” is first and foremost a collective ethos. Its real achievement is not
objective discovery but ethical articulation’ (p. 184). Thus the order is akin to a system of
belief in which the financial reality is taken as an ‘exogenous given’ by the investor, who
then joins the nomos and (re)produces it by doing so. Within this nomos, capitalisation is
simply the ‘most adhered-to convention’ (p. 211).
And, since struggle against capital from without is black-boxed as beyond theorisation,
the primary focus becomes that of the struggle over distribution of pecuniary wealth
between dominant capital-groups. Nitzan and Bichler suggest these can be measured
statistically in terms of differential capitalisation (static comparison of rates of capitalisation)
and differential accumulation (‘dynamic’ comparison of changes in rates of capitalisation) of
groups of owners of capital (p. 313). These groups are caught in the architecture of their
own internal struggle: ‘Its individual members are forced to accept the very logic they
impose on the rest of humanity’ (p. 21).
The underlying driving force of large-scale capitalist organizations is not

fundamentally different from that which propelled the rulers of earlier power
regimes: they all seek to control nature and, ultimately, human beings. (p. 270.)
In sum, the dynamic of capital is the becoming-vendible of power, a dynamic embodied as

a ‘creed’ in the actors found on the static plane of the distribution of wealth. Capital as a
whole is thus, socially speaking, a system of norms (the ‘capitalist nomos’ and ‘capitalist
mode of power’), made up by individual capitalists following the logic of capitalisation. In
this framework, class-struggle cannot be treated as integrally related to the theoretical
account of capitalisation, even if it is invoked occasionally. The only struggle that is theorised
directly is the intra-class struggle of dominant capitals, while inter-class struggle becomes a
question of direct dominance (as deprivation and exclusion), and questions of structural
dominance become disregarded as external to the theory of capital proper.
Neither basing the superstructure nor superstructuring the base

The reason for the absence of any theory of exploitation in Capital as Power is related to
its rejection of that foremost theory of exploitation, namely Marx’s. Nitzan and Bichler’s
rejection is based on the alleged inability of Marx to deal with what they see as the essential
form of capital, that is finance. Nitzan and Bichler’s claim to be instituting a new paradigm
in the study of capital is based on this idea that capital is pecuniary rather than productive.
Readers of Historical Materialism will know that this opposition – productive or pecuniary –
is problematic; capital, for Marx, is inherently both. Nitzan and Bichler’s critique of
Marxism can here help us understand the method and epistemology of Capital as Power.
The question is how Nitzan and Bichler set up their rejection of Marxism and what readings
of Marx they thereby preclude.2
In a passage from the book’s introduction, we find distilled both Nitzan and Bichler’s
reading and their rejection of Marx. Echoing Marx’s claim to put Hegel on his feet, they
write that
Marx classified finance as ‘fictitious’ capital – in contrast to the ‘actual’ capital

embedded in the means of production. This classification puts the world on its
head. In fact, in the real world the quantum of capital exists as finance, and only
as finance. This is the core of the capitalist regime. (p. 7.)
If Nitzan and Bichler are here coquetting with Hegel, it serves not to clarify their position.
Rather, as we will see, it covers up the absence of what we could call ‘the dialectic’ (or rather,
of a dialectical way of thinking, to avoid its reification as system or method) in their reading
of Marx, as well as in their own theory of capital. According to the authors, Marx got things
wrong because he was caught up in analyses of the concrete labour-process of workers and
technology, and never managed to integrate the dependence of the labour-process on
capitalist control, that is, on the accumulation of universal ownership-titles, viz. the ‘form
of capitalism’ (p. 85). Nitzan and Bichler’s claim is that Marx was preoccupied with the
‘content’ of capitalism, neglecting the analysis of its ‘form’.3 Briefly put, Nitzan and Bichler
read Marx’s Capital as a productionist-materialist doctrine of political economy which
leaves the power-dynamics of capitalism largely ignored. Marx, they assert, is caught in a
‘materialistic trap’ (p. 85). Following Veblen and the idea of money as the universal symbol
of capital-as-power, Nitzan and Bichler asserts that ‘capital simply is not a double-sided
entity’, but ‘only a pecuniary magnitude’, a nominal sphere ruling the material, quantity
ruling quality (p. 231).
The conclusion that capital is the abstract rule of the universal equivalent (money) over
the heterogeneous qualities of living labour and use-values mimics a dialectically informed
Marxist critique of, say, the economism of the Second International, but the assertion that
capital is not double-sided is a clear marker of Nitzan and Bichler’s incomprehension of
dialectical thought. For Marx, capital is not simply the abstract rule of money, but, more
importantly – since money is the form of appearance of value – the real rule of value over
living labour. Being unable to think capital dialectically, Nitzan and Bichler’s criticisms of
economism and empiricist materialism (wrongly presented as critiques of all Marxism tout
court) hardly produce much more than the mirror-image of what they criticise. In their
2. As Marx wrote in proto-Wittgensteinian mode: ‘Frequently the only possible answer is a

critique of the question and the only solution is to negate the question.’ (Marx 1973, p. 127.)
3. This claim betrays Nitzan and Bichler’s unfamiliarity with the tradition of readings of
Capital that stress the centrality of the concept of the value-form, from Isaak Rubin via Hans-
Georg Backhaus to Moishe Postone and Christopher J. Arthur.
inversion of economism’s non-dialectical reading of the base-superstructure metaphor,

capital becomes pure superstructure, and the base the sphere of true humanity: ‘When
considered in isolation from contemporary business institutions, the principal goal of
industry, its raison d’être according to Veblen is the efficient production of quality goods
and services for the betterment of human life’ (p. 219). Not only does the failure of their
master, Veblen, in grasping the social process as a totality lead to an immediate distinction
between productive and non-productive functions, as noted by Adorno in his perceptive
critique of Veblen, but also to a humanist problematic.4 In the idea of industry as the
production of goods for the betterment of human life, we find this lack of a politics of
production expressed as the apolitics of the good life characteristic of humanism – as if
industry can be understood in abstraction from the always contested social relations which
structure it.
In line with this, Nitzan and Bichler enlist the philosophical weight of Thorstein Veblen
and Lewis Mumford to characterise the conflict between dominant capital and humanity
as an instantiation of a ‘primal’ conflict between creativity and power. Nitzan and Bichler
also speak of this, without making the distinctions between the different manicheanisms
clear, as the conflict between democracy and power and between industry and business.
Industry is the great pool of human creativity, cooperation and solidarity, a collective
endeavour sabotaged and controlled by business (Veblen) or by power-civilisation
(Mumford). What we could charitably see as a beautiful vision of what could be, as a
universal potentiality – humanity, creativity, democracy and industry pure-and-simple –
Nitzan and Bichler situate in a mythical description of neolithic society as an idyllic,
dispersed and democratic state-of-nature. As Adono says: ‘The positivist permits himself to
conceive of human potentiality only by transforming it into a given, something which
actually existed in the past’.5
By not thinking the social process as a totality, Nitzan and Bichler relate business and
industry ‘causally’, saying that, since capitalist industry is carried out for the sake of
business, ‘causality runs not from production to distribution, but from distribution to
production’ (p. 221). In its exclusive focus on distribution, into which ‘industry provides
no insight’ (ibid.), their discourse conjures up the idea that production under capitalism is
merely an effect of capitalist business. Business-history takes the place of labour-history.
Their inability to think totality is also clear in the criticisms of Marx’s ‘materialist bias’.
They read his assertion in the 1859 Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political
Economy, that a ‘distinct mode of production thus determines [bestimmt] a specific mode
of consumption, distribution, exchange and the specific relations of these different phases
to one another’ as a form of reductionist materialism. They see the relation between
production and distribution as a relation of determination between independent,
autonomous spheres (p. 85), while, for Marx, distribution (of the means of production) is
a moment within production.6
The price of refusing to theorise production and distribution, and, a fortiori, labour and
capital as dialectically co-constitutive, is the abstract romanticisation of the former
4. Adorno 1997.
5. Adorno 1997, p. 88.
6. See the section ‘Distribution and Production’ in the 1857 Introduction (Marx 1973,
pp. 94–98).
(industry/production/labour) and the disembedding of the latter from the former (business/
distribution/capital). In this vision, class-struggle proper cannot be theorised: it is absent
from both industry and business. The struggle, then, is a humanist one between the two. It
is between two sets of abstract signifiers (industry/creativity/democracy vs. business/power/
control), both of which, all too obviously, give away their moral value. If this is correct,
then Nitzan and Bichler’s political doctrine simply states, in all banality: one must stand on
the side of good social relations against the bad.
Constructing and rejecting Marxism

To understand how Nitzan and Bichler can arrive at the dualisms sketched out above, it is
useful to look more closely at their rejection of Marxism. In particular, their abandonment
of class-struggle as a theoretical concept and the absence of a developed theory of capitalist
production in Capital as Power can be understood in relation to their criticisms of
Marxism.
In their all-out attack on Marxism, Nitzan and Bichler rehearse a plethora of well-known
debates within Marxism and between Marxism and the neo-Ricardian school focusing on
Sweezy, Steedman, Fine and Harris, and Foley.7 In two dense chapters, Nitzan and Bichler
unleash an impressive cascade of problematisations, critiques and sardonic remarks, creating
a densely mined field. Playing the part of true outsiders and paradigm-founders, they are
able to condense a number of questions asked in different contexts from different political
projects and research-agendas, and the even greater number of answers these give rise to,
into so many phrasings of the same questions (‘the transformation-problem’, ‘the problem
of the definition of productive labour’, ‘the labour-theory of value’). These questions,
completing the violent condensation of Marxism, in turn come to circle around the
ultimate question: Is a Marxist economics possible at all? Meanwhile, within this overall
refutation, Nitzan and Bichler continue with many insights from Marxism, more than
readers unfamiliar with Marxism would be lead to expect by the vehemence of their
criticisms.
Addressing all the criticisms that Nitzan and Bichler raise against the many strands of
Marxism, let alone give answers to them, is neither possible nor of interest here. Much less
should we want to defend Marxism ‘in general’, something a Marxist can only do by
glossing over too many disagreements between Marxists or by posing as the true inheritor
or supreme interpreter of Marx.8 Rather, we should inquire into Nitzan and Bichler’s
construction of this field, the constitutive omissions of this construction and the theoretical
effects it produces.
In their attempt to found a new paradigm in the study of capital and to demonstrate the
obsolescence of the Marxist approach, Nitzan and Bichler cleverly set up a test for Marx
that he cannot help but fail. They interpret the – indeed central – concept of socially-
7. Sweezy 1942; Steedman 1977; Fine and Harris 1979; Foley 2000.
8. The field of Marxism as a whole cannot be judged from within Marxism, as this
presupposes its being an object external to the subject of the judgement, or, in other words, that
the subject of the judgement is not part of the object itself.
necessary abstract labour-time as the ‘elementary particle’ of Marx’s system, as that which
underlies and founds the whole system, ‘Marx’s science’ (p. 122). Nitzan and Bichler
understand Marx’s socially-necessary labour-time as the undifferentiated universal quantum
that founds all value-rations. Furthermore, it is, they hold, the ultimate code of prices (as
mediated through the labour-theory of value). Without the concept of socially-necessary
labour-time, Marxism cannot understand wages, income-distribution and class-power, as
well as crisis-tendencies and the historical development of capitalism. Having conjured up
a beautiful and complete structure rising from the single elementary particle of abstract
labour-time, Nitzan and Bichler sarcastically quip ‘[t]he key difficulty is that this particle –
like God or the Ether – is forever beyond our reach’ (p. 88). This is the heart of Nitzan and
Bichler’s ornate and extensive critique of Marxism. Indeed, their catalogue of criticisms of
theories gathered under the signifier ‘Marxism’ circles around the critique of the concept of
socially-necessary abstract labour-time, uniting their different criticisms theoretically. The
problem with socially-necessary abstract labour-time, Nitzan and Bichler assert, lies in
converting a given individual labour-time to socially-necessary labour-time and a given
amount of concrete labour to abstract labour. This, they argue, amounts to a ‘make-or-
break-predicament’ for Marx. For, if Marx bases his theory on these conversions and they
cannot be performed, Marx’s theory has no basic unit and thus is no theory at all (p. 89).
As value and surplus-value do not exist, Nitzan and Bichler reject the concept of exploitation
as analytically distinct from oppression (p. 281).
For Nitzan and Bichler, the concept ‘abstract labour’ is materialist in a way most Marxists
would consider vulgar, and a positive concept that can be understood in isolation from
monetary relations. Since socially-necessary labour-time and value are supposed to be the
ground for Marx’s theory of prices, they cannot at the same time be expressed in prices, as
this would mean confusing that which is to be explained with its explanation, the
explanandum with the explanans. The basic move of Nitzan and Bichler is to postulate that
Marx tries (and fails) to derive the theoretical concept of abstract labour from empirically
existing concrete labour, and to quantify either without recourse to money (p. 97). It is by
ascribing to Marx this method of linear argument from empiricist premises that Nitzan and
Bichler can set up the problem of this transformation from value to prices as the decisive,
and ultimately insuperable, problem of Marx.
Abstract labour in Marx

