Historical Materialism, 19.3 (2011)

Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011 DOI: 10.
1163/156920611X592850
Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 328 brill.nl/hima
Revisiting the Domestic-Labour Debate:
An Indian Perspective
Rohini Hensman
Union Research Group, Bombay
rohinihensman@yahoo.co.uk
Abstract
Te class-struggle under capitalism is shaped by the fact that for capital, labour-power is merely
a factor of production and source of prot, whereas for workers it is an element of their own
lives. Given the centrality of labour-power to the accumulation of capital, it is surprising that
Marx nowhere describes or analyses its production. Te domestic-labour debate of the 1970s was
a useful attempt to ll this gap, but left many issues unresolved. Tis article attempts to carry
forward this theoretical task, using examples mainly from India, and to draw practical conclusions
for the working-class struggle.
Keywords
domestic labour, production of labour-power, Marx, gender, feminist theory, India
Introduction
At the heart of the class-struggle under capitalism is the fact that for capital,
labour-power is merely an element of production and source of surplus-value,
whereas, for workers, it is inseparable from themselves as living human beings.
Struggles over wages, the duration and conditions of waged work, and control
over it, have easily been recognised by Marxists as important aspects of class-
struggle. Yet the relations and conditions under which labour-power is
produced, though equally important, have received far less attention, except
from Marxist feminists and feminist Marxists. Given the centrality of labour-
power to capitalism since, as the only commodity that can produce surplus-
value, and therefore prot, it is the sine qua non of accumulation it is
somewhat surprising that Marx nowhere describes its production. Engels did
recognise the existence of domestic labour and the gendered relations within
it, but did not take the analysis further. Te domestic-labour debate of
the 1970s was an attempt to ll this gap, but it left many of the crucial issues
unresolved.
4 R. Hensman / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 328
One consequence of the under-theorisation of this particular arena of class-
struggle by Marxists is that it has been largely ceded to reactionary ideologies
and politics. In Tird-World countries such as India, it also results in extremely
high rates of infant and maternal mortality, malnutrition, and disability or
premature death resulting from preventable or curable diseases. Tis article
attempts to take up this theoretical task using examples from contemporary
India. Recognition that the production of labour-power constitutes a crucial
arena of class-struggle would enable Marxists both to combat male domination
within the working class more eectively, and to play a more eective rle in
revolutionising the social relations of production.
Marx and Engels on domestic labour
Under capitalism, according to Marx, labour is either productive in the
sense that it is exchanged with capital and produces surplus-value or
unproductive, in the sense that it is exchanged with capitalists revenue or
workers wages, and does not produce surplus-value.
1
However, this denition
of productive labour is relevant only from the standpoint of individual capital:
labour is or is not productive according to whether it does or does not produce
surplus-value for the individual capitalist. A problem arises, however, when
we look at production from the standpoint of total social capital, as Marx
himself realised when he considered the capitalist production of articles
of luxury-consumption: Tis sort of productive labour produces use-values
and objecties itself in products that are destined only for unproductive
consumption. In their reality, as articles, they have no use-value for the process
of reproduction, and hence, if there is disproportionate diversion of productive
labour into unreproductive articles, it follows that the means of subsistence or
production will not be reproduced in the necessary quantities.
2
Te result will
be a reduction in the rate of accumulation of capital as a whole.
In other words, what is productive labour from the standpoint of individual
capital can be unreproductive labour from the standpoint of total social
1. Since the immediate purpose and the authentic product of capitalist production is surplus
value, labour is only productive, and an exponent of labour-power is only a productive worker, if it
or he creates surplus-value directly, i.e. the only productive labour is that which is directly
consumed in the course of production for the valorization of capital. . . . Every productive worker
is a wage-labourer, but not every wage-labourer is a productive worker. Whenever labour is
purchased to be consumed as a use-value, as a service . . . labour is not productive and the wage-
labourer is no productive worker. His work is consumed for its use-value, not as creating exchange-
value; it is consumed unproductively, not productively. (Marx 1976, pp. 1038, 1041.)
2. Marx 1976, pp. 10456.
R. Hensman / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 328 5
capital. In Volume II of Capital, Marx does refer to luxury-production in the
reproduction-schemas for simple reproduction, but the schemas for
reproduction on an expanded scale (i.e., capitalist accumulation) include only
department I producing means of production for capital, and department II
producing means of subsistence for wage-workers.
3
Implicitly, he makes a
distinction between reproductive labour, embodied in products including
workers that re-enter capitalist production, and unreproductive labour,
embodied in products that do not. (We are here referring to social, not
biological, reproduction, although biological reproduction, without which
there would be no new workers to replace those who die, is a necessary element
of social reproduction.)
Marx comes closest to describing the process of production of labour-power
in the chapter on Te Sale and Purchase of Labour-power:
Given the existence of the individual, the production of labour-power consists in
his reproduction of himself or his maintenance. For his maintenance he requires
a certain quantity of the means of subsistence. Terefore the labour-time necessary
for the production of labour-power is the same as that necessary for the production
of those means of subsistence[.] . . . If the owner of labour-power works today,
tomorrow he must again be able to repeat the same process in the same conditions
as regards health and strength. His means of subsistence must therefore be
sucient to maintain him in his normal state as a working individual. . . . Te
owner of labour-power is mortal. If then his appearance in the market is to be
continuous, and the continuous transformation of money into capital assumes
this, the seller of labour-power must perpetuate himself in the way that every
living individual perpetuates himself, by procreation. . . . Hence the sum of means
of subsistence necessary for the production of labour-power must include the
means necessary for the workers replacements, i.e. his children[.] . . . Te costs of
education vary according to the degree of complexity of the labour-power
required. Tese expenses (exceedingly small in the case of ordinary labour-power)
form a part of the total value spent in producing it. Te value of labour-power
can be resolved into the value of a denite quantity of the means of subsistence.
4

Marx goes on to give examples of means of subsistence such as food and fuel,
which need to be replaced daily, while others, such as clothes and furniture,
can be purchased at longer intervals. But that is all. Unlike his detailed
descriptions of the production of other commodities, here there is no
description of a labour-process, nor even a mention of instruments of
production (such as a stove, pots and pans, broom, bucket and mop). Just raw
materials means of subsistence and the nished product: labour-power.
3. Marx 1978, Chapters 20 and 21.
4. Marx 1976, pp. 2746.
Te implicit assumption is that all that is required to convert those means of
subsistence into labour-power is a process of individual consumption. Yet the
worker would not be maintained in his or her normal state as a working
individual, nor be replaced when he or she could no longer work, unless
somebody carried the raw materials and instruments of production home
from the market or shops, cooked the food and washed up after the meal,
dusted, swept, mopped oors and washed clothes, fed the baby, changed it,
gave it a bath, and so on and so forth.
Te home is therefore a site of individual consumption, but also of
production;
5
both are necessary for the production of labour-power, and Marxs
failure to identify and analyse the latter has been attributed to his patriarchal
position.
6
In fact, Marxs confusion of production with individual consumption
leads to bizarre contradictions in his work. For example, he writes of domestic
labour that: Te largest part of society, that is to say the working class, must
incidentally perform this kind of labour for itself; but it is only able to perform
it when it has laboured productively. It can only cook meat for itself when it
has produced a wage with which to pay for the meat.
7
If we generalise this
proposition to all commodities, it would state that until a commodity has
been sold, it cannot be produced. But commodities are usually sold only after
they have been produced, and this is especially true of labour-power, which
cannot be sold for the rst time until many hundreds of hours of labour-time
have been spent on its production, as Marx recognises elsewhere: Its exchange
value, like that of every other commodity, is determined before it goes into
circulation, since it is sold as a capacity, a power, and a specic amount of
labour-time was required to produce this capacity, this power.
8

Engels not only recognised the existence of domestic work and the gender-
division of labour within it, but even went so far as to observe that the reversal
of gender-rles during the industrial revolution, and the distress caused by it,
was possible only because the sexes have been placed in a false position from
the beginning.
9
He did not carry the analysis further, however, nor was there
5. In case this is doubted by anyone, one way of demonstrating the point would be to ask: is
it possible for someone else to substitute for a person in this particular activity or not? If someone
else eats all my meals for me, I would die of starvation within a month or two. On the other
hand, if someone else cooks all my meals for me, I would not suer at all, and might even enjoy
them more than if I cooked them myself ! Tus, in general, if it is possible to substitute one
person for another in some activity, it is a process of production, while if that is not possible, it
is a process of individual consumption.
6. Weinbaum 1978, p. 43.
7. Marx 1963, p. 161.
8. Marx 1976, p. 1066.
9. Engels 1975, p. 439.
much progress on this front until the debate around domestic labour (i.e.
housework and childcare) erupted in the 1970s.
10
Let us look at the issues
taken up which throw light on the production of labour-power.
Te debate of the 1970s
Most participants in the debate agreed that domestic labour was socially useful
and necessary: i.e. it was useful not just to other members of the household
but to society as a whole. It is clear that domestic labour transfers the value of
the commodities bought with the wage to the end-product, labour-power, but
does it also create value?
Here, those who say yes
11
are surely correct, while those who say no
12
are
wrong. Domestic labour is part of the production-process of labour-power, a
commodity that is sold on the (labour) market, and to say that it does not
produce value would contradict the whole starting-point of Marxs theory of
surplus-value, according to which the value of each commodity is determined
by . . . the labour-time socially necessary to produce it. . . . Hence in determining
the value of the yarn, or the labour-time required for its production, all the
special processes carried on at various times and in dierent places which were
necessary, rst to produce the cotton and the wasted portion of the spindle,
and then with the cotton and spindle to spin the yarn, may together be looked
on as dierent and successive phases of the same labour process.
13
Whether the materials that go into the production of a commodity are
produced as commodities or not makes no dierence to the value of the nal
product, so long as their quality is comparable. In the case of labour-power,
one male worker may eat his meals at restaurants, get his clothes and linen
washed at a laundry, and pay for a cleaner to clean his at, while another
worker doing the same job at the same workplace and earning the same wage
may have a wife who does the shopping, cooking, washing-up, washing and
cleaning, but the value of their labour-power would be the same. To deny that
the housewifes labour in the latter situation creates value would entail arguing
that the rst workers labour-power has a much higher value than that of the
second; an analogous contention would be that the piece of cloth woven by a
handloom-weaver whose wife spins the yarn at home has less value than an
10. Malos (ed.) 1982.
11. Dalla Costa and James 1972; Seccombe 1974 and 1975.
12. Benston 1969; Coulson, Magas and Wainwright 1975; Gardiner, Himmelweit and
Mackintosh 1982; Himmelweit and Mohun 1977.
13. Marx 1976, pp. 2934.
identical piece of cloth woven by one who buys the yarn on the market, which
clearly cannot be the case. To the extent that domestic labour performs a
function that is necessary for the production of labour power, it produces
value: Te value of labour-power is determined, as in the case of every other
commodity, by the labour-time necessary for the production, and consequently
also the reproduction, of this specic article.
14
And this is reproductive labour
in the sense that it makes an essential contribution to social reproduction.
Once we acknowledge that domestic labour contributes to the value of
labour-power, the neat division of the working day into necessary and surplus-
labour performed in the workplace collapses. Te equation becomes even
more complex when the generational reproduction of labour-power and the
contribution of state-education and healthcare are brought into the picture.
Te rate of surplus-value would then have to be calculated taking into account
all the necessary labour (in the workplace as well as the home) done by
members of the household that is the unit of production of labour-power, and
all the payments made by the capitalist, not only by way of wages, but also in
contributions to services such as state-education and healthcare.
Does domestic labour produce surplus-value? A housewife is not paid
wages, but her labour is paid for out of her husbands wage, so his employer
pays her indirectly. If the amount paid for her labour is the same as or more
than what her husband would have to pay to buy the services she performs on
the market, then she would not be producing surplus-value. (However, it is
possible that her husband keeps for himself part of the amount paid by the
employer for her labour, in which case, he would be exploiting her.) But, if the
amount paid for her labour by her husbands employer is less than the value of
the services she performs, that means the employer is keeping part of what he
would otherwise have had to pay out as wages, and her labour is therefore
contributing indirectly to his surplus-value. Te disparity is likely to be greatest
where there are small children in the family, since the cost of waged childcare
would tend to be considerably greater than the cost of the labour-power of
their mother.
Tus, although Dalla Costa and James
15
were wrong to think that domestic
labour is always productive (i.e. always produces surplus-value for the
individual capitalist), it is true that when its duration is extended unduly, this
labour allows extra surplus-value to be appropriated by subsidising the
production of labour-power. Te Bolivian womens leader and miners wife
Domitila Barrios de Chungara made a precise calculation of this, comparing
14. Marx 1976, p. 274.
15. Dalla Costa and James 1972.
the work performed in the home with the cost of the same services bought on
the market:
One day I got the idea of making a chart. We put as an example the price of
washing clothes per dozen pieces and we gured out how many dozens of items
we washed per month. Ten the cooks wage, the babysitters, the servants. . . Adding
it all up, the wage needed to pay us for what we do in the home . . . was much
higher than what the men earned in the mine for a month.
16
Tus, if a miners wife died or stopped working, and the man was compelled
to buy on the market the services that she had formerly performed, his wage
would not have been sucient, showing that it was less than the value of
labour-power; indeed, the shortfall would have been even greater, because
Domitila, with help from her children, also made and sold small pies called
salteas to supplement the family-income. Tus, the womens surplus-labour
allowed the mine-owner to appropriate more surplus-value than he would
otherwise have been able to do. But it is impossible to see this eect so long as
the production of labour-power (and its value) is seen solely as the activity of
waged workers. Only if it is seen as the collective product of the unit of
production of labour-power the working-class household is it possible to
calculate the real rate of surplus-value.
What happens when there are two or more wage-earners in the family? We
can examine this by looking at three dierent situations that are found in
India. Situation A is one where a male worker in a formal-sector enterprise is
able to support his wife and, say, two school-going children. Tey might rent
a two-bedroom at with running water, use a gas-stove, and eat fairly well.
Te woman is there when the children come home from school, and can
spend time with them even while she does other chores. In eect, the mans
wage is sucient to pay for the upkeep of another person (his wife) to do all
this work.
17
If it is a woman who is the formal-sector employee, the continuity between
her waged and unwaged work is clearer: she must do both, perhaps with some
help from others at home, in order to support the family, since they cannot eat
raw rice, wheat, dal or other food o dirty plates. Te increase in time spent
on domestic labour in order to compensate for lower wages is also more
obvious. A study in Delhi showed that, in response to a cut in real wages
between 1994/5 and 1999/2000 resulting from ination and restrictions in
access to the Public Distribution System, the total time expended on waged
16. Barrios de Chungara and Viezzer 1978, p. 35.
17. See Seccombe 1974.
work and domestic labour by women-workers increased from 1314 hours to
1617 hours a day, as they spent more time shopping around for the cheapest
goods, queuing-up at the ration-shop, and cleaning inferior rice.
18
If the male breadwinner loses his job and has to take an informal job in a
small enterprise which subcontracts work from his former company, earning
just half of what he was earning before (situation B), his wife has two options.
Tey could move to a basti (shanty-town) where she has to spend many more
hours collecting water from the shared tap, cooking on a kerosene-stove,
queuing-up at the ration-shop, cleaning, preparing food and washing up, and
so on. Teir standard of living would be lower, but by spending much more
time on housework perhaps 16 as opposed to 10 hours per day she could
feed everyone on the lower wage and keep the children in school. Alternatively,
she might nd a job that pays half or less of her husbands former wage. Tey
can then stay in their at and keep the gas-stove, but everyone has to chip in
and help with the housework even though she continues to do the bulk of it,
working perhaps 18 or more hours a day. In both cases the rate of surplus-
value has gone up. If the technology in the small enterprise where the man
now works is the same as in the large one (which is quite common), half of his
former wage is being taken as additional surplus-value. If his wife does not get
a job, this is partly compensated for by her increased domestic work; if she
does, then her wage may compensate for the loss in his earnings, but she works
even longer hours as well as creating surplus-value for her own employer. Te
family-wage is now split up between them.
Situation C is the most tragic: the man loses his job and cannot nd
another at most, he can nd only casual work for a few days a month. His
wife takes a job, but even their combined earnings cannot support the family,
so the children are taken out of school and sent to work too. Te family-wage
is now split up between four people, and the rate of surplus-value is even
higher. Teir collective working hours, including necessary labour spent
on household tasks, has also increased, since they are too poor to aord
ready-cooked food or laundry and cleaning services. Tis sequence of events
is not purely ctional, it is only too common: it occurred, for example, as
a consequence of the closure of textile-mills in Ahmedabad.
19
Millions of
agricultural and migrant-labour families have always been in situation C, as
indeed most working-class families were in Marxs time: everywhere, except in
the metallurgical industries, young persons (under 18), women and children
form by far the most preponderant element in the factory personnel;
20
even a
18. Chhachhi 2005, pp. 2479.
19. Breman 2004, pp. 2039.
20. Marx 1976, p. 577.
steel- and ironworks employs 500 boys under 18, and of these about a third,
or 170, are under the age of 13.
21
If we include other permutations for
example, where there are small children in the family, and a slightly older girl
is kept at home to look after them while her parents go out to work the bulk
of the labour-force in India belongs to situations B and C. In all of these cases,
except the rare one where a mans wage is adequate to keep the family in
relative comfort without anyone being subjected to overwork, domestic labour
compensates for the fact that part of the value of labour-power is being kept
by capital as additional surplus-value.
Te genesis of the working-class family
Left to itself, capitals werewolf-like hunger for surplus value
22
pushes down
wages and extends the working day to such an extent that all members of the
family, excluding only the smallest children, work long hours in wage-labour
simply in order to survive. If at any time it needs to retrench workers, it
dismisses men rather than women and children. Te family as a space apart
from capital is destroyed. It is workers, through their struggles for higher
wages, abolition of child-labour and restriction of working hours, who win
back time and space for the family. In this, they are supported up to a point
by the state, acting in the interests of the capitalist class as a whole. At an
earlier stage, in both England and India, the state used legislation to force
reluctant workers to labour long hours; but after capital extended these hours
to such an extent that it produces the premature exhaustion and death of this
labour-power itself
23
in other words, when the supply of labour-power for
capital was threatened the state stepped in again to limit working hours
and ensure that labour-power was not maintained and developed only in a
crippled state; in such a situation, the price of labour-power (embodied in
wages) falls below its value, since the value of every commodity is determined
by the labour-time required to provide it in its normal quality.
24
Tus, both wages and working hours enter into the calculation of whether
the price of labour-power is or is not below its minimum value. Te worker
sells her labour-power for a specied period of time, just as the rent for a at
is for a specied period of time. If a tenant can rent one at for two weeks with
21. Marx 1976, p. 371.
22. Marx 1976, p. 353.
23. Marx 1976, p. 376.
24. Marx 1976, p. 277; emphasis added.
a certain amount of money, but can rent another at for three weeks with the
same amount of money, the latter rent is only two-thirds of the former.
Similarly, if one capitalist pays a certain wage for an eight-hour working day
while another pays the same wage for a twelve-hour working day, the latter
wage is only two-thirds of the former. If working hours are extended beyond
a certain point, the price of labour-power falls below its value even if the wage
is kept constant. Tis calculation cannot be accurate unless all the hours
worked by all the members of the family in order to produce labour-power are
taken into account.
Labour-power is not a purely physiological entity. In contrast . . . with the
case of other commodities, the determination of the value of labour-power
contains a historical and moral element.
25
Wages must enable the working
class to live at an acceptable standard of living. Ensuring that the price of
labour-power does not fall below its value, and setting this value at an
acceptable level, are both products of working-class struggle. Te moral and
historical element would dier from one society to another, but it seems
reasonable to set the minimum value at a level where income covers basic
requirements of food, water, clothing, shelter, healthcare and education; where
the minimum age for employment complies with the International Labour
Organisations norm of 15 years; and where adults get at least 11 or 12 hours
per working day for sleep and recreation, plus paid weekly days o, annual
leave and holidays.
In the formal sector in India, workers have made progress in winning space
and time for the family. By contrast with the situation in 1890, when women-
millworkers in India were getting up at 4:30am and working till late at night
in order to complete their household duties as well as wage-labour,
26
and
children as young as seven years would be working in the factories, the Factories
Act of 1948 (still in force) prohibits the employment of children under
14 in registered factories, and the statutory work-week is 48 hours. When
combined with travel to and from work and with domestic labour, even a
48-hour week means that women never get enough time for rest and recreation:
women-workers in Chennai reported getting up at 4:305:00am, working for
1618 hours, and being forced to miss meals in order to meet their work-
schedules.
27
However, some unions have negotiated a shorter work-week. For
workers in formal employment, there has been considerable advance in raising
the standard of living and wresting family-time away from wage-labour.
25. Marx 1976, p. 275.
26. Savara 1986, p. 38.
27. Swaminathan 2002, pp. 910.
Te same cannot be said for informal women-workers. At the beginning of
the twenty-rst century, malnutrition and ill-health resulted in a maternal-
mortality rate of 540 per 100,000 live births, with around 136,000 women
dying each year from pregnancy-related causes. Maternal malnutrition resulted
in 30% of infants with low birth-weight, creating health-risks that would last
for the rest of their lives. Te infant-mortality rate was 67 and under-ve
mortality rate 93; 47% of under-ve-year-olds were severely or moderately
malnourished. Tis resulted in a large number of children dying or becoming
disabled as a result of contracting preventable and curable diseases.
28
In other
words, the exceedingly low wages, long working hours and unhealthy working
conditions of the vast majority of women-workers resulted in the production
of labour-power in a crippled state.
Unions have demanded equal wages for women for the same work, yet
arguments for a family-wage also reveal an underlying assumption that many
women will not, in fact, be employed, but will be dependent on male wage-
earners who will therefore have to be paid enough to support them. Two
union-ocials in Bengal who were interviewed by the Royal Commission on
Factory Labour (1931) argued for a wage that would be sucient to support
female dependants as well as children. Although not formulated explicitly as
a demand for a family wage based on a male-breadwinner/dependent wife
conceptualization of the family, the complaints of the Bengali trade unionists
over wage levels certainly involved the assumption that the typical worker was
a married male with a range of non-employed dependants whom he had
increasing diculty maintaining.
29
Te Delhi Agreement of 1935 between
the Ahmedabad millowners and the Textile Labour Association made this
assumption explicit by specifying that married women-workers whose
husbands were employed in the mills would be dismissed.
30
Te fact that no
union has ever used the clause in the Equal Remuneration Act prohibiting the
rampant discrimination against women in recruitment, promotions and
training is eloquent testimony to the near-universal agreement that a woman
has less right to a job (especially a well-paid one) than a man.
What has happened here? Are these developments a victory or defeat for
women in particular? Te working class as a whole? Te answer to these
questions, unsatisfactory though it may seem, is both. Comparing the
employment and working conditions of nonunionised informal workers and
their families with those of unionised formal workers and their families,
28. UNICEF 2004, Tables 1, 2, 5 and 8; Krishnakumar 2004; Pelletier, Frongillo Jr.,
Schroeder and Habicht 1995.
29. Standing 1991, p. 149.
30. Chhachhi 1983, pp. 412.
no-one could possibly deny that men, women and children in the latter
category are vastly better o in terms of living standards, rest and leisure, and
access to healthcare and education. It would be hard to nd a housewife
married to a formal-sector worker who would want to trade places with an
informal woman-worker in her hut, chawl or pavement-shack; it is indisputable
that the retreat of certain family members from the labour force, in conjunction
with an organized attempt to secure a family wage
31
has resulted in a very
welcome rise in the standard of living. Like the woman-miner who was glad
that she had left her job because she did not have to do domestic work after
coming home exhausted from a days labour,
32
most women-workers in India
too are glad to escape from heavy labour and have more time to spend on
home-making. It is less obvious, but also true, that compared with young
women and men living on construction-sites or in dormitories supplied by
their employers, who are often nervous to be seen talking to outsiders for fear
of losing their jobs, workers who have homes that are outside the purview of
their employers have greater freedom to discuss, organise and struggle
collectively.
33
Tese are gains.
Yet the development of the male-breadwinner/family-wage norm was also a
defeat for working-class women, and thus for the working class as a whole.
Some women, especially if they have no young children, prefer to have formal
employment and to get help with housework rather than sit at home all day.
34

For large numbers of women-headed households, the acute shortage of formal
employment for women means there is no alternative to poverty, and often the
compulsion either to send children out to work or keep daughters at home to
look after smaller children while the women themselves go out to work. Te
assumption that only men have dependants is not sustainable, nor is it true
that all men have dependants: single young men living in their parental homes
might need a family-wage even less than a woman whose husband is employed.
Moreover, even when husband and wife are earning, there is no basis for the
assumption that his wage pays for basic subsistence while hers is supplementary:
indeed, most research shows that in such situations, womens wages are spent
entirely in ensuring family-survival, while a variable portion of mens wages is
spent on alcohol, tobacco, gambling and other activities.
35
So there is a negative element in the way that the demand for a family-
wage has been posed, fought for, and won in formal employment. It is directly
31. Humphries 1980, p. 157.
32. Pinchbeck 1930, p. 269.
33. See Humphries 1980, pp. 15963.
34. See Chhachhi and Pittin 1996, p. 110.
35. See Elson 1995, pp. 1834; Kottegoda 2004, pp. 13755.
oppressive to women, and also disadvantageous to their dependants if they
have any.
36
Gandhis justication of the expulsion of women from the
Ahmedabad mills made the patriarchal assumptions behind this decision
explicit:
It is not for our women to go out and work as men do. If we send them to the
factories, who will look after our domestic and social aairs? If women go out to
work, our social life will be ruined and moral standards will decline.
37

Tis attitude undermines the working-class struggle as a whole, by constituting
women as secondary-wage earners and therefore cheap labour. In formal
employment, capitalists may have lost the battle to draw all members of the
working-class family (except the very youngest) into the wage-labour force
and compel them to produce surplus-value; but they have very astutely used
male dominance in the working class, which shaped the outcome of this
struggle, to their own advantage, by constituting women as a reserve-army of
cheap labour.
38
In Bombay and Ahmedabad, womens formal jobs in the
textile-mills were destroyed in the early-twentieth century,
39
but when mens
jobs were in turn destroyed, women had to enter informal employment to
ensure family-survival. Teir constitution as a cheap and exible labour-force
with the collusion of male workers and unionists meant that in this latter
situation, living standards for the whole family fell drastically.
Moreover, as discussions with women pharmaceutical workers in Bombay
showed,
40
even well-paid formal women-workers have great diculty
participating actively in the union, due to a combination of domestic-labour
commitments, objections from husbands, and prejudice in the workplace,
thus posing obstacles to united struggles. How can all of these problems be
overcome?
Mechanisation, commercialisation, and state-contributions
to domestic labour
Moving towards a resolution of these issues requires us to take a closer look at
the work that is performed in the home. It can further be divided into (i) work
which results in a product that is distinct from a person (such as cooking a
36. Hartmann 1981, pp. 201; Barrett and McIntosh 1980; Barrett 1980, pp. 267.
37. Patel 1988, p. 380, cit. Breman 2004, p. 112.
38. Beechey 1977 and 1978.
39. Kumar 1983, p. 110; Westwood 1991, pp. 2925.
40. Hensman 1996.
meal or washing clothes) and (ii) work whose product is inseparable from a
person (such as childcare). Te rst kind of production can quite easily be
mechanised or taken over by capitalism. Cleaning is a special case. Tere is not
much scope for mass-production techniques here; it is labour-intensive work,
made more onerous by the fact that its product is noticed only when the work
is not done. Te second kind is exemplied by caring work, where there can be
no mechanisation, no substitution of dead for living labour: caring and
nurturing work is, by its nature, labour-intensive. Although the majority of
people needing care are children (since everyone begins life as a child), there
are also adults who need it. Many people with disabilities and old people need
part-time or full-time attendance, and an accident or stroke can, at one blow,
convert even an able-bodied adult into one needing long-term care.
41
One way in which the workload of domestic labour can be reduced is by
mechanising tasks that were formerly performed manually, or by using labour-
saving devices. Tis process has probably gone as far as it can go in the First
World, but the same cannot be said for India. While refrigerators, which can
cut down the frequency of shopping and cooking, are common among
professionals and better-paid employees, and washing machines are somewhat-
less common, they are not an option for millions of working-class households
in rural areas and urban slums, for the simple reason that they have no power-
supply. Women in these households spend hours each day collecting water.
Tey sometimes also collect and prepare fuel for cooking on primitive stoves,
the smoke from which causes respiratory problems in the ill-ventilated shacks
they inhabit. Lack of sanitation further undermines the reproduction of
labour-power by causing widespread illness and death from water-borne
diseases. Tis is an area where the state urgently needs to contribute to the
social reproduction of labour-power. Providing such households with
subsidised housing, electricity, potable running water, sanitation, and stoves
(including solar-powered ones) that do not require the collection of fuel would
result in an enormous reduction in the time and eort spent on domestic
labour as well as a reduction in avoidable sickness and death.
Another way of reducing domestic labour is by buying on the market
products formerly made in the home. Again, the process has probably gone as
far as it can in the First World, and possibly even too far, substituting not only
ready-made for home-baked bread and frozen vegetables for fresh ones, but
also fast foods of doubtful nutritional value for more nutritious cooked meals.
In India, there has been some substitution of bread or ready-made chapatis for
41. Marxs analysis allows for means of subsistence for such people, but not for the care that
is equally important to their well-being.
home-made ones, rice and pulses can be bought cleaned and packed, spices are
commonly bought already processed, and people often buy our rather than
buying wheat and getting it milled. Te use of packed and processed foods
(ranging from ice-cream and frozen peas to yoghurt and pasteurised milk) is
common among the families of professionals and better-paid employees, who
also often eat their mid-day meal at a restaurant or indigenous fast-food stall
if their workplace has no canteen of its own, and send their clothes and linen
to be laundered, ironed or dry-cleaned. But there are three obstacles to the
wider spread of such practices. One is the abject poverty of the largest section
of the working class, which simply cannot aord to buy processed foods, much
less get their clothes laundered. Another is the patriarchal assumption that it
is the duty of women in the household to do this work. And the third is the
availability of extremely cheap labour, which can be employed to do such tasks
in the home.
Te substitution of waged for unwaged domestic labour is universal among
the rich, many of whom employ whole retinues of live-in domestic workers.
Among professionals and better-paid white- and blue-collar workers, it is
more selective, in the sense that domestic workers are employed for some tasks
and not others, the most common tasks being cleaning, washing, and
washing-up. Te employment of child-minders to look after small children
when both parents are working is also common. Such practices were common
in the First World in Marxs time, then disappeared from all but the richest
households, but recently started spreading again with the inux of cheap
migrant-labour into these countries as well as parts of West Asia. One form is
the cleaning rm, which sends its employees to clean the houses of customers.
Another is the direct employment of domestic workers to work in the homes
of their employers.
Tese practices do free women in more auent households from the double
burden of domestic labour and paid work, but at a heavy cost to the
reproduction of labour-power in the households of the workers who take up
the burden. Tis is unregulated, informal labour, and suers from low pay,
long hours and lack of social security. In India, child-labour is rampant in this
sector. Women and girls who do such work, especially if they are live-in maids,
are extremely vulnerable to verbal, physical and sexual abuse; such cases are
reported from time to time, especially if they result in the death of the worker,
but most are unreported, and serious crimes go unpunished. Tere are similar
horror-stories about migrant workers in First-World countries, who are even
more vulnerable because they may not speak the language of the country
where they work or know anyone to whom they can turn for help, may be
illegal immigrants or on visas that allow them to work only for a specied
employer, and may have had their passports conscated by employers.
42
In the
case of live-in maids who are mothers, the money they send home often does
not compensate for the neglect their own children suer. If the worker is a
child, she loses the time she needs for education, play and rest.
Domestic workers in India, especially those engaged in cleaning work, are
unionising, and the ILO is working to strengthen the rights of migrant
domestic workers. It is possible that these eorts will succeed in improving
their employment-conditions. But employing domestic workers, even if they
come in only for an hour or two per day to do cleaning work, cannot be the
solution to the problem of domestic labour. It is not accessible to most
working-class families, makes use of cheap labour, and tends to reinforce a
social perception that cleaning work, which is socially necessary for hygiene
and health, marks out a person as inferior. In most societies it is ill-paid work
(if paid for at all), and in India has traditionally been consigned to Dalits, who
were at one time and still are in some places treated as untouchable.
43

Paradoxically, regulating this sector of employment so that child-labour is
abolished, a living wage and social-security contributions are paid, and paid
leave is available, would make it unaordable for the few working-class families
that use it. Tus, its rle in the reproduction of labour-power as opposed to
the provision of services to the auent is minimal.
Socialist and radical-feminist solutions
Yet childcare and help with the care of disabled and old people is essential if
women are to be released from full-time domestic labour; sick people need
specialised care and treatment, children need to be educated, and those who
have no means of support need to be supported. One solution that emerged
in countries with social-democratic and state-socialist rgimes was the provision
of these services by the state. Ideally, this would make it possible for workers
performing these services to have decent employment-conditions without
making the services inaccessible to those who need them most, some of whom
may be poorer than the workers. But the Indian state has been particularly
recalcitrant in providing these services, even by comparison with much poorer
Tird-World countries. Millions of children do not even get schooling, much
less pre-school care; providing adequate socialised care and education for all
children would require a substantial investment. Socialised care of adults is
42. Heyzer, Lycklama Nijeholt and Weerakoon (eds.) 1992; Young 2000; Ehrenreich and
Hochschild (eds.) 2003.
43. Menon 2005.
hardly available at all except for the rich; the appalling cruelty with which
mentally ill patients are treated in many institutions, as well as the routine
appearance of people with disabilities and old people begging on the streets,
are testimony to the disastrous under-funding of this sector.
44

A radical solution to the specic problem of childcare proposed by Lilina
Zinoviev shortly after the Russian Revolution was state-run child-rearing:
Our task now is to oblige the mother to give her children to us to the Soviet
State. Te idea was taken up in Kollontais formulation: Children are the States
concern. She added: Te social obligation of motherhood consists primarily in
producing a healthy and t-for-life child. . . . Her second obligation is to feed the
baby at her own breast.
45

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

Another problem, where day-and-night nurseries were tried out in Russia
and China, was that women themselves wanted more contact with their
children.
50
44. For more details, see Hensman 2011, pp. 190203, 24650, 26275.
45. Broyelle 1977, p. 71.
46. de Beauvoir 1997, p. 539.
47. Firestone 1970.
48. Rowbotham 1974, p. 168.
49. Malachevskaya 1979; cf. McAuley 1981, pp. 1989.
50. Rowbotham 1974, p. 196; Dunayevskaya 1996, pp. 734.
It is hard to see how such proposals are an improvement on the more usual
feminist demands for women to be able to control their own bodies, sexuality
and fertility,
51
and for the development of technology which would enable
them to do so safely, thus ensuring that women have babies only if and when
they want them.
52
Tey also suggest that the cause of the oppression of women
is their biological dierence from men. Biological dierences such as sex and
skin-colour can certainly be made the pretext for oppression, but it is the
social relations under which this occurs that are to blame, not the dierences
themselves. Te biological dierence in this case the fact that womens bodies
are adapted to pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding
53
while mens bodies
are not need not in all circumstances lead to the oppression of women.
Whether it does or not depends on technological developments and social
relations, which in turn determine whether or not women can control their
own sexuality and fertility safely, whether or not childbearing is a physically
safe and socially respected activity, and whether or not there is provision of
facilities (such as extended maternity-leave and workplace-crches) which
provide social support for women who wish to combine breastfeeding with
paid work.
As for other aspects of the gender-division of labour, there is no evidence
that they have any biological basis, in the sense that all the tasks can be
performed either by men or by women, and competence depends, not on
gender, but on inclination and acquired skills. However, given particular social
relations, it may well make economic sense to relegate certain tasks to women
other than those for which they are biologically adapted. In precapitalist
agricultural societies where having a large number of children was an asset,
where child-mortality was high, and where women breast-fed each child for
one year or more, they might spend 20 or more years of their lives in
childbearing and breastfeeding, in which case it was more ecient for them to
do other household tasks as well. But these relations are revolutionised
51. Weinbaum 1978, pp. 2930.
52. A womans right to control her own fertility is also partially a protection of a childs right
to be wanted, loved and adequately cared for by at least one parent. Tis is absolutely essential,
given the huge amount of time and eort that is involved in this work indeed, preferably two
or more adults should make this commitment before the child is brought into the world.
Advocates of socialised childcare often forget that this presupposes a much larger number of
people who love children and wish to spend time on childcare than do so at present.
53. Breastfeeding can be substituted by bottle-feeding, either of expressed breast-milk or
infant-formula, but in India and other Tird-World countries this can lead to high rates of
infant-mortality where conditions are not hygienic or the milk-powder is diluted too much,
hence it is recommended that babies should be breast-fed for at least six months. But this does
not mean that the mother has to be solely responsible for childcare during this period, since there
is still a great deal that others can do for the baby.
by capitalism.
54
In India, having a large number of children is no longer an
asset and may be a liability, with children constituting more mouths to feed,
and child-labour driving down wage-rates and causing unemployment by
competing with adult labour. Government family-planning programmes make
birth-control relatively easily accessible and have succeeded in reducing the
birth-rate; child-mortality, while still high, is rapidly being reduced; and a
combination of these two developments means that women need not spend
more than two or three years of their lives breastfeeding infants. On the other
side, the interest of capitalism in women as wage-labourers provides them
with an alternative that is often also necessary for the survival of the family.
In other words, the material basis for the gender-division of labour has changed
drastically.
Since caring work involves a relationship between the carer and the person
being cared for, it cannot completely be passed on to others without damaging
the relationship, but this does not mean that it cannot be socialised at all.
Indeed, at a slightly higher age ve or six years children now routinely go
to school, where they are looked after by people from outside the family for
several hours a day, and it can be argued that full-time care-giving constitutes
a workload that is too heavy for one or even two people to carry alone.
However, good-quality socialised care requires a high ratio of care-givers to
people being cared for, which makes it expensive.
55
Tis is probably why,
under capitalism, it is not provided without a struggle by both feminists and
the labour-movement,
56
except as an expensive service to the privileged few who
can aord it, or in circumstances where a shortage of labour-power makes it
necessary for large numbers of women to be inducted into the labour-force.
Although there is not much formal socialisation of caring work in India, a
great deal of informal sharing of care does take place. Te boundary between
the family and the outside world is not as sharp in South-Asian cultures as it
has become in Western ones. To begin with, the term family would usually
refer to the extended family, even where, as in Bombay, there are many nuclear-
family households due to migration; and it is quite normal for people who are
not kin to be called by family-designations (brother, sister, aunt, uncle, mother,
father, son, daughter, etc.). In traditional communities these honorary relatives
would tend to be from the same caste and religion, but in other settings they
might simply be neighbours or friends who could, for example, be relied upon
54. Ferguson and Folbre 1981, pp. 3213.
55. Tis applies to schoolchildren too, since teachers are responsible for pastoral care as well
as education. Terefore, even a ratio of one teacher for 25 to 30 children forget about the usual
Indian ratio of one teacher for 50 to 70 children! is not enough.
56. Zaretsky 1982, pp. 21517.
to look after children on an ad hoc basis. Te extended family has advantages
as well as disadvantages. In traditional families, it means that young women
and men, for that matter are more tightly controlled; young women have a
heavier workload because they are catering to a larger number of people; and
even if there are grandparents around to help with childcare, this comes at a
price, in the sense that the children may then be imbued with traditional
values such as rigid gender-rles. On the other hand, the uidity of boundaries
means that the isolation of mothers with young children is less common. Te
small minority of alternative families that are not based on biological
relationships and heterosexual marriage are more easily accepted in a metropolis
such as Bombay where traditional communities have partially broken down.
Solidarity instead of competition or domination and subordination
Socialising some caring work helps to reduce the huge burden now carried
mainly by women within the family, but it does not by itself eliminate the
gender-division of labour. It is quite possible that carers in the socialised
facilities are women, that the nurturing which continues to be done in the
home is also done by women, and that women continue to be treated as cheap
labour. Changing this would require challenging the gender-division of labour
both practically and ideologically, because it stunts both those involved in
round-the-clock caring work, who never get a chance to exercise other skills
and abilities, and those who do not engage in it at all, who never develop the
skills and intelligence required for this work. Practical measures to counter it
would include eliminating the gender-division of labour in employment,
working towards the equal sharing of domestic labour between men and
women, provision of crches and nurseries for all children whose parents need
childcare and sheltered accommodation or home-care for adults who need it,
shorter working hours, and regular part-time jobs if possible with exible
working hours to suit the needs of the employees for both men and women
who have caring responsibilities.
57
It would also mean demanding that a much
larger proportion of social-labour time be allocated to this work, which, in a
capitalist society, means state-funding. But the ideological struggle in a sense
has priority, because without winning that the practical struggle will not be
won, either in the home or outside. Te fact that, despite decades of feminism,
and well over one-and-a-half centuries of the labour-movement, caring and
nurturing continue to be undervalued and seen as womens work even within
the working class, needs to be explained.
57. See Molyneux 1979, p. 27.
One strand of the explanation can be identied in what has been described
as a great intellectual and cultural ambivalence within feminism, in that it
represented both the highest development of liberal individualism and also
a critique of liberal individualism.
58
Te bourgeois ideology of competitive
individualism penetrated not just bourgeois feminism but also radical and
socialist feminism, leading to a devaluation of caring and nurturing because they
constitute, inevitably, a handicap in the competitive struggle for recognition.
But this has, at least partly, been a response to the attempt within working-
class movements to eliminate competition between women and men by
reinforcing relationships of domination over women by men, and this constitutes
the other strand of the explanation. Although Marx cannot be accused of
advocating such domination, he did help to create the basis for it by ignoring
and thereby devaluing the socially necessary caring work traditionally done
by women, and assuming that a patriarchal family with the man as sole
breadwinner was the model for the working class. Te result was that when the
working-class struggle wrested from capital time and space for a family, that
family was to a greater or lesser extent modelled on capitalist society, with its
social division of labour and hierarchical, authoritarian relations.
Condoning oppressive and sometimes-violent domestic relationships by
attributing them to the pervasive ideological inuence of capital or male
domination, as some Marxists and feminists do,
59
simply perpetuates a
situation where children grow up to believe that this is the only possible model
of human relationships. But if it is possible to live in a capitalist society and
struggle against it, it is equally possible and, in fact, easier to struggle against
authoritarian relationships between men, women and children within the
working class.
60
Indeed, without this struggle, the labour-movement will
continue to be subordinated to capital. Challenging the domination of capital
requires the full involvement of working-class women and children, including
those who are not directly exploited by capital, in the class-struggle. As
Domitila puts it, the rst battle to be won is to let the woman, the man, the
children participate in the struggle of the working class, so that the home can
become a stronghold that the enemy cant overcome. Because if you have the
enemy inside your own house, then its just one more weapon that our common
58. Gordon 1982, p. 45.
59. See Chodorow and Contratto 1982, pp. 689.
60. However grim the situation is, it is not inevitable that men or women turn the anger
generated by their own oppression against victims who are weaker and more vulnerable than
themselves (women and children in the case of men, children in the case of women, or minority
communities). Tis form of resistance to oppression i.e. the refusal to become an oppressor
oneself is available even to the most powerless.
enemy can use toward a dangerous end.
61
Women have an advantage in this
struggle, to the extent that they recognise both human needs for nurturance,
sharing and growth, and the potential for meeting those needs in a non-
hierarchical, nonpatriarchal society.
62
But it can only be won by the working
class as a whole.
What are the elements of such a struggle, and how far can it progress under
capitalism? Te rst requirement is an understanding and acceptance within
the labour-movement of the value of caring work and the skills and intelligence
required for it, followed by the recognition that these need to be fostered in all
human beings.
63
Caring for a person conforms to the Marxist ideal of work
that is directly for the satisfaction of human need and not for prot; hence
recognising its importance is crucial to the struggle against capitalist
exploitation and oppression. While the demand for wages for housework has
the drawback that, if met, it would eliminate even the limited autonomy
enjoyed by working-class women and bring their domestic labour directly
under the control of the state as employer,
64
the demand that the value produced
by domestic labour be recognised for example, in statistics such as GDP, in
settlements on divorce, and in allocating pensions to women is an important
one, helping to make this vast amount of labour visible. Counting the time
spent in domestic labour as part of the working day is also important, especially
in the case of women-workers, who often do not get enough time to reproduce
their own labour-power through rest and recreation.
Te backwardness of the situation in India, where traditional hierarchies
based on gender and age still predominate, could be an advantage if it allows
the womens liberation-movement to avoid the dead-end of liberal
individualism, which is often confused with the development of individuality
but is in fact as destructive of the full development of individuality as
authoritarianism and patriarchy, which crush individuality in a more obvious
way. Individuality can develop in a child only if she is surrounded by
the loving attention of other human beings; children completely deprived of
this wolf-children, for example fail to develop their human potentialities,
while the development of children who are deprived of adequate interaction
of this type is severely retarded. Yet providing this unstinted love and attention
inevitably puts the giver at a disadvantage in a competitive market, and would
therefore be ruled out in a purely market-driven economy.
61. Barrios de Chungara and Viezzer 1978, p. 36.
62. Hartmann 1981, p. 33.
63. Ruddick 1982.
64. Freeman 1982.
Tis contradiction at the heart of bourgeois ideology the fact that, taken
to its logical conclusion, it threatens bourgeois society with extinction, and
therefore the reproduction of competitive individualism depends on its
opposite (the reproduction of self-sacricing women) is what leads to the
right-wing insistence on the family as a separate realm from which the logic of
capital is excluded.
65
However, from the standpoint of the socialist principle of
solidarity, which posits an indissoluble link between the rights and well-being
of each individual with those of others, such a contradiction does not exist; an
ethic of care, in which the happiness and well-being of the person who is being
cared for is essential to the happiness and well-being of the carer, is entirely
compatible with it. Working for an ideal of nurturance and equal respect for
human beings both inside and outside of the family (whatever shape or form
it may take) is thus an essential component of a labour-movement built on the
principle of solidarity.
Te practical outcome of this understanding would be movement towards
an equal sharing of nurturing between men and women and a struggle for
conditions which would make that possible. Equally important is the struggle
for the allocation of vastly more social-labour time to this work than occurs
currently, reversing the neoliberal policy of cuts in spending on healthcare,
education and welfare. For most trade-unions in India, which have engaged in
collective bargaining exclusively for their own members and have never had a
solidaristic policy,
66
the idea of a social wage (including education and
healthcare for all) as a trade-union demand would be a new and important
departure. Shortening working hours and increasing the number of part-time
jobs with pro rata benets would improve productivity and expand employment
in addition to allowing more time for domestic labour. Te Maternity Benet
Act and Factories Act, which require individual employers to pay maternity-
benets and provide crches for the children of their women-workers, are
direct disincentives to their employing women, as well as being somewhat
unfair, since the generational reproduction of labour-power is a service to the
capitalist class as a whole rather than the individual capitalist. Funding parental
leave and childcare from contributions made by all employers, workers and
the government, as in the case of Employees State Insurance Scheme benets,
removes this anomaly.
Te nal goals of mutually armative relations within the household and
adequate resources for the production of labour-power cannot be reached
under capitalism, yet it is possible to make considerable progress in that
65. Torne 1982, p. 19.
66. Tere are a few exceptions, such as the Chhattisgarh Mines Mazdoor Sangh, which is also
unusual in the rle that women have played (see Hensman 2002).
direction even within capitalist society. Recognition that this constitutes a
crucial arena of class-struggle would enable Marxists to play a more positive
and eective rle in attaining that goal.
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Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011 DOI: 10.1163/156920611X594731
Workerisms Inimical Incursions:
On Mario Trontis Weberianism
Sara R. Farris
University of Konstanz
sara.farris@gmail.com
Abstract
Tis article considers the engagement of Mario Tronti one of the leading gures of classical
Italian workerism [operaismo] with the thought of Max Weber. Weber constituted one of
Trontis most important cattivi maestri. By analysing Webers inuence upon Trontis development,
this article aims to show the ways in which this encounter aected his Marxism and political
theory in general. In particular, during the period of the debate in Italian Marxism about the
thesis of the autonomy of the political, Tronti increasingly adopted Weberian terminology and
theoretical points of reference. Ultimately, the article argues that Trontis heretical method led
him to incorporate and to re-propose theoretical and political problematics that are characteristic
of bourgeois political theory: namely, the dyad administration/charisma, and a teleological and
anthropological approach to history. Focusing upon this heterodox encounter therefore enables
us to understand one of the trajectories of the transformation of Marxism that occurred during
its recurrent rendezvous with the Marx of the bourgeoisie.
Keywords
workerism, operaismo, Mario Tronti, Max Weber, autonomy of the political, friend/enemy,
charisma, partisanship
Words, however you choose them,
always appear things that belong to the bourgeoisie.
But this is the way it is. In an enemy society
there is no free choice of the means for ghting it.
And the weapons for proletarian revolts
have always been taken from the bosses arsenal.
1
1. Tronti 2006a, p. 14. For comments on a previous version of this article, I am thankful to
Harrison Fluss, Jan Rehmann, Peter Tomas, Massimiliano Tomba, Steve Wright, members of
the Historical Materialism editorial board and the anonymous referees.
30 S. R. Farris / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 2962
1. Introduction
In a recent publication devoted to the founding fathers of Italian operaismo,
Mario Tronti retrospectively described one of the dilemmas that troubled the
circle of early workerists in the following terms: the dispute [inside Quaderni
Rossi] was whether to start from Marx or from Weber; we resolved it by nding
a synthesis and saying: lets start from Marx Weber.
2
Tere is a noticeable
discrepancy between the importance that Tronti here attributes to Max Weber
and the relative neglect of such an inuence in the growing secondary literature
devoted to the workerist tradition of Italian Marxism.
3
However, it would not
be an exaggeration to regard Weberian references as something of a Leitmotiv
of the entire tradition, from Panzieris regular quotations and allusions, to
Negris early works and Cacciaris enduring engagement. Indeed, Weber
was such a constant point of reference in workerisms early years in particular
that it could legitimately be described as a Weberian Marxism, a concept rst
essayed by Merleau-Ponty in 1955 in his Adventures of the Dialectic.
4
It is not the aim of this essay to reconstruct the full extent of the workerists
engagement with Weberian themes.
5
Rather, I aim to focus in particular upon
the ways in which the Marxism of one particularly signicant gure of that
2. In Borio, Pozzi and Roggero (eds.) 2005, p. 292 (my italics).
3. Two Italian studies have analysed Panzieris relationship with Webers work: Cavazzini
1993 and La Rosa 2005. Tere is not yet a study in English.
4. Similarly, a full account of Marxist engagements with Weber lies beyond the purposes and
the scope of this essay. For a summary of some of the most important contributions, see Lwy
1996.
5. A full study of the workerist traditions Weberianism would undoubtedly uncover a series
of implicit and explicit references. For instance, as Steve Wright notes, many within the Turin
circle of Quaderni Rossi, including Panzieri himself, were partial to Weber (Wright 2002, p. 25).
Panzieris interest in Weber can be traced back to his enthusiasm for sociology. He regarded
Weber as the most important gure in the history of sociology [who] gave Marxist theory serious
consideration (Panzieri 1965). Negri devoted the second part of his masters thesis [tesi di laurea]
to Weber and later published a long review-essay on Weber scholarship (see Negri 1967). In later
works, he has continued to refer to Weber, especially regarding his typology of domination (see
Hardt and Negri 2000; Negri 2008). Former workerist Massimo Cacciari devoted numerous
studies to Weber. Self-admittedly inspired by Trontis Postscript to Workers and Capital (but
apparently also by Negris work on German philosophy), Cacciari regarded Weber as the
necessary complement to Lenins theory of organisation, arguing that Weber was the great
author who suggested to him the articulation of negative thought (see Trotta and Milana (eds.)
2008, p. 834). Vittorio Rieser (an early member of Quaderni Rossi) published a book in 1992
with the suggestive title Factory Today: Te Strange Case of Dr Weber and Mr Marx [Fabbrica oggi
(lo strano caso del dottor Weber e di mister Marx)]. Finally, Alberto Asor Rosa, a literary critic and
close associate of Tronti in Quaderni Rossi and, later, Classe Operaia, criticised the Weberian
wing (especially Rieser) inside Quaderni Rossi, paradoxically, for not being consistently Weberian
(see Asor Rosa 1965).
S. R. Farris / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 2962 31
tradition namely, Mario Tronti has been inuenced by an ongoing
engagement with the thought of the German sociologist.
6
Although Tronti has
never provided a systematic treatment of Webers thought, Weberian terms
and theoretical perspectives pervade his most important texts. In particular,
Webers political theory and depiction of the qualities of the political leader,
together with the underlying totalising notion of rationalisation, have played
an increasingly strong rle in Trontis theoretical development.
However, what is most distinctive about Trontis engagement with Webers
thought, and the feature that perhaps makes it representative of an important
6. Tough perhaps not as well-known internationally as other founding gures of workerism
such as Negri, for instance, Tronti has nevertheless enjoyed recognition by a non-Italian audience
for many years. At the beginning of the 1970s, the North-American journal Telos translated
some sections of Trontis main work Workers and Capital. More recently, Steve Wrights
reconstruction of classical workerism emphasised the foundational importance of Trontis
contribution to this tradition of heretical Marxism, and the journal Historical Materialism, and
some of its editors in particular, have begun to explore the relevance of Trontis thought for
contemporary debates (see Wright 2002; Chiesa and Toscano (eds.) 2009; Mandarini 2009).
Mario Tronti, born in Rome in 1931, began his political activity in a Roman branch of the PCI
in the 1950s. At the end of the decade, while still a university-student in Rome, Tronti
encountered the thought both of Galvano Della Volpe and of Raniero Panzieri, who had a
profound impact on his intellectual and political development (for a reconstruction of Della
Volpes inuence on workerism, see Alcaro 1977). He initially followed Panzieris plan of creating
a new journal (Quaderni Rossi ) as a theoretical space for rethinking Marxism outside the
constraints of Party lines and for analysing the changes induced by the ongoing process of
massive industrialisation in postwar Italy. After the experience of Quaderni Rossi, which he
abandoned in 1963 together with Antonio Negri and others, Tronti founded what became the
new mouthpiece of classical workerism, Classe Operaia. His articles in these two journals were
later collected in Workers and Capital (published in 1966 and reprinted in 1971 with the addition
of a lengthy Postscript). Tis volume immediately became a manifesto of so-called theoretical
workerism. With his seductive prose and assertive rhetoric, Trontis magnum opus systematised
some of the main theoretical premises that have characterised Italian workerism ever since: the
idea of the primacy of workers struggles over capital, of the factorisation of society as the
increasing extension of the functioning of the factory to society as a whole, and the idea of
politics as a war between arch enemies. Te latter element was not only elaborated on the
theoretical level, but also performed in a particular style of political writing, characterised by its
harshness and vehemence. Te end of the project of Classe Operaia in the mid-1960s marked the
beginning of Trontis increasing disillusion regarding the possibility of an eective politics at a
distance from the traditional organisations of the workers movement. From the 1970s onwards,
he engaged actively inside the leadership-structures of the PCI, nally being elected from the lists
of the PDS as a senator in 1992. Beside his directly political engagement, Tronti was also a
professor in political philosophy at the University of Siena until his retirement in 2000, and
subsequently became the Director of the Centre for the Reform of the State (CRS) in 2006.
Alongside the now-classic Workers and Capital, Tronti is also the author of a considerable number
of monographs and particularly articles on political theory and political philosophy, including
interventions in contemporary debates.
dimension of the workerist tradition more generally, is its presuppositions.
Unlike the advocates of many other Weberian Marxisms, Tronti has not
proposed that Webers thought, or elements of it, can be regarded as compatible
with or complementary to Marxism. Rather, Tronti has argued that Webers
thought could provide a lesson for Marxism and even ll a gap in Marxs
political theory precisely due to the fact that it was a form of enemy-thought,
that is, a form of thought inimical to the perspectives and presuppositions of
Marxism and the working-class movement. In this sense, Trontis Weberianism
exhibits the heterodox approach that was characteristic of workerism more
generally, which aimed to learn from non-Marxist and, especially, conservative
authors as a way of developing new perspectives in the Marxist tradition.
In this essay I therefore aim to identify the specicity of Trontis engagement
with Weber by framing it within the broader idea of the necessity of learning
from enemies. What are the theoretical assumptions of such an idea? What
are its historical and political consequences? Above all, what lessons can an
avowedly Marxist research-project today learn from both Webers thought
itself and the particular way in which Tronti proposed to learn from such an
enemy?
2. Seedbeds for a reception of Weber in Trontis early writings
Tronti begins to quote Weber extensively only in the Postscript to the second
edition of Workers and Capital in 1971. Te Postscript has sometimes been
read as a coupure that marks Trontis departure for the supposedly politicist-
abstract elaboration of the thesis of the autonomy of the political of the
1970s, in contrast to the more political-conjunctural focus of the militant
interventions of the 1960s.
7
Trontis engagement with Weber would thus seem
to be linked to this second stage of his intellectual trajectory, as opposed to his
early work.
Nonetheless, it would be dicult to understand the ways and forms in
which Tronti referred to Weber without mentioning some of the most
important points elaborated in his early writings. A closer consideration reveals
that we can in fact nd in these writings the assumptions and presuppositions
that arguably constituted the fertile soil or seedbeds, so to speak, for a certain
reading and incorporation of Webers thought. Tese seedbeds for a reception
of Weber in Trontis early writings can be schematically summarised in the
7. See Peduzzi 2006; Terzi 2007.
following four elements:
8
rst, the nexus factory-society-state, conceived in
terms of increasing rationalisation, departing from the former and progressing
to the latter; second, a privileging of the political dimension in terms of a
Kampfplatz in the analysis of the opposition between workers and capital;
third, the necessity of an hetero-integrationist approach aiming to ll the
gaps in Marxian and Marxist political theory; and nally, the necessity of the
analysis of bourgeois thought as a crucial stage in the project of developing a
partisan perspective.
2.1. Rationalisation
One of the early workerists most signicant analytical contributions was the
idea of the increasing extension of the factorys functioning to society as a
whole. Trontis famous essay in Quaderni Rossi of 1962, Factory and Society
[La fabbrica e la societ], later republished in Workers and Capital, was highly
inuential in diusing this point of view. As Tronti put it, at the highest
level of capitalist development, the social relation becomes a moment of the
relation of production, the entire society becomes an articulation of production,
that is, the whole society lives as a function of the factory and the factory
extends its exclusive dominion over the entire society.
9
By arguing that the
factorisation of society and of the state was a necessary consequence of
industrialisation, Tronti re-proposed a hypothesis that had already been
formulated by Panzieri, although in a signicantly dierent way.
10
Whatever
their dierences in formulation, however, they were united in arming a
conceptual framework that was at least indirectly or implicitly inuenced by
Weber (in Panzieris case, via his reading of Lukcs),
11
but which was also
explicitly acknowledged. Panzieri in fact quoted Weber directly in the context
of his remarks on the factory-society-state nexus, attributing to him the
understanding of the link between the application of the principle of calculation
8. Tese elements, while not exhausting Trontis numerous and signicant remarks of the
period, certainly appear among the most important ones.
9. Tronti 2006a, p. 48.
10. Maria Turchetto provides one possible interpretation of this dierence when she suggests
that, in Panzieri, the idea of a plan that extends from factory to society essentially refers to the
phenomenon of growing capitalist concentration and its eects. In Tronti, by contrast, the idea of
the extension of the factory above all refers to the phenomenon of the expansion of the service-
sector in the economy. It was Trontis interpretation that prevailed in the subsequent development
of operaismo, where it played a crucial rle. Tese premises in fact gave rise to the idea of the
social worker (Turchetto 2008, p. 292).
11. As Cavazzini

has noted in one of the rare discussions of Weberian workerism, Panzieris
approach to Webers problematic . . . on the regulatory principles of capitalism (Cavazzini

1993,
p. 72) was structured through the lter of his reading of History and Class Consciousness.
in the capitalist enterprise and the bureaucratic organisation of society as a
whole.
12
Rationalisation, a pre-eminently Weberian concept,
13
thus became a
key-concept for understanding increasing factorisation, that is, the progressive
extension of capitalist relations to the entire society, not only for Panzieri but
also for Tronti. As Tronti argued, echoing Webers analysis of capitalist logic as
the octopus of rational, totally instrumental action that increasingly pervaded
the Western world, the process of growing rationalisation of the productive
process has to be extended now to the entire network of social relations.
14
It is
this notion of rationalisation, already present in Workers and Capital, that will
later constitute the latent theoretical framework by means of which Tronti, in
the 1970s, interprets the autonomy of the political as the autonomisation of
the state-apparatus in the course of capitalist development.
2.2. Politicism
Trontis employment of Webers theoretical apparatus from the 1970s onwards
focused in particular on Webers theory of politics, as developed above all in
Politics as Vocation. Nonetheless, Trontis early essays were arguably already
characterised by a politicist focus that displays certain signicant Weberian
dimensions.
15
Trontis most renowned assertion in the 1960s was the idea that
the working-class struggle had been the principle of capitalist development,
16

an idea that was intended to be more performative than informative or
analytical.
17
Above all, it was a pre-eminently political proposition. By
assuming that capitalist development is pushed forward by struggle, i.e., by
the expression of organised, political action, Tronti put the focus of his analysis
on the political/subjective moment of the contradiction between workers and
capital. In this way, the problem was largely dened in political and tactical
12. Panzieri 1972, p. 197.
13. For Weber, the process of rationalisation constituted the omnipervasive dimension of the
Western capitalist world. It represented the release of economic behaviour from goals that were
not informed by the rational search for prot, and the armation of a structure of the state in
which the impersonality of bureaucracy had replaced the links of personal loyalty towards a
traditional lord or a charismatic chief. See Weber 1978.
14. Tronti 2006a, p. 69.
15. On the separation between economics and politics in early operaismo and the primacy of
politics in Trontis early analysis see, in particular, Belloore 1982.
16. As Tronti wrote: Even we have seen, rst, capitalist development, and then the workers
struggles. It is an error. We need to overturn the problem, change the sign, begin again from the
beginning [principio]: and the beginning is the struggle of the working class . . . capitalist
development is subordinate to workers struggles, it comes after it (Tronti 2006a, p. 87).
17. Te idea of starting from workers struggle, as Tronti himself suggested, had a performative
rather than informative purpose insofar as it aimed to create the very climate for ghting against
pessimism and subalternity and to place workers at the centre of history. See also Tomba 2007.
terms already in the 1960s. Te depiction of the struggle between workers and
capital as essentially a battleeld of moves and counter-moves anticipates in
certain important respects Trontis characteristic representation of politics as a
war between arch enemies. What is worth highlighting here, however, is the
way in which this politicist imperative led Tronti to conceive of politics in
terms that can be regarded as much closer to Webers and Schmitts image of a
clash between dierent values than to Marxs idea of politics as class-struggle
founded upon social contradictions.
18
Tis latter element has been emphasised
in a particularly clear way by Gianfranco Pala. As he argues, workerism was
aected from the beginning by a mythological tendency in seeing the
workers antagonism based on proletarian values presupposed as alternative,
instead of posed by real material and social contradictions of the capitalist mode
of production in its becoming. . . . Politically such a reference to presumed
workers values degenerates into a purely ideological instrument that is
presupposed to be autonomous (nally arriving at the result of the so-called
autonomy of the political).
19
A certain type of politics, conceived as the
combative confrontation between opposite factions on the terrain of the state,
then becomes, as we will see, the new and sole terrain of the contradiction
between workers and capital, and, according to Tronti, the only possible
ground on which workers could regain their centrality.
2.3. Hetero-integration
Trontis engagement with non-Marxist thinkers at least in explicit terms
begins largely in the 1970s. Nonetheless, it is possible to trace back the
theoretical presuppositions on which such an engagement was based already
to his early writings. Trontis openness to bourgeois and conservative thinkers
(Schmitt and the litists, among others) was especially rooted in his conviction
of the need to abandon what he called the petried forest of vulgar Marxism.
20

18. Tis element has been also highlighted by Illuminati, according to whom the thesis of the
autonomy of the political can be represented with the Weberian metaphor of the transition from
the monotheism of a totalising Weltanschauung to the polytheism of contradictory values, from
omni-comprehensive rationality to the arbitrary choice between substantially irrational values,
though each of them has their own structural coherence (Illuminati 1980, p. 114).
19. Pala 1995, pp. 623. Tronti himself seems to have been conscious of the risk of falling
into a value-like position entailed in the politicist version of class-struggle. In the mid-1970s,
he observed that taking away the rm ground of objective relations from workers centrality, the
rm ground of structural elements, risks setting them adrift in a sea of values (Tronti 1978,
p. 20). Nevertheless, a few lines later, he reassessed that it was necessary to nd another and
more functional objective anchoring for the concept of workers centrality. Anchoring with
politics is the test of the moment (Tronti 1978, p. 21).
20. Tronti 2006a, p. 11.
Tis proposition was not only due to the early workerist desire for novelty and
the discovery of new paths of research against dogmatic readings of Marxism.
21

Rather, it was also due to Trontis argument that Marxs theory itself was
insucient.

