blowing across this globalized world, from Tunisia to Egypt to Greece to Spain to Occupy Wall Street. How do the theoretical investigations of this site relate to this, to what’s new and emerging? 

This question of the emergence of novelty, of understanding this very changing world so as to help to change it fundamentally, has always been central to this site. And some pivotal issues of the Occupy movement (Who are the 1%? for example) have been explored here as well.

At the urging of Mike Ely from Kasama, we’ve put together a guide to some important writings on khukuri, organized by topic:

What is current the structure of global capital? See essays concerning a transnational capitalist class (TNC) — truly the global 1% (or less) – by Leslie Sklair, by William Robinson, Jerry Harris, and by William K. Carroll, as well as in the recent piece on global corporate networks.

How do we analyze the present crisis, and how do we go forward from it? See this by David Harvey, as well as essays by Don Hamerquist, on the crisis of both capitalism and the left, and hollow states in a time of austerity and chaos, and John Steele’s notes from a conference devoted to this subject.

What is the relevance of Marxism today? This important question is explored in this essay by Vern Gray and in these by John Steele:

Our Relation to Revolutionary Tradition;

We Need a Politics We Haven’t Got;

and To what extent is revolutionary theory detachable?

as well as Bill Martin’s extensive essay Into the Wild.

How can we understand the present historical moment in a way that can also prepare us for the eruption of something new? And what is the relevance of the contemporary thinker Alain Badiou?

John Steele has written a series of essays: Another take on revolutionary theory; on Badiou and the event; Revolutionary fidelity and the radically new; on Badiou’s political value; and on Badiou’s Maoism.

Relatedly, there is J. Ramsey’s essay addressing the question.

And see these by Don Hamerquist: Barack, Badiou, and Bilal-al-hasan; and “…that which in them divides itself from the old”.

(And here too, Bill Martin, in the essay cited above.)

Finally, in terms of understanding the “new wind,” although this is a topic we’ll have more on, for now it’s worth noting an essay by Don Hamerquist on the earlier parts of this sequence.

Related posts:

1. Could the present crisis be an opening to communism?
2. Financialization and hegemony
3. Marxism, politics, and evil, part 2

Image at right: The 1318 transnational corporations that form the core of the economy. Superconnected companies are red, very connected companies are yellow. The size of the dot represents revenue.

The fact of highly concentrated global capitalist networks — as well as the related question of a transnational capitalist class — will be familiar ones to readers of this site. We’ve published a number of essays and interviews which center on these topics. And now these are also central questions for the Occupy Wall Street movement and all its offshoots.

The analysis we’ve seen so far, naturally enough, has come from thinkers with a Marxist background. The following essay, published in a recent issue of New Scientist, deals with a research project from the world of systems analysis, and as the authors of the following article make clear, a main concern is finding ways to make global capitalism more stable and secure. The analytic conclusions, though, have points of strong similarity.

Revealed – the capitalist network that runs the world

by Andy Coghlan and Debora MacKenzie

AS PROTESTS against financial power sweep the world this week, science may have confirmed the protesters’ worst fears. An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.

The study’s assumptions have attracted some criticism, but complex systems analysts contacted by New Scientist say it is a unique effort to untangle control in the global economy. Pushing the analysis further, they say, could help to identify ways of making global capitalism more stable.

The idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy might not seem like news to New York’s Occupy Wall Street movement and protesters elsewhere. But the study, by a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify such a network of power. It combines the mathematics long used to model natural systems with comprehensive corporate data to map ownership among the world’s transnational corporations (TNCs).

“Reality is so complex, we must move away from dogma, whether it’s conspiracy theories or free-market,” says James Glattfelder. “Our analysis is reality-based.”

Previous studies have found that a few TNCs own large chunks of the world’s economy, but they included only a limited number of companies and omitted indirect ownerships, so could not say how this affected the global economy – whether it made it more or less stable, for instance.

The Zurich team can. From Orbis 2007, a database listing 37 million companies and investors worldwide, they pulled out all 43,060 TNCs and the share ownerships linking them. Then they constructed a model of which companies controlled others through shareholding networks, coupled with each company’s operating revenues, to map the structure of economic power.

The work, to be published in PloS One, revealed a core of 1318 companies with interlocking ownerships (see image). Each of the 1318 had ties to two or more other companies, and on average they were connected to 20. What’s more, although they represented 20 per cent of global operating revenues, the 1318 appeared to collectively own through their shares the majority of the world’s large blue chip and manufacturing firms – the “real” economy – representing a further 60 per cent of global revenues.

When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a “super-entity” of 147 even more tightly knit companies – all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity – that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network. “In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network,” says Glattfelder. Most were financial institutions. The top 20 included Barclays Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and The Goldman Sachs Group.

John Driffill of the University of London, a macroeconomics expert, says the value of the analysis is not just to see if a small number of people controls the global economy, but rather its insights into economic stability.

Concentration of power is not good or bad in itself, says the Zurich team, but the core’s tight interconnections could be. As the world learned in 2008, such networks are unstable. “If one [company] suffers distress,” says Glattfelder, “this propagates.”

“It’s disconcerting to see how connected things really are,” agrees George Sugihara of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, a complex systems expert who has advised Deutsche Bank.

Yaneer Bar-Yam, head of the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI), warns that the analysis assumes ownership equates to control, which is not always true. Most company shares are held by fund managers who may or may not control what the companies they part-own actually do. The impact of this on the system’s behaviour, he says, requires more analysis.

Crucially, by identifying the architecture of global economic power, the analysis could help make it more stable. By finding the vulnerable aspects of the system, economists can suggest measures to prevent future collapses spreading through the entire economy. Glattfelder says we may need global anti-trust rules, which now exist only at national level, to limit over-connection among TNCs. Bar-Yam says the analysis suggests one possible solution: firms should be taxed for excess interconnectivity to discourage this risk.

One thing won’t chime with some of the protesters’ claims: the super-entity is unlikely to be the intentional result of a conspiracy to rule the world. “Such structures are common in nature,” says Sugihara.

Newcomers to any network connect preferentially to highly connected members. TNCs buy shares in each other for business reasons, not for world domination. If connectedness clusters, so does wealth, says Dan Braha of NECSI: in similar models, money flows towards the most highly connected members. The Zurich study, says Sugihara, “is strong evidence that simple rules governing TNCs give rise spontaneously to highly connected groups”. Or as Braha puts it: “The Occupy Wall Street claim that 1 per cent of people have most of the wealth reflects a logical phase of the self-organising economy.”

So, the super-entity may not result from conspiracy. The real question, says the Zurich team, is whether it can exert concerted political power. Driffill feels 147 is too many to sustain collusion. Braha suspects they will compete in the market but act together on common interests. Resisting changes to the network structure may be one such common interest.

No related posts.

Rather than a sociological or analytic approach (‘what are the necessary features of a revolution?’) these two members of Wu Ming take a rather different approach.

The following comprise parts of talks given by two members of the Wu Ming collective at the University of North Carolina on April 5, 2011. The full versions can be found at Wu Ming Foundation.

Apparently, the kind of revolutionary tale which our brain is most fond of is that of the great 20th century revolutions: the people in the streets, the seizure of power. We do not consider that there may be different kinds of revolution-narrative. Nation-States have changed since October of 1917, perhaps our concept of revolution should change accordingly. Also because, as said, a revolution is not always just about power, state control, the right of expression and so on. A revolution is certainly made on the streets, but above all it’s a creative drive to change the world, to call it with new names, to try the impossible.

WE ARE ALL FEBRUARY OF 1917

by Wu Ming 1

A few weeks ago, the Guardian newspaper published an article by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt entitled “Arabs are democracy’s new pioneers”. The authors tried to provide a frame in which to interpret the recent popular uprisings in North Africa and theMiddle East. At a certain point they wrote that «calling these struggles “revolutions” seems to mislead commentators who assume the progression of events must obey the logic of 1789 or 1917, or some other past European rebellion against kings and czars.»

Our question while preparing this talk was: Is it possible to acknowledge a present-day uprising as a ‘revolution’ without being misled in such a way? And how can we narrate of a present-day revolution?

There’s no doubt that the recent North-African and Middle-Eastern events, especially the Tunisian and Egyptian revolts, have resonated with us all, with our very bodies, all overEuropeand the West. At a recent London demonstration, some people wore t-shirts with the slogan «WALK LIKE AN EGYPTIAN – DEMONSTRATE LIKE AN EGYPTIAN – FIGHT LIKE AN EGYPTIAN». And yet, the public discussion on this has often been sloppy and confusing, with all the narrative traps and ideological devices my comrade WM2 will list and analyze in his talk.

My take is that, while trying to avoid such traps, we should also look for “healthily schizophrenic” narratives of revolution, that is: stories conveying the multiplicity of this prolonged moment of unrest and potentially liberating us from the conditioned reflexes elicited by all kinds of unquestioned, “pathological” connections in our everyday life.

Such “healthily schizophrenic” narratives could incorporate references to both the 20^th century and the European revolutionary tradition, without any reductio ad unum or over-simplifcation, in unexpected, even unsettling ways.

I think such an approach could help us bridge the gap between, on one side, those thinkers – like Negri and Hardt – who tend to over-emphasize discontinuities with the 20^th century struggles and revolution (for example, discontinuities between today’s multitudes and yesterday’s proletariat, between today’s Empire and yesterday’s imperialism etc.) and, on the other side, thinkers like Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou, who make constant references to the 20^th century revolutionary sequence, but sometimes seem to choose them more for their shock value towards liberals than for their usefulness in the present struggle.

In this talk I will look for examples of “healthily schizophrenic” narratives of revolution by comparing the way the Italian working class looked at the Russian “February Revolution” of 1917, a description Marcel Proust makes in the 2^nd volume of In Search of Lost Time, and a poem by Vladimir Mayakovsky entitled The 150 Million. It would have been tacky to look for examples in our own novels, wouldn’t it?

We’re in March of 1917. The Great War (quite obviously, nobody yet calls it the «First World War») has just entered its third year, and it is a hopeless spectacle of carnage. The core of the European continent has turned into a slaughterhouse. Gigantic battles are fought for meaningless purposes, like conquering a few dozen yards of wasteland. The Battle of  the Somme, which ended two months ago, lasted about twenty weeks and caused the death of over 1 million and a half men.

Italy has entered the war in May of 1915. The front is located in North-Eastern Italy, the enemy is the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Dozens of thousands of men have already died in a series of useless, ineptly conducted battles along the Isonzo river. Daily life in the muddy trenches is miserable and desperate. Shell-shocked men cast ghostly glances upon each other. It might be useful to remind ourselves of who is fighting against whom:

- on one side there’s an alliance called the Triple Entente, that is the UK, France and the Empire of Russia, but the Entente isn’t «triple» anymore because it’s been joined by Italy, Greece, Romania and other countries. TheUShaven’t yet entered the war, they’ll do it in April.

- on the other side we have the so-called «Central Powers», that is, the German Empire, the AustroHungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and the Kingdom of Bulgaria. All of a sudden, inRussia, a revolution forces the Tsar Nicholas II to abdicate in favour of a provisional government formed by liberals and socialists. InRussia, they still have the Julian calendar, which means that they are still in February. The Tsar abdicates on the 7th of March, but inRussiathat day is the 22nd of February, which is why this revolution will pass to history as the «February Revolution».

When the Revolution breaks out, the news reach Rome in mid-March. In these days, the Russian socialist movement is almost completely unknown in Italy. Not even the leaders and top intellectuals of the Italian Socialist Party know much about the Russian revolutionaries. In the past 10 years the party’s official organ, the Avanti! daily paper, has published some news on Russia, but they were all second-hand news, excerpts translated from the French and German socialist press. The only occasions in which delegations of Russian and Italian socialists could meet and talk were two anti-war conferences, one in Zimmerwald, Switzerland (in September 1915) and the other in Kienthal, Switzerland (in April 1916), but since then, the war has been fully raging, communications have been difficult, and Italy is experiencing war censorship. The February Revolution takes the Italian socialist movement by surprise.

If the party’s leaders have only access to second-hand news, then the base of the party, that is, the Italian working class, can only rely upon third-hand or fourth-hand stuff. Socialist proletarians remember the failed revolution of 1905, which they looked to in sympathy and solidarity, but more than ten fateful years have passed, the war has changed everything in most people’s lives, the 1905 uprising belongs to a distant, pre-war set of references. And we’re talking about a nation where 40% of the population is illiterate.

News of the February Revolution reach Italy through a dispatch of the Stefani news agency. The Avanti! publishes it on the 16th of March, and then something happens: the Italian working class, exhausted by the conflict, immediately interprets that faraway revolution as a great event that will end the war. Italian proletarians (whether at the front or at home) instantly assume that the revolutionary process will bring Russia out of the conflict, accelerating the end of the great massacre.

And yet, the Stefani dispatch explicitly states that the Russian revolutionaries «want the war to continue» and want to «eliminate all reactionary influences, which are considered conducive to peace». In fact, the first thing that socialist members of the Russian parliament do is to invite people to return to work and soldiers to the front, in order to continue the fight. And the provisional government, in an official note signed by the new foreign minister Pavel Miljukov, unambiguously declares that Russia is still a member of the Entente and the war will go on «until the fnal victory».

The Avanti! publishes these news on March 19. In fact, the ruling classes of the Allied countries happily welcome the February Revolution, which they consider a favorable event for prosecuting the war in the best possible conditions. Now that Nicholas II has gone, the Entente is composed only of democratic countries, and the rhetoric of «the war against the despotism of the Central Powers» seems to ring truer than before. On March 16 the Italian Chamber of Deputies celebrates the abdication of the Tsar, and many MPs shout: «Long liveRussia!» On the 22nd of March,Russia’s provisional government is recognized by the United States,Britain, France and Italy.

And yet, rather inexplicably, a few days after news of the revolution, the industrial workers go on strike inTurin(a bold move, given that strikes have been illegal since the beginning of the war), and they shout: “Down with the war, let’s do as inRussia!”

On the 18th of March, only forty-eight hours after the news, a Milanese socialist writes a letter to a friend who is at the front, he’s an infantry corporal. Here’s an excerpt:

I do not know if you heard the echo of what is happening inRussia. I think so, anyway

I must tell you that things are known only very imperfectly, because of the intentional and opportunistic lies and distortions and restrictions of the bourgeois press and the censors. What is certain today is this: the Tsar has abdicated [...] And if the purpose of revolution is to continue the war indefnitely, why has the Tsar abdicated, since his program was precisely to continue the war? [...] The truth must be very different, but the truth can not yet leak through the press.

Both the sender and the receiver of this letter were charged with «subversive propaganda among the military» and sentenced to respectively ffteen and fve years of military prison.

On March 30th, the Avanti! publishes a brief, second-hand summing-up of a proclamation issued by the Petrograd Soviet, the council of revolutionary workers and soldiers that’s engaged in a power struggle with the Russian provisional government. The proclamation is addressed to all the proletarians in the world, whom are invited to overthrow their national autocracies and put an end to the war. At this moment, people inItalyknow very little about the Petrograd Soviet and its conflict with the provisional government. This is the very frst vague clue that things inRussiacould go in that direction.

And yet, by now, for more than two weeks the Italian working class has been heralding the Russian revolution as the anti-war event par excellence. This will go on throughout the spring, all overItaly. On April 15th, the Italian Army Intelligence Service reports that several letters from soldiers celebrate the Russian events, and that among soldiers it is widely believed that the revolution’s purpose was [quote:] «not to overthrow a government guilty of mis-managing the war, but to prevent the continuation of the war itself.»

Soon the cry “Long live Lenin!” begins to resonate in spontaneous demonstrations. This is almost a miracle: by all logic, in Italy Lenin should be an almost unknown figure. “Lenin”, however, is a synecdoche, a good synecdoche, not a venomous one: a synecdoche where the part reveals the whole: “End the war!” is the true meaning of the slogan.

The leadership of the PSI, whose official line on the war was “neither support nor sabotage,” doesn’t understand why the base of the party has been giving such a fierce anti-war interpretation of events in Russia, which after all they know only through inaccurate dispatches barely filtering through war censorship, and ending up on newspaper pages devastated by the gaps left by censors. Newspapers that most people aren’t able to read, by the way.

A few months later, the Bolsheviks seize power and propose, unheeded by all governments, a general armistice.

In March 1918 the Bolsheviks fnally manage to bringRussia(by now a socialist republic) out of the conflict, with the separate peace of Brest-Litovsk. It is a costly peace,Russiahas to renounce huge portions of its territory, includingUkraine, which are transfered toGermanyand theOttoman Empire.

Nevertheless,Russia is out of the war.

The Italian workers have been proven right. But how could they immediately comprehend what was going on, against all evidence, with no reliable information?

How did they do it? What snapped in the imagination of those members of the Italian working class? What «vision» anticipated the recognition, what gaze were they able to cast upon the Russian Event? People kept uninformed, living and toiling and dying thousands of miles away, bogged down in a trench or crushed by factory work, very little connected with each other… What did the Revolution look like in their eyes?

As the Invisible Committee put it in their 2009 document entitled «Mise au point»:

The dissemination of a revolutionary movement is not carried by contamination. But by resonance. Something that surfaces here resounds with the shock wave emitted by something that happened over there.

The body that resonates does it in its own way. An insurrection is not like the expansion of a plague or a forest fre – a linear process passing from one to the next, starting from an original spark. Rather, it is something that takes shape like music, whose homes, even when scattered in time and space, manage to impose the pace of their own vibration, to 5gain ever more relevance, until the moment when any return to normality can no longer be desirable or even feasible.

Alain Badiou recently quoted a part of this remark, in an article on North African uprisings which was published on Le Monde.

Ok, but… How and why does an insurrection resound? Why does it not resound with all bodies? Why were proletarians the only ones to feel the resonance of the February Revolution? What did that revolution resound with?  Why was the ruling class unable to foresee what’s going to happen, even if they certainly had more information than the working class?

In 1914 and 1915, the war was propagandized as nothing short of a revolution. The Governments of the larger Entente presented the conflict as a democratic crusade against the despotism of decadent empires, against Prussian authoritarianism, against the iron heel of the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East, and so on. The phraseology was radical and revolutionary. In fact, many radicals enlisted, thinking they would practically help in defeating the old world and build a newEurope. Several Italian radicals thought the war would realize many as yet unachieved political and social goals ofItaly’s Risorgimento. Among these people we find the cream of the crop of that era’s non-Marxist left, for example the Rosselli brothers (Carlo and Nello Rosselli), who a few years later founded the anti-fascist clandestine group Giustizia e libertà.

Even more to the left, members of revolutionary syndicalism looked for a revolutionary value in the radical reset of the world that the upcoming war was likely to cause. In August 1914, the syndicalist Alceste De Ambris, who’d just returned toItalyafter years of political exile in Brazil and Switzerland, wrote:

I believe that the wonderful event which we have the ill or good fortune to behold will have such consequences as to force all parties and all philosophies to radically revise themselves and break all mental habits no matter what principle inspired them, as the 1789 Revolution once did, and maybe to an even wider extent. This is not yet our revolution, but maybe it is necessary in order to get the world rid of the cumbersome remnants of the surviving Middle Ages.