For Marx, abstract labour is the answer to a question which seems rather odd from the
viewpoint of the linear and empiricist logic that Nitzan and Bichler impose on him. The
question is, what do commodities have in common when they are exchanged, what is their
‘third term’, their tertium comparationis? The oddity of the question is obvious: why should
the exchange of use-values which are essentially different imply that the items exchanged
have something in common?
If one simply presumes, as do Nitzan and Bichler, that Marx sets out the general
principles of his theory in the first two sections of Chapter 1 of Capital, one would find that
the shared property of the commodities exchanged has already been presented – they are all
use-values. Or, we might say, from the point of view of exchange – there is a demand for
all. And this was the answer that Aristotle, the father of the question, provided, an answer
which Marx found unsatisfactory.9 Indeed, concrete labour and use-value are both abstract
concepts that jumble together activities and things that are fundamentally heterogeneous.
In a certain sense, this formless mess of different activities and things is only grounded
retroactively with the concepts of value and exchange-value. Whereas it might pragmatically
make sense to fashion a common name such as use-value or utility to speak of all objects
that people find useful, this point of unification is in the name; it is merely linguistic,
naming difference from without. With the commodity-form, however, these fields of
difference find an objective unitary expression beyond the subjective mental synthesis of
the philosopher-economist.
What makes Marx’s method fundamentally different from any empiricist approach is
that the question of what commodities have in common in order to exchange does not so
much point towards a shared substance existing in them prior to their exchange, but at
what the commensuration of commodities in exchange posits. That is the question of what
the becoming-commodity of the product of labour, i.e. its exchange in the market, does to
the labour itself. The answer is not that it turns concrete labour into abstract labour, as
Nitzan and Bichler would have it (along with some of the authors in their selective Marxist
bibliography), but that it gives concrete labour an abstract social form. In general, as
production of products becomes production for the market, commodity-production, the
aim of producing use-values becomes subordinated to that of producing exchange-value.
In short, concrete labour and use-value become dominated, but not eradicated, by
the compulsion of market-competition to produce at or below the socially necessary
labour-time.
This answer in turn only makes sense if, as Christopher Arthur has convincingly argued,
one reads Chapter 1 of Capital as the initial breakdown of the systematic relations of
generalised exchange, rather than of ‘simple commodity-production’. This means that, in
the dialectical reconstruction of how concrete labour ‘becomes’ abstract, capitalist
production and thus money and wage-labour are all presupposed, but bracketed. It is
precisely not a theoretical construction from some element which is understandable in
isolation, but a reconstruction, which means that every element can only be understood in
relation to the whole of which it is a part. Taking the first sentence in Chapter 1 of Capital
into account, it is clear that Marx is not examining questions of production and wealth in
general, but specifically ‘[t]he wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production
prevails’.10 Marx starts his critique with the commodity, not because it is the foundation on
which capitalism rests, some isolatable ‘basic unit’, but because it is the ‘elementary cell’ of
capitalism, through which one can enter into the study of the system as a whole and study
what really matters: the logic that unites and propels the system forward. And this we
might call the dialectic: it is the thinking from the cell to the body, and from the body to
the cell, in a movement of thought which declares primary neither a unit (as if it were a
building block), nor the whole (as if it were a self-sustaining machine, a complete system),
but rather places ‘primacy’ in the contradictions running through the different layers of
the totality.
9. Aristotle 2000, p. 90; Marx 1976, p. 151.

10. Marx 1976, p. 125.
The question of socially-necessary abstract labour cannot be divorced from the question
of money: capitalism is essentially a monetary system.11 When Marx asks the question of
what commodities have in common, we should avoid reading him as asking for a concrete
shared material substance or origin. Rather, the question is how generalised exchange, for
which both money and capitalist production are conditions, constitute the unity of
commodities and labours practically.12 Instead of reading Marx’s exposition as a linear
sequence describing how an amount of concrete labour becomes, or is calculated as, an
amount of abstract labour, the logic of the commodity works both ways; as anticipation of
a value expressed by a price, and as determination of value in the sale. Commodity-
production and exchange describe this circle of constant anticipation and retroaction. The
concrete labour expended on a product, of course, may be of no value if the product cannot
be sold as a commodity: only from the point of view of the endpoint of the circle, the sale/
non-sale, are the previous moments validated. In the actual price, the value of the
commodity is being determined as a function of the fluctuations within the world of
commodities; abstract labour is ruling concrete labour rather than simply being its
product.
Within the value-relation and the value expression included in it, the abstractly
general counts not as a property of the concrete, sensibly real; but on the contrary
the sensibly-concrete counts as the mere form of appearance or definite form of
realisation of the abstractly general.13
Abstract labour, thus, cannot be equated with any particular kind of labour-expenditure.
On the contrary, it is the determination that any particular kind of labour-expenditure can
fall under in so far as the labour is waged (i.e., sold as the commodity labour-power) and
its product, be it a good or a service, is traded as a commodity. Abstract labour is not
something that can be observed or measured directly, but the abstract social form of
concrete labour under capitalist conditions of production.
And yet, in the Marx of Nitzan and Bichler, such ideas are absent. By and large, they
read Capital not with or against Hegel, but as if Hegel had never lived. For instance, we can
read their claim that capital is not a double-sided entity as an index of the absence of
dialectical thought. Whilst the pertinence of a dialectical reading of Capital is indisputable,14
the rather tokenistic invocations of the word ‘dialectics’ throughout the book do nothing
to make up for this absence.15 Lacking in the staging of the make-or-break predicament
Capital as Power sets up against Marx are two fundamental dialectical principles. Firstly,
the reconstruction of an integrated totality, viz. the task of dialectics, is inimical to linear
11. Arthur 2002, p. 12.

12. Arthur 2002, p. 100.
13. Marx 1978, p. 140.
14. See Rubin 2008, Backhaus 1980, and Arthur 2002 for a recent statement to this effect.
15. The ease with which Capital as Power glosses over the centrality of dialectical thought in
Marxism is exemplified in the remark that ‘Marxists, of course, express both the contradiction
and its resolution dialectically rather than mechanically as we have done here, and certainly with
far greater finesse; but their political conclusion is essentially the same.’ (Nitzan and Bichler
2009, p. 29.)
arguments; each concept within the exposition makes sense only in relation to other
concepts. Abstract labour must thus not only be read in relation to those concepts that
precede it (such as concrete labour), but also in relation to the concepts that follow upon it
(i.e. value and money), and within the totality of the exposition itself (importantly relating
it to surplus-value, which, ultimately, is what gives sense to the capitalist chain, M–C–M',
and hence to abstract labour). Secondly, whilst Nitzan and Bichler ascribe to Marx an
empiricist or positivist dualism between concepts and their objects, between theory and
reality, between thinking and being, Marx does no such thing. As we will see, the absence
of the dialectic in Nitzan and Bichler’s account of Marx has the effect that socially-necessary
labour-time is unthinkable as real or practical abstraction, and as an effect of commodity-
fetishism. This, of course, means that it becomes difficult to understand how, for Marx, the
specificity of power in capitalism is its abstract and impersonal character. As we will see,
Marx, contrary to Nitzan and Bichler’s claims, does have a concept of power, and an
extremely dynamic one at that. Furthermore, I will argue, the poverty of their Marx can be
read as a symptom of the poverty of their theory.
Illusion, truth and the obscure position of the critics

As we have seen, Nitzan and Bichler’s critique of Marx is based on the claim that abstract
labour must be fictional since it cannot be observed directly or induced from observables in
a linear fashion. These rather empiricist-positivist criticisms could, however, easily be
applied to their concept of power. Nitzan and Bichler reject Marxism with the help of
principles that their own theory does not honour, and that Marx himself (with Hegel)
would not accept.
In fact, it is tempting to point out a gap between their critique of Marx and their own
methodology. If Nitzan and Bichler utilise empiricist or positivist reasoning in their
attempted refutations, their own approach exhibits a pragmatist eclecticism that is more
akin to their forebear Thorstein Veblen than to any positivist research-programme. What
characterises their references to the history of physics, Mumford’s mythical neolithic
society, and Leibniz’s concept of space, is a pragmatist interest in examples as tools of the
understanding, bringing with it the difficulties of disguising metaphor as analogy and
analogy as argument. Hence their somewhat metaphorical descriptions of societies as
megamachines and conceptualisation of society-as-a-whole as a ‘holograph’ giving us ‘the
whole picture’ seems to be in tension with their empyreal gaze into the inner workings of
capitalism as a mode of power, and the myth-busting ethos they take on in their attacks on
Marxism and neoclassical economics.
Thus, instead of raising the question of the social importance and the possible
mystifications of neoliberalism and Marxism as problems requiring an analysis in their own
right, the two formations are at times dismissed as if they were merely phrases to be
dispensed with, and at others discussed as if they were only theory. On the one hand, their
critique of Marxism is strictly external (but based on unclear criteria), on the other it is
dubiously ‘immanent’. This confusion between these two moments is what sustains them.
Meanwhile, social critique of Marxism and neoliberalism – of their social conditions of
possibility and existence – are by-and-large absent: even when Capital as Power very
occasionally raises the question of the relation between theory, practice and production, as
in the statement that ‘neoclassical political economy is largely an ideology in the service of the
powerful ’ (p. 2), it is not without a tinge of instrumentalism, a limited mode of thought
prevalent in the Marxian tradition – but mostly subordinated in Marx’s writings.
Because of their elimination of a dialectical reading of Capital, Nitzan and Bichler must
claim an immediate identity between capital and power in ‘capitalist society as a whole’,
and that the duality between economics and politics is a pseudo-fact, ‘a theoretical
impossibility, one that is precluded by the very nature of capitalism’ (p. 30).16 In simply
refuting these distinctions as false, the authors fall short of Marx’s insights into the
mystifications of capital as products of capitalism itself and how these relate to relations of
dominance in capitalism. For example, Capital as Power merely points out that power-
relations become mystified and naturalised under capitalism, but does not explain how.
When Nitzan and Bichler write that ‘Marx’s insistence that power pervades the system does
not reject but rather necessitates the liberal duality of politics and economics’ (p. 26), as an
argument that Marx’s theory is flawed, the central Marxian insight that the distinction
between the political and the economic is not merely an illusion, but a product of social
relations themselves, is missed. Nitzan and Bichler replace the possibility of thinking the
unity in contradiction of objectivity and subjectivity, of being and thought, with the fantasy
of a theory that plainly states the facts; instead of the complex immanent relation between
contradiction and mediation, we get the external relation of immediacy and truth as
opposed to plain lies, illusions and falsities. Meanwhile, we look in vain for reflections on
the position from which Nitzan and Bichler speak their truths, and the ontological/
epistemological status of these truths.
Fetishism as power
For Marx, the duality between economics and politics is not only a passive effect of the
capitalist mode of production; it also gives form to subjectivity. It is a necessary appearance
that has an effect of its own. This is the point of the account of commodity-fetishism, in
which the relations between producers ‘take on the form of a social relation between the
products of labour’ and appear as merely ‘economic’ relations.17 Fetishism is not simply
illusion or an ideological ‘instrument’ of the powerful, but, rather, an effect of commodity-
exchange itself, the subjective side of the objectivity of the value-form. Thus, Marx writes,
when the social relations between producers do not appear directly as social relations, ‘but
rather as material relations between persons and social relations between things’, they
‘appear as what they are’.18 When Nitzan and Bichler distinguish capitalism from previous
‘mega-machines’, they do so, not by offering a theory of commodity-fetishism, but by
16. In a brief and otherwise sympathetic reading of Giovanni Arrighi, they reject what they
describe as his idea of a ‘contradictory interdependence’ of state and business, on the grounds
that in this model the two remain ‘fundamentally distinct’ (pp. 277–8). It is useful here to
remind ourselves of Gramsci’s good Hegelian point that the distinction between political society
and civil society is methodological rather than organic. See Notebook 4, §38 (Gramsci 1996,
pp. 177–87).
17. Marx 1976, p. 164.
18. Marx 1976, p. 166, my italics.
claiming that ‘[c]ontrary to earlier mega-machines that depended mainly on punishment,

oppression, violence and terror, capital relies also – and often far more so – on reward’
(p. 271). Raw violence and reward might be necessary for the reproduction of capital (as
well as feudalism), but only Marx’s concept of commodity-fetishism allows us to think
power-relations under capitalism in their specificity as systematically de-politicising and
atomising.
Naming and describing ‘the whole’/displacements of explanation

The advantage of the Marxian dialectic is that it gives us a way to think the capitalist
totality, not as a stable architecture, but as inherently split and driven forward by this split
itself. To the extent that power is symbolised, it is never simply an external name imposed
on the unnameable, but a product of the inherent contradictions of social relations, so
many unstable attempts to mediate and neutralise class-antagonism. But, since mediations
never fully resolve a contradiction, but only raise it to a higher level, we can understand all
levels as unstable and ultimately failed attempts at symbolic closure. For example, as David
Harvey and, recently, David McNally have pointed out with regards to the present crisis,
finance-capital is not a simple distortion of sound productive relations. On the contrary, it
springs from these relations themselves as a way to overcome the inherent crisis-tendencies
of capitalist production and circulation, with the result that these are not solved, but
reproduced on a greater scale.19 Because the Marxian dialectic understands the capital-
totality as built up around and propelled ahead by contradictions, explanation of dynamics
are on the level of the whole as well as its parts. With this theorisation, all partial descriptions
have a greater context, while descriptions of the whole can never be divorced from
explanations of the dynamics of the whole.
Nitzan and Bichler’s theory of capital, on the other hand, is largely split between naming
(posing as abstract explanation) and description. The logic of the relation between the two
sides is not made clear. Hence, their efforts to theorise capital as a general synchronic mode
of power does not convincingly integrate the naming of wholes that serve as ultimate
macro-‘explanations’ (‘the capitalist nomos’, ‘the capitalist mode of power’) and descriptions,
which pivot around statistical analysis of property- or ‘power’-distribution, and specifically
of ‘dominant capital’.
Whether in the static model of differential capitalisation or the derived dynamic mode of
differential accumulation, the analysis of capital is descriptive. Instead of thinking capital as
a complex process of a whole consisting of heterogeneous parts, we get a statistical
understanding of dynamism which, fundamentally, is based on the comparison of different
homogeneous points in time. In other words, time is reduced to the difference between
equivalent moments. The dynamic becomes a mathematical function of the static. To
understand capital, it is not sufficient to be able to compute its magnitudes (found as static
data), but to theorise the social logics by which labour, time and things become quantifiable.
Meanwhile Nitzan and Bichler’s thinking of the régime of quantification as a whole,
without which each act of quantification would be derived of its sense, becomes the level of
explanation. However, from the point of view of social theory, these wholes function as
19. Harvey 2006, Chapters 9 and 10; McNally 2009.