According to Tronti, modern workers science could not rely
forever upon historical materialism in its classical form, because historical
transformations entailed the necessity of updating or changing the form of
science that the working class needed to develop for its struggles.
22
On the
basis of this anti-dogmatic position, Tronti could thus increasingly refer to
non-Marxist authors and theories in a way that Norberto Bobbio would later
call in the 1970s hetero-integrationism,
23
or the recourse to other theoretical
traditions in order to nd necessary concepts and systematic theories that
could not be found within ones own theoretical paradigm. Bobbio
recommended that Marxists adopt such a strategy in his critique of those
Marxists who, instead of conceding that Marx did not provide a full theory of
the state and politics, persisted in trying to nd one in Marxs texts or in those
of his followers, between the lines. In his early writings, Tronti was clearly not
referring to Bobbios chronologically later position; nonetheless, his hetero-
integrative approach avant la lettre could be regarded as a sign of an openness
that would later result in a varied and intense engagement with non-Marxist
political theorists, amongst whom was Weber.
2.4. Partisanship
Tronti has often been read as a strong adversary of bourgeois claims of
objectivity and as the advocate of working-class unilateral and self-sucient
knowledge. Tis interpretation is based upon his repeated and emphatic
insistence on the necessity of assuming a partisan perspective. Against the
false bourgeois pretension of a universality that could accommodate all
positions, the early Tronti argued that synthesis . . . can only be unilateral, can
21. Many young intellectuals at the beginning of the 1960s regarded the politics and culture
of the PCI with scepticism, when they did not reject it entirely, especially after the Soviet invasion
of Hungary in 1956. Tronti insists particularly on this point: Without this transition [1956]
workerism would not have existed (in Trotta and Milana (eds.) 2008, pp. 2930).
22. As he wrote in 1965: from the workers point of view, the form of science is chosen, on
the basis of the weapons that it can procure in order to ght capital. Neither the forms of
struggle, nor those of science are given once and for all. . . . It is certain that to consider historical
materialism still as the modern form of workers science means to write this science of the future
with the quill of the medieval scrivener. We think that any transformation that constitutes an
epoch in the history of workers struggles poses the problem for the workers point of view of
changing the form of its science (Tronti 2006a, pp. 20910).
23. Bobbio 1978, pp. 100.
only be consciously science of class, of one class.
24
At the same time, as we
have seen, he argued for the necessity of engaging with bourgeois thought,
stealing the arms for proletarian revolt from the bosses arsenals, in the
rousing words of Workers and Capital. Taken strictly, these two propositions
would appear to be irreconcilable: on the one hand, an emphasis on
partisanship as the unilateral science of one class; and, on the other, a proposal
to learn from enemies. In order to understand this apparent contradiction,
we need to analyse more closely the specic nature of Trontis notion of a
partisan perspective.
Trontis early writings elaborated an idea of partisan knowledge as an
instantiation of struggle; as he put it, knowledge is tied to the struggle because
to know truly means to hate truly.
25
Nonetheless, rather than an abrupt
dismissal of the hated position, Tronti also seems to suggest that the dimension
of antagonism is constitutive of knowledge. In other words, knowledge
becomes a perspective that can be shaped only in a conictual relation with
the other, in that reciprocal recognition of ones rle and place in the world
(the self-consciousness of both the slave and the master in Hegels famous
image). At the same time, the necessity of developing a partisan perspective
does not imply the denial of the notion of objectivity, because, according to
Tronti, the partisan perspectives of both the bourgeoisie and the workers
contributed to shaping the world of unitarian human knowledge.
26
It can thus be argued that Trontis criticism of objectivity was aimed, not
against the notion of objectivity as such, but rather against a particular
formulation of objectivity in terms of neutral knowledge.
27
What Tronti
criticised, then, was the idea of objectivity as negation of subjectivity, as the
perspectiveless view from nowhere (to paraphrase Tomas Nagels apposite
notion)
28
that was supposed to have been divested (undressed or neutralised)
of its class or partisan viewpoint. Tronti did not deny, however, the
possibility of knowing the objective functioning of society, conceived as the
possibility of attaining to the scientic control of the whole, nor did he deny
a particular idea of universality as the whole of knowledge that includes all the
partisan viewpoints. Such mastery was lost, however, when there was the
pretension to place oneself in the place of the whole. Tis could lead only to
the partiality of the analysis . . ., to understand only detached parts. . . . [O]n
24. Tronti 2006a, p. 10.
25. Ibid.
26. Tronti 2006a, p. 8.
27. On Trontis idea of partisanship and universal science, though from a slightly dierent
point of view, see also Toscano 2009, pp. 117.
28. Nagel 1986.
the basis of capital, the whole can be comprehended only by the part.
29
It is
thus possible to understand in what way the necessity of developing an iron
partisan logic could be reconciled with the idea of appropriating the enemys
science. On the one hand, the enemys thought (qua thought which is itself
intrinsically partisan) could help to form the workers partisan perspective, as
its necessary opposite; on the other hand, the enemys thought, once purged
of its ideological pretensions to neutral objectivity, could contribute to the
totality of human knowledge of the social world, alongside its partisan
opponent.
Although they belong to a phase in which there are not yet explicit references
to Weber, Trontis early writings thus already contained certain elements that
can be regarded as the seedbeds on which a Weberian sensitivity ante litteram
could germinate.
30
While they should not be read teleologically, as if they
dictated the path of Trontis subsequent development, their identication
nevertheless enables us to see that there was room for a favourable and
responsive reading of Weber already in Trontis early thought. Such receptive
elements will be developed in two strictly intertwined directions: on the one
hand, the politicist and, particularly, hetero-integrationist dimensions can be
seen as the basis of what will later be called the thesis of the autonomy of the
political. Such a theory, in its turn, as we will see, presents a problematic
which is typical of Webers own politicism; that is, the dialectic between
politics-as-administration and politics-as-charisma. On the other hand, the
conception of the class-struggle in terms of the confrontation between
competing partisan and value-like positions in the political arena can be
seen as the basis of a philosophy and anthropology of history that will become
increasingly prominent in Trontis thought, particularly in his most recent
writings.
3. Lenin and Weber in the Postscript of Workers and Capital
As previously noted, Weber begins to gure prominently in Trontis writings
in the Postscript to Workers and Capital. Tough not a coupure with his
previous work, as I argued in the previous section, this text certainly marks
Trontis transition towards the more dened problematic of the autonomy of
the political which begins to be elaborated in the following year (1972).
31
It is
29. Tronti 2006a, p. 10.
30. Trontis reading of Weber goes alongside his interest in Nietzsche and Schmitt, who also
constitute recurring points of reference in the case of the latter, increasingly so.
31. As a transitional text, the Postscript in fact should be understood in the broader
in this text that the theoretical and political tasks of the new decade are more
clearly identied in the political understanding of class-composition and the
historical conjuncture. Yet, such tasks, according to Tronti, required attempting
to grasp what had happened inside the working class after Marx.
32
He meant
this literally. Te new assignment of the Marxist research-programme at the
beginning of the 1970s consisted in the historical recognition and analysis of
those great historical knots [nodi] . . . not yet touched by critical knowledge of
workers thought.
33
Focusing on these historical turning-points would enable
the workers movement to understand the paths, dynamics and mistakes of
the past, thus permitting it to overcome these limitations in the new
conjuncture.
34
Above all, it was the historical knot constituted by German classical social
democracy that appeared to have a privileged place in this analysis. According
to Tronti, the theme of the political organisation of the working class found
in the German-speaking world its place of election, particularly in light of the
dramatic growth of the SPD in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth
century.
35
However, such a strength was proportional to its theoretical poverty.
As Tronti argued: Tis miracle of organisation of German social democracy
has, as a reverse side, an average level of intellectual mediocrity, a scientic
approximation, a theoretical misery that could only produce the failure they
produced. . . . Here is then the true illusion within which the tactical social-
democratic horizon is always imprisoned: a sort of optimistic view of the
historical process that moves forward due to a gradual unfolding of its part,
instead of due to a violent crash with the opposite part.
36
For Tronti, social
democracys theoretical misery was due in particular to the progressivist and
optimistic philosophy of history that it promoted, exemplied by its peaceful
framework of what the end of the 1960s represented for one of the leaders of the workerist-
autonomist experience: the experience of Classe Operaia (the Negri-Tronti joint venture after
Quaderni Rossi) came to end in 1967; in 1968, the student-movement exploded and accentuated
the dierences in the group around Classe Operaia; and, nally, workers struggles turned out to
be less strong and mature than the workerists triumphalistic rhetoric of the 1960s had supposed
or wished.
32. Tronti 2006a, p. 265.
33. Tronti 2006a, p. 269.
34. In this historical perspective, Tronti identies and starts to articulate three privileged
historical knots: the development of Marshalls theory and the workers movement in England;
the peak-period of German social democracy at the beginning of the twentieth century; and the
workers struggle in the USA in the rst quarter of the twentieth century. Each of these knots,
according to Tronti, revealed specic developments of the confrontation between workers and
capital, all of which needed to be analysed closely.
35. Tronti 2006a, p. 277.
36. Tronti 2006a, pp. 2823.
portrayal of the Klassenkampf. Te exception to this generalised theoretical
misery was represented by Lenin, the gure who gave social democracy a
theory of the party. Lenin, perhaps even more than Marx, became the muse
of classical workerism. Trontis Lenin was the militant who brought Marx to
Saint Petersburg, that is, the historical gure that had been able to reveal
practically the misery of the social-democratic gradualist theory by achieving
a communist revolution where it was assumed to be impossible. In light of this
result, and consistent with his idea that the working class was the principle of
history and not its passive spectator, Tronti launched the idea of the necessity
of positing Lenin in England.
37
He meant by this the necessity of confronting
the theme of the struggle and organisation at the highest level of political
development of the working class
38
because the link where the chain will be
broken will not be that where capital is weakest, but that where the working
class is strongest.
39
However, Lenin had been able to develop what Tronti called the laws of
tactics not because of his proximity to workers struggles, but, on the contrary,
due to his distance from them. Tis distinguished him from the main currents
of German social democracy. Indeed, for Tronti, Lenins logic was based on a
concept of political rationality that was absolutely autonomous from anything,
independent from the class-interest itself, common if anything to the two
classes.
40
In what might be regarded as an attribution to Lenin of a conception
of the autonomy of the political avant la lettre, Tronti also invoked Max
Weber:
Te true theory, the high science, was not within the eld of socialism, but
outside and against it. And this entirely theoretical science, this scientic theory,
had as content, as object, as problem, the fact of politics. And the new theory of
a new politics arises in common in great bourgeois thought and in subversive
workers praxis. Lenin was closer to Max Webers Politik als Beruf than to the
German workers struggles, on which mounted colossus with feet of
clay classical social democracy.
41
Along with Lenin, it was Weber who understood and developed politics, high
science of capital, as an autonomous object of investigation with its
37. Tis is the famous title of the lead article that appeared in the rst number of Classe
Operaia in 1964.
38. Tronti 2006a, p. 93.
39. Tronti 2006a, pp. 99100.
40. Tronti 2006a, p. 279.
41. Tronti 2006a, p. 281.
autonomous mechanisms.
42
Tronti continued praising Weber for his view of
politics as Machtinstinkt, and for his determination of the political as
fundamentally the constant struggle between classes for power, against the
peaceful compromised line of social democracy. Moreover, the passionate, far-
sighted and responsible political leader that Weber describes in Politik als Beruf
is, according to Tronti, nobody other than Lenin.
At the meetings of the Heidelberg workers and soldiers council that Weber
attended in 1918, he could have brought and elaborated well the proletarian laws
of a politics of power[.] . . . Te struggle between classes and individuals for
domination or power seemed to him to be the essence, or, if you prefer, the
constant matter of fact of politics. No, we are not talking of Lenin but again of
Max Weber[.] . . . Yet the politician described by Weber is called Lenin. Cannot
the burning passion and the cold far-sightedness be found in that rightly mixed
blood and judgement that Lukcs attributes to his Lenin . . .? And does not the
sense of responsibility coincide with the permanent readiness of Lenin, with his
gure as the embodiment of continuously being prepared ? Te truth is that only
from the workers point of view could perhaps the Weberian conception of the
entirely and solely political action be completely applied.
43
For Tronti, Weber elevated the ingredients of political action partisanship,
subjective will, passion, continuous preparation and cold far-sightedness to
the level of theoretical vision. He strove to analyse the historical elements and
moments more favourable to the deployment of the will in the course of
history, thus elaborating a conception of the entirely and solely political
action. In doing so, Weber provided a portrait of a zoon politikon that seemed
to be embodied in a particularly strong fashion by Lenin himself. Continuing
in this register, Tronti adds that
Certainly, Lenin did not know Webers Freiburg inaugural lecture of 1895. Yet,
he acts as if he knew and interpreted in praxis those words: As far as the dream
of peace and human happiness is concerned, the words written over the portal
into the unknown future of human history are: abandon all hope. Tis is the
greatness of Lenin. He was able to come to terms with great bourgeois thought,
even when he did not have any direct contact with it, because he could obtain it
directly from the things, that is, he recognised it in its objective functioning.
44
42. Te Weber-Lenin comparison was later deepened by Cacciari, inspired by Tronti, in an
essay published in 1972. Te Weber-Lenin comparison has been the object of several other
studies from very dierent traditions. See Olin Wright 1975; Katznelson 1981; Bolsinger
2001.
43. Tronti 2006a, pp. 2834.
44. Tronti 2006a, p. 284.
For Tronti, Weber thus represented the great bourgeois thought that Lenin
had been able to recognise in its objective functioning, namely, in the way in
which the bourgeois elaboration of politics was able to be implemented as a
concrete project in the emerging mass-societies of the twentieth century.
Trontis reference to Lenin and Weber was thus not simply an unusual
theoretical and political combination. Rather, we can understand this proposal
as an intervention in the politics of the time and as an attempt to escape an
historical nemesis. In other words, Tronti seems to suggest that the situation
of the German working class on the eve of the 1920s could be compared with
the situation experienced by the Italian workers movement at the end of the
1960s. Tey both grew dramatically in terms of struggles, party and trade-
union membership, and electoral results. However, as Tronti suggests, the
defeat of the workers movement in Germany was due to the theoretical
misery of its main party, which was evident in its inability to come to terms
with the sophistication of the bourgeois elaboration of politics. Te lesson that
the Italian workers party, not yet defeated, could therefore draw from the
past Tronti seems implicitly to suggest was that of the necessity of forging
a leadership able to comprehend the laws of politics. For such a task, it was
necessary to understand the autonomous dynamics of politics, an understanding
that Weber, alongside Lenin, could help to develop. Tis was the starting-
point for the subsequent phase of Trontis development, encapsulated in the
thesis of the autonomy of the political.
4. Weber behind the scenes: the inauguration of the autonomy
of the political
Tronti introduced the thesis of the autonomy of the political in 1972 at a
conference in Turin chaired by Norberto Bobbio. Ever since this inaugural
moment, he has continued to refer to it as a permanent theoretical and political
acquisition. Originally, however, this thesis was closely linked to the specic
nature of Italian politics in the early 1970s, which witnessed a decreasing
autonomy of the social, i.e., a weakening of the workers and students
movement, in comparison to the 1960s.
Te main argument of Trontis thesis of the autonomy of the political can
be briey summarised as follows: the political (to be understood as the
institutions of power and the practice of taking and keeping power) cannot be
analysed as a superstructural level, as had been the case, according to Tronti,
in vulgar Marxism.
45
Rather, the political has its own autonomous dynamics;
45. In Trontis words, Te very term political, the political, is just as strange in the
Marxist tradition as the term autonomy. Tis is because we are introducing, not only a new
it is autonomous from everything that is not power, i.e., from society, and
from what was conceived, in general, to be the foundation [fondamento] of
power.
46
Tis conceptual framework was founded on the presupposition that
there is a dierent rhythm of development between the political and the
social
47
due to the existence of a political cycle of capital . . . that has its
specicity compared to the classical economic cycle of capital.
48
Tis, according
to Tronti, was visible in the usual lateness of the political compared with the
economic. An example of this was the aw of rationalisation, weak eciency
of the political apparatus that Tronti argued to be discernible in the Italian
case in particular, in which the capitalist modernisation and industrialisation
of the 1950s and 1960s had not been matched by a comparable modernisation
of the state.
49
In order to understand this autonomy that is, in order to understand
how the political and, especially, the state functions Tronti argued that
previous Marxist paradigms were not very helpful. According to him, the
deterministic reading of the base/superstructure-relation, in which everything
that happens . . . at the so-called above level is moved by what is below, was
a simplication.
50
Marxs supposed scheme of continuity between the
development of capital and of the political had thus been historically
demonstrated to be incorrect. Te failure of this model in terms both of its
explanatory and predictive power was due to the lack, if not complete absence,
of a theory of politics and the state in Marx, insofar as, for Tronti, Marx does
not eectively advance a critique of politics, but of ideology.
51
He continued
to argue that this gap in Marxs thought was due to the fact that historical
materialism itself was a product of early capitalism. Later historical
developments, however, as a result of the continuous confrontation between
workers and capital, led to the historical necessity of a professional class to
which to entrust the management of power. . . . From this necessity there
derives the historical necessity of an art of politics, namely of particular
name, but also, I would say, a new category into our discourse. What does this category contain
within itself? It contains, on the one hand, the objective level of the institutions of power; on the
other hand, the political class [ceto], that is, the subjective activity of doing politics. Tat is, the
political holds together two things, the state plus the political class. (Tronti 1977, p. 10.) It is
important to note that, at least at this early stage of his theorisation, Tronti conceived of the
political in concrete institutional terms.
46. Tronti 1977, p. 9.
47. Tronti 1977, p. 10.
48. Tronti 1977, p. 12.
49. Tronti 1977, p. 11.
50. Tronti 1977, p. 10.
51. Tronti 1977, p. 15. Particularly in the 1970s, several Marxists argued about the lack of a
theory of politics and the state in Marx. See, for instance, Anderson 1976, Althusser 1978,
Horkheimer 1978, Lucio Collettis contributions to Bobbio 1976, and Hobsbawm 1982.
techniques for the conquest and conservation of power, of a science of practical
collective activity.
52
It was these techniques and this art that the Italian-
communist intelligentsia in the 1970s had to grasp as their autonomous raison
dtre, without thinking of deducing them from a mere study of the economic
situation.
At this point, it might be noted that Trontis reasoning on the autonomy of
the political, containing ambiguous and arguably contradictory formulations,
recalled certain dimensions of Webers problematic. On the one hand, in a
rst moment, Tronti declared that the political was autonomous because it is
usually late compared to economic development; its temporal relation to
economic development thereby immediately cancelled its autonomy,
re-establishing its dependent, if not derivative, status.
53
To this extent, Trontis
thesis remained closer than he was willing to admit to what he had dismissed,
in a Weberian fashion, as the simplication in the manner of historical
materialism.
54
On the other hand, however, Tronti also argued that this
autonomy involved an historical process, in which the autonomy of the
political emerges as a consequence of the fully accomplished rationalisation of
the economic. In this second scenario, the state (as the fundamental dimension
of the political) is autonomous because it has gone through the process of
sophistication induced by capitalist development, which evokes Webers
theory of the development of the state-apparatus in terms of rationalisation.
55
We can thus see that, although Tronti only occasionally refers explicitly to
Weber in his writings of the 1970s (almost entirely devoted to the idea of the
autonomy of the political), the latters problematic seems to be working
behind the scenes. As Tronti further develops his thesis in subsequent decades,
Weber will play an increasingly important rle as a muse of this theoretical
elaboration. In so doing, as Illuminati suggests,
56
Tronti will rediscover in
52. Tronti 1977, p. 17.
53. In other passages, however, Tronti seems to suggest that the political can also anticipate
the economic. See Tronti 2006a, pp. 303.
54. Tronti 1977, p. 10. Trontis strong rhetorical attack on vulgar Marxism echoes Webers
famous critique of Marxisms naivety, because it claimed that ideas originate as reections or
superstructures of economic situations. See Weber 2001, p. 20.
55. In Webers words, historically progress towards the bureaucratic state . . . stands in the
closest relation to the development of modern capitalism (Weber 1994a, p. 147). For Weber,
just as for Tronti, this rationalisation of the state ultimately meant the formation of a professional
class of politicians skilled in the exercise and management of power.
56. Criticising the theory of the autonomy of the political as a political expropriation of the
masses, Illuminati argued that such theory did nothing but represent the classical dialectic
between charisma and administration. It was not by accident that the architects of the autonomy
of the political rediscovered Weber (Illuminati 1980, p. 144).
particular a theme that is central to Webers theory of politics: namely, a
dialectic between administration and charisma.
5. From the weapons of criticism to the critical technique: politics
as administration
Trontis notion of the autonomy of the political, as briey summarised above,
aimed to have both practical and theoretical implications. On the practical
level, it aimed to put politics in command by reconquering workers central-
ity on the institutional terrain, namely, on the level of the relation of the
party with the state. Te delay of the political or the lacking rationalisation
of the state as we have seen, one of Trontis ambiguous arguments for its
autonomy could be corrected only by studying and engaging directly in its
mechanisms.
57
On the theoretical level, this thesis proposed to comprehend
the autonomous laws of politics and the state by means of a careful, heterodox
investigation, which required reference to non-Marxist traditions.
Te practical implications of the autonomy of the political debate
increasingly became the question of a direct participation of the workers
political organisation in the government of the state.
58
Predictably, this position
was subject to numerous criticisms, especially from former workerists and
from Antonio Negri in primis. Negri argued that the notion of the autonomy
of the political was nothing more than the ideology of the historical
compromise,
59
and thus, ultimately, a theoretical position that had the precise
political function of supporting Eurocommunism.
57. As Tronti put it: instead of relying on those moments of lacking political mediation
of power-institutions with respect to capital (by seizing the revolutionary occasion and
substituting ourselves in the position of power, in the management of power, as it was done, in
my view, in a nineteenth-century vision of political struggle), it is instead a case of arriving also
consciously at taking in hand this process of modernisation of the state-machine, of arriving
even at managing, as is said in the jargon, not reforms in general, but that type of specic reform
in particular that is the capitalist reform of the state. In this reading, the working class turns out
to be the only possible rationality of the modern state (Tronti 1977, p. 19).
58. As Tronti would argue in the late 1970s, political force meant demonstrating that the
working class or rather, the workers party was able to govern. Te capacity to govern of the
working class is what we are all committed to build (Tronti 1978, p. 24).
59. In an essay of 1976, Negri polemicised against the autonomy of the political as the
ideology of the historical compromise: the compromise has occurred, with characteristic
funeral-orations of inevitability, the struggle against the crisis and against the workers who
have determined it is, in the autonomy of the political, unanimously conducted (Negri 1976,
p. 5). Similarly, Ferrajoli and Zolo dened the autonomy of the political as a form of intellectual
apology for the historical compromise (Ferrajoli and Zolo 1978, p. 8).
Te administrative-technicist dimension of Trontis proposal and its close
relation to Webers theory of politics, however, can be most clearly observed by
focusing on its theoretical implications. Once again, it was Negri who advanced
a criticism of technicism as inherent to Trontis thesis. Although Negri himself
seemed to share the idea of the absence of a Marxist theory of the state,
60
he
argued that the thesis of the autonomy of the political was no solution to this
problem, but merely the technocratic reinvention and new edition of the
technology of the political.
61
Negris critique of the autonomy of the political
as a technology of the political thus seemed to be based upon the assessment
that Trontis theoretical proposal did not amount to a tactically updated
analysis of the function of the state that could be integrated with the Marxist
traditions strategic vision of the necessity of abolishing the bourgeois state.
Rather, on the basis of the assertion of the absence of a theory of the state in
Marx and on the basis of the supposed historical disconrmation of a
deterministic continuity between the economic and the political, Tronti,
according to Negri, seemed to have abandoned Marxs thesis of the necessity
to smash the state-machine.
62
Te idea of the autonomy of the political in
fact implied the necessity of engaging with the state and of appropriating the
autonomous mechanism of its functioning as its characteristic know-how.
It is such an idea, according to which politics is a set of skills to be acquired,
with the aim of better administering the bureaucratic state-machine, that most
closely recalls the instrumentalist Weberian notion of political science as a
technical critique. In Weber, this amounted to the idea of political science as
ultimately the assessment of the instruments chosen by the politician

by means
of techniques of knowledge and counselling.
63
In this vision, social scientists
function as political advisers insofar as they have the knowledge to suggest to
politicians the best means required in order to achieve their goals. A political
60. While engaging with Bobbios perennial claim that there is not a theory of the state in
Marx (see Bobbio 1976 and 1978), Negri dened it as mere statement of fact [una registrazione],
arming that the ocial workers movement (and the communist movement, for instance)
does not possess a doctrine of the state (Negri 1977, p. 273).
61. Negri 1979, p. 129.
62. See Marx 1987; Lenin 1952.
63. In Webers view, technical critique pertains to the social and political sciences insofar as
they are sciences that do not tell anyone what he should do, but rather what he can and under
certain circumstances what he wishes to do (Weber 1949, p. 60). Unlike the widespread idea
that he regarded the social sciences as informed by a principle of neutrality [Wertfreiheit], Weber
in fact denes them in political terms from the outset. Tey constitute a type of knowledge
intertwined with political concerns insofar as social science rst arose in connection with
practical considerations. Its most immediate and often sole purpose was the attainment of value-
judgments concerning measures of State economic policy (Weber 1949, p. 51). See Hennis
1994 and Jameson 1973 on the political origins of the concept of Wertfreiheit.
science of this type, in other words, is reduced to bureaucratic competence, to
a task that is functional to the hyper-specialisation, fragmentation and
bureaucratisation of the apparatuses of domination. Politics thus undergoes a
shift to governance, as management of the status quo.
Te technicist element of Trontis notion of the autonomy of the political
is similar to Webers notion of critical technique in several ways. First, by
conceiving of politics as a specialised and separated sphere, one ends up
detaching political theory from a class-based political perspective, that is,
theory is separated from praxis. Te unity of theory and practice as Fredric
Jameson has recently argued, the distinctive feature of Marxism compared to
the old philosophical systems is thus annulled.
64
Moreover, by stating the
necessity of acquiring the art of politics as a toolbox of theoretical instruments
elaborated in autonomy, one runs the risk of conceiving of politics as a set of
instruments that are good for many usages, that is, as deployable for dierent
goals. In this way, as in Webers critical technique, the thesis of the autonomy
of the political ran the risk of separating means and ends.
65
Consequently, the
Marxist traditions or, at least, one Marxist traditions emphasis upon the
danger of a conception of politics in which means are separated from ends is
replaced by a position much closer to the calculations of Realpolitik.
66
In the end, the political realism that Tronti arguably wanted to be a corrective
to the supposed lack of political analysis and political pragmatism of the
Marxist-theoretical framework ended up incorporating a technicist-bureaucratic
dimension in which politics becomes management and administration. It was
this dimension that eventually tended towards the other element of Webers
political theory, namely, the dimension of charisma as organising instance of
political power.
64. See Jameson 2009.
65. Tronti has more recently retrospectively explained the rationale for his decision to draw
upon non-Marxist thinkers in order to grasp the laws of the political as tools adjustable for
dierent ends in strikingly Weberian terminology. When you handle the ethics of conviction,
that is the moment when you know that the problem is not to convince somebody, because in
that precise moment, the fact that you understand, that you comprehend for yourself, costs what
it costs. Knowing that which is, as it is, has absolute priority. And if that which you must know
was known before you by your enemy, it doesnt matter. You use that knowledge for other goals
(Tronti 2008, p. 40). Consequent with this line of reasoning, Tronti argues that theoretical
Marxism failed every time it abandoned the terrain of political realism.

See Tronti 2009a, p. 3.
66. See Callinicos 2007 for a good sketch of the means/ends problematic in the Marxist
tradition, discussed also in relation to Webers twofold political ethics.
6. Te illusions of democracy: politics as charisma
In order to understand the way in which the dimension of charisma plays a
rle within Trontis position, it is essential to recall Webers own characterisation
of its distinctive features. In his political theory, charismatic power is one of
the three types of legitimate domination, alongside the traditional and the
legal/bureaucratic types. Tey are dened according to the disposition of the
ruled to subject themselves to constituted forms of domination. Te dialectic
between administration and charisma in Webers political theory consists in
the fact that both have historically become two moments in the same chain of
political power. On the one hand, charisma arises as an extraordinary and
revolutionary force that questions and breaks with bureaucratic forces; on the
other hand, charismatic domination does not last as such, as it is subjected to
a process of routinisation that transforms it into its opposite, that is, precisely,
bureaucracy.
67
Yet, in its statu nascendi, the charismatic power has a peculiarity
that radically distinguishes it from the other two types of legitimate domination.
Charisma is the extraordinary gift of the political (or religious) leader who is
able to obtain obedience precisely because of such a gift. It is not, therefore,
the recognition of the ruled that legitimises the leadership of the charismatic
chief; rather, it is the charisma, the gift itself, that is legitimate and consequently
recognised as such. In Webers words, Charisma is self-determined and sets its
own limits. Its bearer . . . does not derive his claims from the will of his
followers, in the manner of an election; rather, it is their duty to recognize his
charisma.
68
Te dimension of charisma thus entails a typically litist and
aristocratic notion of power as the inherently legitimate rulership of the few
and the best who do not need to ask for popular recognition in order to
dominate.
As in Webers theory, a certain charismatic dimension of power appears also
as the other side of the coin of Trontis administrative idea, particularly in his
later writings. Unlike his own warning at the beginning of the 1960s never
set about constructing a perspective at a distance from the masses
69
the turn
to the autonomy of the political in the 1970s also meant autonomy of the
political from the class-organisation, or autonomy of the party from the
class.
70
At that time, such a statement was intended to be provocative and
67. In Webers reconstruction, this occurs insofar as the charismatic leaders want to keep their
power; they thus have to come to terms with the material necessity of systematising a corpus of
rules/principles and organising a group of functionaries/professionals who take care of the new
apparatus of domination.
68. Weber 1978, pp. 111213.
69. Tronti 2006a, p. 22.
70. Tronti 1977, pp. 345.
scandalous, as Tronti admitted. Yet, this self-referential vision of the workers
organisation has characterised the development of Trontis thought ever since.
In his writings of the 1990s, one can nd this dimension stated even more
clearly and directly:
Te future of the Left depends substantially on the capacity to accomplish the
task of providing politics again with subjectivity and strength. My idea is that
such a task can be accomplished by assuming and conjugating . . . the tradition of
struggle of the workers movement . . . and the tragically Weberian gure of
modern politics, including the history of autonomy and therefore of sovereignty,
of the modern State[.] . . . Te new intertwining of these planes has to be proposed
politically from above and from the outside of contemporary civil consciousness:
because it, alone, spontaneously, after centuries of capitalism, is not able anymore
to produce anything seriously alternative[.] . . . Government and opposition are
not two politics, but two forms of the same politics. And certainly, the most
adequate of these forms, now, after the wars and the peace of the twentieth
century, after that socialism and in this capitalism, is engaging in opposition from
the heights of government[.] . . . Only from here, from this politics of responsibility
and conviction, could the nobility of action be exercised, expressed, once again.
71
In the passage above, Tronti rearms the administrative dimension of politics
insofar as he identies opposition from the heights of government as the
most adequate form of politics, in the wake of the defeats of the twentieth
century. He also highlights that it is from above and from outside that a
political programme of combining workers struggle and the autonomy of the
state has to be proposed to the citizens, as they are declared unable to do it
themselves from below. Confronted with such an assertion by a communist
intellectual, one might hazard the judgement that we are faced with a neo-
Leninist neo-vanguardist vision of the party, according to the caricature often,
and incorrectly, ascribed to Lenin.
72
Tronti, however, oers no such
organisational proposal; his appeal to Leninist rhetoric remains, precisely,
rhetorical.
Instead, in the passage above, Tronti explicitly refers to the Weberian tragic
gure of modern politics together with the politics of responsibility and
conviction as the loci where the future of the Left could be rescued. Tus, the
Weberian ingredients of politics are invoked as necessary antidotes to the
contemporary lack of strength and subjectivity of politics that is, as antidotes
to its Krisis. In order to understand how the Weberian element of charisma is
present in Trontis reection, we thus need to understand how the crisis of
politics has been diagnosed in Trontis later writings in particular.
71. Tronti 1998, pp. 11011, my italics.
72. See Lih 2006.
Tis diagnosis is especially evident in a monograph published at the end of
the 1990s, Politics at Dusk [Politica al tramonto]. Te tendency of Trontis
thought in this text, already highlighted in the conclusive title, is exhibited
clearly in the following formulation: now we need to think not politics but
the crisis of politics.
73
After the long slumber of reason of the 1980s, eventually
concluded with the fall of the Soviet Union, the short century was proclaimed
to be at an end. Also nished was the idea of politics that for decades had
nourished the struggles and hopes for liberation of the organisations that had
been inspired by the ten days that shook the world. Te defeats of the workers
movements permeated Trontis writings at the end of the twentieth century in
the form of a pessimism of reason without that optimism of the will which
had been the distinctive characteristic of his early work. By elaborating on the
causes of the crisis of politics expressed in the defeats of the workers movement,
Tronti eventually came to identify the origin of the problem in democracy
itself. He argues that
the workers movement has not been defeated by capitalism. Te workers
movement has been defeated by democracy. . . . Te twentieth century is the
century of democracy. . . . It is democracy that won the class-struggle. . . .
Democracy, as once monarchy, is now absolute.
74
Yet, Trontis critique of democracy does not amount to a classically Marxist
critique of bourgeois democracy, but of democracy as such. Recalling
Tocquevilles critique of American democracy,
75
Tronti asserts that the winner
of the twentieth century was the democratic mass-man or homo democraticus:
the last degree of depoliticisation of the homo oeconomicus.
76
In an essay that
has recently been published in English, Tronti further claries his critique of
democracy in revealing terms.
77
Following Schmitts critique of the identitarian
nature of democracy,
78
Tronti argues that democracy must not be conceived as
an ideal to come, as the potentiality that still needs to nd its full historical
completion. Rather, it is necessary to accept that the essence of democracy is
the reality that has entirely realised itself, particularly in the twentieth century,
73. Tronti 1998, p. ix.
74. Tronti 1998, p. 195.
75. As Tronti puts it: As the European Tocqueville envisaged with concern in one of his
trips . . . [d]emocracies unied themselves under the centrality, the hegemony, the cult, even the
religion of this form of average individual (Tronti 1998, p. 133).
76. Tronti 2006b, p. 14.
77. Tronti 2009b.
78. Tronti quotes Schmitt approvingly: Democracy is a state-form that corresponds to the
principle of identity; it is the identity of the dominated and the dominating, of the governing
and the governed, of those who command and those who obey (Tronti 2009b, p. 101).
as the power of all on each and every one. Tat is because democracy is
precisely the process of the homogenization, of the massication of thoughts,
feelings, tastes, behaviours expressed in that political power which is common
sense.
79
As such, democracy for Tronti is anti-revolutionary because it is anti-
political, insofar as the political entails precisely the dimension of antagonism
and struggle that is lost once the homogenisation and ecumenical dimension
of democracy has taken over.
Without the pretension of providing ultimate answers to this impasse,
Tronti attempts to indicate some paths of research, or to refer to traditions
that might have been able to prevent democratic systems from falling into
what he sees as their totalitarianism. In this context, he has increasingly
referred over the years to the Italian school of litists, particularly Roberto
Michels, Gaetano Mosca and Vilfredo Pareto. Famously, they criticised
democracy (and socialism as the ideal of absolute democracy) as a mere utopia
unable to come to terms with the everlasting historical recurrence of the dyad
rulers-ruled and the circulation of lites.
80
Te litists believed in what is
known, after Michels, as the iron law of oligarchy, according to which every
form of government and power is inevitably destined to develop into an
oligarchy, with an organised minority of rulers (an lite) that overpowers the
majority of the unorganised ruled. Furthermore, the litists argued that the
idea of democratic systems as representative of the peoples will was a mere
illusion. In reality, it is not people who decide who they will delegate or elect
as their representatives, but the representatives themselves who make people
choose them; that is, they impose themselves because of their privileged access
from the beginning to the sources of power, thus establishing the rules of the
democratic game. Ultimately, therefore, the litists critique of democracy was
based upon pessimism about the feasibility of true democracy, which had
seemingly been disconrmed by history: all attempts to realise the kratos of the
demos seemed to have evolved eventually into the kratos of the oligoi.
Te similarity between this perspective and Webers line of reasoning on the
inevitable bureaucratic fate of charisma though Webers elaboration is far
more complex and articulated is due to both biographical (Roberto Michels
was a student of Weber) and broader historical circumstances. Te conservative
ideas of politics developed both by the litists and in Webers neo-Kantian
environment arose in the intense years of the turn of the twentieth century,
when so-called mass-society and the rise of parliamentary democracies and
political parties provided new challenges for political analysis. In this context,
79. Tronti 2009b, p. 103.
80. On the litist school, see Nye 1977.
the German-Italian frontline to use Rehmanns apposite phrase answered
with a contemptuous and conservative critique of democracy as an expression
of their fear of workers organisations.
81
In light of these brief remarks on the
litists position and its historical coincidence with that of Weber, we can
better understand the senses in which Trontis political theory presents a
charismatic-litist dimension.
First, for Tronti, one of the mistakes of the workers party consisted in the
fact that it had not taken seriously the litists critique of democracy. In other
words as Tronti seems to suggest the communist intelligentsia had not
understood the litists warnings against illusions in the idea that democratic
systems can really represent peoples will; they had thought that the communist
movement could avoid the iron law of oligarchy. It is for this very reason that
Tronti identies one of the causes of the workers defeat in the fact that their
party became the party of the whole people . . . and workers power, where it
existed, became the popular management of socialism, thereby losing its
destructive, antagonist character.
82
What Tronti seems to reproach the workers
party for, albeit in his hermetic way, is the fact that, in Italy, it had tried to
represent interclassist interests, while, in Russia, it became popular management
instead of promoting the circulation of lites in which the people and leaders
could ght for power. Te necessity of the dyad of rulers-ruled for communist
politics, however, is not questioned in this analysis; remarkably, it is instead
dened as essential to workers power. Tronti thus even goes beyond the
pessimistic positions of the litists in the following revealing passage,
radicalising their initial theses:
Te workers state, never realised, presented itself in the twentieth century as the
possible form of government of the best. Not lite, though the nineteenth-
twentieth century theory of lite was the only proposal able to correct in advance
the subsequent defects of dictatorship and democracy. . . . Instead, yes, aristocracy,
social-political body of government, from inside, more than from above,
legitimacy embodied in a collective subject, not for divine grace but for its own
81. In a penetrating reconstruction of German neo-Kantianism, Rehmann denes the
German-Italian frontline [deutsch-italienische Frontstellung] as opposed to the Anglo-French
frontline. Against positivism and naturalism typically Anglo-French constructions that
instituted the idea of equality of humanity and the laws of history and society, thus eventually
leading to socialism and modern democracy, German and Italian intellectuals (Rickert and
Weber, on the one hand, and Croce on the other hand) attempted to subject history to a scientic
consideration by assessing the intrinsic individuality of its object, the historical individual [das
historische Individuum]. Tis position amounted to strong nationalism (the nation, the people,
cannot be attened by a principle of equal humanity) and anti-socialism (society and history do
not have laws). See Rehmann 1998, pp. 144.
82. Tronti 2009b, p. 105.
history, that produces charisma and does not ask for delegacy; authority instead
of power, neither force nor consent, neither dictatorship nor democracy, rulers
and ruled neither contrasted nor identical, instead in reciprocal recognition.
83
By dening the ideal of the workers state as aristocracy, legitimacy that
produces charisma and does not ask for delegacy, Tronti provides a very clear
demonstration of the political consequences of the charismatic dimensions of
his theory of political power. As in Weber, this charisma does not ask for
delegacy; precisely as charisma, it is legitimate in itself, without reference to
the ruled who are then expected to subject themselves to it in reciprocal
recognition.
Te analysis of the crisis of politics in the twentieth century in terms of the
full and disappointing unveiling of democracy leads Tronti to a form of realist
pessimism. In this perspective, he attempts what can be seen as a workerist
reformulation of the dialectic between the rulers and the ruled in terms of a
peoples aristocracy [aristocrazia di popolo].
84
In such terms, however, the
dialectic itself is not overcome but instead maintained, although within the
frame of the same social body, that is, the working class which realises
the workers state as possible form of the government of the best. Alongside
what I propose to term a partisan aristocracy or litism, as a sort of workerist
appropriation of a theme debated for a long time in bourgeois political theory,
Trontis gloomy diagnosis of modern politics and democracy also revives
another perennial theme of the bourgeois tradition, that is, a philosophy and
anthropology of history.
7. Entzauberung of politics: philosophy and anthropology of history
Tronti has depicted the crisis of politics as the end of its Beruf.
85
In this
perspective,
whoever does politics . . . knows that almost nothing of his decision is in his
hands. Economic compatibilities are an iron cage for the initiative of political
action. . . . From all of this arises the degradation of political classes, reduced to
brainless masks, the fall of the political personality, without either profession or
vocation.
86
83. Tronti 2008, p. 58.
84. Tronti 2008, p. 56.
85. Politik als Beruf: Te End is the title of one of the last chapters in La politica al tramonto
(Tronti 1998).
86. Tronti 1998, p. 129.
Te sunset of politics thus seemed to amount to the decline of the Weberian
qualities of the political personality, qualities that had run into the fate of the
iron cage, the totally administered society sine ira et studio. Te latter
represented the stage of bureaucratised capitalist development led by
individuals without vocation that Weber described as the power of the
bureaucrats. For Weber, such a result was already embedded in the historical
process that he termed rationalisation, which described the historical
emergence of instrumental reason and consequently the extension of the
principle of calculation to all spheres of social life. Such a process, in Webers
account, had a double face: on the one hand, it was a progressive development,
inscribed in the trajectory that led to Protestantism. In its positive dimension,
the process of rationalisation liberated the individual from the ties of patriarchal
authority and serfdom, thus leading to the ideological formation called
individualism and to the realisation of the self-made man as the embodiment
of bourgeois virtues. On the other hand, it also carried in itself the seeds of the
complete opposite of this state of majority, that is, alienation and the loss of
individual autonomy. Since asceticism undertook to remodel the world and
to work out its ideals in the world, material goods have gained an increasing
and nally an inexorable power over the lives of men as at no previous period
in history.
87
Weber thus described modernity as what can be called a negative
dialectic.
88
Te disenchantment [Entzauberung] of the world and the
autonomisation of the individual found their necessary mirror-images in the
iron cage of bureaucracy and the alienation of humans. Tis depiction
presupposed two strictly related problematics. First, Weber proposed a quite
classical argument of philosophy of history by means of a teleology of reason.
Second, Webers analysis of modernity in terms of the armation of the ideal
type of individual, corresponding to the homo oeconomicus of classical
economics, constitutes what I propose to call an anthropology of history. In
this vision, history is conceived as the theatre of appearances of dierent and
determined anthropological characters characters in which history itself
nds its meaning and goal.
Can we speak of a philosophy and anthropology of history in Trontis work?
Cacciari seems to suggest such a result, in particularly clear and even Weberian
terms. He argues that:
87. Weber 2001, p. 124.
88. In this context, I refer to Benedetto Croces concept of negative dialectic, as elaborated in
1906 in his famous essay What is Living and What is Dead in the Philosophy of Hegel: In this
negative dialectic the result is not the synthesis, but the annulment, of the two opposite terms,
each on account of the other (Croce 1906).
Te study of the modern-contemporary Political, of the categories or regularities
of its relative autonomy, leads Tronti to discover that the sunset of politics, the
process of de-politicisation, is inscribed in its code, it is immanent to the forms
of its genesis and of its development . . . [.] Tis technical-scientic-economic
rationality, which Weber mentions at the end of his essay on Protestantism . . . this
rationality arises from the development itself of the modern Political. Te sunset
of the Political is its destined result. Te twentieth century, as Tronti writes, marks
the triumph of politics and its denitive tragedy. Yet it is not a suicide . . . it is the
meaning of the modern Political to realise itself in the planetary unfolded
rationality of victorious capitalism.
89
In his turn, Tronti himself explicitly praised Webers depiction of the process
of rationalisation as the bearer of instrumental reason in its inextricable
entanglements with capitalism: Weber grasped well, in the principle of
rationality, an element which is constitutive of modernity. Instrumental
reason, which the German thinker notices also in particular connections
between the dimensions of ethics and economy, carried in itself the destiny of
an objective reason which was organic to the spirit of capitalism.
90
It is
particularly due to this reading of the fate of depoliticisation, almost inscribed
into the DNA of politics itself, so to speak, that several commentators have
identied a philosophy of history in Trontis thought.
91
Rather than the
optimistic tale of progress of nineteenth-century philosophies of history,
however, Trontis particular version constitutes a Weberian negative dialectic
without synthesis; that is, it is a philosophy of history inscribed in a negative
register.
92
Tis Weberian regressive philosophy of history, furthermore, is
characterised by a fundamentally anthropological dimension.
89. Cacciari 2006, p. 44.
90. Crisi della ragione, available at: <http://www.katciu-martel.it/crisi_ragione.htm>. Te
Nietzschean theme of destiny is increasingly important in Trontis thought. He devoted his
lectio magistralis, delivered on the occasion of his retirement from the University of Siena in
2001, to the theme of Politics and Destiny [Politica e destino]. Te lecture was subsequently
published alongside contributions from some of his closest collaborators in the form of a
Festschrift in 2006. See Tronti 2006b.
91. According to Tomba, such an outcome has also to be ascribed to the reection that
[Tronti] made his own in order to learn from enemies, to hegemonise the ambits of thought, to
make the low classes speak the high language, but which ended up presenting itself in the form
of the philosophy of history of the sunset (see Tomba 2007). Zanini, on the other hand,
attributes to theoretical workerism, including Tronti, the constitution of a philosophy of
subjectivity founded on an immanent idea of dierence, irreducible to a philosophy of history.
See Zanini 2006.
92. In this, Tronti was also inuenced by Cacciaris turn to so-called negative thought. See
Corradi 2005, p. 227. On Italian-left readings of Heidegger and negative thought, see also
Mandarini 2009.
Tis result in Trontis development can be identied in his depiction of the
process of depoliticisation as giving rise to its own anthropological ideal-type:
the homo democraticus as the last degree of depoliticisation of the homo
oeconomicus.
We witness the epochal encounter between homo oeconomicus and homo
democraticus. Te subject of the spirit of capitalism is precisely the animal
democraticum. Te gure that has become dominant is the mass bourgeois, which
is the real subject internal to the social relations. Tere will be no genuine and
eective critique of democracy without a profound anthropological investigation,
a social anthropology but also an individual anthropology, taking individual
here too in the sense of the thought-practice of dierence.
93
Te homo democraticus is thus for the political-democratic system what the
homo oeconomicus is for the economic-capitalist system; that is, its
anthropological embodiment. Just as the critique of political economy required
a radical analysis and critique of the myth of homo oeconomicus, Tronti argues
that an eective critique of democracy requires an analogous critique of
its anthropological foundation. However, he does not propose to negate or
to invalidate the anthropological argument. On the contrary, he urges its
assumption and partisan articulation. He thus proposes a partisan
anthropology as a new method of inquiry that can throw light upon the end
of the Weberian vocational profession of politics, namely, the crisis of politics
itself. In Trontis words from the end of the last century, the reason for this fall
of meanings is still to be explained, for this loss of recognition, for this triumph
of appearance and for this collapse of qualities in the two Weberian vocational
professions of the twentieth century, that of the politician and of the
intellectual. Perhaps it will be necessary to turn ones hand to a partisan
anthropology, declined from below.
94
More recently, he has emphasised that
homo oeconomicus, in the modern age, is a more natural datum than zoon politikon.
Neither the noble savage of Rousseau, nor the social individual of Lockes
reasonable Christianity, but Hobbess homo-lupus is the interpreter-protagonist of
the bourgeois state of nature. Political economy won over the critique of political
economy, Smith defeated Marx, because the former began from an anthropology,
the latter arrived at a sociology.
95
93. Tronti 2009b, p. 102.
94. Tronti 1998, p. 49.
95. Tronti 2008, p. 51.
Tronti thus argues that the lack of such an anthropology constitutes the great
theoretical void in the tradition of workers Kultur. Furthermore, in Trontis
view, the crisis of militant Marxism requires us to reconstruct the foundations
of the crisis. Such a task demands the research of a new anthropology because
it was upon an anthropology that classical political economy as well as the
political theories of the state that emerged as the victors of the twentieth
century were ultimately based.
96
Te critique of political democracy itself
must thus be founded upon an anthropology; that is, it must be a critique
that radically questions the idea and practice of man that democracy
presupposes.
97
By positing the anthropological analysis as a ground on which the defeats of
the workers movement and the delusions of democracy of the twentieth
century could be measured, Tronti arguably undertook a path opposite to that
forged by Marx. Te latter began from an anthropological reection on
social inequalities in which a key-rle was played by the concept of man
(or individual), and species-being [Gattungswesen] as the common trait of
humanity, and arrived at an articulation of society as not consisting of
individuals, but as an expression of the sum of interrelations . . . within which
these individuals stand.
98
Tronti, on the other hand, started by asserting that
working-class struggle was the fundamental driving force of history; in other
words, his initial work put a collective subjects action at the core of his analysis.
He then later emerged as the advocate of a workers anthropology in which the
identication of the driving motives of what we can term an imagined homo
proletarius seem to predetermine its possible collective expression.
8. Concluding remarks
To return to my initial research-question: what lessons can an avowedly
Marxist research-project today learn from the particular way in which Tronti
proposed to learn from the enemy Max Weber?
Trontis heterodox approach led him to begin to read Weber, alongside
the authors of the conservative traditions. Convinced that Marxs elaboration
of politics and the state was ultimately inadequate, and with the aim
of integrating and updating it up to the level of the complexity of the
96. See Tronti 2006b, p. 26.
97. In this regard, despite his masculinist mode of expression, Tronti is also referring to
feminist theory of dierence, which he increasingly addresses in positive terms in his later
writings.
98. Marx 1973, p. 265.
contemporary state, Tronti embraced the theory of the autonomy of the
political. It is in the context of the development of this theory that Tronti
resorted increasingly to Weber. Te latters elaboration of politics as the
fundamental terrain of struggle, his articulation of the features of the political
realm from the level of the state as the monopoliser of violence to the level of
the subjective traits of the charismatic leader along the lines of the ethic of
responsibility and conviction, permeated Trontis reection on the political,
particularly from the late 1970s onwards.
Nonetheless, the politicist turn in Trontis development seem to have led
to a terrain of elaboration less novel than he supposed. On the one hand, the
thesis of the autonomy of the political resulted in the armation of the terrain
of state-mediation as the only possible level of political confrontation and in
the reduction of political elaboration to a toolbox detached from a specic
class-project in the fashion of Realpolitik. On the other hand, Tronti conceived
the autonomy of the political as an independence of the party from the class
itself. He turned to the litists critique of democracy, in the process of
elaborating the notion of a peoples aristocracy, in order to reassess the
ineluctability of the duality between rulers and ruled. Arguably, however,
instead of introducing innovation and novelty into the Marxist-theoretical
eld, Tronti ended up re-proposing a classical theme of bourgeois political
theory: namely, the dialectic between administration and charisma, as the two
sides of the coin of an authoritarian conception of power.
Furthermore, Tronti recovered two idealist themes, strictly intertwined,
from Weber and the liberal-conservative traditions: a philosophy and
anthropology of history. Te former led him to analyse the crisis, or sunset,
of politics as the necessary realisation of its own fate; he thus presented a
classical teleological movement that explicitly recalled Webers reading of the
process of rationalisation. Te latter resulted in Trontis important project to
develop and reframe the question of anthropology, an element that certainly
constitutes one of his most intriguing and potentially challenging ideas.
Nonetheless, the still-underdeveloped nature of such a project, alongside
Trontis ambiguous appreciation of bourgeois anthropology as the seemingly
necessary term of comparison for the development of an alternative Marxist
anthropology, ultimately has fallen short of what he proposed, at least until
now. By identifying in Hobbess or Smiths anthropological foundation of
politics and economics the added value of bourgeois political theory that had
enabled it to win against competing positions, Tronti did not seem to
acknowledge that such a foundation was and is the ideological expression of
the dominant classes that seek to conceal and legitimate real historical relations
of domination and exploitation. It does so by naturalising them at the level of
human nature, thus reinforcing the status quo. Such an anthropological
foundation for politics, that is, resulted in a denial of the possibility of
change precisely what Trontis Marxism ostensibly aimed to promote.
In the end, Trontis proposal to study bourgeois thought qua enemy-
thought constitutes an extremely intriguing and potentially fruitful approach.
Instead of attempting dubious re-interpretations of conservative thinkers as
carriers of inherently leftist projects (as, for instance, in various attempts to
win Nietzsche, and to some extent even Weber, to the cause of the proletariat),
99

Tronti assumed at the outset the inimical nature of their thought. He was
well aware, that is, of the inextricably partisan feature of their political
elaborations, which could therefore only play a heuristic rle for the
development of a truly alternative political theory and practice. However, this
antidotal methodology did not prevent him from incorporating some of the
very concepts and problematics of these inimical theories into his own thought,
which thus failed to produce the theoretical innovation for which he strove.
His attempt to introduce novelty into the petried forest of vulgar Marxism
by engaging with the enemy thus brought him perilously close to imprisonment
in the iron cage of Weberianism.
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Manifestolibri.
Antonio Gramscis Contribution
to a Critical Economics
Michael R. Krtke
Lancaster University
m.kraetke@lancaster.ac.uk
Abstract
According to conventional wisdom, Antonio Gramsci is a political philosopher lacking in, and
who avoids, a serious interest in political economy. Tat is a serious misrepresentation of
Gramscis works and thought. Equally wrong is the widespread view that anything Gramsci had
to say about political economy is to be found in his scattered notes on Americanism and
Fordism. On the contrary, a careful rereading of Gramscis Prison Notebooks shows that Marxs
great and unnished project of the critique of political economy plays a crucial rle for Gramscis
eorts to come to grips with the basics of a critical social science that could live up to the
aspirations of a scientic socialism. As Gramsci was fully aware of the everyday battles of ideas
in capitalist societies to be fought about the notions and tenets of popular or vulgar political
economy, he did the best he could in order to understand and clarify the bases of a critical and
scientic political economy. A political economy that was and still is urgently needed in order
to ght the strongest of the strongholds of bourgeois hegemony the ideas of vulgar economics
in everybodys heads.
Keywords
Gramsci, Marx, political economy, philosophy, method, classical economics, market, state,
value-theory, tendencies, laws
Gramsci as non-economist
Most of his admirers regard Gramsci as a pure-political theorist, and misread
his critique of economism as a lack of theoretical interest in political economy.
Tis fatal misunderstanding has rendered many on the intellectual Left
defenceless against the dominant forms of economism of our time. Any
understanding and serious critique of economism in its various forms has to
be rmly grounded in a critical understanding of the real worlds of capitalism
and the various forms of fetishism inherent to them. Marxs critique of political
economy starts and ends with a critique of the enchanted world of social
64 M. R. Krtke / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 63105
forms, inherently fetishistic and irrational forms both of thought and action
that together make up the strange universe of modern capitalism.
1
As a serious rereading of the Prison Notebooks clearly shows, Gramsci was
no ignoramus regarding political economy. Te notebooks contain numerous
notes and considerations on political economy. Tese notes give evidence of a
serious engagement with the history and logic of economic science.
2
Gramsci
wrote dozens of notes entitled Points to Reect on for a Study of Economics
or Brief Notes on Political Economy or Brief Notes on Economics.
3
Tere is
also a lot of material in his critique of Croce,
4
or in short excerpts from or notes
on other authors (for example, on the economists Einaudi and Graziadei).
5