Let’s not forget Benito Mussolini, who at that time was still a revolutionary socialist. In October 61914 he stated:

As both men and socialists, do we want to be idle spectators of this grand drama, or do we want to be, in some way, its protagonists?

One month later, he was expelled from the Socialist Party, and that’s the beginning of another story.

It didn’t take long before such enthusiasm was replaced by disappointment, discouragement, fear, and horror. The war was not a revolution: it was  terrible, meaningless carnage. The war had spoken the language of revolution, but had spoken it with a forked tongue. The promoters of the war had lied.

It should be noted that, unlike the radical intellectuals mentioned before, the masses, who had been contrary to joining the war in the first place, had quickly realized that the war was speaking with a forked tongue, but they couldn’t have imagined the abyss of horror the intervention would topple them into.

The trauma was enormous.

The mobilized masses, tired of the war, could hardly wait for someone to  really speak the language of revolution. A revolution that, at that point could only be antithetical to war.

Let me give you one example among thousands possible: on 20th january 1916, a military court sentenced a 25-year old soldier to four years in prison for spreading news disparaging the army. This guy had written a letter to a friend, in which he told about subversive comments uttered by army officers. He’d written:

Do not believe those stories on the soldiers’ acts of valor, do not pay any attention to what the newspaper says, they’re all lies. Soldiers do not fght with pride nor passion, they go to slaughter because they are ordered to, and because they are afraid of being executed [...]

Then the guy reported a comment he’d heard from an officer:

«If I could lay my hands on the head of government, I would strangle him»

Finally, he concluded:

«Revolution is the only way out. We are tired and only wait for the spark.»

Certainly, nobody would have bet a single cent on backward, peasant Russia. It was the most unlikely country for a revolution. Marxists were looking to more advanced industrial countries. In fact, when the revolution broke out, Antonio Gramsci described it as «a revolution against Das Kapital».

However, a potential narrative of «revolution vs. the war» was in circulation, and the emotions were ready to be expressed. The war itself had contributed to arouse them. The masses were tuned and ready, and when the Event found its unlikely, surprising site, the working class immediately picked up the right narrative, against all evidence, against any “common sense” and all talk by “experts”.

Nevertheless, this is just a general precondition of resonance. We need to know more about the specific ways in which the Russian Event resonated in Italy, and, more precisely, we have to understand what it resonated with.

That’s why I’m starting a second line of reasoning, which is likely to be more tentative and erratic.

As strange as it may seem this line of reasoning has to do with Marcel Proust.

My assumption is that those Italian workers were in an advantaged position with respect to their leaders and their journalists. While the latter were paralyzed by lack of information and suffered the frustration generated by censorship, the workers were more free to look from afar and wonder about the outlines of the revolutionary event, they were more free to focus on its shape, and try to grasp its significance by means of similarities. What did it look like? What did it feel like?

Well, it felt like many things. The proletarians projected on it a multiplicity of images, all of which were related to their main desire, and their main desire was that the war ended, the war that had made life so monotonously terrifying, so unworth living, so depressingly lacking of variety, of multiplicity.

Far from fulfilling its radical promises, the war had established a harsh disciplinary regime, it was associated with blind obedience, despotism and inescapable death. An event in which the masses had disobeyed, overthrown a despot and demanded a better life could not but be associated with the end of the war. A revolution could only be against the war.

Again: those proletarians asked themselves: «What does this remote event look like? What does it feel like?». And they answered: «It feels like what I’d like to do myself! It feels like what I’ve seen attempted many times, without success!».

In mid-July of 1917, the infantrymen of the Catanzaro Brigade rebelled against their officers. It was the biggest revolt ever occurred in the Italian army during the Great War.

The incident took place in Santa Mariala Longa, in the Friuli region, where the brigade had been stationed since June 25th, for a period of rest. The news of a new deployment in the trenches of the first line triggered a protest which soon escalated into open revolt.

The army quelled the revolt by sending in a company of Carabinieri, four machine guns and two autocannon. The fght lasted all night and ended at dawn. In the following days, about 20 rebels were shot and thrown into a common grave.

That’s what the revolution felt like for proletarians: it felt like a mutiny, it felt like desertion, it felt like draft-dodging, it felt like a workers’ strike. Those are the things the Event resonated with: the revolution felt like a larger version of one of the many revolts that were erupting from the trenches in those days.

Ok, but… What in heaven has Marcel Proust to do with this?

……………………………………..

To sum up: our bodies resonate with the multiplicity of life revealed by the Event interrupting the everyday cycle of pathological connections. Such multiplicity and resonance can be powerfully conveyed through a seemingly disorderly description of that moment’s configuration: the “supertrope”, the rhetorical cloud of  “haecceity”, in which there seems to be no “measure” and no hierarchy between small and large things, backdrop and foreground.

This is a direction we could take, in order to avoid the usual framing traps on the path of telling about a revolution. Now WM2 will summarize what those traps are. Thank you.

HOW TO TELL A REVOLUTION FROM EVERYTHING ELSE

by Wu Ming 2

………………………

This means that, in order to tell a revolution from everything else, we need a good heuristic concept, on the one hand, and a good narrative, on the other. Historians, philosophers and social scientists can help to prepare the former, while novelists and storytellers can tell us a few 2things about the latter. Also because, this is not the only link between narrative and revolution, and before proceeding with the analysis, I would like to list at least two others.

The first is that both narrative and revolution revolve around the violation of a rule. In a sequence of ordinary events there is no history and there is no revolution. Without a potential break with the ordinary world, the narrative game isn’t worth playing.  The revolution is born of the same dialectic that acts as a pivot for any story: the one between conservation and change, between what was and what could be.

Secondly, every revolution is an attempt to tell the world with new names and concepts, both on a symbolic level (eg the reform of the calendar during the French Revolution) and on a material one, with previously unknown subjects, rights and laws. It isn’t by chance that coups and civil wars often try to justify themselves through semantic changes that mimic this revolutionary necessity.

At this point it looks clear to me that if we want to deal with a revolution we must handle many more narrative materials than it might seem at first sight. Within these materials, these mythologemes and these rhetoric devices, I would like to identify smokescreens that may confuse our sight, poison the narration and prevent us from distinguishing between a revolution and something else, or rather, between a toxic narrative of the revolution and a narrative of the revolution that’s healthy, open and true to its purpose.

Toxic Narratives

 To begin with, let us ask ourselves what would be the purpose of a narrative of this kind, that is, of a story that doesn’t draw its subject from imagination, but takes it directly from reality.

We might answer that such a story must be true, but then we should explain what truth we are talking about: is it truth as correspondence with the facts, which may be enough for reporters, or is it truth as consistency within a paradigm, the kind wefnd in science and mathematics?

In the case of a narrative – even when it draws on reality – I think it is better to speak of ”poetic truth”, which is not limited to the faithful representation of single facts, but it’s about their overall significance. A narrative is “true” when it increases our awareness, our comprehension (in the etymological sense) of a sequence of facts. In other words, while mere reporting has the task of describing facts, narration must also make them talk: it must connect events, meanings, and individuals.

A story, as we have said, deserves to be told when it insinuates the unacceptable into the allegedly unmodifable rule of everyday life. In fairy tales, there’s an ordinary world in crisis and a hero who leaves for the extraordinary world in order to cut a piece of it and bring it back to the village. Or, to quote Aristotle: the poet is superior to the historian, because the historian tells what happened, while the poet imagines what might have happened. Each story stems from a “what if” question and thereby introduces a conditional and subjunctive dimension in the realm of the indicative. Not even the most realistic non-fiction says “This happened”: it says “this could happen.” Thus, a toxic narrative, a narrative that doesn’t do its job, can be recognized by the lack of subjunctive dimension: a toxic narrative tries to remove the hypothetical, to block in every possible way the drive to “tell the story otherwise” to think of alternative versions, other possible stories, some other poetic truth for the same set of facts.

In this sense, all stories contain a dose of toxins, because – as George Lakoff showed in his studies on neural connections: «When you accept a particular narrative, you ignore realities that contradict it. Narratives have a powerful effect in hiding reality.» This does not mean we should throw them away and replace them with cold hard reason. As we have seen, in order to identify a revolution we need to tell its story. Lakoff’s proposal is that of a New Enlightenment, in which «we will recognize that cultural narratives are part of the permanent furniture of our brains, but we will at least be self-aware of it.» As a storyteller I would add to this program that I would like to produce narratives that raise such awareness, do all that’s possible to restrain their own power to hide reality, and indeed encourage alternative narratives, by providing the reader with hints, occasions, and cracks in the wall.

In the specific case of a narrative of revolution, then, I’d like to understand where the toxins are and what narrative choices play a part in making them dangerous.

To do this, I will start from the narrative structure that our brain uses in reporting of any event, adapting it to the particular case of a revolution.

First of all we have the «Preconditions», that is, the context required for the narrative. In our case, the preconditions are the presence or absence of people with demands that the state cannot fulfill, the situation of human rights and freedom of expression, the presence or absence of a working class, working conditions and the main needs of civil society .

Then there’s the «Buildup», that is, the events leading to the main event: protests, riots, civil disobedience, the reactions of government forces, symbolic protests etc.

Such early unrest should already make us able to understand the «Purpose», what the insurgents want to achieve, what their demands are.

In turn, this should help us to better identify the «Main Event», that is, what the narrative is mainly about. Usually, in newspapers and on TV, revolution is about a regime change.

However, this is not over, because the «Main Event» generates the «Wind-down», that is, the events that end the narrative: what happens to the members of the regime, who will replace them for the time being, the celebrations of the population, etc.

Then we should take into account the «Result», that is, the transformation of the sociopolitical context described in the preconditions, and fnally, consider the «Later Consequences» of the whole mobilization, or how long the desire for renewal remains in circulation in civil society and how difficult it is for the new state to renegotiate its international relations without abandoning the principles of the revolution.

What I just described is, obviously, a structure activated over time. Diachronicity, in fact, is one of the main features of a narrative. To tell a story always means to create a chronology, to interpret time, often with reassuring effects from a cognitive point of view, because putting events in a row convinces us that we dominate them and comprehend them. So much so that not infrequently, this temporal link is transformed into a causal link, the illusion that saying “C follows B which in turn follows A” is equivalent to saying that “C derives from B which in turn derives from A”. If yesterday I said that today there would be a naval battle, my statement today is false, since no naval battle is raging. But yesterday, the same statement was indeterminate, neither true nor false, and the narrative has the task of restoring that pristine shade of unpredictability. We must avoid the so-called retrospective illusion of fatality, a potential toxin present in any story. Under its action, the sequences of the past become necessary sequences and we forget that, on the contrary, there are at any time infinite contingent futures, and that the narratives are made to explore a hypothesis, not to pass it on as inevitable. The fascist regime, in its self-description as the result of a revolution, inscribed in the destiny of Italy, made extensive use of this technique, constantly stressing on the “necessity” of every step, from the foundation of the Party to the March on Rome.

The preconditions

As regards preconditions, it often happens that an analysis of context like the one I described, is made only after the facts, because the revolution «broke out» – instead of «ripened», which could be a better metaphor – in a country of which we know little, an area which suddenly drew international attention because of the riots. We end up knowing the preconditions only after we have formed an idea about what’s going on, because events are pressing but they have to be narrated anyway. However, if preconditions are fished out retrospectively, in a sort of analepsis, they end up butting against an already established frame, rather than helping to establish one. Something similar happened with Libya, where the first demonstrations were instantly seen in the frame “revolutions in North Africa”, and only when Gaddafi proved to be able to resist much longer than Ben Ali and Mubarak, the difference was noticed and we all moved quickly to motivate the regime’s strength with the peculiar preconditions of the Libyan setting. At that point, however, as the Italian saying goes, the patch was worse than the hole, and pundits ended up attributing too much importance to clan-based and territorial divisions among the Libyans, setting entirely aside the element of spontaneous, radical, political protest.

It must be admitted that in the West, before the recent uprisings, knowledge of the civil societies of Tunisia,Egypt,Libya and the Middle East, was heavily conditioned by the vulgate whereby an Arab country is a Muslim country and a Muslim country is a country dominated by religion. Civil society, therefore, is divided between fundamentalists and moderates, and it is religion the only key to understand it and set up a dialogue.

Fortunately for us, if there is a regime that has been revolutionized in recent months, that is our regime of discourse on Muslims and the Arab world. The events of Tunis and Tahrir Square, in this case, have shattered the toxic narrative on preconditions (though for several days, the toxic narrative did prevent many commentators to understand what was happening, and pushed them to look for the role of religion in the riots). As noted by Hayrettin Yucesoy:

«the discourse about Islam in the progressive media and academia was, by and large, similar to Marie Antoinette’s oft-quoted but always mis-attributed, “qu’ils mangent de la brioche” [Let them eat cake].

Good-hearted true, but it showed no understanding and solved no problems. The uprisings destroyed the concepts of “religious dialogue” and “cultural understanding” as a framework for understanding “Muslims” and “Arabs”.»

Another example of a toxic narrative on preconditions is the myth-making carried out by T.E. Lawrence with reference to the so-called “Arab revolution”. Between 1915 and 1916, the British attacked the Ottoman Empire at Gallipoli and inMesopotamia, encountering unexpected resistance. This frustrated the hopes of those Arab secret societies that relied upon the war to open a home front for independence. Such societies were composed of bourgeois elements and military offcials and had their bases in cities like Damascus,BaghdadandAleppo. Facing the discouragement of their revolutionary intentions, the British, who were in great need of that revolution, decided to turn to the Hejaz Bedouins. In the introduction to his magnum opus the Seven Pillars of Wisdom,Lawrence justifes this change in strategy with an ideologic-poetic argument imbued with Orientalism. He explains that the strength of the Arabs was born and lives on in the desert, not in the softness of cities. Therefore, it is in the desert that the insurgency must develop, thanks to a koiné of nomadic tribes held together by the language and faith in the Koran.

Telling the preconditions of the revolution in this way,Lawrence forgot to say that those tribes were good to solicit Western romantic fantasies and to give the Turks a hard time with guerrilla warfare, but they would never complete a revolution, building the Great Arabia from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. They – unlike urban Arabs – were not interested in building a “nation”, much less a “state”. Only their leaders, at most, could have become national leaders, but in states that would be put up by someone else.

The Buildup

Very often, in order to narrate of a revolution, we bypass the preconditions and go immediately in search of a point of origin, a «beginning» that cast light on what happened. A day to be celebrated in the future, or to be studied in school books. Of course, every story needs a beginning, but in the structure of the “revolution” genre, this kind of beginning has a special symbolic value, as a sort of original sin. Its choice is never arbitrary, it cannot be located in any instant of the time continuum: it is extremely unusual to hear a revolution told out beginning in medias res. Most of the time the focus is on an event that reveals a weakness of the government forces. This is because, as argued by Charles Tilly, our frame of “revolutionary situation” is structured around three characteristics: the presence of factions that make claims incompatible with state control, the vast adhesion of citizens to these factions and, of course, the failure by the State to respond adequately to their demands.

In all accounts of the North African uprisings, there is already a mythical reference to the gesture of a young Tunisian graduate, forced to make a living as a street fruit vendor, who burned himself alive to protest the decision of the police to confiscate his goods. His suicide prompted many citizens to express their disagreement with a determination unseen for many years on the streets of Tunisia. One such initiative is not only a beginning: it is a genesis. It manages to symbolize the spontaneity of the revolt and its social composition: working class youth with a good level of education. But a revolutionary situation is always manifold, it contains various situations, produces multiple changes in many areas and at different times, and focusing on a single point of origin is likely to hide its plural character.

A good narrative of the revolution should have the preconditions as its prologue and as fist chapter a beginning that encompasses more than one point of origin.

«Every time the beginning is this moment of separation from the multiplicity of possibles” wrote Italo Calvino. Separation, but not exclusion or isolation. We need a threshold that does not forget what it leaves out.

Moreover, excessive attention to the point of origin can make us sick of chronological myopia. “Chronological myopia” consists in giving too much importance to recent  events, and too little attention to those more remote.

In our case, chronological myopia may lead us describe as a “revolutionary break” an occurrence which, on the contrary, is in continuity with what has been happening for some time. For example, the “Day of Rage” organized in Manama’s Pearl square was hastily described as a point of origin of the Bahraini “revolution”, whereas such protests have occurred in that country for many years, silenced by the fact that Bahrain is usually not interesting to anyone.

Here, with reference to the onset of narration, we experience a problem that’s inherent to any other moment of it. To tell a good story we need to go into detail, but as soon as we do it, this particularity could be viewed as a prototype, representative of a totality, like a poisonous synecdoche where the part hides the whole. The only antidote is to looking for the contradiction, for the one that becomes two.

For example: the people of Bahrain protest in Pearl Square, Manama, against the country rulers. Then, as a good storyteller, you seek the details and ask yourself: «What is the composition of these “people of Bahrain” protesting in Pearl Square?». Answer: they are Shiites. And the country rulers? They are Sunnis. Well, judging only by this detail, one of your readers may form the idea that in Bahrain there is a civil war between two Muslim sects. And because the Shia country par excellence is Iran, he or she will deduct that Iran is backing that revolt. To counteract this Synecdoche Effect the good storyteller must look for the contradiction, which he or she will fnd upon discovery that Bahrain workers are organizing large-scale strikes involving Alba Aluminium, the largest aluminium smelter in the world, whose workers’ union is headed by Ali Bin Ali, a Sunni. And if our storyteller works hard, he or she will find out that the detail chosen at the beginning, that is, thePearl Square protesters are Shiites, could be interpreted as a token of another type,  because the Shiites are the poor majority of the country, and therefore a Shiite rebellion is also a class rebellion.

Another example: if someone in Tahrir SquareinCairohad burned an American or Israeli flag, no doubt that particular act, once told by television and newspapers, would have assumed the value of a synecdoche: if someone burns an American fag undisturbed, it means that the rebels are against the United States, which means that they are fundamentalists. (It’s interesting to notice that this mechanism also applies in absentia: since no American flag was burned during such big events in a Muslim country, then – for conspiracists – the revolt must be controlled by the CIA).

In choosing the details for my narrative, I’ll be also affected by the rules of the narrative genre that I’m practicing. In the case of the revolution, the frame described by Charles Tilly urges us to look for street riots, power clashes, police brutality, regime changes. Apparently, the kind of revolutionary tale which our brain is most fond of is that of the great 20th century revolutions: the people in the streets, the seizure of power. We do not consider that there may be different kinds of revolution-narrative. Nation-States have changed since October of 1917, perhaps our concept of revolution should change accordingly. Also because, as said, a revolution is not always just about power, state control, the right of expression and so on. A revolution is certainly made on the streets, but above all it’s a creative drive to change the world, to call it with new names, to try the impossible.

…………………….

The Result & The Later Consequences

This is the part we most often we forget to tell about, although its importance should not be underestimated. We forgot to tell about it because of our brain. In our brain, every event of a narrative turns on different emotions. The Main Event is an emotional peak, which can food us with positive or negative feelings, depending on our beliefs. It rarely leaves us indifferent, considering that our mirror neurons light up in the same way whether we live a narrative or hear it told by someone else. If the feeling is positive, after the Main Event our brain, which has received its dopamine release, takes a kind of post-coital break. If the feeling is negative, then we are worried or afraid, and norepinephrine reduces our ability to focus. In both cases, we risk to tell with less interest what looks like a simple epilogue to the main event. In addition, our frame of the revolutionary outcome prompts us to think that the main event, that is the seizure of power by the rebels, coincides with the fnal result of the narrative.