names, from the point of view of empirical analysis as frames. As names, these work as
abstract universals or analytical constructs whose criteria of application are pragmatic rather
than entailed by the accompanying descriptive efforts. As frames they simply work as
tautologies: that totality within which individual capitalist action makes sense is that of the
‘capitalist nomos’. What this seems to miss from a Marxian viewpoint is the thinking of
capital as a totality rather than as name, and the tools to explain rather than describe the
distribution of wealth.
Since both the statistical dynamic and the abstract names are descriptive and denotative
rather than explanatory, we must ask how the process can be explained. It seems that the
introduction of abstract wholes such as mega-machines and capital cannot carry this burden.20
The centrality of the concept of capitalisation can be read as symptomatic of an unanswered
question of explanation: does this lie with the whole, the nomos, or the motives of the actors
compared in the statistical models? What we can find here is a tension between individual
subjectivity and social objectivity, the relation between which is nowhere made explicit.
While the concept of the capitalist nomos as a power-architecture enslaving even its masters
seems to stress the primacy of social objectivity (the universality of the nomos as social
order), the theorisation proper of capitalisation as the dynamic axiomatic of capital is not
integrally conceptualised as the logic of a system sui generis. Instead, capitalisation appears
to be the subjective logic of capitalists from whose interactions the system springs. In the
theory of capitalisation, objectivity is treated descriptively and capitalist agency becomes
explanatory, whilst in the idea of the capitalist nomos, capitalist agency is very loosely
described as an effect of social objectivity. Since the relations between these theoretical
constructions are not made explicit, the oscillation appears as an inconsistency: is one or
the other primary? It seems that Nitzan and Bichler would reject this opposition and say
that they co-constitute each other. But, since their relation is simply postulated rather than
demonstrated or reconstructed (something which is the very forte of dialectical thought)
we are left with a circular argument or a tautology: the whole (the capitalist nomos) is
nothing but its parts (capitalist enterprises), and the parts are nothing but those that act
according to the norms of the whole. This means that Nitzan and Bichler’s theory proper
of the logic of the development of capitalism – that of capitalisation – becomes agent-
centred, bound up to a concept of power as an attribute and property of agents and their
possessions, whilst the origin of the subjectivity of these agents is loosely referred to as the
capitalist nomos, a somewhat more idealistic concept than the Marxian ‘mode of production’.
The idea of the nomos prioritises the agency and subjectivity of capitalists (capitalisation as
a ‘universal creed’) over the objectivity of social relations in general – including the relation
between labour and capital. Hence, one class within the system becomes the privileged
agent, whilst class-struggle in both its objective and subjective dimensions is disregarded.
On the level of epistemology, we might say that a similar displacement to the agent takes
place, here centring on the scientist himself. We can discover this unity by going back to
the gap between description and naming, between statistics and the names of social wholes,
or between the empiricist critique of Marx and pragmatic theory-building of Capital as
Power. Underlying all these is a certain nominalism, bridging on the level of epistemology
the methodological gap between the two: the basic structuring presupposition is that the
20. This argumental movement is the exact opposite of Marx’s method of dialectical
reconstruction of a whole from the abstract to the concrete.
world is external to the scientist, available as an object to be described and measured,

named and framed. For this kind of thought, says Adorno of Veblen, ‘there is no whole, no
identity of thinking and being, not even the notion of such an identity’.21 In rejecting the
supposed dualities of Marxist theories, they posit a dualism between theory and reality for
which there is no unity. Very briefly put, instead of positing the gaps and contradictions –
between thought and being, between economics and politics, between abstract and
concrete labour, etc. – as immanent to the world itself, i.e. instead of understanding
the world as inherently and constitutively split – the split as the fundamental fact – the
nominalist discourse entails a gap between theory and the world. However, as a disavowed
presupposition re-emerges the subject; while clinging on to the fantasy of describing reality
as something external, the scientists of capital cast their glance over both theory and the
world (hence their ability to reject Marxism and neoliberalism for not getting capital right).
One side of the duality between theory and reality, the scientist, swallows up the other,
reality, but discovers it not. Instead of a theory of the contradictory unity of thought
and being, we get the unconscious sublation of both in the mind of the theorist-baptiser.
The theorist’s task becomes to understand reality at a distance, naming and categorising
essentially external objects, instead of acting within it and changing it thereby.
Conclusion
Capital as Power provides valuable discussions and criticisms of political economy, Marxist
as well as neoliberal. However, it never reaches the level of a critique of political economy
proper, the level where Marxism moves beyond ‘critical political economy’, and becomes a
theory – situated within the conflictual relations of bourgeois society – of the conditions of
possibility of political economy, the categories of political economy, and the practices and
agencies of capitalism.
The book is often informative and piquant in the detail, and very often fully compatible
with Marxist insights, and interesting also when it is not. However, despite its grand
ambitions, it never comes together as a whole. Caught in a critique of a reductionist and
economistic Marxism, and without the tools of dialectical analysis, Nitzan and Bichler
reproduce the dualisms ascribed to their enemies, replacing a supposedly one-sided theory
of exploitation and class-struggle with an equally biased and agent-centred account of
intra-class competition. Instead of a claim of the rock-bottom reality of production and the
mystified realms of finance, we get the notion of the hard reality of capitalisation and a
romanticised vision of ‘industry’. Nitzan and Bichler strive to overcome the vulgarities of
economistic Marxism, but end up inverting them. Indeed, if economistic Marxism is a
vulgarisation proper to Fordism, we could say that Capital as Power’s lopsidedness is fitting
for post-Fordist financialised capitalism.
As rare as paradigm-shifts are, it is hardly surprising that Nitzan and Bichler’s book fails
to convince overall. The reason for this failure is not, however, ambition as such. Ambition,
surely both a cause and effect of the sweeping criticisms of Marxism, explains nothing;
rather, as this review has argued, the problem lies in the very mode of thought proper both
to the critique and the project itself, its detached nominalism and political humanism, so
21. Adorno 1997, p. 91.

fitting to the rôle of the concerned social scientist. Hence, in the background of this
marginal squabble with the errant knights of Veblen lies a significant insight, unintentionally
confirmed by the shortcomings of Capital as Power: Perhaps only with the dialectic can
Capital, and only with Capital can capitalism be understood. Thus, living under the
dominance of capitalism, we need the dialectic more than ever.
Reviewed by Bue Rübner Hansen

Queen Mary University London
buerhansen@gmail.com
References
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The Philosophy and Politics of Bruno Bauer, Douglas Moggach, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003.
Krise und Kritik bei Bruno Bauer: Kategorien des Politischen im nachhegelschen Denken,
Massimiliano Tomba, Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2005.
Abstract
In this review, both readings of Bruno Bauer are analysed in light of a broader post-Hegelian
context. Douglas Moggach deliberately avoids this issue, since his main focus is on establishing
a connection between Bauer’s philosophy and politics, without immediately exposing him to, for
instance, the alleged ‘caricature’ Marx made of him. This ‘caricature’, however, is of some
importance, since it opens a debate on Bauer’s position among the post-Hegelians, his followers
and his adversaries. Marx’s criticism is particularly interesting, since it was not of a philosophical
nature but, rather, of a political one. Some readers – and Marxists in particular – might, in fact,
be a bit disappointed by the choices Moggach has made, but I am fully convinced that his study
has more to offer than they might suspect. That is why this article broadens the perspective by
discussing Massimiliano Tomba’s Krise und Kritik bei Bruno Bauer. Tomba reaches conclusions
similar to Moggach’s, but differs from the latter by giving, among other things, a different
account of the origins of the older Bauer’s conservatism. In so doing, Tomba illuminates Marx’s
criticism of his contemporaries, while drastically altering our perception of post-Hegelianism in
general.
Keywords
Bruno Bauer, Hegelianism, crisis, criticism, Max Stirner, Karl Marx
Introduction
Both works are the product of years of sustained research, and deal with a variety of subjects
ranging from the philosophical to the political, the historical and back again. In so doing,
they both easily establish themselves as long-awaited standard-works on Bruno Bauer.
Douglas Moggach, however, tends to focus on the continuity in Bauer’s writings throughout
the 1840s, while Massimiliano Tomba situates the older Bauer’s conservatism well before
the revolutions of 1848. I do not intend to settle this debate, but will try to enrich it by
referring to the criticism of two of Bauer’s contemporaries: Karl Marx, and, in particular,
Max Stirner. The differences in approach between Moggach and Tomba bear testimony to
an ongoing debate over the extent to which a creative rendering of Hegelian philosophy
was intertwined with distinct political positions, and distinct ethical programmes in the
Vormärz.
Moggach’s book is organised primarily around Bauer’s major themes and texts. It starts
with an introduction entitled ‘The Friend of Freedom’, which immediately focuses on
Bauer’s main concerns, freedom and history, while sketching out the subsequent chapters
which are both of a biographical and thematic nature. The first chapter deals with Bauer’s
prize-winning essay on Kant’s aesthetics which, according to Moggach, already contained
the foundations that would animate his work throughout the 1830s and 1840s: aesthetics,
ethics and republicanism. The critique of the ‘Old Order’ thus seamlessly flows into Bauer’s
own emancipatory project, which he eventually evaluated in a rather bitter and harsh way
in light of the events of 1848. Moggach’s analysis, however, obscures some of the

incompatible strains in Bauer’s thought. Bauer claimed that only self-emancipation was
possible, without, however, neglecting the objective conditions which could contribute to
the emancipation of others. Still, inner-emancipation preceded outer-emancipation, which
meant that the subjective concept of freedom was pursued at the expense of the rational
idea of freedom. Freedom, thus, becomes an abstract ‘ought’, of the sort that Bauer criticised
elsewhere. The notion of ‘emancipation’ is, therefore, crucial to an understanding of Bauer’s
ambiguous relation to the dialectics of revolution, and comes to the fore in Tomba’s analysis
of the axis of ‘crisis’ and ‘criticism’ in Bauer’s thought.
The post-Hegelian agenda reconsidered

Before addressing Bauer, it is necessary to present a brief overview of the post-Hegelian
agenda. The Vormärz, and thus the period preceding the revolutions of 1848, witnessed an
explosion of philosophical creativity that was firmly tied to the emergence of modern
society, and therefore to a series of distinctly political issues.
The Hegelian school, however, has far-too-often been considered an intermediary
between Hegel and Marx.1 An overtly philosophical approach denied the way in which
philosophical issues were intertwined with a rapidly changing sociopolitical environment
in which the post-Hegelians were immediately implicated, and to which they responded in
many different ways. By focusing on Marx’s criticism of his contemporaries, one gets the
impression that they remained trapped in Hegelian categories, devoid of creativity, and that
they were ultimately unable to respond to the questions raised by modernity. Recent
research tried to challenge this image of the Hegelian school, by elaborating on the
philosophical and political dimensions of its thought, and by emphasising its creative
response to the emergence of modern society as a whole.2 The polemics among the post-
Hegelians in the Vormärz were, indeed, both intensely philosophical and political. Moggach
has played a crucial rôle in reassessing the post-Hegelian agenda. In recent years, he edited
a series of monographs on post-Hegelianism after writing a study on one of its main
proponents: Bruno Bauer.3
Post-Hegelianism tried to present a new account of modernity and freedom, including a
criticism of absolutism, religious dogmatism and rigid individualism. Warren Breckman
has argued that this criticism was, amongst other things, tied to the question of the nature
of sovereignty, linked to the Christian notion of a ‘sovereign individual’ that, in its turn,
was derived from the ‘absolute sovereignty of God’.4 Hegel had indeed replaced the personal
God of Christianity with an immanent God (‘spirit’), thus triggering pantheistic readings
of his work (Feuerbach and Strauss) that were intimately linked to a criticism of the existing
sociopolitical order. Warren Breckman, however, hardly paid any attention to Bruno Bauer,
1. See, for example, Brazill 1970 and Hook 1962.

2. Moggach 2006, pp. 1–23.
3. The Philosophy and Politics of Bruno Bauer is also available in German: Moggach 2009. It
was published in the outstanding series Forschungen zum Junghegelianismus, edited by Konrad
Feilchenfeldt and Lars Lambrecht. There is also a forthcoming volume edited by Moggach for
the Studies in Historical Philosophy series published by Northwestern University Press.
4. Breckman 1999, pp. 5–11.
while convincingly arguing that eventually the post-Hegelians’ struggle against the political
theology of Restoration-Germany was a struggle over the complicity between concepts of
the self and of sovereignty.5 Bauer’s Hegelianism set itself apart from the readings by other
post-Hegelians in that its own revolutionary stands were attributed explicitly to Hegel.
Bauer’s politics were thus firmly intertwined with his philosophical views. It is therefore to
Douglas Moggach’s merit to have established this link in The Philosophy and Politics of
Bruno Bauer. Whereas the older literature on Bauer considered him a radical subjectivist
and aligned him more closely to Enlightenment-rationalism than to Hegel, Moggach
convincingly insists on Bauer’s creative use of Hegel’s account of subjective spirit. In so
doing, he emphasises the continuity throughout the Vormärz of Bauer’s thought, as opposed
to the interpretations that insist on Bauer’s abandonment of the post-Hegelian agenda
after 1843.
What was so particularly ‘Hegelian’ about the ‘post-Hegelians’, however, is still under
debate. This is not a strictly historical question, since it allows us to understand the debates
in the Vormärz without immediately seeking refuge in categories that reduce the post-
Hegelians to mere epigones of Hegel. Massimiliano Tomba addressed this issue in Krise und
Kritik bei Bruno Bauer, and it is of great importance to compare the differences in approach
between him and Moggach in detail. Tomba rightly denounces the dichotomy of right-left
or young-old Hegelianism, for it fails to grasp the differences between such authors as
Cieszkowski, Gans or Rosenkranz, and, eventually, Bruno Bauer himself.6 Moggach has
recently tackled this issue by referring to the young Hegelians as the ‘New Hegelians’, thus
emphasising their own creative use of a variety of sources including Hegel and Fichte, but
also Spinoza and Kant.7 This is not a semantic discussion, but actually deals with the
manifold-ways in which the post-Hegelians responded to what they clearly conceived as the
end of an era, first and foremost the end of the estate-order, and, eventually, the end of
philosophy itself as it was embodied by Hegel. The absolute state seemed to have restored
itself rather easily in the 1830s. This happened not despite, but, rather, thanks to the further
dissolution of the estate-order that was slowly but gradually replaced by an anonymous
mass, which had turned into an atomistic society that was characterised by, among other
things, the assertion of individual property-rights. Post-Hegelianism was spawned by this
crisis and tried to reflect upon it. This would eventually lead to a quest for a new organising
principle which could forge the atomistic mass into a new whole, and consecutively
produced a series of theories of history which projected it into the future.8 The quest for
‘emancipation’ actually tried to fill in the void that was left by the destruction of corporative
privileges.9
Tomba, therefore, drops the term ‘Hegelianism’ altogether, and, inspired by Koselleck,
concentrates on a crisis which was of both a socio-political and philosophical nature. His
deliberate avoidance of an overtly Hegelian interpretation of Bauer and the so-called ‘Young
Hegelians’ should be considered the main reason as to why he presents us with a different
interpretation of Bauer’s philosophy throughout the 1840s. He focuses on how Bauer
5. Breckman 1999, p. 298.