Here, Gramsci studies the economic history of Italy and other countries,
the course of the world-economic crisis as well as the latest developments
in economic theory. He reects upon the philosophical signicance of the
1. See Krtke 2001 and Krtke 2002.
2. Already on 11 December 1926, shortly after his arrest, Gramsci wrote to his friend Piero
Sraa and asked him to send him a textbook of economics and nance a fundamental book
that the economist Sraa could choose (cf. Gramsci 1994a, p. 44). Sraa found and sent him a
number of books, among them the Principles of Economics (1890) of Alfred Marshall in Italian
translation, the Geschichte der Ination (1926) of Richard Lewinsohn in French translation and
the Corso di scienza delle nanze (1926) of Luigi Einaudi (cf. Potier 1987, p. 62). In the following
years, Sraa continued to send Gramsci economic literature, as well as opening an account for
him at a bookshop to order books as he pleased.
3. See Gramsci 1975, Q10II, 23 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 16870); Gramsci 1975, Q10II, 25
(Gramsci 1995, pp. 1645); Gramsci 1975, Q10II, 30 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 1701); Gramsci
1975, Q10II, 32 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 1713); Gramsci 1975, Q10II, 37i (Gramsci 1995,
pp. 1769); Gramsci 1975, Q10II, 53 (Gramsci 1995, p. 229); Gramsci 1975, Q10II, 57
(Gramsci 1995, pp. 18990); Gramsci 1975, Q8, 216 (Gramsci 1995, p. 180); Gramsci 1975,
Q10II, 15 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 1667); Gramsci 1975, Q15, 26 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 2256);
Gramsci 1975, Q15, 43 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 1745); Gramsci 1975, Q15, 45 (Gramsci 1995,
p. 176). References are given to the Italian critical edition of Gramscis prison-writings (Gramsci
1975). Tree volumes of this work now exist in English. I have adopted the internationally
accepted standard of citation in Gramscian studies, giving the number of the notebook (Q),
followed by the number of the individual notes (). Additionally, references are provided to one
of the anthologies of Gramscis texts in English translation where available (Gramsci 1971 and
Gramsci 1995, respectively).
4. See Gramsci 1975, Q7, 42; Gramsci 1975, Q8, 222; Gramsci 1975, Q10I, 13
(Gramsci 1995, pp. 3601); Gramsci 1975, Q10II, 32 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 1713); Gramsci
1975, Q10II, 36 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 4303); Gramsci 1975, Q10II, 39 (Gramsci 1995,
pp. 4223); Gramsci 1975, Q10II, 41vi (Gramsci 1995, pp. 4268); Gramsci 1975, Q10II,
41viii (Gramsci 1995, pp. 41920).
5. See Gramsci 1975, Q1, 63; Gramsci 1975, Q7, 22; Gramsci 1975, Q7, 33 (Gramsci
1971, pp. 3812); Gramsci 1975, Q7, 42; Gramsci 1975, Q8, 162 (Gramsci 1995,
pp. 1634); Gramsci 1975, Q8, 166 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 1867); Gramsci 1975, Q9, 77;
Gramsci 1975, Q11, 29 (Gramsci 1971, pp. 45861); Gramsci 1975, Q11, 52 (Gramsci
1971, pp. 41014); Gramsci 1975, Q15, 26 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 2256).
M. R. Krtke / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 63105 65
discoveries of classical political economists (in the rst instance, Ricardo). In
19302, Gramsci writes extensive notes on the history of political economy
and on the methodological foundations of critical economics. Hence, Gramscis
lack of concern for political economy is largely a myth.
6
With a few exceptions, Gramscis studies of political economy have
remained largely unexplored.
7
On the one hand, the Italian Gramsci scholars
(mostly philosophers) who have commented on these passages have not
focused on Gramscis thoughts as far as economic theory and its peculiar
scientic status is concerned. Rather, they have tried to read Gramscis eorts
to understand the origins of the basic concepts of Marxs critique of political
economy in relation to the elaboration of the concept of immanence, thus
neglecting the particular problems of economic thought and its history.
8
Of
course, careful students of Gramsci know that his close friend Piero Sraa was
a professional economist of high reputation.
9
While Gramsci was imprisoned,
Sraa started to work in Cambridge on the rst complete edition of the Works
and Correspondence of David Ricardo. Gramsci was aware of this project and
quite enthusiastic about it.
10
In their correspondence, both talked about
6. Accordingly, the concept of Western Marxism as developed by Perry Anderson and
based upon an alleged shift of focus towards philosophy and away from political economy, is
highly misleading. As I have shown elsewhere, the alleged shift was never made: not by Gramsci,
not by Karl Korsch or Georg Lukcs, not even by Teodor Adorno (cf. Krtke 2009).
7. See Giorgi 1979; Giovanni 1979; Bertoni 1980; Potier 1986; Calabi 1988; Boothman
1991; Lunghini 1994. A collection of Gramscis writings on political economy appeared in Italy
in 1994 (Gramsci 1994c), leading to some interest in Gramscis contributions to Marxist
economic analysis among Italian Gramsci scholars (see, for example, Badaloni 1994; Cavallaro
1997; Frosini 1999). Further Selections from the Prison Notebooks (1995) contains the most
important notes and marginal notes on political economy in the Prison Notebooks in two sections
(cf. Gramsci 1995).
8. Francioni 1984, p. 94. Cavallaro argues that when Gramsci is dealing with political
economy he is actually dealing with something completely dierent, that is, a general theory of
transition. Frosini claims that the technical-economic meaning of Gramscis reections on
political economy are less important than their contribution to the development of the concept
of immanence (cf. Cavallaro 1997, p. 60 and passim; Frosini 1999, pp. 54, 60 and passim;
Frosini 2003, pp. 1439). Some of the neo-Gramscians among the (international) political
economists provide a striking counterpart to this attitude, as they are mostly interested in
Gramscis concept of hegemony, and make only a selective use of his reections on political
economy (cf. Gill 1991; Gill (ed.) 1993).
9. Te friendship between Sraa and Gramsci, which lasted from their rst encounter in
1919 until Gramscis death in 1937, has often been regarded under a purely biographical aspect.
See Napolitano 1978; Napolitano 2005; Vacca 1999.
10. On 7 September 1931, when Gramsci heard of Piero Sraas work on the critical-
collected edition of Ricardos works (a project that Sraa started on behalf of the Royal Economic
Society in 1930), he wrote to Tania that he hoped soon to read Ricardo in the original text,
when this edition comes out (Gramsci 1994b, p. 66). Sraa answered that he hoped that the
economics and political economy many times. Many years later, in 1947,
commenting upon the rst plan to publish Gramscis Prison Notebooks, Sraa
opined that with respect to political economy they contained some extremely
acute remarks, but also great weaknesses mostly due to the fact that Gramsci
did not have Marxs texts with him. Sraa even advised not to publish some
of Gramscis notes, in particular those on classical and critical economics,
which he regarded as sometimes confused and undeveloped.
11
However, as
Gramscis discussion of Croces Marx critique shows clearly enough, he knew
Marxs Capital well, and not only its rst volume.
On the other hand, in the international debate, Gramscis remarks on
Americanism and Fordism, scattered throughout his notebooks from the
very beginning and then assembled and partly revised in the twenty-second of
the Prison Notebooks, compiled in 1934, have been extensively used in recent
attempts to come to grips with the alleged crisis of Fordism and the emergence
of post-Fordism.
12
Despite frequent claims for their novelty, however,
Gramsci argues in ways that are more often than not rather close to the
orthodox Marxism of the Second International. He insists that all the dierent
phenomena of Americanism and Fordism are linked together as parts of one
overarching process of the transformation of capitalism, a transformation
from the old individualism towards a programmed (or planned) economy
which follows an immanent necessity. Gramsci explains the necessity of all
the transitions and transformations in American- and European-capitalist
societies according to what may seem to be an old fashioned perspective:
namely, the law of the falling rate of prot and the continuous struggles of
the capitalist class to overcome or escape it. Fordism is just an extreme point
in this ongoing process.
13
Many of Gramscis conjectures on these themes are
edition would appear in one to two years, and that he would naturally send Gramsci a copy
(Gramsci 1994b, p. 71). In fact, the edition was published only in the 1950s.
11. In his comments, Sraa gave a whole list of Gramscis misreadings of core-tenets of the
classical and neoclassical tradition, including confusions about the concept of value and the
concept of comparative costs (cf. Badaloni 1992, pp. 44, 45; Boothman 1995, p. xxxv).
12. Many commentators have failed to note that the debate on Americanism and Fordism
had started long before World-War One and was already far advanced in the 1920s, particularly
in Germany. When Gramsci started to rethink the new phenomena in prison, they were not so
new anymore. Te rst Marxist critiques of Fordism and the rst extensive Marxist analyses of
the process of rationalisation had already been published (see, for example, Walcher 1925 and
Bauer 1976).
13. See Gramsci 1975, Q22, 1 (Gramsci 1971, pp. 2789). Te combination of economic
laws that are avoided, circumvented or even overcome by capitalists actions, puzzling as it
might appear, was not unfamiliar among the Marxists of the Second International. From 1915
onwards, many of them were engaged in an ongoing debate on the transformations of capitalism
towards some sort of organised, even planned capitalism.
correct, but certainly not original in the Marxist tradition. For example, his
observation that the rationalisation-process creates a new man and a new
type of worker as all labour is systematically reduced to the merely mechanical-
physical aspect is not particularly originally new, as he himself correctly
remarks, but just the most recent phase of a process which started with
industrialisation itself. What is more, the very process of the transformation of
labour creating more-and-more abstract labour in reality and the creation
of modern wage-workers t for performing abstract labour, is a core-theme
not only in many of Marxs manuscripts that remained unknown to Gramsci,
but right at the centre of Capital, Volume One.
14
Again, Gramscis brief
discussion of the phenomenon of the high wages is largely correct as an
intuition. He rightly stresses the problem of high uctuation among the
workforce in Fords factories and argues that the high wages (the famous ve-
dollars-a-day minimum wage, introduced together with the eight-hour
working day in January 1914 in some of Fords factories) were more appearance
than reality, because the enhanced intensity and stress of work was hardly
compensated for by the enhanced pay. Furthermore, like many other theorists,
Gramsci argues that once the new type of Ford worker together with the new
level of labour-intensity became the average or norm in American and
European industries, the high wages would disappear. Equally correct, and
also more widely acknowledged, was Gramscis observation of the clash
between the traditional moral economy of the factory-worker and the
new economy of ruthless rationalisation of factory-work that Fordism
represented.
Gramscis anti-economism
With the term economism, Gramsci, like his predecessors and contemporaries
in the international-socialist movement,
15
meant a theoretical orientation and
a political movement: in the case of Italy, syndicalism and the syndicalists, who
14. See Gramsci 1975, Q22, 2,11 (Gramsci 1971, pp. 302.).
15. In the Russian workers movement, the bitter struggle against economism that is, a
group in the (illegal or half-legal) trade-unions who named themselves economists and were
explicitly against a political engagement of the Russian workers intermittently played an
important rle. Plekhanov, Dan, Martov, Lenin and others attacked these politics of political
abstinence, for example, in Iskra, printed outside Russian and illegally distributed within it (cf.
Grossmann 1971, pp. 41.; Anderson 1976). Te concept of hegemony was coined for the rst
time in these debates and, just as quickly, became the bone of contention between the ghting
factions, who mutually accused each other of having fundamentally misunderstood the concept
of the hegemony of the working class in a bourgeois revolution.
had entered into a curious alliance with the Italian version of liberalism in the
late-nineteenth century. What he is ghting against are the forms of a workers
movement that stand in the way of the struggle for hegemony. Te proletariat,
in order to become capable as a class of governing, he wrote in 1926 in the
fragment, On Some Aspects of the Southern Question, must strip itself of every
residue of corporatism, every syndicalist prejudice and incrustation.
16
As a
spontaneous-oppositional movement against the reformism of the already-
established parliamentary workers parties, syndicalism, with its calls for direct
action (strikes, boycotts, sabotage, factory-occupations, and so forth) had
found some support in the Italian workers movement (as well as in the Spanish
and French movements). Many socialist theorists entertained sympathies for
syndicalism; some (such as Sorel, Pelloutier, Arturo Labriola and Panunzio)
attempted to give it its own distinctive theory. Syndicalism in France and
Italy produced its own theoreticians, its organic intellectuals, its ideas and
programme.
17
As Gramsci saw in 1926, syndicalism was the the instinctive,
elemental, primitive but healthy expression of working-class reaction against
reformism.
18
In Italy, the leading minds of syndicalism came from the South;
as such, Gramsci thought to be able to recognise an attempt of the peasants of
the South to inuence the industrial workers of the North.
19
Teoretically, the
syndicalists were usually followers of Proudhon or other utopian socialists.
Gramsci suspected that there was a connection between the liberal credo
free market and free trade under all conditions and theoretical syndicalism.
He resolutely declared in 1926 that the ideological essence of syndicalism
is a new liberalism, more energetic, more aggressive, more pugnacious than
the traditional variety.
20
In the Prison Notebooks he formulated this insight
more cautiously: it should be investigated whether economism, in its most
developed form, is not a direct oshoot of liberalism, and if it began from the
theoretical movement for free trade.
21
Gramsci brings together the theoretical
free trade movement and theoretical syndicalism, which are united in their
rejection of any type of superordinate planning, coordination and control of
16. Gramsci 1978, p. 448.
17. See Schecter 1994, pp. 24.
18. Gramsci 1978, p. 450 (my italics).
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid.
21. Gramsci 1975, Q13, 18 (Gramsci 1971, pp. 15867). Tat is simultaneously a moment
of political self-criticism and self-reection. Until the end of WWI, as a journalist and secretary
of the Turin section of the PSI, Gramsci had proposed a consistent free-trade politics with the
argument that the socialists in Italy had to take over the historical task of the liberals (cf. Riechers
1970, pp. 55.).
the economic processes, in the category of economism.
22
However, at the
same time, he sees and emphasises the dierent signicance of both currents the
liberal conception being of the ruling class, that of the syndicalists of the
subaltern classes.
23
Free-market liberalism is based on a theoretical error, on the belief that
economic activity belongs to civil society and the State must not intervene to
regulate it.
24
In liberal thought, a methodological and analytical dierentiation,
between politics and economics, is reied and raised to a political norm. In
order to avoid this conclusion, it is necessary to understand that the free
market and the liberal market-economy is a regulation of a statal nature,
introduced and maintained by means of law and compulsion.
25
A free market,
just like free trade between nation-states, must be introduced by law, that is,
by the intervention of political power. Te free market is forged on the
political road, it is a fact of the will, not of the spontaneous, automatic
expression of economic (natural) laws.
26
Tus, liberalism is also a political
programme determined by its victory to replace the leading personnel of a
state and the economic programme of the state itself .
27
However, it is not a
case of a new political or social order, only a case of replacing the government,
in order to change the existing legal framework in the eld of trade and
indirectly industrial policies.
28
Syndicalism, on the other hand, represents a more complex phenomenon:
there was a strong syndicalist movement, in some countries (France, Italy,
Spain) even temporarily dominant. Tis was a movement of the factory or
industrial workers and the agricultural workers. It rejected the Marxism of
the Social-Democratic parties of Northern Europe. Proponents of conciliar
ideas, they quickly turned, after initial enthusiasm, against the development of
the Soviet Union, where councils and unions were absorbed into the new
state. Tey subsequently became bitter opponents of the Communist parties.
29

Gramsci attacks the syndicalists in the Prison Notebooks, because, as we have
22. Gramsci 1975, Q4, 38 (Gramsci 1971, p. 160).
23. See Gramsci 1975, Q4, 38 (Gramsci 1971, p. 160).
24. Gramsci 1975, Q13, 18 (Gramsci 1971, pp. 15867). See Gramsci 1975, Q4, 38
(Gramsci 1971, p. 160).
25. Ibid.
27. Gramsci 1975, Q13, 18 (Gramsci 1971, pp. 15867).
29. In the course of the 1920s, many syndicalists in Italy drew closer to the Fascist rgime,
which appeared to promise them a preferential position in the new corporative state based
on estates.
seen, he argued that theoretical syndicalism is an aspect of market liberalism.
30

Presumably, he means the then-current idea of the organisation of a future
economy by syndicates: enterprises administered by the respective workforces
and between which only a loose federation exists. Te syndicalists refused the
idea of a proletarian Leviathan and always preferred a (regulated) market to
central state-based planning and control. Tis appeared to oer them a
guarantee for the autonomy of the syndicates (producers collectives in self-
administered enterprises).
31
Te three foundations and three sources of Gramscis economic studies
In order to be able to criticise liberalism in the workers movement, one needs
a critique of political economy a critique that also engages with the second
or third economy of the working class in capitalism, with its more-or-less
utopian projects of self-help and social reform, and a critique that is fair to the
ambivalence of the workers movement and its organisations. Marxs critique
of political economy begins in 18447 with a critique of the political economy
of the working class, its practical experiments such as the Bourses de Travail
(labour-exchanges and banks of exchange like Proudhons Bank of the
People) and the corresponding theories of radical money and credit-reformers
(in the rst place, Proudhon and his followers).
32
However, in order to be able
to grasp this contradictory rle of the political economy of the working class
and its institutions in capitalism, we must rst have a clear concept of the
capitalist mode of production. Te liberal or syndicalist utopianism of the real
workers movement is no chimera of individual theorists. It emerges out of a
particular historical situation, in which the trade-unions were in reality still
spontaneous self-help organisations, which were and had to be many things at
once: professional associations, cooperatives, insurance-associations and
associations for mutual help. It emerged in an explicitly social-revolutionary
frontal opposition to the state, which did not treat wage-workers in any sense
as emancipated citizens and fully-edged legal subjects. It contained anti-
capitalist and even precapitalist elements, such as the idea of a just exchange
on a market, in which, thanks to the syndicates, the inequality and lack of
freedom among the formally equal commodity-owners is abolished and money
is reduced to a pure at-money, so that it can no longer be transformed into
capital. Te ambivalence towards the market on the one hand, the sphere of
31. See Schecter 1994, pp. 40.
32. See Krtke 2005.
freedom, equality and the fullment of all possible desires; on the other hand,
a sphere of inequality, lack of freedom and frustration plays a rle in all
modern social movements right up until today. Liberal utopianism re-emerges
even today in the garb of market-socialism.
Gramscis thought was in the second place strongly marked by the encounter
with the Italian version of legal, academic Marxism.
33
Benedetto Croce, a
student of the Marxist philosopher Antonio Labriola and one of the rst and
most inuential critics of Marx (who did not limit himself to philosophical
themes but engaged extensively with all three volumes of Capital ),
34
is the
most important author for Gramsci. Croce saw clearly that Marxs Capital is
neither pure economics nor a history of the economy.
35
Marx, he claimed,
provided a sort of sociological and comparative-historical explanation and
presentation of modern capitalism.
36
Te problem of pure economics, of the
general economic laws that are valid for all times, however, is not resolved in
this fashion. Croce criticised Marx on three fronts: rst, Croce claimed that
Marx did not want to engage with pure economics, that his economic theory
is not a general theory, and that his concept of value is not a general concept.
37

Second, Croce argued that Marx is not clear about his mode of presentation:
his theory of value as well as his theory of surplus-value is based upon elliptical
comparison, that is, upon a tacit comparison of an ideal situation of a classless
society of pure producers with the existing relations of capitalism.
38
Tird,
according to Croce, Marx fails to provide a justication of the law of the
tendential fall in the prot-rate. Croce argued that it can be observed,
dierently from Marxs claims, that the mass of prot sinks tendentially, while
its rate must rise in the course of capitalist development.
39
Croce was not only famous in Italy; he represented a moral and intellectual
authority hovering above the parties. Like all young Italian intellectuals of his
time, Gramsci was not able to avoid a confrontation with Croce and his
critique of Marx. In the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci gathers together his
commentaries and objections to Croce, which were supposed to go into a
planned but never-written essay, a full-blown Anti-Croce. He took over from
Croce a series of problems that mark his self-clarication regarding Marxs
critical economics: the question concerning the status and the explanatory
33. See Riechers 1970, pp. 37.
34. See Boulay 1981.
35. Croce 1901, pp. 96, 98.
36. Croce 1901, pp. 116., 127.
37. Croce 1901, pp. 117, 120.
38. Croce 1901, pp. 102, 226, 228.
39. See Croce 1901, pp. 237.
value of the theory of value, the question concerning the relations between the
pure economics of Pareto, Pantaleoni and others and Marxs work, and the
question regarding the specicity of the method Marx employed in Capital. In
opposition to Croce, who disputed the philosophical status of Marxism,
Gramsci argued that Marx had founded his own fully-edged world-outlook,
which was just as original and comprehensive as the Christian world-outlook.
40

Tis philosophy, however, was not presented anywhere by its author in a
systematic form; it must be searched for in the totality of Marxs works.
41
As
Marx had dedicated his intellectual forces to other problems, particularly
economic (which he treated in systematic form), the philosophy of praxis was
only present in the form of aphorisms and practical criteria.
42
In an often-
quoted passage of the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci remarks that the philosophy
of a theorist (a great personality) must not necessarily be contained in his
explicitly philosophical writings or expressions. His real philosophy could
rather lie precisely in his formally unphilosophical, political (or, by extension,
economic) writings.
43
Tus Gramsci was interested in the philosophical
signicance of the new type of theory that he thought to nd already in
Ricardo (see below). Related to Marx, Gramscis thesis would seem to suggest
that his philosophy of praxis may lie in his critique of political economy,
particularly as the critique of economics was the dominant and predominant
activity of Marx the scientist.
44
Finally, Gramsci does not avoid an engagement with the socialists and
Marxist economists of his time. Here there are the Italians Achille Loria and
Antonio Graziadei. Tey had considerable inuence on the socialist movement
and the ocial image of Marxism in Italy. Both were fond of reconciling
Marx with the dominant academic doctrine by means of adventurous
40. See, for example, Gramsci 1975, Q7, 34.
41. Gramsci 1975, Q3, 31 (Gramsci 1971, p. 386). Croce, who died in November 1952,
was able to read and comment upon the rst Italian editions of Gramscis prison-writings (Lettere
dal carcere (1947), Il materialismo storico e la losoa de Benedetto Croce (1947), Gli intelletuali e
lorganizzazione della cultura (1949), Il Risorgimento (1949), all thematic editions edited by
Platone under the direction of Togliatti). Croce wrote four short reviews of Gramscis work,
published between 1947 and 1949 in the Quaderni della critica. His remarks are very respectful,
but maintained his criticism of the philosophy of praxis as being fundamentally wrong and
totally political, not philosophical. In short, Croce rejected the very premises of Marxist thought
and restricted himself to a very brief rebuttal of Gramscis criticism of his own work and rle in
Italian intellectual life (cf. Caserta 1984; Caserta 1987).
43. Gramsci 1975, Q4, 46 (Gramsci 1971, p. 403); Gramsci 1975, Q11, 65 (Gramsci
1971, pp. 4034).
44. Otto Bauer had already proposed a very similar position within the Austromarxists circle
before WWI (cf. Bauer 1909, p. 480; Bauer 1979; Krtke 2010b).
constructions, or, rather, of overcoming him by means of such constructions.
Loria receives particular attention in the Prison Notebooks. As populariser, in
the worst sense, of historical materialism,
45
he serves Gramsci as a prototype
of an intellectual species: Lorianism. Loria, a formidably prolic author, had
caused something of a sensation before the turn of the century with a type of
Marxism garbed in the historical economism in fashion at the time.
46
Much
of what was regarded as Marxism in Italy in Gramscis time was actually
Lorias historical economism.
47
Gramsci, however, considered that the
dierences between the economistic interpretations of Marx by Croce and
Loria were not in fact so great.
48
Alongside the left-wing vulgar economists of Italy, there were also the
Soviet-Marxist economists who, with the canonisation of Marxs critique of
political economy in the 1920s, formulated a special doctrine of Marxism-
Leninism. Gramsci knew the Abstract of Political Economy compiled by
Lapidus and Ostrowitjanow, which was translated into many languages
(Gramsci had available to him the French edition of 1929).
49
Tis work,
intended and used as a textbook for courses in political economy in state and
party-schools, was a singular annoyance for Gramsci.
50
He regarded this
textbook as erroneous and not scientic, but, rather, dogmatic, and entirely
inadequate for the phase of development in which Marxism found itself in the
1920s and 1930s. What he said regarding Bukharins Popular Essay (as
Gramsci referred to it) is equally valid for the Abstract of Political Economy: Is
it possible to write an elementary book, a handbook . . . on a doctrine that is
still at the stage of discussion, polemic and elaboration? . . . If the doctrine in
question has not yet reached this classical phase of its development, any
attempt to manualise it is bound to fail.
51
If, as Gramsci seems to suggest,
45. Gramsci 1975, Q7, 13.
46. It was not uncommon to characterise Marxs theory as historicism, economism, and
usually also positivism at the same time (see, for example, the inuential work of Masaryk
(Masaryk 1899, p. 116 et sqq.)). From 1886 to 1894, Loria wrote a whole series of books (Loria
1886; Loria 1889; Loria 1892; Loria 1894) that brought him a reputation as a knowledgeable
and competent political economist, one who furthermore was not uncritical of Marxs theory.
47. Gramsci 1975, Q7, 13.
48. Gramsci 1975, Q10I, 13 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 3601).
49. Tis rst textbook of Marxist-Leninist political economy appeared in Russian: Abstract of
Political Economy and Teory of the Soviet Economy (two volumes, Moscow 1926). By 1941, it
had been through seven reprintings and was translated into many languages (with English and
French editions in 1929). It was only in the course of the 1950s that it was replaced by new
textbooks; Ostrowitjanow was once again active in formulating their conception.
50. See, above all, Gramsci 1975, Q10II, 23 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 16870); Gramsci 1975,
Q10II, 37ii (Gramsci 1995, pp. 1769).
51. Gramsci 1975, Q7, 29; Gramsci 1975, Q11, 22 (Gramsci 1971, pp. 4335).
Marxs critique of political economy is unnished and contains many
unresolved problems, and if it is not a closed system but rather a research-
programme only partially developed, then the adequate form of the
popularising, introductory presentation would be a book in which a series of
essential problems of the doctrine are presented in monographical form.
52

Tat would be more serious and more scientic and necessary,
53
as many
formulations of critical economics . . . have been mystied a proposition
that Gramsci illustrates with the example of the law of the tendential fall of
the prot-rate.
54
Such myth-formation like the law of immiseration or the
law of collapse ascribed to Marx by friend and foe alike perhaps could have
practical meaning.
55
Scientically, they are damaging.
56
Classical, critical and pure economics in Gramsci
Gramsci uses the term critical economics to characterise Marxs critique of
political economy, in opposition to what he describes as pure economics, under
which term he includes also orthodox or liberal economics.
57
Occasionally, he
speaks of Marx as the founder of critical economics.
58
Critical, in opposition
52. Ibid.
53. Te presentation of Lapidus and Ostrowitjanow is in reality not problem-oriented, but,
rather, cut up into xed and nished doctrinal pieces: they insist that political economy treats
the laws of commodity-producing society in the idealised sequence running from simple- to
socialist-commodity production treated from dierent class-standpoints. Correspondingly,
they present beside and following each other the laws of value, surplus-value, wages, prot,
trade, money and credit, ground-rent, accumulation and internationalisation for, respectively,
capitalism and socialism (i.e. the Soviet economy), from the standpoint of the interests of the
working class (cf. Lapidus and Ostrovitianov 1929).
54. See Gramsci 1975, Q10II, 37i (Gramsci 1995, pp. 1769).
55. Ibid.
56. Gramsci did not know the discussion among Marxist economists undertaken in the
Soviet Union in Russian one thinks of the value-theory works of I.I. Rubin, or E.
Preobrazhenskys theory of socialist accumulation. Similarly, Gramsci knew only indirectly
from reviews the contemporary works of Marxist economists in Western Europe for example,
the work of Sternberg or Grossmann. See Gramsci 1975, Q7, 41; Gramsci 1975, Q10II, 33
(Gramsci 1995, pp. 42830). Similarly, he was not able to read the volumes of the rst MEGA
that had been appearing since the end of the 1920s, thought he heard of their publication,
particularly the volumes containing Marxs Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, in
a letter from Sraa, written on 21 June 1932 (cf. Sraa 1991, pp. 745).
57. See Gramsci 1975, Q8, 128; Gramsci 1975, Q10II, 23 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 16870);
Gramsci 1975, Q10II, 30 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 1701); Gramsci 1975, Q10II, 32 (Gramsci
1995, pp. 1713); Gramsci 1975, Q10II, 41vii (Gramsci 1995, pp. 4335); Gramsci 1975,
Q14, 57 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 2235); Gramsci 1975, Q15, 45 (Gramsci 1995, p. 176).
to pure economics, is historicist,
59
because the critique of political economy
begins with the concept of the historicity of the determinate market and
of its automatism , while pure economics (pre-) supposes these elements
as eternal and natural.
60
Te critique of political economy realistically
analyses the relations of forces that determine the market, evaluates the
possibilities of modication [modicabilit] connected with the appearance
of new elements and their strengthening and presents the transitory nature
[caducit] and replaceable nature [sostituibilit] of the criticised science .
It nds in the inner-core of the modern economy the elements that will
dissolve it and inevitably superannuate it.
61
Te historicism of critical economics is therefore meant in a double sense:
its author, Marx, concentrated and limited himself to the investigation of a
determinate historical form of economy; consequently, he assumes that there
are dierent historical types of economy. Economic categories, even highly-
complex ones such as that of the market, carry a particular historical trace;
the critical economist therefore strives to grasp them in their historical
specicity; that is, instead of comprehending the market as such, the critical
economist seeks to comprehend the historically specic market (or the
historically specic system of markets) in capitalism. On the other hand, in
the study of the automatism, of the mode of ecacy of the modern, capitalist
market-economy, he seeks to detect traces of its dynamic, its laws of
movement, but also the tendencies of its development. Te relations in
capitalist economies do not always remain the same; modern capitalism is
capable of modifying its forms of development. Even more scandalously, for
the followers of the traditional economic mode of thought xated upon the
natural tendencies towards equilibrium and closed cycles, critical economists
study the self-destructive tendencies that are immanent to capitalism. Tey do
not dene it, a priori, as a stable, regularly and unproblematically self-
reproducing system that can only be disturbed from without. Rather, they
demonstrate how and why this economic system continually brings forth from
within crises and structural breaks, and that this system in the long-run not
only fails to reproduce its own presuppositions, but even undermines them.
Gramsci also claims, however, that classical economics is only historicist
[economics] under the appearance of its abstractions and its mathematical
language.
62
For Gramsci ascribes the distinctive concept of the determinate
59. Gramsci 1975, Q10II, 30 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 1701); Gramsci 1975, Q10II, 37i
(Gramsci 1995, pp. 1769).
60. Gramsci 1975, Q8, 128; Gramsci 1975, Q11, 52 (Gramsci 1971, pp. 41014).
61. Ibid.
market already to the classical economists, in the rst instance, to Ricardo.
63

Terefore, in his opinion, the theory-type of classical economics is much
more present in critical economics (which emerged as a critique of it) than in
the theory-type of pure economics (which turned against both classical as
well as critical economics). However, there are, in his view, foundational
concepts and fundamental principles of economics that determine the logic
of this science.
64
Tese fundamental concepts are valid for classical economics
just as for the critical variety, and even for pure (that is, neoclassical)
economics. However, the same foundational concepts Gramsci explicitly
names the most important of them as that of the determinate market and
that of the homo oeconomicus are comprehended very dierently in pure
economics from in classical and critical economics. Consequently, there
must be assignable methodological dierences between the three types of
economic theory. We thus come to the leitmotif that runs through Gramscis
numerous notes and provisional remarks on political economy: how and by
what means is critical economics distinguished from classical and from
(neoclassical) pure economics? To what extent, and for what reasons, is it
superior to these theory-types? Is pure economics, as it was presented in Italy
by, for example, Pantaleoni, pure ideology? Or is it perhaps a form of (social)
science with a special, ideological use-value? Is there a particular method, a
specic type of presentation and mode of argumentation for example, the
combination of theoretical derivation and historical interpretation, of
deduction and induction, of dialectical argumentation upon which the
superiority of critical economics over pure economics is founded?
65
Is pure
economics really only vulgar economics, or are there still scientic ndings to
be gained or expected from it even in the postclassical and neoclassical period?
And what is the scientic character of the theory-type of classical economics?
Gramsci inclines towards seeing critical (Marxian) economics and classical
economics together; both belong to the same historicist theory-type.
However, he also inclines towards including pure just as much as classical
economics in scientic economics; at the same time, he sees and emphasises
the dierence between the hypothesis-type (or theory-type) of critical and
(postclassical) pure economics. Precisely how the methodological dierences
between the three types of the independent new science of economics are to
63. See Gramsci 1975, Q7, 30 (Gramsci 1995, p. 187); Gramsci 1975, Q8, 216 (Gramsci
1995, p. 180); Gramsci 1975, Q10II, 9 (Gramsci 1971, pp. 399403); Gramsci 1975, Q11,
52 (Gramsci 1971, pp. 41014).
64. Gramsci 1975, Q7, 22.
65. Gramsci 1975, Q10II, 37i (Gramsci 1995, pp. 1769).
be dened, however, is something that is not clear to him. Without formulating
it clearly, Gramsci struggles with a double problem:
(a) What is the new, epoch-making element in Marxs critique of political
economy? By what means and to what extent did Marx actually, as he claimed,
revolutionise the science of political economy through his general critique of
the entire system of economic categories?
66
How is this critical Marxian
economics distinguished from the equally scientic, albeit in a dierent way,
classical economics, and what meaning does this renewal, this overcoming or
sublation of the theory-type of classical economics by Marx, have for the social
sciences in general?
(b) Was Marx correct when he claimed that, with the dissolution of the
Ricardian school around 1830, there was also at the same time the end of any
real science of political economy,
67
or at least the end of any scientic
bourgeois economy, so that henceforth there could only be vulgar economy
and critical economy?
68
Was there still classical economics after Ricardo and
after Marxs critique, and is a renaissance or continuation of the classical
tradition possible?
69
Gramsci, as we will see, repeatedly, explicitly attributed,
beyond a merely economic signicance, also a philosophical meaning to
Ricardos contribution to classical political economy. He can therefore hardly
deny an at-least-comparable philosophical meaning for the philosophy of
praxis, as for the social sciences in general of Marxs critical economics.
Gramsci continually engages in the Prison Notebooks with the foundation
and development of an independent political science. Te question concerning
politics as an autonomous science, that is, concerning the place that political
science occupies in a systematic (coherent and consistent [conseguente])
66. Marx, Economic Manuscripts of 18611863, in Marx and Engels 19752005c, p. 388.
67. Marx, Economic Manuscripts of 18611863, in Marx and Engels 19752005d, p. 344.
68. See Marx and Engels 19752005a, pp. 20., 245; Marx and Engels 1993, pp. 491.
and passim. Marx, Capital, Volume I, in Marx and Engels 19752005e, pp. 15.; Marx, Capital,
Volume II, Engelss Preface, in Marx and Engels 19752005f, p. 22; Marx, Economic
Manuscripts of 18611863, in Marx and Engels 19752005c, pp. 500. and passim.
69. Te neo-Ricardians who, following on from Piero Sraas Te Production of Commodities
by Means of Commodities (1960), attempted a new formulation of economic theory in its entirety
on the use-value foundation of Sraas reproduction-model, cleansed of value-theory, have
claimed precisely that. Actually, one can view Sraas attempt, which in the subtitle is called
Prelude to a Critique of Economic Teory, as a type of brilliant rehabilitation of the classical
(and to a certain extent, the Marxist) approach (Meek 1967, p. 161), against the value and
distribution-theories (marginal utility and marginal productivity) dominating the neoclassical
doctrine of pure economics. Marx also recognised that there were still classical economists
after Ricardo, representatives of the real science of political economy, like, for example, Richard
Jones; and, besides Ricardo, he knew another theoretical pinnacle of classical economics, namely,
Sismondi. Both are still neglected by proponents of the critical tradition.
Weltauassung,
70
is intertwined with the development of economics as an
autonomous science. Gramsci discusses the conditions under which the new
science of political economy emerged. How is it possible that economic and
political sciences were separated and became two independent thought-
forms?
71
Historically, at a certain stage of development of the world market,
the elements of a determinate market and a preformed economic
automatism were elaborated; only in such an historically determinable
political-social milieu could economic thinking not [M.K.: anymore] merge
into general political thought.
72
Such a milieu was inherited and theoretically
presupposed by classical economists. What is therefore the new, historically
determinate fact and what is the specic concept that underlies the modern
science of economics and indeed, independent of the other concepts and
facts relevant to the other sciences?
73
It can only be the fact of the commodity-
economy and the concept of the commodity, the production and distribution
of commodities, and not a philosophical concept.
74
Tat, however, is Marxs
critical conception, which in no way corresponds to the self-understanding of
classical, to say nothing of postclassical, pure economics.
However, Marxs conception is more dierentiated: he recognises at least
two such political-social milieux, whose two lines of development correspond
to classical-economic science French agrarian and manufacturing-capitalism
and English agrarian, manufacturing and commercial capitalism, just like the
French and the English classical political economy (from Boisguillebert to
Sismondi and from Petty to Ricardo). Furthermore, Marx knew his classical
authors and praised Aristotles original and genial economic research. Te
sphere of money and commodity-economy can be theorised in those societies
71. Tat is an element of transcendental critique, investigating the very conditions of
existence and change of the economic mode of thought, that Gramsci shares with Marx and
with other Marxists such as his contemporary Karl Korsch. Since he studied the emergence of an
independent science of politics, he logically also had to take an interest in the elements of a
political economy, which he thought he could nd in Machiavellis thought, and in the rst
economists such as Petty and Botero, whose thought marked the transition from a merely
practical, directly political concern with economic facts to their scientic treatment. See Gramsci
1975, Q8, 162 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 1634).
72. Gramsci 1975, Q8, 162 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 1634). It is already clear here that
Gramscis concept of the determinate market means something other than the concept of the
determined market in equilibrium-economics, where it only means that a market, that is, a
system of equations, which is supposed to be modelled on a market-exchange situation, is then
determined if all necessary and adequate conditions for an equilibrium are given. Otherwise, it
is undetermined, that is, an equilibrium-price cannot be indicated.
73. Gramsci 1975, Q10II, 41vii (Gramsci 1995, pp. 4335).
74. Ibid.
in which there are markets, regular exchange, trade, money and monetary
transactions, and even a certain degree of production for exchange. However,
the economic structure of ancient society, in which there was already an
independent market-sphere, but not yet an automatism unhinged from all
social obligations dominating the society, places historical limitations on the
possible insight into these market-relations.
75
Even if, with the establishment of the market as an autonomous sphere, as
Gramsci suggests, the historical condition of possibility of a science of
economics were exactly grasped, the common point of departure does not
explain why and how economics then further developed. How did economics
emerge in the form of classical economics, which was then confronted by
critical economics, both then subsequently being confronted by pure
economics? Gramsci emphasises that the science of economics is a sui generis
science, even unique in its type.
76
It is not a historical science in the usual
sense of the word.
77
Regarding pure economics, Gramsci remarks that it
should not be pushed in the direction of mathematics, even though some
mathematical economists would gladly see that happen.
78
One should rather
ask if pure economics is a science or if it is something else , a thought-form
that uses strongly scientic methods like, for example, scholastic theology.
79

Gramsci is not clear about the status of pure economics as a science.
80
He sees
that the pure economists are willing to separate themselves from the (socio-)
philosophical ballast of their history, from utilitarianism and from the
hedonistic postulate, through which their concept of economic trade
changes.
81
Te new concept of rational exchange and of homo oeconomicus
as rational man, reduced pure economics to the (formal) science of choices
75. See Marx, Capital, Volume I, in Marx and Engels 19752005e, pp. 6970. As a matter
of fact, he knew much more of such milieux also Russia, Germany and America as his
notebooks and manuscripts clearly show.
76. Gramsci 1975, Q10II, 57 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 18990).
77. Ibid.
78. Ibid.
80. He seems, for example, to be insecure in dealing with the marginal-utility concept, which
he sometimes ascribed to the classical economists, sometimes treats as a type of economic natural
fact, sometimes as an alternative value-conception with which one could come to similar results
as those of the classical or critical value-theory. See Gramsci 1975, Q10II, 22 (Gramsci 1995,
pp. 4679); Gramsci 1975, Q10II, 23 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 16870); Gramsci 1975, Q10II,
32 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 1713); Gramsci 1975, Q15, 43 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 1745). Tat is
not, however, a scandal. Many Marxist and socialist economists have attempted to reconcile the
objective (labour-value) and subjective (marginal-utility) theories with each other (cf. Krtke
2010b).
81. See Gramsci 1975, Q10II, 30 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 1701); Gramsci 1975, Q15, 43
(Gramsci 1995, pp. 1745).
between alternative goals with limited means.
82
Tus, the concept of economic
action or behaviour is so expanded and generalised that it becomes empirically
and historically empty and coincides with a formal category, that of
rationality.
83
Lionel Robbins summarised the object of knowledge of pure economics in
a formula that is still often used today: Economics is a science which studies
human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have
alternative uses.
84
Economists can therefore occupy themselves with everything
that includes a rational decision. Tus, the traditional borders of economics
as social science were broken. Pure economists built upon the determinate
abstractions of classical economics, which isolated the pure economic facts
from the more or less important connections in which they really appear and
thus constructed an abstract schema of a determined economic society.
85
On
the way to pure economics, this realistic and concrete scientic construction
of the classics was set aside and overlaid with new ahistorical abstractions, which
were related to the generic human as such.
86
By avoiding all (historically)
determinate abstractions, one thus ended up increasingly closer to formal
logic and mathematics. Can we thus explain its claim to be the only, the true
science of economics? And what is then its relationship with the elements of
classical economics, which, in the pure economics stylised as neoclassicism,
were certainly not completely lost, but in a certain sense sublated?
Gramsci is not clear about what constitutes the specic dierence between
Marxs critical economics and classical economics. Tus, he did not deal
extensively with Croces thesis that critical economics plays a valuable side-
rle as comparative-sociological economics besides the general science of
economics.
87
On the contrary, he claims that classical economics certainly
had given the impulse for the critique of political economy, but that a new
science or a new approach of the scientic problematic appears up until now
not to be possible.
88
Occasionally, he remarked that critical economics had
84. Robbins 1932, p. 16. Gramsci knew Robbinss 1932 book Essay on the Nature and
Signicance of Economic Science from a review. He correctly guessed that the formal approach
proposed by Robbins was a sign of a function of marginal-utility theory, thus of any value-
theory. See Gramsci 1975, Q15, 43 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 1745).
86. Ibid.
87. Gramsci 1975, Q10II, 41viii (Gramsci 1995, pp. 41920). Not a few economists would
still today immediately subscribe to this Crocean thesis, which denies Marxs critique of
economics any disciplinary-scientic competence and relevance.
only given a more precise solution of the (value-theory) problematic oered
by Ricardo.
89
In other places, he paraphrased the achievement of critical
economics as a deepening: critical economics deepened the theoretical
investigation of the concept of labour, with which the actual science of
economics begins.
90
Tus, Gramsci holds that some of the solutions oered by the classical
economists had not been completely superannuated. Some of their theorems
for example, the later so-called law of diminishing returns still have their
place in modern ocial economics. Gramsci, at any rate, holds that the
classical (Ricardian) theorem of comparative costs one of the underlying
theorems of classical economics is valid, also for critical economics.
91
What
needs to be investigated is therefore whether this is not completely bound up
with the Marxist theory of value [and the fall of the prot-rate], corresponding
to it in another language. It would thus be its scientic equivalent in ocial
and pure language.
92
He emphasises that orthodox economics treats the
same problems [as critical economics] in other languages. He was fascinated
by the thought that problems had to be able to be translated from one theory-
language of economics (or of another social science) into another.
93
Tis is
something quite dierent from the thesis that the mutual translatability of
90. Gramsci 1975, Q10II, 27 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 1678). Tat is, however, an unsatisfactory
description of the work of critical economics, which Marx himself repeatedly described as the
critique of economic categories or the system of bourgeois economy critically presented (Marx,
letter to Ferdinand Lassalle, 22 February 1858, in Marx and Engels 19752005h, p. 270) and
as a scientic attempt at the revolutionising of a science (Marx, letter to Ludwig Kugelmann,
28 December 1862, in Marx and Engels 19752005i, p. 436).
91. See Gramsci 1975, Q9, 32 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 2334). Marx was of a quite dierent
opinion. Gramsci can hardly be blamed for the fact that he did not know Marxs decisive critique
of Ricardos false theory of international trade. Te Grundrisse manuscript from 1857/8 was
rst published in 1939/41. Te well-known text of the rst book of Capital that Gramsci was
able to consult contains only a short reference to modications of the law of value to be developed
later, with which the state of aairs of market-exploitation on the world-scale, highlighted by
Marx, or the enrichment of one capitalist nation at the expense of another (capitalist and/or
non-capitalist), were supposed to be analysed and explained. See Krtke 2007.
92. Gramsci 1975, Q7, 22.
93. See Gramsci 1975, Q10II, 20 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 1824). Gramsci 1975, Q11, 46
(Gramsci 1995, p. 306). Tis supposition of Gramsci appears to have been inspired by a remark
of Engels, who, in the Preface to the third volume of Capital, refers to the fact that some vulgar
economic explanations of capital-prot could be used for conclusions similar to Marxs surplus-
value theory. In a way capable of being misunderstood, Engels characterised the prot-theory of
Lexis as a paraphrase of Marxs theory, while adding, however, that on this basis an even
plausible vulgar socialism could be built, such as been built here in England on the basis of the
Jevons-Menger use-value and marginal utility theory (Capital, Volume III, Engelss Preface, in
Marx and Engels 19752005g, p. 13). Tus, according to Engelss perspective, the vulgar
dierent philosophical and scientic languages is an element of any conception
of the world, and thus also of the philosophy of praxis.
94
In order to understand
the translatability of theory-languages of economics, we must rst be clear
about the very dierent grammars of these languages, which are certainly not
bound up with one and the same conception of the world. Strangely, Gramsci
seems to forget here the philosophical meaning of the dierent theory-types
of economics, which he otherwise regularly emphasises.
Economic fundamental concepts: determinate market
and homo oeconomicus
Gramsci oscillates in the denition of the foundational concepts or fundamental
concept and the (historical and logical) point of departure of economics. For
him, there are three concepts: homo oeconomicus, determinate market and
tendency-laws. Te concept of homo oeconomicus is the most general, for,
according to Gramscis idea, it plays a central rle in all three types of economic
theory. Te concepts of determinate market and tendency-laws, on the other
hand, are recognised only by classical and critical economics. How the three
theory-types are distinguished from each other is dependent not least on the
dierent versions of these fundamental concepts.
Te foundational concept of homo oeconomicus is an abstraction that
Gramsci regards as fundamentally and historically determined it is a case of
a determinate abstraction.
95
Tis means nothing other than the fact that the
content of this abstraction must be dierent according to the political-social
milieu. Gramsci nominates the concept of homo oeconomicus even as a
specic abstract concept for classical economics,
96
without expressing himself
in more detail regarding the specic, natural-law version of this concept in the
classical economists. For classical economics (just as for critical economics),
equally important is the concept of determinate market, in its turn an
historically determinate abstraction, which Gramsci repeatedly attempts to
explain. It is not the concept of the market in general, for there were markets
in dierent forms in dierent historical periods and in dierent societies, in
economic theory-language also had consequences, namely, vulgar socialist consequences, and
the translation of one theory-language into another had its price.
94. Gramsci 1975, Q11, 46 (Gramsci 1995, p. 306). Today, we would call this a concept
of inter- or transdisciplinarity.
95. Gramsci 1975, Q10II, 32 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 1713). See Gramsci 1975, Q10II, 15
(Gramsci 1971, p. 208); Gramsci 1975, Q10II, 25 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 1645); Gramsci 1975,
Q10II, 37ii (Gramsci 1995, pp. 1769).
which the concept meant something dierent in each case. He also does not
mean a determinate market-form that is construed in ideal-typical terms
(according to the known triad of perfect competition-oligopoly-monopoly).
97

What is meant is a market that has become suciently extensive, suciently
dense and regular, a market that has developed into an automatism of
exchange-relations and acts of commerce, so that the exchange-actions of
market-participants demonstrate an observable equality of form, regularity
and predictability. Only such a market the market in the historical milieu
of a capitalist economy can be studied as a particular phenomenon.
98

Both foundational concepts are bound up with each other: the modes of
behaviour and orientations of action that are described with the concept of
homo oeconomicus rst come about and can thus be studied for the rst time
when a signicantly extensive and stable market-automatism has developed,
which includes and dominates the everyday thought and action of many
individuals.
However, there are dierent versions of these fundamental concepts of
economics: classical, critical and pure (post- or neoclassical). Gramsci describes
the conception that would be adequate to Marx: the homo oeconomicus is
an abstraction, but not an ahistorical or extra-historical abstraction. Rather, it
is an historically determinate abstraction, the abstraction of economic activity
of a determinate social form.
99
It does not exist in general. Every social form
has its homo oeconomicus, that is, its own economic activity.
100
With the
transformation of social form or of its economic structure, the corresponding
activity or economic mode of employment must also change.
101
Tus, via
abstraction, the type of any of the actors or protagonists of economic activity
that follow each other in history can be formed: the capitalist, the worker, the
slave, the slave-holder, the feudal baron, the serf.
102
In order to be able to deal
with such determinate abstractions, one needs, in each case, relatively
homogenous economic modes or types of action (a relatively homogenous
97. Gramsci only once explicitly refers to pure competition and its counterpart, pure
monopoly, as basic concepts of economics. See Gramsci 1975, Q7, 30 (Gramsci 1995,
p. 187).
98. Gramsci 1975, Q7, 30 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 1879); Gramsci 1975, Q8, 128; Gramsci
1975, Q10II, 9 (Gramsci 1971, pp. 399402); Gramsci 1975, Q10II, 30 (Gramsci 1995, pp.
1701); Gramsci 1975, Q10II, 32 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 1713); Gramsci 1975, Q11, 52
(Gramsci 1971, pp. 41014).
99. Gramsci 1975, Q10II, 15 (Gramsci 1971, p. 208).
100. Ibid.
101. Ibid.
102. Gramsci 1975, Q10II, 37ii (Gramsci 1995, pp. 1769).
type of economic man).
103
In critical economics, this abstraction is not
thrown away, but, rather, operationalised, by showing, departing from the
value-concept, how exchange-value, in everyday transactions, habits, needs
and preferences, dominates action and how use-value is potentially reduced
to exchange-value.
104
Te pure economists, however, see that very dierently.
Gramsci correctly remarks that their concept of (utility-maximising) homo
oeconomicus is not a mathematical abstraction, even though it appears in
mathematical form (as assumption of behaviour-maximisation or optimisation
of a variable).
105
Te pure economists interpret this foundational concept
completely generally and suprahistorically, even if only heuristically. Gramsci
claims to be able to demonstrate that also the conception of homo oeconomicus
in pure economists is still an historically determinate abstraction.
106
Te
classical economists, for their part, certainly did not mean by homo oeconomicus
any determinate historical abstraction. For them, the homo oeconomicus is a
philosophical category of natural law, which describes man in his natural
appetites and situations; they make no distinction between the classes
possessing and non-possessing, capitalists, land-owners and proletariat. As
homini oeconomici, they are all the same, they want the same thing and they
behave in the same way, if they are only allowed to do so.
107
Gramsci is not
clear about the content of the abstract concept of homo oeconomicus
specic to classical economics.
108
For this reason, he is not able to clarify his
correct intuition that the concept never used by Marx is bound to have
quite dierent meanings in classical and critical economics.
103. Ibid.
105. See Gramsci 1975, Q10II, 27 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 1678). With the homo oeconomicus,
there enters already a sociological element into pure economic theory (cf. Lwe 1935, p. 53)
thus the angry attempts of the pure economists to clean the homo oeconomicus, that is, to drive
any historically determined meaning out of this category.
106. See Gramsci 1975, Q10II, 27 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 1678). However, he only
formulated the programme of such an investigation: One could do something useful by
systematically bringing together the hypotheses of some great pure economist such as
M. Pantaleoni, and correlating them so as to show that they are in fact the description of a
given form of society (Gramsci 1975, Q10II, 27; Gramsci 1995, pp. 1678). Te classics of
neoclassicism Walras, Marshall, Menger, Pareto would be just as suitable. Bukharin had
already attempted this for marginal-utility theory, with the Economic Teory of the Leisure Class
of 1919, which Gramsci seemingly did not know.
107. See Demeulenaere 1996; Laval 2007. Te rather new idea of a rational man, resourceful
and calculating, inspired and guided by his interests rather than by his passions, indeed had a lot
of moral and ethical implications. Classical political economists were actually propagating a new
moral economy for a new society.
A similar diculty is found in the category of the determinate market.
Gramsci argues that the concept of the determinate market must be
established. How it is taken up in pure economics and how it is taken up in
critical economics.
109
Pure economics deals with markets as such (or, more
exactly, with simple barter). It understands market and exchange as general
economic activity, instinctively abstracted from all the economic actors who
have appeared in world history; it goes back to biological man (and his
natural disposition for exchange) and regards all market-relations as eternal
and natural.
110
Critical economics, however, starts from the concept of
historicity [storicit] of the determinate market and of its automatism.
111

In critical economics, the determinate market is a highly complex concept,
which denominates the ensemble of concrete economic activities of a
determinate social form; it thus signies a multiplicity of relations within a
determinate economic structure.
112
It is a concept of structure: what is the
determinate market, and by what is it determined?. By the underlying
structure of the existing society or those (relatively constant) elements of this
social structure that determine the relatively unchanging structure of the
market in this society, just as those other variables and self-developing
elements , which determine the structural changes and breaks, the
conjunctures and crises in this society.
113
But it is also a concept of action and
historical change, as Gramsci suggests. Te critique of political economy
analyses the relations of forces that determine the market, evaluates the
possibilities of modication [modicabilit] connected with the appearance
of new elements and thus, by analysing the processes of transformation of
markets and market-structures, provides the clue to understanding the
changing and transitory nature of the science [M.K.: classical political
economy] which it criticises.
114
It is, nevertheless, an abstract concept that is based upon two determinate
abstractions. First, abstraction is made from the individual multiplicity of
economic actors of the relevant society (of modern capitalism).
115
Marx,
therefore like the classical economists operates with economic classes
as actors, that is, with the well-founded assumption, corresponding to his
structural concept of the system of markets in capitalism, that, rstly, not all
110. Ibid; Gramsci 1975, Q8, 128.
111. Ibid.
112. See Gramsci 1975, Q10II, 30 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 1701). Gramsci 1975, Q11, 52
(Gramsci 1971, pp. 41014).
114. Gramsci 1975, Q8, 128.
economic actors are the same; secondly, not all can appear on the same market;
and, thirdly, not all can operate in the same way in the markets available to
them. Second, however, the (classical and critical) concept of determinate
market includes the abstraction of the state, or the abstraction of a determinate
political, moral, juridical superstructure, which makes possible and guarantees
the given situation of any ensemble of market-relations.
116
Tis second, central
element of determinate abstraction of modern capitalist market-economics
is highly remarkable, also because Gramsci ascribes it in the rst place to
classical economics. Te modern state, itself an economic actor sui generis
is, as lawgiver and regulator providing the determinate market [with] its legal
form in which all economic actors operate,
117
an element of the determinate
market, a condition of any economic activity in this market-economy.
118
In
order to study purely economic activity in such a market-economy, one must
abstract from the state, that is, from organised political violence and from
the state of violence that it creates protections and guarantee of property,
that is, of monopoly of the means of production, and the subordination of
the possessors of labour-power.
119
One must not only abstract from state-
violence in general, but from States (I say States deliberately), that is,
from the system of states and the structure of the world-market determined
by it.
120
Behind the determinate abstraction of the determinate market there is
thus an implicit state-theory, a theory about the State as an economic actor,
which Gramsci believes to nd in the rst instance in Ricardo.
121
Gramsci
knows that also the liberal and pure economists were not nave on this
point. He regarded the old discussion about the limits of the states activity as
the most important political science discussion, which served to determine
the limits between liberals and non-liberals;
122
many theoretical dierences
of opinion in economics have their foundation in dierent conceptions of
the state, in the struggle over the correct relationship of state and market.
123

Te dierences between classical and critical economics on this point do not
118. Ibid.
119. See Gramsci 1975, Q7, 42; Gramsci 1975, Q10II, 20 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 1824);
Gramsci 1975, Q10II, 41vii (Gramsci 1995, pp. 4335).
120. Gramsci 1975, Q7, 42; Gramsci 1975, Q10II, 41vii (Gramsci 1995, pp. 4335).
121. Gramsci 1975, Q10II, 41vii (Gramsci 1995, pp. 4335). At rst glance, this is correct
insofar as Ricardos Principles are, for the larger part, a treatise on the true principles of taxation.
However, the theory Gramsci is looking for is to be found, on closer inspection, in Marx, who
has a much more determinate and more complex idea of what the state in a capitalist market-
economy does or can and must allow (cf. Krtke 1998a; Krtke 1998b).
122. Gramsci 1975, Q3, 142.
123. See Gramsci 1975, Q6, 82 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 4359). A core-point in his sketch of
disturb Gramsci; both are for him economics without the State. Te actual
problems of any economic State theory to what extent the automatism of
a determinate market and the statal regulation of this market hang together
or condition each other, to what extent economic activities on the markets
and determinate-statal activities outside the market condition each other do
not seem to have been a concern for Gramsci, beyond reference to the states
guarantee of property.
In his remarks on Americanism and Fordism, Gramsci actually goes a step
further. Te transformation towards a new industrial structure in advanced
capitalist countries then underway is closely linked in fact, only possible
due to a peculiar form of the state and a corresponding social structure. It
can and it will, however, be inuenced, even shaped, by state-action. Tis is
inevitably the case in Europe, where the remaining class-structure of the
ancien rgime, the parasitic layers and classes of society, form a major
impediment for the Americanisation of capitalism.
124
Ricardo as philosopher on the methodology of classical economics
Tere are a number of mostly short references and notes on the history of
political economy in the Prison Notebooks.
125
Gramsci had available to him in
prison the textbook of Gide and Rist on the history of political economy
(1926). However, he did not have original texts of classical economics with
him. Gramsci wrote to Piero Sraa and asked for his help (via Tania Schucht,
in a letter from 20 May 1932): is there a specialist literature on the method of
investigation of economics of Ricardo and in particular on the new elements
the Americanisation process is the dierence between America and Europe in terms of their
societal and state-structures.
124. See Gramsci 1975, Q22, 2, 7 (Gramsci 1971, pp. 2814, 293).
125. Some of them have received a signicance that they do not have in the sparse literature
on the topic. Gramsci read an article of G. Arias about the economic thought of Machiavelli in
early 1932. Before, he had asked Sraa if Machiavelli could be seen as a mercantilist who said
in political language what the contemporary mercantilists said in the language of political
economy (letter to Tania on 14 March 1932). Sraa drew his attention to a possible parallel to
Petty. After reading, Gramsci made the suggestion (not claim) that Machiavelli implicitly in
thought had overcome the mercantilist phase and already showed signs of a physiocratic
character (Gramsci 1975, Q8, 162; Gramsci 1995, pp. 1634). He conjectured thus, because
there are some considerations on the rle of the rural population in the renewal of the Italian
city-republics in Machiavelli. His conjecture goes too far (cf. Begert 1983). Many mercantilists
of the seventeenth century dealt also with rural economy (or economic politics), without thereby
thinking in a physiocratic way. Te physiocrats were likewise conditioned by a determinate
socio-political milieu, that of the so-called agrarian revolution, which, however, in the time of
Machiavelli played no rle yet.
that Ricardo introduced into methodological critique?
126
Can one claim that
Ricardo, beyond the history of economics, where he certainly has an important
place, has also had an important meaning in the history of philosophy? And
can one say that Ricardo had contributed to setting the rst theoreticians of
the philosophy of praxis on the way to the superannuation of Hegelian
philosophy and to the elaboration of their new historicism, purged of all traces
of speculative logic?
127
With this hunch, Gramsci clearly goes beyond the usual
and uncontested conception according to which classical English (and French)
economics contributed some essential component elements (categories and
theories) to the development of Marxs conception of social science. He was
concerned to see how and to what extent classical English economics in the
methodological form developed by Ricardo contributed to the further
development of the new theory.
128
He suggests that Ricardos contribution is
also synthetic, namely, that it concerns the Weltauassung and the way of
thinking in general and [is] not merely analytic, regarding a particular doctrine,
fundamental though it may be.
129
He supposes that at least two of the
foundational concepts for economics go back to Ricardo: that of the
determinate market and that of the law of tendency.
130
Tese concepts,
which Gramsci ascribes to Ricardo, were perhaps the stimulus for Marx and
Engels to replace the Hegelian theory of history with a new causal and
dialectical theory of immanent development of human societies.
131
Sraas
answer (from 21 June 1932, mediated via Tanias letter to Gramsci on 5 July)
shows a certain reluctance. Sraa responded: Ricardo was, and always
remained, a stockbroker of mediocre education; the only element of culture
that can be found in him comes from the natural sciences; it is dicult to
estimate Ricardos philosophical signicance, if there is any, for he himself had
never attempted an historical treatment of his own thought. Ricardo did not
question himself about the historical character of the laws that he investigated,
he never adopted any historical point of view and treated the laws of the
society in which he lived as natural and unchangeable. Te concept of
tendential laws belongs rather to vulgar economics and is to be found in
Alfred Marshall rather than in Ricardo.
132
126. Gramsci 1994b, pp. 1789.
127. Ibid.
128. Ibid.
129. Ibid.
130. Ibid.
131. Ibid.
132. See Sraa 1991, p. 74. Derek Boothman is mistaken to suppose that we can draw the
conclusion from Sraas answer that he had not understood Gramscis question (Boothman
1991, p. 61). Sraa knew the real Ricardo even better than Marx had been able to know him he
Gramsci did not allow himself to be deterred. In the Prison Notebooks,
he formulates a programme of methodological investigations related to the
laborious transition from classical to critical economics: it is necessary to study
exactly the way in which Ricardo established economic laws, for these are one
of the points of departure of the philosophical experiences that led Marx and
Engels to historical materialism.
133
One must particularly investigate whether
Ricardo is not only important for Marx as an economist, for example, due
to his development of the theory of value, or rather, beyond that, whether
he did not also suggest a philosophical signicance, a way of thinking and
seeing life and history.
134
To this end, one must look at the conceptual and
methodological novelties that Ricardo introduced into economics, in order
to check if these new methodological rules or formal scientic principles
in reality had the signicance of a philosophical innovation.
135
Tus, one
should rst summarise Ricardos discoveries on the terrain of methodology-
as-rules, and then further research [into] the historical origin of these
Ricardian principles.
136
Tird, this programme would also need to include the
investigation of the question of what Marx did with these methodological new
elements of Ricardo, to what extent he saw them as such and to what extent
the confrontation with the work of Ricardo was for him a philosophical
experience. And there is also, of course, the question of what rle this
experience, that is, Marxs intensive and repeated reading and fundamental
critique of Ricardo (as of the Ricardian school), had for Marxs work on the
critique of political economy. Gramsci did not formulate explicitly this third,
necessary step of his work-programme, even though it is clear that the actual
goal of his study of Ricardo consisted in clarifying for himself the origin of
the characteristic scientic hypotheses and theory-type and the proper and
was then editing Ricardos correspondence and his unpublished manuscripts, which do not
present anything that would vindicate any of Gramscis conjectures. Sraas response was polite
and cautious. He says that he would have to study Marx and Engels again and that is why he
mentions the unpublished work by Marx from 1844, rst published in the same year, 1932, in
that very same letter. Gramscis fundamental thought, however, is entirely correct. Ricardos
eorts to systematise the principles of political economy, based upon value as its core-concept,
was crucial for Marxs critique. It is only that in a more exact investigation something rather
dierent turns out to be the case: Marx needed all of classical political economy, Ricardo is only
one element of it and not in every respect the most meaningful.
133. Gramsci 1975, Q8, 128; Gramsci 1975, Q10II, 9 (Gramsci 1971, pp. 399402).
Tat is, of course, inspired by Lenins well-known idea that Marxism came from three sources
German idealist philosophy, English political economy and French socialism.
136. Ibid.
essential methodological principles of critical economics.
137
Gramsci contents
himself with the bold claim that Marx universalised Ricardos discoveries,
that is, extended them to history in its entirety.
138
Tus, in Gramscis view,
Ricardo, the discoverer of fundamental elements of the new method of
scientic treatment (not only) of economics, has a key-position not only for
critical economics, but also for the philosophy of praxis overall: one can say
that the philosophy of praxis equals Hegel + David Ricardo.
139
What are the earthshaking methodological new elements that Gramsci
supposes to nd in Ricardo? He names two of them: (a) the method of
presupposing that or positing that;
140
and (b) the tendential laws.
141
Te
rst new element, which Gramsci only sketches out briey as the positing of
premises from which results a determinate consequence, is, of course, not
quite so new.
142
All classical economists, just like their predecessors, reason
occasionally in this theoretical way: what would be the case, if . . . ?. Tey
operate, that is, with more-or-less clearly formulated suppositions and
abstractions from what they regarded as irrelevant for the matter at hand. Tis
highly unsatisfactory characterisation of the deductive or abstract procedure,
which had been attributed to Ricardo already by his contemporaries, is derived
almost literally from the textbook of Gide and Rist that Gramsci had with him
in prison: there, this method is characterised as hypothetical; it is even
claimed that Marx was inspired by it.
143
Aside from the more-or-less successful
formulation the presentation of price-theory in mathematical models was
attempted shortly after the end of the Ricardian school (for example, by
Cournot in 1838) any judgement of this procedure depends not only on the
type of selected premises, but also on the rigour with which the necessary
abstractions are carried out, which, in their turn, are connected with the more-
or-less clear idea of the theorist of the goal of proof [Beweisziel ] of his
investigation. Gramsci recognises that it is the type of suppositions and
abstractions that counts, not the abstraction as such. Presumably, he means
the concept of determinate market, which, according to his perspective,
had served Ricardo to investigate purely the economic hypotheses.
144
What
is lacking here, however, is a confrontation with Marxs much clearer and
137. See Gramsci 1975, Q10II, 37ii (Gramsci 1995, pp. 1769).
139. Ibid.
140. Gramsci 1975, Q8, 128; Gramsci 1975, Q10II, 9 (Gramsci 1971, pp. 399402).
141. Gramsci 1975, Q10II, 9 (Gramsci 1971, p. 400); Gramsci 1975, Q10II, 33 (Gramsci
1995, pp. 42830); Gramsci 1975, Q10II, 36 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 4303).
143. See Gide and Rist 1929, pp. 161.
more elaborated critique of Ricardos method of investigation: Marx exerted
himself to note both the historical justication, even the contemporary
scientic necessity of Ricardos method, as well as its scientic inadequacy,
an inadequacy that he claimed had not only led to mistakes in formal
presentation, but also to materially erroneous results.
145
Gramsci is clearer regarding the tendential laws. Here, his thesis of the
new elements is even more plausible, for the classical economists in reality
troubled themselves more-or-less consciously regarding what laws of
economic-social life could look like, given that they were not natural laws,
but also not norms drawn from notions of natural justice. No law of political
economy can be anything other than tendential, Gramsci claimed.
146
What
makes a law a tendential law? What is this reference to the tendential
character or the tendentiality of an (economic) law supposed to mean?
147