Actually, history teaches us that revolutionaries, after overthrowing the regime, face extremely difficult situations and challenges that jeopardize their success. On the other hand, narratology teaches us that a story does not end with victory in the hero’s main trial, with the killing of the dragon: other dangers – and often a comeback of his enemies – expect the hero or heroine on their way back home. The signifcance of an adventure lies in the main character’s ability to return home and change the ordinary world, thanks to the lessons he or she learned during trials and battles in the extraordinary world. It’s on the way back that the hero must experiment a final litmus test, in order to return to the village with the elixir. It is in that last test that the tragic hero usually ends up dying. The Main Event, on closer inspection, is only half of a story and a story that remains half-told cannot avoid being poisonous.

The real success of a revolution depends on the desire for change that it can spread among all citizens, the level of creativity that they invest in this desire and the duration of such investment in time. In a real revolution, that creativity is maintained, it doesn’t congeal after the storming of theWinterPalace. And it’s shared, universal creativity, it isn’t imposed from above.

……………………………….

Related posts:

1. The Cultural Revolution in China: what was its meaning?
2. Assessing Mao and the Chinese Revolution

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The reason is easy to explain: the Keynesian New Deal was the outcome of an institutional configuration based on three essential prerequisites: a nation-state capable of independently developing national economic policies; the ability to measure profits and wages inside a relation of redistribution that is democratically accepted; and industrial relations that allow for a dialectics between the interests of the enterprise and the movements and demands of the working class that can be agreed upon in a legal framework. None of these prerequisites exists in the present circumstances of political economy….As a result, there is no room for any institutional policy of reform in contemporary capitalism. The structural instability of capitalism is definitive, no New Deal is possible.

No New Deal is possible

Antonio Negri

John Maynard Keynes was a gentleman – that is, an honest bourgeois, not a petty-bourgeois like Proudhon, or an ideologue, but an easy man – and when political economy was still concerned with the political ordering of market and society every classical economist knew this. Keynes thought that knowledge functioned factually and that, in the culture of pragmatism, a teleological dispositif needed to be brought into the analysis of series of phenomena and their assemblage; that by organizing the order of facts one could cautiously and efficiently construct the order of reason. In his case, this dispositif consisted in securing the reproduction of the capitalist system.

In Keynes’s times economic science was not that horrid little mathematical device that all variants of financial adventurism and derivations of rent now have at their disposal. Now we know what happens when this mathematization ends up in the hands of dodgers’ individualism… This is not to say that mathematics has nothing to do with economics or other disciplines; quite the opposite: it can be useful and productive for political economy, but at a completely different level. One instance is where neo-Keynsianism resulted from the encounter between socialist planners in the Soviet Union (or the liberal planners of the New Deal) and the mathematicians of market rationalization invented by Léon Walras. But for Keynes and his contemporaries the relationship between reason and reality was still entirely political: capital still sought clarity for itself.

Keynes entered the scene of economic science and the political field of the critique of political economy at the end of World War I, as a member of the British delegation at the Conference of Versailles. Shocked by the stupidity of the politicians who wanted to crush Germany with further impoverishment, he stated in The Economic Consequences of Peace: ‘Vengeance, I dare predict, will not limp.’ In 1919 – witness to the folly of elites who, engaged in reshaping the postwar order in fear of the powerful appeal of Red October, tried to apply the methods of classical imperialism inside Europe – Keynes already warned against ‘that final civil war between the forces of Reaction and the despairing convulsions of Revolution, before which the horrors of the late German war will fade into nothing, and which will destroy, whoever is victor, the civilization and the progress of our generation’. He realized that the Russian Revolution had completely changed the political economy of capitalism, the market was definitively broken, and that ‘one divided into two’ (as a Communist leader would later say).

The fact that capitalist development was traversed and prefigured by class struggle and its movements had to be acknowledged, and Keynes expressed a first sign of this realization when he wrote: ‘Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency… Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society.’ So he scientifically tackled this political problem: how to use currency and finance to defeat communism. On Keynes’s trail this became the main question of political economy for the whole of the twentieth century.

Keynes’s communism of capital

Keynes believed in the virtues of finance; he even had an equivocal relationship with the Stock Exchange until he got kicked in the teeth – as often happens even to the most adept. (I disagree here with his biographer Harrod, who claimed that Keynes had financial speculation in his heart.) From Keynes’s realistic point of view, the virtue of finance was that it was the beating heart of capitalism. Keynes subverted the old moralist conceptions that, from the Middle Ages to Hilferding, had downplayed and disqualified the hegemony of money in the production of wealth and the reproduction of social order. Against them, Keynes claimed that financial markets functioned as wealth multipliers. Can this theoretical assumption still be valid in a period of economic crisis? ‘Of course it can’, he asserted from his position in the middle of the crisis that started in the 1920s and assumed gigantic proportions by the end of the same decade. The state will have to intervene in society and reorganize it productively: ‘Thus it is to our best advantage to reduce the rate of interest to that point relatively to the schedule of the marginal efficiency of capital at which there is full employment.’1

This was how the entire therapeutic cookbook of Keynsianism emerged out of the crisis that kept affecting development. In building a new model of equilibrium whilst being pragmatic and keeping the continuous lack of equilibrium in mind, Keynes proposed to determine a persisting imbalance of state initiative through deficit spending. However, this deficit created new margins for effective demand and aided the development of capitalist dynamics whilst accepting the severe rigidity in workers’ wages. This was the way class struggle got reabsorbed into the system of capital.

Keynes’s proposal was wholly progressivist. He fully recognized it when, in the negotiations leading to the establishment of the Bretton Woods system of international monetary relations, he faced the opposition of the conservative representatives of Washington who were not willing to allow the currency of reference to forget a real standard, as this standard was the dollar that functioned as a means to organize labour and its international division based on the accumulation of gold in the US Central Bank. For them, deficit spending – which each capitalist and national government could have advanced so as to progressively contain the movements of its national working class, who sought to change society and break the capitalist yoke – needed to be controlled by a capitalist centre, the Komintern of Wall Street. Farewell to the illusion of bancor, Keynes’s great invention, an ideal currency based on free exchange that could have given way to the establishment of different equilibriums that referred to the desires of populations and the intensity of the struggle of the organized working class…

Keynes was a serious capitalist: he knew that with reaction and revolution, on the one hand, and an established socialist power, on the other, there was no third way of defending capitalist interests, only a more advanced political synthesis. Deriding the ‘hegemony of real production’, Keynes believed that when confronted with production – production here as ‘civil society’ – finance could become the mediation of opposing class interests, the construction of a new model of capitalism. Against Bolshevism Keynes refuted the slogan ‘Power to the workers’ and its corollary legitimization ‘he who will not work shall not eat’.2 He also realized that socialism and communism went beyond the prospects of constructing a new order of labour and these primitive watchwords and banal political objectives. According to Keynes, communism could represent the totality of abstract labour extracted from the totality of workers in society, every citizen, and hence all socialized human beings. Accepting these paradoxical exclamations, we could now say that communism is the form of the ‘biopolitical’, intending by ‘biopolitical’ the fact that not only society but also life has been put to the work of commodity production and that not only social relations but the relationship between minds and bodies have been made productive. With great foresight, Keynes seems to have understood the advent of what we now call ‘the communism of capital’.

Keynes wished to contain class struggle within the rules of a society where the exploitation of labour was directed not simply towards the production of profit but also towards progress in the satisfaction of needs. We can understand how strong was his hatred for the rentier! Keynes thought that anyone willing to save the capitalist system must hope for the ‘euthanasia of the rentier’, and he saw this as a morally legitimate and politically urgent task, because the rentier is anarchic, selfish, and exploits the possession of land and estates, metropolitan spaces, as well as the labour that surrounds them and keeps valorizing them. The rentier spends nothing in the game; he earns without working and wins without fighting. This squalid exploiter has to be eliminated. And here he reached the highest point of the capitalist intelligence that spent the twentieth century trying to understand its enemy in class struggle.

Fighting for basic income

Allow me a smile at this point. Keynes looks like a subversive genius, in view of the centrality of rent to the post-industrial system of organization of contemporary capital. Today no political leader or economic thinker has the courage to attack rent. … All we see are moralistic sweeps against the obvious thieves and corruptors of banking credit systems. But who is attacking the habitual and surreptitious thieves, the rentiers who are worse than the usurers? Who will ever bring into the frame the sacred, both real and symbolic, foundation of every form of property? Keynes tried, to no avail, but at least he tried…

The attack on rent was certainly the highlight of Keynes’s political discourse but also the point where the illusory character of his reasoning becomes manifest. In fact, as he developed his progressivist discourse aimed at salvaging capitalism, Keynes too often forgot the preconditions on which it rested. Two preconditions were insuperable and, in his view, beyond doubt: one was that colonial power, as an accomplished fact and a tendency, had finally consolidated; the other was that the form assumed by the organization of class relations in trade unions and the social welfare infrastructure in Europe was definitive. The difficulty with presenting Keynesianism as the dominant theory of development between the second half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century derives from the massive transformations of labour, class composition and the geopolitical dimensions of class struggle. From this perspective, from the turn of our century, Keynes is no more than an event, an intellectual flash of intuition of the twentieth century, at the endpoint of the long crisis of Western capitalism. His response to the Soviet revolution was adequate and representative of the hegemonic urge to bring class struggle under the control and development of capital, but no more than that. It failed to account for the global extension of class struggle, the end of colonialism, and, above all, the exhaustion of the ability of capital to transform modes of exploitation and accumulation in the First World. Look at what happened after Keynes: the revolution advanced through the underdeveloped world preventing capital from governing with the instruments of classical colonialism; dependency gave way to interdependency; capital won by globalizing and unifying itself, but at the same time it also lost, because the old order was certainly destroyed and building a new one is a hard task. That is why it is impossible to recuperate Keynes today.

The reason is easy to explain: the Keynesian New Deal was the outcome of an institutional configuration based on three essential prerequisites: a nation-state capable of independently developing national economic policies; the ability to measure profits and wages inside a relation of redistribution that is democratically accepted; and industrial relations that allow for a dialectics between the interests of the enterprise and the movements and demands of the working class that can be agreed upon in a legal framework. None of these prerequisites exists in the present circumstances of political economy.

The nation-state is in crisis because of the processes of internationalization of production and financial globalization, which are the grounds for a definition of a supranational imperial power. Furthermore, the dynamics of productivity increasingly tend to depend on immaterial production and the involvement of human and cognitive faculties that are hard to measure by traditional criteria, so social productivity makes it impossible to ground the regulation of wages on the relationship to productivity. The crisis of the trade unions is, from this perspective, exemplary – albeit not definitive – of the development of contemporary capitalism. And so when we come to the crisis of contractual relations, all the subjects of Keynesian agreements are absent. Moreover, the only thing capitalist interests share is the pursuit of short-term profit, first, and the radical exploitation of the chances for enjoying rent from land, estate and services, second. All of this makes it practically impossible to formulate progressive reforms.

As a result, there is no room for any institutional policy of reform in contemporary capitalism. The structural instability of capitalism is definitive, no New Deal is possible. If we really want to make the effort of resurrecting Keynes, we should direct his deficit spending – his idea of the socialization of investments – towards the institutions of basic income and towards policies that anticipate new forms of development and organize the fiscal structure of the state in relation to the global productivity of the system – that is, the productive power of all citizens. By doing so we would probably move beyond the measures and anthropological requirements of a capitalist society, especially well beyond the ideologies of individualism (of property and patrimony) and the political consequences of its development. Basic income is more than a wage; it is the recognition of the exploitation that affects not only workers but everyone who is available to capitalist organization in society. Fighting for a basic income and recognizing this reality already signals a move beyond the image of capitalist ownership. One has divided into two: whilst Keynes incessantly worked to close this division and redirect all social struggles to the One, in a Hobbesian way, today sees the opening of this division and of struggles. A season of class struggle is probably flourishing. Keynes loved dance (he married a dancer), not flowers (he was allergic to them).

Translated by Arianna Bove

Notes

1. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, 1936, ch. 24.
2. The saying ‘Qui non laborat, non manducet’ originally appeared in the Bible, 2 Thessalonians, 3. It notably recurred in Jeremy Bentham’s (1797) Writings on the Poor Laws as the ‘No work – no eat principle’. In other languages it appears as ‘No mill, no meal’, ‘Il faut travailler, qui veut manger’ (Fr.), ‘Wer nicht arbeitet, soll auch nicht essen’ (Ger.), ‘Chi non lavora non mangia’ (Ital.), ‘El que no trabaja, no come’ (Sp.) [Trans.].

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These are the sorts of questions — important and urgent — posed (although not in these words) by the following.

Consider the ruling class responses in this country to the oil spill and to the financial crisis. They are hard to understand except in terms of these complications, the most significant of which are those that flow from the contradictions between the developing global interests of capital and its requirements for maintaining the hegemonic institutional structures and ideologies which have supported and cloaked the essential nature of power in its core geographies.

In my mind [we face] circumstances for extreme political volatility and a wide range of indeterminacy. So it is a problem, I think, that much of our discussion of whether or not there is an emerging transnational ruling class proceeds with the implicit assumption that the process can work itself out in a gradual and evolutionary way. The resigned and passive tone of left academic takes on the changing face of capital don’t really orient us towards a period of intense conflict with a wide range of potential outcomes. This contrasts with the approach in various AltRight circles. Their stance, which seems more appropriate to me, is that this is not a historical pause, a time out period of floundering that will be followed by a new systemic equilibrium for capital – instead, it maps out the new normal for a protracted period into the future.

Wallerstein, Leys, and the crisis of the core capitalist states

Don Hamerquist

Hopefully the following relates to a few of the recent Khukuri posts.

Beginning with a question and answer from an interview with Colin Leys on Kasama:

First of all, can you explain to us what you mean by the term ‘market-driven politics’, and can you explain the primary forces that have been driving this process?

I use that term to mark the dramatic change that the de-control of capital meant for a country like Britain — or almost any country other than the United States.  With the removal of capital controls, once capital could move where it wished to, governments ceased to have control of the direction of investment, or the terms on which investment is made, making politicians more responsive to the bond markets than to their electorates. This puts political parties in office in a new and complicated position vis-à-vis the electorate.  I had seen that happening in Africa where ex-colonial states, very poor and very dependent on external capital, were constantly having to adapt what they said in public, and what they did in practice, to external forces, and it seemed to me that that would be likely to happen to all countries once capital could go where it wanted.

I’m not familiar with this guy. His stance in this interview suggests a Labour Party left intellectual although I see he has written articles with L. Panitch who is better than that. In any case, I was struck by the relationship he describes between the “decontrol of capital” and the hollowing out of governmental structures – primarily nation states but presumably also including both sub and supra national state structures as well. What is presented is a different set of conditions and circumstances within which the structures we used to term the ‘executive committees of the ruling class’ will have to function.

When Ley’s categories of ‘politicians’ and ‘electorates’ are expanded to notions of class and class fraction, as he would probably agree that they should, the changes he describes and predicts go beyond the ‘hollowing out’ of democratic and parliamentary forms that Chomsky and others have been documenting for decades. It is important to see that a new and, I think, more fundamental process is developing that will more comprehensively ‘hollow out’ the capacities of core nation states and their subsidiary formations to, as John Robb says, deliver the political goods.

The process goes beyond the erosion of formal democracy, which in any case has always had a fraudulent aspect, and exposes important changes in the relationship between the profitability of capital and the hegemonic shape of its dominance. This involves changes that potentially raise questions of legitimacy in the capitalist core areas in ways that haven’t been evident since the eclipse of the movements of ’68. I think that despite many illusory notions to the contrary, some of which may be shared by Leys, this “decontrol of capital” is not the consequence of reversible policies. No ‘recontrol’ that is based on different policies perhaps from a different governmental (multi-state) platform is likely.

Leys excludes the U.S. from the “dramatic change” he sees, but, on the evidence I can’t see why this should be. Consider the ruling class responses in this country to the oil spill and to the financial crisis. They are hard to understand except in terms of that “complicated position” he describes. And the most significant of these complications are those that flow from the contradictions between the developing global interests of capital and its requirements for maintaining the hegemonic institutional structures and ideologies which have supported and cloaked the essential nature of power in its core geographies.

The immensely risky financialization processes overshadow the production and consumption of commodities in the global capitalist system and have created major political risks for ruling fractions in the core nation states, but there is little ruling class stomach for an open confrontation of the political and economic risks which would develop from any serious attempt to bring these processes under control of a given nation state structure. This again points to the importance of Ley’s observations about what might; “…happen to all countries once capital could go where it wanted.”

Both of the forenamed ‘crises’ would seem to provide a possibility for potential governing elites to reinvigorate the legitimacy of their national state structures while expanding and consolidating a substantial political base and gaining large and immediate political benefits for their specific agendas. But such economic nationalist and populist programs, which were certainly major factors in earlier periods of capitalist crisis, are only barely visible in marginalized groupings of the ruling class. That particular mode and arena of resistance is largely left to a toxic mixture of reactionary forces whose increasingly anti-government secessionist orientation provides additional destabilizing pressures on national states. Unfortunately this camp also is sucking in some on the left, looking, without really knowing it, to follow comrade Koba and pick up the flag of nationalism which ‘the bourgeoisie has left in the mud’ (Apologies for the paraphrase).

If this is placed in terms of the Wallerstein/Arrighi conception of “hegemonic cycles” (see specifically the essay posted on khukuri), these growing elements of global disorder make it unlikely that a new sovereign state based hegemon will emerge; one that is able to “…impose it (global order d.h.) on the world system as a whole….”  (Much the same point was made by Negri in Empire: p.xiv, p. 237). But at the same time, the political agreement and the elements of a ‘legitimate’ institutional framework for the shift to a transnational capitalist hegemonic order are not in sight. Indeed, such a development is hardly conceivable without a massive capitulation by class forces whose essential interests are hostile to capital. However, this is far from an impossible scenario. It would probably take the form of a ‘global social democracy’, a term that I’ve appropriated from others who might be distressed by the way I use it. In any of its conceivable formats, this would only provide an appearance of democratic participation, a threadbare cosmetic disguise unlikely to be a stable base for popular legitimacy without substantial material concessions that are not on the order of the cay.

In my mind, although possibly Wallerstein or Negri might put it differently, these are the circumstances for extreme political volatility and a wide range of indeterminacy. So it is a problem, I think, that much of our discussion of whether or not there is an emerging transnational ruling class proceeds with the implicit assumption that the process can work itself out in a gradual and evolutionary way. (I realize this criticism is less applicable to pieces written before the financial crisis.) The resigned and passive tone of the Leys article and other left academic takes on the changing face of capital don’t really orient us towards a period of intense conflict with a wide range of potential outcomes. This contrasts with the approach in various AltRight circles like the Global Guerrilla post I referenced above. Their stance, which seems more appropriate to me, is that this is not a historical pause, a time out period of floundering that will be followed by a new systemic equilibrium for capital – instead, it maps out the new normal for a protracted period into the future.