6. Tomba 2005, pp. 23–4.
7. Moggach 2006, pp. 1–23.
8. Tomba 2005, pp. 24–7.
9. Tomba 2005, pp. 2–3.
conceived and acted upon this crisis, the ways in which Die Kritik eventually became the
crisis itself, and the extent to which (or if ) it sought to reconcile the individual and the state
anew. According to Tomba, Bauer never intended to fill in the void between the individual
and the state. Slowly but gradually, he moved towards a conception of history that left no
room for a new synthesis. He turned his back on an emancipatory project and eventually
on philosophy in general.10
Moggach, on the other hand, immediately focuses on Bauer’s republican interpretation
of Hegel. He hence offers us a very coherent overview of Bauer’s meandering thought, held
together, not by the axis Krise-Kritik, but by his theory of infinite self-consciousness and the
Hegelian unity of thought and being. Such an approach will unavoidably emphasise the
extent to which Bauer clung to his philosophy of self-consciousness throughout the 1840s,
while understating certain evidence, brought forward by Tomba, that its political
implications might have shifted over the course of this period.
Picking up on Tomba’s argument that crisis and criticism were closely intertwined in
Bauer’s thought, his reading of Bauer appeals more to a Marxist audience than Moggach’s.
By aiming his attention at the unity of thought and being in Bauer’s writings of the 1830s
and 1840s, Moggach nearly renders Bauer immune to Marx’s virulent criticism, while, at
the same time, establishing the former as a major thinker in his own right.
Bauer’s universal self-consciousness as ‘the conquest of egoism’

Bruno Bauer derived his notion of infinite self-consciousness from Hegel’s philosophy of
subjective spirit, and opposed it to the pantheistic Hegel-readings of Strauss and Feuerbach.
Hegel had stressed the concept of substance as the pure universal that absorbed the
particularity of the self, and this ‘Spinozist moment’ was seized upon by a number of post-
Hegelians (Strauss, Feuerbach) to grant substantiality a certain independence with respect
to consciousness. Bauer, on the other hand, considered ‘the universal’ to be the immanent
history of self-consciousness; the universal was the rational concept and the particular its
embodiment. The universal acquired objectivity by incorporating the particular as an aspect
of itself, while the particular elevated itself and became the expression of a higher principle.
Infinite self-consciousness was thus tied up in a dialectical development, while it demanded
that individuals acquire the discipline of freedom-as-universality and repudiate their
attachments to merely alienated or given forms of life (pp. 40–6).
Accessing universality was, therefore, the product of intellectual labour turning finite
consciousness into the existence-form of the rational idea of freedom-as-universality. The
unity of the individual with the universal was, therefore, merely a historical possibility and
a constant quest. The subject first had to appear as potentially universal, while the objects
had to show themselves as a purposive order, responding to the subject’s striving for rational
freedom. The next step was to transform substance into the concrete acts of conscious
spirit. Substantiality was, in a sense, a merely abstract universality eventually to be rendered
concrete.
The reconception of substance thus assimilated universality as the subject’s own
universality. Particular consciousness would eventually become universal self-consciousness,
10. Tomba 2005, p. 30.

which was the ultimate synthesis of the universal and the particular, and was, in Bauer’s
opinion, synonymous with ‘the conquest of egoism’ (p. 124). Religious consciousness was
marked by both the particular and the universal, which meant that particular interests were
legitimised out of an abstract universality (pp. 76–7).
By denying the universal character of self-consciousness and by projecting it as an
abstract, transcendent universality onto countless particular interests, the religious
arrogation of universality abandoned the community to ‘egoism’ (p. 13). Religious
consciousness indeed denied the claims of the self to rise to universality by its own efforts.
False universals such as the absolutist state and the fetishist-objects of religion all transcended
this power of individuality, yet all their attempts to assert freedom on the basis of particular
interests were irrational and, therefore, doomed. Infinite self-consciousness, on the other
hand, meant both freedom and humanity, and eventually it dissolved both substance and
the ‘transcendent absolute’. The absolute surpassed religious consciousness and – in turn –
was dissolved in the criticism of individual consciousness. Universal consciousness was thus
literally ‘victorious over egoism’.11
Beyond philosophy: Bruno Bauer and the post-Hegelians

As an immanent-subjective universality, infinite self-consciousness was ultimately linked to
a criticism of liberalism and socialism. According to Bauer, ‘mass-society’ had emerged out
of the French Revolution and was characterised by forms of ‘particularism’ that blocked any
form of criticism of the existing order. Against the political expressions of mass-society,
Bauer assessed his own republicanism. Liberalism translated freedom into particularistic
interests and acquisition which was, like socialism, remotely removed from ‘universal
freedom’. The republic, however, would be founded on the victory of ‘self-consciousness’
over ‘egoism’ (p. 158).
Bauer explicitly linked religious egoism to economic egoism, as they were both opposed
to the true universality of self-consciousness. Thus, the egoism that Bauer ascribed to
Judaism (and Christianity) was also present in his criticism of both liberalism and socialism.
According to Bauer, true singularity or individuality was autonomous, since it had cast aside
the fixity and rigidity of particularism. Bauer always used singularity in reference to the
concept of freedom-as-universality that eradicated the particular. Autonomy is, therefore, a
notion crucial for understanding Bauer’s ethical idealism: autonomy as a duty, with freedom
as its ultimate aim. It strove to bring about a new reality more closely, but never definitively,
in accord with the rational concept of freedom. Subjects could thus only attain genuine
universality by freeing themselves from particular interests, transcendent universals and
reigning institutions that claimed autonomy over self-consciousness (p. 33).
It is from within this framework that one should examine Bauer’s opposition to Jewish
emancipation in Prussia (Die Judenfrage, 1843). He stated that, based on their particular
identity, the Jewish minority in Prussia could claim neither political nor social freedom.
Moggach’s and Tomba’s interpretation of Bauer’s critique of Judaism needs to be addressed
separately, since it differs from the one recently given by David Leopold who considered it
11. Bauer 1986, pp. 497–8.

as ‘anti-Semitic’.12 The older Bauer’s anti-Semitism was, however, quite different from his
stances in the Vormärz, and should be analysed alongside Bauer’s neo-conservatism and
anti-socialism.13 Moggach analyses the younger Bauer’s criticism of Judaism within Bauer’s
wider critique of Christianity and religion in general. In 1843, Bauer radicalised his earlier
critique of Christianity, claiming that its religious form distorts and hinders the concrete
realisation of freedom in personal, social, and political life. Bauer’s critique of Judaism
should thus be considered as implicated in his more radicalised critique of Christianity and
religion in general, as a tool to elaborate on alienation in history, with its specific religious
and political dimensions, which according to Bauer indeed share common defining
attributes (pp. 145–9). Tomba goes well beyond this issue, by relating Die Judenfrage to the
much broader impact of Bauer’s notion of ‘exclusiveness [Ausschlieslichkeit]’. Exclusiveness
was a logic-structure common to religion and the state. Bauer’s Die Judenfrage, therefore,
analysed emancipation from a framework that combined both theological and political
traits. Emancipation, for Bauer, implied the eradication of the possible conditions of
exclusion.14 This is related to another novelty in Moggach’s interpretation. He convincingly
argues how Bauer’s critique of religion was connected to his critique of the modern
economy. The crisis of the estate-order had paved the way for ‘atomism’ and ‘egoism’, which
translated themselves into narrow economic interests, which, in turn, defined personality
and ultimately served as an obstacle to political engagement (pp. 54, 127). This was not a
product of religion, but a development that ran parallel to it.
Both forms of alienation shared an abstract ‘beyond’, which eventually legitimised
particular interests and egoism. It was from this alienated root that both God and the state
derived. The real solution to the problem of Jewish emancipation was, therefore, not only
the renunciation of religion, but primarily the rejection of the Christian state of Restoration-
Prussia as a whole (pp. 86–7).
Karl Marx, on the other hand, entered the discussion by criticising both political
liberalism and Bauer, while still linking Christianity and the sovereign individual to
egoism.15 He had already used a ‘transformative method’ (man-as-subject and thought-as-
predicate) in his dissertation on Epicurus and Democritus, and linked it to a criticism of
so-called ‘abstract individual consciousness’.16 The notion of ‘egoism’ as it was developed
throughout the works of Feuerbach, Bauer and Marx allows us to further elaborate on this
issue. Hegel had linked civil society to ‘atomism’ (individualism), and this thesis was almost
literally translated into a criticism of religion by Feuerbach, Bauer and Marx who interpreted
it as ‘egoism’.17 Feuerbach drastically radicalised Hegel’s remark that Judaism did not
consider nature as the embodiment of the divine.18 According to Feuerbach, Judaism had
reduced nature to an object of self-interest, taking ‘egoism’ as its basic principle.19 Feuerbach
12. Leopold 1999, p. 161; Leopold 2007.

13. Lambrecht 1989b, p. 92.
14. Tomba 2005, pp. 112–13.
15. Marx 1970a, p. 605.
16. Marx 1970b, p. 51.
17. Hegel 1986a, p. 534.
18. Hegel 1986b, pp. 276–311. This text remained unpublished, but the most famous
statements in this regard can be found in Hegel 1986c, pp. 61–3.
19. Feuerbach 1973, pp. 208–11.
criticised both Judaism and Christianity because they spoke of ‘a creation out of nothing’,
and he linked this to the ‘absolute personality to whom nature was nothing’.20
Bauer concluded in a similar way that Judaism was even further removed from ‘freedom’
than Christianity, since it ‘felt at home in egoism’.21 Marx, however, argued in Zur Judenfrage
(1843) that it was the alleged ‘political emancipation’ of Bauer that reduced men to
members of civil society and therefore to ‘egoistic men’.22 Marx’s criticism of the theological
treatment of the ‘Jewish question’ meant that ‘egoism’ as an ‘element of society’ had to be
overcome before Judaism itself would disappear.23 This is the consequence of a thesis upon
which Feuerbach had elaborated before, since, according to Feuerbach, egoism was not the
product of religion, but religion gave legitimacy to ‘Jewish egoism’.24 Christianity had
spiritualised egoism and thus replaced ‘earthly bliss’ with ‘heavenly bliss’.25 The criticism of
‘egoism’ was both a political and social criticism, but, implicitly, also a moral criticism.
What was clearly at stake in Hegel, Feuerbach, Bauer and the young Marx was the
overcoming of ‘atomism’ or ‘egoism’ as it was spawned by the crisis. These debates will prove
to be crucial in understanding the vicious attacks of one of Bauer’s and Marx’s most
infamous contemporaries, Max Stirner. In Der Einzige und sein Eigentum, Stirner no longer
criticised ‘egoism’ but embraced it fully, which was not so much a serious anti-ethical or
philosophical stand, but rather a political one, for it implied that Stirner embraced the crisis
and criticised and ridiculed the emancipatory project (and its implicit morality) of his
contemporaries while seeking refuge in his own individuality. Tomba’s interpretation is
highly illuminating in this regard.
In his assessment of the French Revolution, Stirner claimed that it had brought about a
much more absolute monarchy than the ancien régime. The ‘dissolution [Auflösung]’ of the
estate-order had left the individual powerless before the state, the sole master-on-high. The
end of the estate-order had led to the annulment of the individual. What his liberal
contemporaries were striving for had realised itself beyond their wildest expectations, but
confined within the boundaries of the modern state.26 This is in accordance with Bauer’s
proper assessment of the French Revolution, but Stirner went on to expand Bauer’s criticism
of nivellement until it encompassed Bauer’s ‘humane liberalism’ as well. In the chapter on
his contemporaries (‘Die Freien’), Stirner distinguished ‘political liberalism’ (liberalism)
from ‘social liberalism’ (socialism and communism) and, eventually, ‘humane liberalism’
(Bruno Bauer). According to Stirner, the development of ‘freedom’ throughout history
meant that ‘spirit’ or thought became free, and thus held the greatest possible power of
subjugation over the concrete individual.27 Political liberalism liberated the egoist from ‘the
master’, but replaced him by a ‘ghost’: the state. Social liberalism got rid of the difference
between rich and poor, but put all property in the hand of a ‘ghost’: society. Humane
liberalism (Bruno Bauer) likewise got rid of the personal God, but replaced it with a new
20. Feuerbach 1973, pp. 210–14.

21. Bauer 1986, pp. 178–80.
22. Marx 1970a, p. 599.
23. Marx 1970a, pp. 600–3.
24. Feuerbach 1973, pp. 215–16.
25. Feuerbach 1973, p. 219.
26. Stirner 2000, pp. 136–9; Stirner 1995, pp. 111–13; Tomba 2009, pp. 113–14.
27. Stirner 2000, pp. 52–3, Stirner 1995, pp. 48–9.
faith: mankind or freedom.28 Bruno Bauer thus came at the end of Stirner’s parodic
historical account. The development of so-called ‘freedom’ as the cornerstone of Hegel’s
entire system found its highest culmination-point in Bauer, and meant the absolute
annulment of the individual. Stirner’s Einzige (‘unique’), however, escaped the dialectic of
nivellement, since it was extra-conceptual and hence lay beyond philosophy or ‘criticism’:
There is no development of the concept of the Unique. No philosophical system

can be built out of it, as it can out of Being, or Thinking, or the I. Rather, with
it, all development of the concept ceases. The person who views it as a principle
thinks that he can treat it philosophically or theoretically and necessarily wastes
his breath arguing against it.29
This remark brings us to the core of Tomba’s analysis. What makes Tomba’s reading so
interesting is that it offers a new insight into two authors whom Friedrich Engels considered
to be ‘the only important philosophical opponents of Socialism – or rather Communism’.
Tomba refers to Bauer’s Selbstkritik der Kritik, which, according to him, meant Bauer’s
farewell to the dynamics of revolution. Criticism had to elevate itself to an understanding
of the crisis, while distancing itself from reality (‘pure criticism’).30 Bauer’s transvaluation of
the Revolution thus meant Bauer’s return to pure theory.31 Bauer and Stirner maintained
that the estate-order had only transformed itself in the opposition between the people and
the government, where the state eventually became the sole master-on-high. This dialectic
had led to an equality, which was both liberating and oppressing. In their very own way,
both Stirner and Bauer tried to fasten the crisis, which they judged irreversible, by destroying
the last remnants of the ‘old world’, while seeking refuge in their own individuality as a
means to escape the levelling (nivellement) effects of the crisis. Tomba thus describes Bauer
and Stirner as proponents of a radical and revolutionary aristocratism.32 It is exactly their
distancing from the workers’ movement which Marx criticised in both Die heilige Familie
and Die Deutsche Ideologie. Tomba rightly observes that Marx’s aim was to criticise those
contemporaries who tried to distance themselves from a revolutionary subject and even
social reality as a whole. Marx never intended to write a philosophical criticism of his
contemporaries, but immediately focused on their political dimensions and thus made a
strategic divide between Bauer and Stirner on the one hand, and Marx, Engels, Feuerbach
and Hess on the other, without, of course, ignoring his own criticism of Feuerbach
and Hess.
Marx aimed at convincing the radical intellectuals of the Vormärz to side with the
proletariat. In so doing, he eventually reformulated his previous criticism of ‘atomism’.
Bauer had claimed that only the state ‘held the separate, selfish atoms together’, while Marx
stated that ‘the members of civil society were no atoms’. In his strictly political engagement
with Bauer, he refused to relate atomism to just any form of society, but claimed that it was
in fact related to a specific form of society. In reference to the revolt of the Silesian weavers
28. Stirner 2000, pp. 158–9, Stirner 1995, pp. 128–9.