Gramsci was concerned to clarify this formal-logical principle: tendential
laws are not laws in a naturalistic sense (analogous to laws of nature) and are
not laws in the sense of speculative determinism, but, rather, laws in an
historicist sense.
148
When Gramsci attempted to clarify this particular
tendency-character of economic laws, he referred to Marxs law of the
tendential fall of the prot-rate (which he also characterised as the tendential
law of the prot-rate),
149
or to Croces critique of this law. He did not refer to
the tendential laws that Ricardo established for example, Ricardos version
of the law of the fall of the rate of prot, which Marx, in his turn, had
extensively criticised. In Croces critique, according to Gramsci, there was a
fundamental error. Croce did not recognise that the technical progress and
the thus possible relative surplus-value production (and the rising of the
surplus-value rate) is actually an integral moment of Marxs law, which Marx
already presented in the rst volume of Capital; it is therefore wrong to play
o the presentation in the rst volume against the presentation in the third
145. Marx, Economic Manuscripts of 18611863, in Marx and Engels 19752005b, pp.
389. and passim. Te copious excerpts and commentary on Ricardos chief work that Marx
produced from 1844 onwards remained unpublished until very recently, in Section IV of the
second MEGA. Tis section of Marxs workshop was still closed to Gramsci.
147. See Gramsci 1975, Q10II, 9 (Gramsci 1971, p. 400); Gramsci 1975, Q10II, 33
(Gramsci 1995, pp. 42830); Gramsci 1975, Q10II, 36 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 4303).
148. Gramsci 1975, Q10II, 9 (Gramsci 1971, p. 400). Marx, as might be remembered, had
formulated his many laws of the capitalist mode of production with many conditions, allowing
for various modications even for the most fundamental and general laws such as the law of
value.
volume.
150
Gramsci conducted his anti-critique in the direction of two more-
exact denitions of tendential laws:
(a) the fall of the prot-rate is tendential, because Marx does not ignore the
forces working in the other direction, as in the usual economic hypotheses,
but, rather, brings together two (and more) mutually contradictory aspects or
moments of the same process of the production of relative surplus-value
into an organic whole.
151
Gramscis formulations betray his uncertainty he
did not have the text with him but he is referring to the interaction of the
rising surplus-value rate and rising organic composition of capital. His
surprisingly modern insight is the following: the tendency is nite, because
the immanent forces working in opposed directions that are bound up with
relative surplus-value production have technical and social limits, that is, they
exhaust themselves. When, therefore, the whole world economy will have
become capitalist and at a determinate stage of development, the economic
contradiction will become a political contradiction and will be resolved
politically in a transformation of praxis.
152
(b) Also the type and way that the law is supposed to be established shows
that it is not a case of an automatism, certainly not of something immediately
pre-existing. On the contrary, technical progress in capitalism sets in motion
a contradictory process of development, a dialectical process in which the
molecular developmental advances that are activated by the individual
entrepreneur on their unending hunt for extra prots put all the others under
pressure to follow and thus lead to a tendentially catastrophic result for the
totality of capitalists, which all in their turn try to escape by means of further
individual progressive advances.
153
However, what Gramsci here correctly
deploys against Croce is to be found in Marx and not in Ricardo. Ricardo
establishes his analogous law in a very dierent way with the quasi-natural law
of diminishing fertility of land and the limitation of natural resources. Marxs
law is dealing with a process of creation and destruction of value, a
permanently contested change of social relations of production, disguised as
150. Ibid. With that, Croces objection is only partly refuted. Tere remains the problem of
how and why the rise of the surplus-rate per employee cannot, in the long run, compensate or
even overcompensate the rise of the organic composition of capital, that is, the relative decline
of the number of employed workers. A possible solution that emerged after decades of debates
between Marxist economists consists in giving up the alleged generality of the law and in
explaining the dynamic of the prot-rate in dierent periods of modern capitalism separately,
and partially dierently.
152. Ibid.
values. Gramsci is right in stressing that the fall of the rate of prot is just
one aspect of a whole highly contradictory process of capitalist development.
A philosophical reading of the critique of political economy
In the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci formulated the preliminary point of departure
and the direction for a renewed study of Marxs critique of political economy
nothing more, and nothing less. He thus marks the rst, important step
towards the reconstruction of the philosophy of praxis, whose core-material of
scientic propositions are to be found in Marxs critique of economics. In order
to generalise and to apply it, one must rst be clear about what the claimed
superiority of critical economics over classical and pure economics is based
upon. One must know what its particular scientic potential actually consists
in, precisely that which makes it more fertile for scientic progress than those
other theory-types.
154
In order to be clear about this, it is sensible to begin in
the same place where Marxs own process of research began, namely, in the
study of classical economics. However, the element that Gramsci tentatively
proposes as the actual strength and methodological particularity of critical
economics, namely, an adequate integration of deductive and inductive
method, of theory and history,
155
is, in reality, not a strength of Ricardo
or of the Ricardian school ( James Mill, MacCulloch, de Quincey).
156
Marx
was not able to take over these methodological new elements in a nished
form from Ricardo or any other classical economist; he had to work them
out via the process of critique. Gramsci, thanks to his philosophical interest
in economics, saw the signicance of the new type of scientic treatment, of
specic method, which was carried out for the rst time in Marxs critique of
political economy. Only the Austro-Marxists clearly saw this before Gramsci.
157

However, Gramsci was no longer in a position to be able to carry out a
programme of study.
154. Gramsci 1975, Q10II, 37i (Gramsci 1995, pp. 1656).
155. Ibid.; Gramsci 1975, Q10II, 37ii (Gramsci 1995, pp. 1769).
156. It is, however, correct that at least James Mill and then John Stuart Mill, dierently
from Ricardo himself, produced extensive considerations on the methodology of political
economy. Marx viewed John Stuart Mills Logic with derision.
157. Between Max Adler, Otto Bauer, Rudolf Hilferding and others there was an extensive
discussion of method in the period before WWI, in which they attempted to clarify the new and
specic dimension of the historical and social-scientic research founded by Marx. Rosa
Luxemburg, a trained economist, also had some hunches, but did not engage in any scholarly
debate on the matter.
Given the chance to study again Marxs and Ricardos texts and to study
for the rst time the specialist literature about classical economics and the
fate of the Ricardian school, he would perhaps have reconsidered many of the
perspectives expressed in the Prison Notebooks. He would have quickly noted
that Ricardos strong and coherent version of the labour-theory of value was
in no way seen by Ricardos contemporaries as harmless or, as he wrote in the
Prison Notebooks, a purely objective and scientic presentation, and that it in
fact caused a scandal.
158
He would have seen that the theory of value, because
of the polemical and morally and politically contentious signicance that it
already had long before Marxs time,
159
but also because of its recognisable
deciencies, was already at the time of Ricardo heavily criticised and
successfully contested. After 1831, there was no longer a Ricardian school
of economics in England.
160
Tere was still a classical tradition. However, it
was cultivated either in the form of ever more detailed critique of Ricardian
theorems or in the form of an encyclopaedic presentation of many economic
theories, mixed up with historical and social-philosophical considerations.
In this perspective, John Stuart Mill and Henry Sidgwick followed the great
model of Adam Smith.
Gramscis intuition, however, was correct on one important point. Ricardos
attempt to make a strict science out of political economy led to the rst great
dispute over method in economics. Ricardo was attacked due to his disposition
for abstract, deductive reasoning. His anything-but-harmonic perspective on
the development of industrial capitalism quickly brought to political economy
the charge of being a dismal science in opposition to the noble science of
politics. Te economists sought to liberate themselves from this stigma by
turning against the Ricardian vice of overreaching abstraction, which
unhesitatingly proposed purely logical argumentation on the basis of abstract
hypotheses. Even at the time of Ricardo and in opposition to him, political
economy confronted critique, as Marx remarked.
161
It confronted critique in
the person of Malthus, as well as in the persons of Richard Jones and Simonde
158. See Gramsci 1975, Q7, 42; Gramsci 1975, Q10II, 41vii (Gramsci 1995, pp.
4335).
159. Ibid.
160. At the beginning of 1831 almost eight years after Ricardos death there was a series
of debates among the leading English economists about Ricardos theoretical legacy in the posh
London Political Economy Club. Te question concerned which of the tenets and theories
proposed by Ricardo had to be given up or revised. Te gentlemen there were no women
among them agreed on a voluminous catalogue of Ricardos theoretical errors; almost all his
principles and theories were explicitly condemned by the gathered lite of economists, with only
a few dissenters (cf. Meek 1967, pp. 68.).
161. Marx, Capital, Volume I, in Marx and Engels 19752005e, p. 14.
de Sismondi. Despite the great dierences of their perspective, they all turned
against Ricardos method in the name of history and empiricism. It became
fashionable in the circles of English economists to play o the healthy tradition
of economics embodied in the work of Adam Smith, elevated to a model
against the articial, metaphysical speculations of Ricardo and the Ricardians.
Many classical economists and contemporaries of Ricardo posited political
economy in opposition to the natural sciences and mathematics; many atly
rejected the use of mathematical methods (a perspective that Marx famously
did not share). Ricardo was regarded as a speculative philosopher who,
dierently from the members of the healthy tradition, had no respect for or
even knowledge of the facts (including historical facts).
162
Marx not only studied Ricardo seriously (as far as the texts were available to
him) but also intensively read all the major and minor critics of Ricardo
(Bailey, Tompson, Richard Jones, Sismondi, Malthus, etc.). Given the
opportunity to read Marxs preparatory works for critical economics closely,
Gramsci would have seen that they contain a twofold critique critiques of
Ricardo as well as critiques of critics of Ricardo. Marx is neither a Ricardian
nor on the side of Ricardos opponents. Nevertheless, some of them Richard
Jones and Sismondi in the rst instance play a rle just as important for the
emergence of critical economics as Ricardo. Marxs critique of the scientically
unsatisfactory method of investigation of Ricardo clearly does not regard
abstraction as such, nor does it negate the rigour with which all categories of
the capitalist economy are submitted to a fundamental principle: that of the
determination of value by labour-time. It was precisely in this that Marx saw
the signicant progress of Ricardo in opposition to the trotting of the
economists before him. Marxs critique takes aim at the bad, abstract way in
which Ricardo confronted the fundamental principles of the determination of
value by labour (-time) directly with all of the phenomena of a developed
capitalist economy and attempted to subjugate them theoretically to this
principle.
163
Methodologically, Marx accused Ricardo of abstracting falsely,
incompletely or formally, of not going far enough and not coherently enough,
thus resulting in false abstractions.
164
He attempted to comprehend all
phenomena of bourgeois economics immediately as conrmation of the
general law, instead of rst developing these forms of appearance and their
162. See Sowell 1974, pp. 112.
163. See Marx, Economic Manuscripts of 18611863, in Marx and Engels 19752005b, pp.
389.
164. See Marx, Economic Manuscripts of 18611863, in Marx and Engels 19752005b, pp.
337., 392.; Marx and Engels 19752005c, p. 72.
necessary contradictions with the general law.
165
Marxs critique of Ricardo, in
so far as it is methodological, is the critique of a theorist schooled in Hegel.
Here, Gramscis intuition is correct.
A new textbook of critical economics
Gramscis sketches suer from the fact that, apart from a German edition of
Wage-Labour and Capital, he did not have access in prison to any of the
writings of Marx himself. Terefore he himself noted the necessary limitation,
that the texts of the Critique of Political Economy [must] be read again, for
everything that he wrote down was based for the most part on memory.
166

His dierent notes ow into a consideration that is characteristic of him: how
can today (that is, at the beginning of the 1930s, around 50 years after Marxs
death) a prcis, an introductory textbook of critical economics, that is, an
economics that connects with Marxs political economy and develops it further,
be written in a modern way? After the diverse works of critical economics
have been made available (in the rst MEGA, which had then just begun to
appear), an adequate solution of the problem of the new edition of such
textbooks becomes a necessity, a scientic desideratum.
167
Gramsci notes some
criteria that such a textbook of critical economics would have to satisfy:
(1) It must be written on the basis of all three volumes of Capital; it must
also take note of the remaining economic writings of Marx, his entire
treatment of economics (thus, for example, also the Teories of Surplus-Value,
earlier writings such as the Poverty of Philosophy, Contribution to the Critique
of Political Economy and Wages, Price and Prot).
168
It should give a correct
presentation of the whole corpus of the doctrine of critical economics, not
only a rsum of individual writings.
169
(2) As if he had a presentiment of the Marxist literature of the 1970s,
Gramsci emphasised that the method of presentation should not follow Marx
in a slavish way; unimaginative and slavish summaries are to be avoided at all
costs. Instead, one must orient oneself according to current critical and cultural
standards. Te whole matter should be placed on an original level and
165. Ibid.
168. One should not forget that Gramsci was unable to read any of Marxs texts that were
only published after his imprisonment, some very recently. Gramscis demand for a comprehensive
initial survey has thus not only become much more urgent today, but also much harder to
honour than in his own time.
reorganised, preferably in a systematic fashion, and presented in a way
appropriate for learning. Te entire set of examples and concrete facts that is
contained in the original texts are to be updated and the given facts of the
economic and legal terrain of the country for which the textbook is intended
are to be taken into account. Furthermore, the textbook must be written
energetically, polemically and aggressively. With this demand, Gramsci
turned expressly against the dogmatic style of the textbook of political
economy of Lapidus and Ostrowitjanow,
170
which in his time was used
everywhere in the Soviet Union and in the Communist movement. In
Gramscis opinion, this textbook suered from the fact that it announced the
perspectives of critical economics as the uncontested dogma of a ruling,
established doctrine, as the form of expression of an ocial canon of knowledge,
which was contested by nobody and rejected radically by nobody.
171

Gramsci explained what he meant by polemically and aggressively: not strong
words and bad style, but, rather, a presentation that went into economic
debates of the time, which did not leave any essential questions, or those
presented by the vulgar economists as essential, without an answer, which
thus did not ignore the ruling doctrine, but attacked it vigorously, hunting it
out of its cover and fortresses and discrediting it before the eyes of the young
generation of learners.
172
Rarely does Gramsci attack so aggressively and
blatantly.
173
He argued that Lapidus and Ostrowitjanow did not understand
how to arm the organic and historically current forms in the relation
between dominant and critical economics. What interests beginners
immediately and gives the general direction to the whole further research
namely, the question of how the two currents of political-economic thought
dierentiate themselves from the beginning in terms of approach and how
they are distinguished today in the current cultural terms and not only in
the cultural terms from 80 years ago is simply ignored. How critical
economics relates to ruling economics is not only assumed to be known but
170. See Lapidus and Ostrovitianov 1929.
172. Ibid.
173. In Gramscis time, there were only a few introductory texts that corresponded
to his demand in terms of their approach. Among them would be Julian Borchardts Die
volkswirtschaftlichen Grundbegrie nach der Lehre von Karl Marx (1923) and Otto Bauers
lectures on the Einfhrung in die Volkswirtschaftslehre of 19278 (cf. Bauer 1976). Gramsci knew
Borchardts textbook and praised it, because it is not only based on the foundation of Volume I
of the Critique of Political Economy, but on the basis of all three volumes (Gramsci 1975,
Q10II, 37ii; Gramsci 1995, pp. 1769). Unfortunately, however, he did not know Rosa
Luxemburgs Einfhrung in die Nationalkonomie, published for the rst time in 1925.
also is accepted without discussion, while neither of the two is true.
174
In this
way, however, any scientic progress in economics becomes impossible.
175
If
one wants to defend the critical conception of economics, one must show
systematically that orthodox economics treats the same problems in another
language; one must rst show this agreement of the treated problems and
then prove that the critical solution is superior.
176
Te text of such a textbook
must, that is to say, be bilingual: the authentic text and the vulgar
translation or that of liberal economics, in the margins or between the lines.
177
(3) Such a textbook would not be complete without a course on the history
of economic opinions. Te whole conception of critical economics is
historicist, therefore its theoretical treatment cannot do without the history
of economic science.
178
Critical economics must be interested in the scientic
work of its predecessors, above all of the classical economists, for it inherits
their way of posing problems and categories, as Gramsci explains with the
example of the concept of value: classical economists were only marginally
interested in the abstract and scientic concept of value, even if individual
economic researchers (like Ricardo) made an eort to value theoretical
consistency. For the rst economists, the more concrete and more immediate
concept of individual or enterprise prot was much more important. Tey
were concerned above all with the local, national and international processes
of value-formation and concentrate in the rst instance on the particular
labour crystallised in the dierent commodities.
179
However, they end up
comprehending the concept of value the concept of socially necessary
labour generally and, as Gramsci suggests, in a mathematical formula.
Tus, and thanks to this preliminary work of the classical economists, the
interesting problem begins for critical economics. One must know this
prehistory if one is not to misunderstand critical economics as a xed and
nished product sprung fully-grown from the head of the genial thinker Marx.
Lapidus and Ostrowitjanows textbook (unlike the later work of Rubin (1929)
175. Ibid. With uncommon acidity, Gramsci continues: What strikes one is how a critical
standpoint that requires the greatest intelligence, open-mindedness, mental freshness and
scientic inventiveness has become the monopoly of narrow-minded, jabbering wretches who,
only by reason of the dogmatism of their position, manage to maintain a place not in science
itself but in the marginal bibliography of science. In these matters the greatest danger is
represented by an ossied form of thought: better a certain disorderly refractoriness than the
philistine defence of preconceived cultural positions (Gramsci 1975, Q15, 45; Gramsci 1995,
p. 176).
177. Ibid.
178. Ibid.
that Gramsci unfortunately did not know) is silent on these historical contexts.
Gramsci argues that this is unsatisfactory for a scientic textbook of critical
economics.
180
Additionally, critical economics has a prehistory and its own
history, including dierent historical phases; in each phase, the emphasis lies
upon the historically prior theoretical and practical context.
181
In terms of
the capitalist mode of production, the accent lies upon the totality of
socially necessary labour. For critical economics needs this concept not only
for the goal of scientic and mathematical synthesis, for its own scientic
construction; the critics of political economy wanted (already before Marx) to
make clear to the new class of wage-workers that their value-creating labour is
specially a totality and that as a totality it eects the foundational process
of the economic movement.
182
If the working class has become no longer the
object of the apparently independent movement of value, but rather,
manager of the economy, then the critical economists would no longer be
able to think only of socially necessary average value , but, rather, would
have to enter into the problems of particular labour. Te mode of posing the
problem and the way of working of a critical economics of socialism are
unavoidably dierent from those of the critical economics of Marx and the
Marxists who studied capitalism.
183
(4) Gramsci emphasised that such a textbook could not do without a short
general introduction in which a summarising presentation of the philosophy
of praxis and the most important and most essential methodological principles
of critical economics should appear.
184
Tis presentation could be based upon
the totality of the economic works of Marx, in which numerous methodological
expressions are included or dispersed and indicated, when the concrete
opportunity for it is available.
185
Croce had raised the demand that a
presentation of economics needed a theoretical preface in which the concepts
and methods specic to economics are presented.
186
Gramsci followed him,
not only because he emphasised the methodological originality of critical
economics or the philosophical signicance of Marxs critique of political
180. See Gramsci 1975, Q10II, 23 (Gramsci 1995, pp. 16870).
181. Ibid.
182. Ibid.
183. Ibid.
185. Ibid. Gramsci repeatedly refers to the prefaces to the Contribution to the Critique of
Political Economy and to Capital as examples of a philosophical-methodological introduction to
essays on economics; they are perhaps too short and compressed, but the principle is held to.
Tey were to be extended, based upon the numerous methodological remarks in the main texts
(cf. Gramsci 1975, Q15, 43; Gramsci 1995, pp. 1745).
economy. For him, it was also a matter of the foundation of a tradition of
theory. Te dominant academic economics had been working for a long time
with great care on the improvement of the logical instruments of its science
and owed a large part of its kudos to its formal rigour, the exactness of
expression.
187
In critical economics, until that point, there had been no
comparable tradition of continual work on concepts, analytical techniques
and forms of presentation. One uses there much too often stereotypical
concepts and expresses oneself with a tone of superiority, which does not
correspond to the signicance of the presentation.
188
A deciency, Gramsci
argues, that needs to be redressed.
Gramscis critical economics and political economy today
According to the classical conception, political economy included the triad of
ethics, economics and politics.
189
It emerged in the seventeen-hundreds in the
sovereign-territorial states, which competed with the city-mercantile republics
and the city-federations such as the Hanseatic League and the supra-territorial
political powers such as the (Catholic) Church and the (Holy Roman) Empire,
and nally drove them from the eld.
190
Political science, which then only
existed as science of the statesmen or science of legislation, obtained a new
form: political economy and history combined. Since Adam Smith, methods
and concepts of political economy dominated the political debates just as they
dominated political theory; political economy enjoyed pre-eminence, for it
was regarded as the science whose knowledge was valid independently from
the respective form of government or the composition of the government in
any particular country. Tis privileged position as foundation and model of
all social sciences and as a guiding perspective for political decisions was only
lost by political economy when it became apolitical in the wake of the
so-called marginalist revolution at the end of the nineteenth century,
transforming itself into pure economics.
191
Tis neoclassical ruling doctrine claims the status of a science for itself
and with success. It claims to be the only true social science, because of its
comparatively hard, theoretical core the assumption of maximising-
behaviour, the assumption of a natural tendency towards market-equilibrium
187. Ibid.
188. Ibid.
189. See Cropsey 1980.
190. See Brgin 1993.
191. See Collini, Winch and Burrow 1983.
and the assumption of given and stable preferences that make possible rational
activity. Its basic model should be applicable to all forms and types of human
behaviour, independently from historical time and social location.
192
Tat
imperialistic claim for general competence in the social sciences has been
carried forward with remarkable lan, creating a new and highly inuential
form of economism. Many social scientists let themselves be bedazzled by the
formal elegance and reputed conceptual rigour of neoclassical economics and
join in the party.
Today, we urgently need an eort to revive political economy. We need it
in order to overcome the fruitless and damaging division between an apolitical
pure economics and a political science that ignores the economy. We have to
reinvent the post- or inter-discipline of a new political economy that will
reunite politics and economics. Using Gramscis insights and intuitions,
which point in the direction of an analysis of the economy in its inclusive
sense (leconomia integrale), we will manage to grasp the political element
which was and still is at the core of both classical and critical political economy.
193

A new political economy will embrace and assimilate what pure economics
has lost history, dynamics, variety, whatever makes the real world of markets
real and vivid. A new political economy will outgrow the erroneous form of
political economy popular today which depicts the world of politics as just
another market and thus cripples and disables democractic theory and practice.
A second renaissance of political economy might even help to end the
contemporary resignation of the intellectuals, their impotent and meek
attitude in the face of the predominant form of contemporary (neoliberal)
economism. Gramsci, for one, would rejoice in such a prospect.
Translated by Peter Tomas
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Marxism and the Dutch Miracle:
Te Dutch Republic and the Transition-Debate
Pepijn Brandon
University of Amsterdam
p.brandon1@uva.nl
Abstract
Te Dutch Republic holds a marginal position in the debate on the transition from feudalism to
capitalism, despite its signicance in the early stage of the development of global capitalism.
While the positions of those Marxists who did consider the Dutch case range from seeing it as
the rst capitalist country to rejecting it as an essentially non-capitalist commercial society, all
involved basically accept an image of Dutch development as being driven by commerce rather
than real advances in the sphere of production. Teir shared interpretation of the Dutch Golden
Age, however, rests on an interpretation of Dutch economic history that does not match the
current state of historical knowledge. Rereading the debate on the Dutch trajectory towards
capitalism in the light of recent economic historiography seriously challenges established views,
and questions both major strands in the transition-debate.
Keywords
Dutch Republic, capitalism, feudalism, transition-debate, Netherlands, bourgeois revolution,
history, Marx, Smith
Introduction
1
Te Dutch case has long puzzled historians of the transition from feudalism
to capitalism.
2
Here is a country that, to all outside appearances, attained
1. Te names given to the area that today comprises the Netherlands are cause for some
confusion. In early-modern times, the Netherlands and Low Countries were used both for
present-day Belgium (the Southern Netherlands or Southern Low Countries) and the Netherlands
(the Northern Netherlands or Northern Low Countries). Tese areas did not form a nation, but
a collection of formally independent provinces. Holland was one of those provinces, in the
North-West, as was Flanders in the South. Te name Holland is often used to describe the
whole of the present-day Netherlands (as by Marx in many of the here-quoted passages), but,
strictly speaking, this is wrong. After the Revolt against Spain, the Southern Netherlands
remained part of the (Spanish and, later, Austrian) Habsburg Empire, while the Northern
Netherlands formed a state, alternatively called the Dutch Republic or the United Provinces.
2. I would like to thank the participants at the Fifth Historical Materialism Annual Conference
P. Brandon / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 106146 107
capitalistic features from a very early stage in its history. If nothing else, even
its art would have helped to shape public notions of early-modern Dutch
society in this direction. Te many group-portraits of the merchant-lite
governing the Dutch Republic bear the unmistakeable marks of a society
driven by the logic of commodity-production. Whether exercising control
over the quality of textile-production, administrating an orphanage or
overseeing an almshouse, the core-business of the men and women portrayed
was making money. Rembrandts staalmeesters, the syndics of the cloth-makers
guild, are bent over the account-book they were discussing just a moment
before the audacious spectator forced them to temporarily cease their business.
Simply on the basis of its self-representation, many will agree with the Dutch
historian Huizinga who described Dutch civilisation of the seventeenth
century as thoroughly bourgeois.
3
However, the question of whether the social structures underpinning this
culture were capitalist or merely highly urbanised and brgerlich
4
remains
hotly disputed. After all, despite the ourishing of its seventeenth-century
Golden Age, the Dutch Republic was not the location of an early industrial
revolution. After a brief spell in which Amsterdam acted as the central entrept
of world-trade and the geographically tiny Republic reached the status of a
global superpower, a period of decline set in which saw the locus of economic
growth and military might shift decisively away from the sandy shores of the
province of Holland. For many, this signies that the United Provinces, at best,
represented a preliminary stage to real capitalist development a prime example
of a failed transition to industrial society
5
and, at most, a detour in the process
of capitalist state-formation.
6
Non-Marxist and Marxist historians alike can be
found on either side of this debate. Te main focus of this article will be on
the latter, but, of course, there is a high level of mutual inuence.
7

(November 2008) and the Economic History Lunch-Seminar of Utrecht University (March
2009) for their willingness to engage with me in this puzzle. Special thanks are due to Bas van
Bavel, Neil Davidson, Jessica Dijkman, the late and greatly-missed Chris Harman, Marjolein
t Hart, Maarten Prak, Maina van der Zwan, and the two anonymous referees for their detailed
comments and suggestions on earlier drafts, as well as for sharing unpublished material. Naturally,
they do not share any responsibility either for the theoretical direction taken or for any mistakes
this article contains.
3. Huizinga 1941, p. 62.
4. As is the main focus of studies such as Prak 2010.
5. Krantz and Hohenberg (eds.) 1975.
6. Lachmann 2002, p. 147.
7. For some inuential non-Marxists who treat the Dutch Republic as a modern phenomenon,
see North and Tomas 1973, Kennedy 1989, and De Vries and Van der Woude 1997.
108 P. Brandon / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 106146
Within the wider debate on the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the
Dutch Republic occupies a marginal position at best.
8
But, even so, the
position taken by dierent authors, often only in passing and based on very
general perceptions of Dutch history, is of signicance for their overall views
on the rise of capitalism. Te Dutch Republic is the obvious contender to
Britain in producing the rst really-existing capitalist country. Rejecting or
accepting this case therefore tells us something important about the supposed
uniqueness of the British experience. Given that much of this debate has been
cast as a discussion on why Britain succeeded where the rest failed, the Dutch
case becomes an interesting point for corroboration.
Te aim of this article is twofold. First, it is to locate the debate on the
nature of the Dutch Republic within the wider transition-debate, tracing back
the roots of the dierent positions to the scattered comments of Smith and
Marx on this subject. However, many of the arguments used in this debate are
based on a model of Dutch merchant-capitalism that is scantily worked out,
often stereotypical, and which on the whole does not correspond to the
ndings of state-of-the-art historiography on early-modern Dutch society.
Te second objective of this article is therefore to provide an alternative for
this standard interpretation that is more rmly grounded in Dutch economic
historiography. Central to the alternative narrative laid out in the second part
of this article is the urban-agrarian symbiosis that arose in the course of the
late-medieval period. Tis particular interrelationship was the founding stone
of Dutch success in the seventeenth-century Golden Age. It was based
primarily on a transformation in production, not on the expansion of
international trade. But it did allow the Northern Netherlands, particularly
after the revolt against the Spanish Habsburgs and the establishment of the
Dutch Republic, to prot from this expansion in a qualitatively dierent way
than previous trading empires had done. Although this basis was not sucient
for the Netherlands to complete the transition to industrial capitalism in its
own right, the advances made by Dutch capital did become a major
contributing factor to the nal and more denitive breakthrough of capitalism
elsewhere. Treating the Dutch case thus not primarily as a failed transition to
capitalism, but as one stage in a fundamentally and a priori international
process of transformation can also help to overcome the Anglocentrism that in
the past has characterised much of the debate.
8. See the various contributions in Hilton (ed.) 1976 and Aston and Philpin (eds.) 1985. For
an overview of Dutch Marxist historiography on the early-modern period, see Van der Linden
1997.
Te Dutch Republic in the transition-debate
Te position taken by dierent Marxist historians on the Dutch Republic is
roughly correlated to the two great alternative strands in the transition-debate.
Te rst argues that the rise of capitalism was primarily driven by the expansion
of trade, leading to the dissolution of feudal relations from the outside and
transforming the social structure in turn. Te second focuses on the less visible
and spectacular (but ultimately more profound) changes that took place at the
point of production. Among the latter group, probably the most eminent
today are those who, following Robert Brenner, argue that the main changes
leading to the transition to capitalism took place in what they call the social-
property relations in agriculture.
9
It will come as no surprise that the most enthusiastic endorsement of the
Dutch Republic as a capitalist state has come from those such as Immanuel
Wallerstein who are rmly on the commercialisation-side of the discussion.
For Wallerstein, the rise of the Dutch coincided with the real breakthrough of
the modern world-system in the sixteenth century. Te motor of both processes
was the expansion of European trade, accelerated by the subjection of the
Americas. Te United Provinces, freeing themselves from the grip of the
Habsburg Empire during the Eighty-Years War (15681648), could build on
their previously acquired strong position in Baltic trade. From there they
established a trading empire that provided them with the wealth needed to
keep their position at the top of the European hierarchy during the remainder
of the seventeenth-century Golden Age.
10
Admittedly, Wallerstein does
accord production a prominent rle in his account of the strength of the
Republic. He even makes the assertion that success in mercantilist competition
was primarily a function of productive eciency and that the middle-run
objective of all mercantilist state policies was the increase of overall eciency
in the sphere of production.
11
He proceeds to trace this eciency in both
Dutch agriculture and manufacture. Nevertheless, the picture he paints of
Dutch productive development still ultimately stems from the primacy that
Wallerstein assigns to trade. Production, both for early-modern and for late-
capitalist hegemonic powers, is primarily a tool for domination in the process
of unequal exchange with their peripheries. And it was here that the Dutch
Republic supposedly set the mark for all of its successors.
9. A description of the two main strands in the debate from an essentially outside or third
perspective can be found in Harman 1989 and Harman and Brenner 2006.
10. Wallerstein 1980, p. 46.
In his challenging long-term vision of the history of world-capitalism, the
late Giovanni Arrighi pushed this model still further away from questions
concerning production. His account of the Dutch Systemic Cycle of
Accumulation puts even more stress on the commercial and nancial nature
of Dutch hegemony that lasted far into the eighteenth century.
12
It was the
superior banking techniques at the Amsterdam Bourse that ensured that the
upper strata of the Dutch merchant class remained the leaders and governors
of the European capitalist engine. Troughout this period, the Amsterdam
Bourse remained the central regulatory mechanism through which idle capital
was rerouted towards new trade ventures.
13
Against these trade and nance-centred accounts stand those which look
for the origins of capitalism primarily in the sphere of production. In the
main, this has led these authors to a more negative estimation of the impact of
Dutch development on the emergence of capitalist relations. Of course, they
allow as well for some important capitalist elements evolving in the Low
Countries (comprising the medieval-Flemish and Brabant centres of trade and
production as well as the Northern Netherlands). However, writers such as
Maurice Dobb tended to see the subordination of production to trade as an
insurmountable barrier to capitalist growth beyond a promising and precocious
adolescence. Te position taken by Dobb is the mirror-image to the
Wallerstein-Arrighi approach: It would seem as though the very success and
maturity of merchant and money-lending capital in these rich continental
centres of entrept trade, instead of aiding, retarded the progress of investment
in production; so that, compared with the glories of spoiling the Levant or the
Indies or lending to princes, industrial capital was doomed to occupy the place
of a dowerless and unlovely younger sister.
14
Te rise of capitalist production
was not aided, but hindered, by the dominance of international trade.
Eric Hobsbawm put this argument in an international context in his seminal
article, Te Crisis of the Seventeenth Century. He argued that the
embeddedness of Dutch commerce in a still-feudal European system of trade,
reecting the underdeveloped nature of productive capacities in the home-
market, put constraints on its economic development that the Republic
was not able to break. Even at the peak of its seventeenth-century splendour,
the Netherlands remained in many respects a feudal business economy; a
Florence, Antwerp or Augsburg on a semi-national scale.
15
In line with the
Brenner thesis, Ellen Meiksins Wood has recently extended this argument to
12. Arrighi 2002, pp. 12744.
13. Arrighi 2002, p. 140.
14. Dobb 1963, p. 160; compare p. 195.
15. Hobsbawm 1967, pp. 445.
questions of agricultural change. For her, instead of being forced to invest by
the competitive pressure of rival capitals, Dutch merchants and (crucially)
commercial farmers only made clever use of market-opportunities as a
temporary strategy.
16
Te main interest of the ruling class did not reside in
accumulation and improvement in production, but in public oce as a
means to control monopolistic trading advantages. When international trading
opportunities declined under pressure of the seventeenth-century crisis, the
Dutch lite fully withdrew to political accumulation. For Wood, the Dutch
Republic enjoyed its Golden Age not as a capitalist economy but as the last
and most highly developed non-capitalist commercial society.
17
Te Dutch Republic in Smith and Marx
Te authors cited dier signicantly in their analysis of Dutch society and its
place within the wider transition. But they do share a similar appreciation of
the sources of Dutch wealth. Whether they put more emphasis on the
European bulk-carrying trade or the colonial luxury-trade, all agree that
commerce was at the origin of the Dutch Golden Age. Production is viewed
from the angle of this commercial success, not as a factor in itself. In taking
the merchant-regent as the essential Dutch character, they can build on a
large body of popularising literature well-known in the English-speaking
world.
18
Te pedigree of this view goes back to the eighteenth century, if
not earlier, when the Dutch Republic not completely realistically was held
up as a successful example of the unfettered rule of free trade.
19
Te writings
of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century pamphleteers and early political
economists such as Petty and Davenant formed the limited sources from
which both Adam Smith and Karl Marx drew their views on the Dutch
Republic.
For Adam Smith, the Dutch Republic was the prime example of a purely
commercial society. Tis country, he wrote in a passage extolling the advantages
of a free-port system, not only derives its whole wealth, but a great part of its
necessary subsistence, from foreign trade.
20
Elsewhere, Smith again takes
foreign trade as the basis of Dutch success: Holland, in proportion to the
extent of the land and the number of its inhabitants, by far the richest country
16. Wood 2002a, p. 90; Wood 2002b.
17. Wood 2002a, p. 94. Very similar arguments can be found in Teschke 2003, pp. 136 and
208, and Dumolyn 2004, p. 257.
18. For example, Barbour 1950, Boxer 1965 and Wilson 1968.
19. Nijenhuis 2002, p. 118, and Reinert 2009, pp. 30.
20. Smith 1999b, p. 76.
in Europe, has . . . the greatest share of the carrying trade of Europe.
21
He
suggested that the Dutch primacy in European trade was still a fact in the
second half of the eighteenth century.
22
Low interest-rates stimulated the
Dutch bourgeoisie not to let their money lay idle and invested the whole of
society with a mercantile frame of mind. It is there unfashionable not to be a
man of business. Necessity makes it usual for almost every man to be so, and
custom everywhere regulates fashion.
23
Writing in the decade running up to
the fourth Anglo-Dutch War, Smith of course acknowledged that the leading
position of the Dutch was not entirely due to free trade. Military strength
played an important rle as well.
24
But, on the whole, it was the favourable
attitude taken by the Dutch rulers to the interests of free trade that formed the
main reason for its success. Tis attitude was promoted by the fact that
merchants themselves ruled the country:
Te republican form of government seems to be the principal support of the
present grandeur of Holland. Te owners of great capitals, the great mercantile
families, have generally either some direct share or some indirect inuence in
the administration of that government. . . . Te residence of such wealthy people
necessarily keeps alive, in spite of all disadvantages, a certain degree of industry in
the country.
25
Smith provided a framework that still shapes many of the mainstream
interpretations of Dutch economic history. Two hundred years after Te
Wealth of Nations, North and Tomas wrote their inuential history, Te Rise
of the Western World, explicitly aimed at providing a framework consistent
with and complementary to standard neo-classical economic theory.
26
In it,
they take the Netherlands to be the rst areas of Western Europe to escape the
Malthusian checks associated with feudalism.
27
Like Smith, they treat trade
and commerce as the prime mover of the Dutch economy throughout
the early modern period.
28
And, again following Smith, they argue that the
republican political institutions were key to its success: it is clear that in
the Netherlands property rights appropriate for the development of both
an ecient product market and a short-term capital market had been created.
21. Smith 1999a, p. 473.
22. Smith 1999b, p. 40.
23. Smith 1999a, p. 199.
24. Smith 1999b, pp. 401.
25. Smith 1999b, p. 505.
26. North and Tomas 1973, p. vii.
27. North and Tomas 1973, p. 132.
Te inuence of those developments . . . permeated the entire Dutch
economy.
29
Te most elaborate version of this Smithian view can probably be found in
the magnum opus of Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism. Here,
Braudel tells the story of a poor country that, due to geographical and
historical coincidence, could become the nodal point between the dierent
developing markets of Europe. Dominance in the Baltic trade, primarily
the grain-trade that the Dutch called their mother-trade, was enough to
propel the Dutch high-voltage urban economy
30
into a long period of
success.
31
Once Holland had conquered the trade of Europe, the rest of the
world was a logical bonus, thrown in as it were.
32
It is this view of Dutch
primacy built on the founding stone of international trade that provides the
framework for many mainstream interpretations of Dutch history. Mediated
by the work of its twentieth-century popularisers, it constitutes the prism
through which both sides in the transition-debate have consistently read
Marxs own comments on Dutch capitalism.
Marxs approach to the Dutch case revolves around two remarks. In the rst
volume of Capital, Marx famously described Holland as the head capitalistic
nation of the 17th century.
33
But this description seems to be contradicted
by the passages in the third volume of Capital, where he stresses the limits of
societies dominated by merchant-capitalism.
34
Accordingly, his ultimate
judgement on the extent to which the Dutch Republic reached the stage of
capitalism seems more negative: Te history of Hollands decline as the
dominant trading nation is the history of the subordination of commercial
capital to industrial capital.
35
Taken by themselves, these could easily be held
for throw-away remarks and even for simple adaptations of Smiths conclusions
to his own theoretical framework. Te notebooks now available through the
MEGA project show that this was not the case.
36
Tey show that Marx had a
keen interest in Dutch economic history, and that his observations in Volumes
1 and 3 of Capital were grounded in a wide reading of contemporary economic
historians and pre-Smithian economic texts.
37

30. Braudel 2002, p. 180.
31. Braudel 2002, p. 282.
32. Braudel 2002, p. 207.
33. Marx 1965, p. 704.
34. Marx 1991, p. 448.
35. Marx 1991, p. 451.
36. Lourens and Lucassen 1992.
37. Marx and Engels 1983, pp. 2468, 3902, and 389404.
Te rst thing to note is that Marxs main focus was not on the development
of trade as such, but on the interconnections between trade and production.
In Volume 3 of Capital, he explains that the great revolutions that took place
in trade in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries could only become
accelerating-factors in the transformation of the economic base where changes
in the eld of production had already begun. [T]he modern mode of
production in its rst period, that of manufacture, developed only where
the conditions for it had been created in the Middle Ages. Compare Holland
with Portugal, for example. Te dierence between the two, Marx explains,
lay in the predominant role of the basis laid by shing, manufacture and
agriculture for Hollands development.
38
In an excerpt he made in the mid-
1840s from a work by Friedrich List, he articulated the same contrast in
relation not to Portugal but to the Hanseatic cities: Te Hanseatic cities
founded their trade not on the production and consumption, on the
agriculture and manufacture of the land to which the merchants belonged . . .
they bought there, where they could have the commodities at the cheapest.
But when the countries from which they bought, and the countries to which
they sold excluded them from their markets, neither their own agriculture nor
their internal manufacture were so developed that their superuous merchant-
capital could nd accommodation there; therefore, it disappeared to Holland
and England.
39
Tus, Marx linked the shifts in late-medieval and early-
modern trade-routes that beneted the Low Countries to the presence of an
already more developed productive base.
Marx diered from Smith and his followers not only in this assertion that
changes in production were the starting point of Dutch commercial success.
He also highlighted dierent factors in the ending of Dutch trading supremacy.
It is this element that writers such as Dobb and Wood point to. Indeed, Marx
considered the dominant position that commercial capital attained over its
productive counterparts in areas such as Northern Italy and the Low Countries
as much a barrier as an advantage to further development in production. Tis
law that the independent development of commodity capital stands in inverse
proportion to the level of development of capitalist production appears
particularly clearly in the history of the carrying trade, as conducted by the
Venetians, Genoans, Dutch, etc., where the major prot was made not by
supplying a specic national product, but rather by mediating the exchange of
products between commercially and generally economically undeveloped
communities and by exploiting both the producing countries.
40
Once the
38. Marx 1991, p. 450.
39. Marx and Engels 1981, p. 513; my translation.
40. Marx 1991, p. 446.
societies at both extremes of this mediation became centres of capitalist
production in their own right, the rle of the independent intermediary
became more-and-more obsolete. Being out-competed rst in the area of
production and then in the area of trade, the capitalists in the former
commercial centres started to transfer their money elsewhere, and became
agents for capitalist development across borders.
Tus the villainies of the Venetian thieving system formed one of the secret bases
of the capital-wealth of Holland to whom Venice in her decadence lent large
sums of money. So also was it with Holland and England. By the beginning of the
18th century the Dutch manufactures were far outstripped. Holland had ceased
to be the nation preponderant in commerce and industry. One of its main lines
of business, therefore, from 17011776, is the lending out of enormous amounts
of capital, especially to its great rival England.
41

Even though the Amsterdam capital-market still commanded enormous
amounts of wealth in the rst decades of the eighteenth century, Marx dated
the highpoint (and therefore the start of decline) of Dutch commercial wealth
as early as 1648.
42
Hereafter, Dutch capital started to suer from increasing
competition from the English and the French. Tis competition translated
into erce military conict, mercantilist measures protecting home-markets
from Dutch intrusion, and the building-up of local manufactures that ended
the English and French dependence on Dutch imports. Te owering of the
Amsterdam stock-exchange in the eighteenth century, far from being a
symptom of continued economic strength, was a result of the relative decline
of the productive base.
A third dierence between Marxs account and Smiths lies in his views on
the rle of the Dutch state. Whereas Smith and his followers stressed the
commercial virtues of the Dutch political lite, Marx held a rather less friendly
and much more realistic position on the Dutch ruling class. Not respect for
property-rights in general, but a deep commitment to the property of the
Dutch capitalist lite at the cost of anyone else characterised the operations of
the Dutch state. Te property-rights of either colonial peoples or the poorer
classes within the Netherlands were never part of the equation, and the state
did not act as a neutral guarantor towards them. Marx approvingly quoted a
description of Dutch colonial administration as one of the most extraordinary
relations of treachery, bribery, massacre, and meanness.
43
Te large public
41. Marx 1965, p. 707.
42. Marx 1965, p. 705.
43. Marx 1965, p. 704. Te quote is from the former Lieutenant-Governor of Java, Tomas
Stamford Raes.
debt and developed system of taxation underpinning Dutch naval and military
power two other Dutch novelties that Smith greatly admired were viewed
in the same spirit. Public debt formed both a secure outlet for capital-
investment and a source for state-demand, thus becoming one of the most
powerful levers of primitive accumulation.
44
But the cost of this system was
high taxation, which rested disproportionably on the lower classes:
Modern scality, whose pivot is formed by taxes on the most necessary means of
subsistence (thereby increasing their prices), thus contains within itself the germ
of automatic progression. Over-taxation is not an incident, but rather a principle.
In Holland, therefore, where this system was rst inaugurated, the great patriot,
De Witt, has in his Maxims extolled it as the best system for making the wage-
labourer submissive, frugal, industrious, and overburdened with labour.
45
Te picture that emerges from those passages clearly diers from the one
painted by Smith and his followers. But the most important element of this
dierence has been missed by all Marxists writing on the subject. In taking
agriculture, shing and manufacture as the founding stone, rather than as a
by-product of Dutch commercial success, Marx hinted at an explanation of
the origins of the Dutch Golden Age that is seriously at odds with the
prevalent view of the Dutch case as a pure form of merchant-capitalism.
However, this focus on the productive base underneath the glittering expansion
of trade ts in remarkably well with the ndings of economic historians over
the last thirty years.
Medieval roots and divergent paths
Within the connes of this article, only a short and summary overview is
possible of the transformation of the Dutch economy in the late-medieval and
early-modern period. Tis necessarily comes at the expense of many important
aspects of this story. Too little attention can be given to the relationship
between the Northern and Southern Netherlands (now Belgium), which
contained Europes most developed urban economies but were cut o from
the North in the course of the Dutch Revolt.
46
Another real omission is a
44. Marx 1965, p. 706.
45. Marx 1965, p. 708. Te work cited, long wrongly ascribed to the seventeenth-century
Dutch statesman Johan de Witt, is the Interest of Holland, written by Pieter de la Court, the author
of the rst systematic defence of free trade and a labour-market free from guild-regulations.
46. A short overview of the interrelation between North and South before the Revolt can be
found in Van Zanden 1993a.
proper account of the structure of the Dutch colonial empire.
47
Tis is not
because these issues are unimportant, but simply because some of the main
interpretative battles to be waged are about the structure of Dutch society at
home and its position within European markets. Understanding those will
also increase our understanding of the Dutch mode of operation overseas.
Taking in all those aspects would require at least a book. What follows must
therefore remain highly incomplete. We nonetheless hope that this article will
provide a vantage-point for further debate, which can compensate for these
shortcomings and omissions.
Traditionally, the rise of Dutch commercial dominance has been dated from
the fall of Antwerp to Spanish troops in 1585. Te inux of Southern
merchants into the Northern cities and the blockade of the Scheldt allowed
Amsterdam to become what Antwerp had been until then: the staple market
of Europe. Te overrunning of the Flanders and Brabant towns by the Spanish
armies certainly accelerated the shift of economic weight from South to
North. However, as Blockmans has rightly stressed, It would have been
impossible to take up this role immediately without having developed a
structural basis during the preceding centuries.
48
Recent historiography
therefore puts much more emphasis on the medieval roots of Dutch economic
expansion. Already in the fteenth century, the Western provinces formed the
most urbanised area of Europe. Tey also contained a highly dierentiated,
commercialised and technologically advanced agriculture. At least in the
seaborne peat-areas in the West and the North and the river-clay regions,
this coincided with a class-structure on the land that was markedly dierent
from that of most European agriculture. In the Land of Culemborg, large
tenant-farms worked by wage-labourers in the fteenth and sixteenth centuries
replaced small and medium-sized family-farms. New types of extensive
agriculture were developed in order to reduce the required labour-input and
maximise prots.
49
In Southern Holland, even before the Revolt, wealthy
burghers bought plots of land from peasants on a large scale.
50
And, in Guelders
during the fteenth and sixteenth centuries, three-quarters of the land was
leased out, the mobility of the lease land was high, population pressure was
relatively low and market specialisation was attractive in view of the proximity
of large population centres in Brabant, Flanders and especially Holland.
51
As
47. Te classic work in the English language on this subject remains Boxer 1965.
48. Blockmans 1993, p. 42. For recent studies on the impact of Southern-Netherlands
merchants on Dutch trade, see Gelderblom 2000, pp. 242., and Lesger 2006, pp. 139.
49. Van Bavel 1999a, p. 307.
50. Van Bavel 2004, p. 139.
51. Van Bavel 2004, p. 141.
a result, a structure of landholding arose in which already from the sixteenth
century onwards the only distinction that mattered was between property
(eygendom) and short-term leasehold (huer), even if, in a formal sense, all
the older categories of land tenure . . . somehow survived.
52
Moreover, the
advanced structure of agriculture went hand-in-hand with the rise of substantial
urban production, connected to a growing integration within international
markets.
Tis marketisation, however, was in no way a natural given. Around
the year 1250, according to Hoppenbrouwers the Netherlands by all signs
retained a backward, rather primitive peasant economy. Towns and markets
were virtually non-existent, as was anything like centralized power.
53

Feudal structures in those areas were weak, but this was a result of their
marginal position. Small-scale manorialism, subsistence-farming and simple
commodity-production characterised the structure of agriculture in many
areas until the time of the great late-feudal crisis. In the centuries that followed,
fundamental changes took place in the organisation of agriculture in the Low
Countries, stretching from production-techniques to the forms of land-
ownership, the distribution of control between peasants, lords and burghers,
the application of wage-labour, the rle of specialisation and the measure of
marketisation. But these changes did not follow similar paths in all of the
Netherlands dierent regions, and not every area underwent them to the
same extent. In his recent overview of Dutch agricultural history from 500 to
1600, Van Bavel discerns roughly three types of regions:
54
(1) Areas such as Drenthe and the Veluwe, where very little change took
place until the seventeenth century or even later. Agriculture remained largely
subsistence-oriented, peasants retained control over the land, and only slight
specialisation took place until some of them were forced to adapt to the
capitalist relations becoming dominant elsewhere.
(2) Areas such as the Guelders river-area, coastal Frisia and coastal Flanders,
in which a transition to large-scale, labour-extensive, capital-intensive farming
took place relatively early. By the fteenth and sixteenth centuries, land had
accumulated into the hands of wealthy tenant-farmers, who employed fully-
proletarianised wage-labourers in market-oriented cattle-breeding and grain-
cultivation. Around 75 per cent or even more of the land was leased out, often
52. Van Bavel and Hoppenbrouwers 2004, p. 16.
53. Hoppenbrouwers 2006, p. 254.
54. Van Bavel 2010a, pp. 2447, 336. For a general summary of the argument, see also Van
Bavel 2010b.
on contracts with very short terms, and the rate of turnover for land under the
pressure of competition was high.
55
(3) Areas such as inland Flanders and Holland, where increased market-
orientation was combined with intensive subsistence-farming. Peasant-
landholding remained dominant for a long time, and specialisation was
reached on rather small plots, using labour-intensive techniques to produce
for nearby urban markets. Proto-industrial activities, taking place on
an impressive scale, were usually combined with subsistence-farming. In
Holland, this became the launching-pad for a further transformation towards
large-scale capitalist agriculture on the one hand and more proletarianised
wage-labour on the other, whereas, in inland Flanders, this did not occur until
much later.
It is useful to examine these diverging paths in a bit more detail. In Drenthe,
it seems that the combination of low yields on the sandy grounds and successful
peasant-resistance against the strengthening of feudal control account for
the survival of small-scale peasant-production and communal lands. After
a coalition of nobles suered a crushing defeat in 1227, in which the Bishop
of Utrecht and some four-hundred nobles were killed in the swamps,
what remained of manorial lordship disintegrated, allowing the peasants
to strengthen their hold on the land and the commons.
56
In the long run,
technological change remained slow, sheep were herded in communal ocks
for centuries to come, subsistence-farming remained predominant, less than a
quarter to a third of the land was leased out, and, even during the seventeenth
century, the spread of wage-labour was rather limited (though, with 2530 per
cent, still high in comparison to most of Europe).
57
Here, then, we seem to
have a classic Brennerian case in which the emerging predominance of small
peasant property short-circuited a transition to rural capitalism.
58
However, it
should be noted that, even here, the conservatism inherent in the existing
structures was not absolute, and market-inuences started to penetrate from
the outside once the transition to agrarian capitalism had been made in
neighbouring regions.
59
Te situation in the Guelders river-area was very dierent, if not the
complete opposite. Manorial lords, territorial rulers and religious institutions
had maintained strong control over the colonisation of this highly fertile
region, resulting in a predominance of large landholding. During the thirteenth
55. Van Bavel 2010a, p. 172.
56. Van Bavel 2010c, pp. 2523.
57. Van Bavel 2010a, pp. 172, 204, 336.
58. Brenner 1985, p. 30.
59. Bieleman 1987, pp. 402.
and fourteenth centuries, however, manorial organisation came under intense
pressure. On the one hand, colonisation of the nearby peat-areas oered a
possibility for peasants to escape serfdom by migration. On the other hand,
the monetisation of feudal relations and the intense competition between
manorial and territorial lords forced the landowners to search for means of
exploitation that were directly protable. Te rise of cities and markets in
Holland and Brabant enabled them to do so by starting to exploit their land
commercially, leading to a very early transition to the large-scale lease of
land on increasingly short terms.
60
Te competition for lease-contracts created
strong pressures towards investment, with large landowners spending about
16 to 20 per cent of their gross income on improvement of their agricultural
holdings (with further increases in the sixteenth century).
61
On the other
hand, it stimulated full proletarianisation, in which former peasants began to
be employed as wage-labourers on the land. Van Bavel calculates that, in the
early-sixteenth century, as much as 60 per cent of all labour in this area was
performed as wage-labour a proportion only reached in even the more-
industrialised areas of Europe during the nineteenth century.
62
It is important
to note that, until the second half of the sixteenth century, this transformation
did not lead to a great shift in the distribution of landownership between
peasants and lords. Rather, large-scale landownership in the hands of the lords
remained intact, while the underlying social forms of exploitation of the land
underwent considerable changes towards agrarian capitalism.
Te trajectory of Holland: an urban-agrarian symbiosis
Te most interesting case, and probably the most decisive for the later fate of
the Low Countries, is that of the regions such as Holland. Here, as in the
Guelders river-area, early commercialisation took place. However, there were
substantial dierences in the nature of this commercialisation. Whereas, in
Guelders, colonisation during the high middle ages had produced patterns of
large-scale landownership under seigneurial control, in Holland, colonisation
had taken place under the direction of the territorial lords, undercutting the
power of manorial lords in most areas. Terefore, in large regions, feudal
control on the ground was almost absent, and peasant small-holders owned
their own land. Population-pressure led to a further subdivision of plots,
60. Van Bavel 2010a, pp. 889 and 180; Van Bavel 1999b, pp. 469.
61. Van Bavel 2010a, p. 334.
62. Van Bavel 2010a, p. 204.
which must have made conditions for subsistence-farming increasingly
dicult. Tese changes then started to accelerate around the fourteenth
century. Ecological processes resulting from the use of the land led to a sinking
of the surface by two metres or, in some places, even three metres or more.
63
As
a result, the soil ceased to be suitable for subsistence-farming.
As Bieleman rightly emphasises, this could have led to depopulation, as
happened elsewhere in Europe.
64
But development in Holland took a dierent
course. An economic redirection started towards commercial farming, largely
the keeping of livestock for the production of butter and cheese, and, to a
lesser extent, the cultivating of industrial products such as hops (for brewing)
and hemp (for rope-making), linseed (for oil) and madder (for dyestus).
Although peasants remained in control of their small tracts of land, natural
circumstances increasingly forced them to combine labour-intensive forms of
agriculture with wage-labour in export-oriented shing, peat-digging and
dike-building, proto-industrial activities in rural areas or manufacturing-
work in the towns.
65
For this redirection to be possible, a number of conditions
had to be met earlier, or, at least, more-or-less simultaneously. First, the
maintenance of any kind of agricultural production under the special ecological
circumstances of the Low Countries peat-areas required rather sophisticated
techniques for water-management, from wind- and watermills to developed
systems of cooperation for dike-maintenance.
66
Te fourteenth to sixteenth
centuries saw a steady increase in their application. Wealthier farmers and
townspeople increasingly replaced manorial lords or the Church as investors
in such instruments for improvement.
67
Introduction of new technologies
in this rural setting laid the basis for their later use in rural or urban
manufacturing.
A second precondition for the shift towards commercial farming was
the possibility to import basic foodstus. Without some international
specialisation, and without the development of trading systems to tap into the
agricultural surpluses of other regions, it would have been impossible to have
a majority of Hollands population producing non-subsistence items. Tis
connected the rise of commercial agriculture in Holland directly with the
increase of trade with other, grain-producing regions Germany, the Southern
Netherlands, and France at rst, gradually replaced as the main suppliers of
63. Bieleman 1993, p. 162.
64. Ibid.
65. Van Zanden 1993b, Chapter 2.
66. Davids 2008, pp. 645.
67. Van Bavel 2010a, p. 148.
grain by the Baltic from the late-fteenth century onwards.
68
Te nodal points
connecting the emerging highly dierentiated agricultural society to those
inter-regional networks of trade, of course, were the many towns of medieval
Holland. Rapid urbanisation took place roughly in the same period as the
emergence of commercialised agriculture (see Table 1). Jessica Dijkman shows
that urban fairs in Holland played the rle that in many other countries
was played by local village-markets, both because these urban markets were
geographically close, and because institutional barriers to selling rural products
on the urban markets were limited.
69
Tese towns provided the markets
to which much of rural production was geared, not only as centres of
distribution and consumption, but also increasingly as independent centres of
production. Leyden, the biggest city in Holland at the start of the sixteenth
century, had evolved into one of the leading centres of cloth-production.
Other industries, such as brewing, had started to develop on a large scale
throughout the province of Holland. Tose urban industries became intimately
connected with rural development, both for the supply of raw materials and
labour-power.
68. Tielhof 2002, pp. 67.
69. Dijkman 2010.
Table 1: Urbanisation in the Low Countries and Britain, 13751800
Number of cities with over 10,000 inhabitants
1375 1475 1500 1550 1600 1650 1700 1750 1800
Northern
Netherlands
(Holland in
parentheses)
2 (0) 9 (4) 10 (5) 11 (6) 19 (12) 19 (12) 20 (12) 18 (10) 19 (10)
Southern
Netherlands
11 11 11 12 11 12 12 12 18
Britain 1 1 5 4 6 9 13 23 47
Total population of cities with over 10,000 inhabitants per territory (in thousands)
1375 1475 1500 1550 1600 1650 1700 1750 1800
Northern
Netherlands
20 98 120 182 365 600 640 570 580
Southern
Netherlands
210 310 300 360 250 360 380 350 460
Britain 35 70 80 110 250 500 720 1,020 1,870
Source: Israel 1995, p. 115.
Slowly but surely, the changes in direction of Hollands agriculture led to the
spread of credit-relations to the countryside, combined with a dierentiation
inside the peasantry, in which some peasants managed to become successful
capitalist-farmers and others were forced to combine their agricultural activities
with proto-industrial labour. Tis can be seen as a preceding stage to the
rise of real capitalist agriculture. However, close connections between rural
proto-industries and urban production were not necessarily benecial towards
further capitalist development.
70
Inland Flanders had seen very similar patterns
of rural production emerging as Holland; labour-intensive commercial
agriculture on small plots owned by the peasants, combined with extensive
proto-industrial activities geared towards the large urban centres of (mainly
textile-) production.
71
However, the market-relations between the large
Flemish cities such as Ghent, Bruges, and Antwerp and their hinterland
became much more unequal and exploitative than those among their northern
cousins. Te mighty Flemish towns, with ample privileges gained in long and
bloody struggles against the territorial lords and strong guilds dominating
urban production and politics, jealously guarded their markets against any
encroachment by agricultural producers. Peasants could only sell their products
in the town under tight restrictions, and attempts at independent economic
development in the countryside, for example by building watermills or
introducing other more advanced machines, were crushed sometimes by
force of arms.
72
Te proto-industrial activities that developed in the important
Flemish linen-industry took the form of a Kauf-System, in which peasants
individually owned the means of production and produced the linen, but were
fully dependent on urban merchants for the sale of the end-products. Rather
than forming a stepping stone for further proletarianisation, these forms of
rural proto-industrial labour remained static for many centuries.
73
In Holland, on the other hand, extra-economic coercion to control the
countryside by the urban centres remained much more limited. Certainly,
there were a number of attempts to institute the same barriers to rural
development as in Flanders.
74
But none of the towns of Holland, smaller and
less powerful than their Flemish counterparts, individually had the strength to
carry those through. Furthermore, as t Hart concludes, the high density of
towns meant that urban control over the countryside was strongly contested.
Coercive moves by one town could always be hindered or mitigated by the
70. Epstein 2001, p. 21.
71. Toen 2001, pp. 119.
72. Dijkman 2010.
73. Toen 2001, p. 122.
74. Noordegraaf 2009, p. 133.
actions of another.
75
Unable to control the countryside politically, burghers
were much more prone to extend their reach by purely economic means. Tis
led to a very dierent type of proto-industrial development, in which urban
merchant-entrepreneurs invested directly in rural industries. Tus, a layer
of urban proto-capitalists emerged who not only attained possession of the
end-products of rural labour, but gained substantial control over every stage of
the production-process. On the other hand, the loss of control over the means
of production among peasants set the stage for full proletarianisation once
these merchant-entrepreneurs started to move large swathes of the production-
process to the cities.
76
It is this particular urban-agrarian symbiosis that set the
stage for the transition to capitalism in Holland.
Te discovery of rural capitalism in the Northern Netherlands has led to a
debate on the applicability of the Brenner thesis.
77
Unlike most of his
followers, Brenner does see important steps in the development of capitalist
agriculture taking place in the Netherlands. But his theoretical focus sits
uneasily with the particular trajectory towards agrarian capitalism followed in
Holland (and, to a lesser extent, Flanders), in which the towns played such a
crucial rle.
78
As we have seen, the path of specialisation taken by many Dutch
peasants was only made possible by the presence of strong and independent
towns, increasingly integrated into a European trading system. Even Brenner
himself acknowledged this. Here, of course, urban development was more
intense than in any other region of Europe throughout the long epoch from
the ninth and tenth centuries into the eighteenth. . . . Te outcome was great,
sustained demand pressure on agriculture over a very extended period, the
reply to which by Low Countries agriculturalists was, moreover, very much
facilitated by their access to the international grain market.
79
Te Dutch case,
and particularly the path taken by Holland, suggests that to look for the roots
of capitalism either exclusively in the countryside or in the towns rests on an
articial separation. True, towns were not simply the representatives of
capitalist trade against a feudal hinterland. But neither were they simply an
extension of the power of the lords. Town and country were integrated in
common systems of both trade and production. As Rodney Hilton showed
convincingly, the towns in Europe arose not in opposition to, but in symbiosis
with the development of feudalism.
80
But this symbiosis itself was not static.
75. t Hart 2001, p. 84. Compare Aten 1995.
76. Van Bavel 2010a, pp. 24950.
77. Hoppenbrouwers and Van Zanden (eds.) 2001. See also Wood 2002b.
78. A point also made in Mielants 2001, p. 112.
79. Brenner 2001, p. 302.
80. Hilton 1992.
Even when the cities of the fteenth century were part of a wider European
feudal network of trade, they were not the same as the market-villages that
feudal lords had once set up to provide for their luxury-demands. A considerable
number of them had become powerful centres of wealth and production in
their own right. Te urban industries that arose in Holland were intimately
connected with rural-capitalist development. When the Northern Netherlands
started to gain a foothold in European trade, this did not simply mean further
integration into a larger feudal whole. It was coupled to another, opposite
eect: a slow but fundamental change in the relationship between town and
country. Te connected systems of urban and rural trade and production that
arose created a society in which the old feudal institutions were steadily being
pushed to the background. As far as class-struggle accompanied and shaped
these processes, it was at least three-tiered, involving urban classes as well as
lords (both manorial and territorial) and peasants.
81