Let me make a brief detour to the oil spill issues, maybe not such a detour. Here the most egregious behavior of a ‘foreign’ corporation is officially submerged within the ‘we are all stakeholders’ morass rather than becoming a quasi-official, but certainly popular, basis for economic nationalism. This gets to one of Wallerstein’s important points. Capital has historically been able to displace and defer its real social costs of production, “externalized” is the term he uses in the Khukuri reprint. Wallerstein deals with the issue in a questionable ‘objective’ voice — “…the world is running out of vacant public space” — not mentioning that the ‘space’ was never really ‘vacant’, and never completely ‘public’ or ‘common’, although I am sure that he is not unaware of these issues. However, his major point about the increasing ‘systemic overheads’ created by the shrinking of the actual and perceived ‘outside’ of the capitalist system is certainly valid and important. These overheads makes a ‘responsible’ ruling class attitude towards the BP issue very difficult This is true despite the national political advantages that could accrue from a ‘tough’ stance. Any ‘tough’ stance raises the risk of putting the social costs of capitalist production into clear relief and establishing a damaging anti-capitalist precedent with the potential to become viral.

In an easier world these problems for capital would also be clear potentials for a revolutionary left. But that is not how they are currently manifested. Instead there is a combination of organizational caution and timidity and academic ambiguities on the left. This also has its causes. Speaking primarily of the left in the core societies, there is a widespread fear of premature anti-capitalism – of losing or risking losing what has purportedly been ‘won’. At the same time, it is true that capital’s difficulties may actually expand the potential for certain selected concessions and accommodations. This is a reality that can be easily twisted in reformist directions. It is important, although also difficult, to see that the ‘more’ that may appear to be possible in the emerging circumstances does not necessarily provide a basis for something categorically ‘different’ – for revolution – sometime in the future when stars are better aligned. However, a lot of revolutionary experience demonstrates that this is indeed the case.

I think that in the core capitalist states there is an undeniable comfort factor in being an opposition rather than an alternative. Large chunks of the left are as frightened of the potentially apocalyptic consequences of capitalist crisis as the capitalists. This leads to politics such as this part of Wallerstein’s political response to the crisis:

I would put at the head of the list actions that we can take in the short run, to minimize the pain that arises from the breakdown of the existing system and from the confusions of the transition.

Why should we not put expediting the “…breakdown of the existing system” at the “head of the list”, rather than minimizing the ‘pain’ and ‘confusions’ of the process?

What is really at issue is the assumption that the masses are not ready and a protracted period of successful left base-building is an essential precondition for raising a categorical opposition to capital. This amounts to capitulating to our own weakness and timidity, rather than taking full advantage of capital’s dilemmas. Supposedly these base-building politics will allow us to eventually take advantage of weaknesses in capital, but the more plausible precedent is that they will end up contributing to the adaptive capacity of the system, its ability to morph its areas of ‘weaknesses’ into new points of capitalist strength.

Not only is the left afflicted by a fear of the cliff, it fears the other at the bottom of the cliff. And it should. The commitment of the tribal and autarchic neo-fascist right to bring the system down is at least as radical as that of the left. Its developing understanding of ‘4th Generation War’ and ‘open source insurgency’ make it a substantial alternative to the left. As it is increasingly recognized, there will be a real and growing tendency to look to an implicit cooperation with the ‘progressive’ and ‘democratic’ segments of sections of ruling class to confront this danger from the neo-fascist right. This de facto alliance, basted with illusory objectives, fits very nicely with the reformist base building to infinity and beyond perspective. This is particularly true if, as is frequently the case, the base building covers the avoidance of any focus on bringing down the system with complaints about popular “impatience” with the long march through the institutions. Then the practical outcome will not go beyond greasing the path to a repressive global social democracy.

I was going to just touch on some other elements of the Wallerstein piece, but then we had the fat-finger Thursday and the gulf oil spill. Chaos theory with its black swans, butterfly effects, and fractal cascades gained both credibility and urgency. It is also the case that despite huge problems with both the form and the content of Wallerstein’s analysis, notably including the passage cited above, I agree with his overall conclusion: capitalism is experiencing a “structural crisis” and the left’s organizing concern should be the very real question of, “What order will emerge from this chaos?” It is also true that, in opposition to many on the left, he does recognize that the minimal and defensive reform steps he advocates, “…are not in themselves steps towards creating the new successor system that we need.”

Andy Blunden, who I don’t know but others may, has a survey of earlier variants of Wallerstein’s perspective titled “Utopistics and Simplistics.”  It’s on the web for the venturesome. Blunden finds two elements in Wallerstein’s position; a determinist evolutionary conception of historical cycles, based in long waves of global economic development (Kondratieff cycles); combined with an emerging secular tendency towards systemic collapse, an outcome that is inevitable but essentially unknowable and unpredictable in strategic detail. Wallerstein’s system failure analysis rests on chaos theories associated with the mathmatical work of Prigogine and Mandelbrot that are well beyond my pay grade. Blunden believes the two elements don’t really fit together in a way that justifies Wallerstein’s conclusions that capitalism is no longer able to “mend itself” and that the question on the agenda now is; “What will replace this system?” Perhaps this inconsistency is formally true, but it is still possible that Wallerstein’s conclusions are correct even if his argumentation is suspect. Blunden did not appear to think so, but then he was writing before the current crisis.

I have never liked the long wave analysis. I’ve always seen it as prone to a technological bias that looked away from issues of qualitative change with sharp breaks in normality and underplayed the creative potentials of class and mass struggle. It could very well be that I don’t understand the position adequately and I’m quite open to being corrected. But provisionally, without necessarily accepting the political implications that he derives from his analysis, I would agree with Blunden – against Wallerstein – that capitalism should initially be approached as concrete social formations with internal contradictions embedded in a specific class composition and manifested in struggles that transform what exists and what is possible. This limits the effort expended on tortured attempts to rationalize the collapse of “actually existing socialism” and the incorporation of national liberation as somehow constituting capitalist stagnation and decline.

The functioning of a capitalist world system then should not primarily be viewed as a matter of cyclical repetition, but as the emergence of new phenomena requiring new categories of analysis. This approach, in my opinion, leads to a better use of time than attempts to stuff unwieldy evidence into overly general historical categories that do not help us understand and act on the potentials of the actual situation.

Nevertheless, I would agree with Wallerstein that this is capitalism’s end game.

But how pathetically inadequate is his what-is-to-be-done section which I sampled above. The basic inadequacy rests in the metaphorical conceptualizing of the alternatives as the “spirit of Davos” and the “spirit of Porto Alegre”. Two “camps”, the first split between advocates of militarized order and repressive tolerance; the second split between libertarian decentralists and authoritarian state planners. While these categories have some general descriptive relevance, the strategy they support will most probably devolve to the North vs South simplifications. Along with the lack of an analysis of class forces and of the various states of the situation, there is no understanding that an additional potential outcome is the common ruin of the contending classes; the second option of Socialism or Barbarism.

It is hard to see how much more is possible given the formless presentation of subjectivity; as if there is a given ‘we’: a them for system defenders and an us for system challengers that can confront and reconcile the pending political issues. Without worrying about the issues and contradictions for system defenders, it is a serious limitation to present the problems of revolution as if it were meaningful to say:

“Serious intellectual debate is required about the parameters of the kind of world-system we want, and the strategy for transition.” (From Wallerstein.) So who sets it up and judges the seriousness…and then, who does what?

Maybe my characterization is unfair. So let me balance it by saying how much I appreciate Wallerstein’s specific invocation of the ‘butterfly effect’:

“…when the system is far from equilibrium…small social mobilizations can have very great repercussions…”

Don Hamerquist, 7/6/10

Related posts:

1. Capitalist crisis and left response
2. A crisis of the post-colonial state
3. Causes of capitalist crises — and this one

These excerpts are taken from an interview published in the Spring 2010 issue of Socialist Strudies. The title above (which I could not resist stealing from the interview as published in Socialist Studies, although it’s only tangentially relevant to the contents of the interview) refers to a really sweet song which Carroll wrote for the birthday of one of his sons in 2004, and can be heard on YouTube.

But really, in a world in which private appropriation of wealth – capital – holds back human development in so many ways and keeps us on this unsustainable treadmill of production, the class struggle is not about higher pay. It is about ending the dominance of capital in human affairs.

From an interview with William K. Carroll

Can you explain your response to nationalist political economy, but also your distance from some other left-intellectual traditions, including both post-modern identity politics and a narrow Marxist approach that identifies progressive struggle with the struggles white, unionized, working class men…

…. What I have found fascinating is how dependency theory and left nationalism persists, despite its having been discredited on an intellectual level. I think this is because, from the Waffle foreword, the dependency framework has been the theory that informs the practice of left social democrats — intent on incremental reforms that can humanize capitalism in Canada…. We still see this in recent work by Mel Watkins and Jim Stanford, as in the critique of the ‘hollowing out’ of corporate Canada — the recent foreign takeovers of companies like Inco….. I debated the issue of hollowing out with Mel at the Canadian Political Science Association meetings recently. I recall that at one point he remarked that the problem with the Canadian bourgeoisie is that they are not very bright — that is a close paraphrase….

I would take the exact opposite view. The Canadian capitalist class is entirely unexceptional. Within the logic of capitalist rationality, it responds to, and of course shapes, the specific accumulation situation in which it is dynamically embedded. Capital based in Canada is internationalizing at least as quickly as Canadian firms are being incorporated into transnational empires based abroad. So-called staples are produced in Canada under conditions that feature highly advanced, capital-intensive technology and relatively high wages. The composition of capital is skewed in the direction of resource extraction because these are the most profitable sectors for industrial capital, not due to some logic of dependency.

I made these arguments in my 1986 book, Corporate Power and Canadian Capitalism. In my view, there is little point in putting great effort into the critique of foreign control, which in Canada is not particularly higher than in several other advanced capitalist countries. The emphasis should be on democratizing control of economic life, from the shop floor to overall investment decision-making and budgeting. Jerome Klassen and I have an article in the next issue of the Canadian Journal of Sociology that presents a detailed analysis of hollowing out and the continuity of corporate power in Canada.

On the other issue, I have criticized both the economistic view that class struggle is the only game, partly because this conception simply leaves out the social justice claims of most of humanity, and partly because it misconstrues what class struggle might be about in our era. The typical equation of working class with organized labour is a contributing factor to the confusion. The noble image of workers fighting for higher pay is a very poor template for these times, which is not to say that labour’s resistance to its immiseration is unimportant in the class struggle. But really, in a world in which private appropriation of wealth – capital – holds back human development in so many ways and keeps us on this unsustainable treadmill of production, the class struggle is not about higher pay. It is about ending the dominance of capital in human affairs. Given that the commanding heights of industry and finance are controlled by a miniscule fraction of humanity, class struggle from below is, effectively, the struggle to bring wealth under public, democratic control. The idea is to replace alienated social relations with those of mutual support, to break the class power of capital – power over — while fostering new forms of community and power-with. This is the class struggle, and it necessarily intersects with a raft of social justice and ecological issues and movements.

The bigger issue, I think, is not that of orthodox Marxist die-hards of the Second International; they are no longer with us in any numbers! Rather, it revolves around a dismissal of the relevance of class, based in part on the antiquated stereotype I just invoked, and the elevation of identity and discourse to an exalted status, in concert with an unhealthy scepticism toward the construction of a collective will capable of effecting change beyond local, micro-political contexts. Rather than a postmodern retreat from class, I think we need a broader view of class struggle, along the lines I have sketched. As capitalism’s dual economic/ecological crisis has deepened, we see a reappearance of history’s old mole, and perhaps a disenchantment with 1970s-style Parisian theory, which seems more than a little quaint. This is registered in the popularity of autonomist analyses such as Hardt and Negri’s. Foucault, as it turns out, is most helpful when taken with large helpings of Marx. Foucault had a cautionary tale to tell in his turn away from all big, transformative projects, but in this respect his politics seems to belong to a different era – the climax of post-war Fordism, the failure of state socialism and of the French Communist Party to break from the Stalinist template and so on. The challenges humanity faces today are simply too vast to be addressed within the confines of micro-politics and the ethics of self-care.

I have criticized the postmodern turn away from the concern with building a counter-hegemonic unity in diversity, a broadly inclusive movement/party that could create the cultural and political conditions for transitioning from capitalism to a democratic socialist formation. This scenario seems entirely far-fetched in contemporary Canada, though not in France or Germany, to say nothing of Venezuela or Bolivia. We need to keep in mind the second thesis on Feuerbach — that humanity must prove the this-sidedness of its thinking in practice. As long as the left remains marginal, disorganized into postmodern fragments and social democratic remnants, the vision of a post capitalist world will remain far-fetched, here. And this brings us to the kernel of truth in Canadian left nationalism: Canada shares with the fading hegemon of world capitalism most of a continental landmass, as well as the deep cultural legacy of white settler colonialism. The geopolitics of North America, in my view, preclude any Canadian rendition of what happened, remarkably and to the everlasting credit of the Cuban people, in Cuba half a century ago, or what is happening today in Bolivia and Venezuela. The prospects for socialism in Canada are not easily separated from the fate of the left in the United States. That is a harrowing thought; indeed, it is the repressed underside to left-nationalist complaints about the congenital weaknesses of the Canadian bourgeoisie. Strategically, this asymmetrical dependence suggests that the left in Canada, while vigorously pressing social justice claims locally, provincially and nationally, should also cultivate continental — and broader– solidarities. The Common Frontiers project of the Canada/US/Mexico labour movement in opposition to NAFTA and the inspirational role that Canadian activists played in the Battle in Seattle of 1999 are exemplary. Deep integration, a bourgeois project now on hold but still alive, needs a creative response from the left.

………

Your forthcoming work revisits capitalist networks and some of your earliest work, likewise investigates network relationships amongst the capitalist class. Empirically, can you describe some of your findings, from this book?

I have just completed this book and the working title is The Making of a Transnational Capitalist Class. In terms of thinking about what it all means, off the top, I would emphasize the extent to which the decades since the late 1970s have been a time of class struggle from above. You can see this in the comments of insiders like Warren Buffet. You know his famous interview with the New York Times in 2006 where he declared –this is a close paraphrase– ‘Yes, of course there is a class struggle, and my class is winning.’1 It’s a very interesting quote from the third wealthiest capitalist of the world. There is no doubt that capitalists understand that they are engaged in class struggle. Unfortunately, the rest of humanity is confused about it (laughs).

Looking at the actual architecture of global corporate power, certainly you can see that it is a pretty tight world up at the top. There are regional clusterings and still, definitely, national corporate communities, such as Canada’s. These national corporate communities connect into a transnational network of business leaders who are often also involved in transnational policy planning groups, like the World Economic Forum or the International Chamber of Commerce, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development and so on. There is what Stephen Gill has called a transnational historic bloc in support of neoliberalism. From a social movement perspective, we need to recognize this as a social movement from above that has been very effective in promoting and consolidating the neoliberal project. In general, we have, then, an era of development and consolidation of neoliberalism as a hegemonic project both within countries and on a global scale.

……….

I should add that we can also see the very tentative rise, partly in response to neoliberalism and its contradictions, of a global left, as Boaventura de Sousa Santos has put it. This global left includes quite a range of groups and activities, yet there is a fragility to it evident, for instance, in the cloud that hangs over the fate of the World Social Forum. Finally I would point to the increasing importance, strategically and ethico-politically, of struggles to democratize communication. Corporate and state control of communication, not simply through ownership but through the instrumental practices of commercialized, profit driven media, is an enormous challenge. It is a pillar of bourgeois hegemony. Again we see variegated responses from movements — culture jamming and media literacy efforts, creating alternative media, campaigns to use state-centered reforms to rein in capital’s cultural power.

You are quite lucid about things that don’t work, for example, with respect to the NDP in power in provincial governments and regarding the organizational limits of social movements, as well as the problems posed by post-modern identities oriented to consumerism instead of progressive activism. But, in your critical methods books, I was struck by your interpretation of Marx’s famous quote about ‘history weighing upon us as a nightmare’, as a hopeful phrase — hopeful since our present activism can mean a different future. We are not simply captured by the past. What we do, right now, can create the conditions for a different, better future. Despite your research, are you ultimately hopeful?

This is certainly one of the biggest questions of all. Of course, I have to say that I am deeply pessimistic about the future. (laughs). In principle, I would defend the position that I take, that certainly the past does not lock us into a future. We can radically remake the world. This can be done. It’s entirely possible. But this nightmare weighing on the brains of the living is Marx’s way of saying that yes, people do make their own history. But they don’t choose the circumstances. It can be very difficult to reverse tendencies that have achieved an entrenched position in the world. What we’re talking about here is the hegemony of transnational corporate capital, of states that are at best minimally, formally democratic. So it is, indeed, an uphill struggle. Nonetheless, the fact that the hegemony is thin, because of enormous inequalities and injustices in world capitalism, creates openings. You can see various movements, the movements of landless workers in Brazil, various actions, particularly in South America. There are very, very encouraging political developments in specific places, which, of course, is how political developments occur.

But, I am, I think, overall, pessimistic. Let me qualify that and explain what I mean, before I get too depressing (laughs). I think that we are in an organic crisis, where as Gramsci would put it, ‘the old is dying and the new cannot yet be born.’ We can recall other deep, protracted crises of this sort. There is the depression of the 1930s, for example, or the 1970s crisis of Fordist capitalism that eventuated in the triumph of neoliberalism. But this crisis we are in now is unprecedented. It is unprecedented because capitalism’s ecological footprint has outgrown the biosphere. John Bellamy Foster recently published a piece in Monthly Review (Foster, 2010) that made an acute observation. The ecological crisis, particularly over climate change, is quite different from an economic crisis in its basic logic. Economic crisis, we know, is cyclical. It’s cyclical under the assumption that no transformation of capitalism occurs. That is to say, if humanity is unable to figure out how to exit from capitalism, what will happen in an economic crisis is that the crisis will be resolved on the backs of working people and the subalterns of this world. You can see how the crisis of the Fordist Keynesian formation was resolved that way. That is what neoliberalism accomplished, for a certain amount of time.

Now, of course, I would say that neoliberalism is in crisis, most visibly since at least 2008. But the point is that ecological crisis is not cyclical, it’s degenerative. That is, there is no future recovery whose condition is being prepared by the collapse. The collapse is a cumulative collapse and it’s ultimately a matter of fundamentally changing humanity’s relationship with the rest of nature. Avoiding this crisis is about avoiding getting to the tipping point. Once the positive feedback mechanisms — which are quite well known now, in terms of the melting of the polar ice caps and the release of methane from the tundra regions as they thaw — once these mechanisms kick in, the long term future is really grim. I think that the situation is extremely urgent. Of course, capitalism has built into it this grow-or-die expansionary logic that makes it incapable of solving this crisis. Yet the window for a solution is pretty narrow. So, I think it’s hard not to be pessimistic, quite honestly. But,
pessimism is not the same thing as fatalism. On intellectual grounds, I don’t think it’s realistic to be optimistic today. But to allow one’s will to be broken by pessimism eliminates all hope for a brighter future, or really any future for most of humanity. So I think collectively, through some complex convergence of many movements and communities pushing out the new, we really have to pull the monster down.

To twist around Margaret Thatcher’s famous phrase, I don’t see any alternative.

No related posts.