29. Stirner 1986d, p. 150.
30. Tomba 2005, pp. 175–83.
31. Lambrecht 1989a, pp. 741–52.
32. Tomba 2009, pp. 113–20.
in 1844, Marx considered isolation and atomism as the products of a very specific social
reality, which was not only related to the relation between the individual and the state, but
to a social divide which isolated the workers from ‘the true community of mankind’. By
using a humanist language, he actually bridged the gap between industrial workers and the
prospect of a political and social revolution.33
Moggach, on the other hand, claims that Bauer’s criticisms of mass-society did not imply
that he had abandoned the revolutionary cause altogether. Was ist jetzt der Gegenstand der
Kritik? (1844) and, indeed, the Selbstkritik der Kritik, as expressed in his writings in the
Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung and the Norddeutsche Blätter, were, according to him, a
judgment of the ‘social bearing’ of his commitment to ‘political revolution’ (p. 161).
Moggach maintains that Bauer still defended his republican commitment, but directed it
against the ‘inconsequence’, ‘vacillation’ and ‘unclarity’ in demands of the progressive party
(p. 161). In doing so, Bauer attacked both liberalism and socialism, while still maintaining
his aggressive position against the Restoration-order. Was ist jetzt der Gegenstand der Kritik?
judged Bauer’s previous ‘identification of his criticism with the struggle of the masses as
illusory’ (p. 161), but this should not, according to Moggach, be regarded as a retreat from
active political engagement. Republicanism, according to Moggach, still proposed ‘new
ways’ and ‘new goals’ to ‘transcend the liberal horizon’ (p. 162). This leads us straight to
Bauer’s distinction between a social and a political revolution. Whereas the social revolution
would eventually constitute the republican people, the merely political one, however, would
‘only liberate the atoms of mass society’ (p. 162). Bauer, therefore, develops the notion of
‘the people’ and opposes it to the idea of the masses, which meant that he advocated a much
broader revolution than a merely social or political one. This should be considered the main
reason why Marx mainly took aim at the articles in the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung and
tried to demonstrate how Bauer confused political emancipation with genuine human
emancipation. This was of, course, related to Bauer’s focus on a criticism of socialist and
communist theories after 1844 (p. 166).
An intriguing take on this debate between Moggach and Tomba stems from Stirner’s
criticism of Bruno Bauer and his subsequent reply. To understand Stirner’s assessment of
Bauer’s self-criticism in 1844, it is necessary to return to both his reviews of Bauer’s Posaune
des jungsten Gerichts and Hegel’s Lehre von der Religion und Kunst. It is regrettable, but not
surprising, that none of the past and present Bauer-scholars ever bothered to study these
texts from one of Bauer’s closest acquaintances among the post-Hegelians, and, indeed, one
of Marx’s prime targets in Die Deutsche Ideologie. The literature on Stirner itself hardly ever
mentions these texts, and merely interprets them as a bridge between Hegel and Stirner’s
alleged radicalisation of Bauer’s philosophy of self-consciousness. A study of these texts also
illuminates Bauer’s own ‘Hegelianism’. Moggach convincingly argues that Bauer’s creative
rendering of Hegelianism should not imply that Bauer attempted to be consistent with
Hegel’s own explicit intentions. Bauer did not consider Hegel an atheist, for instance, but
revised his philosophy altogether, while drawing on Hegelian elements that enabled such a
revision. Moggach thus offers a very balanced analysis, often understated in the literature
on the subject. There is, however, a very subtle sense of irony to Bauer’s approach, where
Hegel is radicalised using Hegelian elements, but it cannot and should not be confused
with Stirner’s use of irony in Der Einzige und sein Eigentum. On the contrary, Stirner
33. Tomba 2009, pp. 120–5.

actually ironised Bauer’s Hegelianism and mocked any attempt to re-instrumentalise

(Hegelian) philosophy as a whole. He did so by, for instance, destroying the subject-object
dichotomy throughout his notion of ‘egoism’ (an act of appropriating the objective and
destroying it within oneself ). Tomba’s interpretation allows us to understand the political
implications of Stirner’s stand in new and even unexpected ways. In doing so, he also
clarifies why Marx and Engels were so keen on criticising both. Tomba somehow loosens
the connection between Bauer’s philosophy of self-consciousness and Hegel even further.
Not only did Bauer never intend to elaborate on Hegel as an ‘Hegelian’, but he literally
went beyond him. Tomba rightly questions whether it was at all possible to elaborate
further on Hegel’s philosophy. After all, the crisis was also a crisis of Hegelianism itself,
which meant that the post-Hegelians could only develop elements and concepts that lay
explicitly ‘beyond’ Hegel and philosophy.34 In short, Bauer replaced philosophy with
criticism as the dissolution of the existent, not merely a negative theory, but a practice.
Criticism could play a historical rôle only by destroying the categories that permitted
the existing order to exist in thought itself. Bauer, according to Tomba, tried to think
the concept of atomism through to its ultimate conclusion and eventually did so, well
before 1848.35
The readings of Moggach and Tomba somehow both focus on Bauer’s creative rendering
of Hegelian philosophy. It remains to be seen, however, to which extent Bauer allowed his
philosophy of self-consciousness to prevail over its political implications and goals. In short,
one could ask if Bauer could leave his philosophy of self-consciousness intact, while, slowly
but gradually, departing from its initial revolutionary implications. I agree with Tomba that
Bauer’s creative rendering of Hegel was, in the first instance, a tool in taking on the crisis,
and not the other way around. Bauer could thus easily advocate his philosophy of self-
consciousness throughout the 1840s without drawing the revolutionary conclusions he had
drawn before 1843. We have already argued why Moggach, while focusing on Bauer’s
creative rendering of Hegel, remains reluctant to admit that Bauer subtly abandoned his
emancipatory engagement after 1843, without, however, abandoning his philosophy of
self-consciousness as a whole. I will elaborate on this by referring to Bauer’s criticism of
Stirner in Charakteristik Ludwig Feuerbach’s.
Stirner started publishing his first philosophical articles in 1842, and his initial stances
were heavily influenced by Bauer. This may be inferred from his review of Bauer’s Posaune,
where he enthusiastically supported Bauer’s reading of Hegel as an ‘atheist’ and ‘anti-Christ’.36
This review actually confirms both Moggach’s and Tomba’s interpretation of the Posaune, in
that Stirner supports Bauer’s radical reinterpretation of Hegel, turning him into a weapon
to face ‘egoism’ head-on.37 What makes it particularly ‘Bauerian’ is its focus on both a
‘small’ and an implicit ‘big’ war against ‘egoism’. Bauer’s criticism of egoism was indeed
34. Tomba 2005, p. 35.

35. Tomba 2005, p. 42.
36. Stirner 1986a, pp. 59–74.
37. ‘Hegel, who would and has elevated the human spirit into the all-powerful Spirit, and has
impressed this teaching upon his students that no-one has to seek salvation outside of or beyond
themselves, but rather are each their own Saviour and Deliverer, has never made it his particular
task to lead a so-called “small war” and to hack out of its fortress the egoism which in a thousand-
fold forms blocks the liberation of individuals.’ (Stirner 1986a, p. 63.)
related to his criticism of both religion and the state, and, therefore, by no means a ‘small
war’ against egoism. The ‘small war’ would have been a war against egoism-as-such, whereas
the ‘big war’ was a war against everything that was related to it: a criticism of religion and
the state. His review of Bauer’s Hegel’s Lehre, on the other hand, was a full-frontal attack
against Bauer’s philosophy as a whole and was published just five months after his review of
Die Posaune. It was published in Die Rheinische Zeitung, where Bauer had published all his
writings between Die Posaune and Hegel’s Lehre.
It is hard to tell what might have caused Stirner’s shift, but it is consistent with Stirner’s
criticism of Bauer in Der Einzige und sein Eigentum. Stirner returns to Hegel’s three-fold
‘Kunst-Religion-Philosophie’ in order to attack Bauer’s criticism of religion and his
philosophy as a whole, which tried to reconcile thought and being. Stirner attacked Bauer
by claiming that art gave birth to religion by ‘satisfying the urge’ of some men ‘to split
themselves up’ between ‘that which they are’ and ‘that which they should become’ (Stirner’s
ironic use of Hegel’s ‘unhappy consciousness’).38 By satisfying man’s ‘urge’, and thus
completing the unhappy consciousness, art created an object of worship for religion.39 Man
was henceforth confronted with an object, which it tried to integrate within itself, but
failed to do.40 Bauer, on the other hand, had claimed that art was much more closely related
to philosophy based on their shared determinacy and clarity, and a common ethical root
(p. 37).41 Stirner, however, claimed that art in fact created an object for religion, and could
thus by no means be related to what he considered to be ‘philosophy’. Stirner left philosophy
out of the dialectical triad (art-religion-philosophy), by claiming that philosophy ‘doesn’t
bother itself with objects’ (religion) nor did it ‘create an object’ (art).42 It was religion itself
that ‘makes the object empty’ (through ‘reflection’) and when it was empty, art reclaimed
its object by ‘showing’ that the object was in fact empty (by turning religion into a
‘ridiculous comedy’) and that ‘man’ should no longer hold to it. In doing so, art shook off
its ‘alienation’ (religion had alienated art from its object) and could create a new object.43
In short, Stirner claimed that Bauer remained (in both Die Posaune and in Hegel’s Lehre)
stuck between art and religion, and that he endlessly created and destroyed religion, only to
recreate it anew. ‘Philosophy’, on the other hand, was something completely different in
Stirner’s account. It did not bother itself with ‘objects’, and, therefore, literally remained
‘indifferent’ to religion or ‘God’, which was ‘nothing but a stone’ to it.44 By reconciling
thought and being, Bauer only tried to solve a problem, which he had created first by
making a divide between subject and object. Stirner’s definition of ‘philosophy’ implied
that his post-Hegelian contemporaries, and Bauer in particular, were as religious as the
‘object’ they tried to criticise: religion. This argument, in a nutshell, contained a position
Stirner was to elaborate more fully in Der Einzige und sein Eigentum. Kunst und Religion
contained, as it were, Stirner’s criticism of Bauer’s ‘universal self-consciousness’ as it took
shape around 1842, while Der Einzige und sein Eigentum elaborated more fully upon its
38. Stirner 1986c, p. 99.

39. Stirner 1986c, p. 100.
40. Stirner 1986c, p. 101.
41. Bauer 1842, p. 197.
42. Stirner 1986c, p. 110.
43. Stirner 1986c, p. 108.
44. Stirner 1986c, p. 110.
political dimensions and its relation to the crisis.45 Stirner’s alleged ‘philosophy of egoism’
should be read as an attempt to beat Bauer with his own weapons by touching what had
become the very heart of his emancipatory project around 1843; his criticism of ‘egoism’
and ‘particularism’ as a well-established and fully integrated part of his philosophy of self-
consciousness.46 This might seem at odds with Marx’s claim that Bauer and Stirner were
two sides of the same coin, but can be elaborated further by focusing on Stirner’s remark
concerning Bauer’s 1844 writings.
Tomba is right to attach great importance to Stirner’s ‘remark’ on Bauer’s articles in the
Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung. Stirner had to return to Bauer even after finishing his book,
because of Bauer’s Was ist jetzt der Gegenstand der Kritik? Stirner claimed that Bauer had
expanded his ‘criticism’ to the state itself, which, according to Stirner, eventually came
down to the fact that Bauer ‘sees the inhuman everywhere’ except ‘in his own head’. In spite
of his ‘shift’, Bauer still clung to his ‘humanism’ and his critique of ‘egoism’, and therefore
never changed any of his ‘presuppositions’:
It may now, to conclude with this, be clear that in the critic’s new change of front
he has not transformed himself, but only ‘made good an oversight,’ ‘disentangled
a subject,’ and is saying too much when he speaks of ‘criticism criticizing itself ’;
it, or rather he, has only criticized its ‘oversight’ and cleared it of its ‘inconsistencies.’
If he wanted to criticize criticism, he would have to look and see if there was
anything in its presupposition.47
Stirner actually forced Bauer to reconsider the logical conclusions of his own theory, by
abandoning his ‘humanism’ and political engagement altogether, since it only existed ‘in
his own head’. It is no coincidence that his ‘postscriptum’ contained the clearest expression
of Stirner’s criticism of Bauer and indeed philosophy itself:
So he [Bauer] wants to break up thoughts by thinking; but I say, only