At least in Holland, the late-medieval period saw an almost complete
erosion of local feudal institutions. Te lords who still dominated the province
politically during most of the sixteenth century had their main landed estates
elsewhere. Te main group of large feudal landowners that remained were the
religious institutions. However, the power of both traditional groups of
representatives of feudal society was backed up by the larger feudal states into
which the Dutch provinces were integrated: rst the Burgundian state, then
the Habsburg Empire. Te description given by Hobsbawm for the Dutch
Republic of the seventeenth century might actually be applied with more
success to the Northern Netherlands of the sixteenth: this was a feudal
business-economy. On the ground, both in the countryside and in the towns,
commerce already ruled supreme. At the top, the independence of the capitalist
lites was limited by their subordination to feudal-political entities. Tis
subordination held important advantages to the urban lites, and most of the
time they subordinated themselves willingly. But this willingness, or rather the
ability to settle for a comfortable niche within the larger feudal superstructure
of Europe, was not without limits. A string of crises during the sixteenth
century would show the boundaries within which these contradictions could
be maintained, with truly revolutionary consequences.
From the Dutch Revolt to the Golden Age
Te sixteenth century was an age of economic expansion, but also of serious
disruptions. It is no coincidence that, at the turn of the century, the artistic
81. Van Bavel 2010c.
exuberance of the Flemish masters found their counterpoint in the gruesome
world of Hieronymus Bosch. A number of important industries in this period
faced stagnation or even decline. Leyden cloth-manufacture did not manage
to adapt to the rising competition of the new draperies, as a conservative
urban lite including the merchants who controlled the old draperies
nally succeeded in throwing up prohibitions against the establishment of
new and competing manufactures.
82
Trade was aected by the great dynastic
wars, and the absolutist Habsburg rulers to whom all of the Dutch provinces
after 1543 belonged tried to gain leverage over merchant-wealth through
increased taxation and large-scale borrowing on Hollands capital-market.
83

Te merchant-eet of Holland grew considerably between 1530 and 1567
due to the expansion of Baltic trade, but also was hindered in the 1560s by the
closure of the Sound.
84
Tis drove up grain-prices, which caused serious unrest
among the urban lower classes at a time already characterised by the rise of
popular religious opposition. With the successful spread of Anabaptism, both
worldly and spiritual authorities with the Catholic Church spanning both
categories had to contend with a popular Reformation that contained semi-
communist undertones.
Tese tensions came to a head in the Dutch Revolt that covered the full
last-third of the sixteenth century. No one will deny that, as well as completely
changing the political conditions and religious order, the series of events that
go under this name opened up a new phase in the economic history of the
Netherlands, even though the exact relationship between the revolution
against the Habsburg Empire and the Golden Age of the seventeenth century
is hard to trace. Marx and Engels thought of the Revolt as one of the classical
bourgeois revolutions.
85
But the bourgeoisie certainly did not make the
revolution, as I have argued elsewhere.
86
Opposition of the leading feudal
lords to the centralising policies of Philip II rst destabilised the political-
religious settlement for the Netherlands, and three great waves of urban
uprisings (1566, 1572 and 15789) driven by the artisanal-middle and lower
classes then shifted the point of gravity of the Revolt away from the nobility.
Only then could the bourgeoisie in the Northern Netherlands become the
main benefactor of the Revolt. It is a classic example of Marxs aphorism that
82. Brand 1993.
83. Anderson 1986, pp. 601; Tracy 1985, p. 221.
84. Van Zanden 1993c, p. 8.
85. For example, Marx 1973, p. 192: Te model for the revolution of 1789 was (at least in
Europe) only the [English] revolution of 1648; that for the revolution of 1648 only the revolt of
the Netherlands against Spain.
86. Brandon 2007.
Te chevaliers dindustrie . . . only succeeded in supplanting the chevaliers of
the sword by making use of events of which they themselves were wholly
innocent.
87
Te Revolt had a number of unintended side-eects that greatly stimulated
the further capitalist development of the Dutch economy. One was the
conscation of church-lands, which were sold by public auction and thereby
greatly augmented land-possession as a form of urban investment. Large-scale
capitalist participation in land-reclamation, combined with the hardships
suered by peasants from both government and rebel-troops, further altered
the rural property-structure.
88
In Holland, the dominance of small-scale
peasant-ownership of the land nally started to give way to commercial
exploitation on a large scale.
89
A second direct result of the Revolt was the loss
of the political inuence of the nobility and the Catholic clergy, which, at least
in the province of Holland, left the urban lites in complete control over the
provincial estates. Te same goes, to a somewhat lesser extent, for the other
provinces. Out of a total of 47 votes in the seven sovereign provincial diets,
33 were reserved for the towns.
90
Te purging of former Catholic loyalists
from the city-magistrates could also have had some eect in opening the
way for new groups of merchants, who had previously been excluded by
more conservative merchant-factions. Tis, for example, seems to have
been the case in Leyden, where the purging of the magistrate opened up
city-government to southern refugees involved in new drapery, leading to a
rapid transformation of Leyden cloth-production.
91

Indirectly, the Revolt had an economic impact through the transformation
of the state. Overall, the Dutch Revolt left the state rmly under the control
of the merchant-industrialists. Tis became especially clear in matters of war
and peace, where dynastic ambitions were wholly replaced by commercial
considerations. Internally, through their control over the provincial States of
Holland, the merchants exerted enormous political inuence as well. Te
nancial weight of Holland over the rest of the Republic provided the necessary
coherence among the dierent provinces, despite internal divisions and
regional varieties in the pace of the transition. Although the Dutch federal
state seems like a rather ramshackle construction when looked at in the light
of later development, the outcome of the manifold political balancing acts
87. Marx 1965, p. 669.
88. t Hart 2011, forthcoming.
89. Van Bavel 2004, p. 139.
90. t Hart 2001, p. 82.
91. Lamet 1972, p. 43.
between local lites and their particular interests was not unfavourable to the
further development of capitalism in the seventeenth century. Even when
the new governors increased taxes to a level the Habsburg rulers could not
have dreamt of, both the super-rich and substantial parts of the wealthy
middle-class layers beneath them could feel that their interests were
well-served. Besides, the state never let the urban lites bear the brunt of
taxation. Conrming Marxs observation on the nature of Dutch state-revenues,
in 1640 over 70 per cent of taxes were levied through excises and semi-direct
taxes. In 1650, of all taxes farmed out in the Southern part of Holland,
74.6 per cent consisted of taxes on basic necessities.
92
Te new state that
emerged out of the Revolt was extremely eective in letting the poor and
working classes pay for its commercial-military exploits through a high cost of
living. Te rich, as well as substantial layers of the middle classes, contributed
through the various forms of state-debt which became an increasingly heavy
burden on Dutch society as a whole, but remained a secure and protable
form of investment for the lites.
Te Dutch Revolt liberated one of Europes most developed regions from
the constraints of an empire in which trade and industry were always
subordinated to royal interests, ultimately guided by the landed interests of
the Spanish aristocracy and the Catholic Church. Te independent republic
was established in the 1580s a status that was recognised by the Spanish
Crown only at the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. On the basis of the urban-
agrarian symbiosis created in the late middle ages, the growth in Baltic trade
of the sixteenth century, the rise of the Amsterdam entrept at the expense of
Antwerp and the unscrupulous use of state-power whenever essential economic
interests became imperilled, this republic became Europes dominant centre of
capital-accumulation.
Merchants and manufacturers
Probably the most spectacular eect of the revolt was to launch the newly
founded republic onto the international scene. Among the rst deeds of the
newborn nation was the institution of a naval blockade of the Scheldt estuary,
a form of economic warfare against the trade of its erstwhile sister provinces
that it kept in place for over two centuries. From its small territorial base, the
Dutch started to rival the two Iberian colonial empires, and, soon after the
92. t Hart 1993, pp. 1389.
founding of the East India Company (VOC) in 1602, it became the leading
power in Asia. As in the English Civil War and the French Revolution,
the revolutionary phase of the Dutch Revolt went seamlessly over into the
empire-building phase. From the 1590s to the Peace of Utrecht of 1713, the
Dutch Republic held the position of a European great power. In 1672,
it survived a combined attack at land and sea by France, England and their
allies on the eastern border. In 1688, it managed to send an invading force of
15,000 troops in order to eect rgime-change within its main commercial
rival, installing William III of Orange as King of England. During the War
of the Spanish Succession (170213) the Dutch state could pay and supply
provisions for an army of 120,000 on the strength of a population of barely
two million. Tis military power was based on unrivalled commercial
supremacy. Around 1648, when the war with Spain came to an end, Dutch
shipping outstripped that of all its European rivals put together. According
to one estimate, Englands commercial eet grew from approximately 400 to
1,400 ships between 1600 and 1700. But, already in 1600, around 1,900
ships sailed under the Dutch ag. Tis gure grew to 2,600 in 1670, to decline
to the still considerable number of 2,200 in 1700. Te total tonnage of
the English merchant-eet amounted to approximately 300,000 tons in 1700,
whereas the Dutch reached double that number in 1670.
93
Even in 1800,
after roughly 150 years of stagnation in overall economic growth, per-capita
income in the Netherlands was probably higher than in the neighbouring
countries.
94
Popular myth has it that the main source of this wealth was colonial trade.
Of course, the plundering of the East Indies by the VOC and the active rle
in slavery of its less successful brother, the West India Company, contributed
greatly to the amassing of wealth by many powerful merchant-houses. Tese
commercial activities were accompanied by all the great crimes that Marx so
vividly described in the concluding chapters of the rst volume of Capital.
But, in purely numerical terms, the so-called rich trade in colonial luxury-
goods was overshadowed by the less adventurous (though certainly not
peaceful) trade in grain, wood, iron, copper, furs and other bulk goods. As the
gures compiled by De Vries and Van der Woude show, European trade, rather
than colonial trade, formed the backbone of Dutch merchant-capital:
93. Schipper 2001, p. 55.
94. Van Zanden 1993c, p. 6.
Table 2: Dutch foreign trade in millions of Guilders per year
Ca. 1650 Ca. 1720 Ca. 1770
Export to
Europe, over sea 105 73 72
Southern Netherlands and
Germany, over land
10 10 20
Outside Europe 5 7 8
Total 120 90 100
Export consisted of
European goods (re-export) 49 26 29
Colonial goods (re-export) 11 22 40
Inland products 60 42 31
Import from
Europe, over sea 120 78 95
Southern Netherlands and
Germany, over land
5 6 10
Outside Europe 15 24 38
Total 140 108 143
Source: De Vries and Van der Woude 1997, p. 499.
Colonial goods (including those imported from other European nations)
formed just over 11 per cent of imports and a mere 9 per cent of exports at the
height of the Golden Age. Tis had grown to 31 and 24 per cent respectively
around 1720, partly reecting the decline of European overseas import and
export, partly the growing importance of transatlantic commerce. Only in the
latter half of the eighteenth century did colonial goods come close to European
goods as a proportion of foreign trade. True, more of the European imports
were meant for the Dutch home-market, giving colonial goods greater
prominence (though still smaller than European goods) in re-export. But the
export-gures show something else that challenges the image of a nation
thriving on long-distance luxury-trade. Dutch products comprised a full
50 per cent of the total value of exports in 1650, and still 47 per cent in 1720.
An important part of inland-production was directly connected to the
Dutch function in international trade. Tis was true for those sectors that
were at least partially based on the processing of imported materials, the
so-called traeken [tracs]. Examples are the processing of salt connected to
the export of salted herring and sugar, the sawing of wood, and the distilling
of alcohol. Rope and sail-making used imported hemp in combination with
the Dutch product, and tobacco-industries also depended both on imports
and on locally produced leaves.
95
Shipbuilding was, of course, another sector
that was tied to trade. De Vries and Van der Woude estimate that, between
1625 and 1700, an average of 400 to 500 ships a year were produced. Tey
calculate that around 10,000 people were employed in this sector 5 per cent
of all manufacturing-workers in the province of Holland.
96
To escape
guild-regulation in the towns, much of this production took place in rural
areas. North of Amsterdam, the area called De Saen [de Zaanstreek] developed
into a thriving industrial centre. Its development depended on a considerable
use of technologically advanced machinery such as industrial windmills.
Te total number of industrial mills in De Saen grew from 128 in 1630 to
584 in 1731, then declined to the still high number of 482 at the end of the
eighteenth century.
97
Technological advance underpinned the competitiveness of Dutch trade.
Already in the sixteenth century, two new types of ships were developed that
gave the Dutch a competitive advantage in shing and carrying trade: the
herring-buys and the uyt-ship. Te herring-buys allowed a part of the
processing of the catch to be done on board, enabling the ships to remain at
sea for longer periods and function as oating processing factories. Te uyt
was an easy-to-sail ship, which could carry large tonnages with relatively small
numbers of men. Since the size of the crew was an important determining
factor in the total costs of a voyage, the introduction of the uyt greatly
enlarged trading protability. Te process of shipbuilding itself was also
streamlined, introducing assemblage in standardised parts.
98
Not only in
shipbuilding but also in many other forms of manufacturing-production
during the seventeenth century, the Dutch exported their knowledge,
technologies and skilled workers to the rest of Europe.
99
Te textile-industry
was the largest employer in the Netherlands. It had both a rural and an urban
component. Even in Amsterdam, which was not a textile-city, 26 per cent of
all craftsmen and crafts-workers were employed in this trade. Since over half
the Amsterdam working population was involved in the industrial sector, this
amounts to a total of 14 per cent of all married men.
100
In cities such as
Leyden and Haarlem, in which textile-production was the leading industry,
the proportion was much higher. Dutch capitalism did not take a lead in
95. De Vries and Van der Woude 1997, p. 271.
97. De Vries and Van der Woude 1997, pp. 3467.
98. Unger 1978, p. 86.
99. Davids 2008, Chapter 5.
textile-production in Europe as it did in shipbuilding, but the use of advanced
techniques for production allowed it to nd a substantial niche based on
high-quality products.
Van Bavel has painted a pessimistic picture of the development of
manufacture in the Northern Netherlands after 1600. He attaches much
importance to the introduction of institutions of forced labour, such as
workhouses, and the apparent strengthening of the guilds from the middle of
the sixteenth century. Te possibility to revert to the use of semi-free labour
would have formed a barrier to the introduction of manufacture on a large
scale.
101
However, the work of many other authors contradicts this. Noordegraaf
emphasised the changes occurring in labour-relations due to the growth of
new types of manufacture. Even when formal guild-structures were maintained
and, especially in sectors connected to exports, they often were not in
practice those structures did not hinder, and sometimes even stimulated the
introduction of capitalist relations. Division of labour and hierarchization
characterized an increasingly large part of industrial activities. Even though
the traditional craftsman-based businesses continued to represent a numerical
majority, the economic importance of these businesses declined, in part due
to the rapid growth of new types of enterprises which were not based on
the traditional craftsman structure.
102
Te seventeenth century saw the
establishment of some of the largest manufacturing production-lines to be
found anywhere in the world up until the advent of the Industrial Revolution.
Te shipyards of the East India Company and the ve admiralties employed
thousands of workers under rgimes of intense labour-discipline. Workhouses
and orphanages were run as commercial undertakings, and rather then being
a regression to old patterns of semi-forced labour, they might better be seen as
instruments for the creation of a capitalist work-ethos.
Te growth of new manufactures was accompanied by a great intensication
of capitalist investment in agriculture, completing the social and technological
revolution that had begun in the preceding period. On the basis of this
transformation, the rural areas in the seventeenth century gained a productivity
that was high even compared to the most developed European areas of
the nineteenth century. De Vries argued that its main result was a process
of dierentiation within rural communities, in which commercial, highly
capitalized farm enterprises gained the upper hand. Surrounding these new
households, nonagricultural specialists in crafts, transportation, marketing,
fuel supply, and education arose to provide goods and services that the
101. Van Bavel 2010a, pp. 2602.
102. Noordegraaf 1993, p. 137. On the guilds, see Lis and Soly 2006, Epstein and Prak
2008, and the other contributions in these volumes.
unspecialized households of earlier times had endeavored to provide for
themselves.
103
Countering one of Woods main arguments for a non-capitalist
dynamic in Dutch commercial agriculture, competing for Dutch farmers was
an imperative rather than an option. Among other things, this can be seen
from the continued high turnover-rate of land-holding in the most
commercialised parts of the Netherlands.
104
Te urban and rural economies were linked up by the growth of a developed
system of river-transport, carrying both persons and goods.
105
Peat was used as
fuel in smaller industries such as the making of bricks, tiles, glass and pottery,
as well as in breweries, distilleries, bakeries and textiles. During the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, about 15,000 ships left or returned to Overijssel
harbours in the rural east to transport peat to the more urbanised parts of the
country.
106
Te urban-agrarian symbiosis of the late middle ages had been
reconstituted at a higher level, reecting a further deepening of the process of
original accumulation in which labour was freed in the double sense used by
Marx, and capital gained control over large swathes of the home-economy.
Partly, this was done through an extension of the putting-out system. Leyden
textile-merchants, for example, managed to gain control over previously
independent peasant-spinning and weaving activities in Dutch Brabant.
However, over time, these areas of peasant-production started to evolve as
industrial centres in their own right. Tilburg forms a striking example of such
rural-industry led expansion, growing from a small village to a town of 9,000
inhabitants in a few decades. Individual merchants moved from the Western
urban centres to these rural regions in order to gain more direct control over
the production-process.
107
Wallerstein, then, was right when he attacked those who wanted to describe
the Dutch Republic only in terms of its carrying trade: So much ink has been
spilled to explain why Holland did not industrialize that we tend to overlook
the fact that it did do so.
108
However, it is probably as important to insist that,
despite this advance, productive capital never escaped the control of merchant-
capital to become an independent force, as writers from Marx himself to Dobb
have rightly stressed. Te typical capitalist entrepreneur of the early-seventeenth
century was not the modern industrialist but a merchant-industrialist, who
brought under his control sections of production as an extension of his
103. De Vries 1974, p. 120.
104. Van Bavel 2004, p. 139.
105. De Vries 1978.
106. Slicher van Bath 1982, p. 26.
107. t Hart 2001, pp. 924.
trading ventures, but whose primary concern always remained with the latter
rather than the former part of his business.
109
Once competitive pressures
started to rise, their response was not to build up the protective walls of
mercantilism in order to further the interests of national industries, since this
would harm their trading interests. Instead, they slowly retreated from
productive investment into more secure forms of nancial dealing. Te ties
between traders and producers gradually weakened, and, even in trade itself,
these merchants increasingly took a step back. Around the third quarter of
the seventeenth century, trading on commission overtook trading on the
merchants own account among the major Dutch merchant-houses.
110

Moreover, the relatively advanced nature of manufacturing-production in a
number of important sectors should not blind us to the conditions prevailing
in many others. Numerically, if not in terms of its economic weight, small-
scale handicraft-production still dominated in the seventeenth century, as it
probably did everywhere else at that point in time.
111
Tough fully directed at
the market, the focal point of most of the output remained local. Te federal
state, built on a medieval heritage of provincial autonomy that was reinforced
rather than challenged by the Dutch Revolt, further retarded economic
integration on a national scale, as Richard Yntema has shown convincingly for
the beer-industry.
112
Te weight of local institutions within the federal state
meant that small urban producers often mounted successful pressure on their
rulers in order to shield them from the full blows of open competition. Tus,
while merchant-interests successfully prevented mercantilist measures for
industrial development on a national scale, protectionism on a local level did
strengthen with the waning of the Golden Age. Although economic reforms
countering these trends were widely discussed during the eighteenth century,
the state, rmly held in check from above by the competing factions of the
merchant-oligarchy, and from below by the strong position of the urban-
commercial middle classes, did not have the strength to push through a process
of productive modernisation and started to act as a conservative force instead.
Dutch capitalist development nally bit itself on the tail.
109. Gelder 1982, p. 38.
110. Jonker and Sluyterman 2000, pp. 83.
111. Van Dillen 1970, p. 197.
112. Yntema 2009.
Decline without refeudalisation
Does the onset of decline prove that there never had been development towards
capitalism to begin with? Tis seems to be the thesis of Ellen Meiksins Wood.
In her view, already during the Golden Age, public oce, not production or
trade, was the predominant source of private wealth for Dutch merchant-
oligarchs.
113
Tis wealth was not ploughed back into the economy through
productive investment, and so the Dutch economy retained a disproportionate
dependence on luxury consumption by the wealthy few at home or abroad.
Tis dependence was brought to light by the impact of the seventeenth-
century crisis, which reduced prices of staple exports and demand for luxury-
goods, dragging the other sectors of Dutch production down.
114
As a result,
Dutch lites withdrew into extra-economic strategies and investment in
politically constituted property such as public oce.
115
Following Hobsbawm, Wood puts great stress on the impact of the
seventeenth-century crisis on the Dutch economy. But the mechanism
through which this crisis dragged down the Dutch Golden Age, and the
timing of this happening remains unclear. Tis is not only the case in Woods
argument, but actually more generally. Often, the impact of the general crisis
on the Dutch economy is assumed without explaining which sectors were
aected when, and why. Te problem might reside in the rather underspecied
nature of the notion of a general crisis itself. As for Europe as a whole, this
links a string of economic depressions which had their epicentre in the decades
between 1620 and 1660, the political crises in France and England of the
1640s and 1650s, and a long period of secularly declining prices.
116
But, as
Steensgaard noted long ago, the decades in the middle of the century, when
the greatest economic diculties were to be found in Spain, Germany, France
and England, were at the same time the golden age of the Netherlands.
117
Tis
is borne out by a closer inspection of growth-trends for the main sectors of the
Dutch economy.
118
Probably, as Marx suggested, growth reached its zenith
around 1650. But this does not mean that, after this, overall decline set in. Te
second half of the seventeenth century did not see a complete collapse of the
Dutch economy, but, rather, a long period of stagnation which was felt as a
decline because others had started to set out on the rst steps on the road to
113. Wood 2002b, p. 73.
114. Wood 2002b, pp. 7880.
115. Wood 2002a, p. 92.
116. Trevor-Roper 1967, p. 63; De Vries 1976, pp. 16.
117. Steensgaard 1978, p. 36.
118. Van Zanden 1993c, p. 16.
recovery. Furthermore, the timing of the onset of depression was highly
diverse for dierent sectors of the Dutch economy. Te coincidence of
stagnation with the increasing competition the Dutch faced from the English
and the French, both militarily and in trade and manufacture, would suggest
that it was not the seventeenth-century crisis itself, but, rather, its ending
that put the Dutch economy in a tight spot. Te way in which both England
and France used the state to draw themselves out of the crisis was itself a
particular response to Dutch commercial dominance. Te Navigation Act and
Colberts tari-walls launched a new, militarised phase in the transition to
capitalism.
Tere were two areas in which real, absolute decline indeed slowly set in
during the second half of the seventeenth century. Tese were the productive
sector and the traditional carrying trade in grain, herring, salt, textiles and
wood. Te eects were felt sharpest during the eighteenth century, when
unemployment became endemic in most Dutch cities and many formerly
successful industries dwindled. However, the order in which economic
depression hit seems to have been opposite to the one suggested by the
Hobsbawm-Wood argument. Following the logic of the Dutch Republic as
a feudal business-economy or non-capitalist commercial society, with
indigenous commodity-production fully dependent on the strength of
merchant-capital, it could be expected that a long-term decline in international
trade would have dragged down the productive sectors of the Dutch economy,
beginning with those directly connected to the world-market. Te opposite
seems to have been the case. Whereas the production of beer, soap, salt, barrels,
pottery, tiles, bricks, and the building industry all started their descent during
the seventeenth century, cloth-production was retained at a stable level until
ca. 1715, and ship-building, the production of sail-cloth and sawing wood
until ca. 1725.
119
Meanwhile, as the gures compiled by David Ormrod show,
the total volume of Dutch trade managed to recover after the initial blow of
the 1660s, and remained high well into the 1700s. Te decline in Baltic trade
was apparently more than compensated for by the rise of trade with other
areas. Luxury-trade, far from pulling down the Dutch economy, actually grew
in absolute size, as can be seen from the gures for colonial trade.
Table 3: Estimated values of English and Dutch foreign trade,
16221790 ( 000)
English
imports
English
re-exports
English
domestic
exports
Combined
total
English
Combined
total
Dutch
Dutch
VOC &
WIC
1622 2,619 2,320 4,939
16245 12,163 557
1640s 17,110 1,106
1660s 4,395 900 3,239 8,534 12,200 1,626
1690s 17,529 2,224
16991701 5,849 1,986 4,433 12,268
171620 6,054 2,291 4,739 13,084
17335 7,757 3,104 5,717 16,578
174955 8,144 3,438 8,645 20,227
1753 8,625 3,511 8,732 20,868 16,392 4,067
176476
17724 12,735 5,818 9,853 28,406
1779 10,660 5,580 7,013 23,253 15,784 3,308
17848 15,303 4,286 11,050 30,639
1790 17,443 4,828 14,057 36,328 14,350 2,759
Source: Ormrod 2003, pp. 567.
Neither is it true that the initial reaction to increased competitive pressures
was decidedly non-capitalist. According to De Vries and Van der Woude, the
response of manufacturers was threefold: changes in product mix, introduction
of labor-saving technology, and locational shifts toward lower-wage regions.
120

Ultimately, many of these strategies remained unsuccessful, but this only
became clear in the course of the eighteenth century.
Te other central argument for the non-capitalist nature of Dutch society is
the supposed withdrawal of the Dutch merchant-lite into non-economic
forms of surplus-extraction. Tis ties in with a long-lasting debate within
Dutch historiography on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century processes of
aristocratisation. After they had established their power during the Dutch
Revolt, the ruling merchants soon started to develop into a closed oligarchy
with a strong hold on urban and provincial governments. With economic
decline, these ruling merchants tended to withdraw from active trading,
instead investing in landed property and government-bonds, and acquiring a
more aristocratic lifestyle.
121
Tis argument certainly contains much that is
120. De Vries and van der Woude 1997, p. 676.
121. For example, Roorda 1964.
valid. Members of the Dutch ruling class became increasingly involved in the
accumulation of political functions. Already in the seventeenth century, many
had combined business-careers with public oce, often shared within their
family or close circle.
122
However, only for a minority of those involved in
running the state did oce-holding become the most important source of
income.
123
Most positions within the state did not earn an income of more
than f 2000 a year. Only a minority of all regents became rich or richer just by
taking part in politics.
124

Te most successful members of the Dutch governing lite of the seven-
teenth century managed to combine oce-holding with their economic
functions as merchant-entrepreneurs or long-distance traders. Not everyone
did so in such a caricatured fashion as Willem Hoppevelt and Abraham
Keyser, who substituted their income from minor functions as scribes for the
province of Holland with a highly protable international business in secret
state-papers.
125
Much more common were the cases of Reynier Cant, Louis
Trip and Gillis Sautijn, who combined ruling functions in the Amsterdam
city-government with trade in cannons and ammunition.
126
Whereas, in many
other countries, such interpenetration of oce and trade led to the complete
overpowering of the market by monopolistic practices and personal trading
privileges, this seems to have been far less the case in the Dutch Republic.
Te direct participation of a very substantial part of the economic ruling
class in oce created strong checks against individual merchants using state-
power for their own exclusive benet. Despite a number of spectacular cases
of corruption, public auctioning and open competition in government-
contracting were probably more dominant even than in England.
127
In
absolutist France or Spain, the close ties between small groups of merchants or
nanciers and the state led to a colonisation of the growing market-relations
by royal interests. In the Netherlands, similar integration resulted in a form of
collective bourgeois self-rule.
Large-scale investment in state-obligations became a favourite form of
securitisation of existing wealth for those merchants-cum-politicians. But
laying a hand on state-revenues was not a hidden form of refeudalisation or a
transition to tributary relations, as it might have been in countries such as
122. Adams 2005.
123. Zandvliet 2006, p. xv.
124. De Jong 1987, p. 82.
125. Knevel 2001, pp. 979.
126. Burke 1974, pp. 5960.
127. Tis conclusion is armed by my own research on military contracting in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, which I hope to publish soon.
Spain or France where state-income still ultimately rested on surpluses amassed
by extra-economic extraction. Dutch tax-income in the eighteenth century as
much as in the seventeenth rested on the highly commercialised nature of the
Dutch economy. It was a form of redistribution and concentration of wealth,
but one that was rmly rooted in the developed commercial base of the
economy. Once decline in the industrial sector set in, a substantial part of the
ruling capitalists transformed themselves from active merchant-industrialists
into nancial capitalists. In this way, aristocratisation did take place, although
it should be sharply delineated from the refeudalisation that occurred when
the ruling merchants of the Italian city-states reverted to non-commercial
landholding. In his study of the Leyden lite of the eighteenth century,
Maarten Prak showed that an average member of the city-magistrate held a
staggering 60 per cent of their assets in state-obligations, for which they
received a rent. Another 11.7 per cent or 15 per cent for the family-members
of regents was invested in foreign, mainly British, loans and stocks. Houses,
land and titles made up 13.9 per cent of the regents wealth, but much of this
consisted of productive investments in capitalist agriculture.
128
Te situation
in Leyden was more-or-less representative for most of the Republic, except
that industrial decline was probably sharper than elsewhere.
Te large amount of revenues that could be redistributed among the Dutch
ruling class through state-bonds is a reminder that eighteenth-century decline
should not be seen in overly absolute terms. Even in the sphere of production,
the Dutch Republic probably remained one of the most advanced societies in
Europe. But the inability to break through the trends toward nancialisation,
the persistent economic localism and political fragmentation did mean that
Dutch early-modern capitalism could not become the launching-pad for an
industrial revolution. Te ruling class of the Dutch Republic by-and-large
did not favour the attempts at reform for industrial revival that were proposed
by more farsighted statesmen in the course of the eighteenth century. Instead,
the Amsterdam capital-market became a major source of money-capital
underpinning the British state-debt and private investment.
129
Whereas, from
a national perspective, the transition to capitalism was stalled, from a global
perspective it was partially displaced, feeding into the British industrial
revolution while continuing to ll the pockets of the Dutch ruling class. When
in the 1780s, and again in 1795, revolutionary movements rose against this
regent-class, the ght against aristocracy became a popular battle-cry. But
those movements never had to dispose of a real aristocracy of the land. Tis
128. Prak 1985, p. 117.
129. Riley 1980, pp. 119.
had been broken economically in the late-medieval period, and politically in
the course of the Dutch Revolt. What remained of it was largely a symbolic
force. Te second round of the bourgeois revolution was directed against the
monied aristocracy of the Amsterdam stock-exchange, which had managed to
integrate itself into international capital while forming a barrier to industrial
development in the Netherlands itself.
Conclusions
In the debate on the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the Dutch
Republic has gured as a fully crystallised form of merchant-capitalism. But
the arguments on both sides of the debate have been based on an image of
pre-industrial Dutch society that is often sketchy, stereotypical and outdated.
Tis article has sought to provide a more rounded view, corresponding to the
current state of historical research. Central to the alternative interpretation of
Dutch early-modern capitalism presented here has been to show how strongly
Dutch commercial primacy was actually rooted in a transformation at the point
of production, rather than being articially crafted on a non-capitalist base.
Tis reinterpretation raises serious diculties for both major strands in
the debate. On the one hand, if even the most mercantile of all merchant-
Republics could only ourish on the basis of a prior social transformation at
the point of production, this adds to the criticisms that were made of the
Sweezy-Wallerstein school of commercialisation as the driving force towards
capitalism. On the other hand, taking seriously the interplay between rural-
and urban-economic development that was so central to the Dutch case poses
real problems for the Brenner school, with its almost exclusive focus on
agricultural class-relations and its elevation of one privileged English path of
agrarian transformation as the ultimate measure of success. First, even within
the small area of the Northern Low Countries, not one, but at least three
distinct trajectories led to the spread of capitalist relations in agriculture.
Second, their form and content did not only rely on class-relations in the
countryside, but, crucially, on the interaction between development in the
countryside and in the towns, leading to an urban-agrarian symbiosis involving
trade and production. Tird, the success of this symbiosis depended on the
growing division of labour between various regions of Europe expressed in
the expansion of international trade, even when the way in which the Dutch
provinces managed to integrate themselves into this expanding trade-network
diered from that of the Hanse cities or the Italian city-states because of
the extent to which capitalist relations had already taken root in shing,
manufacture and agriculture. Fourth, the importance of the Dutch Revolt in
freeing the economy of the Low Countries from the political constraints that
followed from their integration into the Habsburg Empire suggests that a
revolutionary transformation of the state-structure was indispensible in
furthering capitalist development, even though this revolution was not
initiated by the bourgeoisie itself, and was neither the starting-point nor the
nal act in the transition.
Te seventeenth-century expansion of Dutch capitalism left a huge imprint
on the spread of the system worldwide. While important, this impact was
certainly not conned to that of the Dutch East India Company and the
Dutch rle in the transatlantic slave-trade. Contrary to long-established views,
homeland-production far outstripped colonial goods and luxuries even in
foreign trade. Te seventeenth-century Golden Age saw the deepening of the
medieval urban-agrarian symbiosis, extension of wage-labour, substantial
development of manufacture and the growing economic integration of the
dierent regions within the Dutch Republic. However, the Dutch trajectory
of capitalist development also carried strong marks of its early birth. Although
the strength of merchant-capital went hand-in-hand with substantial changes
in production, the core of the capitalist class always remained focused primarily
on trade. Tis started to become a serious hindrance to further capitalist
development once the Dutch were outcompeted or forced out of international
markets by political means from the 1650s onwards. Financialisation, based
on the strong integration in international capital-ows, proved the easier
option for the Dutch ruling class over a restructuring of production, leading
to the long eighteenth-century depression. Meanwhile, the consistent localism
and small scale of production meant that drawing-up the walls of urban
protectionism remained the preferred answer to increased competition for
much of the urban middle classes. Te federal state-apparatus, probably more
directly populated and controlled by the leading capitalist families than any
state before or afterwards, could never act as a counterweight to these trends.
Instead, it helped to enforce economic policies that were characterised by the
absence of protectionism on a national scale and strong protectionism on a
local scale. Tese strongly favoured merchant and nancial capital over
productive capital, creating social tensions that contributed to the revolutionary
waves of the 1780s and 1790s.
Te advanced economic structure of the seventeenth-century Dutch
Republic did not become the launching-pad for an early industrial revolution.
But, reading the history of the transition backwards from its late-eighteenth
century result has marred our understanding of the many changes in the shape
of capitalism before its nal breakthrough. Too much of the transition-debate
has been recast as a debate on why Britain succeeded and the rest failed.
What is lost in this way is Marxs fundamental insight into the international
character of the transition, in which the dierent momenta of primitive
accumulation distribute themselves . . ., more or less in chronological order,
particularly over Spain, Portugal, Holland, France, and England.
130
Te story
of this distribution of moments is not simply one of linear national trajectories,
consisting of many failures and one privileged path to success. Rather, it
consists of a real dialectical unity, in which the stalled fragments of capitalist
development in one country formed the elements of its further development
in the next.
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Review Articles
Althusser, el innito adios, Emilio de pola, Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 2007
Althusser: une lecture de Marx, edited by Jean-Claude Bourdin, Paris: Presses Universitaires
de France, 2008
Althusser et la psychanalyse, Pascale Gillot, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2009
Machiavel et nous, suivi de Des problmes quil faudra bien appeler dun autre nom et peut-tre
politique, Louis Althusser; Althusser et la insituabilit de la politique et de la recurrence du
vide chez Louis Althusser, Franois Matheron, Preface by tienne Balibar, Paris: ditions
Tallandier, 2009
Abstract
A review of recent French and Latin-American work on Althusser suggests that the received
interpretations of the latters work may protably be re-examined. Te notion that there exists an
early, middle and late Althusser, each distinct from the others in important ways, is called
radically into question by this body of scholarship. Various authors show the presence of an
aleatory dimension, usually associated with the late Althusser, in even his most structuralist
concepts (for example, structural causality). Tese works help us read Althusser in a new way.
Keywords
philosophy, materialism, psychoanalysis, structuralism, Marxism
Spectres of Althusser
In 1990, at the very moment a relieved intellectual world was convinced that it could
nally, in good conscience and with unimpeachable theoretical and political justication,
forget Althusser, he had the impudence to die.
If he had been, as he expressed it, entombed in silence during the last decade of his life
a bit of hyperbole that nonetheless captured the sense that, legally, professionally and
socially, from the moment he strangled Hlne Legotien in 1980, he was already dead,
waiting only for the ocial pronouncement that came a decade later his death paradoxically
brought him back to life. Not only did it bring the eulogies and encomia that should (but
perhaps could not) have been uttered during his lifetime: the words of praise and admiration,
the tributes both expected and unexpected, which revealed that the silence that had
surrounded Althusser was determined by causes external rather than internal to his work,
as if the desire to give Althusser his due had only been waiting for the appropriate moment
to express itself.
148 Review Articles / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 147156
Perhaps it could not have been otherwise given the generalised contempt that surrounded
his most important texts, Pour Marx and Lire le Capital, texts that had been conned to a
historical moment not only past but surpassed, namely the structuralist moment, a moment
well-known to be deprived of any theoretical interest. In the English-speaking world, the
fact that E.P. Tompsons Te Poverty of Teory, with its portrait of Althusser as both
structuralist and Stalinist, preceded Hlne Legotiens death by little more than a year
made it appear prescient. Te revelations concerning Althussers long history of mental
illness gave Tompsons assertion that much of Althusser was mere nonsense a certain
credibility, as if the diculty that many anglophone readers experienced in reading his
work was grounded in their objective poverty, rather than any lack of preparation on the
readers part.
Althussers death, however, ten years later, marked the time not only of a burial but also
of an uncovering: its eects altered forever the narrative of the rise and fall of Althussers
structural Marxism (to cite the title of Ted Bentons well-known study). Althusser, it
turned out, had produced an enormous body of work over a period of more than
four decades that he, for various and often-complicated reasons, had never published. It
included not only a thesis on Hegel but a number of book-length manuscripts, essays,
course-notes, as well as an astonishing number of letters, many touching on philosophical
and political themes.
Of these, none was more notorious than Althussers autobiography, Te Future Lasts
Forever [Lavenir dure longtemps], which began by describing and then proceeding to
(attempt to) explain the death of his wife. Te publication of this text in 1992 succeeded
in re-opening the case of Althusser, although primarily in a psychiatric sense (the Writings
on Psychoanalysis published the following year contained lengthy letters to Althussers
analyst), as if he had only to take his place alongside Dr Schreber or Pierre Rivire. To a
lesser extent, however, its publication succeeded in leading readers back to his published
uvre. His brief remarks on philosophy were enough to cast doubt on the received reading
of Althusser, and opened the way for the appearance in 1994 of the rst volume of
the crits philosophiques et politiques.
1
Of the texts included in the crits philosophiques,
none proved to be more stimulating or provocative than Te Underground Current of the
Materialism of the Encounter,
2
a text selected and assembled from a number of fragments
by Franois Matheron. Made up of materials written by Althusser in 1982, it was almost
immediately received in the mid-nineties as the announcement of nothing less than a new
project: the establishment of an aleatory materialism. Furthermore, in the same year
another posthumous publication appeared, Sur la philosophie, which contained a long,
carefully organised interview with the Mexican philosopher Fernanda Navarro, Philosophie
et marxisme, which repeated the themes (sometimes verbatim) of the Underground
Current. Tus, the late Althusser was born, an Althusser who, it was argued, had liberated
himself from the errors and failures of the early Althusser (which signicantly was not the
Althusser of the forties and fties, but of the sixties, that is, Althusser after the book on
Montesquieu), characterised as a proponent of structuralism, or structural Marxism. It was
as if Althussers own work was marked by an epistemological break (Toni Negri called it his
1. Te two volumes of Althussers crits philosophiques et politiques have been translated into
English as Althusser 1997, Althusser 2003, and Althusser 2006.
2. Althusser 2006, pp. 163207.
Review Articles / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 147156 149
Kehre) by which he separated himself from his own metaphysical or idealist past. Perhaps
such a reading was inevitable, as if the only way to refer to Althusser at all was to dissociate
him from himself and declare him innocent of his early work. With all of its problems,
though, such a reading succeeded in identifying the antagonisms internal to Althussers
work, even if it could do so only by translating these antagonisms into the language of what
Althusser himself called the chronological time of successive theoretical problematics, and
thus to a before and after. Te weight of this view remains so great that not only has the
posthumous publication of texts written before 1975 failed to displace it, but Machiavelli
and Us, of which the bulk had been written in 19723 (and thus, as tienne Balibar has
pointed out, contemporaneously with the Reply to John Lewis) continues to be regarded as
a late text.
Now, nally, nearly twenty years after Althussers death, we have reason to hope that the
situation has begun to change. In the English-speaking world, G.M. Goshgarians well-
researched prefaces to the English versions of the posthumous publications, as well as
William Lewiss Louis Althusser and the Traditions of French Marxism, meticulously
reconstruct the political context and stakes of Althussers work, above all, of the sixties and
seventies. A revised and updated version of Gregory Elliots classic, Althusser: Te Detour of
Teory, provides an indispensable overview of Althussers work as a whole. Nor is the
renewed interest in Althusser conned to the US and Britain. A group of French and
Spanish studies that I propose to examine here have returned to the early Althusser with a
clear sense of the incomplete and contradictory character of even the most polished of
texts, often insisting on performing nothing less than a symptomatic reading of Althusser
himself: Emilio de polas Althusser, el innito adios, Pascale Gillots Althusser et la psychanalyse,
and a collection of essays edited by Jean-Claude Bourdin, Althusser: une lecture de Marx.
But perhaps even more signicantly, they have returned to the investigations and debates
that took place in and around Althussers texts before they were suspended and then set
aside by the events of 1968 and rendered nearly illegible by the theoretical and political
conjuncture that these events produced. Now, many years later, in a very dierent
conjuncture, it appears not only that these investigations and debates have retained their
interest, but that they are now endowed with a new signicance and relevance. Such a view
not only rules out the evolutionary reading of Althussers development, but forces us to
confront the irreducible complexity that characterises his uvre from beginning to end.
I will take as my starting-point Emilio de polas extraordinary work, Althusser, el innito
adios [Te Innite Farewell ]. I say extraordinary because it is, by turns, strange, exhilarating,
and surprising. pola had been Althussers student in 1965, and, while there is an
incontestably personal quality to the work, there is not a trace of nostalgia. On the
contrary, far from yearning for the theoretico-political golden age of 1960s Paris, pola
resumes the debate around the theme, all-but-forgotten in France and still the object of
scorn in the anglophone world, of structural causality. He writes as if the participants
(above all, Althusser, Jacques-Alain Miller, and Badiou) had reconvened after a nights rest
to resume the discussion, the past forty years nothing more than an instant in the time of
theory. In fact, all three of the books under consideration here share the sense, most
emphatically argued (or even dramatised) by pola, that the debates around the concepts
of structural causality, conjuncture and subjection were in a perfectly aleatory fashion
suddenly suspended (and never, until now, to be taken up again) by the events of 1968 and
a new theoretical conjuncture, to use Althussers phrase, in which, for better or worse,
other theoretical and political questions, which appeared far more urgent and unavoidable,
emerged. From such a perspective, according to which historical succession cannot be
confused with progress and that which comes after is not necessarily superior to what came
before, the debates that took place within Althussers circle neither reached a theoretical
impasse nor did they cease for lack of interest or signicance. Te texts in which they
assumed their material existence wandered invisible through the theoretical void until an
encounter or series of encounters, as unpredictable as those that rendered them for nearly
half-a-century unreadable, endowed them, not only with visibility, but also with a new
theoretical power.
Te legibility of Althussers texts and the texts of his students, however, is neither
spontaneous nor given. It is not easy to free ourselves from the grid of interpretation that
an objective alliance of Althussers critics and admirers have succeeded in imposing upon
his work. It is for this reason that pola proposes a protocol for reading Althusser, a protocol
that, far from seeking to identify or reconstruct the coherence and consistency of Althussers
arguments (Althusser according to the order of his reasons), instead opens itself to the
lacun, the dcalages, the silences, that is, the symptoms, that traverse, according to
Althusser himself, even the most apparently rigorous texts: Tere is no doubt that there
exists in Althussers uvre an explicit philosophical and political aim [propuesta], a stated
[declarada] project that the majority of his exegetes, for better or worse, have seen as his
only contribution. Nevertheless, to the extent we enter without preconceptions into the
details of his analysis and into the subtle texture of his writing, we, not without increasing
perplexity, discover in it the unexpected presence of certain dissonances, the intermittent
but systematic eruption of certain atypical statements, and, on occasion, of certain moments
of incoherence in the logic of his argumentation, all of which serve to cast doubt on the
univocity of his project.
3
With certain precautions, we can speak of two intertwined but distinct and opposing
projects whose disjunctive synthesis, in which distinct projects diverge and then meet in a
confrontation, producing a diraction of meaning across the surfaces of texts, characterises
Althussers work. But we would be mistaken to regard the subterranean project(s) as fully-
formed but hidden beneath the stated project as its inverse or its mirror-image, as in the
religious conception of exoteric and esoteric textual meanings. It is more accurate to
describe the intertwining of these projects as a process of uneven and combined theoretical
development, a process that neither ends nor simply ceases at the limit of Althussers work,
but pursues its unpredictable development through the encounters that constitute the
afterlife of Althusser. Te underground project, according to polas argument, emerged as
the unthought remnant of his stated project, existing in a sporadic manner, in certain
formul that Althusser in an allusive and intermittent way let slip in his rst writings.
4