We’ll have more discussion of this common view of the economic crisis soon on this site. The following essay, which originally appeared in Radical Philosophy, deals with a similar idea: that the atrocities of the “war on terror” have come near to extinguishing (or “destabilized,” as Neocleous puts it) a once well-established boundary between war and peace. Neocleous argues that this boundary has always been blurred and that in accepting it we accept a basic myth of the liberal order. (I have somewhat abridged a couple of the longer discussions; the complete essay is available here.)

War as peace, peace as pacification

Mark Neocleous

To stress one’s own love of peace is always the close concern of those who have instigated war. But he who wants peace should speak of war. He should speak of the past one … and, above all, he should speak of the coming one.1

A remarkable consensus appears to have emerged on the Left: that in the context of the war on terror the distinction between war and peace has been destabilized. Alain Badiou suggests that the category of ‘war’ has become so obscured that ancient capitals can be bombed without serving notice to anyone of the fact that war has been declared. ‘As such, the continuity of war is slowly established, whereas in the past declaring war would, to the contrary, have expressed the present of a discontinuity. Already, this continuity has rendered war and peace indistinguishable.’ ‘In the end’, notes Badiou, ‘these American wars … are not really distinguishable from the continuity of “peace”.’ Antonio Negri and Éric Alliez likewise comment that ‘peace appears to be merely the continuation of war by other means’, adding that because peace, ‘otherwise known as global war … is a permanent state of exception’, war now ‘presents itself as peace-keeping’ and has thereby reversed their classical relationship. Their reference to a concept made popular following Agamben’s State of Exception is far from unusual in this new consensus. ‘We no longer have wars in the old sense of a regulated conflict between sovereign states’, notes Žižek. Instead, what remains are either ‘struggles between groups of Homo sacer … which violate the rules of universal human rights, do not count as wars proper, and call for “humanitarian pacifist” intervention by Western powers’, or ‘direct attacks on the USA or other representatives of the new global order, in which case, again, we do not have wars proper, merely “unlawful combatants” criminally resisting the forces of universal order. Hence ‘the old Orwellian motto “War is Peace” finally becomes reality.’2

The consensus is wide. From a diverse range of recent publications, let me just cite Daniel Ross’s analysis of democratic violence in which he claims that in democracies ‘peacetime and wartime … are increasingly convergent’, Rey Chow’s suggestion that war is now the very definition of normality itself, Gopal Balakrishnan’s claim that the invasion and policing of ‘rogue states’ means that ‘a long-term epistemic shift seems to be occurring which is blurring older distinctions between war and peace’, and François Debrix’s argument that the reason the war machine permeates everyday culture is because the distinction between peace and war has broken down.3

I have no interest in challenging this account in itself; as will be seen, despite its apparent boldness it is in fact a fairly uncontroversial position to hold. What I do want to challenge, as my starting point at least, is the major historical assumption being made within it. For these accounts rely on an assumption of a ‘classical’ age in which war and peace were indeed distinguishable; they assume that the destabilization is somehow new – hence the references to wars in ‘the past’, in the ‘old sense’ and in the ‘classical’ age. The nebulous nature of some of these phrases is remarkable, given the implied radicalism of the insight being expressed. Worse, in accepting the very claim made by the USA and its allies that everything has indeed changed from the time when the distinction between war and peace was categorical and straightforward, this account also reinforces the general fetish of ‘9/11’ as the political event of our time. Perhaps there really was a time ‘in the past’ when mass killing possessed a greater conceptual clarity; but I doubt it. Felix Grob’s Relativity of War and Peace, published in 1949, offers countless examples of states engaged in mass killing but either denying or sometimes just not knowing whether or not they were at war, which explains why a wealth of categories have existed to describe a condition that appears to be neither war nor peace or that might just be a little bit of both: reprisals, belligerency, state of hostilities, measures short of war, intermediate state, quasi-war, and so on. And more than a few international lawyers in the early- and mid-twentieth century pointed out the artificial nature of the distinction between war and peace.4 It really is a bad sign when supposedly key insights on the Left come half a century after the same insights are made by international lawyers.

The first aim of this article is therefore to make a historical point: that this consensus about a recent elision of the difference between war and peace is rooted in a deep historical misconception. Rather, I will aim to show that the distinction between war and peace has always been blurred. The second and more political aim is to suggest that this blurring was part and parcel of an ascendant liberalism which found an important political use for the language of peace within the context of international law. To accept the idea that there was a ‘classical age’ where the distinction between war and peace did make sense is thus to accept one of liberalism’s major myths, one which circulates widely in academic discourse as part of ‘the liberal peace’ hypothesis: that peace is the focal dynamic of civil society, that the state exists in order to realize this ‘liberal peace’ within civil society, and that international law exists to ensure peace between states. On this view, war is an exception to peace. As a myth, this has served to gloss over liberalism’s own tendency to carry out systematic violence and to call it peace; to gloss over, that is, the violence of the liberal peace. I therefore argue that it has never made sense for the Left to adopt a categorical distinction between war and peace.

This takes me to my third aim, which is to suggest that in accepting the major liberal assumptions about war and peace the Left has cut itself off from developing a concept of war outside of the disciplines of International Relations (IR) and strategic studies (within which, unsurprisingly, the idea of a ‘classical age’ is also constantly reiterated). For the liberal argument to hold, war has to be understood as a phenomenon of the international sphere: as a confrontation between militarily organized and formally opposed states. Not only does this contraction of the war concept ignore the transnational nature of a great deal of warfare, it also manages to obscure the structural and systematic violence through which liberal order has been constituted. 5 The Left has too easily bought into the idea of war as articulated in IR and strategic studies and has thus been driven by an agenda not of the Left’s own making, replicating the idea of war as formal military engagement between states and aping IR and strategic studies in becoming little more than a series of footnotes to Clausewitz.6 One of the wider implications of this article, then, is to move discussion of war away from the fairly restrictive account found in liberal mythology, IR and strategic studies, and to expand it to include what is after all the most fundamental war in human history: the social war of capital.

To make this case I will begin with the birth of international law and end with some comments on the ideology of security. Why? Because the formal liberal position is that the decision about whether war exists is a legal one and that peace comes through law. ‘Law is, essentially, an order for the promotion of peace’, says Hans Kelsen in his lectures on international relations: ‘The law makes the use of force a monopoly of the community. And precisely by doing so, law ensures peace.’7 Thus the proclaimed purpose of international organizations such as the United Nations is always peace, to be achieved through law and the legal regulation of war. And not just peace: it is always ‘peace and security’ that are expected to come together; a conceptual couplet performing the same ideological role internationally as ‘law and order’ performs domestically. I therefore focus on the early period in international law (or, as it was, the law of nations), since this was the period in which liberalism found in law a way to articulate its vision of peace and security. It did so in that crucible of capital’s civil war: colonialism.

The humanity of Indians

Although there is much debate about when international law first emerged, with many treating it as an outcome of the Peace of Westphalia, there is a wide enough agreement that prior to Westphalia there was a ‘Spanish age’ of international law,8 so called because the arguments developed at that point coincided with the rise of Spain as a colonial power. Spanish political thought was at this moment central to European intellectual life and it is no coincidence that it became so through its debates about war. In this context the work of Francisco de Vitoria is crucial.

Vitoria’s work is regarded as one of the first statements of a universalist and humanitarian conception of international law. He is often regarded as the first to have ‘proclaimed a “natural” community of all mankind and the universal validity of human rights’, and to have presented a ‘courageous defence of the rights of the Indians’ against the Spanish.9 This reading of Vitoria is rooted in his conception of ‘the whole world which is in a sense a commonwealth’ and the idea of a law of nations which would have ‘the sanction of the whole world’.10 ‘Vitoria was a liberal’, notes James Brown Scott. Indeed, ‘he could not help being a liberal. He was an internationalist by inheritance. And because he was both, his international law is a liberal law of nations.’11 One reason for this interpretation is that Vitoria’s ‘humanist’ tendencies meant his work was established against the more explicitly violent policies of Spanish colonialism: ‘No business shocks me or embarrasses me more than the corrupt profits and affairs of the Indies … I do not understand the justice of the war.’12 A second reason is his claim that the Indians had rights of dominium. Sinners and non-believers as they might be, they are nonetheless ‘not impeded from being true masters, publicly and privately’ and so ‘could not be robbed of their property’.13 One of the reasons they had rights of dominium, and the third reason for the interpretation of Vitoria as one of the first statements of universal and humanitarian international law, is because they are human beings with reason: the Indians are not monkeys but ‘are men, and our neighbours’, so ‘it would be harsh to deny to them … the rights we concede to Saracens and Jews’.14

In suggesting that non-Christians are somehow equal with Christians, Vitoria challenges the idea of a universal Christian order administered by the Pope within which the Indians could be characterized as heathens and their rights and duties determined accordingly. He thereby disallows religion as the basis for war against the Indians or rule over them. Yet although the Indians are like the Spanish, their social, economic and political practices, including nudity, the consumption of raw food and cannibalism, mean they diverge from universal norms in such a way as also to make them unlike the Spanish. The Indian appears to have some of the social and cultural characteristics of civilized life, yet is markedly uncivilized; the Indian shares the characteristics of a universal humanity, yet is also set clearly apart. Thus the ‘Indian problem’ became the basis of a discussion about the relations between different groups of humans within a ‘republic of all the world’. In effect, as Anthony Anghie points out, the problem for Vitoria was not one of managing order between formally equal sovereign states, but of constituting order among culturally different entities. 15 It is this tension between the claims of natural law against behaviour that is somehow ‘unnatural’, and the necessity of understanding others within the framework of a universal humanity, which runs though Vitoria’s two 1539 lectures on the Indians and on the laws of war. And it is this tension which reveals the conjunction of violence and law running through the liberal imperialism which emerges, an imperialism in which the idea of peace becomes a key thematic.

Inspired by the dynamics of Spanish territorial possession, Vitoria places colonial domination – and thus dispossession – at the heart of international law. At the heart of this domination and dispossession are the laws of war and peace and the question of ‘free trade’. According to Vitoria, the natural rights and duties of the law of nations are society and fellowship, trade and commerce, communication, participation regarding things in common, and the freedom to travel. Because trade is essential to human communication and to the exchange and development of human knowledge, the right to maintain lines of communication through trade and exchange is a right of natural law. Hence ‘the Spaniards have the right to travel and dwell in those countries, so long as they do no harm to the barbarians’, and ‘they may lawfully trade among the barbarians, so long as they do no harm to their homeland.’ A refusal by the Indians to trade with the Spaniards constitutes a refusal to maintain ‘natural’ lines of communication, and is barbarism. Moreover, ‘if there are any things among the barbarians which are held in common both by their own people and by strangers, it is not lawful for the barbarians to prohibit the Spaniards from sharing and enjoying them.’ The reason for this is based in part on the principle of trade and in part on the idea that in natural law a thing which does not belong to anyone becomes the property of the first taker. What this means is that should the barbarians try to deny the Spaniards what is theirs by the ‘law of nations’ – that is, by natural law – then ‘they commit an offence against them’.16

If Vitoria’s argument is a major contribution to some kind of emergent international law of nations, then it is equally an important contribution to an emergent discourse of political economy centred on commerce and accumulation; it is through this contribution that Vitoria helps shape natural law arguments for conquest, for the right to engage in commerce and trade is for Vitoria a natural right. As Williams points out, within the totalizing discourse of a universally obligatory natural law of nations, the profit motive occupies an extremely privileged status, in the sense that not engaging in trade is treated as contrary to the mutual self-interests shared by all humankind.17 And this motivation must be allowed to triumph over common property rights. Put simply: customary land use by the Indians has to be treated as an illegitimate form of property. Any indigenous ‘law of the commons’ must therefore be abolished and replaced by the law 11 of private property, and dispossession legitimized on the grounds of natural law. As is well known, it is this dispossession and replacement of common property with private property that becomes central to the colonizing project and to bourgeois political economy thereafter. It is at this point that the question of war becomes crucial, as the Spaniards have the right to defend themselves against the offences committed by the Indians by availing themselves of the other main right of the law of nations: to go to war. ‘If the barbarians … persist in their wickedness and strive to destroy the Spaniards, they may then treat them no longer as innocent enemies, but as treacherous foes against whom all rights of war can be exercised.’18 In making this argument Vitoria’s lecture broke new theoretical ground for Western colonizing thought, providing a natural law source of Spain’s right – and by implication any other state’s right – to engage in war against native peoples and to rule in the New World as a means of securing the right to commerce. If the law of nations emerged to deal with war, then the war in question was one of accumulation.

As a war of accumulation this was recognized from the outset as permanent. ‘Our war against the pagans is … permanent because they can never sufficiently pay for the injuries and losses inflicted.’19 Because of this ‘a prince may do everything in a just war which is necessary to secure peace and security’, including plundering the goods of the innocent, killing the innocent, and enslaving the women and children, to the point of absolute destruction:

War is waged to produce peace, but sometimes security cannot be obtained without the wholesale destruction of the enemy. This is particularly the case in wars against the infidel, from whom peace can never be hoped for on any terms; therefore the only remedy is to eliminate all of them who are capable of bearing arms, given that they are already guilty.20

Vitoria’s law of nations, then, gives us two options: permanent war in search of free trade or absolute destruction of the enemies of such trade.

…Vitoria really needs to be understood in terms of the tradition of liberal imperialism that was then becoming established in Europe.

Peace, liberty, violence

Much has been made of what J.G.A. Pocock has called ‘the Machiavellian moment’ in the history of political thought, in which a new language was forged addressing the problems associated with constituting a republic of liberty through a dialectic of virtue and fortune.22 Mikael Hornqvist has shown that this republican ideal of freedom was deeply implicated in the imperial project, in which acquisition becomes the touchstone of liberty. For in the century leading up to Machiavelli, as well as in the years to follow, writer after writer had stressed the importance of empire to liberty: Bruni on the right to lordship over the world; Dati on the centrality of empire to security and economic order; Palmieri on the links between civic unity and increase of empire; Savonarola on the importance of the empire to ancient Rome; the list is long and well-documented by Hornqvist. Thus when Machiavelli lays down the basic tenets of Roman and Florentine republicanism, namely that a city has two ends – one to acquire, the other to be free, he draws on and summarizes a position that had become well established over the previous century. This tradition assumes that liberty ‘entails a commitment to empire understood as a defence and a militant extension of true liberty in a hostile world’. In concrete terms, this ‘translates into a pursuit of territorial security which justifies the intervention in the political life of neighbouring states and the subjugation and annexation of foreign lands’. Far from being contrary values, notes Hornqvist, liberty and imperial acquisition are understood as together constituting the dual end of the healthy republic.23 The liberal and ‘humanitarian’ concept of a world of universal being presupposes an expansive polity, which, in generating a politics of acquisition, in turn produces new enemies and thus requires the exercise of violence. For there can be no empire of liberty without arms. The art of politics is the art of war, as Machiavelli has it in the title of the only one of his major works to be published in his lifetime (in 1521). Or as he puts it in his better-known work: the successful Prince ‘takes as his profession nothing else than war and its laws and discipline’.24 This art of war is in Machiavelli’s mind central to imperial politics but links back to the discipline of liberty needed for internal order. Empires of liberty are always already empires of violence.

As empires of liberty, however, this violence is carried out in the name of peace and security. ‘The aim of war is peace and security’, says Vitoria, over and again. War is waged specifically for the defence of property, for the recovery of property and in revenge for an injury, and it is waged more generally ‘to establish peace and security’.25 This is used to justify offensive as well as defensive war.

The purpose of war is the peace and security of the commonwealth … But there can be no security for the commonwealth unless its enemies are prevented from injustice by fear of war. It would be altogether unfair if war could only be waged by a commonwealth to repel unjust invaders from its borders, and never to carry the conflict into the enemies’ camp.

Indeed, pre-empting the idea of a ‘humanitarian war’ that would emerge centuries later, Vitoria insists that war might be carried out ‘for the good of the whole world’.26

The significance of Vitoria’s idea that war is made for peace and security lies in the fact that it was being articulated as a key principle in the emerging law of nations, that the ‘permanent’ colonial wars which gave rise to this law of nations were increasingly taking on the ideological form of peace, and that this was a key moment in the development and structural transformation of the state. The prolonged cumulative effect of new weapons technology, new disciplinary provisions, fortifications, increase in the size of armies and navies, and the changes in tactics and strategy which these developments aided and abetted, including a fiscal centralization necessary to sustain these developments, meant that not only was the development of the state machine being accelerated as the monarchs and republics of Europe centralized and nationalized, most notably in the major colonizing powers of England, Spain, the Netherlands and France, it was being accelerated as a war machine. War made the state and the state made war, as Charles Tilly puts it.27….

Within this ideological transformation, ‘peace’ came to be addressed as a political issue. Humanists such as Erasmus suggested that an unjust peace was better than a just war; statesmen and sovereigns came to talk about a universal peace rather than perpetual war, some of them adopting beati pacifici (‘blessed are the peacemakers’) as their motto or styling themselves as rex pacificus, and pageants lauding peace increasingly took place with a pomp and performance that would have been unthinkable just a century earlier. Catherine de Medici, for example, took on the mantle of peacemaker using symbols of peace such as the rainbow or the Juno (arranger of peace-bringing marriages), and Charles V fashioned himself as the new Augustus, the emperor of peace – the famous painting of him by Titian has him riding through a landscape conveying the peaceful calm after a raging battle, while a sculpture of him by Leone y Pampeo has him ‘dominating over fury’.28 The issue here is not just a monarchical jockeying for the image of ‘peacemaker’, for the question of peace resonated culturally and intellectually – it has been noted, for example, that the mid-sixteenth century saw a proliferation of peace poetry.29 As Ben Lowe has shown, by the sixteenth century ‘peace’ was becoming more complex and adaptable as an idea and more entrenched as a societal ethic. In personal form it was associated with charity, mercy and piety; in its religious mode it connoted tranquillity as part of a rigorous Christian ideal; in a more ‘political’ mode it meant the restoration of order and stability along with an end to lawlessness; and in becoming conjoined with a set of ideas associated with the rise of capital (‘commerce’, ‘prosperity’, ‘wealth’, ‘profit’) it connoted certain practical benefits to the nation. It was a discourse of peace outside and distinct from ‘just war’ doctrine and centred on the idea of the nation-state.30

Thus it is fair to say that amidst the ‘military revolution’ of the sixteenth century, new ideas of peace were evolving as part of political discourse. As the nineteenth-century liberal jurist Sir Henry Maine once commented, ‘War appears to be as old as mankind, but peace is a modern invention.’31 An invention, that is, that came about amidst the increasing monopolization of violence by the developing state and one which could be shaped and utilized by the state to help justify the violence under its control. The discourse of peace came to permeate the discourse of war in the very century in which war was being treated as an ineradicable feature of politics, as a necessity for the security of the state, and in which the ‘permanent-war machine’ was being perfected…. The war machine is a peace machine; the peace machine is a war machine. Permanent war normalized as peace.