thoughtlessness really saves me from thoughts. It is not thinking, but my
thoughtlessness, or I the unthinkable, incomprehensible, that frees me from
possession.48
The ‘postscriptum’ thus no longer tried to ironise Bauer, and hence contains no references
to his parody of the Vergegenständlichungsdialektik [subject-object thinking]. Tomba
rightfully claims that Bauer had given up on his notion of ‘autonomy’ around 1843 and
hence his emancipatory project, but this changed very little for Stirner because he had not
yet given up on either ‘humanism’, ‘thought’ itself and his philosophy of self-consciousness
or ‘criticism’. Stirner claimed that, despite Bauer’s ‘self-criticism’ in the Allgemeine Literatur-
Zeitung, he remained trapped in his own constructions, of which, for instance, both Stirner
45. This helps to explain why Stirner continued to criticise ‘egoism’ in another article just
before Der Einzige und sein Eigentum, and claimed that it is in fact opposed to ‘self-determination’.
See Stirner’s Einiges Vorläufige vom Liebesstaat, published in 1843, just before Der Einzige und
sein Eigentum (Stirner 1986b, pp. 123–6).
46. For an analysis of Stirner’s criticism of Bauer, see De Ridder 2008, pp. 296–7.
47. Stirner 2000, p. 167; Stirner 1995, pp. 134–5.
48. Stirner 2000, p. 164; Stirner 1995, pp. 132–3.
and Tomba say that he sees ‘the inhuman’ everywhere except ‘in his own head’. Bauer thus
actually drew the logical conclusions of his ‘humanism’, according to Stirner, but ‘would
have to look and see if there was anything in its presupposition’ in the first place. Tomba
relates Stirner’s extra-philosophical stand to Bauer’s very own point of view, as expressed in
his criticism of nivellement, and brought to the fore for the very first time in his seminal text
Was ist jetzt der Gegenstand der Kritik? (1844). Stirner indeed picked up on Bauer’s criticism
of nivellement, but suggested that Bauer himself completed this by juxtaposing living
human beings to his idea of ‘man’. Stirner urged Bauer to abandon his ‘humanism’, by
seeking refuge in his own individuality against the levelling effects of the crisis.
Tomba offers an interesting insight to the developments in both Bauer and Stirner’s
writings after 1844. He argues that – despite Stirner’s criticism of Bauer – their philosophical
‘radicalism’ was very similar and dealt with the crisis. Tomba argues, for instance, that Bauer
gave up on his emancipatory project while replacing it with a ‘new history’. He understood
that he had to give up on conceptualising the present and the future and started to write a
series of historical studies, which no longer referred to his initial philosophy of self-
consciousness.49
Bauer’s review of Der Einzige und sein Eigentum might be highly illuminating in this
regard. It was actually part of Bauer’s criticism of Feuerbach, which contained both a
criticism of Stirner, as well as a very clear appropriation of Stirnerian arguments which were
directed against Feuerbach. In his review of Stirner, Bauer defended his philosophy of self-
consciousness against Stirner’s attacks, and, in fact, related Stirner to Feuerbach’s Spinozistic
reading of Hegel, thus relating Stirner to Feuerbach, just as Stirner had related Bauer
himself to Feuerbach.50 He refused to deal with Stirner’s main criticism (from the
‘postscriptum’) that ‘he tried to dissolve thought through thought itself, while only
thoughtlessness can save me from thought’. Instead, Bauer focused on Stirner’s parody of
the Vergegenständlichungsdialektik [‘egoism-ownness’]. Stirner, however, never intended to
present a ‘new’ subject-object philosophy or a new ‘solution’ to it, but tried to destroy it
altogether just as he had already tried to do in ‘Kunst und Religion’. Bauer’s review confirms
that Bauer still clung to his philosophy of self-consciousness, but, interestingly enough, no
longer refers to its political and social dimensions.
Conclusion
Moggach’s study focuses on Bauer’s philosophy and politics without immediately exposing
him to Marx’s virulent criticism. Marx’s criticism of Bauer was indeed of a highly polemical
nature and deliberately tried to obscure Bauer’s own philosophical project. His writings,
however, shed light on how the political implications of Bauer’s philosophy were perceived
by his contemporaries of the Vormärz.
By meticulously analysing how Bauer’s philosophy of self-consciousness was intertwined
with his republican programme, Moggach manages to correct a couple of misunderstandings
regarding, for instance, Bauer’s criticism of Jewish emancipation in Prussia or his alleged
‘subjectivism’. Other than merely amending the existing interpretations of Bauer’s work in
49. Tomba 2005, pp. 153–5.

50. Bauer 1845, pp. 94–106.
the Vormärz, Moggach also introduces a number of novelties, such as Bauer’s criticism of
the modern economy, etc. In order to understand the criticism of Bauer’s contemporaries,
however, I have also dealt with Massimiliano Tomba’s Krise und Kritik bei Bruno Bauer.
Tomba’s research offers a different account of Bauer’s post-Vormärz conservatism and
considers it the outcome of Bauer’s gradual abandonment of the dynamics of revolution
around 1844. Tomba’s interpretation is refreshing in that it focuses on the ways in which
crisis and criticism were intertwined in Bauer’s work. In so doing, he emphasises the broader
political implications of Bauer’s philosophy and allows us to shed new light on the criticism
of Bauer’s contemporaries. I have tried to enrich this debate by referring to the criticism of
one of Bauer’s closest acquaintances among the post-Hegelians, Max Stirner. Stirner’s
criticism is particularly interesting, because it helps to elaborate on Marx’s criticism of
Bauer in Die heilige Familie (1844). Neither Moggach nor Tomba pay any attention to
Stirner’s reviews of Bauer prior to his seminal work Der Einzige und sein Eigentum. This is
not surprising, since these reviews are generally considered a prelude to Stirner’s alleged
‘radicalisation’ of Bauer’s ‘subjectivism’. Moggach and Tomba both successfully rebuke
Bauer’s alleged ‘subjectivism’. Such an interpretation of Bauer is confirmed by Stirner’s
criticism around 1844. His earlier reviews, however, reveal that Stirner had already distanced
himself from Bauer’s philosophy of self-consciousness, even before Bauer’s rather
controversial stands regarding Jewish emancipation in Prussia. This means that Stirner’s
seminal work should be considered as dealing primarily with the social and political
bearings of Bauer’s philosophy. This is particularly important when dealing with Bauer’s
writings for the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, which, according to Tomba, contained Bauer’s
farewell to the dynamics of revolution. Stirner returned to these writings even after
completing his book, but interprets Bauer’s contempt for the masses as the completion of
his ‘humanism’ and ‘criticism’. Bauer finally sees the ‘inhuman’ everywhere except in ‘his
own head’, without, however, giving up entirely on thought or humanism as such. Stirner’s
criticism seems to confirm that Bauer still clung to his philosophy of self-consciousness
around 1844, but adds fuel to Tomba’s interpretation in that it no longer focuses on Bauer’s
emancipatory project, but still attacks his philosophical pretensions and presuppositions.
Bauer’s review of Stirner, on the other hand, defended his own philosophy of self-
consciousness without referring to its emancipatory implications either. In short, Moggach’s
study should be read back-to-back with Tomba’s when studying the older Bauer’s
conservatism, for their debate is, among other things, crucial to an understanding of Marx’s
criticism of both Bauer and post-Hegelianism in general. Both Moggach’s and Tomba’s
work are essential for understanding Marx’s early writings and the gradual shaping of
historical materialism as a defensive mechanism against the philosophical and political
pretensions of his contemporaries.
Reviewed by Widukind De Ridder

Free University Brussels/Vrije Universiteit Brussel
wderidde@vub.ac.be
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Historical-Critical Dictionary of Marxism
Fanonism poet associated with the literary movement

known as négritude. In 1944, Fanon left the
A: fikr Fanun. – G: Fanonismus. – F: fanon- Vichy-occupied island to join the Free French.
isme. – R: teorija Frantz Fanona. – S: fanon- In 1947, he began university-studies in Lyons,
ismo. – C: fanong zhuyi 法农主义 where he immersed himself in medicine,
philosophy and radical politics. A major intel-
Frantz Fanon (1925–61) was a major intellectual influence during this period was exis-
lectual influence on Third-World revolution- tentialism: Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche,
aries and New-Left radicals during the sixties. Jaspers, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and, most
‘The Third World discovers itself and speaks to importantly, Jean-Paul Sartre. He also read
itself through his voice’, wrote Jean-Paul Sartre extensively in classical Marxism as well as the
in 1961 (Sartre in Fanon 1961, xlvi). Fanon’s works of Luxemburg, Lenin, Trotsky and
thought is characterised by three aspects. First, Kautsky, and became familiar with the con-
he proposes a radical anti-imperialist theory, flicts surrounding the construction of socialism
which emphasises the central significance of after the October Revolution. Fanon finished
‘race’ in the context of colonial oppression; medical training in 1951 and began a speciali-
race is not a contingent determination that sation in psychiatry. His mentor, François
could be subsumed under the general category Tosquelles, a refugee from Franco’s Spain,
of class, but, rather – like nationality and advocated a treatment that emphasised the
gender – is a distinctive and autonomous form social environment of mental illness.
of social, economic and political inequality. In 1952, he published Black Skin, White
Second, Fanon stresses the significance of Masks, a powerful intellectual autobiography
the revolutionary act as also a psychological that details his discovery as to how deeply
and intellectual transformation, which must embedded racism was in Western culture, and
accompany material transformation, or the the devastating effect it has on the black per-
socialist reorganisation of production, as its son’s self-identity. It also elaborates the fierce
conditio sine qua non. Third, Fanon argues for internal struggle by which Fanon recon-
individual freedom as an essential component structed his own sense of self. In 1953, he
of a socialist synthesis that should guarantee took a position as a psychiatrist in a govern-
democratic participation in the construction ment hospital in French Algeria. When the
of socialism. Algerian Revolution broke out the next year,
Fanon’s sympathies were strongly with the
1. Fanon, descendant of African slaves, was Front de Libération National (FLN). Between
born in Martinique, the son of a minor official 1954–6, while carrying out his normal duties,
in the French colonial service. Blacks were Fanon treated FLN-militants wounded and
97% of a population rigidly stratified along tortured by the French and engaged in other
racial lines, the vast majority of whom worked secret activities in support of the resistance. In
on white-owned sugar-plantations. As part of 1956, he resigned from French government
the small black middle class, he attended the service and went into exile in Tunisia as a
lycée in Fort-de-France where he came under full-time FLN-militant. He became political
the influence of Aimé Césaire, the Communist editor of the French-language edition of the