Bourdins description of Althussers own practice of reading will use another formula, which
is as applicable to Althussers own texts as to those of Marx: Te task thus consists of
reading texts such as Capital with the aim of extracting from them the philosophy that
inhabits them in the practical state .
5
3. pola 2007, pp. 367.
4. pola 2007, p. 39.
5. Bourdin (ed.) 2008, p. 195.
Structural causality, as becomes quickly apparent, is a point of intersection, a crossroads
where two concepts simultaneously meet and diverge in Althussers work: the concept of
conjuncture and the concept of the (interpellated) subject. Te rst reminds us that
Althussers primary task was to gather together and think the deferred eects that, insofar
as they returned to alter the meaning of Marxs own texts, constituted his scientic
revolution. As Balibar reminds us, Althusser has been read as a thinker of structure and a
thinker of conjuncture, as a structural functionalist and as a thinker of indeterminacy, that
is, as a thinker of opposing and irreducibly antagonistic poles. His use of the term structure,
especially in the early sixties, together with his antihumanism and antihistoricism, convinced
many Marxist readers that he had in fact reasoned himself into an ahistoricism from which
there was no way out: E.P. Tompson is the perfect specimen of such a reader. On the other
side, his constant recourse to the idea of the conjuncture an idea that found its way into
few commentaries on Marx, which generally sought the deep, not surface structures of
history, the site of necessity, as Gramsci suggested in the Modern Prince, not the site of the
accidents by which it was resisted or retarded appeared (to a smaller, and perhaps more
discerning, group of readers) almost as a provocation, an attempt to use the language of
political practice and the confrontation of forces to disguise his smuggling of foreign
philosophies across the borders of ocial Marxism. Was not his constant reference to
Lenin, to the concrete analysis of the concrete situation the soul of Marxism, and his
corresponding contempt for any Marxist religion of history understood as an unerring
movement towards communism, a way of talking about Machiavelli and perhaps even
Spinoza, and therefore a movement away from Marxism, a movement all the more cunning
in that it was carried out in the name of a return to Marx?
pola suggests exactly the opposite: the apparently opposing poles of Althussers thought
are better understood as attempts to respond to the same theoretico-political problem.
Structural causality belongs neither to the early nor to the late Althusser, it is neither on the
side of the structure nor of the conjuncture: it is the element in Althussers thought which,
once understood in the nexus in which it took shape, nullies these polarities, which can
be seen as nothing more than attempts to think the same historical problem from dierent
vantage-points. Here, Pascale Gillots careful reconstruction of the place and stakes of the
notion of structural causality especially insofar as it was shaped by the encounter with
Lacanian psychoanalysis is very useful. Althusser was inspired rather than instructed by
psychoanalysis, particularly by the notion of metonymic causality apparently constructed
by Althusser on the basis of Jacques-Alain Millers presentation to Althussers seminar on
psychoanalysis from 19634. Citing Balibars notes on Millers presentation, Gillot
illuminates this otherwise-mysterious concept: the manque--tre (the lack in being) that
characterises the subjects existence in and through the order of language cannot be said to
be the cause of the desire that simultaneously attempts and fails to ll that lack [manque].
Instead, desire is the metonymy of the lack in being [le dsir est le mtonymie du manque
tre]. Here, and I move beyond Gillots analysis, we can see the way in which Althussers
increasing interest in and familiarity with Spinoza shaped his construction of metonymic
causality. Refusing to follow Millers rejection of the very notion of cause, he reads
metonymy as the action of a cause that does not exist outside of or prior to its eects. In
the sense that it is nowhere present except in the eect that it produces, it is an absent
cause. Spinoza, who rejected the notion of the vacuum or the void, whether in the scientic
or theological sense, preferred to call such a cause (to be precise, God) an immanent cause,
perhaps ruling out in advance any recourse to an originary void or nothingness, as, in his
way, did Miller. Te dierence between the absent cause and the immanent cause, so slight
as to appear insignicant, would prove decisive to the emergence of aleatory materialism.
But perhaps even more importantly, the concept of structural causality marked Althussers
attempt to break with the models of emanative or expressive causality whose practical as
well as theoretical eects within Marxism had proven so disastrous. Te idea or principle of
faith that an immanent teleology of the productive forces was realised in the contradiction
between the forces of production and the relations of production (or even the contradiction
between the economic base and the ideological superstructure) governed the apparently
opposing politics of social-democratic evolutionism and ultra-left voluntarism (or in
Althussers time, the PCF and the Maoism of the Union des Jeunesses Communistes
Marxistes-Leninistes (19668) and its successor, La Gauche Proltarienne (196873)).
Tis implacable faith in the immanent teleology of history was expressed in such formulas
as late capitalism or the rst stages of the transition to communism. It was Althusser,
above all the structuralist Althusser, who repeatedly noted Lenins insistence, often against
not only his own prior arguments but perhaps even against his own instincts, that a political
line was not determined by the stages of historical development (capitalism was always-
already overripe), but by the conictual unity of the conjuncture whose very conguration,
whose objective alliances and conicts, often appeared utterly to contradict the immutable
laws of historical development.
In his Introduction to the new French edition of Machiavelli and Us, Balibar makes the
very important observation that more than the fragments in which Althussers attempt to
think an aleatory materialism often treated as his nal word, was realised, the text on
Machiavelli represents a sustained attempt, more than a decade long, to examine certain
key-problems: the interpretation of Machiavelli constituted for him a privileged site of
invention and experimentation, and did not represent an application to a particular
case .
6
If indeed Machiavelli was the element in which Althusser, at the risk of falling into
the empiricism and pluralism of which he had been accused following the publication
of Contradiction and Overdetermination in 1962,
7
would pursue a line of thought
that began with the notions of over- and underdetermination, it is only here in Machiavelli
and Us that he will, as he liked to say, put his cards on the table. Did there exist, on the
one hand, the objective conditions for the realisation of the Italian nation (or the
construction of socialism), and, on the other, the merely accidental and epiphenomenal
obstacles (whose eventual disappearance is thus guaranteed) to this realisation? Althusser,
following Gramsci following Machiavelli, will ask whether a historical necessity (itself the
product of the laws of history) that can be deferred, delayed, retarded for years, decades
or centuries, can accurately be called a necessity at all. As he famously or infamously
argued in Contradiction and Overdetermination, a historical scheme which consists of
necessity and its (ever-growing list of ) exceptions must give way to the recognition of the
necessity of the exception which thereby ceases to be understood as an exception at all.
In speaking of Machiavelli, and therefore at a safe distance from the themes of revolutions
betrayed, deferred and abandoned, Althusser can say openly that historical necessity does
6. Althusser and Matheron 2009, p. 14.
7. English translation in Althusser 2005.
not exist prior to or outside of the conjuncture, which would then be understood as its
imperfect or degraded expression. Rather, historical necessity exists in, and only in, its
conjunctural realisation. Te necessity or cause of the conjuncture is structural, the
structure of the conjuncture, immanent in or absent from (that is the question) its eects.
Tus, conjuncture is not the name of a random or haphazard list of elements, determinations
or circumstances; it is instead the codication of multiple relations of force. Te system,
as fragile and unstable as a system can be, that these forces, in their very antagonisms, form
determines the movements of displacement and condensation which ensure that the
solitary hour of the last instance never comes.
8
Given the interest in the aleatory or conjunctural tendency in Althusser, it is all the more
striking that no single work by Althusser receives more attention by these recent studies
than Ideologie et appareils idologique dtat. Tis text, extracted from a longer manuscript
posthumously published by Jacques Bidet as Sur la reproduction in 1995, has exercised
greater inuence on more elds of study than any of Althussers other works. Indeed, in
certain important ways it is profoundly unlike Althussers other (published) works: it is, in
part, a manual of Marxism-Leninism written in a simplied, not to say simplistic, language
and in part a dense and extremely elliptical account (in which, once again, Althusser stages
an encounter between Spinoza and Lacan) of the constitution of subjects in a way that
completely transforms the very idea of ideology. Te co-existence of these two utterly
dissimilar parts in a single text has produced the eect, perhaps intended, of obscuring the
originality and diculty of the latter part of the essay and of ensuring that it would be read
in the light of the rst part: to use the label or imprecation applied to the Althusser of
the ISAs text in American sociology-textbooks, its structural functionalism. We must be
absolutely clear: this is not a misreading. In fact Althussers postponing of any discussion of
resistance and struggle to a brief postscript, in which he attempts to deny what he has just
done by citing the primacy of class-struggle, only enforced the separation between the
reproduction of capitalist social relations and class-struggle, whose mutual immanence the
essay renders unthinkable. As Isabelle Garo notes, in the ISAs text, ideology is situated
only on the side of the functions of conservation and reproduction.
9
In fact, it is this very
functionalism the argument that capitalism produces the very ideological apparatuses
necessary to its reproduction, the means by which a collective subject pursues the end of
its own survival that secured the essay its prestige. A comparison of the ISAs essay
with the parts of Sur la reproduction from which it was taken, however, reveals some
surprising facts. For reasons that remain to be explored, Althusser carefully removed
passages from the published version that would in any way qualify or complicate the
functionalism that most readers have found in the essay, especially those in which he
describes the antagonistic by-products [sous-produits] that the process of reproduction
excretes. For pola, Gillot and several contributors to Althusser: une lecture de Marx (most
directly, Garo and Franck Fischbach, but also, if at a certain remove, Jacques Bidet and
8. See Yves Vargass Lhorreur dialectique (description dun itinraire) for an account of this
tendency in Althussers thought, especially as it took shape within and against the notion of the
dialectic (Bourdin (ed.) 2008, pp. 14792).
9. Bourdin (ed.) 2008, p. 54.
Roberto Nigro),
10
all these problems are condensed into the single thesis: ideology
interpellates individuals as subjects.
As both Garo and Fischbach point out, this thesis is unprecedented within Marxism for
which, at least in its dominant forms, the human subject was a given, and more, an origin
that would only belatedly come to be divided, fragmented, lost to itself, in a word, alienated.
However complex and sophisticated they might be, from Lukcss theory of reication to
the notion of the society of the spectacle, what might be called theories of the subject
tended to focus on the deception of an already-constituted subject. Althusser alone, at least
in a direct form, posed the question of the constitution of the subject, how the free and equal
individuals who are the actual subjects of democratic societies, but merely the potential
subjects of totalitarian rgimes (I place these terms in quotation-marks because Althussers
essay calls these distinctions radically into question), are called into being and made
responsible and punishable for the actions of which they are the authors and owners.
Te concept of the interpellated subject, however, cannot be grasped independently of
the theses that precede it in Althussers argument. To extract it from the context of its
theoretical development, and to imagine, as many commentators have, that interpellation
is primarily a discursive act or linguistic act in which a Subject calls the subject into being
through a speech-act, is to restore Althusser to a dualism of the discursive and the non-
discursive, if not exactly of spirit and matter. In fact, the Lacanian references and allusions
in the essay have often served to encourage such readings. Te more closely we read the
essay, however, the more we can glimpse the outline of Spinoza beneath that of Lacan. It is
not simply, or primarily, the notion of interpellation that separates Althusser from previous
theories of ideology. More fundamentally, the term ideology in the ISAs essay has nothing
in common with earlier uses but the name, and the essay itself may have contributed to the
declining frequency of the use of ideology. Ideology suggests a system of ideas which, in
the modern period at least, tended to be regarded as false or inadequate (Althusser himself
oered a version of such a theory in Marxism and Humanism in For Marx). In his 1970
essay on the ISAs, Althusser broke irrevocably with such notions of ideology: ideology has
a material existence, which means that not even ideas have an ideal existence, but are
always-already realised in an apparatus and its practice or its practices.
Tus, as Garo notes, the phrase ideology represents the imaginary relation of individuals
to their real conditions of existence, often understood as an illusory notion, what
individuals imagine (i.e., falsely) their relation to reality to be, takes on a radically opposed
meaning. Te imaginary relation is not only fully material and real, it is inscribed in
apparatuses and practices. What is this relation? It is just as Spinoza described in the
Appendix to Part I of the Ethics, as well as in the Scholium to Proposition 2, Part III:
individuals imagine themselves to be the cause of their actions, they imagine that an act of
will moves the body to do the bidding of the mind. But these subjective errors are
mirrored in the objective existence of apparatuses: they are not only regarded as the
authors of their acts, their authorship is an ever-increasing theoretico-practical network
organised around the theme of intention, which is attributed to and imposed upon them
10. I say this because, in a certain sense, the problems of alienation (Bidet) and anthropology
(Nigro), problems that, if we take him at his word, Althusser rejected, can perhaps more
accurately be said to have been displaced to the problematic of interpellation.
and upon their bodies, a fact that Foucault, a perceptive but critical reader of the ISAs essay,
would capture in his famous dictum: the soul is the prison of the body. Michel Pcheux,
one of Althussers privileged interlocutors in the matter of ideology, and whose important
text, Language, Semantics, Ideology [Les vrits de la palice], was published in 1975 in
Althussers Torie collection, argued that for Althusser the autonomy of the subject is the
form of its subjection. We might think of the vagabonds simultaneously set free (i.e.
expelled and abandoned) and criminalised by the process of primitive accumulation in
England described by Marx, the ancestors of todays illegal immigrants.
Tus, interpellation is no more reducible to speech or discourse than the call that the
Apostle Paul heard on the road to Damascus: it is the call, vocatio or , already
inscribed in the movement of persecution and counter-persecution, of violence and
counter-violence (it is hard to kick against the pricks, that is, to resist torture). It is that
call by which the police individualise the subject who will be asked to identify himself , so
as better to be held accountable for his deeds, a call in which speech and armed force, and
thus not simply the force of speech, are one and the same thing.
Pcheux took very seriously the charge (notably by one of Althussers former students,
Jacques Rancire) that Althussers emphasis on reproduction at the expense of transformation
leaves little room for resistance that is not simply a ruse of capitalist development. Fischbach
surveys the two most prominent attempts to imagine resistance to interpellation, those of
Judith Butler and Slavoj iek, but nds neither satisfying. For Butler, subjectivity is more
extensive than the identity of the subject that results from the subjection of ideological
interpellation.
11
According to iek, subjectivity recovers that negativity in which the
symbolic order is grounded in a gesture that arms its own non-substantiality. Both
options, subjectivity as a reserve of possibility and subjectivity-as-negativity tend to the
derealisation and disincarnation
12
of the subject. In opposition, Fischbach posits that
composite body whose very persistence would take the form of resistance to the abstraction
and alienation to which ideological interpellation subjects us.
13
It appears, then, that if Althusser once incited us to read Spinoza, that is, really read
Spinoza, seeking in the remotest corners of his work the solutions to the pressing problems
confronted by the theoretical practice of Marxism, so now Spinoza directs back to Althusser
and his contemporaries, casting a brilliant light on passages so often read, but overlooked.
To take these recent studies seriously is to see Althusser, not as a ghostly presence hovering
at the margins of the world, haunting it like a bad memory, but rather as an indispensable
part of the process by which the present may become intelligible to itself, his work in its
unevenness and its conictuality returning upon the present to furrow a hole in its walls, a
hole through which something new, a future, may pass.
Reviewed by Warren Montag
Occidental College
montag@oxy.edu
11. Bourdin (ed.) 2008, p. 144.
12. Ibid.
13. Bourdin (ed.) 2008, p. 145.
References
Althusser, Louis 1959, Montesquieu, la politique et lhistoire, Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France.
1965, Pour Marx, Paris: Maspero.
1973, Rponse John Lewis, Paris: Maspero.
1992, Lavenir dure longtemps, Paris: Stock/IMEC.
1993a, crits sur la psychanalyse: Freud et Lacan, edited by Olivier Corpet and Franois
Matheron, Paris: Stock/IMEC.
1993b [1992], Te Future Lasts a Long Time, translated by Richard Veasey, London:
Chatto and Windus.
1994a, crits philosophiques et politiques, two volumes, edited by Franois Matheron, Paris:
Stock/IMEC.
1994b, Sur la philosophie, Paris: ditions Gallimard.
1995, Sur la reproduction, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
1996 [1993], Writings on Psychoanalysis: Freud and Lacan, edited by Franois Matheron,
translated by Jerey Mehlman, New York: Columbia University Press.
1997, Te Spectre of Hegel: Early Writings, translated by G.M. Goshgarian, London:
Verso.
2003, Te Humanist Controversy and Other Writings, translated by G.M. Goshgarian,
London: Verso.
2005 [1969], For Marx, translated by Ben Brewster, London: Verso.
2006, Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings 19781987, translated by G.M.
Goshgarian, London: Verso.
2008 [1971], On Ideology, London: Verso.
Althusser, Louis, tienne Balibar, Roger Establet, Pierre Macherey and Jacques Rancire 1965,
Lire le Capital, Paris: Maspero.
Althusser, Louis and tienne Balibar 2006 [1970], Reading Capital, translated by Ben Brewster,
London: Verso.
Althusser, Louis and Franois Matheron 2009, Machiavel et nous, suivi de Des problmes quil
faudra bien appeler dun autre nom et peut-tre politique/Althusser et la insituabilit de la politique
et de la recurrence du vide chez Louis Althusser, Preface by tienne Balibar, Paris: ditions
Tallandier.
Bourdin, Jean-Claude (ed.) 2008, Althusser: une lecture de Marx, Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France.
Elliot, Gregory 2006, Althusser: Te Detour of Teory, Second Edition, Historical Materialism
Book Series, Leiden: Brill.
Gillot, Pascale 2009, Althusser et la psychanalyse, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
pola, Emilio de 2007, Althusser, el innito adios, Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno Editores.
Lewis, William S. 2005, Louis Althusser and the Traditions of French Marxism, Lanham: Lexington
Books.
Pcheux, Michel 1975, Les vrits de la palice: linguistique, smantique, philosophie, Paris:
Maspero.
1982 [1975], Language, Semantics and Ideology, translated by H.C. Nagpal, Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Spinoza, Baruch 1992 [1677], Te Ethics, Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, and Selected
Letters, translated by Samuel Shirley, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company.
Tompson, Edward Palmer 1978, Te Poverty of Teory: or an Orrery of Errors, London: Merlin
Press.
Lenin Reloaded: Towards a Politics of Truth, edited by Sebastian Budgen, Stathis Kouvelakis
and Slavoj iek, Durham, NC.: Duke University Press, 2007
Abstract
Tis review looks back at Lenin Reloaded: Towards a Politics of Truth, the 2007 collection of essays
from Slavoj iek, Alain Badiou, Fredric Jameson, Sylvain Lazarus, Terry Eagleton, and others.
Taking up the volumes central questions, it moves through the problems posed explicitly and
implicitly by an attempt to think the gure and politics of Lenin today. In so doing, the review
takes on the Leninist conception of history and revolution, the position of dialectics as description
and as method, the rle of the partisan, the debate about voluntarism, and the status of the party
as historical and contemporary form.
Keywords
Lenin, dialectics, party, voluntarism, iek, Jameson, Badiou
Lenin undead
On 25 June 1935, Leon Trotsky dreamed of Lenin. Not Lenin in the past, when he was
alive, but Lenin undead in the present, unaware that he had died. And in the dream,
Trotsky could not bring himself to remind his comrade of that unfortunate fact.
For many on the Left, the gure of Lenin occupies a similar unsettled position: he whose
legacy haunts the Marxist tradition, who belongs to another epoch, who stood outside of
the natural progression of socialist politics, and who should stay dead and buried. For
others, these same charges become the very reason to turn back to Lenin, as one who
refused to accept the trend-lines of the spontaneous development of worker-politics
dictated by capitalist ideology. From this perspective, we need a reanimation, not of Lenin
the man, or even of Leninist politics per se, but of the Leninist gesture, of the move through
this mode of analysis, this mode of conviction, and the consequent capacity for such
interventions.
Lenin Reloaded: Towards a Politics of Truth,
1
the 2007 collection of essays edited by
Sebastian Budgen, Stathis Kouvelakis and Slavoj iek, aims for just such a reanimation of
that which never died: not Lenin the unwelcome reminder of what the Soviet project
became, but Lenin the thinker and the partisan. Not the statist doctrine called Leninism,
in its Stalinist variation, but a singular politics called Lenin. To borrow Fredric Jamesons
phrase from this volume, the book concerns itself with theorising the desire called Lenin
from a group of distinct perspectives.
2
Composed of seventeen essays, the volume is divided
1. Te title cannot but help echo the 2003 lm Te Matrix Reloaded, an echo that is likely
intentional. It is worth recalling that the lm is obsessed with repetition and what goes wrong
with it as it tells the story of the messianic One like the proletariat, the sum of the aw of the
system who is expected to make the choice of saving humanity at the expense of resetting the
program and having to rebuild the resistance from scratch. What is less obvious, in the context
of Lenin, is how it is the Ones choice to ditch humanity for a woman he loves that is the game-
changer, the wrong choice that breaks the ceaseless cycle of failed revolution and moves it
forward.
2. It is worth noting here that the series in which this volume appears (SIC, edited by iek)
self-designates as oering Lacanian interventions. We need to ask what this Lacanian orientation
into four parts, each of which articulates a particular lens onto the topic: Retrieving Lenin,
Lenin in Philosophy, War and Imperialism, and Politics and Its Subject.
Te obvious question that lies at the heart of the book is, why Lenin now? What is specic
about our historical moment in which this look back would be productive for the Marxist
Left? Any provisional answer needs to take stock of previous attempts to think Lenin. Te
most powerful of these attempts have undoubtedly been those, such as this volume, that
venture Lenin as a theoretician of practice and attempt to decouple and reforge this link: as
Lenin himself reminds us, revolutionary practice requires advanced theory. In this way,
Lenin Reloaded may be thought of as the inheritor of a tradition that would include, among
others, Lukcss Lenin: A Study on the Unity of His Tought (1924),
3
C.L.R. Jamess Notes on
Dialectics: Hegel, Marx, Lenin (1948),
4
Althussers Lenin and Philosophy (1968),
5
and
Negris Tirty-Tree Lessons on Lenin (19723).
6
However, to consider the specicity of Lenin in our moment, and the aggregate position
of this collection, is to approach the supposed general acceptance of the foreclosure of
revolutionary politics in our day, following the collapse of the revolutionary movements of
the 1960s and 1970s and the ascendance of neoliberalism in the 1980s. More particularly,
the volume situates itself against the prevailing theoretical accompaniment to this historical
closure. In a stance that should be familiar to readers of iek, Alain Badiou, and other
contributors to the volume, a return to Lenin functions as a counter-blow to the postmodern
relativism of neoliberal capital and its apologists, especially those on the Left. Tis counter-
blow, the editors argue, is particular in its insistence on a politics of Truth:
Breaking out of this deadlock, the reassertion of a politics of Truth today, should,
in the rst place, take the form of a return to Lenin. But once again, the question
arises: Why Lenin, why not simply Marx? Is the proper return not the return to
origins proper? (p. 2.)
In short, returning to Lenin should not mean returning to a more recent Marx in Bolshevik
clothing. Te wager is an improper return, constitutively dierent from a proper return to
the origin called Marx. (Terein the specicity of reloading, which carries simultaneous
connotations of a completed project started over again dierently, a second attempt at what
did not take correctly the rst time, and, in a dierent register, putting more bullets into
the gun to nish a battle that needs nishing.) Rethinking Lenin or the particularity of
his historically situated gesture is, for this volume, dierent precisely because of how he
manifested a total political conviction, in which a certainty of force is undergirded by a
certainty of interpretation. Truth, in this Leninist vein, is necessarily partisan truth: Lenins
wager today, in our era of postmodern relativism, more actual than ever is that truth
and partisanship, the gesture of taking sides, are not only not mutually exclusive but
oers, when it does show itself intermittently in this collection, to a reloading of Lenin.
However, given the Marxist specicity of this journal, this question will be addressed only when
productive.
3. Lukcs 1970.
4. James 2005.
5. Althusser 2001.
6. Negri 1977.
condition each other: the universal truth in a concrete situation can only be articulated
from a thoroughly partisan position. Truth is by denition one-sided. (p. 3.) Extended
further: is it not that truth can only be articulated from a partisan position but rather that
the very procedure of truth particularly a politics of truth consists in the act of taking a
side? Tis might be the heart of the radical Leninist gesture as sketched here: there is no
truth that is not that of becoming-partisan. However, we should note that the use of the
word partisan and its rle as a structuring concept here signals a dominant tension that
runs through the volume, a tension that might be broadly described as that between a post-
Maoist Lenin and a Trotskyist Lenin. Crudely put, this makes itself felt in the volume by
the recurrent emphasis on the partisan for the former tendency and on the party for the
latter, although in both cases the issue is not simply terminological but that of a designated
centrality as a theoretical and political category. (Indeed, one of the values of the book is to
esh out another Lenin that does not represent a tradition following his death, but the
placement in an antecedent lineage: namely, a Hegelian Lenin which cannot be easily
situated in either camp.) Such a gap is unmistakable, yet there are few moments of direct
confrontation between these positions. Tis is ultimately a shame, given that in the absence
of such line-drawing, certain issues most notably, what exactly is meant by the party
today? remain more opaque than they deserve to be.
Taken as a whole, however, we can summarise the guiding questions of Lenin Reloaded
as follows:
1. What is the Leninist conception of history? What is the event we call a revolution, if
revolution is even to be thought of as evental in character? What does it mean to
intervene in the course of history when we no longer believe that it has a discernible
course, but instead that it is a discontinuous set of conjunctures only sutured together
by analysis and practice?
2. Does Leninist analysis detect cracks in the totality of capital, or does it produce them,
driving wedges into what seems like an impenetrable surface? What is the link between
dialectical reason and a politics grounded in partisan truth (the truth-procedure oriented
in terms of antagonism)? What is the particular truth that makes possible the certainty
of the Leninist gesture?
3. How do we move from our analyses of the historical conjuncture to the organisation of
real bodies and minds that can intervene? Does a reloaded Leninism require the
resurgence of the Leninist party? What is the form to be taken and the form given by
the vanguard that does not stand outside, if such a concept has any analytical or
political utility now?
History and intervention
History, the scattered eld
To address the rst set of inquiries that I see Lenin Reloaded articulating, we need a grasp of
what, for the authors, a Leninist sense of history looks like and how it conceives of the
cohesion and directionality of events (or, more accurately, how it renders fraught the
category of event itself ). Daniel Bensads essay Leaps! Leaps! Leaps! details what we
might call Leninist political temporality, as counterposed to the homogeneous and empty
time of mechanical progress that Lenin detected in Kautskys thought.
Lenin, in contrast, thought of politics as a time full of struggle, a time of crises
and collapses. For him the specicity of politics is expressed in the concept of a
revolutionary crisis, which is not the logical continuation of a social movement,
but a general crisis of the reciprocal relations between all the classes in society. Te
crisis is then dened as a national crisis. It acts to lay bare the battle lines, which
have been obscured by the mystical phantasmagoria of the commodity. Ten
alone, and not by virtue of some inevitable historical ripening, can the proletariat
be transformed and become what it is. (p. 150.)
Tere is much here to return to, particularly the laying bare of battle-lines so crucial to
Lenins thinking. For now, however, what is at stake is a fundamental mechanism of how
politics happens across time. A revolutionary crisis
7
occurs, but this is not the culmination
of the slow ramping-up of revolutionary potential. Rather, the untenability of the capitalist
system shows itself, rendering visible its insurmountable contradictions (this does not
mean, however, that such a system is a weak, tottering enterprise waiting for any militant
intervention: it is precisely because it is so exible that one cannot just wait for the right
moment). Yet, while the root of the crisis is the damned-to-fail motor of capitalism itself,
the crisis must become conceived as a national crisis, so as to stitch the general conditions
of possibility to a particular historical conjuncture. Te political singularity of the crisis,
read through a localised sequence of events and actors, serves to lay bare the battle-lines,
the work of exposure central to the vanguard. Only at this point, when the fundamental
antagonism is shown, can the proletariat become what it is. Or, more precisely, the proletariat
retroactively becomes what it was, the missing sign that renders thinkable the scattered events
gathered under the category of revolution.
From a Leninist perspective, then, since the one thing that should be the inevitable
outcome of capitalism the negation of the capitalist project by the class-conscious
proletariat comes about through general crises which may or may not become politically
productive, the best we can do is to develop reading practices, detect trend-lines, and gauge
what actions regure and disrupt these patterns. More important, however, is how the
Leninist gesture situates itself within the historical eld: it is because history fundamentally
has no determinate course that we have to intervene so as to direct that absent course. As
Alex Callinicos writes in his contribution to Lenin Reloaded, for Lenin, the very
unpredictability of history requires that we intervene to help shape it (p. 20). Or, in the
words of Sylvain Lazarus:
7. To be noted here is the fact that Bensad writes of the concept of revolutionary crisis. To
be sure, for Lenin, the chain of actions and contingencies that retroactively become a revolution
can never be understood according to the abstract category of revolution. However, an issue
worth pursuing in detail elsewhere is what changes if the people involved think of what they are
doing as revolutionary, rather than it being designated as such after the fact. For more on this
question, consider the pieces by Lazarus, Shandro, and Lih in this volume.
History is clear (analysis of the war), politics is obscure . . . History and politics are
thus out of phase, and we are extremely far from the mechanism of historical
materialism and dialectical materialism that Stalin was to theorize and that
Althusser paradoxically took over as well. Politics, in this sequence, is in a never-
ending discussion with history, just as with philosophy, while maintaining
disjunctive relations with both. Politics is charged with assuming its own thought,
internal to itself. Tis is the condition for its existence, and it is also this point
that requires the disjunctions. (p. 260.)
Several of the other essays give a further sense of just how deep this insistence on
unpredictability and invention runs. In Lars Lihs Lenin and the Great Awakening, he
draws forth, via analogy to the evangelical tradition, the rle that radical conviction plays
in the Leninist project. Not only conviction in the correctness of ones course of action, but
also in the transmissibility of that militant will to others. As with a preacher, there is a
double condition of faith: you have to act with the certainty of conviction, and you have to
believe that the word can be spread. Tere are two transfers of will: from action to discourse
(within the militant subject) and from the discourse of the militant subject to the actions
of the masses. Tis, then, raises a hard question when we recall Bensads description of
the temporal framework in which Leninist political consciousness ourishes on a mass-
scale. Can Leninist will be achieved and transmitted without certain cultural and material
underpinnings, namely, certain changes in labour-conditions and living standards? Tis
is the crux of what has been called the spontaneist-versus-voluntarist debate. Aside
from the broader set of thoughts about vanguardism, labour-autonomy, and ideological
legacies, this is what the voluntarist position articulates: although we cannot dismiss the
organic material composition of the working class, consciousness comes from without,
and it is the articial interventions into what appear as the spontaneous developments of
consciousness that produce revolutionary discourse.
Te reference to discourse here is not accidental, drawing particularly from Jean-Jacques
Lecercles Lenin the Just, or Marxism Unrecycled, a piece that oddly combines an aective
portrait of Lenin with a move toward a Lenin-inected Marxist philosophy of language.
Lecercle oers that, what is suggested here is a political concept of discourse of discourse
as intervention. (p. 274.) Returning to the question of Leninist temporality and sense of
historical narrative oered by Bensad, Callinicos, and Lazarus, we might read Lecercle as
pointing elsewhere and asking: if what makes discourse political is its interventionist
character, should political be thought of as commensurate with interventionist? Te concept
of discourse as intervention gives traction here, for this is not a discourse of intervention,
a discursive intrusion into a homogeneous eld. Discourse as intervention means, rather,
that there is no course of history into which we intervene, because all singular instances
enunciations, contingencies, and happenings that compose the material of history have
the character, or category-form, of interventions. As such, drawing together Lih and Lecercle
indicates that the Leninist stance requires at once the utter conviction of political will and
the recognition of the utter messiness of the scene upon which one acts.
tienne Balibars compelling Te Philosophical Moment in Politics Determined by
War: Lenin 191416 is particularly sharp about this messiness of conjunctures, impure
revolution, and the ways in which heterogeneous elements (such as national characters) are
recombined in encounters, producing new global scenarios that can scarcely be predicted.
As he writes: it appears that the war profoundly transformed the very notion of a
revolutionary situation. Tis was no longer a postulate bound up with the idea of a certain
maturity of capitalism (of which war was the symptom), but rather the result of an
analysis of the eects of the war itself on a dierentiated global structure, in which the
advanced and backward countries coexisted and interpenetrated. (p. 218.) Here, then,
is where the general intervention of Lenin Reloaded shows itself most clearly. For, aside from
its particular takes on what rethinking Lenin today should look like, it remains a theoretical
enterprise, insisting that the desire called Lenin remains, not only a politics of truth, but
also, circling back to our earlier framing, an emphasis on the hard work of analysis, of
mapping historical situations onto theoretical frameworks. To paraphrase Lenin, advanced
politics requires advanced theory. And it is indeed advanced theory that oers the way out
of the deadlock, a move from the recognition that we must intervene, but in a eld
consisting purely of eects, of symptoms of capital that veil their absent cause.
Revolution
How, then, to think about the revolutionary event? I want to track through the related
arguments of two of the essays, from Fredric Jameson and Sylvain Lazarus, to draw the
tenor of this knotty conceptual and practical problem. Jamesons essay (one of the books
strongest in its clarity and movement) opens with Trotskys previously mentioned dream
and Lacans reading of it in the seventh Seminar. However, our interest here is in the
explicitly dialectical core Jameson detects, both in Lenins thought and our attempt to think
it. Lenin, Jameson oers, presents a paradox for us. On one hand, Lenin remains remarkable
in the totalising optic of his politics, in the way in which everything is political for him.
However, Marxism is, as an analytic practice and horizon onto the world, a priority of
economics over the political, reading state and legal forms as consequent symptoms of the
fundamental economic antagonism. Is returning to the Leninist encounter with capitalism
a betrayal of the core of historical-materialist analysis?
For Jameson, this apparent deadlock is the dialectical centre of reloaded Leninism:
revolution is the third term, not just in thought, but as a temporal instance, when politics
and economics become indistinguishable. Of more importance is the other dialectical two,
event and process, whose slippage produces the category of revolution. Revolution is neither
the utterly incommensurable event which undoes the symbolic and rational order that it
disrupts, nor is it just another point in a continual augmentation of the political awareness
of the working class. It is the event-as-process and process-as-event, the moment that, in
our earlier terms, is both an intervention and a coming-into-being of a historical lens
through which we can recognise the force of that intervention. We are clearly far from the
Engelsian denition of revolution as the act where one part of a population imposes its will
upon the other part by violent means.
8
8. However, in State and Revolution, this is the basic denition that Lenin holds to (Lenin
1970, p. 74), and it is perhaps symptomatic of our historical moment that the volumes authors
do not appear to aim to reload this aspect of Lenin. To be sure, iek and Badiou in particular
maintain a conviction in the importance of this more unpleasant side of Leninism. However, in
this volume, the relation between a politics of truth and the violence (possibly) required to bring
such a politics into being remains largely obscure.
Lazarus, by contrast, refuses the general dialectical function of revolution, restricting it
to a particular political sequence in which it designated the constitutive political-subjective
stance of the period (the French Revolution and its spectres). Te notion of revolution has
been captured by a historicist sequence of politics, a sequence most prominent now in its
statist articulation. However, this is only a facet of the larger narrative: seen from today, the
capture of revolution by historicism is only one of the elements and symptoms of a far more
fundamental capture, which is that of politics by the state (p. 263). Consequently, Lazarus
wants to remove from October the description of revolution, to give it back its originality
and its unprecedented political power that of being the invention of modern politics
(p. 264). However, what is the fundamental problem with the historicist conception of
politics? It is precisely around the conception of the revolutionary event that Lazarus detects
the lineage that must be cast aside, for the historicist vision thinks of politics only in terms
of great events concerning the limits of forms of power, of which revolution is the ultimate
paroxysmic event articulating the impossible, unthinkable end of the state. At this point,
[p]olitics then belongs to the order of the event and not to that of thought (p. 262).
How, if it is possible, to square this with Jamesons reections on event, process, and
revolution? Te event, for Lazarus, can only be recognised by the historicist/statist model
in exteriority: it is a break of order in the social mechanism, yet there can never be an idea
of singularity (pp. 2645). It is, rather, an order of before and after, as if the thinkability
of the political remains constant while its material congurations are altered. Against this,
Lazarus aims for the event in interiority, when it is the specic material that gives rise to
identication, the study of deployment and cessation (p. 265). To parse this out: against a
model a prior political sequence that legitimates or delegitimates the event according
to its conditions of readability, trying to think the event in interiority is a study of
deployment and cessation, of the intervention into a eld that is no longer recognisable.
For Jameson, however, this study of deployment and cessation is precisely revolution, when
the event ruptures a political sequence as singularity, yet is dialectically folded back as part
of a process, as a designated point in a narrative that could not be recognised previously.
We might ask, what does it mean to guard the word revolution? Lazarus wishes for a
politics in thought, an active emptying-out of the holdovers misused by the historicist-
statist conception, while Jameson sees it as a still-necessary suturing-point for a Leninist-
dialectical conception of politics across time. Tis is a longer, harder debate that needs to
be continued, as Lenin himself was deeply attentive to the importance of naming.
9
For
now, the issue becomes: no matter what we call it, the revolutionary event remains the
necessary horizon of Leninist thought. So, out of this eld of messy conjunctures, phantom-
sequences that may or may not emerge, and scattered interventions, what grounds a politics
of truth and points it toward that horizon? Te answer provided in this volume is two-fold:
a certain mode of dialectical thought and a particular approach to, and mobilisation of,
class-antagonism.
9. Consider, for example, Lenins writings on slogans (Lenin 1974) and his call to abandon
the name of social democracy when it became apparent that it was emptied of its disruptive
specicity (Lenin 1965, pp. 12642).
Dialectics and antagonism
Turn and turn again
As mentioned previously, Lenin Reloaded is best read, not only as a timely optic onto the
possibilities of the Leninist gesture, but also as an insistence on the political urgency of
advanced theory. Tis manifests itself in the volume in several incarnations: the Lacanian-
inspired thought of iek, Badiou and Jameson, the post-operaismo, Spinozist work of
Negri on immaterial labour and the general intellect, and the philosophical-political texts
(to be distinguished from political philosophy) of Balibar and Lazarus.
Yet, at the literal centre of the volume, rests a set of four inquiries, from Savas Michael-
Matsas, Kevin B. Anderson, Daniel Bensad, and Kouvelakis, into Lenins notebooks on his
reading of Hegel in 1914, and his explicit confrontation with dialectical reason that
exceeded his 1909 Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. Kouvelakiss expansive and subtle
essay, Lenin as Reader of Hegel: Hypotheses for a Reading of Lenins Notebooks on Hegels
Te Science of Logic, provides a lucid sense of the historical particularity of why Lenin, at
the outbreak of the First World-War, turned to an intensive reading of Te Science of Logic.
As Kouvelakis argues, in the context of the modernised innovations of this historical
catastrophe, Lenins return to Hegel is an attempt to read Hegel as a materialist, not by
turning to the more explicitly political writings, but by a return, against the Second
Internationals devalorisation of Hegel, to his most abstract and idealist text and the one in
which the Marxian conception of dialectics via leaps is most present. For Lenin, the
philosophical consequences of this were a stress on the dialectical as the immanent self-
movement of things grasped by thought, the undoing of any stress on simple evolution or
ux, and, most critically, that the grasping of self-movement as a transformative action is
revolutionary praxis. Taken in dialectical combination with the material particularity of his
collaged notebooks, Lenin moves toward a true materialist reversal of Hegel, transforming
the interest in the subjective logic into an assertion of the primacy of practice.
However, rather than dig heavily into the readings of the notebooks oered in Lenin
Reloaded, I want to follow the crucial line of thinking proposed by Kouvelakis at the end of
his piece, namely that, the new position that Lenin attained with his reading of Hegel is to
be sought nowhere else than in his political and theoretical intervention in the years that
followed the First World War (p. 194). In other words, what is the particularity, not of
Lenins reading of Hegel, but of Leninist dialectics themselves?
10
10. Given this shift of emphasis pushed by Kouvelakis, I should note that I nd the section
on Lenin in Philosophy to be the weakest of the volume, not on the grounds of their scholarly
value, but in terms of the desire for a reloaded Lenin proposed by the volume. Tis is, to be
sure, a matter of contention and preference, though two comments are in order regarding my
qualication of these texts. First, although Lenins 1914 reections on Hegel certainly constitute
an advance in his thinking, Lenin, at the end of the day, is not a highly original or productive
reader of Hegel. Te question that Balibar and others raise why Lenin turned to metaphysical
Hegels Logic in the moment of international war is signicant, but this has more to do with
grasping the trajectory of his thought than with how he is to be regured for our times. Put
bluntly, I do not nd that the importance of a reloaded Lenin has much to do with his relation
to Hegel. Tis leads to the second point: if there is something in Lenin, in our improper return
to him as a lost moment within the Marxist-theoretical tradition, it is not to be found in what
What might the specicity of Leninist dialectical theory look like? Savas Michael-Matsas
notes, in his essay Lenin and the Path of Dialectics, that Lenin distinguishes between a
motion without repetition, without a return to the point of departure, and dialectical
motion, motion precisely with a return to the point of departure (pp. 1067). However,
this depiction of the Leninist motion needs to be claried. For, in one sense, the point of
departure never remains still: the historical conjuncture is always shifting, and our point of
departure may become unrecognisable, undesirable, recuperated by bourgeois or reformist
logic and unusable for our project. Yet, in another sense, the issue is not just that we must
return to a point of departure, but to the same point of departure, to the basic social
contradiction that is the incessant motor of capitalism. In this way, analysis is required to
parse out what is and what is not relevant, to make sure that we can detect how this
constant contradiction manifests itself in unforeseen ways.
Tese returns to the point of departure, Michael-Matsas oers, are Knottenpunkte, or
nodal-points, turnings of the spiral that, in Hegelian logic, provide the basic form of the
fundamental dialectic of thought toward the absolute. Tought passes through a position,
through its negation, and carries the traces of that motion back to its earlier position. Tese
positions are the Knottenpunkte, not the static rst position but the rst position turned,
rendered strange by the thought of its negation. We need to ask, however: does this describe
the fundamental Leninist conception of dialectical thought? If we consider the notes on Hegel,
the essays here support this conception. But, if we consider Lenins political and historical
writings, the answer would be no. Te point is that, unlike a Hegelian dialectic, which
could not fully grasp the world-to-be of capitalism, Lenins dialectic in the practice of his
historical and situation-analytical writings, rather than his notes on Hegel does not return
to the point of origin in this sense of passing through positions, and does not move up the
spiral by returning to origins. Why do I claim this? After all, many of the authors of Lenin
Reloaded stress, quite rightly, that one of the vital strengths of the Leninist gesture is its
ability to re-evaluate, to circle back upon itself to its point of departure, and to grasp how
its analytical mode must never remain constant. However, Lenin remains most powerfully
for us today, not a thinker of the horizons of thought qua thought, but of the horizons of
thought and action in historically specic organisations of global capitalism. And the specicity
of that organisation in which Lenin struggled and wrote is the logic of an uncanny, stalled
dialectic that goes nowhere without the conscious intervention of an organisation, the
revolutionary party.
Splitting images
As such, it is not a choice to be voluntarist, but rather the necessary conclusion for a
Leninist conception of capitalism, the main and basic fact of which is the cleavage of
he did with Hegelian metaphysics. It is, rather, to be found in the partisanship of his truth and
the conception of the Two that underpins this. As such, dialectics are of serious concern here,
but I want to argue that we should seek his dialectical thought, not in his notes on Hegel, but in
his fundamental approach to the circuits and mechanisms of capitalism and the social
contradictions thereby brought into being. Te value of the Lenin-avec-Hegel section is that it
raises this tension powerfully and helps us to think through this gap.
society into irreconcilably antagonistic classes.
11
For this splitting is at once the necessary
precondition for the production of capital and the impossibility of a dialectical unfolding of
socialism without active intervention. It is at once the constant motor of capital and that
which is veiled. To speak paradoxically, it is hidden out in the open.
So, what does this mean for the Leninist gesture and its conception of how it intervenes
in the world? Its specicity lies in its insistence that the capitalist totality is, contrary to its
projected image, an open totality. As Michael-Matsas puts it: Lenins approach to dialectics
does not have any closed totality as a point of departure but the splitting of a single whole
and the discovery of its contradictory tendencies and aspects. Only through this penetration
in the interior of the object is the latter revealed as an open totality. (p. 116.) Te vital
point in this schematic is that against the vulgar anti-Leninists who claim Leninist
voluntarism is a forcing of radical will against the natural order of the working classs
spontaneous development the contradictions were already there, and the act of penetrating,
the analysis of the conditions and directions of its history, is not the act of hammering away
at a whole, but of exposure, of revealing the openness and splitness of this totality. If Lenin
is a dialectical thinker, it is not because he understands the capitalist world as dialectical.
Rather, this volume suggests, it is precisely because the capitalist world lacks internal-
dialectical movement the development of the productive forces and social relations do
not necessarily engender the forces of their negation that we need dialectical analysis and
action to interrupt it.
Tat said, I want to argue, through consideration of Badious signicant contribution to
the volume, One Divides Itself into Two, that what remains striking and potent in the
Leninist gesture, as it is theorised in this collection, is its recognition that, while conjunctural
analysis demands the defamiliarising capacity of dialectical thought, the result of that
thought is a call to non-dialectical action, at least insofar as we think of dialectics as involving
an internal negation. In an argument familiar to readers of his 2005 book Te Century,
Badiou claims that we must think the century from 1917 to the end of the 1970s as
the century thinks itself: Its subjective determination is Leninist. It is the passion of the
real, of what is immediately practicable, here and now (p. 9). What exactly is meant by the
real here? It remains rather slippery, as Badiou does not fully specify the degree to which
its Lacanian echoes should be followed. However, to locate it within a properly Leninist
(and productive) register, ieks comments in his polemical essay, A Leninist Gesture
Today: Against the Populist Temptation, give vital clarication. Following a discussion of
real abstractions and of capital as a structuring logic, iek writes: Here we encounter the
Lacanian dierence between reality and the Real: reality is the social reality of the actual
people involved in interaction and in the productive processes, while the Real is the
inexorable abstract spectral logic of capital that determines what goes on in social reality.
(p. 90.)
12
Clearly, the Leninist passion for the real is neither a passion for the social reality
of capitalist life nor its spectral architecture.
13
11. Lenin 1970, p. 11.
12. To put this in other terms: the symbolic order of capitalism its determined ows of
capital and dictated modes of subjectivity, all the codes of being that undergird social reality
overlays, yet is threatened by, the uncanny drive of capital (its invisible hand, so to speak), the
Real of anti-subjectivity that is utterly incompatible with the ideology of free choice as the
fundamental mechanism of competition and market-trends.
13. If anything, Lenin urges the vanguard to become a sort of counter-spectre, a structuring
It is, instead, a passion for modes of praxis forms of being-in-the-world that are
materially quite possible, particularly with the technological advances of the industrial
revolution, but that are politically unthinkable under capitalism. Te passion for the real
is the passion to stand outside of the totality of capitalism and to forcefully decouple the
here and now, itself a horizon of what could be, from this totality.
14
Crucially, this work
insists that, despite its variations, when the symptoms are aligned correctly, we see in
the totality the same form as always, the tension between the non-dialectical Two and the
background from which it emerges, capitalisms fantasy of the unied One. Hence the
title of Badious piece and its central move in determining the subjective determination of
the century:
Te century is a gure of non-dialectical juxtaposition of the Two and the
One. Te question here is to know what balance sheet the century draws of
dialectical thinking. Te driving element for the victorious outcome, is it the
antagonism itself or the desire for the One? (p. 10.)
In the century that Lenin inaugurated, the world is comprehended according to a political
optic that divides the world into an irreconcilable Two, an opposition that cannot be
talked through or ameliorated. It is the nal conict of a historical era coming to a head,
manifested in the communist vision of the war between classes and the fascist version as
that between opposed nation-races. However, although the Two is the gure of the
century, it is so only in its attempted overcoming, for, as the passion for the real, it is the
animation toward the One.
Where Badious piece moves from this observation, however, is the real site of his thinking
in Lenin Reloaded, as it cuts to the heart of Leninist dialectics. For the question of whether
it is the antagonism itself or the desire for the One that compels the conviction of nal
confrontation is, at its basis, a question of what dialectical model we use. In the terms in
which this debate was fought in China in 1965: Tis struggle opposes those who think that
the essence of dialectics is the genesis of the antagonism and that the just formula is One
divides itself into two; and those who estimate that the essence of dialectics is the synthesis
of the contradictory notions and that consequently the correct formula is Two unite into
one. . . . Is it the desire to divide, to wage war or is it the desire for fusion, for unity, for
peace? (pp. 1011.) For Lenin, the desire is obviously the former, to divide, to wage war.
However, in asserting this, we need to ask: what is the specicity of this antagonism, what
are its consequences, and how does it orient political action? Te specicity is that although
the capitalist totality thinks itself as and defends its historical perpetuation according to
the logic of a One, it is fundamentally split. It is constituted along the mechanisms of
abstraction capable of reshaping the matter currently moved by capital. As he writes in What Is
to Be Done?, what else is the function of Social-Democracy if not to be a spirit, not only
hovering over the spontaneous movement, but also raising this movement to the level of its
program? (Lenin 1973, p. 63).
14. To esh out the Lacanian schematic hinted at by Badiou and iek, we might think of
the totality of capital (its subjective formation in total) as the intersections and contradictions of
the following: its Real (spectral market-logic), its Imaginary (the libidinal attachments to
commodities and social phenomena), and its Symbolic (the consequent illusions of self-
determination and rational choice).
its non-dialectical Two, the opposition between workers and capitalists that is the tangible
manifestation of the broader logic of antagonism between subjects and capital. Terefore,
to claim the necessity of One divides itself into two is to say that the functional
contradictions of capital lead to the division of itself, always-already divided. Tis is the
crucial lesson iek draws out in his rejection of understanding Leninist communism as
populist, in Laclaus sense: Against the populization of Communism, one should remain
faithful to the Leninist conception of politics as the art of intervening in the conjunctures
that are themselves posited as specic modes of concentration of the main contradiction
(antagonism). It is this persisting reference to the main contradiction that distinguishes
the truly radical politics from all populisms. (p. 83.) Reading this alongside Badious text,
the work of revolutionary consciousness cannot be the antithesis that the annihilative
passion forges itself as (the destructive embodiment of the antagonism itself ), but something
else, a horizon toward a third that escapes either the unary phantasm of the One or the
terroristic deadlock of the Two. Badiou oers a version of the subtractive passion for
the real; of interest, here, however, is how the other writers in the volume conceive of the
Leninist strategy, that of the vanguard-party and the practical work of organisation that
makes an escape from this deadlock possible.
Vanguard and party
To touch on organisation, we should ask why this doubled question of enmity and non-
spontaneous consciousness remains so important for the Leninist conception of politics,
and what the concrete apparatus of the Leninist gesture the partisan vanguard and the
party-form means for radical politics today. Te objections are familiar: the categories of
bourgeois and proletariat no longer apply to a globalised market of precarious life, an
insistence on political enmities leads to a validation of political terror, and the time of the
Two is over. However, we know better. To be sure, we have lost this fundamental division,
but in ideology, not economic reality. We should insist that this is exactly the reason why
the Leninist work of exposure and splitting is necessary more than ever today.
But what does it mean to insist on partisan truth, as the Introduction stresses, on this
politics of vigilant antagonism and declaring enemies? Tis is, after all, the core of the
vanguard: not their status as intelligentsia (as shown by Eagleton and Shandro), but as
professional partisans who specialise in clarifying messy conjunctures so as to let the
proletariat-to-be see who the real enemies are. As such, it is a misreading of the Leninist
project to condemn it for too-rigidly designating enemies, fetishising antagonism, and
subsuming all to a binary division. For, as Lenin writes in What Is to Be Done?: Since there
can be no talk of an independent ideology being developed by the masses of the workers in
the process of their movement the only choice is: either bourgeois or socialist ideology. Tere
is no middle course (for humanity has not created a third ideology, and, moreover, in a
society torn by class antagonisms there can never be a non-class or above-class ideology).
15

We want to insist on such a rigid division (either bourgeois or socialist ideology), but not
because conjunctures, cultural objects, and political decisions are cleanly bourgeois or
proletarian. It is precisely the opposite: it is because all objects of analysis are overdetermined
15. Lenin 1973, p. 82.
by ideological cross-currents because such divisive terms perhaps do not obtain that we
need the hard work of parsing out these two tendencies through this political optic, to insist
that they remain the basic building-blocks of ideology.
Tis is, of course, the work of the conscious vanguard, who are, in Alan Shandros
words, called upon both to foster the spontaneous working-class movement and to combat
it (p. 309). In his piece, Lenin and Hegemony: Te Soviets, the Working Class, and the
Party in the Revolution of 1905, Shandro sums up, with admirable clarity, the critical basis
for Lenins anti-spontaneity: Lenin analyzes the spontaneous movement as the movement
of the working class, not simply as it is determined by the relations of production, but
also as it is subjected to the inuence of the ideological apparatuses of the bourgeoisie . . .
(p. 310.) Te absolutely vital point here is that countering the spontaneous movement of
the working class is neither a symptom of litism nor an over-valorisation of trained
intelligentsia. For what is thus subject to this domination is not the working class as such
but the spontaneous unfolding of its movement, that is, the working-class movement
considered in abstraction from its revolutionary socialist vanguard, from those intellectuals
and workers whose political activity is informed by Marxist theory and is, in this sense,
conscious. (p. 310.) If, as Lenin urges, there is no middle-path, and the political
conjuncture is a composite of bourgeois and socialist ideology, this must extend to the
spontaneous movement of the working class. Te very conception of becoming-proletariat
is constricted and directed by the dictates of bourgeois ideology as long as we accept our
subject-position as somehow authentic, as a product capable of vaunting the system. Such a view
should remain as unacceptable to us as it was to Lenin in his critiques of party-traitors. For
it is at heart a question of the persistence of political form and of the ideological stains that
persist beyond their utility or welcome, even when we think that we have cast aside a past
tradition. Te proletariat, if conceived as the gure of the self-developing internal negation,
tracks out the categories of politics allowed by the bourgeois state: it is the extension of
how the bourgeois state thinks itself, not a supersession of the political architecture of
capitalism.
But what of the form of the Leninist project, the party? It is a question raised across
Lenin Reloaded, but the general consensus can be paraphrased as such: the Leninist vanguard,
yes, the Leninist party, no. (Regarding the party-issue, there are notable exceptions to which
we shall return.) Tose who cringe at the thought of an intellectual vanguard are unlikely
to be interested in Lenin Reloaded, as it is a book, without question, of theoretical texts by
recognised gures of the intelligentsia. And the claim that vanguardism is simply veiled
litism is patently absurd, as Eagleton demonstrates in his witty and sharp text included
here. What remains harder to confront is the form to be adopted by the vanguard: is it still
the party? Te general tenor of argument regarding the party in Lenin Reloaded is that,
while we have lost the organisational force rendered possible by the party, we have to accept
its consignment to that specic dustbin of history containing avant-garde forms transformed
into mechanisms for the maintenance of capitalist hegemony. My use of avant-garde is not
accidental, as Eagleton raises this in his discussion of State and Revolution, a text that is
audaciously avant-garde . . . not only in the sense of being poised at a political cutting-edge,
but in the more technical sense of promoting the politics of form (p. 56).
16
Tis is to say:
16. As Eagleton writes of the Dublin Post Oce situation in 1916 (and of the mobile, conjunctural
form of the vanguard ): Tey were a vanguard because of their relational situation because,
the vanguard must be radical, not only in their analysis and action, but also in the form of
their politics and the politics of the form they adopt. It is for this reason that adopting the
crystallised shape of the Leninist party cannot be our strategy now: not because it is more-
or-less litist, but because the codes and arrangements of capital have been conditioned to
ward it o.
However, one should not ignore the useful counter-balance that Alex Callinicoss essay,
Leninism in the Twenty-rst Century? Lenin, Weber, and the Politics of Responsibility,
gives to the more dominantly iekian position of the Lenin at hand here. Following
immediately after Badious piece, it serves also to delineate that wider split mentioned
earlier, between a post-Maoist Leninism and a Trotskyist one which Callinicoss piece
exemplies. Te general thrust of the piece is a necessary question about the consequences,
in terms of strategy and of outcomes, of a decisionism that valorises the conviction to
follow through on the revolutionary event, take full responsibility for the consequences of
ones actions, and leave behind the sphere of liberal-universal ethics that limits the range of
revolutionary practice.
Broadly, we might divide the argument into three moves. First, it raises a disagreement
with iek, via an analysis of how his opposition between a politics of responsibility and a
liberal inconsequential politics maps onto Webers distinction between an ethics of
conviction and an ethics of responsibility.
17
Second, it follows from its critique of the
Lenin he sees valorised by iek to venture a version of Leninist thought he sees as more
correct, tempered, and important as a political legacy. Tis version focuses on the rational
kernel of decisionism (that no theory can unambiguously entail or uniquely determine a
course of political action) and the fact that, without appeal to universal normative principles
(such as those of the left-liberals denounced by iek), decisionism can devolve into a focus
on the intentions behind the act (p. 28). Moreover, given that the consequences on which
iek focuses are less the future outcome that might justify our actions in the present than
the means necessary to achieve this outcome (p. 29), Callinicos worries that this focus on
intention (and on having the conviction to do what needs to be done) excuses itself from
a more genuine responsibility to the type of disastrous outcomes that may be brought
about. Disavowing a universal-ethical framework for the brakes it can put on partisan
activity, it eschews moderation and, potentially, the rle of reason and analysis.
18
As such,
unlike a Weberian decisionism in which reason can only play at best an instrumental role,
identifying the most eective means for achieving ends in whose selection it has played no
part (p. 23), Callinicos sees in Lenin (and in Trotsky) a movement from the key-recognitions
of the complexity and unpredictability of history and the necessity of political intervention
to a moderated decisionism that requires careful analysis and practical theory. In this way,
like the revolutionary cultural avant-gardes in contrast with the modernist coteries, they saw
themselves not as a timeless elite but as the shock troops or front line of a mass movement. Tere
can be no vanguard in and for itself, as coteries are by denition in and for themselves. (p. 49.)
17. Here, it is worth noting that the specicity of foreseeable consequences is of more
importance than Callinicos appears to grant it: one of the key-points of ieks position is the
conviction to accept also the consequences that could not be foreseen.
18. In fairness to the post-Maoist and iekian lines of thought, we should be quite clear of
the gap between a disavowal of reason (which it has never advocated) and a disavowal of a
universal-ethical framework (which it indeed often advocates).
Lenin becomes one of Webers rare breed of Gesamtpersnlichkeit, the total personality
capable of crossing the gulf between the two opposing ethical modes.
Lastly, Callinicos calls for both the primacy of political struggle, organisation, and a
return to a serious consideration of the socialist party as a structure for articulating a range
of grievances and needs. Of the nal calls he makes (the rst being the importance of
strategic analysis of capitalism), the last two push toward a continued belief in the party-
form: the specicity and centrality of politics and a continued belief in the weakest link
(p. 37). Both of these indicate the necessity of political organization and, more specically
for Callinicos, the need for a socialist political organization that generalizes and gives focus
to all the myriad grievances produced by capitalist society (p. 38). Given his other writings,
we may know well that socialist political organization here does mean socialist party. But,
taken on its on terms, in this essay, no such move is explicitly made. As such, in the
conclusion of Callinicoss piece, we can detect a tendency that runs throughout the volume,
particularly visible in those essays that tend to focus more favourably on contemporary
attempts to form mass-socialist or communist parties while still acknowledging the post-
Seattle world of organising.
To be sure, there are limits of space in a collected volume such as this one, and its tone
is generally analytic rather than prescriptive. Moreover, I am not implying that the absence
in these essays of eshed-out justication for a continued faith in, return to, or revision of
the party-form implies that such a justication is impossible. However, I would contend
that such an attempt to broaden its meaning, either to fold in perspectives originally hostile
to it, or to claim it is still up with the times despite the massive structural changes
acknowledged by these authors, belies a more genuine problem. In the immediate context
of this volume, one has to ask: by a socialist political organisation, do we still mean the
party? Whether the answer is yes or no, the dodged direct address of this indicates both a
reticence to fully associate with a term and concept whose legacy is less than spotless, and
an unwillingness or an incapacity to leave behind a category of organisation and political
thinking around which so much of the twentieth century took shape.
Such a broadening of the meaning of party is particularly evident in Bensads piece,
which, in addition to detailing the specicity of Leninist political temporality, also defends
the continued relevance of the party-form, particularly against charges of the undemocratic
nature of the party. As he writes, a certain degree of centralization, far from being opposed
to democracy, is the essential condition for it to exist because the delimitation of the party
is a means of resisting the decomposing eects of the dominant ideology, and also of aiming
at a certain equality between members, counter to the inequalities that are inevitably
generated by social relations and the division of labor. (p. 161.) Tis is at once true and of
real signicance, and I think one would be hard-pressed to nd any on the Left now,
including anarchists and others opposed to the party-form as such, who would disavow the
necessity for political formations to delimit themselves against dominant ideology and to
produce, in their own organisation, a mode of relation more egalitarian than the hierarchies
of labour. However, it is when Bensad turns to criticise those who want a politics without
parties that his argument falters: A politics without parties (whatever name movement,
organization, league, party that they are given) ends up in most cases as a politics without
politics (pp. 1612). Barring the petty celebration of that politics without politics by
some of the very targets of this criticism, it is clear that this is indeed usually the case. But
what Bensad poses against this politics without politics is far from the particularity of the
Leninist party. Rather, we have a double move that understands the distinction between
movement, organization, league, party to be largely terminological and, simultaneously,
that folds these other forms in under the general framework of parties. In short, this
collapses the specicity of, and justication for, the party, rendering it unclear as to what
exactly distinguishes it and makes the development of it, as opposed to other modes of
collective political practice, the task for the present. Politics without parties may indeed be
politics without politics, but this is parties without the party. And, at this point, we need to
ask seriously what is gained, that could not be otherwise, by continuing to think about, and
give shape to, our modes of organisation under the sign of the party.
Interestingly, in one of the more striking passages of the volume, Bensad points in a
distinctly dierent direction, one which celebrates the indeterminacy of political formation,
not as a sign of weakness, but as the basic condition for, and expression of, an immanent
and contagious communism:
For Lenin, everything leads to the conception of politics as the invasion whereby
that which was absent becomes present: the division into classes is certainly, in
the last resort, the most profound basis for political groupings, but this last resort
is established only by political struggle. Tus, communism literally erupts from
all points of social life: decidedly it blossoms everywhere. If one of the outlets is
blocked with particular care, then the contagion will nd another, sometimes the
most unexpected. Tat is why we cannot know which spark will ignite the re.
(p. 153.)
Without question, the political struggle of this last resort does not happen without
organisation. However, one of the crucial and constant projects for Marxist analysis and
struggle is to recognise which outlets are blocked with particular care, which turning-points
are stuck and which openings have closed over. We cannot know which spark will ignite the
re, but we have to know what cannot catch. Reading between the lines of this volume, at
least, the party begins to look like one of these potentially wet matches, dampened all the
more by the attempt to make of it many things it was not.
A nal question to follow this: has the economic base changed so drastically that these
Leninist tactics, reversals, and theories have become outmoded? Will the reloading of Lenin
resemble him only in name, a hollow echo of an evental rupture in our century? Two essays
confront this shifting ground directly in order to approach the particularity of our historical
moment. In From Imperialism to Globalization, Georges Labica asks if the stage of
capitalism Lenin analysed as imperialism, a new superstructural development of capitalism,
has been superseded by this set of phenomena we call globalisation. For Labica, the answer
is a resounding no: we have witnessed merely mutations of the fundamental imperialist
world-order, and globalisation in the true sense of a socialist international remains a real
horizon for our politics.
In Negris What to Do Today with What Is to Be Done?, or Rather: Te Body of the
General Intellect, which rereads Lenin through the framework of biopolitics and immaterial
labour, he grapples with the shifting ground on which we can advance from modes of
production and the consequent forms of general intellect to modes of subversive
subjectivity. Regardless of the degree to which claims about the immateriality of
contemporary labour may or may not be overextended, the fact remains that the political
force of the gure of abstract labour as a strong, material, industrial proletariat has
vanished along with the party capable of mobilising that gure. What remains? A biopolitical
multitude hemmed in by lost political legacies? A sea of precarious life, of informal labour,
over which hovers the autogeneration and speculation of nance?
Tere was a time, according to Negri, when it was indeed the party: Te party was the
engine that powered the production of subjectivity or rather, it was the utensil employed
to produce subversive subjectivity (p. 301). Te point of the party was not the organisation
of subjects, but of the production of a body, the constituted body of the proletariat, which
alone is capable of fully recognising and articulating the life of the masses and the entire
articulation of their needs as a physical, corporeal potential that alone can ground and give
content to the abstract violence of revolutionary intellectuality (p. 299). Taken in this way,
Lenin, alongside Luxemburg, thus represents not an apology for the autonomy of the
political sphere but the revolutionary invention of a body (p. 299). However, according to
Negris account, signicant shifts in the organisation of capital above all, the rise of
immaterial labour and the distinct mode of social cooperation it requires have changed
the terrain on which this body took shape. What, then, could do the same now, what
production of subjectivity for seizing hold of power is possible for todays immaterial
proletariat? (p. 301). He sketches two possibilities worth citing at length: In order to make
the event real, what is required is a demiurge, or rather an external vanguard that can
transform this esh into a body, the body of the general intellect. Or perhaps, as other
authors have suggested, might the becoming body of the general intellect not be determined
by the word that the general intellect itself articulates, in such a way that the general intellect
becomes the demiurge of its own body? (p. 302). Given his own trajectory, and his relation
to Lenins thought at dierent points in his life, from the early 1970s of Italian autonomia
to the late 1990s of the multitudes becoming, Negri has expressed both of these positions,
and the arc of his work might be read as the passage between the two. In this text, however,
there is a remarkably honest, and remarkably refreshing willingness to say we just do not
know: I myself do not believe that we have the power to identify which road to take; only
a genuine movement of struggle will be able to decide that (p. 303). He does want to hold
out the party, if not as a predominant mode of political organising, then as a category by
which to organise our thinking about the political situation. Yet, as he recognises, in
concrete, political, and material terms there is no longer a space but a place, no longer a
horizon but a point, the point at which the event becomes possible. For the party, therefore
the subject of space is subordinated to a specic kairos, the untimely power of an event
(p. 304). Shortly after this, we read that only a specic kairos will enable the body of
the general intellect to emerge (p. 304). One can debate the degree to which the kairos, the
evental moment, can be made to emerge and what rle a party can play in fostering
the conditions by which one can discern that moment. But it is clear, nonetheless, that the
subordination of the subject of space, and the rejection of the weakest-link model, indicates
that the gap between the spatial-political conjuncture in which the Leninist party took
shape and the one that we face now is so large as to make the transposition of that past-
organisational model, however successful it may have been at its proper kairos, to this
formless struggle hard to fathom.
To end, then, we might take up Negris question:
But what does all of this actually mean? Regarding these considerations we can
come to no theoretical conclusion. Never as in this case has there been so great a
need for militant action and experimentation. (p. 304.)
I would argue that this language of experimentation is of immeasurable importance, not
least because it takes stock of a situation in which those outlets of which Bensad wrote
cannot be discerned other than through a constant testing, scrapping, and trying otherwise.
In this light, the genuine diculty, not just of justifying a party, but of all theoretical
questions about what models of organisation are to be employed might appear in a dierent
light, as the consequence of another Leninist inheritance not fully examined in this volume.
Namely, an insistent localism, even as it reached toward the constitution of an International,
a recognition that what works elsewhere does not work here. Moreover, that which was
supposed to happen elsewhere and did not i.e. revolution in the more developed capitalist
core nds its success where the conditions are not right, against the odds. Tis indicates,
not just the critical worth of a theory of history that sees a scattered eld in which things
bloom wrongly and which therefore requires constant returns to a ground we thought we
knew well, but also that an experimenting and ruthlessly self-revising mode of struggle,
with no delity to general models or past traditions, alone can provide that necessary
cartography.
A vanguard without a front-line, a Leninist without a party? Clearly, with this we are far
from what is commonly, or even uncommonly, understood in terms of a lineage of
Leninism. What is less clear is the degree of what is gained or lost in the attempt to grasp
these major shifts in world-order, mode of production, and attendant subjectivity in terms
of political models, concepts, and practices associated with Lenin. Even less certain, and
more problematic, is the particularity of the party-form and whether or not it is a correct
mode of organisation for the myriad situations now faced. All that is certain is the degree
to which our theory and practice, our thought and battles must like Lenins body and
thought refuse to go away, to overstay a respectable welcome and become truly
unacceptable to bourgeois ideology, to be profoundly incorrect. Ceaselessly, we have to
keep renaming our enemies, misusing our dead, re-splitting the world.
Reviewed by Evan Calder Williams
University of California, Santa Cruz
evancalder@gmail.com
References
Althusser, Louis 2001 [1968], Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, translated by Ben Brewster,
New York: Monthly Review Press.
Badiou, Alain 2007 [2005], Te Century, translated by Alberto Toscano, Cambridge: Polity
Press.
Budgen, Sebastian, Stathis Kouvelakis and Slavoj iek (eds.) 2007, Lenin Reloaded: Towards a
Politics of Truth, Durham, NC.: Duke University Press.
James, Cyril Lionel Robert 2005 [1948], Notes on Dialectics: Hegel, Marx, Lenin, London: Pluto
Press.
Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich 1965 [1918], Extraordinary Seventh Congress of the R.C.P.(B.), in
Collected Works, Volume 27, Moscow: Progress Publishers.
1970 [1918], Te State and Revolution: Te Marxist Teaching on the State and the Tasks of
the Proletariat in the Revolution, Peking: Foreign Languages Press.
1973 [1902], What Is to Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement, Peking: Foreign
Languages Press.
1974 [1917], On Slogans, in Collected Works, Volume 25, Moscow: Progress Publishers.
Lukcs, Georg 1970 [1924], Lenin: A Study on the Unity of His Tought, translated by Nicholas
Jacobs, London: New Left Books.
Negri, Antonio 1977, La fabbrica della strategia: 33 lezioni su Lenin, Padova: CLEUP.
From the History of Soviet Philosophy: Lukcs Vygotsky Ilyenkov, Sergey Mareev, Moscow:
Kulturnaia revoliutsiia, 2008
Abstract
Tis review-essay explores the subterranean tradition of creative Soviet Marxism
1
through a
recent book by the Russian philosopher Sergey Mareev, From the History of Soviet Philosophy:
Lukcs Vygotsky Ilyenkov (2008). It provides a brief overview of the history of Soviet philosophy
so as to orient the reader to a set of debates that continue to be largely unexplored in the
Western-Marxist tradition. Mareev oers a new account of the development of Soviet philosophy
that not only explodes the myth that Soviet philosophy was simply state-sanctioned dogma, but
also reinterprets the relationship between the key creative theorists so as to oer a new way of
understanding its development that challenges several key-aspects of the dominant Western
scholarship on this subject. He argues that alongside ocial Marxist philosophy in the Soviet
Union the crude materialism of Diamat and Istmat there existed another line, which
counterposed the central rle of social activity in the development of human consciousness. He
traces this line of anti-positivist theory from V.I. Lenin through Georg Lukcs and Lev Vygotsky
to Evald Ilyenkov a pivotal gure in the Marxian renaissance
2
of the 1960s, but who has to
this day remained a Soviet phenomenon without much international inuence.
3
Specically,
Mareev disputes the rle of A.M. Deborin as a precursor of the Ilyenkov school, and instead
introduces Georg Lukcs a gure primarily recognised in the West as one of the founders of
Western Marxism into the line of development of creative Soviet Marxism. Furthermore, he
reconsiders the rle of V.I. Lenin and G.V. Plekhanov the so-called father of Russian social
democracy in the development of Soviet philosophy. In the process, the author provides a
detailed history of the emergence of Diamat and Istmat, and shines a spotlight on a gure widely
recognised as the most important Soviet philosopher in the post-Stalin period E.V. Ilyenkov.
Keywords
Soviet Marxism, Russian philosophy, S. Mareev, E.V. Ilyenkov, G. Lukcs, A.M. Deborin
Towards a history of creative Soviet theory
In a recent article on the history of Russian philosophy, Evert van der Zweerde recalls the
joke that in Russia nothing is more dicult to predict than the past.
4
Tis bit of popular
wisdom reects an understanding that the past is more than something that happened
before us, but a relationship that is always informed by present concerns.
5
Indeed, the
history of philosophy in the Soviet Union, as a constellation, continues to be recongured.
I have sought to explore elsewhere the subterranean tradition of creative Soviet Marxism a
body of thought that existed on the margins of ocial state-sanctioned Marxism in the
1. Creative Soviet Marxism is a body of thought that developed side-by-side with ocial
state-sanctioned Marxism, which was suppressed in the Soviet Union and not suciently studied
in the West.
2. Oittinen 2005, p. 224.
3. Oittinen 2005, p. 228.
4. Van der Zweerde 2009, p. 178.
5. Benjamin 2003, p. 397. Te historian who proceeds from this consideration ceases to tell
the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary. He [sic] grasps the constellation into which his
own era has entered, along with a very specic earlier one.
Soviet Union and that has not been suciently studied in the West.
6
Tis creative Soviet
Marxism could be found in various academic disciplines, most notably in the 1920s and
1960s. What principally distinguished these currents from ocial Soviet thought was their
departure from positivist conceptions of subjectivity. However, a history that draws out the
historical and theoretical connections between these currents, which articulates creative
Soviet Marxism as a coherent tradition, has yet to be written.
Tere is, however, an emerging body of work that illuminates various aspects of
creative Marxist thought in the Soviet Union. For instance, in his recent book, From the
History of Soviet Philosophy: Lukcs Vygotsky Ilyenkov (2008), Russian philosopher Sergey
Mareev oers a new account of the development of Soviet philosophy that not only
explodes the myth that Soviet philosophy was nothing more than state-sanctioned dogma,
but also reinterprets the relationship between the key creative theorists so as to oer a new
way of understanding its development that challenges several key-aspects of the dominant
Western scholarship on this subject. He argues that alongside ocial Marxist philosophy
in the Soviet Union the crude materialism of Diamat and Istmat there existed another
line, which counterposed the central rle of social activity in the development of human
consciousness. He traces this line of anti-positivist theory from V.I. Lenin through Georg
Lukcs and Lev Vygotsky to Evald Ilyenkov a pivotal gure in the Marxian renaissance
7