This is nowhere truer than in that centrepiece of the art of war: empire. The concept pax, appropriated from the Pax Romana, was central to the articulation and development of the imperial theme in this period (and would remain so through the further growth of empires in the later Pax Britannica and Pax Americana). But in the Roman tradition from where it hails pax has more affinity with the word ‘dominance’ than with modern notions of ‘peace’. What is connoted by the word is not simply an absence of conflict or making of a pact, but the imposition of hegemony achieved through conquest and maintained by arms: the goddess Pax was portrayed on Trajanic coins with her right foot on the neck of a vanquished foe. Pax thus had unmistakable military and hegemonic overtones and was deeply embedded in military codes and practices; it was and is a victor’s peace, achieved by war and conquest.34 Pax and imperium went hand in hand: peace as domination. Or, we might say, domination as pacification.

Pacification, law, security

…. ‘Pacification’ is often thought to have been developed as a term during the America–Vietnam war, following its adoption in 1964–65 as a substitute term for ‘counterinsurgency’. In fact, the term enters political discourse in the context of the colonial wars of the sixteenth century. In July 1573 Philip II came to believe that the continued violence being meted out in the conquest of the colonies was causing a certain discontent among his own people. He therefore proclaimed that all further extensions of empire be termed ‘pacifications’ rather than ‘conquests’.

Discoveries are not to be called conquests. Since we wish them to be carried out peacefully and charitably, we do not want the use of the term ‘conquest’ to offer any excuse for the employment of force or the causing of injury to the Indians … Without displaying any greed for the possessions of the Indians, they [the ‘discoverers’, ‘conquerors’] are to establish friendship and cooperation with the lords and nobles who seem most likely to be of assistance in the pacification of the land.36

As Tzvetan Todorov notes, the conquests themselves are not to be stopped, but the idea of ‘conquest’ is to be replaced with ‘pacification’,37 a mystification still in place centuries later.38 The violence remains unchanged, but in taking from the Roman tradition of imperial glory through military domination, in which pax implied ‘pacification’, it was understood in terms of the verb ‘pacificate’, now obsolete but which in the seventeenth century meant ‘to make peace’. Playing on the constitution of internal order in ordinary language, ‘pacification’ quickly came to describe the enforcing of a certain kind of peace, order and security. Pacification, then, is a police action: a military act dressed up as peace. Through pacification, (colonial) war becomes (colonial) peace, a rhetorical move devised in the context of the wars of the sixteenth century and perfected over the centuries to follow: from the ‘Edicts of Pacification’ of the late sixteenth century to the treaty taken by many to be the definitive original document of international law, the Treaty of Westphalia, which several times refers to itself as a Treaty of Pacification; from the pacification of Vietnam to the streets of Baghdad in the ‘war on terror’. If peace itself is a coded war, then pacification is core to the codification.

So too is law…. Law is pacification. Moreover,…this was the crowning achievement of liberal contract theory.

The story told about this tradition is that war is replaced by law; the social contract sees the natural right to use force given up to the state, which then monopolizes the means of violence and thus the war power….

Despite Hobbes’s attempt to ‘annex’ war to the state, he cannot give up the idea that the multitude is always already on the verge of rebellion, the people always already on the verge of revolution and thus civil society always already on the verge of chaos. To grasp this Hobbes has to invoke once more the category war, and he does so not for relations between states but for the social order constituted by the contract. For all the talk about the ‘peace and security’ of the juridical order generated by the Leviathan, then, in Hobbesian terms what one should really speak about is the pacification of an otherwise permanent civil war.

The same logic of pacification is found in other writers in the social contract tradition which supposedly sought to say ‘no’ to war, such as Locke. It appears in Locke’s acceptance of slavery, which is ‘nothing else, but the State of war continued’ and which is then reincorporated into civil society through the place of the slave within the domestic situation. But it is most explicit in Locke’s theory of punishment, which stems from the idea that those who commit crimes against us or even show enmity towards us have ‘declared War against all Mankind’. This argument about punishment in Chapter II of the Second Treatise runs straight into the argument about war in Chapter III, where it is suggested that ‘Force without Right, upon a man’s Person, makes a State of War.’ This appears initially to concern the state of nature: ‘force … where there is no common Superior on Earth to appeal to for relief, is the State of War’. Yet within a few lines Locke adds that force without right makes a state of war ‘both where there is, and is not, a common Judge’. This is war saturating the social body following the creation of political society; indeed, war as a constitutive feature of political society. One might note that despite Locke twice suggesting that this account of punishment will seem to many a ‘strange doctrine’, it is actually not far from the doctrine of punishment held by Vitoria, and, moreover, when Locke comes to flesh out the theory of punishment he does so in the context of colonialism and the right of war against the Indians.46 The introduction of government in Locke’s argument, then, often understood through the lens of the liberal search for peace, is in fact comprehensible only through the logic of war, exercised in a permanent fashion against rebellious slaves, antagonistic Indians, wayward workers, and criminals with something unsocial in mind: a liberal war masquerading as liberal peace.

In other words, the civil society created by the contract in the name of peace and security remains for liberalism a space of war. Regardless of its desire to restrict war to the international realm, civil society is always already at war. On the one hand, and pace the myth of peace and commerce as congenital twins, there is the permanent war of capital (spelt out by Marx in his treatise on this war, namely Volume 1 of Capital). On the other hand, there are the manifold permanent or semi-permanent wars against the various ‘enemies within’: war on crime, war on drugs, war on poverty, war on unemployment, war on scroungers, and on it goes until the war that has been articulated as the one that will probably never end: the war on terror. All are code for the permanent pacification required in/of the bourgeois polity and all are a product in one way or another of the supreme concept of bourgeois society: security. ‘Fundamental to pacification is security’, commented someone with more than a little first-hand experience.47 The demand for peace and security, then, is a demand for pacification.

Beyond peace

In an essay on ‘African Grammar’, Roland Barthes once highlighted the ways in which official French reports on African affairs functioned not as communication but as intimidation, often employing that standard tactic of bourgeois ideology: giving something the name of its contrary.

GUERRE/WAR. – The goal is to deny the thing. For this, two means are available: either to name it as little as possible (most frequent procedure); or else to give it the meaning of its contrary (more cunning procedure, which is at the basis of almost all the mystifications of bourgeois discourse). War is then used in the sense of peace, and pacification in the sense of war.48

Barthes’s insight is clearly gleaned from French colonialism, but his point is a general one about one of the most important mystifications which has accompanied bourgeois power since its inception. As I have suggested here, this mystification concerning war and peace is far from being a product of the global war on terror; rather, it is a long-standing ideological feature of the global war of capital.

Recognizing this is but one move towards more creative thinking about war; thinking has to be done outside and against the mystifications found in liberalism, IR and strategic studies. It is also thinking that has to be done outside of the discourse of peace and security. As noted by Retort in what is by far the best analysis of the war in Iraq, the reality of a permanent war on terror ‘renders inadequate the notion of “peace” as an oppositional frame or strategy’.49 As much as this is true of the ‘war on terror’ so it has been true of the permanent social war of capital. Creative thinking about war therefore also requires jettisoning naive ideas about peace.

Notes

1. Walter Benjamin, ‘Peace Commodity’ (1926), in Walter Benjamin’s Archive, trans. Esther Leslie, Verso, London, 2007, pp. 56–7.
2. Alain Badiou, ‘Fragments of a Public Journal on the American War against Iraq’, 26 February 2003, in Polemics, trans. Steve Corcoran, Verso, London, 2006, pp. 39–41; Antonio Negri and Éric Alliez, ‘Peace and War’ (2002), in Antonio Negri, Empire and Beyond, trans. Ed Emery, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2008, pp. 54–6; Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates, Verso, London, 2002, pp. 93–4.
3. Daniel Ross, Violent Democracy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004, p. 12; Rey Chow, The Age of the World Target: Self-Referentiality in War, Theory and Comparative Work, Duke University Press, Durham NC, 2006, p. 34; Gopal Balakrishnan, Antagonistics: Capitalism and Power in an Age of War, Verso, London, 2009, p. 104; François Debrix, Tabloid Terror: War, Culture, and Geopolitics, Routledge, London: Routledge, 2008, p. 97.
4. Fritz Grob, The Relativity of War and Peace: A Study in Law, History, and Politics, Yale University Press, New Haven CT, 1949. For the lawyers: Quincy Wright, ‘When Does War Exist?, American Journal of International Law 26, 1932, pp. 362–8; Georg Schwarzenberger, ‘Jus Pacis Ac Belli? Prolegomena to a Sociology of International Law’, American Journal of International Law, vol. 37, no. 3, 1943, pp. 460–79; Philip C. Jessup, ‘Should International Law Recognize an Intermediate Status between Peace and War?’, American Journal of International Law, vol. 48, no. 1, 1954, pp. 98–103.
5. See Tarak Barkawi, Globalization and War, Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham MD, 2006.
6. Recent attempts to shift the debate include Randy Martin, An Empire of Indifference: American War and the Financial Logic of Risk Management, Duke University Press, Durham NC, 2007; Michael McKinley, Economic Globalization as Religious War: Tragic Convergence, Routledge, Abingdon, 2007; Peter Alexander Meyer, Civic War and the Corruption of the Citizen, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2008; Nelson Maldonado- Torres, Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity, Duke University Press, Durham NC, 2008; Tarik Kochi, The Other’s War: Recognition and the Violence of Ethics, Birkbeck Law Press, London, 2009. Also important is Étienne Balibar’s unpublished lecture ‘Politics as War, War as Politics: Post-Clausewitzian Variations’, Alice Berline Kaplan Center for the Humanities, 8 May 2006. I am grateful to John Kraniauskas and Philip Derbyshire for bringing Balibar’s lecture to my attention.
7. Hans Kelsen, Law and Peace in International Relations, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 1942, pp. 1, 11–12.
8. Wilhelm G. Grewe, The Epochs of International Law (1984), trans. Michael Byers, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin, 2000.
9. Julius Stone, Human Law and Human Justice, Maitland Publications, Sydney, 1965, p. 62; James Leslie Brierly, The Law of Nations, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1955, p. 26.
10. Francisco de Vitoria, ‘On Civil Power’ (c. 1528), in Vitoria, Political Writings, ed. Anthony Pagden and Jeremy Lawrance, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1991, p. 40.
11. James Brown Scott, The Spanish Origin of International Law: Francisco de Vitoria and his Law of Nations, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1934, pp. xvi, 280.
12. Francisco de Vitoria, ‘Letter to Miguel de Arcos’, 8 November, 1534, Political Writings, pp. 331, 332.
13. Francisco de Vitoria, De Indis, in Political Writings, pp. 246, 250–51.
14. Francisco de Vitoria Vitoria, ‘Letter to Miguel de Arcos’, p. 333; De Indis, p. 251.
15. Anthony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2005, pp. 15–22, 36–7.
16. Vitoria, De Indis, pp. 278–80.
17. Robert A. Williams, The American Indian in Western Legal Thought, Oxford University Press, New York, 1990, p. 102.
18. Vitoria, De Indis, pp. 282–3.
19. Vitoria, De Indis Relectio Posterior, in Political Writings, p. 318.
20. Ibid., p. 321.
21. Arthur Nussbaum, A Concise History of the Law of Nations, Methuen, New York, 1961, pp. 74, 83, 296–306.
22. J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition, Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 1975.
23. Mikael Hornqvist, Machiavelli and Empire, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004, pp. 61, 72, 74.
24. Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince (1532), in The Chief Works and Others, Vol. 1, trans. Allan Gilbert, Duke University Press, Durham NC, 1989, p. 55.
25. Vitoria, De Indis, p. 283; De Indis Relectio Posterior, p. 319.
26. Vitoria, De Indis Relectio Posterior, p. 298.
27. Charles Tilly, ‘Reflections on the History of European State-Making’, in Charles Tilly, ed., The Formation of National States in Europe, Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 1975, p. 42.
28. Frances A. Yates, Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1975, pp. 133–4, 210; Ralph Bauer, The Cultural Geography of Colonial American Literature: Empire, Travel, Modernity, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003, p. 44.
29. James Hutton, Themes of Peace in Renaissance Poetry, Cornell University Press, Ithaca NY, 1984, p. 19. 30. Ben Lowe, Imagining Peace: A History of Early English Pacifist Ideas, Pennsylvania State University Press, Pennsylvania, 1997.
31. Sir Henry Sumner Maine, International Law: A Series of Lectures Delivered before the University of Cambridge, 1887, John Murray, London, 1888, p. 8.
32. José A. Fernández, ‘Erasmus on the Just War’, Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 34, no. 2, 1973, pp. 209–26.
33. Erasmus, ‘Letter to Martin Bucer’, 11 November 1527, in J. Huizinga, Erasmus and the Age of Reformation (1924), Phoenix Press, London, 2002, pp. 288–92; Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius (1513–17), in Chief Works, pp. 224, 399. Note too his comment on Ancus, a man ‘so gifted … that he could both enjoy peace and carry on war’ (p. 245).
34. Ali Parchami, Hegemonic Peace and Empire: The Pax Romana, Britannica, and Americana, Routledge, London, 2009, pp. 15–17, 42, 62, 92–3.
35. Michel Foucault, ‘Society Must Be Defended’: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76, trans. David Macey, Allen Lane, London, 2003, pp. 15–16, 46–8, 50–51.
36. Cited in Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America, HarperPerennial, New York, 1984, p. 173.
37. Ibid., p. 174.
38. During the war in Vietnam one ‘unofficial’ Pentagon spokesman, Hanson W. Baldwin, let slip the mystification: writing in the New York Times of the ‘ink blot’ or ‘oil stain’ theory of pacification, in which like ink blots or oil stains the operations from one base overlap those from another, he commented that ‘gradually the area pacified or conquered covered the country’. Cited in Joseph Hansen, ‘The Case Against “Pacification”’, International Socialist Review, vol. 27, no. 4, 1966, pp. 131–6, www.marxists.org/archive/hansen/1966/xx/pacification. htm.
39. ‘I want to have a war to build as well as to destroy’, said Johnson to his advisers about ‘the other war’, as he called pacification; cited in Frank L. Jones, ‘Blowtorch: Robert Komer and the Making of Vietnam Pacification Policy’, Parameters: US Army War College Quarterly, vol. 35, no. 3, 2005, 103–18, p. 104. ‘Pacification had to be productive’, notes William Gibson, who in outlining the ‘Eleven Criteria and Ninety-Eight Works for Pacification’ in Vietnam comments that ‘the list sounds like a program for the construction of a liberal welfare state’; The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam, Grove Books, New York, 1986, pp. 281, 291.
40. Foucault, ‘Society’, p. 50.
41. ‘If God grants me life … the last thing that I would like to study would be the problem of war … There again I would have to cross into the problem of law’. Interview with André Bertin, 1983, published as ‘What Our Present Is’, in Foucault Live, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, Semiotext(e), New York, 1996, p. 415.
42. Walter Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence’ (1920–21), trans. Edmund Jephcott, in Selected Writings, Vol. 1: 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, Belknap/Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 1996, pp. 248–9.
43. Foucault, ‘Society’, pp. 17, 97.
44. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975), trans. Alan Sheridan, Penguin, London, 1977, p. 26.
45. Thomas Hobbes, De Cive (1642), in Hobbes, Man and Citizen, ed. Bernard Gert, Hackett, Indianapolis, 1991, pp. 103–4, 177–8; Leviathan (1651), ed. Richard Tuck, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1991, p. 219.
46. John Locke, Two Treatises, ed. Peter Laslett, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1988, I, sect. 130, 131; II, sects. 10, 19, 24
47. General William C. Westmoreland reporting his experience in Vietnam, in A Soldier Reports, Doubleday, New York, 1976, p. 68. Robert McNamara likewise described Vietnam as a ‘pacification security job’; cited in Gibson, Perfect War, p. 275.
48. Roland Barthes, ‘African Grammar’, in The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies (1979), trans. Richard Howard, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1997, p. 105.
49. Retort, Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War, Verso, London, 2005, p. 94.

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By Eddy Laing

At the core of Marxism is the methodology of historical materialism (HM), which “regards every historically developed social form as in fluid movement, and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence.” ¹ As developed by Marx and Engels, the dialectical materialist conception of history is not just an interpretation of the world; it is a guide to active transformation and “in its essence critical and revolutionary.”²

Of course, it can be argued that any study of history is necessarily a study of social development. Unlike histories defined by the acts of presidents, generals, bankers or other elites, and measured against the Idea, or Moment or other ideological abstractions, historical materialism proceeds from an analysis of how society as a whole functions, “starting with the material production of life itself and comprehending the form of intercourse connected with and created by this mode of production.”³ In other words, historical materialism is a study of societies as they really are – as diverse and complex assemblies of people with various needs and aspirations. In order to do that, we need to examine society in all its stages and component reciprocal actions; how people make their lives, enact the state (laws, governance), and conduct themselves ideologically through religion, philosophy, ethics, morality, art, literature, music, etc. These activities and expressions are in fact social practices and, taken together, form the cultural matrix of the given society.

In 1848, Europe was still emerging from the centuries-long hold of feudalism and monarchism. From that vantage point, Marx and Engels had a palpable sense of the old social formations – dying but not yet dead – as well as the newly emerging ones, especially a rising class of proletarians for whom social revolution was on the immediate agenda.⁴ Thus, Marx and Engels developed their framework in active opposition to the idealism which, then as now, reinforced the dominant narratives of the day. And it was through that struggle that they were able to stand Hegel’s dialectical method ‘right side up’ and develop a science of the general laws of motion of the external world and of human thought, so that the real world was approached as the source of ideas, and not the other way around.⁵

HM proceeds from the hypothesis that our social being produces our consciousness; how we think and what we think are construed from our collaborations and communication with others. We devise our ways of life through networks of economic, political, and ideological social relationships, which we usually call ‘society.’ This sociality is a defining characteristic of humans; we could not exist, much less create culture, outside our social practices. Furthermore, the reciprocal interaction of our thinking and being is transformative; through our social practices we intentionally – and unintentionally in some cases – change our conditions of life, including how and what we think.

In this way, we produce our history, not as a recurring series of equivalent events, but as ongoing transformative experiences. Thus, human cultural history is oriented; it is a continuum of social practices that intersect in a complex matrix and which extend from and build upon collective past practices. How we live today is not how people lived two hundred or two thousand or two hundred thousand years ago. Neither are societies identical; each contains its own specificity and history. That said, how we live today is based in some part on how we have lived in the past and societies often share features that are built from similar social practices. An analogy can be drawn from biology: natural history is oriented in its evolution in that new species derive from species, body plans and organs that already exist, not according to a metaphysical system of phylogenetic progress. Furthermore, as biology, geology, astrophysics, and other sciences have subsequently shown, all life on this planet and all matter in the universe have histories too.

Orientation – the continuum of formative practices – does not preclude accident or obviate contingency. Social development is inexorable through time, but not in regard to its structure. Societies are what we make them to be, but we operate “under circumstance directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.”⁶ Societies arise according to specific conditions of material life, and as history demonstrates, they continue to undergo various subtle and dramatic changes over time: technologies are invented and become obsolete, forms of symbolization are transformed and deprecated, shared knowledge (oral or written) of the world is gained, forgotten or destroyed. As history also demonstrates emphatically, when the functional conditions of life of enough members of a society come into sharp conflict with how that society is directed or organized, resolutions are found in climactic and sudden events, often pitting one section against another, or pitting all against nature. Mass migrations, epidemics, wars and revolutions are all examples of resolving events.