176 W. W. Hansen / Historical Materialism 19.2 (2011) 175–182
FLN’s official organ, El Moudjahid, essays billions of people into extreme poverty, hun-
from which were compiled in two further vol- ger and suffering.
umes: A Dying Colonialism (1959) and Toward The concept of ‘psychic violence’ is used to
the African Revolution (posthumously, 1964). comprehend the mechanisms through which
In addition to his political work, he simulta- racism and colonialism debase their victims to
neously undertook medical duties at seven dif- such an extent that they begin to doubt their
ferent locations in Tunis and regularly travelled own value as human beings, accepting and
to guerrilla-camps on the Moroccan and Tuni- internalising their inferiority. The dominant
sian borders to give medical training and treat culture denigrated the language, the religion,
the wounded. Once, seriously injured by a the social mores, the very biological-genetic
land-mine, he was sent to Rome for medical composition of the conquered people. The
care and narrowly escaped two assassination- colonised were declared to be mere savages,
attempts. Diagnosed with leukaemia, he died sub-humans, dependant upon the conqueror
in December, 1961, just weeks after the publi- for tutelage and protection from themselves.
cation of The Wretched of the Earth. Deprived of his or her very humanity and self-
respect, the dominated person internalised a
2. Theory of Violence. – It was Fanon’s dis- sense of shame and disgrace – the self-hatred
cussion in The Wretched of the Earth of the role of the colonised. In Fanon’s view, the black
of violence in the anticolonial revolution that man internalised the idea that the more he
was by far the most controversial aspect of his adopted the cultural standards and language
political theory. What is often ignored is his of the white man, the closer he would come to
differentiation of the concept of violence, into being a real (‘civilised’) human being. In order
immediately physical, structural and psychic to achieve an approximation of whiteness, he
violence. In particular, the context of his reflec- must denounce his own blackness. (cf. ‘The
tions has sometimes been neglected: namely, Negro and Language’ and ‘The Fact of Black-
the extent of French barbarism in Algeria. ness’ in Black Skin, White Masks and ‘Con-
During the first four decades (1830–70) of cerning Violence’ in The Wretched of the Earth).
colonialism, an estimated one-third of the For Fanon, the moment in which the
Muslim population was eliminated; in 1945, ‘native’ rejects his humiliation, his de-human-
40,000 people were massacred in less than a isation, his self-hatred, is the moment in which
month at Sétif alone. During the years of the the revolution actually begins. Only through a
liberation struggle (1954–62), over one million radical claim of self-love could the disease of
Algerians, overwhelmingly non-combatants, self-hatred be expunged. This self-redemption
were killed; nearly 12 % of the population. By and self-purification could be accomplished
comparison, fewer than 12,000 French lost by an uncompromising will toward action,
their lives during the entire war and of these, which Fanon chose to call violence. Fanon’s
9,000 were soldiers (Humbaraci, 2–55). In conceptualisation of human renewal is, in cer-
this context of massive French brutality, the tain respects, an extension of that position
use of physical violence to liberate the country that Marx and Engels formulate in The Ger-
was seen by Fanon as legitimate and morally man Ideology, where they argue that both ‘for
justifiable, though he did not hesitate to warn the production on a mass scale of this com-
in the penultimate chapter of The Wretched of munist consciousness, and for the success of
the Earth of the dangers inherent in a reliance the cause itself, the transformation of men on
on mere physical violence. a mass scale is necessary, a transformation
Fanon employs the concept of ‘structural’ which can only take place in a practical move-
violence to describe the existing international ment, in a revolution’ (MECW 5, 52–3; trans.
capitalist system. The expansion of Europe modified).
into Africa, Asia and the Americas over the Fanon argues that this lost humanity can
previous 500 years had created a global system only be recovered through an absolute and
of exploitation so rapacious that it forced uncompromising rejection of the entire con-
W. W. Hansen / Historical Materialism 19.2 (2011) 175–182 177
cept of – external and internal – colonialism: Marxist and psychological categories (Gend-
its cultural values, its political principles, its zier, 199). Caute says simply that he was not
economic system. The more or less spontane- a ‘traditional’ Marxist (Caute, 76). Jinadu
ous assertion of one’s self-worth alone cannot considers Fanon to be broadly within the
carry through a permanent transformation. It Marxist-Leninist tradition ( Jinadu, 98), while
must be accompanied by organised resistance Woddis, an orthodox Communist, rebukes
(Chapter 2, ‘Spontaneity: Its Strengths and Fanon as a Third-World upstart who was not
Weaknesses’). Organisation, in its turn, cre- sufficiently appreciative of socialism’s Euro-
ates obstacles as the movement toward a col- pean origins, and insists that he had no under-
lective national liberation is in danger of standing of Marxism (Woddis, 173). Geismar
falling under the domination of particular ele- argues that his concept of Communism was
ments, using nationalist slogans, who establish not that of joining a party, but of joining a
themselves in the name of the nation as a post- revolution (Geismar, 19).
colonial ‘state class’ and instrumentalise the In fact, Fanon was influenced by and
revolution for their own narrow class-interests. engaged in the non-Communist, Marxist Left
during his student days. His antipathy toward
3. Nationalism and the culture of liberation. – the PCF had two sources: first, the Party’s
Differently from the majority of the chief fig- dedication to a chauvinist conception of
ures of African nationalism he met in recently French civilisation led it, at best, to vacillate
independent Ghana in 1960 as a FLN-repre- on the colonial question and, at worst, to out-
sentative, Fanon pointed to the necessity of a right racism; second, the rigidly hierarchical,
dialectical relation of national liberation with ‘Leninist’ form of party-organisation was at
internationalism: the national consciousness distinct odds with Fanon’s democratic con-
that needed to be created, in order for it not to ception of a socialist party.
turn into a new form of domination, must be Nevertheless, Fanon was deeply influenced
articulated internationally. Aimed both against by Marxism, which is attested to not only by
‘progressives’ who claimed that an emphatic the repeated use of Marxian categories and the
emphasis upon nationality corresponded to an explicit and implicit references to Marx and
obsolete stage of human development as well Engels. Even more decisive is the fact that
as against autocratic nationalists, Fanon saw Fanon argues that ‘Marxist analysis should
the most urgent tasks of the African intellec- always be slightly stretched every time we have
tual in the development of his nation, but to do with the colonial problem’ (Fanon
which would only be able to represent the 1961, 5). ‘Classical’ Marxism, whose treat-
expressive will of the people if it were accom- ment of race and nationality as mere epiphe-
panied by the discovery and creation of uni- nomena concealed a Eurocentric approach,
versalising values. Here, Fanon’s concept of had not been able to do that.
‘culture’ is decisive: ‘If culture is the expression
of national consciousness, I will not hesitate to 5. ‘Race’ and ‘class’. – Central to Fanon’s
affirm that in the case with which we are deal- analysis of the colonial social formation was
ing it is the national consciousness which is the phenomenologically comprehended con-
the most elaborate form of culture. [. . .] It is at cept of race, of being the other. One’s skin
the heart of national consciousness that inter- colour was an inescapable badge of subordina-
national consciousness lives and grows. And tion that determined the black person’s exist-
this two-fold emerging is ultimately the source ence and forced him to accept his own
of all culture’ (Fanon 1961, 199). inferiority. Consequently, the simplistic trans-
ferral to the colonies of class-categories devel-
4. Fanon and Marxism. – Biographers differ oped in the European context and appropriate
regarding their assessment of Fanon’s relation to an understanding of industrial societies that
to Marxism. Gendzier, for example, argues were racially relatively homogenous was a sig-
that Fanon’s writing fluctuated between nificant intellectual error because it ignored
the racial-national dimension (and could, in the colonised population into four classes: the
turn, lead to negative political consequences). peasant-majority, the large and growing lumpen-
Fanon’s saw the chief contradiction of colo- proletariat, the tiny full-time working class
nial societies as that of race; those who ruled and the national middle class.
were those who came from elsewhere, those The perspective of the colonial or postcolo-
who declared themselves as belonging to a nial reality required a revision of the Eurocen-
superior species. The essential criterion of tric dogmas canonised by Marxism-Leninism.
their right to rule was not based on their own- The typical African colony was a vast sea of
ership of capital, but on their belonging to a impoverished peasants surrounding relatively
particular race. ‘When you examine at close small islands of urbanisation. African cities
quarters the colonial context, it is evident that were not areas of industrial production, but
what parcels out the world is to begin with the primarily administrative centres whose task
fact of belonging to or not belonging to a was to supervise the extraction of wealth in the
given race, a given species. In the colonies the form of agricultural and mineral products.
economic substructure is also a superstructure. Third-World Marxists, following the ‘Leninist’
The cause is the consequence; you are rich model, argued that, despite its minuscule size,
because you are white, you are white because the leading revolutionary class must be the
you are rich’ (Fanon 1961, 5). working class under the leadership of a prole-
Fanon therefore did not simply ignore class tarian party. The peasantry was seen as a neces-
as an analytical category. His argument was sary, but subordinate ally.
that, in the colonies, class and race had a sym- The minuscule colonial working class, while
biotic relationship; the latter was dominant, nationalist, was not particularly revolutionary.
but only insofar as colonialism continues. In They were relatively well off compared to the
The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon makes it peasantry and the lumpenproletariat and more
clear that, with independence, the barriers to interested in preserving and increasing their
socialism are no longer racially determined, existing privileges than they were in funda-
and the revolution must be transformed into a mental revolutionary change. In this context,
social (class-) revolution. In Fanon’s view, the Fanon deployed the theory of the ‘labour aris-
colonial society in transition had two alterna- tocracy’ developed by Engels and then later
tives: either it could make a total break with Lenin. With his use of the term ‘working
imperialism and begin the construction of class’, Fanon was explicitly referring to only a
socialism based on a thoroughly humanist- small minority of all those engaged in wage-
democratic programme that addressed the labour; those with regular, relatively skilled,
political, spiritual, cultural as well as the eco- relatively well paid, full-time employment
nomic needs of the broad masses; or it could (ibid.). He was not referring to the thousands
sink into being a neocolonial appendage of of migrant workers, casual and day-labourers,
world-capitalism that would keep the people workers on white farms, nor the masses of per-
in bondage. The alternative chosen would be sonal and household-servants. In the typical
determined by the configuration of class- African colony, these latter groups of workers
forces as they were formed during the colonial constituted 95% of the wage-earning class. In
period but, more importantly, as these forces order to designate this majority, Fanon refor-
were influenced and re-shaped morally and mulates the concept of ‘lumpenproletariat’
politically by the struggle for independence. that had been negatively deployed by Marx
and Engels – motivated in part by the inten-
6. Social analysis. – In Fanon’s model, colo- tion to provoke the French Left, whose cow-
nial society was divided into two racial groups ardice and arrogance on the question of
that were simultaneously expressed in five Algerian independence he despised.
class-categories. At the summit of this pyra- Fanon clearly does not conceive of the
mid the dominant race and the dominant lumpenproletariat in the European sense; as a
class were interchangeable terms. He divided marginalised minority, what Marx called a
social scum made up of vagabonds and thieves. standing the nature of this class and how it
Rather, Fanon’s lumpenproletariat was made would function when in power.
up of peasants recently deprived of their land
who had migrated to the urban areas in search 7. Revolution, party, democracy. – Fanon’s
of work and survival (sometimes he refers to theory of revolution departed significantly
this class simply as a fraction of the peasantry). from Lenin’s model of the vanguard-party. He
It was in the lumpenproletariat that social emphasises the significance of the radical
rebellion would find its ‘urban spearhead of intelligentsia and particularly its ability to
the revolution . . . one of the most spontaneous bring leadership to the spontaneously revolu-
and the most radically revolutionary forces of tionary masses. In Fanon’s model, however,
a colonized people’ (Fanon 1961, 81). the radical intelligentsia, while providing the
Fanon’s analysis of the ‘national middle initial leadership, also learns from and becomes
class’ or ‘national bourgeoisie’ is his most as one with the masses. Fanon’s idea of radical
important and most prophetic contribution to leadership means that as the exploited classes
an understanding of postcolonial society. as a whole experience revolutionary politics
Fanon was referring to that portion of the they also gain the knowledge and skills to exer-
colonised population who had benefitted from cise self-leadership. The party, consequently,
a European education and were engaged as develops a completely different internal organ-
small businessmen, doctors, lawyers, teachers isational culture. It becomes a mass, radical
and employees within the colonial bureauc- and democratic movement in which the ‘grass
racy. The upward mobility of this class was roots’ feel power in their newly found self-
also inhibited by the racism inherent in colo- confidence, in their ability to participate in
nial society. Consequently, they were the first decision making and to determine the direc-
to begin organised nationalist agitation and tion of the revolution they are creating –
assumed the leadership of the emergent a concept clearly marked by Luxemburg’s
nationalist organisations that began demand- influence.
ing independence. Fanon saw this class, Having theorised his ideal party, Fanon
however, not as a potential revolutionary lead- embarks on a devastating criticism of the one-
ership, but as one whose primary interest was party state. He was referring not only to dan-
in assuming positions of political and eco- gers he saw inherent in the evolving
nomic dominance that would be available contemporary politics of the African revolu-
upon independence. Their interest was in tak- tion. His scathing reference to ‘that famous
ing the place of the Europeans in the colony, dictatorship whose supporters believe is called
and then serving as middle-men, mere busi- for by the historical process’ (Fanon 1961,
ness-agents of European capitalism. The colo- Chapter 3; trans. modified) is an unmistakable
nial middle class demanded the nationalisation allusion to the ‘Leninist’ concept of the prole-
of various sectors of the postcolonial economy, tarian dictatorship and democratic centralism.
not in the interest of the new nation as a ‘The incoherent mass of the people is seen as a
whole, but to gain control of the postcolonial blind force that must be continually held in
state to advance its own interests. To accom- check either by mystification or by the fear
plish this, they were perfectly willing to act as inspired by the police force’ (ibid.). Leader-
subordinates of international capitalism and ship gains its possible ‘value and strength only
continue the exploitation of the people as it from the existence of the people in struggle. It
had existed under colonialism. is literally the people who freely fashion a lead-
It is important to realise that Fanon wrote ership for itself, not the leadership that toler-
his analysis of the emergent national middle ates the people’. Similarly, Fanon undertakes a
class in early 1961: that is, at a time when it critique of the ‘cult of personality’: ‘The leader
was only assuming power and the euphoria of the people no longer exists today. The peo-
surrounding independence was nearly unani- ple are no longer a herd; they do not need to
mous. Fanon was virtually alone in under- be led. If the leader drives me on, then he
should know that at the same time I show him work of cultural destruction (36 et sq.). Nev-
the way’ (ibid.). ertheless, Fanon believed that the conflict
Fanon argues, in a way reminiscent of both between men and women could find its reso-
Luxemburg and Kautsky, that, in a one-party lution in the context of the revolutionary
state, free and democratic political life is grad- struggle, which itself requires changes in the
ually stifled so that eventually only the party- female-male relationship. The success of the
bureaucracy makes decisions. The single party revolution required the active participation of
is content to give orders and remind the peo- women, as a consequence of which the veil
ple constantly that the government expects lost its inviolability. The liberation-struggle
from them only ‘obedience and discipline’ thus, ultimately, led to entirely new perspec-
(ibid.). Socialism, in order to exist, must also tives in the relations between men and women
incorporate a free and democratic political and to the breakup of the traditional mono-
life: ‘the choice of a socialist regime, a regime lithic family. The historical process had pro-
which is clearly oriented toward the will of the duced conditions wherein men and women
people as a whole and based on the principle were changed and, in turn, were forced to
that man is the most precious of all posses- change conditions. – The outcome of the
sions, will allow us to go forward more quickly revolution in postcolonial Algeria, however,
and harmoniously, and thus make impossible turned out to be quite different from Fanon’s
that caricature of society where all political utopian vision (cf. Humbaracci 1966; Scheil
power is held in the hands of a few’ (ibid.). 1969).
That epigones of Marxist-Leninist ortho-
doxy quite clearly understood the implications 9. During his lifetime, Fanon was little
of Fanon’s thinking explains the virulence of known outside the ambit of the French left-
the attacks against him as well as the severe wing intelligentsia and the Algerian Revolu-
restrictions on access to his work. In the GDR, tion. This changed dramatically with the 1963
for example, Fanon’s writings were only pub- English translation of The Wretched of the
lished in 1986 (more than 20 years after they Earth. Translations of his other works into
were published in the BRD) and, even then, English as well as other languages followed
in a severely truncated form. shortly after. His fame spread in the political
context of the mid-sixties, a high point of
8. The woman question. – References to the revolutionary optimism in the Third World.
women’s struggle are found throughout In the United States the civil-rights movement
Fanon’s work, but he devotes particular atten- had become a potent political force, while,
tion to the question in A Dying Colonialism throughout Western Europe and North Amer-
(1958). His points of departure are the veil ica, the New Left was posing a challenge both
(Chapter 1) and the family (Chapter 3) and to bourgeois capitalism and state-socialism.
the ways in which the meaning and structure In this situation, there developed a sort of
of these were changed by the revolutionary proxy-war around and over Fanon’s theses. In
experience. Traditionally, the Algerian woman the United States, the centre of the ‘Fanon
had been completely dominated by men: controversy’, the assault was undertaken by an
father, husband, brother. The veil had been amalgam of liberals, social democrats and
one of the most significant symbols of that some orthodox Communists, with the goal of
domination, but colonialism itself had trans- maintaining ideological and political control
formed the symbolic meaning of the veil. over the activists in the new progressive move-
French colonial policy was predicated on the ments, who referred to Fanon, alongside other
destruction of Algerian culture and, in part, figures.
this necessitated gaining control over Algerian Both sides concentrated their attention on a
women (Fanon 1958, 35–67, 99–120). To very narrow interpretation of Fanon’s theory of
this end, the French discouraged wearing the violence. Critics charged Fanon with revelling
veil, in order to make women ‘allies’ in the in bloodshed, advocating a Sorelian fascism
and having an almost Satanic influence over there has been a marked increase in Fanon
young radicals. The best known of these critics studies, particularly in the United States, but
was the philosopher, Hannah Arendt. In On also in Africa, the Caribbean, Britain and, to a
Violence, a diatribe tinged with racism against lesser extent, in Latin America. (E. Hansen,
the New Left and the revolts of the (in her Onwuanibe, Bulhan, Jinadu and Sekyi-Otu).
eyes, unqualified both socially and intellectu- Fanon’s writings have also influenced Third-
ally) African-Americans, she argued that the World women’s studies. African (as well as
influence of Fanon was responsible for endan- West-Indian and African-American) writers
gering social peace. While polemicising against have acknowledged his influence on their fic-
Fanon’s supposed glorification of violence tion (Lazarus). The Wretched of the Earth and
(Arendt, 14–20, 65–96), she downplayed Black Skin, White Masks came to be regarded
both the ‘naked violence’ of the colonial pow- by literary theorists as important examples of
ers as well as the role of violence in American modern protest-literature. – The collapse of
history, above all, violence directed against state-socialism has also led to a re-evaluation
humans with dark skin. Finally, she utterly of Fanon’s views on the revolutionary party in
failed to see the violence of a brutal, racist war light of democratic theory and the failure of
the United States was then waging against the the ‘Leninist’ proletarian dictatorship (Gordon).
Vietnamese people. – Most of Fanon’s defend- Fanon’s thoughts on the symbiotic relation-
ers contented themselves with revolutionary ship of race, ethnicity, gender and class become
posturing. Only a few interventions, often by even more relevant the more the multiracial,
African-American intellectuals, attempted to multi-ethnic and multicultural nature of
analyse Fanon within the context of his over- Euro-American societies is widely recognised.
all work. However, it was generally the anti-
Fanon critics who published their views in Bibliography: H. Arendt 1969, On Violence,
widely read journals and, therefore, domi- New York; P. Bouvier 1971, Fanon, Paris; H.A.
nated the debate. The consequence was that Bulhan 1985, Frantz Fanon and the Psychology of
Fanon was politically demonised. Oppression, New York; D. Caute 1970, Fanon,
By the seventies, the epoch of the neocon- New York; F. Fanon 1952 (1967), Black Skin,
servative ‘roll-back’, Fanon played no role in White Masks, New York; F. Fanon 1958 (1965),
the political debate any longer. This occurred A Dying Colonialism, New York; F. Fanon 1961
at the very point that his prophetic analysis (2004), The Wretched of the Earth, New York;
of the state-class in postcolonial society was F. Fanon 1964 (1967), Toward the African
proving so unerring in its accuracy. A number Revolution, New York; P. Geismar 1971, Fanon,
of scholars began producing analytical bio- New York; I. Gendzier 1973, Frantz Fanon: A
graphies (Gendzier, Geismar, Caute, Perin- Critical Study, New York; L.R. Gordon 1995,
bam) and studies of various aspects of his Fanon and the Crisis of European Man, New York;
political and social thought (Zahar, E. Hansen, L.R. Gordon et al. 1996, Fanon: A Critical
Onwuanibe, Bouvier, Lucas, McCulloch). Reader, Oxford; E. Hansen 1977, Frantz Fanon:
Social and Political Thought, Columbus, Ohio;
These studies gave impetus to a return to
W.W. Hansen 1996, Frantz Fanon, Mainz;
Fanon’s work for insights regarding the nature
A. Humbaraci 1966, Algeria: A Revolution that
of neocolonialism, of continuing racism, of
Failed, New York; L.A. Jinadu 1986, Fanon:
corrupt dictatorships and the deterioration of In Search of the African Revolution, London;
the state in the Third World. A new genera- N. Lazarus 1990, Resistance in Postcolonial Afri-
tion of African intellectuals who were trying can Fiction, New Haven; P. Lucas 1971, Sociolo-
to analyse the disintegration of their own soci- gie de Frantz Fanon, Algiers; J. McCulloch
eties not only developed a far deeper under- 1983, Black Soul, White Artifact: Fanon’s Clinical
standing of Fanon’s writing on violence, but Psychology and Social Theory, Cambridge; K. Marx
also gave much needed attention to his and F. Engels 1975–2005, Marx Engels Collected
thoughts on democracy, the party and the Works (MECW), London; R.C. Onwuanibe
postcolonial state. Since the mid-eighties, 1983, A Critique of Revolutionary Humanism:
Frantz Fanon, St. Louis; B.M. Perinbam 1982, revolution, relations of force, self-organisation,
Holy Violence: Fanon, An Intellectual Biography, slavery/slave-holding society, state-class, Third
Washington DC.; C.J. Robinson 1983, Black World, transitional societies, universalism, West-
Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradi- ern Marxism, woman question, working class,
tion, London; A. Sekyi-Otu 1997, Fanon’s Dia- vanguard, violence.
lectic of Experience, Cambridge, MA.; J. Woddis
1972, New Theories of Revolution, New York; Antikolonialismus, Arbeiteraristokratie, Arbe-
U. Wolter 1999, ‘Algerien entschleiert. Frantz iterklasse, Avantgarde, Bauern, Befreiung,
Fanon in der feministisch-postkolonialen Debatte’,
Black Marxism, Bündnispolitik, Chauvinis-
in iz3w, Nr. 235, 34–7, and Nr. 236, 37–41;
mus, Demokratie/Diktatur des Proletariats,
R. Zahar 1969, Kolonialismus und Entfremdung,
demokratischer Zentralismus, Dritte Welt,
Frankfurt/M.
Entkolonialisierung, Entwicklungsländer,
Ethnozentrismus, Eurozentrismus, Frauen-
frage, Führung, Gewalt, Graswurzelrevolu-
William W. Hansen tion, Hauptwiderspruch, Ideal, Imperialismus,
Internationalismus, islamischer Sozialismus,
Alliance-politics, anticolonialism, Black Marxism, Kaderpartei, Klasseninteressen, Klassenreduk-
cadre-party, chauvinism, chief contradiction, city/ tionismus, Kleinbürger, koloniale Produk-
country, class-interests, class-reductionism, colo- tionsweise, Kolonialismus, Kräfteverhältnisse,
nialism, colonial mode of production, cultural Kulturrevolution, Linksradikalismus, Lumpen-
revolution, cult of personality, decolonisation, proletariat, Luxemburgismus, Marxismus-
democracy/dictatorship of the proletariat, demo- Leninismus, Massen, Massenintellektueller,
cratic centralism, developing countries, ethno- Menschenwürde, Mittelschichten, nationale
centrism, Eurocentrism, grassroots-revolution, Befreiung, nationale Bourgeoisie, nationale
human dignity, ideal, imperialism, international- Identität, Nationalismus, Neokolonialismus,
ism, Islamic socialism, labour-aristocracy, leader- Neue Linke, neuer Mensch, Orthodoxie, Per-
ship, left radicalism, liberation, lumpenproletariat, sonenkult, Populismus, postkolonialer Sozial-
Luxemburgism, Marxism-Leninism, masses, mass ismus, Rasse und Klasse, Rassismus, Revolution,
intellectual, middle classes, nationalism, national Selbstorganisation, Sklaverei/Sklavenhalterges-
bourgeoisie, national identity, national libera- ellschaft, Staatsklasse, Stadt/Land, Übergangs-
tion, neocolonialism, New Left, new man, ortho- gesellschaften, Universalismus, westlicher
doxy, peasantry, petty bourgeoisie, populism, Marxismus.
postcolonial socialism, race and class, racism,
Notes on Contributors
Stefano Azzarà is Research Fellow at the University of Urbino. His publications include
Politica, progetto, piano. Livio Sichirollo e Giancarlo De Carlo a Urbino 1963–1990
(Cattedrale, 2009) and Pensare la rivoluzione conservatrice. Critica della democrazia e «grande
politica» nella Repubblica di Weimar (La Città del Sole, 2000; enlarged edition, 2004).
s.azzara@uniurb.it
Bill Bowring is Professor of Law at Birkbeck College, University of London, a practising
barrister, and International Secretary of the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers. His most
recent publications include The Degradation of the International Legal Order: The
Rehabilitation of Law and the Possibility of Politics (Routledge Cavendish, 2008), ‘The
Russian Constitutional System: Complexity and Asymmetry’ in Asymmetric Autonomy and
the Settlement of Ethnic Conflicts, edited by Marc Weller and Katherine Nobbs (University
of Pennsylvania Press, 2010) and ‘ “Terrorist Lists” and Procedural Human Rights: A
Collision between UN Law, EU Law and Strasbourg Law?’ in Rights in Context: Law and
Justice in Late Modern Society, edited by Reza Banakar (Ashgate, 2010).
b.bowring@bbk.ac.uk
Vivek Chibber teaches sociology at New York University. He is the author of Locked in
Place: State-Building and Late Industrialization in India, (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2003), and numerous articles on economic development, Marxist theory, historical
sociology, and imperialism. He is now completing a critique of postcolonial theory, to be
published by Verso Books.
Vivek.chibber@nyu.edu
Ben Fine is Professor of Economics at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University
of London. His recent publications include Theories of Social Capital (Pluto Press, 2010)
and, in collaboration with Dimitris Milonakis, From Political Economy to Economics
(Routledge, 2008) and From Economics Imperialism to Freakonomics (Routledge, 2009).
bf@soas.ac.uk
Bue Rübner Hansen is a PhD student at the School of Business and Management, Queen
Mary, University of London.
buerhansen@gmail.com
Bill Hansen, a native of Cincinnati, Ohio, was an activist in the civil rights movement in
the sixties where he first read and became interested in Frantz Fanon. He was educated at the
universities of Maryland, SOAS London and Boston. Currently he teaches at the American
University of Nigeria, Yola where he was the founding head of the Politics Program. His
research interests have to do with identities: nationalism, race, ethnicity and religion.
billhansen1@yahoo.com