of the 1960s, but who has to this day remained a Soviet phenomenon without much
international inuence.
8
Mareevs book is an interesting contribution to a growing body of work
9
on the legacy of
the Ilyenkov school of Soviet philosophy. By reconsidering Ilyenkovs rle in the history of
Soviet philosophy, Mareev reconsiders that history itself, challenging several key-features
of its dominant understanding in Western scholarship. Specically, he disputes the rle
of A.M. Deborin as a precursor of the Ilyenkov school, and instead introduces Georg
Lukcs a gure primarily recognised in the West as one of the founders of Western
Marxism into the line of development of creative Soviet Marxism. Furthermore, he
reconsiders the rle of V.I. Lenin and G.V. Plekhanov the so-called father of Russian
social democracy in the development of Soviet philosophy. In the process, the author
provides a detailed history of the emergence of Diamat and Istmat, and shines a spotlight
on a gure widely recognised as the most important Soviet philosopher in the post-Stalin
period E.V. Ilyenkov.
A short course on Soviet philosophy
English-language accounts of Soviet philosophy often begin with a justication for their
object of inquiry. For example, David Bakhursts Consciousness and Revolution in Soviet
Philosophy (1991), the main English-language work on the Ilyenkov school, begins with an
6. Te term creative [] Soviet Marxism is used by some contemporary Russian
theorists to distinguish certain currents in Marxist theory from ocial Soviet Marxism
(Maidansky 2009, pp. 201, 202; Tolstykh (ed.) 2008, p. 10; Levant 2008; Mezhuev 1997).
David Bakhurst uses the term genuine (Bakhurst 1991, p. 3).
7. Oittinen 2005, p. 224.
8. Oittinen 2005, p. 228.
9. Such as is to be found here, for instance: <http://www.caute.net.ru/ilyenkov/lib.html>.
acknowledgement that Soviet philosophy is sometimes seen as a contradiction in terms,
and then proceeds to answer the question Why study Soviet philosophy?
10
Soviet
philosophy has not received adequate attention in Marxist thought outside of the Soviet
Union.
11
In fact, the term Western Marxism
12
often serves to distinguish certain currents
in Marxist thought from theory developed in the Soviet Union, with Soviet Marxism
appearing as its other in various ways.
Tis near-dismissal of Soviet theory is, in part, a product of the view that Soviet-Marxist
philosophy had largely been reduced to rehearsing a set of principles that were sanctioned
by the state. As Vadim Mezhuev, a contemporary Russian philosopher from the Ilyenkov
school recalls,
To be a creative, thinking Marxist, in a state at the head of which were Marxists,
was the most dangerous thing of all. Tis is where the state had its monopoly. It
preferred to recognize its opponents, rather than rivals within the sphere of its
own ideology. You could be a positivist, study the Vienna School. . . But to write
a book about Marxism, that was dangerous. . . . Tis is the paradox, you see? Tat
is why all the talent began to leave. It was impossible to work here. One had to
rehearse dogma, and nothing else.
13
Tis dogma had been codied in a famous text called Dialectical Materialism and Historical
Materialism, which was rst published as part of the Short History of the Communist Party
of the Soviet Union (1938), and is believed to have been written by Stalin. Tis text became
the Bible of Soviet philosophy,
14
as philosophy in the Soviet Union changed from argument
to simply referencing Stalins writings and speeches. According to Bakhurst, this text became
the denitive work on the subject [and] came to dene the parameters of all Soviet
philosophical discussion.
15
Hence, Marxist philosophy in the Soviet Union became
synonymous with Diamat and Istmat.
10. Bakhurst 1991, p. 1.
11. Oittinen 2005, p. 228.
12. Te term Western Marxism is broadly associated with Perry Andersons inuential work
Considerations on Western Marxism (1976) where it is understood as a body of theory that
emerged in the wake of the defeat of Classical Marxism, associated with names such as Lukcs,
Korsch, Gramsci, Benjamin, Della Volpe, Marcuse, Lefebvre, Adorno, Sartre, Goldmann,
Althusser, and Colletti. According to Anderson, what principally distinguished this body of
thought from Classical Marxism was its divorce from revolutionary-political practice (i.e. that its
main contributions were produced in a context of isolation from mass-movements and mass-
political organisations). However, this body of thought is also dened by its shift in emphasis
from political economy to problems of culture and subjectivity. As Russell Jacoby argues, these
theorists are distinguished, not only from Classical Marxism, but also from Soviet Marxism in
their concern to rescue Marxism from positivism and crude materialism (Jacoby 1983, p. 524).
In my view, the theoretical focus of Western Marxism has much in common with creative Soviet
Marxism; however, the latter is often overshadowed and obscured by ocial Soviet Marxism.
13. Mezhuev quoted in Levant 2008, p. 31.
14. Guseinov and Lektorsky 2009, p. 12.
15. Bakhurst 1991, p. 96.
Te above account, while certainly true, does not contain the whole truth. In a recent
article, Russian theorists A.A. Guseinov and V.A. Lektorsky write: In general, when
consideration is given to the way the national culture evolved after October 1917, weight
is generally placed on the fact that the declared ocial ideology, which imposed a
dogmatically interpreted Marxism, prevented any free philosophical thought. Tis
viewpoint . . . is not without some justication; [it] does not however reect the full
complexity of the facts.
16
Tis complexity presents itself when we take a closer look at how
philosophy actually developed in the Soviet Union. For example, as Mareev reminds us,
prior to 1931 in the Soviet Union, Bolshevism was not the dominant current in philosophy
(pp. 45). At this time, Soviet philosophy was the site of vigorous debates on various
problems, including eorts to overcome reductionism in Marxist thought.
17
Tese debates
coalesced into two schools, the mechanists and the Deborinites, whose rivalry dominated
Soviet philosophy for much of the 1920s and constitutes the prehistory of what we know
as Soviet philosophy in the form of Diamat and Istmat.
We can also go further back, prior to 1922, before the prerevolutionary philosophical
establishment was expelled from the Soviet Union. In the autumn of 1922, on Lenins
orders, about two-hundred representatives of the intelligentsia, including Russian
philosophers such as Berdayev, Bulgakov and Frank, were sent from Petrograd to Hamburg
on what came to be known as Te Philosophers Ship.
18
Teir expulsion brought to an end
the development of prerevolutionary schools of philosophy, which were collectively known
as the silver age and which competed with Marxism within Russian philosophy. Tis
forms the pre-prehistory of the context in which Diamat and Istmat developed.
After 1931, a new philosophical establishment the Diamatchiki took control of the
philosophy-departments and academic journals. Tis group was endorsed by the Central
Committee of the Communist Party, which on 25 January 1931 demanded a working out
[razrabotka] of the Leninist stage in the development of dialectical materialism.
19
Tis
appeal to Lenins name, however, was politically motivated, and had little to do with Lenins
own philosophical work. In fact (as we shall see below), one of Mareevs principal arguments
is that Lenins philosophy has nothing in common with Diamat and the Leninist stage
of philosophy. As Bakhurst writes, the true focus of the Leninist stage was not Lenin,
but Stalin.
20
Mezhuevs description of Soviet philosophy above describes well the period of the next
2030 years. In fact, direct state-control over the development of Marxist theory extended
beyond the discipline of philosophy. For example, the famous Marxist developmental
psychologist Lev Vygotsky who produced an original theory of consciousness, anchored
in intersubjectivity, language and activity was blacklisted in the Soviet Union for 20 years
(193656) following the Central Committees resolution of 4 June 1936 against pdology
17. Similar eorts continue in contemporary Western Marxism. For example, consider the
ongoing debates around issues raised in John Holloways Change the World Without Taking Power,
including the 2005 symposium in Historical Materialism, Volume 13, Issue 4.
18. Guseinov and Lektorsky 2009, p. 23; Van der Zweerde 2009, p. 175.
19. Bakhurst 1991, pp. 924.
20. Bakhurst 1991, p. 94.
(the study of childrens behaviour and development).
21
During this period, Soviet Marxism
took the form of Diamat and Istmat, and eectively erased its own prehistory, which had
produced multiple schools of Marxist theory.
Te Diamatchiki dominated Soviet philosophy over most of Soviet history after 1931;
however, their dominance remained virtually unchallenged only for about a 20-year period.
After Stalins death in 1953, during Khrushchevs thaw, a new group of theorists, who were
part of the Shestidesiatniki (of the 60s-generation), began to question some of the basic
tenets of ocial Soviet Marxism. As V.I. Tolstykh writes in a recently published edited
volume entitled Evald Vasilyevich Ilyenkov (2008), At the end of the 1950s begins the crisis
of ocial Soviet ideology, and [Ilyenkov] is among other young philosophers together
with Aleksandr Zinoviev, Gregory Shchedrovitsky, Merab Mamardashvili and others [who]
enter into polemics with philosophers of the type of Molodtsov and Mitin.
22
Ten a junior
lecturer, in 1954 Ilyenkov declared to the Chair of Dialectical Materialism at Moscow State
University that in Marxism there is no such thing as dialectical materialism or historical
materialism, but only a materialist conception of history (p. 8).
23
Over the next 25 years,
his original development of Marxist thought, which directly challenged the positivism that
dominated ocial Soviet Marxism, inspired and guided a critical current of Soviet
philosophy that continues to this day.
Te signicance of Evald Ilyenkov
Ilyenkov has a special place in the history of Soviet philosophy. Tere is no consensus about
his status in the discipline; however, much of our understanding of its history turns on how
we see his rle. He is widely recognised as the leader of the group of philosophers who
challenged ocial Soviet Marxism during the period of the thaw. He was a Marxist and a
Leninist, but he was not a model Marxist-Leninist.
24
His conception of ideal (non-material)
phenomena, as forms of human activity, conicted with the ocial view of materialism,
placing him on a collision-course with the Diamatchiki.
25
He was denounced as a
revisionist, censored, and eventually prevented from teaching. He committed suicide in
1979. Nevertheless, his work was widely published inside the Soviet Union, and had a
considerable inuence on a whole generation of Soviet theorists.
His entry on Te Ideal in the Soviet Encyclopdia of Philosophy (1962) challenged
ocial Soviet Marxism, which tended to view human consciousness as a machine, a product
of the matter that constitutes the human brain. He argued that such a view rested on a
crude materialism. In contrast, he revived the Marxist notion that consciousness is a social
21. Bakhurst 1991, p. 60.
22. Tolstykh (ed.) 2008, p. 6.
23. See also Bakhurst 1991, p. 6.
24. For example, in 1965 he was unable to accept an invitation from the University of Notre
Dame to present his paper, Marxism and the Western World, in which he writes not as a Soviet
delegate presenting an ocial line, but as an autonomous scholar addressing the specic concerns
of the symposium in his own voice (Bakhurst 1991, p. 8). Subsequently, he spoke out against
the Soviet invasion of Prague in 1968 (Tolstykh (ed.) 2008, p. 8).
phenomenon, something that does not develop automatically in each individual, but which
rather is a capacity acquired through socialisation.
26
Tis perspective not only posed a challenge to the vulgar materialism of Soviet Diamat,
but also oers an original approach to the problem of the ideal that should be of interest to
Western Marxism. Although there is a considerable literature in the West that focuses on
the rle of language in the social production of consciousness, what sets Ilyenkov apart is
his distinction between language and the ideal. For Ilyenkov, language is not the ideal, but
its objectied being,
27
its material form. Te ideal does not exist in language for Ilyenkov,
or in other material phenomena, but in forms of human activity. His entry on the ideal in
the 1962 encyclopdia-article denes it as the subjective image of objective reality, i.e. a
reection of the external world in forms of human activity, in forms of its consciousness
and will.
28
One can think of the ideal as the signicance that matter assumes in the process
of its transformation by human activity. In other words, it is only in-and-through human
activity that matter takes on the character of an object with signicance.
To be clear, Ilyenkov was not referring only to parts of the material world that individuals
directly transform, but to all matter that society comes in contact with. Idealisation is, for
him, a social phenomenon. In the same encyclopdia-entry, he wrote:
An ideal image, say of bread, may arise in the imagination of a hungry man or of
a baker. In the head of a satiated man occupied with building a house, ideal bread
does not arise. But if we take society as a whole, ideal bread and ideal houses are
always in existence, as well as any ideal object with which humanity is concerned
in the process of production and reproduction of its real, material life. Tis
includes the ideal sky, as an object of astronomy, as a natural calendar, a clock,
and compass. In consequence of that, all of nature is idealised in humanity and
not just that part which it immediately produces or reproduces or consumes in a
practical way.
29
From this perspective, all matter appears in individual consciousness already transformed
and idealised by the activity of previous generations, and this ideal informs the individuals
activity in the present.
Perhaps the most striking feature of Ilyenkovs concept of the ideal is its articulation as
part of a larger process, as a phase in the transformation of matter. Tis move allows him to
avoid both forms of reductionism: the reduction of the ideal to the physical brain
(characteristic of vulgar materialism) and the reduction of the ideal to some extra-human
phenomenon such as nature (characteristic of idealism). By understanding it as a phase of
a process, Ilyenkov is able to grasp the ideal without severing it from human activity. In the
1962 article, he wrote: Te ideal is the outward being of a thing in the phase of its becoming
in the action of a subject in the form of his wants, needs and aims.
30
Conceiving of it as a
phase enables him to capture several moments of its existence matter invested with
26. Marx and Engels 1991, p. 51.
27. Ilyenkov 1962, p. 221.
28. Ilyenkov 1962, p. 222.
29. Ilyenkov 1962, p. 225.
30. Ilyenkov 1962, p. 223.
meaning in the process of human activity, which comes to inform the subsequent
transformation of the material world. In the recently published Dialectics of the Ideal (his
most complete, authoritative articulation of the concept of the ideal, written in the mid-
1970s, but published only in 2009), he describes it as follows:
Te process by which the material life-activity of social man [sic] begins to
produce not only a material, but also an ideal product, begins to produce the act
of idealisation of reality (the process of transforming the material into the ideal),
and then, having arisen, the ideal becomes a critical component of the material
life-activity of social man [sic], and then begins the opposite process the process
of the materialisation (objectication, reication, embodiment) of the ideal.
31
As individuals, we enter an already-idealised material world, which we continue to transform
as we materialise the ideal we inhabit in our own activity.
Tis approach recalls similar readings of Marx that were developed before the Diamatchiki
seized control of Soviet philosophy in 1931. It is widely acknowledged that Ilyenkovs work
revives and develops certain themes from the prehistory of ocial Soviet Marxism.
32
For
example, in the Preface to Ilyenkovs posthumously published book, Art and the Communist
Ideal (1984), Mikhail Lifshits a close associate of Lukcs who helped publish Marxs early
works in 1932 writes: By some miracle the seeds that were then sown on a favourable
ground began to grow although in a dierent, not immediately recognisable form. Evald
Ilyenkov with his living interest in Hegel and the young Marx (who was discovered in the
20s and 30s here at home, not abroad, as is often claimed) . . . stood out as an heir of our
thoughts.
33
Similarly, Guseinov and Lektorsky describe this period as a philosophical
renaissance in the Soviet Union
34
and Ilyenkov as one of its leading gures. Mezhuev
writes: It is to him that my generation owes the conscious break with dogmatic and
scholastic ocial philosophy.
35
Te 1950s and 60s mark a revival of certain lines of inquiry
that had been displaced by ocial Soviet theory, with Ilyenkov as a principal gure. Te
specic lines of continuity, however, remain a subject of debate.
Mareevs reconstruction of Soviet philosophy
Mareev traces the roots of Diamat and Istmat further back than Stalins Dialectical
Materialism and Historical Materialism (1938) or even the takeover of Soviet philosophy by
the Bolsheviks in 1931. According to Mareev, the positivism and reductionism that dene
Diamat were already present in the main currents of the 1920s.
Te period in Soviet philosophy during the years 19249 was marked by a vigorous
debate between two competing schools of thought the mechanists and the Deborinites.
Te mechanists comprised a broad range of thinkers, including Bolshevik Party activist
31. Ilyenkov 2009, p. 18.
32. Bakhurst 1991, pp. 267; Oittinen (ed.) 2000, p. 10; Dillon 2005, p. 285.
33. Lifshits quoted in Oittinen (ed.) 2000, p. 10. Ilyenkov became a friend of Lifshits after a
correspondence with Lukcs who directed Ilyenkov to contact Lifshits.
35. Mezhuev 1997, p. 47.
I.I. Skvortsov-Stepanov, former-Menshevik Lyubov Akselrod and the early-Bolshevik
philosopher Alexander Bogdanov, and received support from the famous Bolshevik leader,
Nikolai Bukharin. What united this diverse group was the view that the explanatory
resources of science are able to provide a complete account of objective reality.
36
In
response, the Deborinites a more cohesive group of philosophers, most of whom were
involved in A.M. Deborins seminar at the Institute of Red Professors dismissed the
Mechanists optimism about the global explanatory potential of natural science and held
that the Mechanists were committed to blatant reductionism.
37
In our opinion, Deborin
argued, thought is a particular quality of matter, the subjective side of the objective,
material, i.e., physiological processes, with which it is not identical and to which it cannot
be reduced.
38
During this period, theorists in both schools developed a considerable
amount of work, much of it aimed at overcoming reductionism in Marxist philosophy.
Te debate was muted in 1929 when, at the Second All-Union Conference of Marxist-
Leninist Institutions of Scientic Research, the mechanists were ocially condemned.
According to Bakhurst, Mechanism was defeated not by new philosophical arguments, but
by the charge that it was a revisionist trend and, as such, a political danger.
39
Deborin and
his followers accused the mechanists of gradualist politics, a charge that resonated at a time
when the party was in the midst of a campaign against right-deviationism, which was
associated with Bukharin.
40

In Bakhursts account, this debate was not properly resolved; rather, it was prevented
from being expressed within the connes of the institutions of Soviet philosophy. From this
perspective, it reappeared in some ways during the thaw of the 1950s with Ilyenkov
expressing the anti-positivism of Deborins school. Although contemporary Soviet
philosophers may not see themselves as re-creating the early controversy, writes Bakhurst,
the continuity is undeniable. Tis is particularly so in the case of Ilyenkov, who can be seen
as heir to the Deborinites project.
41
Te Deborinites eort to develop a theory of the
relationship between thought and matter, but without reducing thought to the physiological
properties of matter, appears to be echoed in Ilyenkovs own conception of the ideal.
Bakhurst sees Ilyenkov as an heir of the Deborin school from the prehistory of ocial
Soviet Marxism.
One of the principal distinguishing features of Mareevs account is that he challenges this
reading of the development of Soviet philosophy, which has become dominant in Western
scholarship.
42
In contrast, he locates the roots of Diamat not only among the mechanists,
but also in the work of the Deborinites (p. 18). In fact, he traces its development back to
Deborin himself, and even further back to his teacher G.V. Plekhanov.
Mareev argues that the thread that runs through this long line from Plekhanov to
Deborin to the Diamatchiki is itself characterised by a crude materialism, which reduces
consciousness to a reection of material production. In Deborin, thought is not reduced to
36. Bakhurst 1991, p. 31.
37. Bakhurst 1991, p. 37.
38. Bakhurst 1991, p. 38.
39. Bakhurst 1991, pp. 456.
40. Bakhurst 1991, p. 47.
41. Bakhurst 1991, pp. 267.
42. Maidansky 2009, p. 202.
matter, as with some mechanists and Diamatchiki; rather, it is properly understood as a
reection of activity. However, this activity is grasped as production, which, according to
John Rees, in fact returns us to the old Second International insistence on the inevitable
onward march of the productive process as the guarantor of social change.
43
Deborins
understanding of dialectical materialism, which, according to Mareev, derives from
Plekhanov and Engels, reduces the problem of consciousness to essentially an economic
problem.
In addition to challenging Western scholarship, which treats Ilyenkov as an heir of the
Deborin school, another distinguishing feature of Mareevs book is his inclusion of the
early Lukcs as a pivotal theorist in the development of creative Soviet Marxism, and
specically as a precursor of the Ilyenkov school. In fact, Deborins reductionism comes
into sharp relief when examined against Lukcss History and Class Consciousness (1923).
Taking aim at the determinism inherited from the Marxism of the Second International,
Lukcs posited a theory of subjectivity that aorded a much greater rle to human agency
in the development of class-consciousness. Lukcss central argument was that activity is
organised in bourgeois society in a way that not only facilitates the development of class-
consciousness, but also blocks its development primarily through the eects of the
transformation of activity into the commodity, labour-power. He argued that the rle of
the Communist Party is to intervene in this dynamic in various ways, including counter-
organising the activity of its members, by creating what he called a world of activity.
44
By
broadening the notion of activity from the labour-process to political practice and
organisation,
45
he went beyond Deborins reduction of the ideal to a reection of the
material, thus preguring Ilyenkovs work by several decades.
In 1924, Deborin published a scathing dismissal of Lukcss book, calling it idealist.
46

Deborins critique was part of a broad attack on Lukcs, Korsch and other professors
47
who
were denounced by Zinoviev at the Fifth Congress of the Comintern:
Tis theoretical revisionism cannot be allowed to pass with impunity. Neither
will we tolerate our Hungarian Comrade Lukcs doing the same thing in the
domain of philosophy and sociology. . . . We cannot tolerate such theoretical
revisionism in our Communist International.
48

43. Rees 2000, pp. 201.
44. Lukcs 1971, p. 337. He writes: Freedom . . . is something practical, it is an activity. And
only by becoming a world of activity [italics mine] for every one of its members can the
Communist Party really hope to overcome the passive rle assumed by bourgeois man when he
is confronted by the inevitable course of events that he cannot understand.
45. Rees 2000, pp. 201. All this is beyond Deborin, who can see only the labour process as
the site of practice: the one-sidedness of subject and object is overcome . . . through praxis. What
is the praxis of social being? Te labour process . . . production is the concrete unity of the whole
social and historical process. Again, this is formally correct but in fact returns us to the old
Second International insistence on the inevitable onward march of the productive process as the
guarantor of social change, whereas Lukcs, without ignoring this dimension, is concerned with
political practice and organisation as well.
46. Deborin 1924, p. 4.
47. Rees 2000, p. 25.
48. G. Zinoviev quoted in Rees 2000, p. 25.
While Lukcs recanted, it is well known that his book, A Defence of History and Class
Consciousness: Tailism and the Dialectic (1925), was written in response to these charges. He
tried to demonstrate that he was, in fact, championing Lenins organisational approach over
the determinism of the Second International and the Mensheviks. In fact, Lukcss polemics
with Deborin in philosophy bear a certain resemblance to the polemics between the
Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks on organisation 20 years earlier, where Lenins pamphlet
What Is to Be Done? and his intervention at the Second Congress of the RSDLP in 1903
had been understood by Lukcs and others as the beginning of his shift from the fatalism
of Second-International Marxism to what we now know as the Leninist conception of
the party.
49
In contrast to dominant Western readings of the history of Soviet philosophy, Mareev
argues that the debate between Lukcs and Deborin reveals two distinct lines in Soviet
philosophy: one that runs from Plekhanov through Deborin (themselves Mensheviks) to
the Diamatchiki, and a counter-current that runs from Lenin through Lukcs and Vygotsky
and then to Ilyenkov in the 1950s (p. 42).
50
Paradoxically, writes Mareev, Lenins line won
in politics, but Plekhanovs line won in philosophy. (p. 17.) Lenins victory over Plekhanov
in the political sphere is well known, but it was Plekhanovs views on Marxist theory that
shaped Soviet philosophy. Plekhanov committed suicide on 5 May 1918, only a few months
following the October Revolution. Nevertheless, as Mareev notes, his followers, who now
divided into mechanists and Deborinites,
occupied practically all key-positions in the newly created Soviet ideological
apparatus and the system of higher Marxist education. D.B. Ryazanov headed the
Marx-Engels Institute [and] A.M. Deborin became in 1921 the editor-in-chief of
the journal Under the Banner of Marxism. Tey determined the character of
Marxist philosophy in the 20s and 30s. (p. 17.)
From Mareevs perspective, these students of Plekhanov, many of whom would soon lose
their positions in Soviet academe, inherited a mechanistic reading of Marx which continued
to dominate Soviet philosophy during the reign of the Diamatchiki.
In contrast to this line, Mareev posits a current of anti-positivist Marxist theory that, in
agreement with Bakhurst, re-emerges during the thaw of the 1950s in the work of Ilyenkov.
However, unlike Bakhurst, who sees Ilyenkov as an heir of the Deborin school, Mareev
roots this line in Lenins critique of positivism in his Philosophical Notebooks (191415).
Mareev argues that Lenin and Plekhanov read Marx very dierently, and that Plekhanovs
reading, as we saw above, became institutionalised in Soviet academe.
Mareev locates Lenin in the line that runs through Lukcs-Vygotsky-Ilyenkov in light of
Lenins criticism of Plekhanov in the Philosophical Notebooks. Although Lenin considered
himself a student of Plekhanov, he criticises his former mentors vulgar materialism
(p. 36). For instance, Lenin writes: Plekhanov criticises Kantianism (and agnosticism in
49. Lukcs 1970; Molyneux 1978.
50. Vygotsky is widely recognised as a precursor to the Ilyenkov school. What is novel here is
locating Lenin and Lukcs in a line that, in contrast to the Plekhanov and Deborin line, leads to
Ilyenkov.
general) more from a vulgar-materialist than a dialectical-materialist perspective.
51
Mareev
notes that Lenins critique of Plekhanovs vulgar materialism was echoed in the polemics
between Lukcs and Deborin in the 1920s, and which again resurfaced in the challenge
posed by Ilyenkov and others to the Diamatchiki in the 1950s and 60s.
Te diamatovskaia-tradition in Soviet philosophy was indeed dominant. Indeed,
it successfully continues in the post-Soviet period. But there was a tradition of
Soviet philosophy which was counterposed to diamatskoi. Tis tradition is
related to names such as G. Lukcs, L.S. Vygotsky and E.V. Ilyenkov. (p. 12.)
Mareev roots this anti-positivist Soviet Marxism in Lenins philosophy, and ocial Soviet
Marxism in that of Plekhanov. He writes: Te entire so-called Soviet Diamat, despite
becoming rooted during Stalins epoch, by its own genealogical history, and even
terminology, originates from Plekhanovs branch of the development of Marxism, and not
from Lenins (p. 30).
Mareev also notes that Ilyenkovs reception has not changed since the collapse of
the USSR. According to Mareev, Ilyenkovs anti-positivist philosophy was marginalised
during the Soviet era, and remains so today. Te Soviet Union is long gone. But the
treatment of Ilyenkov on the side of philosophical ocialdom, as has been stated, remains
the same, as it was during the Soviet era. (p. 9.) Tis is the case, Mareev argues, because
contemporary Russian philosophy-texts are, in essence, Diamat under a dierent name
(p. 11). As we can see from this brief sketch, Mareevs reading of Ilyenkov produces a very
dierent understanding of the history of Soviet philosophy from the dominant reading in
the West.
Critical and concluding remarks on Mareevs book
Tis provocative reconstruction of Soviet philosophy oers a window onto a eld that has
been studied by barely a handful of serious scholars in the West. A student of Ilyenkov
himself, Mareev aligns his own views with those of this inuential, yet paradoxically under-
studied philosopher. As a result, Ilyenkov is presented not only uncritically, but also in a
somewhat-hagiographic fashion. While this perspective from within has many advantages,
as it oers a forceful articulation of Ilyenkovs strengths, it also has some limits as it tends
to overstate Ilyenkovs status as a dissident, which results in a particular reading of his
relationship to Soviet philosophy and to the rle of Lenin in its development.
Mareevs book presents a one-sided view of Ilyenkovs relationship to ocial Soviet
philosophy, casting him as an outsider whose Marxism had a dierent origin than
Diamat and Istmats. In contrast, the Finnish philosopher Vesa Oittinen (editor of Evald
Ilyenkovs Philosophy Revisited (2000) the proceedings from the international conference
on Ilyenkov, which was held in Helsinki in 1999) challenges the view that Ilyenkov was a
dissident Soviet philosopher.
52
Oittinen acknowledges that Ilyenkov suered from
ideological mobbing; however, he also notes that he had inuential friends who ensured
51. Lenin quoted in Mareev 2008, p. 36.
52. Oittinen (ed.) 2000, p. 16.
the publication and wide circulation of his work. Unlike many scholars from within the
Ilyenkov school, Oittinen does not side unequivocally with Ilyenkov against his critics,
noting that not all criticism of Ilyenkov was politically motivated. Instead, he argues that
Ilyenkovs anti-positivism exemplies one of two currents within ocial Soviet Marxism,
both of which can be traced back to two lines of thought in Lenins philosophy. Challenging
Ilyenkovs status as a dissident calls into question Lenins rle in Soviet philosophy and
hence Mareevs two-line approach to its development.
Unlike Mareev, who argues that positivist Soviet philosophy followed the line from
Plekhanov to the Diamatchiki, and that anti-positivist Soviet philosophy can be traced back
to Lenin, Oittinen argues that both currents are rooted in an ambiguity in Lenins own
philosophy. According to Oittinen, there was a shift in Lenins philosophy, which can be
seen in the dierences between his Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1909) and the
Philosophical Notebooks (191415). He writes: It is rather obvious that there are many
points of divergence between Lenins Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, written in 1909
against the Machist subjective idealist current which at this time was widespread among the
Bolshevik intellectuals, on the one hand, and the Philosophical Notebooks, which is essentially
a conspect of Hegels Logic with Lenins own commentaries which Lenin wrote down in the
library of the canton of Bern (Switzerland) in 19141915, on the other.
53
Lenins attempt
to break with the Marxism of the Second International on the question of organisation
during his Switzerland years appears to also have a counterpart in the sphere of philosophy.
Oittinen writes, Lenins Philosophical Notebooks can be seen as an attempt to nd an
adequate formulation for a Marxist philosophy that would avoid the deterministic and
objectivistic world-view of the Second International.
54
According to Oittinen, Lenin was
ultimately unsuccessful in this eort, and this tension between positivist and anti-positivist
readings of Marx continued unresolved throughout Soviet philosophy. From this
perspective, Ilyenkov is not seen as challenging ocial Soviet theory, but as expressing one
side of an ongoing debate that characterised Soviet theory.
Ilyenkov considered himself a Leninist, but he had a particular reading of Lenin. Unlike
Oittinen, he did not recognise a break between Lenins philosophy in 1909 and 191415.
55

Rather than championing a positivist reading of Marx, Ilyenkov understood Lenins
Materialism and Empirio-Criticism as the philosophical counterpart of What Is to Be Done?.
56

According to Bakhurst, For Ilyenkov, Lenins great contribution lay in his rejection of
empiricism and positivism.
57
Mareev acknowledges that the Diamatchiki tried to use
Lenins Materialism and Empirio-Criticism to claim him as a vulgar materialist, but he
insists that Lenin distinguished between Marxs materialism and materialism per se (p. 37).
However, and similar in this respect to Oittinen, Bakhurst acknowledges that the ambiguity
in Lenins materialism has given rise to two opposing schools of thought within contemporary
Soviet philosophy.
58
He continues, While the germ of radical realism in Lenins philosophy
exercised a formative inuence on Ilyenkovs philosophical concerns, Lenin also inspired
53. Oittinen (ed.) 2000, p. 13.
54. Oittinen (ed.) 2000, p. 15.
55. Bakhurst 1991, p. 100.
56. Bakhurst 1991, p. 130.
57. Bakhurst 1991, p. 122.
58. Bakhurst 1991, p. 123.
the very school of scientic empiricism that Ilyenkov came to see as his principal opponent.
59

Te rle of Lenins philosophy in the development of both creative and ocial
Soviet Marxism continues to be a subject of debate; however, this debate does not nd
expression in Mareevs book, in part due to the limits of his own perspective from within
the Ilyenkov school.
Mareevs book, From the History of Soviet Philosophy: Lukcs Vygotsky Ilyenkov, is a
very important contribution to the study of a vast body of thought that remains largely
unexamined in the West. He illuminates a history of creative Marxist thought in the Soviet
Union that should be of interest to Marxist theorists in the West. Far from state-sanctioned
dogma, this book presents us with a rich tradition with various schools of thought that
competed not only with each other, but also with ocial Soviet Marxism.
Although controversial and provocative both in Russia and in the West, this book
forcefully challenges several widely held views on the history of creative Soviet Marxism. It
convincingly problematises the rle of A.M. Deborin, and locates the roots of Diamat and
Istmat not only in the mechanists, but also in the Deborin school. Furthermore, it traces
both of these competing schools of the 1920s to their common root in the work of G.V.
Plekhanov, and contrasts his thought with that of V.I. Lenin. Another original feature is the
inclusion of Georg Lukcs in this history as a precursor to the main protagonist of the
book, E.V. Ilyenkov.
Te Ilyenkov school is perhaps the most interesting and under-studied feature of creative
Soviet Marxism for the Western reader. Tis book oers a reconsideration of the genesis of
this school of thought from one of its contemporaries. It is a highly original and important
piece of work that merits serious consideration, and constitutes an invaluable contribution
to the study of the tradition of creative Soviet Marxism.
Reviewed by Alex Levant
Wilfrid Laurier University
alevant@wlu.ca
References
Anderson, Perry 1976, Considerations on Western Marxism, London: New Left Books.
Bakhurst, David 1991, Consciousness and Revolution in Soviet Philosophy: From the Bolsheviks to
Evald Ilyenkov, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
1995, Lessons from Ilyenkov, Te Communication Review, 1, 2: 15578.
Benjamin, Walter 2003 [1940], On the Concept of History, in Selected Writings, Volume 4:
19381940, Cambridge, MA.: Belknap Press.
Deborin, Abram 1924, . [G. Lukcs and His Criticism of
Marxism], Under the Banner of Marxism, 67: 4969.
Dillon, Paul 2005, Review of Evald Ilyenkovs Philosophy Revisited , Historical Materialism, 13, 3:
285304.
Guseinov, Abdusalam A. and Vladislav A. Lektorsky 2009, Philosophy in Russia: History and
Present State, Diogenes, 56, 23: 323.
59. Ibid.
Ilyenkov, Evald 1962, Idealnoe [Te Ideal], in Filosofskaia entsiklopedia, Volume 2, Moscow:
Sovetskaya entsiklopedia.
2009, Dialektika idealnogo [Te Dialectic of the Ideal], Logos, 65, 1: 662.
Jacoby, Russell 1983, Western Marxism, in A Dictionary of Marxist Tought, edited by Tom B.
Bottomore, Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press.
Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich 1972 [1909], Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, in Collected Works,
Volume 14, Moscow: Progress Publishers.
1976 [1929], Conspectus of Hegels Book Te Science of Logic, in Collected Works, Volume
38, Moscow: Progress Publishers.
Levant, Alex 2007, Te Problem of Self-Emancipation: Subjectivity, Organisation and the Weight of
History, Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation, York: Te University of York.
2008, Te Soviet Union in Ruins, Saarbrucken: VDM Verlag.
Lukcs, Georg 1970 [1924], Lenin: A Study on the Unity of His Tought, translated by Nicholas
Jacobs, London: New Left Books.
1971 [1923], History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, translated by
Rodney Livingstone, London: Te Merlin Press.
2000 [1925], A Defence of History and Class Consciousness: Tailism and the Dialectic,
translated by Esther Leslie, London: Verso.
Maidansky, Andrey 2009, A Diagram of Philosophical Tought, available at: <http://caute.net
.ru/am/text/diagramma.html>.
Mareev, Sergey 2008, Iz Istorii Sovetskoi Filosoi: Lukach Vygotskii Ilenkov, Moscow:
Kulturnaia revoliutsiia.
Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels 1991 [1846], Te German Ideology, New York: International
Publishers.
Mezhuev, Vadim 1997, Evald Ilyenkov and the End of Classical Marxist Philosophy, in Drama
sovetskoi losoi, Moscow: Te Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Molyneux, John 1978, Marxism and the Party, Exeter: A. Wheaton and Co., Ltd.
Oittinen, Vesa (ed.) 2000, Evald Ilyenkovs Philosophy Revisited, Helsinki: Kikimora
Publications.
2005, Introduction, Studies in East European Tought, 57: 22331.
Rees, John 2000, Introduction, in Lukcs 2000.
Stalin, Joseph Vissarionovich 1976 [1938], Dialectical and Historical Materialism, in Problems
of Leninism, Peking: Foreign Languages Press.
Tolstykh, Valentin Ivanovich (ed.) 2008, Evald Vasilevich Ilenkov, Moscow: ROSSPEN.
Van der Zweerde, Evert 2009, Te Place of Russian Philosophy in World Philosophical History:
A Perspective, Diogenes, 56, 23: 17086.
Alienation After Derrida, Simon Skempton, London: Continuum, 2010.
Abstract
Simon Skemptons book re-reads Marxs concept of alienation, and its roots in Hegel, through
Derridas critique of the metaphysics of presence. In a wide-ranging study that engages with
Heidegger, Kant and Lukcs, as well as with a large proportion of Derridas work, both early and
late, Skempton argues that, contrary to the prevailing orthodoxy in critical theory, it is possible
to account for a kind of political disalienation, provided that one rst accepts that the
metaphysical account of the self-present subject is itself a product of alienation. Disalienation,
on this model, would be a recognition of the inherently dierential condition of humankind,
with both Marxian and post-Kantian theories of the subject enlisted to support the Derridean
thesis of an originary dirance. Skemptons thesis is attractively original, but it risks articially
reducing Kant, Hegel and Marx to mere avatars of Derrideanism avant la lettre, while
simultaneously denying the force of Derridas critique of post-Kantian philosophy.
Keywords
Skempton, Marx, Derrida, alienation
Te concept of alienation remains contested in philosophical and political circles.
Historically, the debate has been divided over the question of the relative innateness of
alienation, over whether we can assign the concept an ontological status. British Marxism,
as a consequence of its general empiricism, has tended to insist on the possibility of
disalienation, and has thus largely refused any concession to the constitutivity of alienation
as a subjective condition. Te French tradition, by contrast, and especially in its post-
Althusserian conguration, has tended to install alienation at the very centre of the subject.
Althusser himself posited alienation as an inevitable corollary to ideology, transposing the
mconnaissance of the ego found in structural psychoanalysis onto the political subject.
1
As
a result, any notion of disalienation, of the restoration of the subject to a non-alienated
state consonant with its essential nature, is found to be chimerical, dictated by the illusory
logic of the ego it supports. Te concept of alienation is, then, itself alienated, divided
between these opposing readings, and others besides. Te extent to which such readings can
be justied by recourse to Marxs writings most often depends on the period of Marxs
writing one appeals to, although the Althusserian claim that alienation, as a hangover from
Marxs ill-advised early Hegelianism, was decisively rejected by the scientic Marx of
Capital is too simple-minded to bear serious scrutiny.
2
Jacques Derridas political commitments had, from his very earliest publications, been
the subject of some debate. Derrida had never been a member of the PCF during its
intellectual heyday, and many saw in his grammatological writings an implicit pessimism
as to the theoretical possibility of a relatively stable subject of political action. His
publication, in 1993, of Spectres de Marx
3
held out the hope for many that Derrida would
make explicit the political implications of deconstruction, in a manner more systematic
than his previous, sporadic allusions to being of the Left. What resulted was rather less,
1. Althusser 2001.
2. Althusser 2008.
3. Derrida 1993.
and rather more, than many had hoped: Derrida mined Marx for elided concepts that
might lend themselves to a deconstructive reading, alighting on the repeated gure of the
ghost as a metaphor for the seeming strength of the spirit of Marxs radical critique if
not his actual analyses and prescriptions even after, and perhaps especially after, the fall
of actually-existing socialism. It is an unsatisfactory analysis in many ways, and its main
legacy seems to have been to turn the unintentionally self-parodic neologism hauntology
into an inescapable, and largely meaningless, philosophical meme. Terry Eagleton summed
up the disappointment of many when he excoriated Derrida for fetishising Marxism only
at the time when it seemed to be at its lowest practical ebb, implying that deconstruction
could only advocate a position when it had assumed the requisite level of fashionable
marginality.
4
It is to Simon Skemptons credit, then, that he cuts through polemical debates around
the supposed political quietism of deconstruction with a sustained and convincing
exploration of the concepts of both alienation and disalienation in the light of the critique
of the metaphysics of presence. Skemptons purview takes him from the early writings on
Husserl and grammatology to the more explicitly political writings on hospitality and
justice that characterised Derridas nal writings. In reading the concept of alienation
through a dialectical articulation of Hegel and Derrida, Skempton provides a robust
defence of Hegel against Derridas contention, elaborated most systematically in his Glas,
5

that Hegels totalising systematicity excludes and eaces the constitutivity of a remainder,
what Rudolph Gasch has called a quasi-transcendental horizon of possibility for the
system as such.
6
For Derrida, the relation in Hegels Phenomenology between brother and sister constitutes
just such an excluded remainder, the supposed uniqueness of which its freedom from
antagonism contradicts the system from within. Derrida outlines a series of such supposed
remainders, posing the radical openness of the insistence on the remainder with Hegels
attempt to sublate particularity into the horizon of the absolute (p. 78). Derridas Hegel is,
then, very much the Hegel of the absolute, of the encompassing of particularity in the
movement of the universal, and of the explosion of the Kantian-critical limit within the
contours of thought. Put another way, the fate of alienation in such a reading of Hegel
is its ultimate subordination to identity, or, in Derridas parlance, presence. Any
singularisation of dierence, which would do justice to the constitutivity of the exception,
is lost in such an account.
For Skempton, by contrast, Hegels dialectic presupposes the very openness to non-
identity that Derrida nds wanting. Skempton writes: It does not make sense to speak of
an excluded remainder to the Hegelian system, because the system is not a closed
mechanism. Te word system simply refers to a thinking together, a thinking of things
in their interconnectedness and relationality. (p. 81.) With caveats aside, then, Skemptons
Hegel is broadly an ontologist of a Derridean stripe, elevating to its deserved position of
importance the point of singularity in its tussle with the universal. Te absolute, far from
being the closure in the face of dierence that Derrida implies, is in fact the non-
objectiable absolute subject, which is itself nothing other than eternal freedom, the
4. Derrida, Eagleton, Negri et al. 1999, pp. 838.
5. Derrida 1990.
6. Gasch 1986.
freedom of productive indeterminacy or determinability, which . . . pregures Derridean
dirance (p. 35). Tere are many comments one could make here, not least that, for
Hegel, the absolute must imply rather more than any pre-dialectical opposition between
closure and openness, and between freedom and necessity. Further, one must question the
delity of a scholar to Hegel when all that is made, at least in places, of Hegels take on
system is the commonsensical thinking of things in their interconnectedness (p. 79). Most
striking, however, is how close to Kant, and, in particular, Kants own account of the
subject of freedom, Skemptons account draws Hegel, and it points to what will become
the most important consequence of Skemptons argument, namely the necessity of a
philosophy of the subject for any philosophy that cleaves to the consequences of either the
post-Kantian tradition or of deconstruction.
Skemptons argument rests, fundamentally, on the promisingly original claim that it is
indeed possible to account for a kind of disalienation, even if one must presuppose the
rejection of any account of a disalienated origin. Before alighting on a post-deconstructive
theory of disalienation, one must rst accept Derridas argument as to the necessity of an
inalienable alienation, of the primacy of an originary writing prior to presence or identity.
As Skempton puts it in his conclusion, presence [for Derrida] is the basis not only of the
notions of substance and identity, but also of consciousness and subjectivity. Tis is despite
the fact that for Kant subjectivity is non-phenomenal and non-substantial. (p. 193.)
Skemptons reference to Kant here is key: for him, the standard reading of deconstruction,
whereby the positive, substantial subject of Enlightenment-philosophy is rendered
impossible by the movements of dirance, is itself a misreading of the subject of post-
Kantian philosophy. For Kant, the subject is, necessarily, unknowable when read within
the bounds of phenomena, within the transcendental constraints of time and space. Te
subject of freedom is necessarily noumenal, for to posit such a subject as a knowable object-
of-thought would contradict the very conditions of its action, namely a freedom from
mechanical causality. Te fact that it is Derrida himself who most consistently misreads the
subject of philosophy in such a way is a fact not missed by Skempton, whose argument, as
a result, begins to read like an attempt to save Derrida from his own philosophical
mistakes.
Skempton accuses Derrida of a similar misreading in relation to Marx, and it is perhaps
in his treatment of Marx and the concept of objectication that Skempton nds his surest
footing. Derrida, Skempton nds, sees in Marx a desire to ward o the consequences of
dirance, to exorcise the spectrality of capital in order to restore the fullness of presence.
In particular, Derridas Marx wants to reveal the truth of exchange-value as use-value,
which is itself symptomatic of a desire to eace the logic of the trace in favour of the
certainty of innate value. By contrast, Skempton insists that, for Marx, humanity is
inherently relational and dierential, and that the spectral nature of capital is simply a
formal universality, an alienated projection of humanitys own universal character, its
generic nature (p. 99). Human being, for Marx, is dened through the uniquely human
ability to separate from the immediacy of life in order to apprehend generality, and to thus
not be determined by the individual, present particularity of ones situation. As a result, the
nitude of particularity is converted into the innitude of relational existence, of the praxis
of human universality. Skempton writes: A human qua conscious being is a species-being
[Gattungswesen] precisely because it does not belong to a species, because it is free
from specic determination and is hence able to perceive generality. (p. 102.) As such,
disalienation would involve the recognition of the fundamental relationality of the human
condition, not a return to the limits of nitude, the persistence of which is the very sign of
alienation itself, of the reication inherent to capitalism.
When viewed in this way, both the Marxist theory of praxis and the Kantian and post-
Kantian take on the subject read as forms of deconstruction avant la lettre. Skempton
writes: Te target of deconstruction, the metaphysics of presence, is itself the alienated
condition of givenness and positivity. Te unalienated condition, in its generative
determinability, is itself dirance, dirance freed from the presence that is its own
eacement. (p. 198.) Tus, it is a serious misreading to posit the theory of alienation as if
it were reliant on a pre-critical metaphysics; instead, disalienation is formally equivalent to
the recognition of dirance itself, of the insubstantiality of the subject and the dierential
condition of humankind. By the end of Skemptons book, Derrida occupies a singularly
ambiguous position, on the one hand, castigated for misrepresenting the tradition of critical
philosophy as so many instantiations of the logic of positivity and substantiality, and, on
the other, celebrated for recalling, in a contemporary mode, the truth of the critical turn,
taken by Skempton to be the recognition of the primacy of sociality, and the innitude of
the insubstantial subject.
Tere are benets to Skemptons analysis, and it is made with an admirable concision
and concern for the philosophical context of the entirety of Derridas work, so often taken
as mere props to an exotic branch of literary criticism. Te parallels Skempton draws
between Kants transcendental turn and the philosophy of praxis that underlines much of
Marxs work is suggestive, although one wonders whether as much is lost as is gained in
such a transhistorical-philosophical comparison. Skemptons move is, after all, essentially a
reductive one: by denying the force of Derridas grammatological critique of Kant and
Hegel, and by asserting the equivalence of disalienation and dirance, Skempton runs the
real risk of obscuring the singularity of the thinkers he marshals in service of his argument.
It is, after all, one thing to assert an innite, ontological relationality as the underlying truth
of human existence, and quite another to deny the particularity of the dierent ways that
one might conceive of such a relationality philosophically. Tere are points during the
reading of Skemptons book when one becomes suspicious that his argument rests ultimately
on the persistent substitution of terms, back and forth, such as it suits the argument:
presence for identity, dierence for non-identity, objectication or externalisation
for alienation, and so on, until Derrida resembles Hegel and Hegel resembles Derrida.
Such suspicions are ultimately, however, allayed by the systematic force of Skemptons
arguments, particularly in debunking some of the more persistent, traditional inter-
pretations of Hegel that continue to distort dialectical philosophy. Instead of contenting
himself by taking apart some of the more obviously defective analytical-philosophical
reductions of Hegel, Skempton also questions the veracity of some canonical, left-critical
approaches to dialectics. Addressing Lukcs, for instance, Skempton detects a simplistic,
organic approach to Hegel, predicated on the retreat and the promise of the return of the
origin (p. 58). For Lukcs as well as for Althusser and Foucault, at least on Skemptons
account Hegels dialectic is best understood as expressing the loss of an original immediacy,
regained through the eventual, immanent coincidence of subject and object. Such
metaphors of an organic originary presence are sporadically used by Hegel himself, Skempton
concedes, but the ultimate consequence of such an approach to Hegel is to deny the
primacy of negativity, and, in particular, the negativity of the subject. Skempton writes:
the relationality of the organic whole . . . is itself dependent on the dissolution of the
isolated xity of abstract positivity, an ex-position rendering xed thoughts uid through
the negativity and self-ex-position of the pure I that is their basis (p. 59).
For Hegel, the subject takes the position of an ultimate, negative contingency, that
disrupts both the self-closure of substance and any attempt to generalise the movement of
dialectic to the status of a teleology. Read this way, Skemptons occasional reduction of the
implications of Hegels pro-social ontology to a kind of commonsensical intersubjectivity
is forgivable, if inexplicable, and one hopes Skempton might expand his take on Hegelian
subjectivity in future work. Skemptons reading points towards an intriguing take on the
anti-Fichteanism of post-Hegelian dialectics, with the pure I less the force of an absolute
positing, and more the negative glitch in the forward-movement of dialectics. Obvious
here, of course, is the inuence of reading Hegel through a deconstructive lens, although
perhaps the contemporary model of subjectivity that best ts Skemptons reading is that
developed out of Jacques Lacans structural psychoanalysis.
7
Tere are productive parallels
to be found, too, between Skemptons reections on the non-organicism of the
Phenomenology and Fredric Jamesons recent reading of a non-teleological Hegel in his Te
Hegel Variations.
8
At any rate, the implications of such a non-, if not anti-teleological
dialectics for the wider thesis on alienation and disalienation proposed in the book is that
alienation, far from eacing a positive origin, can only be understood as representing a
denial of the impossibility of totalisation.
Derrida, of course, rejects any philosophy of the subject through his critique of
substantiality and of the metaphysics of presence, although Skempton insists, rightly, that
such predicates are not necessary for a theory of the subject inspired by the post-Kantian
tradition. Indeed, I think it is through a focus on the persistence of the subject in this
tradition that Skemptons wider arguments around the question of alienation become
especially forceful. If the ontological condition of disalienation is itself dirance, is itself
the consequences of the trace-structure of time, then the question that looms largest is the
survival of the subject in such conditions; what, in other words, remains of the subject
upon its desubstantialisation? Skempton seems to want to retain a subject that, in a broadly
Kantian mode, is ultimately unknowable and yet determinant of the process of disalienation.
It is not entirely clear, however, how even such a de-substantialised subject, liberated as it
may be from the metaphysics of identity and presence, might survive the relentless
paradoxes of Derridas analysis. Skemptons answer is to align such a subject with the
subject of practical activity, of praxis (p. 199). Tus, reading Marx through Hegel, the
subject becomes the singular act that breaches the positive givenness of the determined
totality of presence (p. 199). But how to account for the persistence and relative stability
of such a subject in time, if the subject is reduced to being only an instance of disruption?
A more developed engagement with work outside the legacy of post-Kantian philosophy,
7. Te Lacanian subject names the movement of [the] non-totalizable . . . that both found[s]
and breach[es] totalities (Skempton 2010, p. 166), and it would have been interesting to see
how Skempton reconciles his deconstructive sympathies with Lacans perplexity in the face of
Derridas anti-subjectivism; how, Lacan asks, can Derrida reject the subject when it is only,
nally, the subject of the unconscious that names the ineliminability of what Derrida names
dirance?
8. Jameson 2010.
particularly, perhaps, with work in the psychoanalytical tradition, is required to answer
such questions, if an answer is indeed possible at all.
Tat the focus on the subject of disalienation ultimately reaches an impasse is less a fault
in Skemptons argument and more an inevitable consequence of the philosophy of
deconstruction itself. Indeed, in reorientating our understandings of Hegel and Marx
through such a productive aporia, Skempton has done a considerable service in underlining,
again, the persistence of the subject as a question that haunts deconstruction, and that
remains, indeed, its very condition of possibility. What is unspoken in Derridas work is
the extent to which the elaboration of dirance itself relies both on the straw-man of the
substantial subject that Skempton so ably subject to critique, but also the bounds of a
deconstructed subjectivity that must be presupposed, but, crucially, not admitted, for
deconstruction itself to subsist as a set of philosophical propositions. What remains in
question at the end of Skemptons account is how to nally reconcile this hidden subject
of deconstruction with the Hegelian and Marxist insistence on praxis, which may be
another way of asking after the philosophical possibilities of the subject as an explicit model
of emancipation. How do we ground, in our perpetually deconstructive moment, the
subject that must bear the weight of political action? Skemptons book poses the question,
even if only implicitly, better than most.
Reviewed by Tom Eyers
PhD candidate, Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy,
Kingston University
thomaseyers@googlemail.com
References
Althusser, Louis 2001 [1970], Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, translated by Ben Brewster,
London: Verso.
2008 [1965], For Marx, translated by Ben Brewster, London: Verso.
Derrida, Jacques 1990 [1974], Glas, translated by John P. Leavey, Jr. and Richard Rand, Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press.
1993, Spectres de Marx: LEtat de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle Internationale,
Paris: ditions Galile.
Derrida, Jacques, Terry Eagleton, Antonio Negri et al. 1999, Ghostly Demarcations: On Jacques
Derridas Spectres of Marx, London: Verso.
Gasch, Rudolph 1986, Te Tain of the Mirror, Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press.
Jameson, Fredric 2010, Te Hegel Variations: On the Phenomenology of Spirit, London: Verso.
Skempton, Simon 2010, Alienation After Derrida, London: Continuum.
Political Writings, 19531993, Maurice Blanchot, translated and with an Introduction by
Zakir Paul, New York: Fordham University Press, 2010
Abstract
Tis review considers the collection Political Writings, 19531993 by Maurice Blanchot as a
means to assess the relatively little-known political odyssey of this writer and theorist. Noting the
absence of his earlier right-wing political texts from the 1930s in this collection, it attempts to
probe Blanchots idiosyncratic ultra-left turn represented in his texts of the 1950s and 1960s. In
particular, I analyse how Blanchot develops a communism that focuses on the problem of
abstraction: both the abstraction intrinsic to social reality, and the necessity to negate and contest
that abstraction through a communist writing. Te review reconstitutes this unusual form of
Marxism, and analyses the possible resources it oers and its limits.
Keywords
Maurice Blanchot, Marxism, abstraction, ultra-left, politics
Te publication of this book should oer the opportunity to assess the singular, and
relatively little-known, political odyssey of Maurice Blanchot (19072003). Cultivating
a deliberate discretion, remarking I have always tried . . . to appear as little as possible
(p. 167), Blanchot was the minence grise of that strange event known as theory. His dense
and allusive writings on literature, and his own enigmatic literary writing, were profoundly
inuential, notably on Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida.
1
Blanchot also lived a political
life of reversals, interruptions, strange continuities and scandals. He was a militant-journalist
of the extreme-nationalist Right in the 1930s, but, after withdrawing into literary writing,
would reappear in the 1950s and 1960s as a militant of the extreme Left. Elaborating a
communism of writing (p. 85), protesting against the Algerian War, and then becoming
heavily involved in the May 68 protests, Blanchot would once again withdraw from politics
in the 1970s due, he argued, to the Lefts attacks on Israel. He then reserved for himself the
right to the unexpected word by intervening on particular issues, such as the imprisonment
of Nelson Mandela or the fatwa against Salman Rushdie.
Tis collection is limited, as the subtitle suggests, to Blanchots political writings of
between 1953 and 1993, which obviously implies omissions, as his actual political writing
spans the period from 1931 to 2002. In particular, this involves exclusion of his early
political journalism for conservative, nationalist and extreme-right journals and newspapers
between 1931 and 1937. Instead, the collection is divided into three parts. Te rst is
concerned with Blanchots writings from 1953 to 1962, which are focused on his opposition
to the Algerian War, his elaboration of a new communism, and several texts intended for
the planned, but never-implemented, Revue Internationale journal-project. Te second
section, from 1968, includes the largely anonymous texts that Blanchot wrote for Te
Student-Writer Action-Committee, which are some of his most militant and interesting
works. Tese were written for the very short-lived journal of that committee and are
dedicated to elaborating a new form of interventional writing that is equal to the emergent
struggle of May 68. Finally, the third section deals with his occasional interventions from
1. See Foucault 1987 and Derrida 2000.
1970 to 1993, which mark his withdrawal from active militant writing, and these texts are
often concerned with the question of the Holocaust or Shoah.
It is the absence of the texts from the 1930s and early 1940s that renders the value of this
collection for truly assessing Blanchots politics, and especially the abrupt reversal from far-
Right to far-Left, highly problematic. It is dicult, if not impossible, to analyse the issue of
the continuities and dierences between these moments of radicalisation without them.
Te Preface by Kevin B. Hart and the Introduction by Zakir Paul try to address this issue
by providing a full and detailed account of Blanchots political actions and writings in
the 1930s and 1940s. Also, Hart judiciously notes the diculty caused by this absence, as
well as that of other texts by Blanchot which might well be considered political (p. xxiii).
Obviously, however, these very useful and thorough eorts at amending this absence cannot
replace the texts themselves. Te result is a lacuna in any account of Blanchots political life,
one which has often been lled with tendentious and suspect accounts.
Although Blanchots writings of the 1930s were known of, and some were republished in
the French magazine Gramma in 1976, this did not prevent his work from being attached
as a minor supplement to the Heidegger Aair and Paul de Man Aair when seized on
by US academics keen to implicate deconstruction with the taint of fascism. Jerey
Mehlman put this case in its strongest form: accusing Blanchot of investing in fascist
ideology in the 1930s, and implying continuity between these views and his later left-
political writings and involvement in May 68.
2
Tis argument served a particular ideological
use: discrediting the politics of theory by imputation of a hidden, toxic, fascist core, as
well as discrediting any form of political radicalism as implicitly fascist. In his detailed and
sympathetic account of Blanchots intellectual and political itinerary, Leslie Hill has rebued
the simplications on which these accounts rest, whilst noting the necessity of an account
that can analyse Blanchots politics in its entirety.
3
And yet, taking into account as well
Derridas remark that the political prosecutors of Blanchot should at least begin by reading
him and learning to read him,
4
the unavailability of these texts renders this task dicult,
to say the least.
5
Te actual writings consisted of journalism that Blanchot contributed to nationalist and
extreme-right journals and newspapers in the 1930s. Blanchot played an active editorial
rle in the nationalist and conservative Journal des dbats, but his most controversial texts
would be contributions to the more extreme-right journals such as Combat (eight articles
published between 1936 and 1937) and LInsurg (a weekly news-sheet Blanchot contributed
to in 1937). In these texts, Blanchot would adopt a violent revolutionary nationalism that
called into doubt the legitimacy of the French state and, as the most notorious work had it,
2. Mehlman 1996, p. 213; see also Melhman 1983, and the retrospective account he oers of
his discovery in Mehlman 2005. Ungar 1995 oers a slightly milder, but still damning, version
of this charge.
3. Hill 1997.
4. Derrida 2000, p. 48.
5. A bibliography of Blanchots texts is available in Hill 1997, pp. 27498, and online (in
French) at: <http://blanchot.info/documents/Bibliographie_des_textes_de_Blanchot_Octobre_
2010.pdf>. One of the texts of the 1930s, Marxism Against Revolution (1933), was republished
in Italian by Roberto Esposito for a collection he edited on the unpolitical (Blanchot 1996);
I owe this reference to Alberto Toscano.
called for Le Terrorisme, mthode de salut public (Terrorism as a means of public
salvation). Te extremity of these texts was deliberately beyond Left and Right, aiming at
a dissident contestation of both in order to develop a new politics.
Tese works were obviously not without equivocations or ambiguities. Although
Blanchot certainly did not directly make antisemitic arguments, if we except for some
derogatory references to Jewish migrs in the Combat articles, and to Lon Blum in his
LInsurg writings, his work was nevertheless being published in antisemitic contexts.
6
Tat
said, he was rmly anti-Nazi, and often philosemitic, and personally violently rejected
antisemitism. Te equivocations of his position lie in how far his revolutionary nationalism
really placed him beyond fascism. His development of this work from the extreme Right
makes Blanchots case far more problematic than the heavily debated stance of his later
friend Georges Bataille, who tried to claim the aective forces stirred by fascism and Nazism
for the radical Left.
7
Certainly, Blanchots discourse was disturbing and, deliberately,
dissident although whether this frees him from dangerous continuities is at the heart of
the debate. His stance of dissidence was one that, as Denis Hollier puts it, exacerbates
contrarieties and involves the refusal of a stable political position for a dierent space
altogether.
8
Te diculty remains of how far this actually moves to a new space, or risks
collapsing back into existing political options, including the worst of those options.
9
What should be noted is that there is an undeniable continuity between Blanchots
writings of the 1930s and those of the 50s and 60s, which rests upon an insistence on
radical dissidence and refusal. In a late text from his period of right-wing radicalism,
Dissidents Wanted (1937), Blanchot remarked: Te true communist dissident is someone
who leaves communism not in order to nd common ground with capitalism but in order
to dene the true conditions of the struggle against capitalism. In the same way, the true
nationalist dissident is someone who neglects traditional formulas of nationalism, not in
order to seek reconciliation with internationalism but in order to ght internationalism in
all of its forms, including the economy and the nation itself. (p. xv.) If we reverse the order
of these statements, and leave aside the crucial implication of equivalence in their
symmetrical formulation, we can trace the continuity in Blanchots path. Similarly, in
regard to refusal, Blanchot writes in 1933 that [r]efusal tolerates no conditions, except
that of never going back on itself ,
10
while, in his 1958 article Refusal, he insists: What
they are left with is the irreducible refusal, the friendship of this sure, unshakeable, rigorous
No that unites them and determines this solidarity. (p. 7.)
Contrary to the usual liberal collapsing-together of the extreme-Right and extreme-
Left as shared discourses of absolute state-power and social control the totalitarianism-
thesis instead, here we nd continuity lying in absolute refusal, dissidence and negation.
Tis commonality of extreme refusal requires a dierent form of analysis to unpick
continuities and dierences, and so also to resist a simple collapsing of extreme-Right and
6. For a balanced discussion, see Hill 1997, pp. 368.
7. See Denis Hollier, On Equivocation Between Literature and Politics, in Hollier 1997,
pp. 7693, for a comparison of Blanchot and Bataille in these terms.
8. Hollier 1997, p. 82.
9. Hollier 1997, p. 83.
10. In Hill 1996, p. 6.
Left together, which serves, not so much as a political analysis, but rather to provide a
legitimation of liberal democracy as the only safe political option.
Here, for the reasons I have noted, I cannot provide that account, but I do want to
carefully consider the texts that are reprinted to grasp the particular lineaments of Blanchots
singular ultra-leftism. Te singularity lies, in part, in the fact that it does not belong to the
usual currents of the historic ultra-Left, which emerged from splits in the Tird
International, and which were condemned by Lenin for their intransigence in refusing to
cooperate with bourgeois structures.
11
Instead, here it refers to what we could call a
theoretical ultra-Left, concerned with contesting the usual organisational forms of then-
actually-existing Marxism, including the Trotskyite and other oppositional currents, and
calling for an immediate and disruptive communism posed against ocial Marxism. An
inuential gure here would be Blanchots friend Georges Bataille,
12
and such currents
would also erupt in full force at the moment of May 68.
With the contemporary emergence of Tiqqun, Teori Communiste, the currents of
communisation, and anarchist-inspired groups, we could argue for a return of this
theoretical ultra-leftism.
13
While certainly not arguing for Blanchot as origin-gure for
these currents, and not discounting the problematic issue of whether Blanchots ultra-
leftism is compromised by his earlier extreme right-wing views, I do want to suggest that
even an assessment of his later thinking on its own terms may provide some guidance on
the value of his political thinking and its implications for our understanding of this strand
of Marxism.
In particular, Blanchots ultra-leftism raises the issue of abstraction in the articulation of
communism. Of course, it is a common charge that theory is fatally abstract, and the
politics of an extreme ultra-leftism have also regularly received such criticisms. Blanchots
deliberately literary communism,
14
with its emphasis on absolute refusal and innite
contestation (p. 58), would seem to synthesise, and so radicalise, this abstraction to the
maximum degree. If, however, certain currents of ultra-leftism retain their appeal in the
contemporary conjuncture, then the question of whether anything is salvageable of
Blanchots extreme and highly abstract communism gains resonance; to assess whether, in
Leslie Hills phrase, Blanchot remains our extreme contemporary. For Blanchots
elaboration of communism, we are leaning [adosss] on Marxism, pressed up against it,
albeit in order to contest it (p. 58), and it is this peculiar relation of proximity and
contestation that I want to assess as it is elaborated in Blanchots texts of the 50s and 60s.
We can begin with the rst text in this collection: An Approach to Communism (Needs,
Values), in which, via a review of Le communisme (1953) by his friend Dionys Mascolo,
Blanchot traces the major elements of his own Marxism.
15
Mascolos work is an obvious
reference-point for Blanchot, not only due to their friendship, but also because Mascolo
engages with the work of another mutual friend Georges Bataille. Mascolo analyses
11. See Aufheben 2003.
12. See Noys 1998 and Noys 2000.
13. Noys (ed.) 2011 surveys the currents of communisation, while Graeber 2002 surveys
anarchist currents.
14. Te phrase is that of Jean-Luc Nancy. See Nancy 1991, p. 71.
15. Mascolos work is also a reference for the work of Daniel Bensad in elaborating an anti-
Stalinist Marxism, for example, his text Te Mole and the Locomotive (Bensad 2003).
communism in terms of drawing together politics and aesthetics as sites of irrecuperable
negativity, and against the reications of Stalinist political congurations.
16
He maintains a
parallel and separation between these two domains in terms of a radicalised model of
communication, derived from Batailles concept of sovereign communication.
17
Tis
discourse spoke to Blanchots own project of thinking the space of literature as one of
innite contestation, connected to a politics of revolt and rupture.
What Blanchot primarily takes from Mascolo, unsurprisingly, is his emphasis on Marxism
as communication (the subtitle of Le communisme is Rvolution et communication ou la
dialectique des valeurs et des besoins), interpreted in Bataillean fashion. Tis form of
communication is as far from any Habermasian-style promotion of communicative
rationality as it is possible to be, and Blanchot denes it as the opening, the shattering
violence, the re that burns without waiting, for that is also, that is rst of all, what
communist generosity is, this inclemency, this impatience, the refusal of all detours, of all
ruses, and of all delays: innitely hazardous freedom. (pp. 56.) Communication is no act
of mediation, but rather the immediate circuit of a demand that does not wait.
Taking this ruptural communication (in the form of anti-communication) from
Mascolo allows Blanchot to link his own critical writing on modernist literature and ultra-
modernist literary works with the stakes of communism. Tese works probe the power of
literature as one of contestation rather than communication, a power that, Blanchot argues,
allies it with communism (p. 6). In one of his relatively few remarks on his shift from far-
Right to far-Left, Blanchot said, I changed under the inuence of writing (p. xviii).
Typically enigmatic, we could say that it is not so much a matter of writing narrative-ction
freeing Blanchot from false political commitments, but rather the opening to this experience
of non-relational communication through writing, and which is continued into communism.
Te correlation of writing in the sense of an anonymous, lawless and innite space and
communism is suggestive.
In Blanchots hands, Mascolos intervention inspires a reversal of the usual humanist
tropes of opposition to alienation and reication by arguing that Marxism will liberate us
by taking the side of things (p. 3). Tis provocative formulation, in fact, comes close to
Benjamins and Adornos arguments of the 1930s that we nd liberation in the Dingwelt,
the world of things,
18
although Blanchot seems to have come to this point independently.
It also echoes Brechts formula that we nd communism in the bad new, and this is
reinforced by Blanchots formulation that we are tasked with returning to a new barbarity
in order to break with the polite and camouaged barbarity that serves as our civilization
(p. 4). Tat said, and understandably in a text of such brevity, and in light of Blanchots
own writing-practice, these remarks are left tantalisingly suggestive and even abstract a
theorists communism.
It is exactly this question that is raised in the attempt by Blanchot to create the Revue
internationale, a journal described by Blanchot, in a letter to Sartre of 2 December 1960, as
a review of total critique (p. 37). Te ambitious plan to form three editorial boards
German, Italian, and French to produce the journal (with suggested titles including
16. See Crowley 2006 for an excellent account of Mascolos work in general, and Le
communisme in particular (see pp. 1469).
17. See Bataille 1985 and Bataille 1988.
18. Adorno 1992.
Gulliver and Te Other Review) foundered before an issue could appear.
19
At the time,
Roland Barthes, perhaps tongue-in-cheek, bearing in mind the failure of the review,
described Blanchot as a great leader of negativity with a capital N.
20
What is most
interesting in the planning of the project is Blanchots commitment to an impersonal and
collective mode of working, which pregures his reaction to May 68 and draws on his
characterisation of communism as communication, and his confrontation with charges of
abstraction levelled by the German editorial board. In relation to this charge, he writes: I
must say this refusal of abstraction and defense of the concrete seemed essentially abstract
to us and of a more dangerous abstraction than the kind that we were reproached with,
because it is idealizing and, in the end ethical in nature. (To say: One must stop being
abstract, one must be concrete without worrying whether such a slogan has the least
meaning in the state of exploitation of our societies is what I call pure idealism.) (p. 45.)
What Blanchot wisely points out is how the charge of abstraction is often itself abstract,
leaving unspecied and hanging the notion of the concrete. In fact, the demand for the
concrete serves an idealising (pseudo-) materialism that neglects to analyse how the
abstract is embedded in the concrete.
Blanchot would note in a text intended for the review titled Berlin (1961) that the
literally concrete oppression of the Berlin Wall is, in fact, essentially abstract and that this
reminds us we who forget constantly that abstraction is not simply a faulty mode of
thought or an apparently impoverished form of language but rather our world, the one we
live and think in on a daily basis. (p. 75.) It is not dicult to assume that this statement is
a coded reply to his German critics. What it also indicates is Blanchots insight into the
abstraction of reality itself, not only in terms of language or thought, but also in the
structures of oppression.
Returning to his previous reply, Blanchot goes on to point out that the critique of
abstraction directed against philosophical thinking from the Left is, in fact, deeply familiar:
In France, people from the right unanimously denounce philosophy because they are
afraid of contestation and of the questioning that is essentially philosophy for us and
because, under the pretext of praising the concrete, of praising empiricism without
principles, they aim to hold onto the social status quo and sociological comfort. (p. 45.)
Certainly, we could add, not just in France, and that this kind of manuvre, which was
classically articulated by Edmund Burke, displays remarkable persistence.
21
What Blanchot
detects is a doxic, and less remarked-upon ideological convergence of Left and Right
around the concrete, which defuses critique and negation in the name of the preservation
of what exists.
In Blanchots scattered remarks, we can see the coordination of the necessity to pose an
abstract thought that is capable of grasping the actual abstraction of reality, those real or
practical abstractions noted by Marx, with the need for innite contestation (p. 58). Yet
such a call might seem empty or gestural, or, yet again, abstract. In his conclusion to One-
Dimensional Man (1964), Herbert Marcuse quotes Blanchots 1958 text Refusal [Le Refus],
noting that negation appears in the politically impotent form of the absolute refusal ,
22