Marx and Engels first presented their ‘materialist conception of history’ in polemics against the ‘idealist conception of history’ espoused by certain academic Hegelians⁷ and Ludwig Feuerbach. Starting with those polemics and specifically with The German Ideology, written in 1847, historical materialism provides a bright red thread running through their subsequent decades of collaboration, as demonstrated in their many practical applications: The Manifesto of the Communist Party; Capital; The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Boneparte; The Civil War in France; Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State; and their many other investigations of history, contemporary society and the struggle for socialism.

Since all scientific theories are developed from fact, my intent here is to illustrate the validity of HM by drawing on the empirical evidence of human social history: anthropology, psychology, archaeology, and other social sciences. Marx’s own study of the history of law and philosophy provided him with a starting point (e.g. the ideological and political superstructure of societies) for developing this theory, and his extensive study of capitalism, using England as its primary data set, is summarized in his famous critique.⁸ However, the data available today is more extensive than that obtainable in 1847 or 1867.

I do not presume to exhaust this subject, which is not possible in any event. Neither am I interested in compiling a set of rules or formulas or mechanistic ‘just so’ statements. What I do hope to accomplish is a cogent explanation of key theses within the HM methodology and an exploration of certain misconceptions, in the spirit of “revolutionizing the existing world, of practically coming to grips with and changing the things found in existence.”⁹

Humans as Social Animals

More than a simple statement of fact, we are animals and so we have a natural history. Our species, Homo sapiens, is a sub-set of the Hominidae family within the Primates order. We share a common ancestral species with and are most closely related to other hominids – chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans. Those animals (with the possible exception of Borneo orangutans) as well as the Old World monkeys and some other primates are social-banding creatures from which we can infer that earliest members of our species also lived that way. Early humans in Eastern Africa very likely lived in groups that jointly gathered food, secured shelter and biologically reproduced. It is also likely that early human bands observed some form of internal hierarchy aligned with age and sex. Based on ethnographic analogy, it is reasonable to suggest that the exploitation of female and juvenile labor emerged early as expressions of such a hierarchy, ^10,11,12 and rudimentary manifestations of exploitive practice have been observed among collateral species ^13,14,15,16 (e.g. adult males aggressively taking food that has been gathered by females or juveniles).

Successful population groups are by definition those that solve the problems of maintenance and reproduction of the group, which of course takes place in relation to the group’s environment. This is a necessary quality for biological evolution, and it is a necessary quality of social evolution.¹⁷ Functional groups are able to cooperate and are multi-generational. They have a need to communicate and they have learned behavior that can be shared among peers and with the younger generation. It is in these functions that we can begin to discriminate the capabilities of humans from those of other hominids. Very significantly, comparative observations of humans and other great apes show that the human infants display a capacity for understanding shared intentions. In other words, as part of our cognitive development we learn – before we can speak – that other humans are agents with whom we can cooperate.^18,19,20,21

It is in the course of cooperation that we learn vocabulary and other cultural information. As everyday events show us, speech acquisition is an on-going social practice. We are continually encountering – and inventing – new words and new meanings for words. While infant vocalization may begin as signaling, it rather quickly evolves into something more. We are not learning a set of signals when we acquire speech.²² Rather, our speech is comprised of a logically formed and extensible system of symbols.²³ Here again, we are the only animal known to be capable of symbolizing and symbolic recursion.²⁴ Taken together, these capabilities enable an expandable matrix of social practices, which reciprocally comprise intra-group social relationships.

“The production of life, both of one’s own labour and of the fresh life in procreation, now appears as a twofold relation: on the one hand as a natural, on the other as a social relation – social in the sense that it denotes the co-operation of several individuals, no matter under what conditions, in what manner and to what end. It follows from this that a certain mode of production, or industrial stage is always combined with a certain mode of co-operation, or social stage, and this mode of co-operation is itself a ‘productive force’.”²⁵

Modern society has developed – over several thousand generations – from those beginnings. As our social history illustrates, those specific capacities do not prescribe one type or direction for our cultural evolution. Our capacity for shared intentionality, for example, has not obviated social conflict; our ability to create tools produced Zyklon B and the H-bomb. Social contradictions do not result simply because we are not as ‘wise’ as our taxon sapiens suggests, but they do demonstrate the innovative variability inherent in our transformative actions.

Thought and Social Practice

The phenomenon of consciousness has been the object of speculation – what is it, how does it happen – throughout written history. A well-known Zen koan frames the subject-object question by asking whether the dreamer is a man or a butterfly, but an entomologist might point out that the Lepidoptera nervous system is too primitive to support memory. Historical materialism, developed in opposition to philosophical idealism, answers this question directly: it is not human consciousness that produces our being; it is our social being which produces our consciousness.

This statement should not be interpreted to mean only that the brain is an organ for thought or memory, or that thoughts are simply biochemical signals transmitted through a central nervous system. Although it is required for and enables thinking and memory, the physiology of the brain is not thinking. Brains do not produce symbols or memories from within. Thinking proceeds from interactions with others. The dialectical materialist psychologist Lev Vygotsky and his colleagues conducted path-breaking investigations of cognition during the revolutionary 1920s in Russia, demonstrating that cognitive ability develops through social interaction.²⁶ Human infants learn how to learn through dialogic exchange with others. Thus, we are not born ‘human’; we are made so through our interactions. We continue to acquire knowledge throughout our lives by internalizing direct and indirect shared experience, through social practices, including those of semiotic mediation – the forms through which we communicate with each other. ^27,28,29 In this process, we create our thoughts: as memories of dialogic experiences, as physical perceptions, and through a process of comparison and association that we sometimes experience as an ‘inner monologue.’³⁰

This assumes still greater significance when we consider the full history of our species. Humans migrated out from Africa in perhaps several waves, reaching across Asia as well as into Europe, out onto the Pacific, across the Bering Sea, and the length of the Western Hemisphere. This in itself demonstrates a range of transformative and transmitted behaviors that enabled ‘success’ in a tremendously wide range of habitats – from the African savannah to the Arctic tundra, from the Tibetan plateau to the Amazonian basin. While human presence has created habitat opportunities for fellow travelers (rodents and domestic cats are two examples), no other animal has demonstrated such a capacity for adapting to widely different climates and habitat.

Humans have not only responded to the environment, we have learned to remake it. The earliest details of how we learned are lost to the oral histories of the thousands of generations who came before the advent of written language about 5,000 years ago. Relying on their oral folklore our distant ancestors learned to predict climate and seasons, learned to control fire, learned to cultivate plants, learned to domesticate certain mammals, learned to create their own shelter, and with various other assembled skills and affinities eventually stepped into a more settled world; produced by their own hands and minds in dialogue with each other.

An ongoing argument within anthropology for most of the last century has been whether the breadth of human culture has been mainly a process of diffusion – the communication of practices from one group to another – or independent invention responding to specific similar or distinct conditions of life. Writing, for example, is thought to have developed independently in at least two cultures (Mayan and Sumerian) and possibly others (Indus), based on distinct glyphic systems and proto-grammars. Other examples can be inferred from the invention of crop cultivation, for while varieties of the same grains might be transplanted to different locales with similar climate (for example from east to west or vice versa), the same transfer would not be successful when moving longitudinally (south-north) or across elevations (into or out of significantly different climate zones).³¹ It would appear that both the social, interactive practices of innovation and of interchange are foundational to human cultural history, and have been employed by various – distinct and related – population groups at different times and in different places.³²

The Core of Culture is the Mode of Production

Every human society, regardless of its simplicity or complexity, coheres around modes of activity that solve the prerequisites of food, shelter, clothing and other basic physical and ideological needs. Generally, modes of production are comprised of the activities through which the group provides for this subsistence and reproduction, including the rules, customs, techniques, beliefs, and other ideas that have arisen from and in turn enable those basic activities, such as how those activities are communicated across generations and geography.

Marx described the capitalist mode of production as distinguished by two characteristics. First, the social product takes the form of commodities (a useful product of human labor created for exchange), and second, the aim of production is the creation of surplus-value (the value created by labor beyond its cost as labor-power), which is appropriated as interest, ground rent and profit by capitalists.³³ In this mode of production, the capitalists direct the kinds of social production and how the social surplus (the surplus-labor of the society as a whole) will be used as they compete to exchange commodities in various markets. Within this type of economy, human labor is one of the commodities produced and traded. The proletarian sells her labor-power for wages with which she feeds, clothes and shelters herself and her dependants, and thereby lives to work another day (and create more surplus-value for the capitalists).

This does not mean that only one mode of production is possible in any society. Social practices are dynamic and human culture is constantly in process. For example, during the 12th and 13th centuries and continuing into the 18th, mercantile and small-scale productive capitalism co-existed with feudal agrarianism in much of Europe. Likewise, in some aboriginal North American societies observed during the 18th and 19th centuries, as well as among some Amazonian groups in the 20th, hunting/gathering co-exist with crop cultivation. In addition, from the 15th until the late 19th centuries, slave labor was essential to large-scale Euro-American capitalist farming and natural resource extraction in the Western Hemisphere. Nonetheless, within a given society at a specific period in time, one mode is dominant “whose relations thus assign rank and influence to the others. It is a general illumination which bathes all the other colours and modifies their particularity.”³⁴

The transformative quality of human culture both requires and enables the ensemble of ideological activities that explain, reproduce and challenge the underlying social practices of the society. We are not only capable of symbolizing; we require language, other sound and visual expression to enable our consciousness and our sociality. Our cultures are matrices of social practices. In order to operationalize a mode of life (hunting, cultivating, manufacturing, singing, painting, storytelling, writing) we cooperatively invent tools and techniques, which further transform our shared existence. All of this requires semiotic mediation – the expression and internalization of ideas – and that social interactivity in turn promotes new knowledge and expressions (words, meanings, etc.).

Early human advances in cognition were most likely confronted with many practical obstacles, not the least of which was recognizing cognition as the rationalization and internalization of social practice.³⁵ Consequently, in the course of thinking about themselves and the world, people developed belief systems and ‘world views’, some of which were partially accurate or largely inaccurate. For example, long ago humans observed various manifestations of seasonality and learned to track the passing of time in order to predict their requirements for migratory hunting, agriculture, ceremonies, and other activity planning. Thus were created lunar and solar calendars. In various ancient societies, supernatural forces were assumed responsible for many of the phenomena being observed; the sun, the moon, major rivers, certain marine mammals, were ascribed with motive force. Coincidence was confused with causality, and successful predictions in one circumstance (seasonality as applied to cultivation) were sometimes generalized into ideological systems (the sun as an omnipotent god) in order to explain other phenomenon. We can recognize similar gaps between being and understanding in contemporary capitalist society, for example, ascribing the processes of economic exchange to supra-social ‘market forces,’ or the fetishism of commodities in which “a definite social relation between men assumes … the fantastic form of a relation between things.” ³⁶

Our awareness is created through our interactions with the rest of the world, but it can never be fully aligned to it: first, because material reality is expansive and continually changing and second, because our thinking is a symbolic interpretation, an abstraction formed from that reality. A hallmark of human cognition is ‘predictive thinking’ and being able to form hypotheses that describe probable events or outcomes. We can’t actually ‘see into the future’; we anticipate based on prior experience.

Division of Labor and Social Stratification

As far as is known, within nearly every society to date, regardless of the mode, production has been engaged according to a division of labor. The regular production of a surplus enables such a division – more is collected or produced than is consumed by those collecting or producing it – and reciprocally, a division of labor may enable producing a surplus by concentrating specific skills on specific social functions. Alternately, if the band, ethno-unit or society is unable to maintain a productive surplus, it typically collapses (rather than contract to a less complex productive mode) and its members die out, migrate, or merge as bands with other groups.³⁷ In just the last few decades, we have seen societies and state forms that have ‘failed,’ dissolved, been annexed or partitioned, and of course, throughout recorded history many states have been formed or dissolved because of social revolution or inter-state warfare.

Turning again to ethnography in search of historically analogous examples, at least some recent societies that have been primarily engaged in a combination of cultivation and hunting have done so through a division of labor between hunters and cultivators, reinforced with customs, rules, and other specialized behaviors that were developed and transmitted according to that division.³⁸ In addition to expressly productive tasks, a division of labor also developed between manual activities and ideological tasks, such as conducted by shamans, priests or medicine societies. These specializations were required to ensure the life and growth of the group; to develop specific practices, such as birthing, dying, hunting, cultivating and symbolizing; to innovate new practices, such as plant or animal domestication; and to communicate specific practices as knowledge, especially across generations.

The first division of labor within human ethno-units was likely between women and men and may have arisen from one of the qualities of human biological dimorphism; within a given breeding population group of our species, males are typically larger than females. This hypothesis contradicts some well-known earlier assertions following L. H. Morgan³⁹ who hypothesized that early human societies practiced a ‘primitive communalism’ in which labor was equally shared. Arguments contra Morgan have been proposed by various anthropologists who cite the behaviors of closely related hominids (as mentioned earlier). Others refer to analogous social relations as recorded by ethnographers over the past Å 200 years, such as J. H. Moore’s 1978 survey of Human Relations Area Files⁴⁰ for evidence of exploitation of women by men in hunting and gathering societies. The only examples Moore found of ‘agalitarian’ societies – where there was no indication of such exploitation – were four groups who live or lived in marginal ecological zones that did not support a regular productive surplus (such as the Arctic coast and the North American Great Basin). However, those marginal zones were inhabited only after exploitative societies had fully occupied the more productive areas. Moore further argued that the subjugation of women provided a cultural model for the subjugation of men.⁴¹

Regardless of the moment and practice of origin, the differentiation of labor very early in human social history suggests the production of some amount of surplus. On that basis, societies cleaved according to provision and task. Those divisions would have promoted or reinforced in-group and cross-generational knowledge and technology transfer apropos to cultivation, hunting, healing, tool making, etc. As noted earlier, recorded oral histories of many hunter-gatherer societies describe divisions between hunters and cultivators and between mental and manual activities. Those ethnographies (as well as other data, such as archaeological evidence) also suggest that those two divisions are linked, and that within the resulting strata further hierarchy, primary leaders, and inter-strata conflicts emerged shortly thereafter. These earliest divisions provide the starting points for later and more complex stratification. Out of this process, sections of society come to be ‘fixed’ in their social relationships as classes that are comprised of specific relationship types, distinct from other classes. In many societies, these class definitions are transferred across generations, as heredity. Stratification also promotes – and increasingly requires in order to reproduce those relationships – the further development of an ideological and political superstructure, which soon comes to direct every aspect of the society’s activities.

“The division of labor implies from the outset the division of the conditions of labor, of tools and materials, and thus the fragmentation of accumulated capital among different owners, and thus, also, the fragmentation between capital and labor, and the different forms of property itself.”⁴² It is in this division of labor (including the division between town and countryside) that private property and class distinctions are based. Marx and Engels considered this essential to understanding the dynamics of class society as well as to understanding how to create a new kind of society, free of class distinctions, exploitation and oppression.

Stratification Produces Class Struggle

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” With this statement in the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels introduced their analysis that through all of human history “oppressor and oppressed stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on a now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.” ⁴³

The division of societies into distinct classes is enabled by the economic exploitation of subaltern classes by the dominant class: slave by master, serf by landlord, proletarian by capitalist. These classes exist as social contradictions. There is dialectical unity between the opposing classes in such a society; one requires the other, but this is not a static relationship. The dominant class exists at the economic, political and ideological expense of the subaltern class. The economic disadvantage is generally evident in the respective life-ways of the opposed classes. The political disadvantage is evident in the nature of the laws and customs that promote those disadvantages. Ideologically, the ruling classes have free rein (by law as well as by economic control) to dominate the intellectual life of the society through philosophies, aesthetics, traditions and other sentiments that champion their position as elites and justify the subjugation of the other class. Beyond that fact, the ruling class also expropriates the symbolic innovations of the subaltern groups; the visual art, music, dance, poetry, prose and song created by the oppressed often become property of the dominant class in the intellectual market.⁴⁴

This socio-political contention between strata and classes is grounded in the division of society according to labor that, as proposed earlier, emerged first between men and women and between mental and manual labor. Here, the reciprocity between different forms of social practice is critically important. The division of labor as it has evolved is not incidental much less inconsequential to the society; it is a requisite component of the social order and its continued existence.

Without devising solutions to shared necessities – such as how to hunt most effectively, what plants to cultivate and when or how to attend to the sick and dying – the band cannot survive and thrive. Over time, these shared practices are explained and encoded as ideology. Knowledge is not acquired in the abstract or equally by all members of the group concurrently; as a process, it proceeds unevenly among individuals and is intentionally withheld or shared. Those discrepancies, transferred across generations, eventually come to comprise distinct ideological systems shared within specific sub-groups, strata or classes.

Given the burden of knowledge acquisition and transfer, especially for the many tens of thousands of years before the advent of writing, specialization of activity was both vitally important and subject to tremendous pressures. Nature (climate, weather, geology, biology) appeared as mysterious and dominating forces. Predation by other animals was always present. An unsuccessful collection or hunt could produce internal strife over causes and results, under the constant specter of starvation. The spontaneous emergence of division morphed into codifications deemed necessary for survival and which came to be perceived as complementary to the conditions of life, as ‘natural’ as nature itself. From this process emerge concepts of medicine, taboo, morality, ethics, etc.

These ideological practices are tethered to how the society is structured and functions. The anthropologist Leslie White pithily noted that “religion is, at bottom, an affair of the emotions,”⁴⁵ but emotions – affective responses – are an interpretation of the real world. Marriage traditions and incest taboos promote exogamy⁴⁶ which can foster productivity by the group (by expanding its size) and reinforce peaceful coexistence with neighboring groups in their mutual use of resources (for hunting, cultivation, etc.). Origin stories explain in-group distinctions and traditions and thus promote social cohesion.

These interactions work in reverse as well. Shocks to the lifeways of the society call into question the ideologies that support and promote those lifeways. The 19th century encroachment of the US Army and European settlers onto the North American Plains undermined the status and role of the traditional Cheyenne clan system of Council Chiefs, prompting its replacement by the Soldier Chiefs.⁴⁷ The economic dislocations and prolonged slaughter of the First World War, combined with subaltern demands for peace and bread and land, prompted the overthrow of the 300 year-old Romanov dynasty and its replacement by a revolutionary socialist government. ⁴⁸ In both cases, long-standing ideological support for the traditional order was overturned in favor of new worldviews.

The struggle within societies between strata and classes, and which appears to erupt more or less ‘spontaneously,’ takes as its starting point any of a wide variety of practices in politics, ideologies and/or economics. In times of acute social crisis, any aspect of how society operates is liable to be interrogated, and at such times, “(new) beginnings are to be seen literally on all sides.”⁴⁹

Economic Base, Political-Ideological Superstructure and the Need for Revolution

In their historical analysis, Marx and Engels specifically noted and partly described several types of societies that have existed over the past two thousand years, primarily citing the Mediterranean and Europe. Tribal societies, slave societies, feudal societies, and capitalist societies have each been characterized by distinctive but generalizable economic relationships and technologies (e.g. estate agriculture using slave labor together with small-scale handicraft production) and ideo-political superstructures (Roman or common law, literature and music, religions and customs, etc.) In every stratified society, the dominant class exerts hegemonic control over the rest of society, including over intellectual life, aspirations, and the ability of subaltern strata to express ideas independent of that dominant, ruling class narrative. The proletariat (and every other non-dominant class) is not only expropriated economically; they are expropriated in every aspect of culture including their intellectual life. Consider, for example, how the ruling class narrative defines popular discussions of ‘democracy’, ‘dictatorship’, ‘violence’, ‘peace’, ‘terrorism’, ‘economic crisis’, and so on.