184 Notes on Contributors / Historical Materialism 19.2 (2011) 183–184
Andrew Lawson is Senior Lecturer in English in the School of Cultural Studies at

Leeds Metropolitan University. His publications include Walt Whitman and the Class
Struggle (University of Iowa Press, 2006), ‘Early Literary Modernism’ in A Companion to
the Modern American Novel, edited by John T. Matthews (Blackwell, 2009) and ‘Mark
Twain, Class, and the Gilded Age’ in The Cambridge History of the American Novel, edited
by Leonard Cassuto, Clare Eby and Benjamin Reiss (Cambridge University Press,
forthcoming).
a.lawson@leedsmet.ac.uk
Michael Löwy is Research-Director in Sociology at the Centre National de la Recherche
Scientifique in Paris. His publications include The Theory of Revolution in the Young Marx
(Haymarket, 2005), Franz Kafka, rêveur insoumis (Éditions Stock, 2004) and The Politics of
Combined and Uneven Development: The Theory of Permanent Revolution (Haymarket,
2010).
michael.lowy@orange.fr
Dimitris Milonakis is Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Crete. His is
co-author, with Ben Fine, of From Political Economy to Economics (Routledge, 2008) and
From Economics Imperialism to Freakonomics (Routledge, 2009).
milonakis@econ.soc.uoc.gr
Panagiotis Sotiris teaches social and political philosophy at the Department of Sociology,
University of the Aegean. His publications include Communism and Philosophy: The
Theoretical Adventure of Louis Althusser (in Greek), Athens, 2004. His research-interests are
Marxist philosophy, modern social theory, and the theory of imperialism.
psot@soc.aegean.gr

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Historical Materialism 19.2 (2011) 3–31 brill.

‘Useless but True’:

Ben Finea and Dimitris Milonakisb

* Delivered as the Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial-Lecture, London, 12 November

inspiration is drawn from Michel Callon who perceives capitalism as non-

2. From the crisis of capitalism . . .

4. For a fuller account of what follows, see Fine 2011, forthcoming.

unpicked. And it is to scholarship to which we now turn, and economics in

3. . . . to the crisis of economic theory . . .

7. Taleb 2007, pp. xvii–xviii.

on these assumptions preclude the possibility of such an event taking place.

15. Bernanke 2004.

Employment Act of 1946 in the United States provided blueprints for

16. Hoover 2003, p. 412.

This process of formalisation has created a whole generation of so-called idiot

20. Greenspan 2008.

This paper extends interplanetary trade theory to an interstellar setting. It is

26. Krugman 1978.

formalist era, accompanied by Americanisation and standardisation of the

31. Fine and Milonakis 2009.

microeconomic market-imperfections, and eventually to the almost-total

36. Rizvi 2003, p. 384.

its commitment to mathematical reasoning, that reasoning always takes second

All of this Charles Ferguson highlights as ‘the convergence of academic

Fama and mainstream-economics, then, cannot explain crises, so we might

45. Cassidy 2010c.

the structural characteristics of the capitalist system which, however, are

51. Colander 2000 (reprinted in Colander 2001); Davis 2006.

56. Colander, Holt and Rosser, Jr. 2004.

not economics’.61 This, however, is not true scientific pluralism, ‘a genuinely

61. Colander, Holt and Rosser, Jr. 2004, p. 11.

68. Skidelsky 2009, p. 103.

both academic and non-academic rôles and his intellectual integrity. He

It is, with apologies to Jane Austen, or indeed, her ghost-writer,76 a truth

76. See BBC News 2010.

EuroMemorandum group. At the same time, the Heterodox Economics

78. More on these organisations may be found by consulting Google.

Historical Materialism Limited Edition Artwork

Luibov Popova Untitled Textile Design on William Morris Wallpaper for

Mabb regularly reworks the artistic imagery of Marxism to produce startling

natural imagery with the abstract machine aesthetics of the Russian

Beyond Simple Fidelity to the Event:

is in sharp contrast to what Badiou calls, in Platonic terms, doxa, or mere

2. The absent space of relations

presented without inter-elemental relations of any kind.’8 This is based on

8. Hallward 2004, p. 15.

original conception of the primacy of relations in a novel form of social

Pierre Macherey has insisted that ‘social relations . . . constitute a multiplicity

[n]ot a moral impossibility or a ‘contradiction in terms’, but what might be called

Badiou is trying to present a much more complex theoretical perspective,

20. Balibar 1995, p. 102.

Between the being of a pure multiplicity and an appearing as docile or insurgent

A relation, within appearing, is necessarily subordinated to the transcendental

Furthermore, despite his many references to dialectics, he insists in Logics of

27. Badiou 2009a, p. 122.

This leads us to another important contradiction in Badiou’s endeavour,

socio-historical causation – geographic, demographic, economic, technological,

On the contrary, what we have is the insistence on the radically contingent

3. Antagonism and the subject