19. A discussion of the project can be found in Fynsk 2007.
20. Barthes, as quoted in Holland 2007, p. 51.
21. Toscano 2010.
22. Marcuse 1986, p. 255.
although adding that if the abstract character of the refusal is the result of total reication,
then the concrete ground for refusal must still exist, for reication is an illusion.
23
Te
abstraction of social reality all the way down, its total real subsumption, seems to call for
an absolute refusal to match, but one left abstract.
What we might call the practical moment of this contestation was to come with
May 68, into which Blanchot plunged without reserve (Derrida, by contrast, displayed
considerable reservations in regard to 68 spontaneism (p. xxvii)).
24
To adapt a phrase
of Batailles, we might talk for Blanchot of a philosophy in the streets, or negativity
in the streets. What May 68 realised was an essentially anonymous experience of a
community of contestation, the promise that had not been delivered with the failure of the
Revue internationale. It also promised the concrete realisation of the abstract innite
contestation or refusal in this open, and deliberately abstract, community that was
anonymous and plural.
Blanchot, for a fairly brief period, welcomed this opportunity to discard the I in such a
community (and his texts from this period were anonymous and only attributed to him
later by Dionys Mascolo). Reiterating his armation of rupture in the rst bulletin of the
Student-Writer Action-Committee, he wrote: for us penury, speechlessness, the power of
nothing, what Marx rightly called the bad side, that is, the inhuman. (p. 88.) Again,
Blanchot returns to his previous articulation to develop an antihumanist communism, a
communism of pure negativity. Tis innite power of destruction-construction (p. 91) was,
for Blanchot, a communism without heirs (p. 92), an immediate and anonymous non-
party communism.
Tis ercely antihumanist Marxism, very dierent in style from Althussers, was once-
again geared to particular forms of speech and writing: the tract, the slogan, the interruption
of usual communication. In a brief text, Reading Marx, Blanchot suggested that three
types of speech operate in Marx: the rst, a philosophical writing, teleological and humanist;
the second, political, which short-circuits all speech (p. 104), and carries the moment of
rupture at once; the third is indirect and scientic, but a science that upsets and subverts
science. For Blanchot, it is a matter of arming that Communist speech is always at the
same time tacit and violent, political and scientic, direct, indirect, total and fragmentary,
lengthy, and almost instantaneous. (p. 105.) We can note that, in this characterisation, the
rst voice tends to drop out or be downgraded, with the implicit identication of
philosophy with (bad) metaphysics. In a sense, Blanchot promises an alliance between
politics and science that will break up the serenity of the lengthy speech of philosophy.
Tis emphasis on the fragmentary indicates a political incarnation of abstraction, not in the
direction of more philosophical writing (as one might imagine), but in a dense writing that
is abstract by refusing the usual abstractions of the literary I and philosophical good
conscience.
Blanchot was to break-o from this path of inquiry. Te very incandescence of May,
which could well conrm the scepticism of those who would regard ultra-leftism as an
infantile disorder, was only short-lived. In fact, Blanchot recognised this problem, noting
that the will to escape, by any and every means, an alienated order confronts an order that
is so powerfully structured and integrated that simple contestation is always at risk of being
23. Marcuse 1986, p. 256.
24. See Smith 2009 for a description of Derridas Leninist response to May 68.
placed in its service. (p. 79.) Here, the very immediacy and ruptural ecacy of an ultra-left
position becomes caught in a dialectic of recuperation; a problem, I would argue, that we
continue to confront and that requires a continuing working through.
As I previously remarked, the later political texts collected in this volume are usually brief
interventions, often concerned with particular testimonials to friendship, notably to
Emmanuel Lvinas, or to reections on the Holocaust or Shoah and the impossible duty of
memory. Tese texts largely break o from any consideration of the fate of Marxism in a
period of historical defeat and crisis; instead, they seem to inhabit a retrospective serenity,
a patience (Blanchot remarks: Messianic impatience is perhaps the danger of dangers
(p. 165)), that is far from the violent urgency and immediacy of the earlier communist
texts. Although unconventional in form, and often idiosyncratic, they also seem to return
to more familiar political themes that preoccupied the 1980s and 1990s.
Still, one of these texts, on the prose-poem Factory-Excess [LExcs-lusine] by Leslie
Kaplan, does indicate a more direct continuity with Blanchots earlier armation of
communism. Here, Blanchot reects on a text that, through discontinuity, traces the
experience of the factory-universe. While refusing the facile comparison of this universe
with the concentration-camp (Hell has its circles (p. 132)), Blanchot does reect on the
day-to-day violence of innite suering you have to know that retirement at sixty and
death at seventy will not liberate you. (p. 131.) Tis remarkable text reects on this
eternity of suering for female factory-workers, an inhuman universe that leaves one
suering in human form. Certainly, this is a profoundly abstract text, but it attests to a
particular form of abstract violence, one that is itself a kind of perversion of the anonymous
community of revolt that Blanchot still retains faith in.
In a sense, the overall importance of this collection lies in the broken threads that
Blanchot leaves us to take up, in considering the possibilities of a communism articulated
through abstraction and negation. His own fragmentary writing deliberately leaves this
possibility open through a refusal to stabilise such a communism within discrete forms. Of
course, such a strategy could easily licence frustration, and would seem to conrm classical
diagnoses of the limits of the ultra-Left. More perniciously, it might even give succour to
standard tropes of anti-intellectualism and to those who always condemn political
extremism as fatal to the good conscience of democracy. Despite this, I would argue that
the challenge of Blanchots political writings, which of course cannot simply be quarantined
o from his other texts, is that they invite us to read another Blanchot. Whereas the
preoccupation has been to condemn the political Blanchot as an anti-democratic crypto-
fascist, to the benet of the verities of liberal market-democracy, the possibility of a more
nuanced analysis is also possible. Tis is not the simple matter of reclaiming Blanchot for
the Left, but rather a more thoughtful reinterrogation of questions of abstraction, violence,
community, and communism after Blanchot.
Reviewed by Benjamin Noys
University of Chichester
b.noys@chi.ac.uk
References
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Volume Two, translated by Sherry Weber Nicholsen, edited by Rolf Tiedemann, New York:
Columbia University Press.
Aufheben 2003, Intakes: Communist Teory Beyond the Ultra-Left, available at: <http://
libcom.org/library/beyond-ultra-left-aufheben-11>, accessed 31 January 2011.
Bataille, Georges 1985 [1957], Literature and Evil, translated by Alastair Hamilton, London:
Marion Boyars.
1988 [1954], Inner Experience, translated and with an Introduction by Leslie Anne Boldt,
Albany: State University of New York Press.
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Blanchot, Maurice 1996, Il marxismo contro la rivoluzione, in Oltre la politica. Antologia del
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2010, Political Writings, 19531993, translated and with an Introduction by Zakir Paul,
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Testimony, translated by Elizabeth Rottenberg, Stanford: Stanford University Press.
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Studies, 42, 2: 13950.
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Blanchot and Derrida 2000.
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Libertarian Communism: Marx, Engels and the Political Economy of Freedom, Ernesto
Screpanti, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Abstract
Book-review of Ernesto Screpantis Libertarian Communism: Marx, Engels and the Political
Economy of Freedom. In this book, Ernesto Screpanti questions the nature and status of freedom
within both Marxs thought and possible forms of communist organisation. By way of an
argument which contends that communism should be understood as a theory of freedom, he
extracts a deliberately individualistic version of communism from Marxs work, and proceeds to
develop this into a series of recommendations for practical-organisational forms. Tese forms,
and the notion of freedom that they arise from, are, however, closely related to Screpantis
adoption of an economic approach that consists of the quantication of freedom. Tis prompts
a number of political and theoretical problems.
Keywords
Anarchism, freedom, individualism, libertarian, Screpanti, quantication
Ernesto Screpantis Libertarian Communism: Marx, Engels and the Political Economy of
Freedom begins on a triumphant note, albeit by way of a rather familiar argument. Te
breakdown of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe, Screpanti writes, has not
destroyed but rather liberated the communist movement (p. ix). Freed from the
authoritarianism of party-doctrine and fostered by struggles against the globalisation of
capitalism, the spectre of communism, he claims, now haunts the entire world (ibid.).
Tis has fostered a proliferation of Marxisms, the diversity (ibid.) of which now tends to
be celebrated rather than vilied, and the majority of these new currents are said to share
common ground in voicing a new libertarian trend within communist thought. Tis, in his
view, necessitates an engagement with the theoretical roots of communisms concerns
with freedom and an attempt to develop the practical politics that it entails. Libertarian
Communism attempts to go some way towards meeting both of these requirements, and, in
doing so, it oers a fundamentally individualist version of communism (p. 83).
Screpanti is Professor of Political Economy at the University of Siena, and Libertarian
Communism can be seen to continue his interest in the reformulation and modernisation
of Marxist economics. Screpantis past works have sought to address the dicult connection
between Marxs theory of value and price; to replace the primacy of property-relations with
that of contractual relations; to undermine theories of alienated labour, and to free
(p. 104) Marx, as he puts it in Libertarian Communism, from any latent vestiges of
Hegelianism.
1
Tese past attempts to develop classical-Marxist economics and to do away
with the latters philosophical framework would seem to inform the aims and arguments of
this book. Its rst section argues that communism cannot be understood as a theory of
justice or ethics, and thus cannot be based around egalitarian or utilitarian principles; any
appeal to universal notions of right or essence is thus ruled out. Te second section then
builds on these claims by arguing that communism should be understood as a theory of
freedom, and, above all, as geared towards the expansion of the freedom of the individual.
Te third section then attempts to build on the books rst two parts by casting this theory
1. See Screpantis own website: <www.econ-pol.unisi.it/screpanti/indexeng.html>.
of freedom as a form of practical politics. Tis, however, is attempted by way of a rewriting
of Marxs and Engels theory of communism (p. 143) that involves linking communist
freedom to individual choice within a market-system. Consequently, whilst the rst two
sections of the book oer provocative and salient discussions of the relation between
freedom and communist organisation, its third section is decidedly more problematic:
Screpantis interpretation of freedom lends itself to what he describes as a weak variant of
methodological individualism (p. 86) which he augments by adopting economic methods
of quantifying consumer-choice. As I shall describe below, this seems to give rise to a
number of political and theoretical diculties.
Viewing communism as essentially individualistic allows Screpanti to present the latter
as a system of maximal equal freedom (p. 138) rather than as a system of equal welfare.
Tis then allows him to negotiate the objections that he levels at the famous motto of from
each according to his ability, to each according to his needs (p. 5): a doctrine that is said
to suer from an unworkable ineciency (p. 9), due to its removal of the incentive
principle (p. 6) required to make people work and perform unpleasant jobs. In order to
function, this famous motto would thus need to rely upon a utilitarian and egalitarian
ethic, adherence to a moral law or, worse, the realisation of a higher and nobler form of
humanity (pp. 1112). In contrast, Screpantis own individualist communism relies solely
on self-interest, entailing that binding moral laws and xed notions of justice can be
dismissed.
Tis pertains to Screpantis desire to free Marx from Hegelianism (p. 104), and, indeed,
from any other vestiges of Feuerbachian species-being or Kantian ethic: for a notion of
freedom that relies on the realisation of a universal human essence or on the recognition of
a transcendental absolute whether that be a utilitarian ethic, an ideal future or a prescient
vanguard is said to invite oppression and dogma, insofar as it posits an identity or an
authority over and above that of the individual (the Hegelian-Marxist notion of freedom
is thus said to be possessed of totalitarian connotations (ibid.)). Furthermore, in the
consequent absence of any notions of telos, human essence or species-being, Screpanti is
able to use Marxs views on the historical contextuality of the human subject as a means of
casting the latter as being possessed of an almost Sartrean indeterminacy: Marx and Engelss
early descriptions of communism as a historical process
2
are thereby given an individualistic
reformulation, as in rejecting any sense in which communism might be an ideal state
(p. 102). Screpanti describes it instead as a liberation process (p. xiv) pursued by
self-interested individuals.
Screpantis focus rests, however, on Marxs later works. Following Althussers notion of
an epistemological break (which Screpanti locates with peculiar precision: it can be found,
he tells us, between the tenth and eleventh theses on Feuerbach (p. 62)), he equates Marxs
mature economics to a concern with individual freedom and agency. Tis purportedly
scientic concern with the individual is thus placed in contrast with the implicit universalism
and ethical idealism of Marxs earlier Hegelianism, and is subjected to a reformulation
(p. 141) that makes recourse to a new rigorous scientic method for analysing freedom
(p. 145).
2. For example: We call communism the real movement that abolishes the present state of
things (Marx 2000, p. 187).
Despite frequently stressing the basis of this methodology in contemporary science
(p. xviii), Screpanti tells us little about its origins. It does, however, involve the quantication
of freedom, and it tends towards the identication of the latter with consumer-choice
(Screpanti admits that its development was far removed from Marxism (p. 145)). We are,
however, told that it derived from the work of two political philosophers: rstly from Isaiah
Berlins notion of positive and negative freedom, and secondly from Gerald MacCallums
later development of Berlins work (p. 104). Screpanti introduces its salient points by way
of a brief account of MacCallums triadic model of freedom, according to which a correct
denition [of freedom] requires three elements to be specied, namely, the subject, the eld
of choice, and the impediments to freedom (ibid., Screpantis italics). On this view, the
individual becomes a decision making agent (ibid.), and his or her freedom is referred to
as an opportunity set (ibid.): a term borrowed from nance-capital, and used here to
refer to the numerical quantity of options available to the individual (thus denoting the
degree to which he or she is free). Te wider the set, Screpanti writes, the greater the
freedom (ibid.).
Tis approach oers Screpanti the possibility of treating freedom as an objective reality
rather than as a philosophical principle. Freedom becomes quite independent of any
notions of essence, telos or immanent identity; yet whilst this model can be related to issues
of class, insofar as one set of individuals can be said to have a greater amount of freedom
than another, it eectively reduces the qualitative dierence between communism and
capitalism to that between the quantities of freedom that the two systems aord.
Furthermore, we no longer have the antipathy to the market generated by theories of
alienation (the latter having been dismissed as being based on a universal notion of human
nature (p. 5)), and this enables Screpanti to present a version of communism based around
a competitive market-system (Marx and Engels . . . often . . . give the impression of believing
the market can only be capitalist and that communism presupposes its overcoming. Tere
is more to it than that (pp. 10910)). It is thus hard to avoid the sense that Screpantis
libertarian communism constitutes a form of enlightened capitalism: for, in the absence of
any intrinsic opposition to the wage-relation, the pursuit of a quantitatively abstract set of
choices might just as well involve those aorded by commodities and capital.
In this respect, it is perhaps worth noting just how distinct Screpantis libertarian
communism is from many of the other anarchist and communist currents associated with
the term;
3
for, rather than arguing for the abolition of wages, private property and markets,
Screpanti writes that he does not see what is wrong in conceiving a cooperative rm which
produces to sell its goods to another cooperative rm (p. 110). Screpantis interpretation
of Marxs individualism is also said to be radically dierent from liberal individualism
(pp. 845): this is because it rejects any sense in which the human subject might be viewed
as an ahistorical abstraction; hence his concern with Marxs emphases on historical
contextuality, as noted above. Tis contextuality is, however, gured almost exclusively in
terms of individual choice, and, indeed, must be for Screpantis quantication of freedom
to stand: for in order to maintain the primacy of the individual agent that this methodology
relies upon, notions of ideology and determination must be somehow accommodated into
3. See, for example, the Libcom groups library of (primarily anarchist) texts associated with
the term libertarian communism: <www.libcom.org/tags/libertarian-communism>; see also
Toscano 2009 for a discussion of this aspect of Marcuses work.
the opportunity-set: a point that can be introduced by way of Screpantis handling of the
primacy of the individual over the class.
As noted above, Screpanti employs a form of methodological individualism (p. 86), and
he even goes so far as to attribute that approach to Marx himself (p. 85), although he
concedes its potential conict with Marxs concern with class and social structure (p. 86).
Tis informs his concern with the postulate of ethical individualism, which he terms the
most fundamental axiom of modernity: namely, the principle that each individual is free
to think autonomously about what is to be considered the public good (p. x). Tis
necessitates the rejection of the dogma of a general interest, even a class interest, which
is not reducible to private ones (p. 84). Tus, whilst class and struggle are the undoubtedly
complex result (p. 70) of individual actions, they are never their nal cause, since the
movements of social aggregates are explainable by reducing them to the actions and
interactions, as complex as you like, of the individual agents participating in them (p. 86,
Screpantis emphasis). Te individual is thus primary, and all individual interest and
thus, by extension, all action and social interaction lies in the expansion of ones
opportunity-set (p. 144). Tis, however, becomes problematic when related to the
ideological issues that he himself introduces.
Screpanti does not deny the existence of historical and social conditioning, and he
claims that social determinants aect the individuals development and his forms of
consciousness (p. 69). Arguing for the ontological primacy of individual subjects, he
stresses, does not mean that their behaviour cannot be inuenced by the relations and
institutions in which they are embedded (p. 79). Tere is, however, a problem here: for, if
their behaviour is inuenced, and if all behaviour stems from self-interest, then there must
be a sense in which this conditioning aects that self-interest. However, this same self-
interest would seem to be eectively pure by virtue of its primacy, and because of the
absence of any natural, essential template that it might be said to have deviated from. So,
to talk of conditioning on this basis would therefore only seem to be possible if a) it simply
meant that dierent sets of objective options produce dierent forms of behaviour on the
part of neutral subjects, thus problematising the sovereignty of the individual agent required
by Screpantis model; or, if b) one posited a natural version of self-interest and declared it
to be subject to distortion by ideology, thereby entailing a collapse back into the humanism
that Screpanti wants to avoid.
In the absence of Spirit, species-being or human essence, there can be no sense in which
the ends of individual actions are presupposed by human nature. Tis means that there can
be no necessary content to any of the actions that the subject undertakes; and, if actions are
not pre-determined, Screpanti concludes that freedom must consist only in the range of
opportunities which are ex ante open to action (p. 98). Tus, freedom for Screpanti lies in
capacity rather than in action per se: only the notion of freedom as capacity, he writes, as
an array of possibilities, is compatible with a theory developed on the ground of a materialist
critique of Hegel (ibid.).
If the subject is conditioned, then this must aect its capacity in some way, and thus its
freedom. Yet Screpantis opportunity-sets are intended to show that freedom is an objective
reality, and that one can view freedom in abstract[ion] from the degrees of rationality of
individuals, as well as their motivations and beliefs (p. 145). He would thus seem to need
a theory of ideology, or at least some account of the ways in which social structures
condition social agents; yet, on the other hand, the premises that his account rests upon
render this problematic: would ideology be a part of the opportunity-set, or a part of the
subject? It would presumably need to be both, and yet cannot be: it must be a part of
the opportunity-set because it shapes choice; yet, in order to maintain the primacy of the
individual, the subject and its choices must be kept distinct. In addition, Screpanti also
wants to indicate instances where objective choice is present whilst subjective decision is
impaired.
Tis can be seen in the manner in which he illustrates his adoption of the notion of false
consciousness (p. 121, n. 181), which he contrasts to the conscious self-determination
allowed for by communism. For Screpanti, the self-government aorded by communist
society entails that the constraints people have to cope with . . . are rationally perceived as
autonomously determined by the people themselves (p. 121). In contrast to this clear self-
determination stand ideological deformations that induce people to perceive some norms
as self-determined when in fact they are not (p. 121, n. 181). Now, the rst and most
obvious question that arises here is as to how any such deformation could take place in the
absence of a natural and essential consciousness, but the manner in which Screpanti
illustrates this point is itself interesting: he presents a situation in which an individual is
faced with free, objective choice whilst suering subjective, ideological restrictions, and his
rather provocative example is a woman who complies with the moral norm that obliges
her to wear a chador (ibid.) (an example that he employs on two further occasions; see
pp. 100, 105). Screpantis claim is that whilst she might be convinced that the norm is
right, any assumption on her part that she has contributed to its determination would
be irrational (ibid.).
Ironically enough, false consciousness and irrationality here presumably means
something akin to a Feuerbachian notion of alienation, i.e. a mistaken transposition of the
individuals primacy and capacity to choose onto a (in this case) religious absolute. Tis,
however, can only be explained through the theory of ideology that Screpantis approach
renders so dicult: if, objectively, she may or may not take part in this custom, and if,
subjectively, she chooses to do so nonetheless, then surely if the primacy of free, individual
choice is to stand she has indeed deliberately contributed to this norms determination,
and there remains little to dierentiate her false consciousness from its true counterpart. If
this is not the case, her actions are not entirely her own, she is being inuenced by the
weight of ideology, and individual-subjective choice is no longer fully free.
Te issue of rationality and irrationality seems pertinent, as, despite Screpantis rejection
of transcendental and universal absolutes, his views seem to rely upon the ubiquity of
reason. Given the fact that he cannot make any appeal to ethics, essence or any other form
of universality, his arguments must rely upon the rational faculties of those to whom they
are addressed. Hence his concern with objective and scientic proof (the proletariat, he
writes, only needs an eective scientic theory of the reality in which it acts (p. 39)), and
hence also the pertinence of issues relating to the deformation of subjective choice.
Tis should be qualied: Screpanti rejects all transcendental conceptions of reason, and
all cognitive theories of justice (p. xi, passim). Reason, in his account, seems instead to
become a faculty for weighing costs against benets. Yet, as this implies the capacity to
produce a (relatively) right answer, it does not entirely remove the authoritarian and
totalitarian implications of the transcendental versions of reason that it is intended to
counter: for, if all those who stand to gain greater freedom from communism recognise that
their self-interest lies in that political project, and realise that collective, militant-political
action is required to realise it, then we have a sense in which reason has led all such actors
to the same correct conclusion. By extension, a failure to recognise that the communist
future aords broader opportunity-sets than the capitalist present must, presumably, be a
product of irrationality (or false consciousness). Opposition to Screpantis communism
thus becomes unscientic, wrong-headed, and just as backwards as any purported deance
of the grand telos of Spirit.
Such issues, however, fall outside Screpantis objective study of opportunity-sets, and
indeed must do so; for, if particular actions could be classed as good or bad per se, then the
abstract equivalence of the opportunities within the set would be jeopardised. Tis returns
us to the sense in which Screpantis approach eaces qualitative distinctions between
capitalism and communism. Communism can only be preferable if it allows the
maximisation of opportunity-sets, and the very notion of comparing capitalism and
communism in this way reects the sense in which his quantitative views on freedom
render the two social systems quantitatively equivalent. Tis is perhaps marked by the debt
that his approach seems to owe to economic analyses of market-choice, which, in turn,
returns us to his view that any future co-operative system . . . involves the market (p. 109)
([t]he autonomy of [communist] co-operative rms, he writes, entails some form of
mercantile exchange (p. 110)).
Screpantis claim that freedom should be understood in terms of capacity means that the
possibility of action and the possibility of consumption become abstractly equivalent.
Buying, consuming and possessing goods become quantitatively identical components of
the opportunity-set and thus instances of real, objective liberty: the eld of choice, he
writes, is dened as the array of goods or actions which might be chosen by the individual
(p. 104). Te danger here is that, if we are to view communism as the accumulation of
greater possibilities, both in terms of consumption and production (pp. 14555), then
there seems little reason why it should not entail accumulating greater quantities of capital
(a danger that he himself notes and warns against (p. 166)). Indeed, when describing the
distribution of freedom as a class-issue, Screpanti himself states that the higher the
opportunity set (the higher the level of income) the more [freedom] there is, for a rich
man is freer than a poor one (p. 150). Screpanti is thus faced with the task of showing
communism to aord broader opportunity-sets for the majority of people than
capitalism.
To this end, and having established the market as his playing-eld, he pits the
opportunity-sets of a capitalist boss against those of a co-operative, and shows the self-
managed workers to have a greater number of options. Tis is followed by further arguments
relating to the consumption of goods, in which free social goods (p. 151), taxation and
socialisation are shown to aord greater opportunities, and, nally, by similar assertions
regarding the availability of free time. One of the most memorable of these arguments is
Screpantis claim that the self-employed worker enjoys the excess opportunity set of self-
management (p. 147). Te argument here is opaque, but it seems to present the case that
the self-managed workers capacity to determine his or her own income entails greater
opportunities than those facing the capitalist, for whom the price of labour is a xed cost:
the worker seems to be free to cut his or her own pay in order to compete more eectively.
We thus have the freedom to lower wages, combined with the freedom to trade within a
market-system and to thereby enjoy more social benets. To borrow the words of the
Libcom group (referenced above), taken from one of their own arguments against a
similarly quantied communist future: Screpantis account would seem to seek the
emancipation of the spirit of capitalism from the limits imposed on it by capitalist society:
generalised wage labour for all, but where eort and sacrice will be fairly rewarded in a
way impossible under capitalism as we know it.
4
Screpantis book is by no means without virtues. His arguments for a non-absolutist and
amoral Marx and Engels are particularly interesting, as is his location of Marxism within an
essentially relativist framework. In addressing the relation between individual freedom and
communist organisation, he also takes up an undeniably important problematic. It is,
however, hard to avoid the sense that he has taken something of a wrong turn in refusing
any sense in which that freedom might rest upon more universal concerns. For example,
where many other forms of libertarian communism tend to rely on notions of solidarity
and mutual aid, Screpanti holds that conceiving of the individual as an element of a self-
producing collective agent invites his or her domination by an enlightened and active
vanguard (p. 104). Yet, other libertarian communists who directly experienced the rise of
such a vanguard would seem to disagree: in 1926 the exiled Dielo Truda group set out their
response to the Bolshevik victory in a seminal libertarian-communist text entitled the
Organizational Platform of the General Union of Anarchists.
5
Te rise of an lite should
be combated, they claimed, not by abstract individualism, but, rather, by the universality
of collective responsibility and solidarity. Certainly, Screpantis replacement of such
collective responsibility with the operation of the (rational, communist) market (pp. 110
16) could be seen to ground these universal concerns within objective forms of organisation,
thereby precluding their status as moral law. Yet this move of grounding the universal
requirements of individual freedom within objective forms of organisation is by no means
absent from other libertarian-communist theories for example, those geared towards
councilism
6
which do not rely upon the retention of a market-system.
Screpantis book has the virtue of raising questions about communist organisation, and,
as noted above, its rst two sections oer an interesting commentary on the relation
between organisation and freedom. Yet, as Libertarian Communisms recommendations
seem so problematic, and the books real merit may lie rather more indirectly in the
questions that it implies. For example: does a notion of alienation really involve a human
essence? Must humanism be thought of as an absolute, or can it not be thought of in terms
of process and self-determination (a position which Screpanti comes close to)? And does a
concern with producing freedom really require an economic model that seems best suited
to theorising consumption? Whilst the opening sections of the book are of interest in their
own right, the implications that Screpanti draws from them in its third section are pertinent
more by virtue of the issues that they raise than as a result of their actual prescriptions. In
consequence, and despite the objections outlined above, this book might not only be of
interest to those interested in the relation between Marxism and theories of freedom: in
4. Libcom and Te Project for a Participatory Society 2009.
5. Dielo Truda 1926.
6. See, for example, Debord, whose own quasi-existential view of history and concern with
individual subjectivity involved the view that the latter was to be fully liberated and realised
through the establishment of workers councils (Debord 1995, pp. 878).
addition, it may also prove useful to those seeking to orient their own concerns with a
libertarian or individualist Marxism.
Reviewed by Tom Bunyard
Goldsmiths College, University of London
cup01tb@gold.ac.uk
References
Debord, Guy 1995 [1967], Te Society of the Spectacle, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith,
New York: Zone Books.
Dielo Truda 1926, Organizational Platform of the General Union of Anarchists (Draft),
available at: <www.anarkismo.net/newswire.php?story_id=1000>.
Engels, Friedrich and Karl Marx 2000 [18456], Te German Ideology (extracts), in Karl
Marx: Selected Writings, Second Edition, edited by David McLellan, Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Libcom and Te Project for a Participatory Society 2009, A Participatory Society or Libertarian
Communism?, available at: <www.libcom.org/les/a%20participatory%20society%20or
%20libertarian%20communism.pdf>.
Toscano, Alberto 2009, Liberation Technology: Marcuses Communist Individualism,
Situations, 3, 1: 522, available at: <http://ojs.gc.cuny.edu/index.php/situations/article/
viewDownloadInterstitial/329/450>.
Species-Questions
A: al-masil al-mutaalliqa bi-n-nau.
F: questions gnriques. G: Gattungsfragen.
R: rodovye voprosy. S: cuestiones de
gnero. C: lei wenti .
Species-questions precede class-questions was
one of the arguments in the late 1980s with
which the supposed obsolescence of the Marx-
ian project was proclaimed. Mikhail Gor-
bachev incorporated it in the new thinking
of Perestroika in order to accord preeminence
to questions of general humanity over those
related to class-struggle. Tis raises questions
regarding the articulation of species-questions
[Gattungsfragen] and class-questions in Marxs
work.
A precise reading can show that, since the
1844 Manuscripts, the relation of species-
questions to class-questions has generally
occupied a central, albeit often unacknowledged,
position in Marxs thought. An appropriate
appreciation of the relevant argumentation
can serve to undercut later reductionist/
productivist caricatures of his thought. At the
same time, it provides the basis for a clear
understanding of the environmental contra-
dictions posed by late-twentieth-century capi-
talist development.
1. Te scope of Gattungsfragen is set by
Marx for the rst time (whilst still inuenced
by Feuerbach) in the 1844 Manuscripts. Nat-
ural relations and species-beings are under-
stood here as fundamental conditions that are
aected by capitalist alienation [Entfremdung].
(Capitalist) private property poses threatening
species-questions, because it negates the uni-
versality of the human species-being in the
structure of the conscious life-activity
(MECW 3, 276) specic to humans, which
entails a conscious interaction between indi-
vidual choice and the structures established by
others (accumulated choices). Te subsump-
tion of human life-activity under capital, and
the appropriation of competencies that goes
along with it, negates the species-being of the
worker, so that the worker only feels himself
freely active in his animal functions [. . .] and
in his human functions [i.e., work] he no
longer feels himself to be anything but an ani-
mal (MECW 3, 274 et sq.).
Tis critique of the class-structure is lodged
in a more general approach, in which the
human species is considered both a part of,
and separate from, the rest of nature. Sig-
nicantly, Marxs initial description of the
eects of capital is tied to a conception of the
human-nature relation that transcends any
particular historical epoch. While Marx would
later centre his critical analyses on historically
specic, class-related questions, he would
never forget that these represent just one
dimension of a larger reality (Ollman 1993,
55 et sq.).
Te social-natural relations [die gesell-
schaftlichen Naturverhltnisse] constitute the
framework within which class-questions are to
be understood and in which the need to over-
come them can be acted upon. It is in this
sense that the domain of class-struggle is situ-
ated, in the words of the Communist Mani-
festo, not in human society as such, but in
hitherto existing society (MECW 6, 482). If
humanity is to progress from the condition of
class-struggle to one in which the free devel-
opment of each is the condition for the free
development of all (506), certain changes will
therefore have to take place not only within
the human species, but also in its relations to
the rest of nature.
Historical-Critical Dictionary of Marxism
214 V. Wallis / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 213218
Since Marxs initial formulation of species-
questions, the sphere of their practical applica-
tions has drastically expanded. Te overall
trajectory of species-questions can be observed
in the following stages: 1. Marxs early discus-
sion of the basis on which human alienation
would be overcome; 2. Marxs later treatment
of capital in its dual exploitative relationship
to the worker and nature; 3. Te unfolding of
an ecological crisis, which is interpreted by
bourgeois ideology as the reection of an
inherent conict between humanity and the
rest of the natural world; and nally, 4. Capi-
tals attempt, emerging from its internal devel-
opmental logic, simultaneously to extend its
hegemony and to escape its contradictions by
manipulating and appropriating life-forms at
the microbiological level.
2. Marxs basic response to alienation
whether between man and man or between
man and nature is implicit in his account of
its origin. What was imposed by capital will
have to be removed by liberation from capital.
As retreat to earlier forms of social relations is
impossible, advance to a higher form becomes
necessary. It is thus in the context of his
discussion of humanitys species-being that
Marx engages in his earliest reections on
communism.
Given the dual aspect of humanitys link to
the rest of nature (as being part of it while yet
acting upon it), it is signicant that Marx
identies the nodal issue the point of con-
vergence between human-to-human and
human-to-nature ties with the question of
the relationship between the sexes. In this rela-
tionship, mans relation to nature is immedi-
ately his relation to man (MECW 3, 295). By
taking any given historical expression of this
tie as the measure of mans whole level of
development (MECW 3, 296), Marx is again
stressing an aspect of human life that on the
one hand is prior to class, but that on the
other hand is inescapably bound up with every
form that class-relations or their transcend-
ence might take.
A similar observation applies to Marxs later
discussions of value, to which use-value, on
the one hand, is prior they [use-values] con-
stitute the substance of all wealth, whatever
may be the social form of that wealth (MECW
35, 47) but which, on the other hand, is
equally connected to the social forms of capi-
talist commodity-production that dominate
it. Without this methodological clarication,
value-theory is permanently threatened by an
obfuscation and conation of capital-relations,
provoked by the equivocation of the expres-
sion value in use-value and exchange-value.
Te terminology surrounding the analysis of
the value-form [Wertform] has remained a
source of misinterpretation, the most impor-
tant of which, in this context, is the interpre-
tation, used as a testimony to an alleged lack
of concern with the degradation of the natural
world, of Marxs analytic dual thesis, that
commodities as exchange-values [. . .] do not
contain an atom of use-value (MECW 35, 49)
and that things of nature, in cases where their
utility to man is not due to labour (MECW
35, 51), have no value (in the economic sense
of labour-value), even though they can have a
price. Tat this is a non-theoretical miscon-
ception is demonstrated by the bold attack
with which Marx opens his Critique of the
Gotha Programme of German social democ-
racy. Te alleged free availability of natural
resources led its authors to state that labour is
the creator of all wealth. Marx makes clear
that labour is not the source of all wealth.
Nature is just as much the source of use values
[. . .] as labour (MECW 24, 82).
In Capital Volume I, labour is initially also
analysed in the perspective of the species-
activity that is both presupposed by and foun-
dational for the capital-relation as a process
between man and nature, a process by which
man [. . .] confronts the materials of nature as
[himself ] a force of nature; but, insofar as he
acts upon external nature and changes it, he
simultaneously changes his own nature
(MECW 35, 187). Within this frame of refer-
ence, which is still without capital, a character-
istic feature is the specically human capa city
to anticipate ideally that is, in imagination
that which is physically realised only after-
wards (MECW 35, 188). By subsequently
robbing the worker of this ability and with
that his species-being capital simultaneously
removes all barriers for the plundering [Aus-
plnderung] of nature; hence Marxs charac-
V. Wallis / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 213218 215
terisation of capitalist farming as the double
exploitation of both worker and soil. Te fun-
damental threat to the natural world is thus
rooted not in the human species as such, but
rather in the accumulation and consumption-
eects of the prot-mechanism, which makes
man and nature its twin victims.
3. Although the natural world aects the
existence of humanity as a whole, humanity in
its entirety aects the natural world in a
plurality of ways; this is indicated by the dif-
ferentiation in energy-consumption between
world-regions and historical epochs. By break-
ing up modes of existence that rested largely
on the production of use-values, capitalism
introduced an economic calculus that fosters
limitless waste.
Bourgeois environmentalism seeks to take
away from capital the responsibility for envi-
ronmental degradation and to place it onto
the shoulders of humanity as a whole. In this
perspective, the whole human species [Gat-
tung] emerges not just as a victim of the eco-
logical crisis, but also as its creator. Te primary
agents of this supposed species-behaviour are
isolated individuals and families, acting as
consumers or as procreators [Versorger]. Suita-
bly programmed as consumers, they demand
ever-higher levels of goods and services; as
procreators, their intentionality and objectives
may vary, but their practice is shaped over-
whelmingly by purely private criteria, whose
eects have pointed mostly toward expansion.
From such expansion of both wants and
population-size the carrying capacity of the
world has run into an acute crisis. Te answer
of bourgeois environmentalism oscillates
between Malthusian warnings against over-
population on the one hand and the quest for
technological solutions for situations of depri-
vation on the other (for example, recycling in
industry; devices to increase agricultural pro-
ductivity). Te latter, in turn, rely heavily on
market-incentives and are thus limited by the
basic economic calculus that has led to the cri-
sis in the rst place (Wallis 1997a, 113.).
Without the structural/institutional foun-
dation to tackle wasteful production and con-
sumption, only supercial remedies are
possible. On the other hand, the enormous
regional variations in per-capita levels of
resource-utilisation (even between zones with
similar indices of well-being) conrm the
potential of human society to reduce its toll
upon the natural world. Such a general reduc-
tion, appropriate for the dynamics of this
crisis, would presuppose a sharp separation
of species-interest from capitalist/productivist
imperatives. But it is exactly this distinction
that bourgeois ideology in the form of
commodity-aesthetics and commercial mass-
media undercuts by conating consumer-
desires with basic human needs. To challenge
this conation is to call into question every
dimension of socially organised production
(Wallis 1997b). It thus raises the most funda-
mental questions of what denes human soci-
ety and therefore of what constitutes human
species-identity.
In Marxs understanding, humanitys spe-
cies-interest would come to prevail conjointly
with the culmination of working-class strug-
gle, i.e., through the creation of a classless
society. Te practice of those organisations
and states who identify themselves as Marxist
of interpreting species-questions as opposed to
class-questions, and not as constitutive to the
background (or the culmination) of such
questions, could only emerge on the basis of a
crude attening of Marxs approach. Such
reductionism has been a routine aspect of
bourgeois thought, as the bourgeoisie has
always tried to present its own interests as
being those of the entire society. Te Soviet
rgime was unable to transcend such reduc-
tionist transpositions. It began by one-sidedly
rejecting the bourgeois approach and arm-
ing the primacy of class-interests, but it sup-
pressed workers self-management in favour of
despotic industrialism. In the race against
capitalism, the ideology of quantity over qual-
ity [Tonnenideologie] and inability to transition
from extensive to intensive growth amplied
the destructive interaction with nature. When
uncensored trans parency and certain forms of
democratic participation were nally revived
under Gorbachev, the real dialectic between
class and humanity in its totality under the
contemporary concrete conditions (Gor-
bachev 1988, 111; cited in Haug 1989, 81)
moved to the front of ocial statements. As
liberating as the general goals of Perestroika
were, the conception of the relation of species-
questions and class-questions remained unclear.
Te phraseology of the generically human
eventually ended up leading to an ignoring of
class-antagonism. Te self-defeating implica-
tion of such non-politics [Unpolitik] would
soon become evident, as, now more than ever,
capitals global expansion continued unim-
peded. What began as a vote of support for the
unication of the species [Gattung] as well as
the subordination of the competition of social
systems based on class-antagonism to the ques-
tion of species-survival [Gattungsfragen des
berlebens] concerning which, it must be
remembered that competition of systems would
change its position and its form of movement
[Bewegungsform], without disappearing as such
(Haug 1989, 67) ended up as capitulation to
the most favoured class. What followed was an
epoch characterised by the completely unre-
stricted primacy of the now globally dominant
interest of capital over questions of humanity
and the species [Gattung] as such.
4. Even as the overexploitation of nature
begins to show the gravest consequences, in
the form of increasingly severe climate-related
disasters (Davis 1998, 63 et sqq.), it eectively
remains the agenda of the capitalist global
market to expand relentlessly the appropria-
tion of natural processes. Te destructive-illu-
sionary character of such appropriation in the
long-run was already expressed by Engels:
For each such victory nature takes its revenge
on us (MECW 25, 460); for as control is
gained within a limited sphere, the broader
conditions for predictability for example, in
agriculture are undermined. Irrigation-sys-
tems can accelerate desert-formation; forest-
clearance ultimately reduces cropland by
causing ooding; air-conditioning systems
increase global warming, and so on.
Much as the capitalist cycle repeats itself,
however, so does each stage in the illusory
appropriation of nature. Te more man tames
natural processes, the more they spin out of
control, provoking new and more aggressive
taming measures with increasingly disastrous
outcomes. Tus, diverse ecosystems are indis-
criminately broken up; species-equilibria are
disrupted; pest-species multiply; synthetic
poisons are applied; new strains of the pests
evolve, requiring stronger poisons with
increasingly severe side-eects, and so on. Te
outcome threatens the survival of many spe-
cies, including that of humanity itself.
At an advanced stage of this taming cycle
appears the practice of crossing species-bound-
aries; that is, using genetic manipulation to
alter the traits of a given species in such a way
as to make it resistant to the eects of the
cycles earlier stages. Tus, one of the most
common applications of biotechnology is the
creation of plant-species with particular
immunities. Te alleged purpose is, typically,
to counteract the eect of a given herbicide.
Te immediate result is an economic one: to
create a captive market for the herbicide (i.e.,
farmers compelled to grow a plant-strain on
which no other herbicide can be used). Te
uncalculated side-eects, however, include the
propagation of the particular immunity (via
natural processes) to other plant-species,
thereby generating new varieties of super-
weeds with enhanced immunities (Altieri
1998, 67; Rifkin 1998, 82 et sq.).
Mans appropriation of nature and natures
deance of such appropriation thus appear
to advance simultaneously. On the one hand,
the farmer, even if still a landowner, is increas-
ingly drawn into a net of vertical integration
in the agricultural sector, in which the
inputs to every stage of the growing process
whether of crops or of livestock must be
obtained from the same monopolistic rm
(Heernan 1998, 53 et sqq.). On the other
hand, this extreme level of control unleashes
its side-eects chaotically in every direction.
Te physical eects include soil-depletion,
water-pollution, and an array of degenerative
processes aecting wildlife as well as livestock;
consumers as well as farmworkers (Altieri
1998, 65; Rampton and Stauber 1997). Te
social eects are all those implied by the
imposition of a modern form of debt-peon-
age, notably, decaying rural communities
incapable of supplying their own needs, and
with populations prone to various forms of
anomic behaviour.
V. Wallis / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 213218 217
Te dynamic in question develops through
the global enforcement of intellectual prop-
erty-rights, and the practice of patenting
intrudes into the very nature of species (Shiva
1997). In some cases, this extends to the
acquisition by capital of particular cells of the
human body, meaning that any medical use of
such cells (regardless of whose body supplied
them) is tied to a premium demanded by the
patent-holders (Rifkin 1998, 61 et sq.; Shul-
man 1999, 33 et sq.). Moreover, such patents
do not even presuppose any genetic alteration
of the cells in question; it suces to have iso-
lated them. As a result of such privatisation of
generic human body-parts, control over a
given kind of cell, tissue or organ can become
subject to market-transactions. Te particular
persons whose bodies are made available for
such procedures are to that extent absorbed
into a matrix comparable to the slave-market,
or the child-labour market. Te victims are in
all cases drawn from among those who have
fallen below the essential conditions of a mini-
mally human species-existence.
Although the commodication of labour-
power, the alienation of labour, and the assault
on mans species-being pertain to the entire
working class, Marx was well aware of the dif-
ferentiation of conditions within the working
class. He could thus call attention to those
women in nineteenth-century England who
were still occasionally used instead of horses
for hauling canal boats, because the labour
required to produce horses and machines is an
accurately known quantity, while that required
to maintain the women of the surplus-popula-
tion is below all calculation (MECW 35, 397).
Capital thus found use, in the most primitive
of ways, for those very sectors of the popula-
tion that had been rendered superuous by
the most advanced machinery. In a similar
way, the biotechnology of the late-twentieth
century threatens to transmute hierarchies of
class and empire into biologically distinct
communities, in which those with the neces-
sary resources will attain formidable physical
resistance and longevity, while the excluded
sectors, increasingly deprived of all bases of
sustenance, will sink to previously unimag-
ined depths of misery, from which they will
again become available for uses incompatible
with their humanity.
5. Marx was the rst to see the rule of capi-
tal as a threat to human species-existence.
Beyond his philosophical discussion of Ent-
fremdung, he later documented the extreme
physical degeneration of workers drawn into
the factory-system (MECW 35, 275). Te
many improvements that were subsequently
gained through workers struggles have not
altered the underlying dynamic. In part, the
centres of misery have shifted away from the
industrial core; in part, the health-destroying
impact has spread from the immediate envi-
ronment of the factory to the larger environ-
ment of the earths ecosystem; and in part,
with the aid of new technologies (informa-
tional as well as genetic), the dierence in lev-
els of power-resources available to ruling and
subject classes has been carried to unprece-
dented heights.
Te dynamic aecting the natural as well as
the social world is thus one in which, as antic-
ipated in the Communist Manifesto, the
response of the bourgeoisie to each emerging
crisis only paves the way for more extensive
and more destructive crises (MECW 6, 490).
Marxs approach to the humanity/nature rela-
tion, by establishing the context for his treat-
ment of the social relations of production,
equips us to understand the global crisis as it
appears at the dawn of the twenty-rst cen-
tury. Te newly felt dangers presented by the
natural world represent the accumulated costs
of the devastation imposed upon it by capital.
Any large-scale alleviation of these dangers
will require a correspondingly vast shift in the
system of social relations. Te core-Gattungsfrage,
namely the question of human survival, will
thus remain inextricably linked to the resolu-
tion of the class-question.
Biniiociaiu\: M.A. Airiiii 1998, Ecologi-
cal Impacts of Industrial Agriculture, in
Monthly Review 50 (3), 6071; B. Coxxoxii
1990, Making Peace with the Planet, New
York; M. Davis 1998, El Nio and Year One,
in Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 9 (3), 6173;
J.B. Fosrii 1998, Te Communist Mani-
festo and the Environment, in L. Panitch and
C. Leys (eds.), Socialist Register 1998, London,
16989; M. Goinacuiv 1988, Perestroika:
New Tinking for Our Country and the World,
New York; Y. Haiia and R. Livixs 1992,
Humanity and Nature: Ecology, Science and
Society, London; W.F. Hauc 1989, Gorbat-
schow: Versuch ber den Zusammenhang seiner
Gedanken, Hamburg; W.D. Hiiiiixax
1998, Agriculture and Monopoly Capital, in
Monthly Review 50 (3), 4659; J. Kixc 1998,
Te Biotechnology Revolution: Self-Replicat-
ing Factories and the Ownership of Life
Forms, in J. Davis, T. Hirschl and M. Stack
(eds.), Cutting Edge: Technology, Information,
Capitalism and Social Revolution, London;
R. Livixs and R.C. Liwoxrix 1985, Te
Dialectical Biologist, Cambridge, Mass.; R.C.
Liwoxrix 1998, Te Maturing of Capitalist
Agriculture: Farmer as Proletarian, in Monthly
Review 50 (3), 7284; R.C. Liwoxrix,
S. Rosi and L.J. Kaxix 1984, Not in Our
Genes: Biology, Ideology, and Human Nature,
New York; K. Maix and F. Exciis 1975
2005, Marx Engels Collected Works [MECW],
New York; K. Maix and F. Exciis 1975,
Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe [MEGA], Berlin/
GDR; K. Maix and F. Exciis 1957, Marx-
Engels Werke [MEW], Berlin/GDR; B. Oii-
xax 1993, Dialectical Investigations, New
York; H.L. Paisoxs (ed.) 1977, Marx and
Engels on Ecology, Westport, Conn.; S. Raxi-
rox and J. Sraunii 1997, Mad Cow U.S.A.:
Could the Nightmare Happen Here? Monroe,
Maine; J. Riixix 1998, Te Biotech Century:
Harnessing the Gene and Remaking the World,
New York; V. Suiva 1997, Biopiracy: Te
Plunder of Nature and Knowledge, Boston; V.
Suiva and I. Mosii (eds.) 1995, Biopolitics: A
Feminist and Ecological Reader on Biotechnol-
ogy, London; S. Suuixax 1999, Owning the
Future, Boston; V. Waiiis 1997a, Lester Brown,
the Worldwatch Institute, and the Dilemmas
of Technocratic Revolution, in Organization
& Environment 10 (2), 10925; V. Waiiis
1997b, Ecological Socialism and Human
Needs, in Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 8 (4),
4756; V. Waiiis 1997c, Elektrizierung
[Electrication], in Historisch-Kritisches Wr-
terbuch des Marxismus Vol. 3, Hamburg-Berlin.
Victor Wallis
Translated by Andreas Bolz
Accumulation, agrobusiness, alienation, appro-
priation, biologism, body, Chernobyl, class-soci-
ety, commodication, communism, consumer/
user, consumism, crisis, destructive forces, domi-
nation of nature, earth, ecology, eco-socialism,
electrication, energy, entropy, evolution,
exchange-value, excrements of production, gene-
technology, geography, Gorbachevism, human-
nature relation, immiseration, industrialism,
labour, life, limits to growth, Mathusianism,
means of life, metabolism, need, use-value, pro-
duction of life, productivism, recycling, social
costs, social relations with nature, subsistence-
production, surplus-population, sustainable
development, value, waste.
Agrobusiness, Akkumulation, Aneignung,
Arbeit, Bedrfnis, Biologismus, Destruktivkrfte,
Elektrizierung, Energie, Entfremdung, Entropie,
Erde, Evolution, Exkremente der Produktion,
Gebrauchswert, Gentechnologie, Geographie,
gesellschaftliche Naturverhltnisse, Gorbatscho-
wismus, Grenzen des Wachstums, Industrialis-
mus, Klassengesellschaft, Kommodizierung,
Kommunismus, Konsument/Verbraucher, Kon-
sumismus, Krise, Leben, Lebensmittel, Leib/
Krper, Malthusianismus, Mensch-Natur-Ver-
hltnis, nachhaltige Entwicklung, Naturbeherr-
schung, kologie, kosozialismus, Produktion
des Lebens, Produktivismus, Recycling, soziale
Kosten, Stowechsel, Subsistenzproduktion,
Tauschwert, Tschernobyl, bervlkerung, Ver-
elendung, Vergeudung, Wert.
Notes on Contributors
Pepijn Brandon is a PhD-researcher at the University of Amsterdam. His current research
is focused on the linkages between war, state-formation, and capital-accumulation in the
Dutch Republic during the seventeenth and eighteenth century. He has also published on
the Dutch Revolt, and was the editor of the rst Dutch edition of Rosa Luxemburgs classic
text Social Reform or Revolution?
p.brandon1@uva.nl
Tom Bunyard is a doctoral candidate in the Centre for Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths
College, University of London. His work deals with Guy Debords theory of spectacle and
its relation to Hegelian philosophy.
cup01tb@gold.ac.uk
Tom Eyers is a doctoral candidate at the Centre for Research in Modern European
Philosophy, Kingston University. From August, he will be Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow in
the Interdisciplinary Humanities at Washington University in St Louis.
thomaseyers@googlemail.com
Sara R. Farris is currently Research-Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies at the
University of Konstanz (Germany) and European coordinator for the sociological section
of the European Union Daphne project on discrimination against second-generation
migrant women. She is the author of Politics Enchanted: Religion, Subjectivity and Power in
Max Weber (Brill, forthcoming 2012). She has published in the history of social and
political theory, Orientalism and Islamophobia, female international migrations, Marxism
and gender-studies. She is an editor of Critical Sociology.
sara.farris@gmail.com
Rohini Hensman is an independent scholar and activist who has written extensively on the
labour-movement, women-workers, globalisation, and the oppression of ethnic and
religious minorities in India and Sri Lanka. Her publications include Workers, Unions, and
Global Capitalism: Lessons from India (Columbia University Press, 2011), and two novels.
rohinihensman@yahoo.co.uk
Michael R. Krtke is Professor of Sociology at Lancaster University. His recent publications
include Rosa Luxemburg. Eine politische Oekonomin in ihrer Zeit (Dietz Verlag, 2009), and
Neun Fragen zum Kapitalismus (Dietz Verlag, 2007).
m.kraetke@lancaster.ac.uk
Alex Levant holds a PhD from York University in Social and Political Tought. He
currently teaches communication-studies at Wilfrid Laurier University and political science
at York University, Canada. His work focuses on the question of subjectivity and
organisation. His recent articles include Introduction: Rethinking Leninism ( Journal of
220 Notes on Contributors / Historical Materialism 19.3 (2011) 219220
the Society for Socialist Studies, 2009) and De spontaneteit voorbij het klassieke marxisme:
Rosa Luxemburg met de hulp van Benjamin, Gramsci en Tompson opnieuw bekeken
(Vlaams Marxistisch Tijdschrift, 2009). He currently lives in London on a Postdoctoral
Fellowship in Sociology at Goldsmiths College, where he is translating Ilyenkovs Dialectics
of the Ideal.
alevant@yorku.ca
Warren Montag works at Occidental College in Los Angeles. He is the author of Louis
Althusser (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002) and has another book on Althusser forthcoming from
Duke University Press.
montag@oxy.edu
Benjamin Noys teaches in the Department of English at the University of Chichester. He
is the author of Georges Bataille: A Critical Introduction (Pluto Press, 2000), Te Culture of
Death (Berg, 2005), and Te Persistence of the Negative: A Critique of Contemporary
Continental Teory (Edinburgh University Press, 2010).
b.noys@chi.ac.uk
Victor Wallis teaches in the Liberal Arts department at the Berklee College of Music in
Boston and is the managing editor of Socialism and Democracy. His recent articles include
Beyond Green Capitalism (Monthly Review, February 2010), and Workers Control
and Revolution in Ours to Master and to Own: Workers Control from the Commune to the
Present, edited by Immanuel Ness and Dario Azzellini (Haymarket Books, 2011).
ZENDIVE@aol.com
Evan Calder Williams is a doctoral candidate in Literature at University of California,
Santa Cruz. He is the author of Combined and Uneven Apocalypse (Zero Books, 2011) and
Roman Letters (Oslo Editions, 2011). He currently resides in Naples, where he is a Fulbright
Fellow in Film-Studies.
evancalder@gmail.com
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HISTORICAL MATERIALISM 18:2
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Argentina, 19201935 and Osvaldo Coggiolas Historia del trotskismo en Argentina y Amrica
Latina Giorgio Cesarale on Roberto Fineschis, Marx e Hegel. Contributi a una rilettura
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