The oppressed classes’ struggle – as individuals and in groups – not just against the surface phenomenon of economic conditions, they push up against all of these other types of subjugation too, although often without awareness of the real nature of the contradiction or of potential outcomes. Within the system of class divisions, the boundaries of oppression – just like the actual composition of the classes – shift over time, depending upon the resistance of the oppressed, the rate of success/failure of the social economy, the relative political/military strength of the classes facing each other, and environmental conditions. Bourgeois revolutions often set out to overturn the hereditary rights that characterized earlier class societies, and replace those with the so-called ‘inalienable rights of man.’ Yet, as the history of the last 350 years shows, social status remains inheritably constrained (but not completely fixed) within capitalism; through inheritable property; through the bourgeois family; through literacy and a stratified education system; through acculturation in literature and arts; through national/ethnic oppression and racism, and so on.⁵⁰ As Marx and Engels observed, “class in its turn assumes an independent existence against the individuals, so that the latter find their conditions of life predetermined, and have their position in life and hence their personal development assigned to them by their class, thus becoming subsumed under it.” This “subjection of the separate individuals to the division of labor … can only be removed by the abolition of private property and of labor [i.e. the sale of labor-power] itself.”⁵¹ In other words, class societies reproduce themselves by reproducing the classes of social practices on which that mode of life is based.

Based on their analysis of historical succession, Marx and Engels theorized that class society was itself historical; that the blind necessity that had driven all prior class societies was being eclipsed by the current capabilities of social reproduction; and that therefore exploitative capitalist society could and should be brought to an end by the revolutionary class struggle of the proletariat. This struggle, aimed immediately at the capitalist state, must account for all the other components of the social superstructure and not only production relationships.

“The alteration of men on a mass scale is necessary, an alteration which can only take place in a practical movement, a revolution; the revolution is necessary therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew.”⁵²

As 20th C. history shows, while an essential and great leap, the revolutionary transformation of the superstructure requires much more than ‘smashing the state’ and establishing a new regime of workers or their representatives. It is increasingly evident that the revolutionary transformation of all social relationships (economic, political and ideological) must be the program for the entire period of socialist transition. Short of that type of movement, the economic relationships at the outset of socialist reconstruction not only bear “the birth marks of the old society,”⁵³ they stand in active opposition to moving forward: an extensive division of labor; wage scales and the exchange of labor-power; various forms of small-scale production and commerce; the administration of public property, etc.

In order to create a society that has rid itself of the ‘muck of ages’ we need to refashion all of the ways in which we interact with each other; transform all of the social relationships upon which society is based. This is not just a matter of enacting laws or restructuring the economy, although those are enabling actions from which we must start. This again speaks to the relationship between being and thinking; between the ways society is organized and functions and the ways we conceptualize each other. We cannot re-conceptualize ourselves without changing the ways in which we live; we cannot change those social relationships without re-conceptualizing our peers and ourselves.

Is Human History Directionally Orientated?

Marx wrote to Joseph Weydermeyer that “no credit is due to me for discovering the existence of classes or the struggle between them … what I did new was to prove: 1) that the existence of classes is only bound up with particular historical phases of the development of production, 2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat, 3) that this dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society.”⁵⁴

This has led some to view socialist revolution and the demise of capitalism as inevitable and bound to occur, under the pressure of its own internal contradictions. There are indeed fundamental contradictions inherent in capitalist societies, not the least of which are those internal contradictions between exploitation and accumulation, between the proletarian and capitalist classes. However, patterns and trends in social history do not necessarily indicate all potential or future actions; human societies are inherently dynamic and variable, even – perhaps especially – when large numbers of its members attempt to act in concert, such as classes struggling to become conscious of their collective and strategic interests.

Engels spoke to social contingency in his notes on Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, and is worth citing at length here. “In spite of the consciously desired aims of all individuals, accident apparently reigns on the surface. That which is willed happens but rarely; in the majority of instances the numerous desired ends cross and conflict with one another, or these ends themselves are from the outset incapable of realization, or the means of attaining them are insufficient. … The ends of the actions are intended, but the results which actually follow from these actions are not intended; or when they do seem to correspond to the end intended, they ultimately have consequences quite other than those intended. … Men make their own history, whatever its outcome may be, in that each person follows his own consciously desired end, and it is precisely the resultant of these many wills operating in different directions, and of their manifold effects upon the outer world, that constitutes history.”⁵⁵

The struggle for communist society is a struggle to overcome and do away with all of the inequalities that arise from the historic divisions of society and the division of labor. As the struggle between classes is fought out through every social relationship, it creates further potential for revolutionary transformation of all social relationships. The object of the socialist revolution is not simply an equal (or even generally-increased) distribution of the social product – such an equity between sellers and buyers can only reproduce the old social relations of capitalist exchange⁵⁶ – rather, the object must be the creation of new and non-exploitative social relationships in every field of activity. Most importantly, this applies to the proletariat itself, which must “rid itself of everything that still clings to it from its previous position in society.”⁵⁷

Instead of life’s work as compulsory and alienated (so many units of labor-power within a capital process), communism envisions emancipatory ‘life’s work’ unfettered of narrow economic relationships. To arrive at that mode of life, we need to reorganize society beyond the narrow confines of the “bourgeois right,”⁵⁸ beyond an ‘equality’ grounded in commodity exchange and which masks the relationships among people with relationships between things. As Marx and Engels envisioned it, classless society enables the full realization of individuals through the full realization of society as a whole. In capitalist society, the prime objective for the worker is the sale of her labor-power for purposes directed by capital. Even one’s ‘free (unpaid) time’ and compensatory (in lieu of truly self-directed) activities are narrowly defined by capitalist relations, such as the periodic ‘freedom’ to purchase – or more often, borrow against – ‘non-essential’ consumer goods, make a holiday excursion, etc. As Marx and Engels envisioned it, communist society is one where “each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, [since] society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow.”⁵⁹ This vision of the future suggests but cannot propose specific solutions to every form of social contradiction, and it certainly strains an imagination subsumed in the present-day ideologies of late capitalism and the age-old traditions of class society. (e.g., how can everyone be competent or enabled to engage in every type of activity?) However, the scope and sociality of this vision stands exactly opposed to all of the brutality, muck and ennui of imperialist society, with its ruling class of loathsome parasites.

The oppressed can make their own history only through overcoming the ‘dead hand of the past’ – ideologies and practices that perpetuate exploitation and oppression. Historical materialism is an essential tool for decrypting those social practices. Especially important to the theory is the observation that “it is not a question so much of the motives of single individuals, however eminent, as of those motives which set in motion great masses, whole peoples, and again whole classes of people in each people. … Everything which sets men in motion must go through their minds; but what form it will take in the mind will depend very much on the circumstances.”⁶⁰ We are who we are through our social practices and our socially transformative capabilities arise from that sociality, especially as class struggle.

Up through the mid-19th century, materialist philosophy had largely been constrained by mechanistic and reductionist interpretations: the world as an aggregate of things, each with a cause and effect. Marx and Engels liberated materialism from this conundrum by applying dialectical analysis; instead of a series of isolates, the physical world and human society were revealed as complex webs of interactive processes. Within the web of human culture is the communist project, based on the premise that overthrowing capitalism and building a new form of society is historically possible; the proletariat can act in that direction because of its position as a class within the matrices of contemporary social relationships. Our actions are generally deliberate, but not ‘inevitable’ or automatic, and often produce unanticipated consequences. For all of that, by acting we are transformative of society, the world and ourselves.

Of course, the advent of dialectical HM has not meant the demise of idealist and subjectivist modes of thought. It did however expand the proletarian class struggle – already taking place over economic and political relationships – into the realm of philosophy and within the ideological superstructure more broadly. In that way, by providing a framework for interpreting the world, HM dialectically enables the communist hypothesis to change it. The manifestations of this ideological struggle (such as against idealism and subjectivism) are of critical importance for those struggling to revolutionize society.

For example, in their examination and analysis of society, Marx and Engels adopted the approach of isolating and dissecting various social relationships in their phenomenal forms – such as labor-power, surplus-value, constant capital, economic base, political and ideological superstructure – in order to describe internal features and specific categories of interaction. These specific features were examined by Marx in order to understand society as a whole process, as a ‘rich totality of many relations.’

“It seems to be correct to begin with the real and the concrete, with the real precondition, thus to begin, in economics, with e.g. the population, which is the foundation and the subject of the entire social act of production. However, on closer examination this proves false. The population is an abstraction if I leave out, for example, the classes of which it is composed. These classes in turn are an empty phrase if I am not familiar with the elements on which they rest. e.g. wage labour, capital, etc. These latter in turn presuppose exchange, division of labour, prices, etc. For example, capital is nothing without wage labour, without value, money, price etc. Thus, if I were to begin with the population, this would be a chaotic conception [Vorstellung] of the whole, and I would then, by means of further determination, move analytically towards ever more simple concepts [Begriff], from the imagined concrete towards ever thinner abstractions until I had arrived at the simplest determinations. From there the journey would have to be retraced until I had finally arrived at the population again, but this time not as the chaotic conception of a whole, but as a rich totality of many determinations and relations.”⁶¹

This approach remains vulnerable to one-sided and reductionist interpretations and, indeed, some activists have made those types of mistakes; adopting mechanical and atomized perspectives – over that of capitalism as a matrix of international process – fragmenting the relationships between economics, politics and ideology in the near-term revolutionary class struggle and as they affect the longer struggle for communism. Those misinterpretations have had harmful and often disastrous effects. For example, various conceptualizations of socialism have been advanced over the past century which give priority to productive capacity, types of technology, or amounts of output as the ‘key link’ for creating socialism and for revolutionizing society, substituting these for the truly key objectives of socialist revolution: the radical transformations of all economic, political and ideological social relationships. Similarly, various visions of anti-capitalist social change center on organizing incremental economic oppositions to individual capital formations, policies or capitalists in place of advancing the struggle to challenge all of the oppressive and exploitative social relationships inherent in capitalist society, including and especially the character of the state. Within the ranks of the proletarian movement, the failure to recognize and accurately advance the struggle over key matters of ideology, of materialist dialectics, as well as of the analysis of specific socio-political moments, contributed to the reversals of socialism in the USSR and China, and to the misdirection of many revolutionary movements in other countries worldwide.⁶² Our practical and theoretical work today is very much grounded in those past practices – successes and failures – and on the struggle to accurately assess them.

As current events continually remind us, the social world is not frozen, waiting for the oppressed and exploited to seize the day. The outrages and atrocities of capitalism are an ongoing assault on the great majority of the people of the world and on the planet itself. The clock is always ticking. For us, the project for the future will only advance if we assume among our component tasks the critical opposition to such mechanistic and ‘metaphysical’ conceptualizations and the further critical development of dialectical, revolutionizing, historical materialist practice and theory.

Notes:

[Abbreviations for multi-volume book sets: MECW = Marx and Engels Collected Works; MESW = Marx and Engels Selected Works; LCW = V.I. Lenin Collected Works]

1. Marx, K. 1967/1867. Capital. Vol. 1. New York. p 29.
2. Capital. Vol. 1. p 29.
3. Marx, K. and F. Engels. 1976/1848. The German Ideology. MECW 5. New York. p 53.
4. Describing 1848, Engels wrote “the Paris uprising found its echo in the victorious insurrections in Vienna, Milan and Berlin; when the whole of Europe right up to the Russian frontier was swept into the movement.” see Marx, K. 1969/1850. The Class Struggles in France. MESW Vol. 1. Moscow. p. 189.
5. Capital. Vol. 1. p. 29. See also: Engels, F. 1969/1886. Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy. MESW Vol. 3. Moscow. esp. Part IV on Marx.
6. Marx, K. 1969/1869. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Boneparte. MESW Vol. 1. Moscow. p. 398.
7. German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel was a very strong influence for Marx and other radical thinkers of the day.
8. Capital, Vol. 1. p. 19.
9. The German Ideology. p 38.
10. Moore, J. H. 1977. The Evolution of Exploitation. Critique of Anthropology 2(8): 33-48.
11. Moore, J. H. 1978. The Exploitation of Women in Evolutionary Perspective. Critique of Anthropology 3(9-10): 83-100.
12. Terray, E. and J. S. Kahn. 1979. On Exploitation: Elements of an Autocritique. Critique of Anthropology 4(13-14): 29-39.
13. Brennan, J. and J. Anderson. 1988. Varying responses to feeding competition in a group of rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta). Primates 29(3): 353-360.
14. Starin, E. D. 2006. Patterns of food transfer in temminck’s red colobus. Aggressive Behavior 32(3): 181-186.
15. Whiten, A. and C. P. van Schaik. 2007. The evolution of animal ‘cultures’ and social intelligence. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 362(1480): 603-620.
16. Cheney, D., R. Seyfarth, B. Smuts. 1986. Social relationships and social cognition in nonhuman primates. Science 234(4782): 1361-1366.
17. By evolution, I mean simply ‘the change in properties of populations of organisms over time’ as per Ernst Mayr.
18. Tomasello, M. 2001. Cultural Transmission: A View from Chimpanzees and Human Infants. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 32(2): 135-146.
19. Tomasello, M., M. Carpenter, J. Call, T. Behne, and H. Moll. 2005. Understanding and sharing intentions: The origins of cultural cognition. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28(05): 675-691.
20. Herrmann, E., J. Call, M. V. Hernandez-Lloreda, B. Hare, M. Tomasello. 2007. Humans Have Evolved Specialized Skills of Social Cognition: The Cultural Intelligence Hypothesis. Science 317(5843): 1360-1366.
21. Tomasello, M. and H. Rakoczy. 2003. What Makes Human Cognition Unique? From Individual to Shared to Collective Intentionality. Mind & Language 18(2): 121-147.
22. Wertsch, J. V. 1985. Vygotsky and the Social Formation of Mind. Cambridge and London, Harvard University Press.
23. Vygotsky, L. 1986. Thought and Language. Cambridge, MIT Press. p. 68-95.
24. Hauser, M. D., N. Chomsky, et al. 2002. The Faculty of Language: What Is It, Who Has It, and How Did It Evolve? Science 298(5598): 1569-1579.
25. The German Ideology. p 43.
26. Vygotsky. Thought and Language. p. 68-95.
27. Moll, H. and M. Tomasello. 2007. Cooperation and human cognition: the Vygotskian intelligence hypothesis. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 362(1480): 639-648.
28. Fernyhough, C. 1996. The dialogic mind: A dialogic approach to the higher mental functions. New Ideas in Psychology 14(1): 47-62.
29. Wertsch, J. V. and P. Tulviste. 1992. L. S. Vygotsky and Contemporary Developmental Psychology. Developmental Psychology 28(4): 548-557.
30. Vygotsky. Thought and Language. p. 210-256.
31. Several examples are discussed in Diamond, J. 1997. Guns, Germs, and Steel. New York, W.W. Norton.
32. For tens of thousands of years this may also have involved interchange between Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis, another, somewhat earlier species of humans who also populated areas of Africa and Eurasia. c.f. Mellars, P. 1988. The Origins and Dispersal of Modern Humans. Current Anthropology 29(1): 186-188.
33. Marx, K. 1967. Capital. Vol. 3. New York. p. 879-880.
34. Marx, K. 1973. Grundrisse. New York. p. 107-108.
35. A related illustration might be the schizophrenic perceiving their own thoughts to be external voices. c.f. Fernyhough, C. 2004. Alien voices and inner dialogue: towards a developmental account of auditory verbal hallucinations. New Ideas in Psychology 22(1): 49-68.
36. Capital, Vol. 1. p. 77. < http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm#S4>
37. c.f. Diamond, J. 2005. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. New York. Viking.
38. Ethnography is rich on this topic, but an illustrative sample would be: Sharrock, S. R. 1974. Crees, Cree-Assiniboines, and Assiniboines: Interethnic Social Organization on the Far Northern Plains. Ethnohistory 21(2): 95-122. Moore, J. H. 1974. Cheyenne Political History, 1820-1894. Ethnohistory 21(4): 329-359. Southall, A. 1976. Nuer and Dinka Are People: Ecology, Ethnicity and Logical Possibility. Man 11(4): 463-491. Moore, J. H. 1994. Putting Anthropology Back Together Again. American Anthropolgist 96(4): 925-948. Masco, J. 1995. “It is a Strict Law That Bids Us Dance”: Cosmologies, Colonialism, Death, and Ritual Authority in the Kwakwaka’wakw Potlatch, 1849 to 1922. Comparative Studies in Society and History 37(1): 41-75.
39. Morgan’s survey Ancient Society (1877) is cited by Engels throughout The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.
40. HRAF is a collaborative archive at Yale University that catalogues worldwide ethnographic data.
41. Moore. ‘Exploitation of Women’.
42. The German Ideology. p. 86.
43. Marx, K. and F. Engels. 1969/1848. Manifesto of the Communist Party. MESW Vol. 1. Moscow. p. 109.
44. This is obviously the case in many fields of intellectual activity, where patents, copyright and other contracts assign ‘intellectual property’ rights to the employer, not the intellectual employee.
45. White, L. A. 1926. An Anthropological Approach to the Emotional Factors in Religion. The Journal of Philosophy 23(20): 546-554.
46. White, L. A. 1948. The Definition and Prohibition of Incest. American Anthropologist 50(3): 416-435.
47. Moore. ‘Cheyenne Political History’.
48. c.f. Lenin, V.I. 1964/1917. Lessons of the Revolution. LCW Vol. 25. Moscow.
49. Lenin, V.I. 1964/1920. ‘Left-wing’ Communism - An infantile disorder. LCW Vol. 31. Moscow. p. 101.
50. Studies of education practices in the US have shown that a large majority of low-income and ethnic-minority students are regularly placed in ‘low-skilled’ educational tracks. c.f. Condron, D. J. 2007. Stratification and Educational Sorting: Explaining Ascriptive Inequalities in Early Childhood Reading Group Placement. Social Problems 54(1): 139-160.
51. The German Ideology. p. 77.
52. The German Ideology. p. 53.
53. Marx, K. 1969/1875. Critique of the Gotha Programme. MESW Vol. 3. Moscow. p. 17.
54. Marx, K. 1969. Letter to J. Weydermeyer in New York. 5 March 1852. MESW Vol. 1. Moscow. p. 528.
55. Engels, F. 1969/1888. Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy. MESW Vol. 3. p. 366.
56. Where “he, who before was the money-owner, now strides in front as capitalist; the possessor of labour-power follows as his labourer.” Capital Vol. 1 p. 172.
57. The German Ideology. p. 88.
58. Critique of the Gotha Programme. p. 18.
59. The German Ideology. p. 47.
60. Ludwig Feuerbach. p. 367.
61. Grundrisse. p. 107-108.
62. c.f. Ely, M. 1980. Slipping into Darkness, ‘Left’ economism, the CPUSA, and the Trade Union Unity League (1929 – 1935). Revolution 5(2-3).

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